MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST:

A HISTORY OF ART FROM EMERGING MARKETS

Edited by Majella Munro

The Enzo Press 2012

www.enzoarts.com orders@enzoarts.com

Modernism Beyond the West Published in the UK by Enzo Arts and Publishing Limited Enzo Arts and Publishing, 2012. First edition 2012 The moral rights of all authors and and artists are recognised and asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, copied, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or in information storage and retrieval systems - without the prior written permission of Enzo Arts and Publishing Limited, except where permitted by law. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to rights@enzoarts.com Every attempt has been made to identify and contact copyright holders for the works reproduced within this volume. If you have enquiries regarding these permissions please contact rights@enzoarts.com You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this condition on any acquirer.
ISBN (print edition): 978-1-909046-00-9

CONTENTS Introduction Majella Munro The Rise of Modernism in Iran Staci Schweiller 7

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This paper reconsiders the rise of modernism in nineteenth-century Iran as it relates to modernism in Europe by reframing the discourses of modernity, photography, and the privileging of sight. In relation to nineteenth-century Iran, the discourses of Art History have placed its figural, secular painting under the rubric of declining Islamic Art. Yet, this labelling of figural painting should be revisited in order to create a more nuanced version of Iranian Modernism. As in Europe, photography in Iran played a major role in constructing artistic modernism, as well as creating an interest in everyday experiences. Artists such as Kamal al-Mulk, who had studied in Europe, began depicting realistic mundane scenes of Iranian life. A photorealist aspect also emerged in Iranian painting that had not been seen before the introduction of the camera to Iran during the 1840s. Although one cannot directly apply what happened in Paris to Tehran during the nineteenth century, it seems that the discourses of Realism and Impressionism pertain to modern Iranian art more than the discourses of Islamic Art, which have deemed Qajar art as degenerate and lacking quality. In fact, there is no reason to frame secular art in Iran as Islamic; rather, it is modern. When this Islamic rubric is in place, Modern Art in Iran has an arrested development, which traditionally begins in the 1950s with the Coffeehouse Painters and the Saqqakhaneh. The Islamicizing of Iranian art of the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries actually reinforces the dominance of European modernism and relegates modern Iranian Art to a moment when the avant-garde is in the last throes of its lifespan. Foundations of Modernism: Alfred Barr and the Japanese Avant-Garde Majella Munro 33

Increasing anxieties around globalisation foreground the difficulty of conceiving of a modernism that is non-Western. Modernisation has become synonymous with Westernisation, a situation exacerbated by the rise of international art fairs, which are increasingly agents for homogenisation rather than for exchange. Paradoxically, the resultant globalised contemporary art is championed as a source of revitalisation in a Euro-centric art world, not necessarily because it articulates an alternative to this centrism, but because emerging regions provide a much needed source of new products and collectors to sustain the market, a need that is becoming more urgent. The term emerging art in itself reveals how discourse is overly dependent on economic models: emergent describes the state of these industrial economies, not of their cultural production, the history of which is deliberately obfuscated. Alfred Barrs work is foundational in that curious paradox, the history of modernism, but one of his most important assertions is glossed over: that the formative influences on European modernism are exclusively non-Western, suggesting a longer history

of intercultural exchange, and revealing that anxieties over cultural influence are not unique to contemporary globalisation; rather modernism, in all periods and contexts, always issues from elsewhere. This paper will draw on theories of acculturation to interrogate the binaries Western/indigenous and traditional/modern, and to examine the reception of Barrs model in the non-West, particularly amongst avant-gardists and Surrealists in Japan, arguing that in both the West and non-West modernity presents a rupture that is not only temporal but also geo-cultural. Negotiating Art Borders: Between Avant-Garde Calligraphy and Abstract Painting Eugenia Bogdanova 41 This paper examines the postwar modernisation of Japanese calligraphy through the activities of the Bokujinkai group. Founded in 1952 by Moria Shiry, Inoue Yichi and others, the group aimed to open calligraphy up to the world by brining it onto equal terms with contemporary art (specifically painting) from Europe and America via artistic dialogue between these cultural spheres. The aim of this paper is to study and compare definitions of and the roles allotted to calligraphy in the postwar art world, comparing the opinions of Bokujinkai members and other avant-garde calligraphers (including Ueda Sky or Hidai Nankoku) to those of abstract painters from the US (such as Franz Kline and Isamu Noguchi), Europe Pierre Alechinski) and to other artists from Japan such as Hasegawa Sabur and the philosophers Iijima Tsutomu and Hisamatsu Shinichi, in order to disentangle the artistic discourses underlying the formation of avant-garde calligraphy (as it is now termed) by singling out and analysing the individual standpoints of the artists and theoreticians who contributed to its configuration. International Voices in the Dance of Absolute Darkness: Butoh, Bellmer and Actionism Lucy Weir 63 The dance/theatre hybrid Ankoku Butoh encompassed a deconstructive and often grotesque range of performative activities, an art form that shocked Japanese audiences with its often-controversial subject matter. Today, the term Butoh has come to signify a collective of avant-garde performance art-related movements. However, it is significant that Butoh remains a relatively marginalised art form in its native Japan, while garnering both appreciative audiences and even generating imitation in the Western hemisphere, particularly in Germany and the United States. This paper will challenge the assumption that Butoh as an art form is uniquely Japanese in character, and will attempt to re-position Butoh in the history of 20th century dance as part of an international, reciprocal dialogue. It will begin by tracing the history of Butoh from its emergence in late 1950s Japan, before going on to explore its engagement with Western modern dance. This paper posits that Butoh owes more to the legacy of German Ausdruckstanz (expressive dance) than traditional Japanese performance such as Kabuki or Noh, and that Butoh fits more comfortably in the framework of postmodern dance history than that of Japanese theatre practice. Focusing on early Butoh practice, particularly that of Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno, this paper seeks to prove the contemporary Butoh aesthetic owes a significant debt

to its early practitioners engagement with Western avant-garde performance and literature, and consequently argues that Butoh ought to be included in the canon of twentieth century dance history alongside comparable postwar movements in Europe. Exploring Central Asian Identities in Modern Art Alex Ulko 79

This paper discusses approaches to the exploration of multiple identities in modern Central Asian art and the relationship between artists, society and art as a whole in the region and more specifically, in Uzbekistan. The end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, marked by a worldwide crisis, signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another in Central Asia, with the first generation of people born after the collapse of the USSR coming of age. Culture, art and individual artists in the region are coming under pressure from three sides: the lingering Soviet legacy; the ethnic and traditional heritage; and the demands of the modern globalised world. These players apply pressures to artistic communities in different proportions and combinations, seeking to establish various kinds of identities (e.g. national, ethnic, regional, stylistic), attempting to prescribe what Central Asian culture should be and ignoring by and large the analysis of what it really is. Artists reactions to these kinds of pressure are twofold: compliance and resistance. The external forces and responses cause some new art forms and images to appear (e.g. installations) while more traditional ones are being transformed in new contexts (e.g. traditional architectural forms used to underline the ethnic roots of modern Central Asian regimes; or traditional silk fabrics produced to suit Western customers taste). This paper considers two descriptive approaches to the relationship between identities and art: one, identifying the way different identities are expressed through art forms and the other, focusing on different artistic genres to discover the identities reflected in them, arguing for a more holistic and integral way of exploring these complex relations. Negotiating the West and non-West: Francis Als, Santiago Sierra and Tania Bruguera Andrs D. Montenegro 99 Francis Alss, Santiago Sierras and Tania Brugueras artistic practices occupy an in between space decidedly lodged between Western constructions and nonWestern counter-narratives, activated as a site for transcultural dialogues. Born in Belgium, Francis Als moved to Mexico City in the late 1980s. Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra also relocated his artistic practice to Mexico City. Inverting this migratory pattern (from North to South), in the late 1990s, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera left the island for the United States. These physical displacements, along with their ensuing cultural dislocations, have effectively exposed these three contemporary artists to different notions and understandings about the benefits and shortcomings of both the ideology of modernity and the historical construction of the West. This paper seeks to explore how these narratives have been resisted,

appropriated and criticized by works such as Politics of Rehearsal (Als), 9 persons paid to remain inside cardboard boxes (Sierra), and Tatlins Whisper 5 (Bruguera). By paying close attention to each works contexts and conditions of possibility, I will investigate how each work articulates the complex process of imbrication, and its ensuing tensions, between the hegemonic discourse of the West and local, site specific discourses.

Digital Natives, Digital Spaces: photography and the internet in contemporary Indian practice 121 Bhavani Esapathi What is an image telling the West about the East? This is the problematic that I am going to be battling in this paper: the idea of creation and invention, and the practices that naturalize these into our everyday lives. The photographic process was incepted into our social lives from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, a period that also saw the height of the capitalistic division of labour. Capitalism brought with it separation, not just between classes, but also between specialisms. Specialization reinstated binary oppositions. Mary Warner Marien in Photography: A Cultural History writes that mid-nineteenth century photographers sought to highlight cultural differences,2 and goes onto reveal how such differences were reinforced through binaries, such as active and passive, childlike and mature, feminine and masculine, and so forth. These binaries later became thriving wholesale social labels, and are some of the binary oppositions reinforced by, or which can be called the effects of, modernism. I am going to consider the binary opposition between East and West in terms of the process of narrating a story with images. The objective of this paper is to elaborate on the conception of photography as brought about by emerging technologies. Within digital spaces, which are comprised of the geo-political spaces of both the East and the West, there exists a unique amalgamation of politics. Such a politics needs to be acknowledged as a category of its own, rather than by ascribing historically proven methods of understanding politics, whether those be connected to the West or the East. This essay investigates these binaries through the concept of the digital native, who render many of these distinctions obsolete. What we are left with instead are images between: between discourses, between spaces and, most importantly, between binaries.

