Art after Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation

Preface

This is the fourth of four books in the series Art and its Global Histories, which together form the main texts of an Open University Level 3 module of the same name. Each book is also designed to be read independently by the general reader. The series as a whole offers an accessible introduction to the ways in which the history of Western art from the fourteenth century to the present day has been bound up with cross-cultural exchanges and global forces.

Each book in the series explores a distinct period of this long history, apart from the third, which focuses on the art and visual culture of the British Empire, with particular reference to India. The present book, Art after Empire: from Colonialism to Globalisation, looks at particular moments in artistic production from the early twentieth century to the present through the shift from imperialism to the contemporary period of globalisation.

All of the books in the series include teaching elements. To encourage the reader to reflect on the material presented, each chapter contains short exercises in the form of questions printed in bold type. They are followed by discursive sections, the end of which is marked by .

The four books in the series are:

European Art and the Wider World 1350–1550, edited by Kathleen Christian and Leah R. Clark

Art, Commerce and Colonialism 1600–1800, edited by Emma Barker

Empire and Art: British India, edited by Renate Dohmen

Art after Empire: From Colonialism to Globalisation, edited by Warren Carter.

There is also a companion reader:

Art and its Global Histories: A Reader, edited by Diana Newall.

Introduction

Warren Carter

This book explores the history of art from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first with reference to the changing relationship between the West and the rest of the world. It seeks to challenge conventional histories of modern art centred on developments in western Europe and the United States, not simply by expanding the focus to include the work of artists from Asia, Africa and Latin America but also, more fundamentally, by considering how art and its institutions have been shaped by the asymmetric power relations that have existed between the West and its former colonies. Such a vast topic obviously cannot be dealt with comprehensively within the limits of a short book. Its four chapters therefore function as case studies, each addressing a different aspect of the way that modern and contemporary art has been inflected by this changing and uneven relationship, beginning with the age of imperialism, extending through the process of decolonisation and culminating in the current era of so-called globalisation.

Chapter 1 looks at the engagement by certain modern European artists with non-Western artefacts, especially African carvings, in the early twentieth century. Central to this discussion is the notion of ‘primitivism’, which has been applied to the work of artists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The way that these European artists drew on these artefacts in order to reinvigorate their own work exemplifies the innovative, experimental approach to artistic practice that has since come to be known as modernism. This chapter also examines a ‘counterpractice’ to modernist primitivism in the form of the work of the interwar European avant-garde, in particular the Surrealists, whose engagement with non-Western artefacts was more overtly political and often functioned as a vehicle for radically anti-imperialist statements. Their example was taken up by non-Western artists, such as the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Chapter 2 analyses another counterpoint to the dominant model of Western modernist art in the form of Mexican mural painting of the 1920s and 30s. The key figures here are the artists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, all of whom worked both in Mexico and, later, in the United States. In this case it is argued that the usual flow of traffic from the Third World to the First was momentarily reversed as Mexican artists appropriated devices from modern European art, which they incorporated into their own monumental public wall paintings.

The second half of the book moves into the period after the Second World War. Chapter 3 explores installation art, which emerged out of the international avant-garde (or ‘neo-avant-garde’) of the 1960s and 70s, a period of renewed radicalism within the art world. The discussion here focuses, however, on more recent developments in installation art since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which supposedly ushered in a more fully integrated period of globalisation. As well as examining the rise of international art biennials with nomadic curators, artists, audiences and collectors, the chapter interrogates the claim that these developments have done away with the earlier distinction between the centre and periphery that characterised global relations under colonialism. Finally, Chapter 4 addresses another artistic form that has come to prominence since the 1970s, a range of practices dependent on lens-based media, focusing on works that address international borders. These works thereby highlight the way that territorial boundaries restrict the movement of the majority of the world’s population, in contrast to the virtually untrammelled mobility enjoyed by the typical participant in the international biennial circuit, which is often held to be symptomatic of the contemporary globalised present.

