Art History & World Consciousness

In 1982, the great art historian Oleg Grabar wrote an article titled: "On the Universality of the History of Art". The article is a short piece about how the discipline has progressed over the years to its present state (or rather, in the 80s), and what future progression may look like. As with any Grabar writing, it is spot on even in 2008, though this may be due to the slow mechanics of changing a discipline's methodology. The central crux of the paper is that art history has advanced beyond simply covering the canon of art as was put together, primarily, by Vasari in his Vitae, to include more artworks and regions than ever before. The problem remains, however, that despite this shift, the field remains stuck in a Eurocentric mode. One need only step into an introductory art history course and be reminded of this fact. Grabar says: "The day would come, some of us thought, when introductions to the history of art would be based on any artistic tradition and when African sculpture or Persian miniatures would help us to understand Bernini and Titian." (Grabar, p. 33)

This hope remains unrealised. Sure, in an introduction to the history of art and architecture, students will be taught about art from around the world, but Europe and, in the modern period, the United States, take a central role in this history with other histories acting as footnotes to this main body of knowledge. This is partly because the initial years of the field allowed for an extensive history to be drawn up of Western art, whereas the process is still in its infancy for most non-Western art histories. But there is also a deeper, more troubling (at least to my mind) reason why Euro-centrism continues to haunt us: The fact that many art historians believe that this is what students, no matter what their speciality or interest, should be taught, that because this is a Western field in Western universities, the West should be the focus. I find this very upsetting, both as a non-Western specialist, and as a non-Westerner.

I'm going to segway here into providing a little bit of background to how this blog, and more specifically, this last statement came about: Recently, I have expressed my dismay at the fact that the university's intro course spent its second half squarely in Europe and North America the entire time. As such, the department head, who is a lovely woman, occasionally chats with me about how the course can be changed. In this process, I stumbled across a book while at a bookstore (of course I went to the art history section, it's how I measure a store's worth!), that did not follow the canon per se. Instead, the author wrote a chronological history of art where, during every time period, he talked about art production the world over side by side. Not necessarily linking them all together, but presenting their simultaneous production so that a reader would come away knowing what went on the world over in, say the 12th century. It's still heavily Western, but its a start in moving away from the canon and similar troublesome things.

I showed the instructor the text as something for next year and it has been taken up well. Our conversation, however, did not go so well. I think this might have been my fault because I wasn't very tactful. Anyways, what happened was that the instructor mentioned that another possibility for next year's class had been to make up a coursepack with selected texts that would cover each period/region for the class. Now that is relatively easy to do with something like Impressionism which is a single philosophy, not so easy with others like African art which covers not simply an entire continent (save North Africa, which is shoved into Islamic art) but also an impossibly large timeline (prehistoric to today). Her solution was that for the places where a short summary could not be found/proved inadequate, instead a single issue would be the focus for that unit. The art shown in class would work in conjunction with this reading. Here was where I began my tactless statement by the way.

What I couldn't explain to her was that I found that ridiculous because to cover a single issue within a vast genre while managing to cover every little Western art movement was the reason why the course needed to be overhauled in the first place. It didn't change a thing! Why didn't we continue using Marilyn Stokstad or Gardener because they were doing that in their overpriced text books. What was more insulting was that she thinks that because there is more scholarship is available on Western art movements, its okay to teach more of it. The fact of the matter is, art historians are unwilling to spend less time on Europe. They'll happily spend more time on non-Western as long as it doesn't take away from them spending an entire lecture on Georges Seurat and pointillism for example. An entire lecture!

There's more than enough art historical information out there on non-Western art history to adequately inform an introductory course, the space needs to be taken away from Western art to make way for this information to be included. I don't think art history departments are willing to compromise here and that is the problem. Right now, I am unsure of how or even whether to continue with my complaints with the structure of the course because it tends to make me feel defensive, being that I am both a non-Western specialist and non-white on top of that, and leaves me seething in irritation. I also dislike being not nice to people, it's not my usual modus operandi and my last bit of tactlessness was not pleasant for me. I suspect that I will continue to be frustrated by this, since there seems to be no resolution in sight. Sorry to end on such a note but when I have happy things to say, I won't write on my blog! It's my form of therapy...cheap and unable to reply.

P.S. I use non-Western in this blog even though I rather dislike the term because I have no substitute that covers the same meaning.