INTRODUCTION

This volume brings together a range of papers on East Asian, Central Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latin American art. The broad geographical perspective was inspired by a need for greater dialogue between scholars working on discrete regions of what is termed non-Western art. Though there has been a strong turn in recent discourse on modern and contemporary art towards questioning the dominance of Western cultural values, the confinement of this debate to area studies has inhibited the emergence of unifying theories and methodologies that can be applied across various regional cases in the cause of systematically deconstructing the dominant paradigm. Art historians working on Japanese, Chinese, Indian and even Mexican art confront similar issues; primarily those to do with development, colonialism, and differences of language and expression, allowing their contributions to be forged into a unified field: the field of non-Western art. This volume is an intervention towards establishing a new pan-regional discourse based on this common ground. The issue of a Western cultural bias in art history has been exacerbated, rather than alleviated, by recent attention to the artistic production of Asia and South America within the art market and art press. Neophilliac commentators can assimilate the non-Western into a discourse on the contemporary with ease, as the contemporary is a priori post-modern, and, by extension, post-Western. But this emphasis on the contemporary necessarily excises history. The non-West can be incorporated because the socio-historical factors that previously made it distinct from the West are no longer invoked. Under this rubric the West itself also no longer has a history, instead being restricted to the dissatisfying condition of being always post. The excision of historical and contextual information from discourse does little to further understanding, either between artists and viewers, or, more significantly, between cultures. Viewers and collectors are presented a supporting discourse that fails to offer the analyses they require to develop an informed and critical response to contemporary art. Unpacking the complex and problematic relationship between writers and scholars of art and the artistic product itself is beyond the scope of this introduction, suffice it to say that commentary on art presumes to have some function in supporting the viewers experience, and that this is an area in which writers on the contemporary, understandably, have difficulty. They do not have the luxury of taking a long perspective on the objects they discuss. This in turn exacerbates the problem of the non-West. It is difficult to distinguish contemporary art produced in, say, Beijing, from contemporary art from London (unless either is self-consciously exploring issues of local identity), and the lack of contextual support does nothing to alleviate this. The perceived homogeneity of international contemporary art is taken by viewers as evidence of increasing globalisation, rather than understood as a function of discourse, presentation, and curatorial strategies.
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 This volume intends to address an anti-contextual bias within the contemporary. Through greater attention to the historical forces shaping international contemporary art, some deeper understanding of the geo-politics at play might be achieved. The term non-Western is used here, despite its inherent ideological bias, in preference to the term emerging. While emerging is increasingly the favoured term for Asian and South American contemporary art, the description of artists from particular regions as emerging renders these works ahistorical, and implies that they are coming to the contemporary belatedly, reminding of the pejorative designation of particular nation-states as late modernisers during the early twentieth century. To describe nonWestern artists as emerging continues to perpetuate the trope of the non-West as the modernism of the West more than a century after it was first conceived. In addition, that modernisation in these late modernisers appeared to ape Western developments has allowed the term modernisation to become synonymous with westernisation, an issue that each of the essays contained in this volume engages with in its own way. Staci Schweillers paper on the formation of modernist discourse during the nineteenth century opens this volume at the inaugural crisis of visual modernity: the advent of photography. Her contribution addresses the perception of modernisation as a function of westernisation, by arguing that the move towards realism distinguishing modern Iranian art was a response not to Western illusionism, but to the introduction of photographic techniques. The idea that modernism in the non-West depended on the innovations of the West is, in the field of art history, arguably false. Rather, todernism in the West, as it developed at the end of the nineteenth century, depended on the precedents of non-Western art. Whether in the Impressionists attention to Japanese woodcuts, or Picassos interest in ethnographics, modernism depended on a critical reassessment of domestic culture premised on the unprecedented international contact that industrialisation and Imperialism had allowed. While this point is rather banal, the potential of this reciprocity of influence for revisionism has yet to be fully exploited. Can it be used to force a shift away from a binary West/non-West narrative, to a global model of mutual and simultaneous exchange? Majella Munros paper turns to Japanese exemplar to answer this question. In many ways the Japanese case has set the model for all discussions of modernism in the non-West, a consequence of Japans early modernisation, non-caucasian identity, and explicit embrace of Western prototypes. However, as Japan self-consciously modernised along the pattern established by European Imperial powers, these powers themselves were, simultaneously, in the grip of Japonisme, disproving the international spread of modernism as a linear, non-reciprocal dissemination from West to East. This chapter both examines the impact of Western influence on early twentieth century Japanese art, and considers the formative influence of non-Western cultures on modernism and the avant-garde, through particular attention to the diverse international manifestations of the Surrealist movement.
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 The following article, by Eugenia Bogdanova, traces the Japanese case forward in time to the 1950s and 1960s, attending to attempts by various artists and commentators to forge a modern and internationally-viable avant-garde from the ancient local practice of calligraphy. The Bokujinkai, founded in 1952 by Morita Shiry, Inoue Yichi and others, aimed to modernise calligraphy and bring it to an equal status with contemporary painting in Europe and America, through a series of efforts that implicitly attempted to articulate a new national identity in the wake of American Occupation at the end of the Second World War. Lucy Weirs paper on Ankoku Butoh continues the theme of a postwar exploration of identity in Japan. Butoh performances were characterised by their, at times violent, emphasis on the bodily experience. Weir draws an interesting and unexpected parallel between Butoh performance art and the shocking spectacles staged by Viennese Actionists, asking whether the comparable status of Japan and Austria during World War Two influenced both sets of practitioners to arrive, independently, at a form of expression that explored embodiment and subjectivity in the most extreme terms possible. Alex Ulko continues this discussion of identity and its impact on regional expression through a study of contemporary Uzbek art. He notes that, in Central Asia, the existence of overlapping regional, ethnic and religious identities can make the cultural contexts of the region opaque to outside observers, acting as a potential impediment to scholarship. In Uzbekistan, where competing European and Soviet imperial interests were played out and eventually overcome with declared independence in 1991, the replacement of a modern Russian culture by traditional folk forms in recent times reveals how both the post-modern and the avant-garde can exploit precedents that appear retrogressive for progressive political ends. Ulkos paper explores the absence of uniform cultural identities not only within a geographic region, but also over the course of that regions history, and touches on how insights gained from the study of one country can be extrapolated to describe a region as a whole. The art histories of individual nations in Asia and South America - particularly China, Japan and Brazil - are becoming well known, but the possible links and similarities between these non-Western modernisms have not yet been interrogated. For this reason, this volume includes discussion of Latin American art alongside papers on Asia. Andres Montenegros chapter examines the movement of artists from the West to South America and vice-versa, proving again that the transmission of cultural influences is reciprocal. By considering the movement of Tania Bruguera from Cuba to the USA, and the migrations of Francis Als and Santiago Sierra from Europe to Mexico, our notion of diaspora is also complicated. Bhavani Esapathis epilogue brings us up to the present moment with a reflection on digital media. The power of new media particularly those disseminated on the internet is vaunted as heralding a new age of unrestricted international and intercultural exchange. Yet this power remains unrealised: problems of access, whether
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due to material deprivation or policies of censorship, have meant that old geo-political inequalities continue to skew discourse, leading to the emergence of a digital divide. This returns us to the point raised in the opening essay of the volume in connection to photography: that technology is not exempt from ideology. Rather than creating new spaces to overcome geo-political divides, digital media have equal potential to create fora in which pre-existing divides can be replicated, making discussion of these new forms urgent.