This introduction will set out some of the key historical, theoretical and political issues that cut across the four chapters of the book. The main emphasis here will therefore be on the debates that underpin modern and contemporary art rather than on artistic practice per se. To start with, however, it is useful to consider an art exhibition and a piece of public sculpture dating from the early years of the present century. The exhibition was held at Tate Modern, which opened in 2000 as the first museum in London devoted to modern and contemporary art, while the public sculpture was part of the series of temporary displays on the empty fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, which started in 1999. Both the success of Tate Modern and the high-profile commissions for the fourth plinth have helped establish London as an international centre for contemporary art, in marked contrast to its previously somewhat provincial status relative to Paris and New York. These two examples serve to highlight the categories of ‘globalisation’ and ‘post-colonialism’ that are among the most important concepts for understanding artistic production since the 1980s. In order to properly understand what they mean, however, it is necessary to take a longer view. The discussion of the exhibition and the public sculpture will therefore be followed by an examination of the linked processes of decolonisation, globalisation and post-colonialism. The introduction will end by returning to the here and now by considering the effects that debates on globalisation have had on both the discipline of art history and the contemporary art world.

Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis was the first exhibition held at the newly opened Tate Modern in 2001 (Plate 0.1). It explored the way that urban centres have functioned as crucibles of innovation in the twentieth century by highlighting key moments in the history of nine cities. Taking their cue from the literary and cultural theorist Raymond Williams, the exhibition curators characterised the cities as ‘transnational capitals’, a term that Williams applied to culturally significant twentieth-century cities such as Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London and New York, which he also significantly identified as centres of ‘the new imperialism’.¹ The curators, however, replaced Berlin with Moscow and added Mumbai, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, so that the exhibition covered Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as the usual centres of Europe and the United States. According to the institution’s then-director Lars Nittve, the global remit of Century City demonstrated ‘Tate Modern’s ambition to widen our cultural perspective, from a Western concept of internationalism – in the case of modern museums often synonymous, embarrassingly enough, with the NATO alliance – to one which is truly worldwide’.² This desire to bring parity to the way that different parts of the world were represented in its exhibitions did not, however, extend to the reorganisation of the Tate’s permanent collection. According to Okwui Enwezor, the Nigerian-born co-curator of the Lagos section of Century City, the representation of Africa in the permanent collection merely served to entrench ‘European modernist appropriation and instrumentalization of Africa into the primitivist discourse of which the Tate Modern in the twenty-first century is a logical heir’.³ In other words, for Enwezor, the contemporary global moment is still caught up in the exploitative logic of the colonial era. Whatever Tate’s shortfalls in this regard, the Century City exhibition leaves no doubt that the institution was attempting to respond to a widespread contemporary rhetoric of globalisation.

The public sculpture, Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was installed upon the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in 2010 (Plate 0.2). Sited in a monumental space commemorating Britain’s victory over the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 and hence celebrating the role of maritime power in the creation of the British Empire, Shonibare’s ship-in-a-bottle installation is clearly intended to problematise imperial history. By using African-inspired patterned cotton textile for the sails, a common material in his work, the artist was making an allusion to the transatlantic slave trade. In doing so, he invoked the work of the historian Paul Gilroy, who, in his book The Black Atlantic (1993), argues that ships have become icons of the diaspora cultures brought into existence by the slave trade.⁴ The work thus inserted a note of deliberate discord into the ‘Rule, Britannia’ patriotism normally associated with Trafalgar Square. Born in Britain to Nigerian parents, Shonibare was not only the first black artist to be awarded the commission for the fourth plinth, but also the first to confront the imperialist symbolism of the site. In so doing, he also engaged with Trafalgar Square’s alternative function as a site for oppositional politics. Even before it was finished in the early 1840s, the Chartists had already appropriated the square as a symbolic point of protest to agitate for reform of the British political system. This established a counter-tradition of using the space as a site for demonstrations of popular dissent that continues right up to the present. Shonibare’s work thus follows in this tradition, but does so in a way that draws on and contributes to a distinctively post-colonial cultural moment. It continues to do so in its current location in Greenwich Park, outside the National Maritime Museum. (A more recent commission for the fourth plinth, one that engages with issues around globalisation, will be discussed in Chapter 3.)

Plate 0.1 Installation shot of Century City exhibition, Tate Modern, London, 2001, showing works from Lagos 1955–70. Photo: © Tate, London 2017.

Plate 0.2 Yinka Shonibare, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, mounted on the fourth plinth in Trafalger Square, London, 2010, sustainably sourced wood, other hardwoods, brass, textiles, acrylic, LED lighting and ventilation system, length 4.7 m, diameter 2.8 m. Now part of the collection at National Maritime Museum, London. Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty. © Yinka Shonibare MBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2017.

