Abstract
This special issue explores the concept of polyphony in writing art history, using it as a methodological lens to examine diverse voices, along with their intricate interactions and contradictions, archival practices, and the collective creation of knowledge. Ranging from dialogic and experimental approaches to academic styles in writing, the authors embrace a spectrum of narratives in their writing to challenge canonical art history. Exploration of themes such as otherness, cross-cultural encounters, and relational aesthetics are also central, enriching the discourse with varied perspectives. Relational approaches to art history writing exemplify efforts in some of the articles to transcend conventional academic boundaries, offering writing nearby artistic practices and merging written with oral narratives. The issue also examines the role of archives, reflecting on racial and gender-based power dynamics and the concepts of living archive and archival rewriting. Several articles explore the implications of this approach, highlighting the need for a multi-dimensional narrative that acknowledges the complexities of the interactions between local and global discourses, transnational, transcultural, and diasporic identities. In summary, this special issue invites the reader to reconsider the traditional frameworks of art history and to embrace a more inclusive, resonant, and interconnected understanding of the field.
In music the idea of polyphony suggests collectivity, diversity and dissonance. As such it has many equivalents in non-European languages, for example Imbalang in Bahasa Indonesian where the gamelan orchestra has no composer or conductor but is a communal work. In German the word Vielstimmigkeit compounds the words for ‘many’ and ‘voices’ but also for ‘moments of harmony’, stimmigkeit, in which we resonated with each other. It is in this sense of polyphony that we worked together on this special issue. At its core this is a methodological experiment in which the group developed and edited each article collectively and then created interludes which highlight the polyphonic discussion between us.
El Anatsui, Gravity and Grace, 2010, aluminium and copper wire, 482 × 1120 cm, collection of the Artist, Nsukka, Nigeria, © El Anatsui, image courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Across the chapters of this special issue we incorporate two interludes, along with content in this introductory chapter, to address polyphony as method, as a diversity of voices, and as a manifestation of archive and archival practice. These interludes are edited versions of intensive conversations that the participating authors in this issue undertook over the period of a year. This collaboration began following the coming together to form the panel Global Art History and the Imbalance of Power at the Association for Art History (AAH) conference in 2021. Due to the ongoing effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic that year, as well as the isolation imposed by ongoing global lockdowns, the conference had turned into an online, somewhat chaotic and often frustrating event in which we swam through waiting rooms and attempted to navigate a clunky virtual world. Despite the technological challenges of the new Zoom era, our panel felt a compelling need to get together again and continue to develop the conversations which we had begun at the conference. Without the possibility of physical travel and through the disruptions of COVID-19, there was an undeniable excitement in connecting across continents. During 2021 and 2022 we conducted six round-table discussions which were recorded, transcribed and refined. The Zoom transcription (ZT) joined our enaction of polyphony by suggesting alternative readings of what the different contributors (from Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, the Americas and Europe) were recorded as saying. We have included the occasional outlandish transcription interpretation in the interlude text of this introduction, but the subsequent interludes have been edited for clarity.
At that time, we had no idea that rapidly developing software such as Chat GPT was about to change our view of what AI-driven technology could do to writing, communication and the production of knowledge. It was amusing to read back the transcription errors produced by Zoom, which offered an unexpected source of humour for the editors and authors of this volume. Transcribing and amplifying certain slips showed that if you were not careful, ‘modern’ would become ‘mother’, ‘polyphony’ was frequently ‘polly funny’, and the voice recognition software ironically misspelled the names of discussants, artists or places whose inclusion in the canon we were discussing. Archiving some of these transcription errors in the text was an anticipation of current concerns about AI’s growing influence, and as art historians, it seemed important to record the rapid technological advancements and their interventions as a sign of the times we are living in. At the time we wanted to reveal this artifice, in the same way the Renaissance painters sometimes revealed their technologies. On reflection, in 2023 when universities are now debating the use of AI in the classroom, this is already dated. Nevertheless, it captures a moment.
Crafting Interludes and Polyphonic Method
Khadija We thought this collective and our discursive format would draw out the major themes which will develop into interludes to reflect on polyphony (ZT We can’t hate. Dysfunctional polly funny). We haven’t done these kinds of open-ended roundtables in the journal before because it’s unwieldy as an editorial process.
Renate Overall, our papers offer a combination of views, like a kaleidoscope. I want to bring our papers and our discussions into a shared format, to create our own space, where everybody can comment on the themes that emerge. We can carry on enriching the conversation, we can look at the topics that are shared or related through different lenses and develop these aspects to add a further layer of reflection and polyphony that shows interaction and a different kind of engagement. An interlude is similar to the layering of voices that Barbara discusses in her text. It presents an interweaving of our voices and perspectives. The traditional model of a special issue is hierarchical. There is the introduction and then the texts. Taking the approach of having other conversations, where we unpack our texts by relating them to one another, opens up an alternative structure.
Astrid ‘Interlude’ is also a nice term for thinking about polyphony, sound and resonance. If we are going to be in conversation with each other, or have some kind of dialogue, in a way we will be tracing our own living archive, our own connections to some of the places, communities and art forms that we are speaking about. This is a way to make our work more personal and take a less common approach to the academic journal.
Renate Yes, for example, there are interesting parallels between mine and Astrid’s work, as we both engage with Indigenous artists. The geographical and historical contexts are related but also different, so our conversation could do a little dance around that. We can work with a more horizontal layering that develops a structure which reflects the ideas we are exploring.