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REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN STACI GEM SCHEIWILLER

To address the emergence of modernism in Iranian art, I return to the late nineteenth century as a point of entry, as I find it problematic that the art world in general frames artists from outside Europe and North America as belated travelers1 to modernity who have suddenly emerged onto the contemporary art scene. It appears that when the avant-garde disintegrated in Europe and North America during the late 1960s and 1970s, so did their cultural hegemony over who could participate in the discourses of modernism, and when Europe and North America had reached the postmodern age by the 1970s, the floodgates opened. Contemporary Iranian artists, both inside and outside Iran, such as Shirin Neshat (b.1957) and Shadafarin Ghadirian (b.1974), became international names, with Neshats work reaching canonical status. The situation is further complicated as discourses on contemporary Middle Eastern art are not even decisive as to which label to use; for example, Contemporary Islamic Art is a strange description, since most rubrics of art history are delineated either by period or by region. This paper will reconsider the rise of modernism in Iran, as it relates to the rise of modernism in Europe, by reframing the discourses of modernity, photography, and the

Ismail Jalayir, Ladies around a Samovar, c.1850-75, Tehran, oil on canvas, 143.8 x 195cm. Reproduced courtesy of the V&A Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 11

Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, 1994. Black & white RC print & ink. Photograph by Cynthia Preston. Shirin Neshat Reproduced courtesy of Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Shadafarin Ghadirian, From the Qajar Series #16, 2001, black & white digital prints, edition of 10, 90 x 60 cms. Courtesy of Aeroplastics Contemporary, Brussels, and the artist.

avant-garde, beginning during Irans own long century, 1786-1925, a period known as the Qajar dynasty. The legacy of modernism and its emphasis on painting as its dominant narrative has partially relied on the writings of French poet Charles Baudelaire (182167), who has been both credited and criticized2 for describing the modern artist as a flneur who records the ephemeral and fugitive. The primary nineteenth-century art movements that resonate with Baudelaires call were Impressionism, and, to some extent, the earlier movement of Realism, both of which were reacting in part to the static photograph, focusing on everyday events and their optical experiences, and hence lending to the unstable brushwork prevalent in their paintings. Likewise in Iran, fast changing ways of life, especially in the capital of Tehran, led to a consciousness of the everyday here and now, and this cognizance was reinforced or paralleled by the arrival of photography in Iran around or before 1844. What is strikingly different between Iran and Europe and North America is that the new forms of art and photography were eagerly accepted by the court and the elite but not by the average person on the street. There was also no avant-garde in nineteenth-century Iran as there was in the European context, so what one remains confronted with is the question of how to define modernism: as a rebellion against the academy led by the avant-garde
12 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

that keeps culture moving forward and above capitalist mass-production; or, as espoused by Baudelaire, an attempt to represent the ephemeral and transitory? Or, alternatively, must one ultimately call into question what art historians, and in particular modernists, have been defining as modernism, realizing that we have been constructing modernism, as Baudelaire had done, and that the definition of modernism has different implications depending on the historical circumstance of each region? I propose this notion, not as an extension of Gaonkars notion of alternative modernity3 (as this term implies that there is still a central modernity), but to show that the entire notion of modernity and its representation have been constructed to exclude those outside Europe, excluding the possibility of an alternative modernity. In viewing these ideological constructs, could there still be a set of modernist definitions on which we could all agree, that would keep the integrity of the notion of modernism, without being Eurocentric? One cannot apply directly what happened in Paris to Tehran during the nineteenth century, although many of Baron Haussmanns innovations were adapted in the 1870s in Iran, after the king Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r.1848-96) toured Europe, including France, in 1873. However, it seems that nineteenth-century Iranian court art has been more in line with the discourses of Impressionism than those of Islamic Art, which have deemed Qajar art as degenerate and lacking in quality. There is no reason to frame secular art in Iran as Islamic; rather, it is modern. There are works of court art from this era that have Islamic motifs, and cultural production outside the court, such as several coffeehouse paintings, do depict scenes of Shii martyrology, but not all artwork from this era can be considered religious in nature (although it could all be called modern). Thus, although the history of photography differs in Iran from that of Europe or North America, and Iranian artists, such as Kamal ol-Molk (1847-1940), who had studied in Florence and Paris, were embracing the detail of the camera rather than reacting against it, it is in light of these nuances in the modernist narrative that the modern art of Iran should be reconsidered, rather than discussed solely in terms of Islamic culture. The Islamicizing of Iranian art of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries actually reinforces the dominance of European modernism and delays modern Iranian art to the rubric of contemporary art. The Ideological Framing of Qajar Art Qajar art has been the bane of art history, especially Islamic art history, because it does not fit into a constructed continuum of Islamic art history. One must first consider that the discipline of art history itself is Eurocentric, as Johann Winckelmanns Geschichte der Kunst des Alterums (Of Art of Antiquity, 1764), deemed the first art historical text, privileges Greek art over any other; later the first professorships of art history were also established in Germany, at Gttingen, in 1813.4 Art history in general until the twentieth century had been constructed and perceived almost completely through European worldviews. As powerful empires, such as those of the British and French, began to colonize Africa, Asia, and the Middle East during the nineteenth century, scholars also embarked on producing a discourse of Islamic Art, comprised in part from the booty taken from colonized entities.5 The ways in which the discourses of Islamic Art have been written and categorized often affirmed the ideological agendas of colonial empires. For
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 13

Mohammad Modabber, The Day of the Last Judgment, 1897, coffeehouse painting, Sad-Abad Cultural Collection, Iran.

example, Sir Charles Hercules Read (1857-1929) writes about the problems in collecting art from the Middle East in a catalogue of faience for the Burlington Fine Arts Club: One inherent and unsurmountable difficulty makes these discoveries [of collectible materials] of far less value than they might be. This is the innate mendacity of the Oriental nomad who is mostly the purveyor of these relics. If a vase be really from excavations in Asia Minor he will surely declare that it comes from the neighbourhood of Teheran [sic], perhaps in the belief that the buyer might send an agent thither to buy direct. [T]he story of the cosmopolitan oriental is untrustworthy, and thus, though ample new material is daily coming into the market, it provides but little sure ground for additions to the history of the wares.6 What Read implies in this passage is that Europeans are the only reliable agents in collecting and preserving Islamic Art. The Oriental is too stupid to realize the priceless treasures of his country and will sell them off to make a quick profit. Conversely, he will dupe European collectors at any cost. The Oriental nomad should not be the distributor of these precious relics or have such a strong hand in the art market, creating another White Mans Burden for collectors who must protect both the Oriental and his culture from his own backward, selfish devices. Read within a broader context, if the Oriental cannot even manage his artwork effectively, then how could he manage his own government and people, hence leaving no alternative but to be colonized by powers smarter and greater than he.
14 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

Oftentimes, Islamic art survey timelines end before the nineteenth century, or if Qajar art is included, it is denounced as the decline of Persian art, and this decline has been attributed to the European influences in Iranian art.7 In the 1860s, Julien Comte de Rochechouart, the French legate in Tehran and the successor of Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-82), wrote a chapter devoted to contemporary Iranian art in his Voyage en Perse (Journey in Persia, 1867). This chapter sets up many of the assumptions that have framed how one has understood this transitional point of Iranian artistic production, laying out several standard formulaic prescriptions that have been carried over into the twentieth century. For example, in Chapter XXIII, Du cartonnage et de la peinture, he writes: [T]he Persians have no idea of painting as we [the French] do, and besides, they do not understand it Having no idea of design, ignorant of the most simple laws of perspective they copy the most flat and absurd compositions with minute care.8 He explains further that the Qajar government has sent Iranian students abroad to study European art, but they learned nothing, and that the paintings that they produced were detestable.9 These declarative statements affirm at once that those Iranian artists were incapable of creating European-style art, and that any attempt to do so would result in failure. What seemingly compounds the Persian taste for bad art is that their houses are full of licentious lithographs that must be even difficult to obtain in Paris, and the artist in the Orient is only a merchant or a laborer who sells his work to make a living and not for some greater aesthetic cause.10 Yet, according to de Rochechouart, what Iranian artists used to do well in the past were illuminated manuscripts, which had the finest details and depicted motifs from canonical literature, such as the Quran, Sadis Golestan (1258), the Divan of Hafez (c.1300s), the Shahnameh (c.1010), and the Masnavi of Rumi (c.1258-73).11 Although he mentions that that art form too has fallen into decadence, the Iranians certainly have their own past accomplishments; therefore, they should not be dabbling with European art forms: their [of Persian artists] principal defect is in the European copies which fell into the hands. Through us, having heard much of our artists and critiquing theirs, the Persians believed they would please us [the French] by copying. Since they know very well what is the price of the works of our masters and what is the price of their own, and on the other hand, we are the only ones who give life to their works, because the great Persian figures [of literature, depicted in painting] slip away further from them each day, by using their money to buy our products, they think we can meet and raise the price of their works by introducing what they call the French method.12 Similar to Reads message of cultural superiority and fatherly oversight, the underlying message here is that Iranian artists should excel at making or repeating their own type of art and not borrow from other cultures (although European artists had no issue in borrowing from the outside during the nineteenth century), and, also, that they should depict traditional or standard themes in past Persian art, such as the story of Khosrow and Shirin in Nizamis Khamseh (late 1100s) or Yusuf and Zuleikha from the Quran.13 Their artwork will never measure up to the European masters in quality or
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 15