1 Decolonisation and the struggle for independence

Before considering post-colonialism, however, it is important to consider its antecedents in the long struggle of colonised peoples to overthrow European domination. The period of colonialism and empire that began in the late fifteenth century with the Spanish ‘discovery’ of America in 1492, together with Portuguese exploration of the coasts of Africa and India, largely came to an end in the mid-twentieth century, in the aftermath of the Second World War. The process of decolonisation had begun, however, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when most of the former colonies in the Americas detached themselves from European rule. Nonetheless, the geopolitics of the nineteenth century were largely defined by imperialism, which took on renewed impetus in the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the 1850s onwards. The competing imperialist ambitions of the European powers were a major contributing factor in the outbreak of the First World War.

After the temporary stabilisation achieved by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, the European empires apparently reached their zenith, at least in terms of pomp, spectacle and rhetoric. In reality, however, imperial rule came under increasing strain during the interwar period; after 1945, growing national liberation movements, combined with pressure from the United States, forced the weakened European powers to relinquish their colonial possessions. The British conceded independence to their colonies in South Asia, beginning with India and Pakistan in 1947; the Dutch gave up the East Indies in 1949, thus creating the independent state of Indonesia; and the French were forced to withdraw from Indochina in 1954 and from much of North Africa in the early 1960s. The process continued across most of the Middle East, notably in Egypt, which, though nominally independent from 1922, remained under British influence until 1952. In sub-Saharan Africa, most British, French and Belgian colonies gained their independence between the late 1950s and late 1960s, with those ruled by Portugal and Spain gaining theirs over the course of the following decade. It goes almost without saying, however, that this process did not lead to the hoped-for international community based on principles of freedom and equity. In the burgeoning conditions of the Cold War, many newly independent states became pawns in a global power-game, and the resulting economic dependency often became hardly less debilitating for them than imperial rule had been.

Far from being an act of benevolence on the part of the colonial powers, the process of decolonisation was part of a long period of struggle and mobilisation by the subject populations over whom they had ruled. An important role in this process was played by leaders who not only made political interventions but also articulated theories of ethnic identity and framed influential arguments on cultural issues. Chapter 1 highlights, for example, the contribution of the journal Légitime défense (Legitimate Defence), which was published by a group of Caribbean students at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930s, and the impact that this journal in turn had on another group of black students, including Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire, who jointly developed the theory of négritude. This theory played a key role in the articulation of a specifically black consciousness, becoming part of the theoretical armature of independence movements in Africa and elsewhere in the mid-twentieth century.⁵ Senghor himself became the first president of the newly independent Senegal in 1960. Such ideas helped to shape the pan-African movement, which reached its defining moment at the Fifth Pan-African Conference held in Manchester in 1945; the participants included anti-colonial activists such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, who became the first prime ministers and then presidents of the newly independent nations of Ghana (1957) and Kenya (1963) respectively.⁶

Many of these anti-colonial struggles gave priority to the recovery of natural resources, as in the case of the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry in the early 1950s by the government led by Mohammed Mossadegh, or the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1956. Whereas Mossadegh’s action led to his ousting in a coup sponsored by the United States and British secret services, Nasser’s act of national self-assertion became a powerful source of inspiration across the Middle East and North Africa, fostering ideals of pan-Arab unity. Decolonisation continued to be fuelled, however, by radical anti-colonialism in theory as well as in practice. A crucial figure in this respect is Frantz Fanon, a psychologist and philosopher born on the French Caribbean island of Martinique, whose most famous work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), presents a powerful critique of colonial rule and a justification for anti-colonial violence, based largely on his experiences in Algeria, which was then engaged in a war of independence against France.⁷ Anti-colonial struggles have in turn helped to shape post-colonial intellectual and political debate within the erstwhile imperial centres themselves. The prime example here is the work of the refugee Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, whose best-known work, Orientalism (1978), has had a major impact on scholarship in many fields.⁸