The articles in this collection, as well as the conversational interludes, engage with multi-relational positions. The theoretical and artistic interventions are offered to create polyphonic texts on the history of art, thereby depicting an assemblage of practice and research. Developing our collectivity around the key concept of polyphony was inspired by Barbara Preisig’s contribution to the AAH conference, which encouraged us to pursue the question of how to be in resonance within the practice of writing art history. The interludes are the result of open-ended self-reflective practices to (un)learn our positionality collectively, exploring the moments of speaking and listening to each other and to our case studies. Preisig’s article in the special edition abstracts the roles of curator, artist and viewer in a polyphony that also plays with the power of anonymity. She urges us to pay attention to museums’ public communications in various contexts, thereby illustrating a multiplicity of voices and formations of unexpected trans-local relations with art. Expanding on the themes of otherness and cross-cultural encounters, Preisig presents a semi-fictional article which delves deeper into the complex relationality of art objects with different historical, temporal and spatial attributions within a museum space. Furthermore, when seen through the lens of aesthetic relationality proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud, her dialogic and experimental approach in writing about the exhibition entitled ‘El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale’ (2020) at Kunstmuseum Bern aligns with the idea of interconnectedness and art as ‘a state of encounter’.Footnote1 This reading of the show expands upon the principles of relational aesthetics while consciously avoiding the potential depersonalisation of the featured art. Preisig also reflects on the power dynamics at play within an international art platform. In this context, her examination of El Anatsui’s Gravity and Grace (2010) underscores that the artwork is not confined to being an isolated object but is intricately woven into a larger web of relationships, extending beyond mere human communication to encompass broader sociocultural and material interactions.
The concept of polyphonic history, while not entirely new, has gained attention in recent years. The idea of polyphony in a broader cultural and literary context was notably developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in the early twentieth century to describe a narrative that includes a variety of voices and perspectives.Footnote2 In the field of history, it became especially relevant with the rise of new approaches such as microhistory, subaltern studies, and the histories of everyday life, which focus on the experiences and perspectives of those often marginalised or overlooked in classical historical writing. In ‘Cultural History as Polyphonic History’, Peter Burke suggests the concept as a methodology in opposition to the traditional monodic approach, highlighting its rich, varied composition. Burke notes that, characterised by its multilingual perspective, polyphonic history is presented as a dialogic form that encapsulates a spectrum of narratives rather than a singular, overarching story. He touches on the contemporary plurality of approaches in cultural history, encouraged by the increasing international conferences and interdisciplinary contacts in the field. Burke advocates for a pluralistic approach that does not replace old methods but supplements them, recognising the value of interaction, interpenetration and hybridisation within the discipline of history.Footnote3
In The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew, Yair Mintzker states that ‘when a historian can’t trust any of the [available] sources, he or she should write a polyvocal, critical work of scholarship: a polyphonic history’.Footnote4 His use of various historical sources and individual accounts of the story of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer’s passing constructs a multidimensional narrative and presents their complexities and contradictions. In 2020, three years after the release of his book, Mintzker engaged in a forum alongside four of his readers, Michael Meng, Sarah Maza, Jesse Spohnholz and Jay Geller. This forum itself was polyphonic in nature, featuring papers from all five authors (Mintzker included). The discussions in the forum fostered dialogues not only between the content of the book and its readers but also between Mintzker’s current perspectives and his past viewpoints as the author.Footnote5 This set-up allowed for a multifaceted examination of the book’s themes and methodologies, mirroring the polyphonic approach Mintzker used in his writing. All four readers value this choice of research method in the context of absent accurate and trustworthy accounts, particularly when the subject’s own voice is missing. Michael Meng, in ‘History, Self Interest, and Polyphony’, highlights the role of self-interest in shaping historical narratives. He reflects on a key challenge of polyphonic history: achieving a balance among multiple voices without allowing any single narrative to dominate, thus reducing individual self-interest in historical storytelling. While appreciating polyphonic historical writing, Meng also questions whether it is possible to entirely avoid self-interest.Footnote6 Perspective, positionality and inserting oneself into the narratives of art history were recurring themes in our round-table discussions.
Sara Maza, in ‘Biography or Microhistory?’, demonstrates that Mintzker’s reconstruction of Oppenheimer’s world deploys a mix of traditional and new methods, including deep archival research, literary analysis and conversations with a hypothetical reader across the book, to create a dialogic and immersive narrative.Footnote7 The dialogues with an imaginary reader, as Mintzker puts it, are not prescriptive but serve to address and validate potential objections to his polyphonic methodology, reflecting the Platonic concept of thinking as an internal discourse and underscoring the inherently multivoiced nature of all thoughtful historical writing.Footnote8 Jesse Spohnholz highlights the connection between polyphonic history and microhistory in Mintzker’s work. She notes that Mintzker examines the motivations behind four different accounts of Oppenheimer’s story, effectively utilising microhistory to unravel the complex context of the trial. Spohnholz recognises this approach as a potent tool for exploring historical agendas without overly idealising Oppenheimer’s image. She observes that Mintzker’s method reveals the contrast between the historically specific trial of Oppenheimer and an essentialised view of anti-Semitism, although it falls short of explaining their transformation over time.Footnote9 Spohnholz suggests that while Mintzker’s polyphonic history uncovers self-serving falsehoods in these accounts, as Meng also points out, it opens up broader enquiries about how Oppenheimer’s case was used in later centuries. Ultimately, Spohnholz considers Mintzker’s work a valuable starting point for further research, offering new avenues for addressing historical questions through diverse methodologies. This polyphonic method can be extended to pave the way for an examination of how art and art history writing enter into dialogues and interconnected relationships across diverse transcultural contexts.