price, so why attempt to reach so high? Any divergence from what they used to do would inevitably result in low-quality artwork, and do nothing for the art market anyway. De Rochechouart was not the only nineteenth-century writer to espouse such opinions on Qajar art. In 1879, Major Robert Murdoch Smith, who had participated in archeological expeditions in Iran and headed the Iranian section of the Indo-European Telegraph Department,14 wrote in his handbook Persian Art on Qajar painting: The paintings on a larger scale on canvas are very poor, especially as regards drawing. The large pictures in the museum, chiefly of women, were bought, not for any interest they might have from an artistic point of view, but rather as illustrative of costumes, national types.15 Murdoch also agreed that illuminated manuscripts were some of the finest examples of Persian painting.16 A hundred years later, echoes could be heard in the writing of B.W. Robinson: The Qajar period [] has been dismissed by most writers on Persian painting as unworthy of serious consideration [] One can see why [] Not only has the style a superficially hybrid appearance, uneasily blending European modeling and perspective with Persian conception, composition, and narrative style, but much inferior work has survived.17 Robinson actually takes his cue from an earlier text on Persian art from The International Exhibition of Persian Art in 1931 at Burlington House,18 and continues the narrative in this vein, asserting that the artwork can never be considered high art and that it could never compete with the masterpieces of the Timurids and Safavids (although it is interesting to note that both Timurid and Safavid artwork had absorbed Central Asian, Chinese, and European influences prior to the Qajar era, but does not suffer from the same diagnosis of superficial hybridity). Finally, in 1995, Islamic Art historian Ernst Grube wrote: It is finally possible that we simply have in Iran at the end of the nineteenth century a situation that could best be defined as Victorian, corresponding exactly to what was happening in the West: a culture which had reached a point of total eclecticism and was incapable of creating a new, pure, and original contemporary style.19 It is interesting that Grube compares Iran to the West but omits that European modernism arose from or in tandem with this Victorian eclecticism, whereas Qajar Iran is framed as not having any counter-cultural movement to make up for its malaise. This notion, then, of a new, pure, and original contemporary style seems to be Qajar arts unjust downfall, although not an art historical anomaly. Islamic Art historian Finbarr Barry Flood has argued that this contradiction in disavowing hybridity formulates the closer one gets to the time of the European narrator,20 which is partially true, as there was no field of Islamic Art until the height of European colonialism. Yet as a reaction to this colonialism and modern nationalism, a discourse of blood purity that rejected diversity and hybridity became popular - a European neurosis developed through internalizing the effects of imperial contact with non-white peoples and the acceptance of Darwinism.21 A nations strength and superiority were conditioned on how pure the race was, thus keeping European cultures pristine white, while at the same time not allowing people of color to modernize fully or adopt more global innovations.
16 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

 Yet, it may be easy to blame solely imperial discourses for this condemnation, as the 1931 exhibition was sponsored not only by the British monarch George V (r.1910-36), but also by the Iranian monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi (r.1925-41)22 who was passionately anti-Qajar, as it was the dynasty that Reza Shah had toppled. Legitimizing his Pahlavi dynasty (1925-79) depended on shaming the memory of the Qajar, even destroying their photographs and forbidding their public exhibition. Also, since Reza Shah ruled the Iranian state as a dictatorship and directly challenged European interference, European art historians and archeologists, such as Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948) and Erich Schmidt (1897-1964), needed the Iranian government to comply with their goals and kept relations with Iranian officials as diplomatic as possible.23 Their studies and archeological digs would not have been possible without the approval of the Iranian state; thus, how information about Iranian art of the past was framed and disseminated depended on the co-operation of the Iranian state. The perpetuation of the Qajar dynasty as backward and not modern was not only a colonial machination but an Iranian one as well, and has been difficult to recuperate. One must consider, though, that to reframe Qajar art as a form of Iranian modernism and not part of an Islamic Art discourse puts Qajar art on par with European modernism. Moreover, this type of understanding makes Iran not only coeval with Europe but breaks the hegemony of European, particularly French, modernism, although in the case of Iran, its modernism was highly influenced by what was occurring in nineteenthcentury Paris. When discussing the discourses of African Art, artist and scholar Olu Oguibe has written: if African is a race-specific qualification, it would be proper to remember that artists of Negro descent were practising in the contemporary styles of their time in Europe and America much earlier than the turn of the century [] To reject the exoticisation of Africa is to destroy an entire world-view carefully and painstakingly fabricated over several centuries.24 Oguibes profound comments could be applied to approaching Islamic Art, and more specifically, Qajar art in Iran, because an entire worldview has centered on making Europe central and the Middle East Other, a claim also rigorously argued in Edward Saids Orientalism (1978). What is at stake here is that Iranian artists did not simply copy what Europeans were doing, but were continually engaged in a negotiated dialogue on how to express and represent a developing world, changed by innovations, inventions, and colonial contests on Iranian borders. The Iranian Empire under the Qajars was one that was competing with tsarist Russia and Great Britain, all the while being influenced by the French and attempting to negotiate with the Germans; hence, within that matrix of global structures and power dynamics, the sign systems produced in Iran provide a deeper insight into those struggles with modernity. Another powerful ramification of excluding Qajar art as a form of modernist expression is that European modernism itself was framed in part as a reaction to the presence of non-European artwork in Europe. As argued by Frances Connelly in The Sleep of Reason (1995), a way for European avant-garde artists to rebel against the academy and classicism was to absorb the abstract and decorative, as noted in imported objects from abroad, into what would become European Primitivism. Taking Connellys suggestion further, one could even claim that non-European art was the backbone and foundation
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 17

of what would become European modernism as a whole, such as Impressionisms absorption of Japanese prints, Paul Gauguins appropriations of Polynesian culture, Pablo Picassos incorporations of African art, and Henri Matisses use of Islamic artistic motifs. After 1945, when the New York art scene began to dominate the art world, Abstract Expressionisms reliance on Indian sand painting or Barnett Newmans ideographs that recall Native American signage reaffirm Connellys analysis that art produced by nonwhite artists and cultural groups was invoked to push the boundaries of bourgeois art and move modernism forward.25 Furthermore, to keep this paradigm consistent, it would not have benefited artists, such as Picasso and Matisse, to see African Art as a modern phenomenon (as Oguibe suggests) or motifs of Islamic art as a form of representation that was not necessarily Islamic. The difference, the Otherness, had to be invoked in order to create a striking blow to academic art and the artistic culture of the bourgeoisie.26 One has to note that this paper has focused primarily on painting. Painting has heavily dominated the narratives of modernism, and that too has had impact on how the discourses of art history have been constructed in relation to European/non-European art. As mentioned de Rochechouarts text begins the discussion that Iranian artists do not understand French painting and cannot execute it effectively, and Iranian artists cannot contribute to the discourses of modernism by default of these types of assumptions. This pigeonholing of Iranian art was reflective of a need to maintain European art markets, which desired European primitivism and Islamic Art, but not the work of primitives making naturalistic or seemingly European art. In a world that was increasingly globalizing through imperialism, only European art could speak of those modern changes, but non-European art had to remain in its historical state, as if always to seem backward and reflective of its past glory and primordial savage state. In addition, scholars have argued that one-point perspective is particular to European art and has not appeared in other parts of the world until contact with Europe, thus making naturalism and perspective European innovations. Art historian Hans Belting has argued, however, that Italian artists development of one-point perspective was indebted to the theories of a Baghdadi mathematician, Alhazen (965-1040), thus dispelling the notion that perspective was wholly a European project.27 One could argue that European illusionism dates back to Antiquity, but the Iranians are inheritors of the classical world just as much as Europeans. Moreover, according to the way discourses on modernism have been shaped, the underlying message is that modern art constitutes a rebellion toward academic art and its illusionism; thus, the flattening out of the picture plane can only be a European quest, and only Europeans have been capable of creating modern art. European arts monopoly on naturalism has given Europe all the rights and privileges of that representation. When non-white artists in countries outside Europe have achieved a naturalist aesthetic in painting, it has been characterized as a degenerate attempt.28 This also raises the question of whether modernism is simply European, with Americans picking up the tail end. With other movements, such as Neoclassicism or
18 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

Romanticism, art historians are not concerned to devise a global aesthetic, although it is noteworthy that the Baroque is now called Early Modern, which can be used in global comparisons. But just as Early Modern can open up interpretations of style and be more inclusive, terms such as early modern, modern, and postmodern indicate time, not region or culture. Ali Behdad, based on the theories of anthropologist Johannes Fabian, makes a powerful claim that time is instrumental in Othering; privileging European modernity depends on framing everyone outside Europe as lagging behind, thus denying time to the Other.29 Oguibe has also argued that time is an ideological concept used as another colonial construct that frames everyone outside Europe and North America as existing in a time lag.30 Furthermore, in understanding modernism, especially in the context of Connellys argument, the condition of modernity is inherently global, and according to theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Walter Mignolo,31 modernity has been ushered in, shaped, and constructed in relation to colonialism. Europeans would not have had modernity without imperialism; capitalism would not have existed without mercantilism, which depended on exploitation, slavery, and colonialism. Modernism and postmodernism were and are global projects that have encompassed the world at large, leading back to my initial assertion that if modern art was in production in Europe during the nineteenth century, then so it was in Iran too. The Impact of Photography on Qajar Art There were artistic European influences already in Persian art before the modern era, but it was the camera that had most impact on the production of modern art in Iran and determined its appearance and subject matter; realism in these works is thus a response to photography, rather than to European naturalism. A prominent courtier and historian at the court of the king Nasir al-Din Shah, Etemad al-Saltaneh, had written: [the] outcome of [] photography [] on [] painting [is that] photography had [] served [] portraiture and landscape by reinforcing the use of light and shade, accurate proportions, and perspective.32 The import of the camera itself has caused debate as to whether its effect on Persian painting was European, as the cameras production of a window on the world, framed by a rectangle, demonstrating a three-dimensional naturalism reflects European conventions; however, Belting has also shown that the camera obscura was invented in the Middle East.33 Furthermore, the presence of photography at the court was enormous. Nasir al-Din Shah was a great enthusiast of the new medium, taking, commissioning, and collecting photographs, and was responsible for disseminating photography throughout Iran.34 The kings love of photography was spread throughout the court and installed as a course of study at the polytechnic established during his reign, Dar al-Fanun. By the end of his reign in 1896 he had amassed a collection of over 40,000 photographs, of which 20,000 he had taken himself, in more than 1000 albums at the Golestan Palace in Tehran.35 He had also begun an extensive campaign to photograph all aspects of Iran, because Iran was changing, and there was a need to record Iran before it transformed under his modernization projects. Thus, the effects of modernization were also prevalent in Iranian painting and reflected the desire to record what was and what was to be no more.
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 19