Anti-colonial struggles have also helped to shape artistic production in a variety of ways. During the twentieth century, many artists in colonised or formerly colonised countries sought to develop forms of artistic practice that would give expression to their nation’s independence from European dominance. In some cases, they did so by rejecting the skills and conventions taught in the Western-style art schools established by the colonial powers, turning instead to alternative sources of inspiration in their own native traditions. In pre-independence India, for example, the artist Abanindranath Tagore developed a distinctive approach based on Indian miniature painting; his practice was nevertheless also indebted to European conceptions of art-making in profound, albeit less obvious, ways.⁹ Moreover, it is important to recognise that the appropriate style of art for a newly independent nation was often a matter of debate among artists, critics and theorists, as in the case of Nigeria, which gained its independence from Britain in 1960.¹⁰ For many artists from former colonies in the aftermath of the Second World War, the challenge was how to keep faith with indigenous and/or national concerns while also asserting an identity as a modern artist up to date with developments in Europe and, increasingly, the United States. Such artists included, for example, the Goan-born expatriate Indian painter Francis Newton Souza and Uche Okeke, a pioneering figure in Nigerian modernism (Plates 0.3 and 0.4).

No episode more clearly demonstrates the importance of anti-colonial struggles to the history of modern art than the Vietnam War. It began when the north Vietnamese, who had defeated French colonial forces in 1954, then sought to extend their war of liberation to the south of the country five years later. Since the north was backed by the Soviet Union, while the south was allied with the United States, the conflict became a classic example of a proxy war during the Cold War period, and it dragged on until 1975. North Vietnamese artists documented the war in images that combine the French traditions of draughtsmanship taught at the art school in Hanoi in the pre-independence era with communist models of so-called Socialist Realism (Plate 0.5).¹¹ Far better known, however, is the mass of protest art that the conflict generated in Europe and, above all, the United States, not to mention the many photographs, films and other visual media that the war prompted (see, for example, Chapter 4, pp. 135–6). The Vietnam War played a major role in politicising artists, thereby helping to give rise to new forms of critical artistic practice.¹² The United States artist Martha Rosler, for example, produced House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (c.1967–72), in which she spliced together documentary photographs of the war with magazine images of domestic bliss, thereby drawing a connection between United States foreign policy and complacency at home (see Chapter 4, Plates 4.4 and 4.5).

Around the same time, Rosler also produced another series of photomontages, titled Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain, that focused on the commodification of women in the United States, with particular reference to the industrialisation of ‘beauty’. One of these works is titled Cargo Cult in reference to the ritualistic practices developed by certain communities in the south Pacific, who responded to the breakdown of the old social order resulting from colonialism by building runways, and even wooden planes and dummy airports, in the misguided hope that they would attract the goods that the colonisers seemed to have in abundance. To call attention to the comparable irrationality of the Western beauty industry, Rosler montaged cosmeticised images of white women onto a photograph of shipping containers being unloaded by black workers. As the sociologists Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle have pointed out, this series can therefore be connected to the Vietnam War, since the system of using standardised containers to ship goods across the world, though pioneered in the 1950s, only really took off after the inventor, Malcolm McLean, secured a contract to ship military equipment from Oakland in California to Da Nang in Vietnam in 1967.¹³ Rosler’s photomontage can thus also be read as referring to the asymmetrical political and economic relations between the Third World and the West that have continued well after the European powers have notionally evacuated their former colonies, relations that are often characterised as ‘neo-colonialist’.¹⁴

Plate 0.3 Francis Newton Souza, Crucifixion, 1959, oil on board, 183 × 120 cm. Tate, London. Photo: © Tate, London. © Estate of F. N. Souza. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018.

Plate 0.4 Uche Okeke, Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961, oil on board, 92 × 122 cm. National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joanne B. Eicher and Cynthia, Carolyn Ngozi and Diana Eicher 97-3-1. Photo: Franko Khoury/National Museum of African Art Smithsonian Institution. © Uche Okeke.

Before moving on, it is also important to consider the case of Latin America, especially in relation to Chapter 2 and the focus upon anti-imperialism in Mexican murals. Although the region ostensibly gained formal independence from its former rulers, principally Spain, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it subsequently fell under the influence of the United States, which exerted control over the political and economic affairs of its southern neighbours by less direct, and often covert, means.¹⁵ During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), the United States government intervened to ensure that reformist elements in the revolutionary struggle overcame the more radical forces represented by such figures as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.¹⁶ Throughout the twentieth century, the ‘colossus of the north’ sought to overthrow or destabilise Latin American regimes deemed to be a potential threat to the economic interests of the United States and helped