The collection of articles in this special issue prompts reflection on the permeability and fragility of geographical borders. Rather than romanticising their abolition, we engage with a transition of their implications: from expansion, prevention and protection to what Édouard Glissant identifies as a passage, a communication – a Relation.Footnote10 This is a study which highlights the interactions between roots and routes. Non-violent transcultural imaginations of the world can be achieved through unlearning our conditioned ways of thinking about identity and belonging not within roots and territorial boundaries but in routes and relations with others. Departing from her multilingual video performance Surya Namaz (2018), Deniz Sözen’s article explores the question of roots, ancestry or lineage that arose in the making of the video, considering the pitfalls of self-othering, the trope of the return and the problematic position of the Native Informant in the context of diaspora art and its histories.Footnote11 Experimenting with the voice(s) of the artist as performer, filmmaker and researcher, her article reflects on her own positionality as a diasporic artist of mixed Turkish and Austrian heritage who currently resides in the United Kingdom, highlighting notions of embodied knowledge and listening to the body as a living archive. Sözen underscores the potential of resonance as a method in writing with her art practice, aiming to sidestep the portrayal of art merely as an illustration of theoretical frameworks. Her article seeks to challenge the binary view of identity and delves into the body as a site of diverse affiliations, resonating with Glissant’s sense of Relation.Footnote12
The relational approaches to writing presented by Preisig and Sözen exemplify the authors’ endeavours to transcend conventional academic boundaries. They navigate beyond the dichotomies encompassing theory and art practice, written discourse and oral articulation while offering a nuanced exploration of positionality in our interactions with the broader global context. While to a certain extent the difference-producing space in the international art scene, as Sarat Maharaj puts it, can result in a flattening sameness, there is always an element of the untranslatable that resists translation.Footnote13 Polyphony demonstrates that contact produces mixing while also making visible profound differences that resist fusion. As Glissant reminds us, unforeseeable change through cultural exchange must be achieved through no degradation or diminution of all the beings; this means being in relation with resistance to unjust intermixing, or, as expressed in French, ‘Le monde se creolise’, emphasising the concept that the world becomes creolised.Footnote14 Artists insist on distinctiveness even as they experience or resist the forces of globalisation, to achieve a voice in the cacophony of global cultural dialogue.
Polyphony of Voices and (Trans-)National Imprints
If we end up having a dialogue that embodies the idea of transnationality, with all of us in our own particular places trying to make connections with each other, we will figure out what we have in common, but it’s also quite obvious that actually we’re just speaking from where and for whom we are. I think this round-table format can be viewed as an act of translation. I mean, our work may be rooted in particular national art histories, but we’re all trying to share something in common with others. I am interested in connecting the idea of the polyphonic, the national and the transnational.
Maybe in terms of the ‘transnational’ how about saying trans-coloniality? (ZT trans colon yellow team) That is what really connects all the papers, because you can’t separate nationalism from coloniality (ZT colon reality).
I want to add two things. The first concerns ‘transnationalism’. The term makes sense for a historical approach, for thinking about times when the movements of things and bodies were conditioned primarily by national borders. In relation to present times, I have the impression that the term captures just one possible way of becoming polyphonic. The other thing is an idea which I have had listening to our discussions today, which is that one roundtable could give the impression that we would like to conclude, or channel the discussion, and so I agree that we need to draw out and develop themes over several sessions.
What we refer to as polyphony in this special issue connects the spectrum of practices that include a polyphony of voices on a single subject, a single body even. A collective of voices stemming from one or several minds in dialogue occurs across time and space, where the response is often a resonance of imaginations. As Hartmut Rosa states, resonance as an experience within our relationship with the world cannot be predictable or controllable; we cannot engineer or ensure the moment of being in resonance in the sense of when it starts or ends, or the ways that each of us might feel it, but we can accommodate the conditions in which it might happen to us.Footnote15 Creating moments of resonance in our interactions with the world requires listening and opening up to the experiences of so-called passivity and, in turn, being responsive.Footnote16 These are moments in which a synergy unclicks something that seems singular but is actually multiple. In the complexity of these voices, the notion of an authorial hierarchy is distorted. What becomes louder is a plethora of being in a polyphony.
In Interlude 1, Rex Butler introduces the term ‘artist-centric’ history, which was something that he felt all the authors had in common. Art history can be written by artists, not just in the capacity of informant in interview with the art historian or curator, but as author both of the work they make and the writing they produce about art history.Footnote17 Deniz Sözen, A D S Donaldson, the Karrabing Collective, Elizabeth Povinelli, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Azadeh Sarjoughian are all artists-as-authors. Their contributions reflect on how we treat the perspective of the artist within the polyphony of voices about their work. The question is, for example, after a conversation with an artist, how is that recounted in text – is it perhaps smoothed into the shape of theory and packaged for an international market? Or can we find a way of writing that is artist-centric, that privileges the conversations and anecdotes that form the decisions artists make? Some articles are devotedly ‘artist-centric’ or ‘artscene-centric’, in which the thoughts of makers in the process are taken as vital aspects to understanding the kinds of movements that artists form. Their relations are based on affinities and competitions, letters and calls, the kinds of ephemeral and living archives that we use in our research.