Anonymous, Portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah, Tehran, c.1852-5, salt print, 33.7x21.2cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Runion des Muses Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. Portrait of Nasir al-Din Shah. Iran, Mid 19th CE. Miniature painting. MAO778. Photo: Herv Lewandowski, Artist: Anonymous, 19th century, Location, Louvre, Paris, France

Kamal ol-Molk came from a line of famous painters, including his uncle Sani olMolk (c.1814-66) who had brought back the lithographic process from France in 1848.36 Kamal ol-Molk first trained in Iran and later in Europe between 1897 and 1900. Although he knew of the Realists and Impressionists while abroad, especially through his good friend Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904)37 who had personally known Baudelaire, douard Manet (1832-83), and Gustave Courbet (1819-77), Kamal ol-Molks work from before his European travels already revealed a modernist tendency to represent the contemporary world and not necessarily literary or traditional motifs. At the Qajar court, where Kamal ol-Molk was head painter, photography and even cinema had become major art forms, and he himself had acknowledged using photographs in devising his paintings.38 Nasir al-Din Shah also noted this naturalist tendancy in Kamal ol-Molks work.39 In an interview later in life, Kamal ol-Molk said: Of course, I had been inclined to the Naturalists and a lover of Naturalism.40 Although Iranian photographers were still using wet collodion throughout the nineteenth-century, the ten-second shutter time allowed for a reflection on modern life, revealing its importance in Iranian painting and thus returning Time to the Other. Kamal ol-Molks paintings replicate mundane scenes from everyday life and record monuments such as the newly-built Takkiyeh Dowlat (State Theater) in the late 1860s, the first major modern theater of its time.
20

What is notable about the notion of modernity in Qajar Iran is how Iranian
MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

writers thought of modernization. The term used was taraqi, which means progress, and modern art was called honar-e taraqi, literally progressive art, which indicates an avant-garde attitude that seeks to push art forward,41 and some scholars have even described Kamal ol-Molk as an artist of protest.42 When Kamal ol-Molk returned to Iran from studying in Paris, Iranian newspapers praised him endlessly:43 the overall consensus was not that he was westernized, but that he went abroad, learned new skills, and became fluent in French, evolving into a better artist and person. Sending Kamal ol-Molk to Europe or adopting inventions such as the cinematic camera was not entirely viewed as westernization, but was still sometimes problematic. For instance, Abdul-Bah (1844-1921), the son of Bahaullah (1817-92), the founder of the Bahai faith, wrote in 1875:

Kamal ol-Molk, Takkieh Dowlat: Talar Salaam, Golestan Palace.

[Nasir al-Din] Shah has [] resolved to bring about the advancement of the Persian people, their welfare and security and the prosperity of their country [] hoping that by the light of justice he might make Iran the envy of the East and West, and set that fine fervor which characterized the first great epochs of Persia to flowing again through the veins of her people [] Those who maintain that these modern concepts apply only to other countries and are irrelevant in Iran [] disregard [] that other nations were once as we are now. Would the extension of education, the development of useful arts and sciences, the promotion of industry and technology, be harmful things?44 His answer is, of course, no. In general, Iranian officials and scholars were aware of their place in the global scheme. The monarchy had lost wars to tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Great Britain, resulting in the loss of quite a bit of territory and money. As these three empires surrounded Irans borders, the Qajar governments ability to compete in the world, or at least keep conditions consistent, depended on their modernizing or becoming progressive, as the word taraqi shows up quite prominently in nineteenth-century texts. In addition, scholars attempted to claim inventions, including the camera, the telegraph and centralized postal system, as Iranian innovations that had been appropriated by foreign neighbors; texts, such as those by Iranian scholar Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (1853-96), Islamic intellectual Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838-97), and Abdul-Bah, state that the signs of modernity and modern life did not disseminate from Europe and North America into the rest of the world but had originated in Iran.45 Frustrations in their texts arise not solely due to the British, French, and Russian empires meddling in Iranian internal affairs, but also because if great European civilizations owed their Aryan white genes and Indo-European languages to the Iranians, as described in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discourses on linguistics and race, then why was Iran not considered wholly modern by other global powers? They believed that global superiority had originated in Iran, and powerful European countries stole or utilized that greatness at their expense.46
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 21

Above, Antoin Sevruguin, Talar-i Takht (Throne Room), Kakh-i Gulistan (Gulistan Palace), Tehran, Iran, c.1889. A.4 2.12.GN.15.03, Myron Bement Smith collection, 1899-1962, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. Below, Kamal ol-Molk, The Hall of Mirrors, c.1888, oil on canvas, Golestan Palace.

22

MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

Kamal ol-Molk, The Fortuneteller of Baghdad, c.1891,Oil on Canvas, Golestan Palace.

There was a stunning naturalism prevalent before the arrival of photography in Iran, however, which also brings into question the pathways that Iranian modernism has taken. Perhaps there had been a political agenda in adopting naturalism, as the pictures of the ruling shahs changed dramatically in such a short period of time. It may have been a way to separate later reigns from that of Fath Ali Shah (r.1797-1834) who had lost so much territory in the Russo-Persian (1804-13) and OttomanPersian wars (1821-3). The earlier portraiture of Fath Ali Shah resembles that of the Zand period (1773-94), but then he embarked on an aesthetic program that mirrored artwork from the ancient, Pre-Islamic Achaemenid period (c.550-336 BCE), most likely as a way to legitimize the Qajar dynasty and mirror Achaemenid greatness. Moreover, paintings from Fath Ali Shahs court were filled with gold overlay and

Antoin Sevruguin, A Ramal (Fortuneteller), after 1870, Golestan Palace. 23

REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN

displayed figures adorned with jewels and elaborate dress. In contrast, Fath Ali Shahs grandson Mohammad Shah (r.1834-48) was very pious and austere, much like his father Crown Prince Abbas Mirza (1789-1833), having only twelve wives in contrast to Fath Ali Shahs enormous harem. In relation to both his grandfathers and fathers military losses, Mohammad Shah continued his fathers efforts to reform the military. Finally, Nasir al-Din Shahs portraiture demonstrates even more usage of naturalism, in part due to the increased presence of photography at the court. In his own portraits, he usually poses in European clothes or a generals outfit. Possibly, the combination of the modern monarch using a modern technique in representation could have signaled that he was fit to rule, and that a changing Iran could compete with Europe. There may have been other calculated reasons for the increasingly naturalistic appearance of the Qajar aesthetic. For instance, a Nashr-e Abgineh publication on Kamal ol-Molk argues that after four hundred years Persian painting had run its course, and that naturalism was already endemic to Persian painting and the next step to its fulfillment.47 Also, B.W. Mehr Ali, Fath Ali Shah, 1813, Oil on Canvas, The State Robinson had dubbed Qajar art Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photograph The State Hermitage Museum, photographed by Vladimir Terebenin, tourist art, since during the Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. nineteenth century Islamic Art had become a hot commodity in the European art market: a new field was opened up for the Persian miniature painter by the increasingly frequent visits of European
24 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

envoys and their suites, merchants, and wealthy travelers, as a result of the newly established diplomatic relations between the Persian court and various foreign powers, notably England.48 According to Wendy Shaw, after many cherished objects had been sold off to European markets, Ottoman artisans and artists could not keep up with demand, producing lessthan-average artwork.49 In an Iranian context, one example is that, by 1858, Persian rug manufacturers were adapting their styles and sizes based on European tastes to supply a European demand.50 The Manchester-based Ziegler & Co. was the first company in Iran with foreign capital to start dictating the market, by exporting cotton to Iran and then importing finished rugs, an enterprise that was incredibly large and successful.51 It may have been the case that Iranian painters and patrons felt it time to move away from what had become kitsch art consumed by tourists, Abol-Hassan Sani Ghaffari, Bust Portrait of creating an identity crisis that made it Mohammad Shah, 1842, Oil on Canvas, 80x100cm, Golestan Palace Museum. imperative to revamp or rethink Persian painting. Finally, if a baseline definition of modernity is the breaking down of tradition, then that was exactly what Persian painters sought to do: they turned away from traditional Persian painting to something different. Even B.W. Robinson writes: Persian painting seemed to have broken once and for all with the old tradition developed during the Mongol and Timurid periods, and settled firmly for imitation, painstaking but essentially superficial, of European models.52 But what else could be the opposite of tradition? It would by necessity be something akin to European art, while the European avant-garde was simultaneously looking to precedents unlike European art. The Avant-Garde Modernism in general can be traced back as early as the European movements of Realism (c.1840s-50s) or even Romanticism (late 1790s-1840s), but the avant-garde, who became spokesmen for the contemporary moment, broke away from the academy, used artistic media to speak of the neurosis of modern life, and reacted to foreign and photographic influences, first came together under Impressionism. The dilemma here in constructing multiple definitions of modernism or rethinking a more inclusive modernism is that some of its characteristics must remain. In the context of modern Iranian art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iranian modernism fits many of the definitions set by Baudelaire; for instance, the modern artist must seek to
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 25

