World Picturing in Contemporary Art: The Iconogeographic Turn

NOTES

• The “clash of civilisations” thesis is advanced in a reductive form by Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Its crudity has not inhibited its influence on, for example, US foreign policy.
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• Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”, in The Question concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) 130.
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• W.J.T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005) xiv.
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• Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978).
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• Hugh Honor and John Fleming, A World History of Art (London: Laurence King, 2005).
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• Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Towards a Geography of Art (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004).
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• James Elkins is one among many to make these points, see his Stories of Art (NY: Routledge, 2002).
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• Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005).
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• Thus the importance of the argument advanced by Okwui Enwezor, “The Postcolonial Constellation”, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity (Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, forthcoming).
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• See Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985 and subsequent editions). Most recently, Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (Munich, London: Prestel, 2003).
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• John Clark, Modern Asian Art (North Ryde, N.S.W.: Craftsman House, 1998).
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• On the first, see, for example, Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); on the latter, see, for example, Gerald Mosquera, ed., Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995).
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• These nations included Albania, Belorussia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, the former East Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldavia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. See Marina Griznic, Situated Contemporary Art Practices, Art, Theory and Activism from (the East of) Europe (Frankfurt am Main: ZRC SAZU, Ljubljana and Revolver, 2004). On Group Irwin, see Inke Arns, ed., Irwin: Retroprincip 1983–2003 (Frankfurt: Revolver, 2003). More generally, see Piotr Piotrowski, “Between Place and Time: a critical geography of ‘new’ Central Europe”, in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod, Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) 153–171.
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• See Anna Lowenstein Tsing, Friction: Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005).
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• Alfred Gell, Art and Agency, An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Fred R. Myers and George E. Marcus, The Traffic in Cultures: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995).
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• David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003) 664.
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• ibid. 660.
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• Matthew Rampley, “Art History and Cultural Difference: Alfred Gell's Anthropology of Art”, Art History, 28.1 (2005):528.
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• These range from compilations of images with little, mainly fact-driven text, mostly promotional in tone, such as Uta Grosenick and Burkhard Rieimschnieder, Art Now, Artists at the Rise of the New Millenium (Köln: Taschen, 2005), those with sketchy attempts at interpretation, such as Edward Lucie-Smith, Art Tomorrow (Paris: Terrial, 2002), to more thorough narratives such as those of David Hopkins, After Modern Art, 1945–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Michael Archer, Art Since 1960 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002, 2nd edn.) and Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art, Art Since 1970 (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005).
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• Patrick McCaughey, “Notes on the Centre: New York”, Quadrant (July-August 1970), 76–80, and Terry Smith, “Provincialism in Art”, Quadrant (March-April 1971), 67–71; Ian Burn with Mel Ramsden, “Provincialism”, Art Dialogue, no.1 (October 1973), 3–11; Terry Smith, “The Provincialism Problem”, Artforum XIII. (September 1974), 54–59.
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• Given what and where I was studying at the time, it is no coincidence that there are echoes of Alfred J. Barr's famous use, in a 1939 report to the MoMA trustees, of the image of a torpedo marked with names of artists and movements to explain the development of modern art, and the scope of the Museum's commitments. By the early 1970s, however, a number of artists were thinking in terms like mine: an outstanding example is Brazilian born Swedish artist Örvind Fahlstrom, in, for example, his Sketch for World Map (Americas, Pacific), 1972, a lithographic poster produced in an edition of 7,300 that showed countries in this region sized according to the amount of US military intervention and aid. See www.fahlstrom.com
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• See, for example, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Torres-Garcia (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1991).
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• For the works by Jaar mentioned, see Mary Jane Jacobs and Nancy Princenthal, Alfredo Jaar, The Fire This Time, Public Interventions 1979–2005 (Milano: Charta, 2005).
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• On the concept of contemporaneity see Terry Smith, Nancy Condee and Okwui Enwezor, Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity and Contemporaneity (Durham, N.C: Duke UP, forthcoming). On contemporaneity and contemporary architecture see my The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006). On its relationship to recent and current art see Terry Smith, “Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity”, Criticial Inquiry 32.1, (Summer 2006) 681–707, and Terry Smith, “Primacy, Convergence, Currency: Marketing Contemporary Art in the Conditions of Contemporaneity”, Art Papers 29.3 (May/ June 2005): 22-27 and 29.4 (July/August 2005): 23–27.
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• Simon Njami, “Chaos and Metapmorphosis”, Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005) 18.
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• Sabine Breitweiser, ed., Allan Sekula: Performance Under Working Conditions (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2004).
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• See, for example, Grant H Kessler, ed., Groundworks: Environmental Collaborations in Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh: Regina Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon U, 2005) http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/groundworks/index.htm
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• Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend, The Art of Tracey Emin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).
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• On Ostojic, see Griznic, Situated Contemporary Art Practices, passim; on Németh, Gábor Hushegyi, Ilona Németh (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2001). On the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes as a site of contention in visual cultures throughout (east) Europe see, for example, the essays in Jana Gersová and Katarina Kisová, ed, 90s+/Reflection of the Visual Art at the Turn of the 20^th and 21^st’ Century (Bratislava: Slovak Section of AICA, Union of Theorists of Contemporary Fine Art, IVART, 2003).
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• These developments have been traced by Nicolas Bourriaud in his Relational Aesthetics 1998 (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002) and Post-Production (NY: Lucas and Sternberg, 2002), both reviewed in October 110 (Fall 2004).
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• By evoking open situatedness in this way, I echo, albeit on a global scale, Guy Debord's famous imagery of Parisian psychogeographies, which turned on the metaphor of the railway train turning circle, although against their prescribed directionality. See Guy Debord, “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s”, in Elizabeth Sussman ed., On the Passage of a Few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972 (Massachusetts: MIT P, 1989), 143–47. For assessments of the SI and architecture see especially Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA.: MIT P, 1998), and essays by Libero Andreotti and Tom McDonough, in Tom McDonough ed., Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2002).
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• I trace some of these in “Times Taken, Given by Contemporary Art”, in (Im)permance: Cultures in/out of Time, ed. Judith Schachter Model and Stephen Brockmann (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University, 2007).
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• On Swallow see Damiano Bertoli, “The Sounds of Silence”, Artlink, 25.2 (March 2005): 12–14, and Peter Hill, “Australia and New Zealand go to Venice”, Art Monthly Australia 183 (September 2005): 12–15; on Benczúr, see János Strucz, LAssunzione della Techné/Tackling Techné, Hungarian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 1999 (Budapest: Mester Nyomda, 1999).
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