These are not new concerns that we highlight. Edward Said’s discussions of the ‘voyages in’ to Europe of exiles, intellectuals and artists; the work of James Clifford, Irit Rogoff and Kobena Mercer on the significance of artistic and academic movement, exchange, travel and spatiality in the crafting of modernist subjectivities – both led to fundamental reconsiderations of how the histories of global engagements in modernity have been told. These scholars highlight that Indigenous artistic perspectives have often been missing in art-historical writing. The archival rewriting of the present is to show that while, currently, we see ourselves in a time of transnational art history – indeed not post-national art history – the story of connections between places has always been experienced by artists, not just in the present but also in the past. In their article, Rex Butler and A D S Donaldson present the idea of the artist colony where cosmopolitan cultural exchange flows between centres and peripheries, to ask how we cultivate solidarity and create kin across state and racial borders. The authors propose that the artist colony may represent a new model for art production within a decolonialised art history framework. Particularly in Australia, this model is exemplified by Aboriginal art emerging in self-regulating, self-identifying cultural centres that diverge from traditional national art narratives. These artist colonies, pivotal to Australian art, have seen significant participation from local artists, extending their influence both nationally and internationally across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Butler and Donaldson focus on the Abbey Arts Centre near London, a hub for Australian artists and art historians from the late 1940s to the late 1950s which provided them with unique access to the English art scene. They specifically examine the interactions between a group of Sydney artists at the Abbey in the late 1940s, highlighting their integration into the London artworld. The Abbey later evolved to reflect a more nationalist character with other notable Australian artists and historians. Butler and Donaldson propose a microhistorical framework for polyphonic art history where diverse voices, including those from traditionally central and marginal cultures, engage in dialogue within a shared space and time. This is in line with Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of global flows of people, products, images and ideas, which ushered in textured readings of the machinery of globalisation and the linkages between location and identity in both earlier and more recent periods.Footnote18
Azadeh Sarjoughian, An Alternative Measurement Plus Seven-Centimetre High Heels, 2017, Centrala Gallery, Birmingham, UK, photograph courtesy of the artist
Focusing on Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams (2019), Azadeh Sarjoughian explores the rhizomatic relation with otherness that the artist illustrates by drawing on her own hyphenated national identity as an Iranian-American. Neshat explores the binary of self and other within the sociopolitical landscape that exists both between the two nations and within them. Sarjoughian reflects on this video and photographic installation as an artistic response to the weighty classification of ‘art(ist) from the Middle East’, produced by an artist whose oeuvre frequently attracts negative connotations of identity politics. In Land of Dreams, Neshat encounters subjects of varying cultural heritage in a peripheral zone of the United States. The juncture of themes such as Glissant’s ‘the right to opacity’ and Rogoff’s ‘regional imaginaries’ provides a theoretical foundation to explore Neshat’s diasporic aesthetic in this installation.Footnote19 The analysis focuses on Neshat’s visual strategy in this work to destabilise the fixed vision of identity and belonging, often confined to localised spaces, while continuing to incorporate her ever-present references to the Farsi language and aspects of what she recognises as Persian culture. Sarjoughian offers a nuanced understanding of the complexities that arise from intertwining cultural identities and their impact on artistic expressions. Her article explores how Land of Dreams embodies a polyphonic approach to history by intertwining diverse narratives and linguistic layers, inviting a multitude of distinct voices and perspectives to coexist and resonate despite the current cultural and linguistic hierarchies.
This approach could describe the coming together of the authors in this issue, as well as their subjects of study, across time and space. The online worlds we began to open into together in the making of the texts in this collection, and the mode of several of the artworks we viewed together, recall Christoph Brunner and Ines Kleesattel’s concept of ‘Earthly Relational Aesthetics’, a reflection upon Glissant’s exploration of inhabitation from a geopolitical perspective. They refer to Glissant’s concept of chaos-monde (chaos world) in which he identifies opportunities for ‘new subjectivations and for more precise perceptions of the colonial capitalist modes of operation of modernity (to which Western aesthetics belong)’. Through a relational and more-than-human lens, Brunner and Kleesattel unfold this chaos-monde, conceived as a method of ‘worlding’, reminiscent of Donna Haraway’s concept, which aligns with speculative, multi-species storytelling essential for earthly survival. They discuss that Glissant’s poetic approach to worlding gives voice to ‘the chaos-monde as a polyphonic, dissensual tout-monde (whole-world)’; his landscape writing, thereby, emerges not as an individual, authoritative description but as a collective evolution originating from the landscape itself, standing as a worlding of ‘becoming-with or co-emergence’ and moving beyond the dualism of ‘perceiving subject and perceived object’.Footnote20
In the process of researching representations of polyphony for this introduction, the format of film appeared in various genres as a visual medium for bringing many voices together. Thinking through experimental filmmaking, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll critically approaches reparative gestures in conversation with Elizabeth Povinelli, who outlines the notion of the White Indigenous Counter-Reformation. The films of the Karrabing Collective (of which Povinelli is a founding member) have a way of storytelling that puts on screen a kind of polyphony of ancestors’ yarning that is also experienced through many other mediums in Australia. For example, in the Anindilyakwa community recently, it has been through a repatriation of shell dolls that a world of storytelling relations with neighbouring clans in Groote Eylandt has emerged.Footnote21 In conversation with Anindilyakwa artists, Carroll told the stories of dolls that have been returned to African communities in recent repatriations she has been making a film about as part of her Repatriates project. The immediate interest of the Anindilyakwa doll makers during a workshop with the various groups Carroll is working with in Windhoek, Namibia, was much stronger than that of any former centre of empire in Europe. This disruption of the usual north–south exchange in the form of a south–south exchange can be heard and seen in the polyphony of film (which, like the Zoom screenshots, can only be illustrated as stills here).
Above: Girls playing with shell dolls, photographed by Peter Worsley 1952–1953, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Below: Anindilyakwa artists dying fabrics on Groote Eylandt in 2022
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, film stills from Te Moana, 2020, from top left to bottom right: Hinano Teavai-Murphy; Jody Toroa; Emalani Case; Tupaia embroidery; protestors in Gisborne; Karakia to Te Haa o Tangaroa the whale after she beached at Muriwai in July 2019; Tahitian dancer with delegation welcoming the waka in Gisborne, October 2019
Expanding Povinelli’s cunning work on recognition, we could bore into the fallacies of discourses around inclusion and diversity that we also tackled in editing this collection.Footnote22 The process of polyphonic editing that we did together collectively here was an attempt to move from the hollow claims of globality in which centres of power maintain themselves. By dropping into our personal intellectual histories, we reflect on the differences in forms of dispossession in Europe and in the settler colonies like Australia. The many voices of disoriented relatives who cannot be drowned out by the prevailing discourses of economic rationalism and prosperity come into resonance with the presence of powerful non-human agents. In listening to them, both in the melting Alpine regions of Europe and islands threatened by rising tides in the Pacific, lies another way of understanding the environmental crisis of our time.