depict the present, exactly as Kamal ol-Molk, and even his uncle Sani ol-Molk, had set out to do. In Baudelaires writing, the artist most adept for this search for the modern was embodied in the dandyish figure of the flneur who sought to infiltrate the spaces of modernity; the voyeur who saw but was not seen, while experiencing new modern spectacles: For the perfect flneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.53 Part of Baudelaires neurotic desire to capture the ephemeral and fleeting was in reaction to Haussmannization, which had radically changed Paris by destroying old neighborhoods and completely overhauling the old streets of France into long, commercial boulevards; a phenomenon also occurring in Iran, as the Nasiri government was implementing its own modernization projects. If one follows the prescriptions set by de Rochechouart and others who have complained about the European influences depicted in Qajar art, then there can be no Iranian modern art at that time. Iran was becoming more global in its architecture, clothing, cityscape, and in the increased presence of foreigners. The world of Khosrow and Shirin did not apply anymore - yes, in a historical sense, as Baudelaire implies - but not as a point of reference in articulating that contemporary moment. If Baudelaires prescriptions of modernity can coincide reasonably with Irans own modernism, then what is the issue? Why cannot Qajar art be a form of Iranian modernism? One crucial element seems to be missing, which is the major theoretical problem in rethinking Iranian modernism: the notion of the avant-garde. Indeed, the avant-garde has been seen as critical to moving modernism forward, as one movement rebels against the next and disdains middle-class values that are enmeshed with the cultural ideologies of capitalism. Although Peter Brger has attempted to argue that modern art and the avant-garde should not be conflated or necessarily implicate each other54 - his discussion of Gyrgy Lukcs theories on realism is a case in point55 - other major writers, such as Theodor Adorno,56 Herbert Marcuse,57 Clement Greenberg,58 and Renato Poggioli,59 have been instrumental in framing the avant-garde as a modernist challenge to bourgeois values. Moreover, avant-garde art in modernist production is the last bastion of culture that can say something meaningful, whereas bourgeois cultural production, such as kitsch and autonomous art (separated and alienated from the praxis of life),60 can only spew middle class ideologies and provide processed and packaged messages that are readily consumed. One problem with this narrative for Iran is that the court culture of the king was both the mainstream and avant-garde; there was no bourgeoisie to react to. There was a middle class in Iran, primarily the bazaaris, who were the merchant class of the bazaars, but they had not yet obtained enough power to become a dominant class. They did join other social and economic groups in successful uprisings, such as the Tobacco Protest (1890-2) and the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11), and Kamal ol-Molk himself became a staunch supporter of the revolution.61 Mohammad-Hasan Semsar even argues that Kamal ol-Molks art school, Madreseh-ye Sanaye-e Mostazrefeh, was the fruit of that revolution, only to be legitimized and co-opted by the Iranian state, eventually ending in Kamal ol-Molks resignation in 1928.62 It would not be until the 1978-9 revolution that the bazaaris would take power and become the ruling class, thus making the Islamic Revolution of Iran actually a bourgeois revolution. Moreover, bazaari bourgeois artistic
26 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

tastes were and still are conservative and Islamic, replicating the more religious expressions of the Qajar style.63 Overall, despite many reforms and modernization projects that were completed during its long century, Qajar Iran was similar to a feudal monarchy,64 an economic state that Poggioli deemed antithetical to producing an avant-garde: it is exactly the particular tensions of our bourgeois, capitalistic, and technological society which give the avant-garde a reason for existing.65 Since high Qajar art and photography were deeply connected to the Qajar monarchy, it would be considered Courtly Art according to Brgers text, and thus not autonomous and alienated from the praxis of life.66 Brger also states that art as an institution prevents the contents of works that press for radical change in society,67 which could describe high Qajar art and photography, produced and patronized by the court and institutionalized at the Dar al-Fanun polytechnic and the art school that Kamal ol-Molk had set up. During the twentieth century, under the Pahlavi dynasty, it was Queen Farah who had the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran commissioned, just before the revolution. Although one could argue that the modernist art groups Khorus-e jangi (the fighting rooster) of the 1940s-1950s and the Saqqa-khaneh of the 1950s-1960s were reacting to kitsch culture in Iran, it was the ruling classes who were both patronizing and promoting fine art and kitsch. The economic institution of capitalism was endemic to the rise of the avant-garde and modernism, as a reaction to the commodification of culture and the new tyranny of the bourgeoisie. Even further-reaching is the problem of capitalism defining modernity as a whole - a point that Walter Mignolo in Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) has attempted to rectify through his concept of Border Gnosis, created through colonial contact, which formed a modern consciousness on both sides of the equation for the colonial and colonized. Another formulaic problem could be the embrace of photography by the Nasiri court and its artists. Realism and Impressionism were reacting against the camera, which replicated nature in fine detail and thus competed with the naturalism of painting. French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856) has apocryphally proclaimed that Photography is born, painting is dead.68 Baudelaire also initially railed against the newfound medium in 1859, when misused by lazy artists: I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography [] have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce.69 Later in the twentieth century, Jackson Pollock named the camera as the impetus that drove modern artists to work against it and express their inner worlds instead.60 However, Brger once again nuances the situation by showing that photographys adoption by the bourgeoisie was not the crux of avantgarde movements, although it certainly had an impact.61 If one defines modernism at its base level, it simply means the representation of modern life, the here and now. On that definition alone, then, is it possible to mitigate the avant-garde in a global context, but still use it in a European and North American one? If Lenin could extricate the bourgeois step for his Russian Revolution of 1917, hence transforming a feudal state into a Communist one without an intervening capitalist phase and creating an altered from of Marxism, then it seems that for modernism in Iran to
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 27

be recognized, one must also skip the step of the avant-garde that has been fashioned and formed as a reaction to the ruling middle classes.62 This is also why Iran and other countries outside Europe and North America have been brought into a postmodern consciousness and their contemporary art recognized, as neoliberalism and globalization have been generally accepted as coherent ideological and economic paradigms. Epilogue Now I come full circle, because if one is to argue that the avant-garde still exists in contemporary Iranian art in Iran and in the diaspora, this is because these artists challenge on some level the ruling classes of Iran, which are now the bazaari middle class and their Islamic values. They finally have an avant-garde in these ripe conditions, and thus, their artwork can join the postmodern legion of Contemporary Art and its discourses. Yet, the ghosts of de Rochechouart and those like him continue to survey and frame what is now considered Contemporary Iranian Art. The global art world continues its racism and insensitivity by showing Iranian artists together in exhibitions without contingence, just because they are Iranian in origin.63 Hamid Severi, an art historian and former Head of Research at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, has commented that international exhibitions on Contemporary Iranian Art tend to focus on Iranian identity and culture at the expense of other artistic factors and interpretations.64 For example, the exhibition Iran Inside Out (2009) at the Chelsea Museum in New York showed Iranian artists who work inside Iran in relation to those who work outside, comparing and contrasting their approaches and trends in light of their geographic differences. Although the show was praised for its wide representation of women artists and its potential to elucidate stereotypes about Iran,65 especially when its opening coincided with the Green Revolution, some critics thought that the show only compounded monolithic thinking. Melik Kalyan, who writes for Forbes Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, noted: What the show doesnt do is change our perceptions, for this is exactly what we thought. Iranians on the whole, especially young Iranians - and most of the home-based artists are young - despise the regime. If that is a stereotyped perception, the show merely confirms it.66 Not only do Kalyans suspicions allude to American ideological concerns that obsess over a disgruntled Iranian youth, with the hope that they may overthrow the Islamic Republic, but they also demonstrate the shows (need for a) construction of an Iranian avant-garde art that is anti-Islamic Republic, and anti-bazaari. Overall, much like the nineteenth-century raids that resulted in fabulous collections of Islamic art entering European collections, the art market spurs the demand for Contemporary Iranian Art that speaks of Iranianness, and of course, in a postmodern context, one has to ask whether such a state can actually exist. Yet, this drive for Iranian art is what dismissed Qajar art, which sought to speak of a global reality brewing in nineteenth-century Iran. It is not to say that those current Iranian artists who do speak of their identities in their artwork are pandering to the art world; indeed, self and identity are parts of the artist that inevitably manifest through the visual. It is however striking that the art market invests millions of dollars in a new and growing Contemporary Iranian Art industry,67 when really, there has always been modern and contemporary Iranian art.
28

