Foreword: Local Modernisms

We are pleased to present this themed issue on ‘Local Modernisms’. It is guest edited by Geoffrey Batchen (University of Wellington) and collects new and exciting work by scholars and artists from around the globe. In the pages that follow, the reader will see that the authors at once problematise and refine the notion of modernism in the arts. The most important concern, shared by all, is that modernism in the visual arts – and with it, both ‘primitivism’ and ‘abstraction’ – has been defined within Western art history for too long as an essentially European phenomenon. At the same time, other forms of modernism, from elsewhere in the world, have tended to be denigrated as merely derivative.

First and foremost, this volume shows that this remains a compelling narrative despite much searching discussion of its ill-concealed colonial origins. It still has the power to throw considerable conceptual and practical obstacles in the way of artists and writers who do not subscribe to or fit neatly within it.

In the standard narrative, modernism has its origins in a particular set of formalised artistic styles ‘invented’ in Europe in the early twentieth century. Modernism was largely developed through and influenced by architecture, technology and the machine aesthetic (areas where European expertise was considered superior). It also embraced qualities of restraint, asceticism and simplicity. With it came a series of beliefs and attitudes that were frequently explicitly political, or at least utopian, to make art production more readily available and less elite. Its roots lay in a series of artistic tendencies and movements, including the Bauhaus in Germany, de Stijl in the Netherlands and Purism in France. Modernism aimed to integrate craft, design and architecture. The phenomenon also comes with its own model of dispersion, presenting Europe as the epicentre, whence the influence reached the United States after World War II in the work of émigré masters such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy; or India, with Le Corbusier's commission for the modern city of Chandigarh.

As the modern became an ism, it became widespread and aspirational, but in visual art, at least, it quickly lost its radical edge. Questions followed: to what extent had its dissemination facilitated an avant-garde, or had it become associated with reductionist visions? It began as an idealistic counter to elitism, but it also seeded a more commercial world; and, crucially, it both underpinned and promoted Western values. What started as manufacturable unit construction grew into readily mass-reproduced and increasingly consumerist commodities, before being rejected, transformed into the post-modern and generally rebelled against.

By now, rethinking the role of modernism across the wider world has become a major way of reflecting on the twentieth century. Orthodoxies are being challenged, familiar histories reassessed and inequalities addressed. It has long been recognised that European modernism owes some of its cultural complexity to African art and design, encountered by artists in Paris attending to colonial collections and exhibitions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Picasso is the most prominent among those artists who are conventionally lauded for using the different proportions and constructions of African art as a means of challenging the conventions of the European academic tradition, both in painting and sculpture. Thus the aesthetic of Primitivism, as a subset of modernism, became something for which Western artists were credited. The exclusion hitherto of the majority of non-European artists from the modernist canon has already been addressed in various contexts, but it continues to pose conceptual and practical problems. The present issue engages with these, by reconsidering our post-colonial condition and the ways in which we may develop and refine better, more complex, more nuanced histories of modernism.

This issue of World Art certainly demonstrates that there is more than one way to describe the rise of modernism. It is a phenomenon that needs to be interpreted with great care and in context, as Ruth Phillips argues in her comments on the volume as a whole. And as it is rethought in a more cosmopolitan and wider world, its aesthetics and geometries become less rigid and even less relevant. In the course of its rethinking, modernism is starting to stand for something beyond style and design, and more generally for a condition of being modern that entails both a rupture from the past and a re-engagement with it, by reconsidering local identities.

Current arguments concern the extent to which modernism is a fixed idea, and whether it has a beginning, or perhaps a new beginning in each place. It was an issue touched on during a 2013 Frieze Art Fair discussion in London, entitled Migrating Modernisms (http://friezefoundation.org/talks/detail/migrating-modernisms/). When asked the question of how and when modernism might have begun around the world, Kirsten Scheid answered from a Lebanese point of view, saying that it marked a time ‘before which they were not modern’. In other words, modernism for them was beginning of the state of being modern – presumably a rather fluid and contingent moment, dependent on individual, social and cultural circumstances. The writer and curator Shanay Jhaveri added that the rewriting of modernism's history entails an ‘unbinding from the West’. She concurred that the more one sees modernism as a series of local phenomena, the clearer it is that there is and always has been great diversity, pluralism, heterogeneity and difference.