Identifying the constraints of modern/colonial aesthetics, which are predominantly governed by the Western gaze, Astrid Korporaal’s contribution to this issue redirects our attention towards the notion of ‘aesthesis of listening’. Like the previous article by Povinelli and Carroll, Korporaasl also explores the works of the Karrabing Collective, drawing out multi-perspectival impressions that stand in contrast to the hegemonic vision associated with the ethnographic documentary and archiving tradition. Referring to Haraway’s concept of ‘visiting as a mode of ethical attention’, Korporaal highlights the Karrabing Collective’s polyphonic cinematographic narratives, invoking vibrant ancestral voices and stories tied to a particular coastal land, which speak to their colonial wounds. The concept of ‘peripheral vision’, for Korporaal, presents an intersection of ethical and cinematic questions; she argues how the collective’s films challenge the hegemonic norms of Western capitalism and conventional documentary practices by crafting an earthbound tapestry of stories that intertwine human and non-human environments, guiding viewers through glitched moments within transcultural world imaginations. Hence, the polyphony of voices here resonates with the concept of ‘earthly relational aesthetics’ as the Karrabing Collective undertakes a multifaceted journey across aesthetic, ethical and epistemological landscapes. As Korporaal puts it, they embrace ‘the living, shifting agency of the relationship between land and water, humans, and environment, past and present’. Like Sözen, Korporaal reflects on the concept of ‘living archive’ as a dynamic space that challenges Western institutional narratives and archives, reimagining the role of visual media in resisting colonial and Eurocentric paradigms of representation.
Building on this, Renate Dohmen’s article focuses on an artist whose intervention of global art history rooted in an Indigenous perspective is intended to actively disrupt and reimagine colonial representations. She analyses the Cree artist Kent Monkman’s approach as a ‘rampage’ through conventional art-historical narratives, representing a challenge to the grand narratives of modernism emanating from the West. Dohmen brings forward an artist whose practice steals and counters the mantle of the Avant-Garde, who subverts the very idea of masculine artistic genius. Her article explores Monkman’s approach in the context of ‘transmotion’, a concept taken from Gerald Vizenor’s ‘postindian tricksterism’, and compares it to the decolonising framework of sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, focusing on intercultural translation and the notion of ‘the swerve’. Dohmen underscores the importance of rethinking academic engagement with Indigenous art, advocating translation and storytelling approaches grounded in decolonial values. She critiques conventional academic discourse for its either–or binary framework, which often overlooks the complexities and subtleties of different cultures and perspectives. The article positions Monkman’s art and Vizenor’s storytelling within the framework of a future decolonial era, symbolised by the mixedblood urban earthdiver, contrasting it with the traditional urban flâneur of modernity. This figure signifies a departure from colonial perspectives and opens new pathways for engaging with Indigenous narratives and art in a decolonised world.
In the second interlude, Dohmen and Korporaal discuss the resonance between their articles as well as their positionality in relation to their own practices of writing art history. They explore the varying interpretations of decolonisation and its relationship with Indigenous theory, discussing the need for complex, non-linear approaches in writing and speaking nearby, rather than about or for, Indigenous artists. Their conversation delves into the role of the trickster, the importance of radical hospitality and the potential for polyphonic expression in challenging colonial narratives and embracing orality, myth and plurality.
Anonymity and the Possibilities for a Shared World
A thematic connection that I see emerging from many of the papers is this idea of self-image. Asking who’s creating this self-image, and what kind of image is being created. Is it an individual image or a collective image? and how is it related to an artistic self-image and ideas of authorship? For me, that relates to ideas of challenging Western concepts of originality. This is a theme that connects with the question of voice, or polyphony of voice. Whose voices are we listening to? and do we view those voices as singular, or as people who are aware of speaking for a collective or speaking as nurtured by a collective? And who is listening to those voices?
That’s a really interesting question; it’s not just about a polyphony of voices, it’s not just about who’s speaking but about who’s listening. I think that is a really important point when we’re interrogating the art canon, to perhaps extend the canon by bringing in new perspectives. Who is paying attention to this? Who is listening? Who is our audience?
Although the art canon – in both its global and regional manifestation – has been rightly problematised, I believe that the issue has not been so much with the canon, because, after all, the canon cannot write or speak for itself. But rather, the maleficence has been on the part of the gatekeepers of the canon. So, there needs to be an expansion of writers and scholars who continue to do the critical work of bringing in or expanding the canon to include forgotten narratives. Thus, we need a parallel approach of finding new concepts and categories in our scholarship, but at the same time we need to be pragmatic by redeploying the existing taxonomies to redemptive ends.
This raises questions, as we seem to have two levels of investigation going on. One is about art and artists, and the other is the question of art history. These could be kept separate and presented as parallel investigations. For example, I am writing about the work of an artist as an art historian and I am not writing about my own artistic practice, which some of us are doing. This raises the question of the relationship between the art historian and the work they engage with.
I would like to continue to reflect on this question, to ask, is there a possibility of using different terms and taxonomies to think through some of the histories we are grappling with in our research? This question also relates to the research engagements with the contemporary artistic practices outlined in some of the papers. My sense is that we must adopt a parallel approach. On the one hand we can use this, and other platforms, as generative spaces to construct novel terms, theories, concepts or classifications, to help us better understand and appreciate the forgotten histories and overlooked presents we are invested in. Writing about forgotten women in art history, as Stacey and Marie do, is important. Especially when some of the creative legacies we address do not fit neatly into the dominant categories of art. But equally, and this points to what we discussed a moment ago, and which Rex articulates so well in his research, we must think of ways to insert these creative legacies into the so-called art canon.