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Notes 1 I use this term slightly differently to Ali Behdad, who is referring to nineteenth-century European travelers in the colonial world, although I refer to his work later in the paper. Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 2 See Jrgen Habermas, and Seyla Ben-Habib, Modernity versus Postmodernity, New German Critique, no.22 (Winter 1981): 3-14. 3 See Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). 4 Vernon Hyde Minor, Art Historys History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 20. 5 Stephen Vernoit, Islamic Art and Architecture: An Overview of Scholarship and Collecting, c.1850-1950, in Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 18501950, ed. Stephen Vernoit (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 2. 6 Charles Hercules Read, introduction to Exhibition of the Faience of Persia and the Nearer East(London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1907), xiv. 7 Arthur Upham Pope, Masterpieces of Persian Art (New York: The Dryden Press, 1945), 6; Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 148; Robert Irwin, Islamic Art in Context (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 191. 8 Julien M. de Rochechouart, Souvenir dun voyage en Perse (Paris: Challamel Ain, 1867), 260, 264. I have taken part of the translation from Finbarr Barry Flood, From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art, in Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfield (London: Routledge, 2007), 37. 9 De Rochechouart, Souvenir dun voyage en Perse, 260. 10 Ibid, 260, 265. 11 Ibid, 265. 12 Ibid, 264. 13 Ibid, 267. 14 Appendix 2: Biographies of Scholars, in Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, 1850-1950, ed. Stephen Vernoit (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 214. 15 Major R. Murdoch Smith, RE, Persian Art (London: Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1879), 78. 16 Ibid, 79-80. 17 B.W. Robinson, Persian Painting in the Qajar Period, in Highlights of Persian Art, eds. Richard Ettinghausen and Ehsan Yarshater (Boulder: Westview Press, 1979), 331. 18 Laurence Binyon, Painting, in Persian Art, ed. E. Denison Ross (London: Luzac and Company, 1930), 71. 19 Ernst Grube, Studies in Islamic Painting (London: The Pindar Press, 1995), 428. 20 Flood, From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art, 36. 21 An excellent source that defines constructions of race during the height of European colonialism in the nineteenth century is Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1995). Earlier examples of colonial concerns with blood purity are reflected in the Spanish casta paintings, and later examples include the Nazi German state. In a later American context, Amy Lyford demonstrates art critics disdain toward Isamu Noguchis artwork, calling him semi-Oriental,in other words, a half-breed. Amy Lyford, Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment, The Art Bulletin, 85, no.1 (March 2003): 140. Of course, in an earlier American context, the institution of slavery and its inherent components of sexuality and rape also made blood purity a major issue of contention. 22 Flood, From the Prophet to Postmodernism? New World Orders and the End of Islamic Art, 43; Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldly Field, The Art Bulletin85, No. 1 (March 2003): 155. 23 See Staci Gem Scheiwiller, Iran in the 1930s, review of Exploring Iran: The Photography of Erich F. Schmidt, 1930-1940, by Aye Grsan-Salzmann, History of Photography 33, no.1 (February 2009): 103-5. 24 Olu Oguibe, In the Heart of Darkness, Third Text, 23 (Summer 1993): 6, 8. 25 See Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge,
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 29

MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), 55. 26 Bourgeois tastes craved the exotic of Iran, for example, by commissioning faux Persian tiles in the Mediterranean Style of architecture, most prominent in the Hearst Castle (completed 1947) in San Simeon, California. Another example is shown in American womens fashion from the 1940s, which had adopted Persian overcoats and motifs. See Persian Art and Design Influences from the Near and Middle East (New York: Studio Publications, 1948). 27 See Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 28 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 89. 29 Behdad, Belated Travelers, 6-7. 30 Oguibe, In the Heart of Darkness: 3-4. 31 See Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Bhabha, The Location of Culture. 32 Etemad al-Saltaneh,Al-Maaser va al-Asar [Contemporary impressions](Tehran: ye Sanai, 1970), 123, quoted in Adle and Yahya Zoka, Notes et documents sur la photographie Iranienne et son histoire [Notes and Documents on Iranian Photography and its History], Studia Iranica20 (1983): 274-5. Unfortunately, I could not locate the original source. The English translation is from Donna Stein, The Photographic Source of a Qajar Painting, in Performing the Iranian State:Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity, ed. Staci Gem Scheiwiller (London: Anthem Press, 2013), forthcoming. 33 Belting, Florence and Baghdad, 95. 34 Mohammad Reza Tahmasbpour, Naser-od-din: Shah-e akaas [Nasir al-Din Shah: the photographer king] (Tehran: Nashr-e Tarikh-e Iran, 2000), 45. 35 Iraj Afshar, Some Remarks on the Early History of Photography in Iran, in Qajar Iran: Political, Social and Cultural Change, 1800-1925, ed. Edmund Bosworth and Carole Hillenbrand (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1992), 275. 36 Layla Diba, The Court Painter Yahya Ghaffari: His Life and Times, in Persian Painting from the Mongols to the Qajars: Studies in Honour of Basil W. Robinson, ed. Robert Hillenbrand (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 83. 37 Maktab-e Kamal al-Mulk [School of Kamal al-]: Guzidahi az asar-e Kamal al- Mulk, Ashtiyani, aydariyan, Awliya, Yasami, Shaykh va Shahabi (Tehran: Nashr-e Abgineh vabastah biMarkaz-e Nashr-e Farhangi-e Raja, 1986), pp.12-13, H; Mahshid, Modares, Qajar Painting in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and Realism, (Masters thesis, San Jose State University, 2006), 106-7. 38 Kamal ol-Molk, My Life, in Yadnameh-ye Kamal ol-Molk [Memorial on Kamal ol-Molk], ed. Ali Dehbashi (Tehran: Nashr-e Beh Did, 1999), 19, 26. 39 Ibid, 24. 40 Ibid, 26. 41 Ahmad Soheili Khansari, Kamal-e Honar: Ahval va asar-i Muammad Ghaffari Kamal al-Mulk [Perfection of Art: Life and Works of Mohammad Ghaffari Kamal-ol-Molk] (Tehran: Elmi Publishing, 1990), 4. 42 Hushang Hesami, Ansha-e akas-e shodeh-ye Kamal ol-Molk [The essay of Kamal olMolk that turned into a photograph], in Yadnameh-ye Kamal ol-Molk [Memorial on Kamal olMolk], ed. Ali Dehbashi (Tehran: Nashr-e Beh Did, 1999), 354. Hesami is critical of this assertion, however. 43 Khansari, Kamal-e Honar, 26. 44 Abdul-Bah, The Secret of Divine Civilization, trans. Marzieh Gail (Wilmette: Bah Publishing Trust: 1970), 5, 13, 14. 45 Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, Ayneh-ye Sikandari: Tarikh-e Iran [The Alexandrian mirror: The history of Iran] (Tehran: s.n., 1324/1906), 110; Jamal al-Din Afghani, Tarikh-e Ijmali-e Iran [A brief history of Iran], in Fursat Shirazi, Divan Fursat, ed Ali Zarrin Qalam (Tehran: Kitabfurushi-e Sirus, 1337/1958), 72; and Abdul-Bah, The Secret of Divine Civilization, 91-2. 46 See Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography(New York: Palgrave, 2001); and Staci Gem Scheiwiller, Cartographic Desires: Some Reflections on the Shahr-e Farang (Peepshow) and Modern Iran, in Performing the Iranian State:Visual Culture and Representations of Iranian Identity, ed. Staci Gem Scheiwiller (London: Anthem Press, 2013), forthcoming.
30 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

47 Maktab-e Kamal al-Mulk, pp.9-10, E. 48 B.W. Robinson, Painting in the Post Safavid Period, in The Arts of Persia, ed. RW Ferrier (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 228-9. 49 See Wendy M. K. Shaw, Exhibiting the Middle East: Collections and Perceptions of Islamic Art, Ars Orientalis (2000): 55-68. 50 Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250-1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 312. 51 Ibid. 52 Robinson, Painting in the Post Safavid Period, 225. 53 Ibid, 9. 54 Jochen Schulte-Sasse, foreword to Theory of the Avant-Garde, by Peter Brger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xiv-xv. Richard Murphy also attempts to make this separation between modernism and the avant-garde in Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 29-33. 55 See Georg Lukcs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963); and Georg Lukcs, Essays on Realism, ed. Rodney Livinstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 56 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor, rev. ed. (1970; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 57 Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, rev. ed. (1965; London: Free Association Books, 1988). 58 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). 59 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde. 60 Peter Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 24-5. 61 Seh negaresh raje beh Kamal ol-Molk: Nameh-ye Zoka ol-Molk beh Doktor Ghani [Three writings about Kamal ol-Molk: Zoka ol-Molks letter to Doctor Ghani] in Kamal-e Honar, 1990, 193. 62 Mohammad-Hasan Semsar, introduction to Kamal ul-Mulk, rev. ed. (2003; Tehran: Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, 2004), 12-13 (Persian and English). 63 For more examples of the Islamic Republics artistic tastes, see Peter Chelkowski and Hamid Dabashi, Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1999). 64 A.K.S. Lambton, Qajar Persia: Eleven Studies (London: I.B. Tauris, 1987), x-xi. 65 Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, 107. 66 Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 48. 67 Ibid., 95. 68 Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in NineteenthCentury France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 91. 69 Charles Baudelaire, The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography, in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, eds. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison (London: Paul Chapman, 1982), 20. 70 Jackson Pollock, Interview with William Wright, in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, rev. ed. (1992; Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 584. 71 Brger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 24-5. Stephen Bann also argues that the initial relationship between photography and painting was not as antagonistic as the histories have framed it. See Bann, Parallel Lines, 89-125. 72 Ali Behdad provides a good discussion of Lenins approach to Marxism, Belated Travelers, 3. 73 Hamid Keshmirshekan, Contemporary or Specific: The Dichotomous Desires in the Art of Early Twenty-First Century Iran, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, no.4 (2011):52-3. 74 Ibid. 75 Holland Cotter, Iran Inside Out, New York Times, July 23, 2009, Art in Review, accessed May 30th, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/arts/design/24galleries. html?pagewanted=all.
REFRAMING THE RISE OF MODERNISM IN IRAN 31

76 Melik Kaylan, The View from Here, The Wall Street Journal, August 5th, 2009, Life and Culture, accessed May 30th, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203547904 574280051845780902.html#articleTabs%3Darticle. 77 Artist Barbad Golshiri gives several figures in his article For They Know What They Do, E-Flux Journal, no. 8 (September 2009): 1, 3, accessed May 30th, 2012, http://www.e-flux.com/ journal/for-they-know-what-they-do-know/.