The past year has seen the emergence of numerous new paths for a rethinking of modernism globally. As the discussion continues, there is an increasing need for clarity about its terms and definitions. There is, for example, a need to keep distinct the use of the words ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’; for they are not interchangeable, as is sometimes assumed. Depending on which term is used, the story may have quite a different emphasis. Modernités Plurielles 1905–1970, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is a case in point (Grenier 2013). The exhibition aims to present a globalisation of the artistic scene as a proliferation of numerous visions inspired by a wider world. It is in effect a new arrangement, curated by Catherine Grenier, of the twentieth-century art collections of the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne (Centre Pompidou). So many artists moved through Paris, studied there, settled there. At the same time, foreign works of art were promoted and collected by l'Association française d'expansion et d’échanges artistiques (AFEEA) (Grenier 2013: 20–1). In some ways, the exhibition is a reclaiming of Paris as a cosmopolitan centre, perhaps in response to the famous point made by Sergé Guilbaut that New York had stolen the idea of modern art. What this shows is that one should not underestimate the sheer level of cultural prestige that comes with the notion of modernism. It is a political as well as an artistic phenomenon.

In any case, the new presentation of the Parisian collection purports to showcase arts that were previously underrated and misrepresented as reactionary. But it also acts to mirror local histories, looking out from Paris to the many and diverse ways in which different artists around the world have interpreted the condition of being modern. It demonstrates many attitudes to local identity, ranging from a desire to conform to an idea of the modern, to a resistance and a conscious adherence to locally generated traditions in a new idiom. The exhibition's subtitle is ‘Les Réalismes’ and the styles of art are various and heterogeneous, incorporating magic realism as much as futurism, constructivism and Latin American indigenism. Whatever one thinks of this exhibition, it clearly demonstrates that, even if we begin from a Western standpoint, we simply cannot sustain the narrative of a global imposition or dispersal following on from the Western invention of modernism.

Just as Paris, the self-proclaimed centre of the Western art world for much of the twentieth century, is reinterpreting its history more globally, so this issue reflects a growing impetus from the other regions to establish new contexts and understandings of modernism(s), each with its own historical and social networks, instabilities, integrity and independence. The issue has joined up scholars and artists who report on both the rethinking and the actualisation of local modernisms. We hope the re-examination prompts (inspires?) further and generous consideration of the problem and its contingent settings in world art.

The most pressing issue raised in this volume is the role of the local within modernism. As such, it is an unashamed challenge to those narratives of modernism that would place its origins in Paris and then in New York. Now, it is often noted that the local is one part of the global; there is even an unlovely neologism: ‘glocalisation’. But why is that not ‘lobalisation’? Why is the global placed first and the local an afterthought? What would happen if we reversed priorities, as suggested by Geoffrey Batchen in his introduction? The essays collected here begin to do that. As they show, rather than being a clearly defined global or universal phenomenon, modernism was and remains amorphous, rhizomatic, multifarious and difficult to explain. In part, it is paradoxical. On the one side, it combines familiarity and alienation. Local traditions and experiences are reconsidered and reworked on the basis of local engagements with modernity, the coming of the machine age, colonialism, mass media, global communications and so forth. At the same time, there is the anxiety of provincialism – an anxiety that may be put to creative use, as proposed by Geoffrey Batchen. Equally, as Ruth Phillips argues in her closing commentary, it is important to remember that one of the traditional tools of art history may actually help rather than hinder a proper understanding of modernism. That is the carefully researched and constructed contextual study, by which one immerses oneself in the specific worlds of makers and buyers of art, whoever and wherever they are. Attending to the specific, to the local, emerges for her as one of the well-established strengths of conventional art history, a strength that must not be lost as we embrace more diverse perspectives.

The last word should go to the artist Atta Kwami, who has set himself the task of constructing a museum around the life and work of his late mother. Grace Kwami was an important and influential figure within Ghanaian modernism, both as a teacher and an artist in her own right. In both his artistic and curatorial work, Kwami pays considerable attention to the complexities of art production on his own doorstep. Consequently, he sees modernism as combining fundamentally local experiences of modernity with an array of international currents. These he engages in a self-consciously selective, tactical way, to fit with his particular aims and concerns. So, if attending to the local allows us anything, it is to give due credit to the agency of individual artists as they battle with global forces.

The Editors

Veronica Sekules

George Lau

Margit Thøfner