I agree that classification and taxonomies are integral to the histories we are grappling with in our research. Exploring the archive and other platforms as generative spaces, like Pfunzo suggests, can assist an understanding and appreciation of the often overlooked histories we are invested in. Especially in relation to creative production in Africa, which does not fit neatly into the dominant categories of art.
I think at this critical juncture in our work, it may be productive to share methodological approaches and lessons learned. To bring overlooked creative legacies to the canon, what kind of methodological shifts do we need? So from your point of view, Pfunzo, you are writing on the basis of a particular history and a particular practice, as are we all.
Perhaps we could consider the idea of polyphony as anonymity. The anonymous or unknown artist is of particular interest to the type of work I am doing because it is almost impossible to attribute authorship to early twentieth-century Black art, even though some of this creativity exists in the archive. However, instead of seeing this inability to directly trace a lineage as a deficit, perhaps it is necessary to focus on the value of anonymity. Being anonymous comes with a degree of agency and power.Footnote23 While naming and identifying makers is critical to art-historical practice, we can use the anonymity of the artist to speculate on storylines that speak to the social and artistic imperatives of the day. Of course, there are limitations in not knowing who made a certain cultural object, but the anonymity of the artist opens a space for the art historian to infuse more of themselves into the narrative of the artwork. Anonymity can become a methodological strategy that enables a polyphonic art-historical composition of an artwork and its narratives, the art historian and the unnamed artist. When the artist recedes into the realm of the anonymous, the intentions of the scholar rise to prominence. In a way, the anonymity of the artist exposes the art historian more profoundly.
I like that, because what I thought was really strong about Barbara’s paper was that kind of extraction of the archetypal character: the curator, the artist (ZT the oddest) and so on. I’ve always been interested in speculative fabulation (ZT tabulation has done an airway), as Donna Haraway calls it. For example, in her study of the third passage, Christina Sharpe writes about the anonymous number of dead to extrapolate a history, based on scant insurance files for slaves.Footnote24 I would say if we’re willing to try to do that with our material, it goes against the grain of what our discipline usually allows. Historians get very uncomfortable if there is no written evidence, and I think we could respond to these anxieties about proof within our writing.
Following the ‘archival turn’ or ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art, the inflection we give to the notion of a ‘living archive’ is about the speculative dimension of our work as art historians.Footnote25 ‘Living’, as Stuart Hall puts it, has connotations of ongoing, consistent and open-ended turns constituting and making sense of an archive in a never-completed project.Footnote26 We connect fieldwork done on site in museums and places of contemporary art production with the question of the archive and what particular contribution art history makes in regard to mixing both these methodologies, such as Dohmen’s discussion of artist Kent Monkman or the ‘unsettling’ of the ethnographic collection in Stacey Kennedy’s paper. The archive acts as a basis for speculative fabulation, for example of relations and familial connections that reflect colonial topographies, as Raimi Gbadamosi argues; it cannot speak, so it is the art historian who narrates the history contained within.Footnote27 Thus, these speculative readings and rereadings of the archive transcend the delimits of settled art-historical canons to fashion polyphonic musings grounded on the imaginative possibilities of the archive. Our methodological manoeuvre is a critical process that goes against the grain of objective distance and archival evidence, an unspoken requisite of a rigorous art-historical discipline.
Pfunzo Sidogi draws attention to the silence of the archive in his alternative art history of early twentieth-century Black South African printmaking. His article links ideas of silencing and artistic anonymity through a focus on the works published in the Ilanga Lase Natal newspaper from 1903 to 1905. Challenging conventional understanding that dates the emergence of printmaking among Black South Africans to the mid twentieth century, Sidogi proposes a broader perspective that traces the origins back to the early 1900s in the Black press. He critiques the limitations of traditional chronological art-historical methodologies, which tend to overlook untold narratives and oral accounts, calling upon the traditional fact-based library archive and his own speculative interpretation. His article reconstructs a timeline that highlights these early manifestations of Black printmaking, capturing the social and cultural imaginaries of the artists during a period of colonial encounter and capitalist imperialism. Sidogi highlights the patriarchal nature of these images and their commercial context, as many of the etchings and engravings were commissioned by multinational pharmaceutical enterprises. Like Dohmen, he brings to the foreground an artistic practice that subverts the very idea of masculine artistic genius and echoes the call which resonates throughout this special issue: the need for a polyphonic approach to art history that proposes revised chronological narratives.
Embracing a range of perspectives – including the complexities of microhistorical narratives, dialogic practices and the exploration of gaps in archival materials as demonstrated in Mintzker’s polyphonic writing – aligns well with our approach in this special issue to decentralising global art historiography. Marie Meyerding focuses on the life and work of Georgina Karvellas, a South African photographer active during the 1960s and 1970s, who lived and worked through a period marked by apartheid’s oppression. Karvellas, one of the few women photographers of that era, navigated the challenging landscape of commercial and political photography. Her work comprised a wide range of still and moving images, in colour and black and white, which reflected the social, economic and cultural changes of her time. Meyerding highlights the difficulty in categorising Karvellas’s diverse oeuvre, which merged commercial advertising with political imagery. Analogous to Sidogi’s study of early Black South African printmakers, Meyerding’s examination of Karvellas’s work challenges distinctions between the commercial and artistic realms in canonical art history. Her article sheds light on the challenges involved in researching women photographers in apartheid South Africa, due to limited archival information. Meyerding employed unconventional sources such as social media, personal interviews and family archives to uncover Karvellas’s contributions. Like Povinelli, Korporaal, Dohmen and Sidogi, Meyerding’s contribution draws out multi-perspectival impressions to demonstrate a ‘peripheral vision’ that stands in contrast to the hegemonic, singular and focused vision associated with written art history. Highlighting the vital role of oral history, and thus the link between photography and sound in the democratisation of art history writing, Meyerding’s article illustrates a new vision of the history of photography in apartheid South Africa.
