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Windows for the world: nineteenth-century stained glass and the international exhibitions, 1851-1900 focuses on the display and reception of nineteenth-century stained glass in an international and secular context, by exploring the significance of the stained glass displayed at ten international exhibitions held in Britain, France, the USA and Australia between 1851 and 1900. International in scope, it is the first study to explore the global development of stained glass in this period, as showcased at, and influenced by, these international events.
Drawing on hundreds of contemporaneous written and visual sources, it identifies the artists and makers who exhibited stained glass, as well as those who reviewed and judged the exhibits. It also provides close readings of specific stained glass exhibits in relation to stylistic developments, material and technological innovations, iconographic themes and visual ideologies.
This monograph broadens approaches to post-medieval stained glass by placing stained glass in its wider cultural, political, economic and global contexts. It provides new perspectives and fresh interpretations of stained glass in these environments, through themed chapters, each of which highlight a different aspect of stained glass in the nineteenth century, including material taxonomies, modes of display, stylistic eclecticism, exhibitors’ international networks, production and consumption, nationalism and imperialism.
As such, the book challenges many of the major methodological and historiographical assumptions and paradigms relating to the study of stained glass. Its scope and range will have wide appeal to those interested in the history of stained glass as well as nineteenth-century culture more broadly.
Staging art and Chineseness is about the politics of borders ascribed to Chinese contemporary art and the identification of artists by locations and exhibitions. The paradoxical subject of Chineseness is central to this inquiry, which begins with the question, what does the term Chinese Art mean in the aftermath of the globalized shift in art? Through an exploration of embodied and performative representations (including eco-feminist performances) by artists from China and diasporic locations, the case studies in this book put to the test the very premise of the genealogical inscription for cultural objects attributed to the residency, homeland, or citizenship of the Chinese artist. Acknowledging the orientalist assumptions and appropriations that Chineseness also signifies, this study connects the artistic performance to the greater historical scope of ‘geographical consciousness’ envisioned by past and present global expositions. The emergence of China’s shiyan meishu experimental art movement in the 1980s–1990s has largely been the defining focus for ‘global art’ during the period when artfairs, biennials, and triennials also came into prominence as the new globalized art institution (exemplified by China’s first biennial in Guangzhou). The political aim is to recognize the multiple contradictions and repetitions of history engendered by art, nationalism, and capital in the legacy of Althusserian/Maoist interpellations – the reifications of global capitalist illusions in the twenty-first century are conveyed in this book by performative artistic expressions and the temporal space of the exposition.
This book intervenes in current debates on global art history and transcultural modernism from a postcolonial perspective. It reacts to the challenges of elaborating a post-Eurocentric art history by providing a joint study of the transcultural in artistic practice, theoretical concepts, and anti-colonial liberation movements of the 1920s to 1960s. The notion of the transmodern refers to an artistic and theoretical impulse aimed at a decolonial transformation of white and Western conceptions of modern art. Transmodern understands the diversity of global modernisms not merely as regional effects of cultural globalisation but as intentional and political responses to the coloniality of Western modernity. During the first half of the twentieth century, within the framework of anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, a transcultural modernism emerges at many places of the globe. Concurrently, Western concepts of race and culture, shaped by colonial worldviews, become subject to fundamental theoretical critique. Demonstrating the emergence of global modernism in the context of decolonisation, this book is oriented towards the motif of contact. While anthropological and sociological works – by e.g. Fernando Ortiz and Melville J. Herskovits – examine situations of contact under colonial conditions and develop new conceptions of culture and identity employing terms like transculturation and syncretism, the transmodern movement in the arts is based on contacts and collaborations between artists across colonial boundaries. Alongside methodological considerations on a postcolonial history of modern art, this book presents case studies in Indian modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and postwar abstraction.
-historical lacuna that this text hopes to rectify. This omission, alongside the perceived art-historical divisions between Eastern and Western performance art, have causes both political and art-historical: the binary of the Cold War, for one, alongside oversight on the part of scholars and critics. Compiling this history is thus the necessary first step toward a reassessment of the field of contemporary performance art and a move toward a global art history, where the main point of reference is not necessarily the West. The continuities I have highlighted between techniques and
has been part of the project of modernity. A discourse of subversion, in this way, reduces the contexts unknown to Western European and North American scholarship to the status of cultural tools serving the need for representation and inclusion of the Other, while it robs the Other of universality. As a disciplinary approach, it reduces art history to a politics of representation, of inclusion and exclusion. Neither can this study be subsumed within emerging discussions on global art history that respond to the increasing globalization of art following the
itself), as in the case of global contemporary art. It can be found instead in the urgency with which the need to ask new questions is flaunted with the grand gesture of a fresh start and the aura of a paradigm shift. Current discussions about a global art history are hence usually guided by the question of whether and how Western forms of art historiography can lay claim to global validity. The art historian James Elkins, frequently cited in these debates, asks in the introduction to the anthology he edited, Is Art
dominant and until recently marginalised manifestations of artistic modernism. I will discuss some of the descriptive models that I consider productive below. My own approach, which arose from dealing both with these as well as, in my opinion, less convincing models of a global art history, is based on the insight gained from case studies that it is not sufficient to transfer conceptual instruments from postcolonial studies as well as cultural and diaspora studies to art history in a generalising way. Although
Europe in the 1990s, my interest in the relation between contemporary art and Soros has lasted longer than I expected. I have already written on the topic, but the compulsion to return to the “scene of the crime” (hoping to reconstruct it in my mind) rests on the belief that the network's case is important for understanding the current art historical paradigm, or idea, of contemporary art. This is especially the case when one considers “the contemporary” within the interconnected context of global art history. It must also be stressed early on that the main aim of this
(eds) , Becoming a Writing Researcher ( New York : Routledge ), 44–46 . Moya , P. ( 2011 ) ‘ Who We Are and From Where We Speak ’, Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World , 1 : 2 , 79–94 . Petersen , A.R. ( 2015 ) ‘ Global Art History: A View from the North ’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture , 7 : 1 , 1–12 . Qin , D. ( 2016 ) ‘ Positionality ’, in N.A. Naples (ed.) , The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies ( Oxford : Wiley-Blackwell ), 1–2 . Rushdie , S
evaded the standard geographical and conceptual binaries that characterize the discipline of art history and postulate systems for remapping that are more tenable for true inclusiveness. The Byzantinist Robert Nelson once wrote that: “In the past world, whatever choices we made about our fields, most of us gave little thought to the taxonomy into which we fitted our courses, our research, and our lives.” 9 In the new global art history, this is no longer possible. Whether applying to graduate school, planning a dissertation, seeking