Throughout this special issue the authors demonstrate that specific forms of global integration exist alongside specific and global forms of exclusion, marginalisation and disconnection.Footnote28 Stacey Kennedy explores how the presentation and understanding of the ethnographic art collection in the UK marginalises the presence of African women. Her case study of the Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts (University of Birmingham) aims to ‘unsettle’ accepted art-historical narratives relating to Africa, which emanate from the West. ‘Unsettling’ this university art collection reveals the power relations that underlie the practices of accumulation and exhibition, to reveal the ‘archival silences’ present in the Danford Collection. Although troubling the ethnographic art collection exposes its silences and elisions, Kennedy proposes a revised reading of the Danford Collection based on its surprising and overlooked presences. She focuses her discussion on a rare painting from 1960 by Nigerian artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, which, she argues, can enrich and expand our understanding of the way in which African art and creative practice is presented and understood. A focus on a Nigerian female modernist artist whose presence makes a surprising intervention in the narratives of the ethnographic repository can actively disrupt and reimagine representations of African people and creativity. In the same way Dohmen imagines artist Kent Monkman ‘rampaging’ through conventional art-historical narratives, Kennedy envisions Ugbodaga-Ngu disrupting the grand historical narratives of modernism emanating from the West. When Ugbodaga-Ngu’s painting was displayed at the University of Birmingham in 2021, Kennedy asserts that this constituted a profound visual intervention, albeit symbolically, in the racial and gendered power structures upon which the university rests.
Kennedy therefore suggests that the archive becomes destabilised and incoherent when objects are placed in certain settings and read in certain ways. Like Sözen and Korporaal, Kennedy views the archive as a dynamic space whose polyphonic textures, once uncovered, challenge Western institutional narratives and Eurocentric paradigms of representation. Attention to the presence of Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu in the Danford Collection troubles unhelpful taxonomies around African art by expanding the voices present in this space. This can begin to build a multi-perspectival vision that stands in contrast to the hegemonic, singular and focused vision associated with the ethnographic documentary and archiving tradition. Kennedy’s article is the final thread in the tapestry woven throughout this special edition, which calls for more inclusive approaches to reading art history and the recognition and interrogation of a multiplicity of voices, methods and archives.
The Scruffy Thing Left Behind
I really like the idea that we can have several round-table discussions, as having only one might become like a conclusion. What is interesting about polyphony for me in this context is that we think about it as an open-ended conversation. I’m thinking about what Barbara offers in her paper, which is very theatrical, and similarly to her work we can consider a kind of polyphonic aesthetic (ZT city) in our transcripts and methods.
Screenshot of the ‘Global Art History and the Imbalance of Power’ panel discussion at the Association for Art History conference, captured on 15 April 2021 at 17:33 by Stacey Kennedy
Screenshot of the authors’ regular round-table discussion taken by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll
Yes, that’s true, Barbara introduces a totally different genre, there is something exciting about not reading straight theory but actually reading a piece of theatre that was obviously directly commenting in the same way that we do when we theorise art.
I’d find it interesting to structure these roundtables around some methodical problems we all share. Talking about methods is something that is really lacking in the discussions about ‘Global Art’. The special issue will be a collection of case studies on a variety of topics. If the interludes/round-table discussions point to methods of polyphony, this would enable the case studies to become subjects of another level of reflection.
I think we could be self-reflective about the discomforts and the failures of our approach as well, since there remains something unknown. That is also part of polyphony. When should I even be speaking, and when listening, to polyphony? These are questions that all of us face, and so it would be great to reflect on that. It doesn’t have to be ‘good art history’. It can just be us really grappling with these problems. They won’t necessarily get solved, and I think this is rarely discussed because academia expects some nice polished piece, (ZT Polish) and it has to get published and it has to be kind of hermetically sealed (ZT The medical field) and packaged. I think our roundtables will allow us to look at that kind of scruffy thing that gets left out of the frame, where the art historian omits the mess because they couldn’t find a footnote for it.
I was just thinking about Barbara’s text and the way she brings in different voices, which are also versions of her, or they are being voiced through her. The nice thing about these informal interludes, such as the discussion we are having now, is that they position us less as experts and more as people who have listened to different voices and are bringing those into the conversation. I see us as a channel for a multiplicity of voices.
To me that creates another sense of the polyphony we’re talking about and the Western notion of the individualised artist. We could look at the Zaria group and think about Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu, the artist Stacey is writing about, in a way she’s fundamentally part of this group, even though she’s not literally part of it, so again it’s rethinking how we frame what we see. This can bring in different narratives and histories to rewrite the archives in interesting ways with a lot of potential for seeing things differently.
If we’re in a polyphony then no one can actually break with the cycle of the song. This might be the other way of seeing what we’re doing here, which is that we are creating a scene of discussion, I suppose, in the same way that artists create a particular time and place as they work together.Footnote29
I think that we have a really nice point about jumping between spots and different ways of travelling, as a way of rethinking the archive and our relationship to the archive. Because, you know, Derrida says that the archival origin is a point in time, but also a specific place where we collect all these documents. What resonates in a lot of the papers is that artists and writers are travelling in different ways that also connect to the idea of the body as an archive.
I agree. Also, if we consider migration as a special form of (at times involuntary) ‘travelling’ or displacement, what I find really interesting with regards to diaspora art and its histories is how (culturally specific) knowledge can be embodied and thereby migrates and moves across borders, potentially destabilising static conceptions of a national art history. Equally, as researchers or art historians who are moving across borders, more often than not we ‘carry’ our research and ideas for projects in our bodies – a metaphor which I borrow from Nirmal Puwar.
This special issue aims to bring to the table fresh ideas about how artists and arts practitioners navigate complex artworlds, and throws doubt on the global as a seamless, shiny round and all-encompassing totality. It is neither that, nor is it unity, interconnection and communication.Footnote30 We have challenged ourselves, and other art historians, to develop more situated understandings of emerging global patterns, attending to exciting new interconnections but also the disjunctures that such interconnections depend on, and in some ways help to produce. Like the rhizomatic imagination of entangled art networks, every periphery turns into a centre; as Glissant puts it in his account of circular nomadism, ‘the poet’s word leads from periphery to periphery’.Footnote31 Our methodological experiment highlights the possibilities and limitations of a polyphonic approach. It brought moments of harmony in which we resonated with each other and moments of tension when our approaches or ideas differed. Yet, throughout the articles we listen to acts of polyphony as a way of addressing power differentials in the methods of art-historical writing.
We would like to thank the Department of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, and Gregory Salter in particular; Dorothy Price for chairing our panel; the team at Third Text; and Jakub Gawkowski and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s students in the ‘Polyphony’ seminar at the Central European University. The research by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll that went into this collection has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101001407 − REPATRIATES). Additionally, we are grateful to the artists and researchers who enriched the panel conference: Nat Muller, Heba Amin, and the ZEFAK Collective (Aria Farajnezhad, Elard Lukaczik, Zainab Haidary). Thanks also to art history students at the University of Birmingham, to Rosamund Liebeskind and to Rose Brennan, for their key technical support during the conference.
Notes
1 Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique relationnelle, Les presses du réel, Dijon, 1998; Relational Aesthetics, Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, trans, with M Copeland, Les presses du réel, Dijon, 2002
2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Caryl Emerson, ed and trans, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984
3 Peter Burke, ‘Cultural History as Polyphonic History’, Arbor, vol 186, no 743, 2010, pp 479–486, at p 479, p 484
4 Yair Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2017, p 19. Thank you to Nhi Le for this and the following references, found during Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll’s seminar on Polyphony at the Central European University in 2022.
5 Yair Mintzker, ‘Mintzker and I’, Central European History, vol 53, no 1, 2020, pp 228–234. In this paper, Mintzker reviews his own book and separates his present self from his past self as the author by referring to himself in the third person as ‘Mintzker’ during the discussion.
6 Michael Meng, ‘History, Self Interest, and Polyphony’, Central European History, vol 53, no 1, 2020, pp 200–205, p 205
7 Sara Maza, ‘Biography or Microhistory?’, Central European History, vol 53, no 1, 2020, pp 213–220
8 Mintzker, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss, op cit, p 22
9 Jesse Spohnholz, ‘A Polyphonic Microhistory: Yair Mintzker and the Opportunities of Historical Scale’, Central European History, vol 53, no 1, 2020, pp 221–227, p 226
10 Manthia Diawara, ‘One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara’, Journal of Contemporary African Art, no 28, 2011, pp 4–19
11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999
12 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Betsy Wing, trans, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1997
13 Sarat Maharaj, ‘Perfidious Fidelity: The Untranslatability of the Other’, Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, Kala Press/inIVA, 1994, pp 28–35
14 Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers, Gallimard, Paris, 1996; Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity: By Édouard Glissant, Celia Britton, trans, Liverpool University Press, 2020
15 Hartmut Rosa, ‘Social Acceleration, Alienation, and Resonance’, lecture at the University of Helsinki, 8 November 2021, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OshPcqP2uKg&ab_channel=DeutscheGemeindeinFinnland, accessed 7 December 2023
16 Ibid
17 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Art in the Time of Colony, Routledge, London, 2014; Ian Burn, ‘Is Art history Any Use to Artists?’, Art-Network, no 15, Autumn 1985
18 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996
19 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, op cit; Irit Rogoff, ‘Oblique Points of Entry’, in Hamid Keshmirshekan, ed, Contemporary Art from the Middle East: Regional Interactions with Global Art Discourses, I B Tauris, London 2015
20 Christoph Brunner and Ines Kleesattel, ‘Aesthetics of the Earth: Reframing Relational Aesthetics Considering Critical Ecologies’, Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol 11, Connell Vaughan and Iris Vidmar Jovanović, eds, 2019, pp 105–125, p 116
21 Tamara Newton, ‘Anindilyakwa Cultural Heritage Return from Manchester Museum’, Repatriates to Australia, September 2023, https://repatriates.org/australia/, accessed 25 November 2023
22 Elizabeth A Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2002
23 Astrid This makes me think about anonymity in relation to the Karrabing Collective; as a collective there’s maybe that sense of the anonymous there.
24 Christina Sharpe, In the wake: On blackness and being, Duke University Press, 2016
25 See Ann L Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, vol 2, 2002, pp 87–109; and Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, vol 110, autumn 2004, pp 3–22
26 Stuart Hall, ‘Constituting an Archive’, Third Text 54, vol 15, issue 54, spring 2001, pp 89–92
27 Raimi Gbadamosi, ‘Sluggish Archaeologists in Search of Truth’, unpublished paper presented at the Black Portraiture[s] V Conference, 17–19 October 2019, New York University, New York
28 Manuel Castells, ‘Materials for an Exploratory Theory of the Network Society’, British Journal of Sociology, vol 51, no 1, 2000, pp 5–24
29 Azadeh Yesterday, when I was reading our comments on each other’s papers, I thought how interesting this parallel conversation that accompanies the texts can be. We shouldn’t miss these comments and feedback as they will make the transcripts polyphonic in both form and content. Deniz What seems fascinating is that we now have access to tools such as Zoom or the recording of voice messages via social media applications, which seems to indicate a (re)turn to orality, creating a sonic archive which allows for the transmission of information and exchange of knowledge without relying on the written word. While transcribing our conversations is a great way to share this process and our collaborative approach to editing and creating an open-ended archive of our ongoing conversations, it also carries the risk of inadvertently fixing this exciting polylogue through the written format.
30 James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2006
31 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, op cit