32

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FOUNDATIONS OF MODERNISM: ALFRED BARR AND THE JAPANESE AVANT-GARDE

MAJELLA MUNRO Alfred Barrs well known 1935 diagram The Development of Cubism and Abstract Art was a seminal attempt to rationalise the plural influences on and outputs of the modernist experiment. Sybil Gordon Kantor, author of the most substantial intellectual biography of Barr, ascribes the development of the flow chart to the influence of CR Morey, under whom Barr studied at Princeton. Morey had forged a taxonomy of early Christian art by compiling a stylistic index of thousands of exempla. For Kantor, this example of historiographic significance prepared Barr to treat modernist art within the continuous historical framework of Western tradition.1 Yet the formative cultural precursors to modernism cited by Barr are almost exclusively non-Western, including near Eastern art, negro sculpture and Japanese prints. Barrs document is the first attempt to analyse modernism and the avant-garde as the heirs to art history, rather than as discontinuous with it; but the precedents from which modernism stems are radically distinct from the Euro-American frameworks of early twentieth-century art historical research. This forces us to think again about our models of modernism as not only a temporal, but also geographical, development. The current narrative of the spread of modernism holds that as less developed states industrialise and modernise taking Western achievements as their model they also import the frameworks of cultural modernity, making modernisation and Westernisation synonyms. Japan is a particularly useful case study of this process as in the mid-nineteenth century, threatened by the encroachment of Western Imperial powers, Japan deliberately modernised along Western lines. But if we look more carefully at Barrs diagram we see that the actual process of modernism is one in which Western artists, critical of their own culture, turn to external precedents; when this production is received in the culture of influence, the manner in which domestic culture has been incorporated by Western artists is apparent. While the experiments of the Impressionists with Japanese prints may form a point of disembarkation for a new discourse on modernism in France, in Japan those productions speak to an already long-established aesthetic. What those viewers see is not necessarily a Western modernism, but can instead be recognised as the appropriation by foreign artists of the viewers own cultural heritage.Western modernism is, therefore, already a result of visible inter-cultural synthesis. The status of the West as the modern other is further problematised by modernisms recourse to retrogressive precedents found in so-called primitive African art and in pre-modern Japanese prints. To elucidate this reciprocity of cultural influence and examine further the tensions inherent in the process I am going to attend to the reception of the Surrealist movement in Japan. Surrealism began to be historicised by scholars from the 1950s, a process that
33

gained pace through the 1960s and 70s: periods concurrent with the US Occupation of Japan and its aftermath. This confluence of historiographic and political events generated a discourse on the absence, rather than presence, of Surrealism in Japan: while there is evidently a body of artistic production influenced by Surrealism, this was dismissed as somehow derivative of French experiments. The repressive pre-war Japanese state was said to suppress the kind of politically radical, sexually explicit, and socially subversive experiments engaged in by Surrealists, but this argument misrepresents the relationship between the state and the avant-garde, which depends on institutional or political hostility to fuel its critique. Against denials of the possible Japanese reception of Surrealism Barrs diagram stands as powerful testimony, presenting as it does Surrealism in a direct line of descent from Japanese prints. Barrs connection allowed contemporary Japanese artists to understand Surrealism within their own cultural framework. Surrealism made visible to Japanese artists the extent of their own influence on Western art, facilitating the development of a Japanese contribution to the international avant-garde. For example, Surrealist painter Fukuzawa Ichir (1898-1992) acknowledged the debt of French art to Japanese culture, writing: In France, indigenous [artistic] principles were turned upside down on the basis of borrowing from Japan.2 Takiguchi Shz (1903-79) specifically connected this influence to French Surrealist practice, explaining that a recognition of the Surrealist characteristics in Japanese poetic activity, including haikai, has emerged. [...] French Surrealist poets including Paul luard also experimented with so-called haikai [...] luard is thought to have an especially profound interest. Particularly amongst his recent verselets a haikai-style of humour can be found.3 This complicates the idea that modernism or Surrealism is inherently Western and therefore in tension with what was Japanese. From the mid 1930s Surrealism was consciously internationalising through the series of International Expositions du Surrealisme, demonstrating the Surrealists awareness that their production was not confined to a singular cultural context. Surrealism has particular capacity to be synthesised with other cultures, given its interest in disenfranchised peoples and cultural relativism; in non-Western art; and its unique recourse to art historical precedent in an attempt to trace a transhistorical and transcultural Surrealism. Surrealists eschewed Western cultural hegemony and were interested in radical geographies; these are just some of the features accounting for Surrealisms unprecedented cultural spread, facilitating its manifestation in every inhabited continent of the world by the start of the second world war. In a 1937 text on the international development of Surrealism, pioneering critic, theorist and Surrealist poet Takiguchi wrote that: In observing Surrealism, up to now it has been said that the origin of this school of contemporary art was in Paris, but the significant implications of this have not been questioned. [...] Surrealism is a considerably irregular thing. [...] I want to consider national reality and, at the same time, the uniqueness of Surreality.4
34

He asserts that Surrealisms internationalisation depends on the assimilation of

MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

local cultural contexts, and that Japanese people have many characteristics somewhat close to Surrealism; in accordance with Zen culture a variety of poetic dialectics have been assimilated.5 However, in the case of Japan, the assimilation of Western avant-gardism and Japanese culture has been deemed problematic. Hiroshi Nara cautions that describing Japanese modernisation as self-conscious, particularly in connection to its incongruent cohabitation of elements from the past with contemporary artefacts is a direct reflection of American post-war narratives on Japans inability to modernize itself, forged during occupation.6 Surrealism,with its critical and dialectical foundation, depended on incongruity, meaning that a recourse to tradition within Japanese Surrealist praxis does not depend on a problematic modernisation. Fukuzawa recorded that his interest in Surrealism was precisely that it allowed him to reconcile his interests in contemporary and pre-modern painting, and held that Surrealism was unique amongst avant-gardes because it permitted such figuration, unlike the abstract avant-garde, giving it special potential for incorporating cultural referents. Fukuzawa implied that Surrealism was the method by which traditional culture could be put to avant-garde use, noting the similarity of Zen to dialectical materialism. Out of Fukuzawas interest in Zen emerged a new discourse on the object. He described the tokonoma (an alcove in domestic architecture in which calligraphy and flower arrangements are displayed) as similar to Surrealist object making, in that the space of the tokonoma elevates the quotidian object. The object was thus a way for tradition to be rehabilitated within avant-garde expression. Art critic Hasegawa Sabur, by contrast, held that object making was endemic in Japanese culture and was, therefore, something that the West was retarded in recognising: Was there Surrealism in ancient Japan? [...] The Surrealists exhibit objects,extolling the value of natural objects, found objects, interpretive objects, non-physical objects, mobile objects, and, on the different shelves of the tokonoma are placed ornaments, stones, shells, polished tree roots, bamboo branches (natural objects), modern artists and arts enthusiasts scorn these as curios [but] certainly the future of Western style sculpture is this type of object dart (which the Surrealists esteem) and which they are only just discovering.7 At the same time that Hasegawas contemporaries were dismissing the object as pass, the West was coming to realise its expressive power: this articulates the problem of tradition and its relationship to modernity and how these terms cannot necessarily be consistently applied across cultures. Fukuzawa had also connected the object to the dry garden, including photographs of the world-famous Buddhist temple, Ryan-ji, Kyoto, in his 1937 encyclopedia of Surrealism: It goes without saying that the arrangement of stones in a basin came to
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERNISM 35

be the taste for gardens on the whole. It relates to the Surrealist taste for the object. In these cases simple stones become objects with a symbolic function. These same objects, found in primitive religions and phallic rituals, disturb us; sexual symbols are abundant. The garden at Ryan-ji takes inspiration from the stones of the Muromachi period, a valuable example, In the everyday applied arts of Japan, Zen plays a considerable role. Zen is mixed with life everyday, because it is a spirit that manifests in the concrete. In Zen there can be found, somehow, a Surrealist spirit.8 Surrealist painter and Kyoto resident Kitawaki Noboru (1901-51) also explored Ryoan-ji in terms of the object. He attempted to uncover a metaphysical logic behind the arrangement of the stones, based on his studies of geomantic sections of the Iching, an ancient Chinese divinational text, chiming with the Surrealist interest in psychic phenomena. Items Photographs of Ryoan-ji, Kyoto, in appropriated from the temple site were presented Fukuzawas Surralisme: LIde et by Kitawaki as objects. lesprit de lart moderne, 1937. Kitawakis painterly output presents a particularly interesting problem in the identification of transcultural influences. Kitawakis handling is similar to that of French Surrealist Yves Tanguy (1900-55) in its presentation of disenfranchised forms on a flat luminous ground. However, rather than assume that Tanguys work, which was both chronologically and geographically prior, influenced Kitawaki in this direction, instead I am provoked to tangential consideration of the manner by which Tanguy himself arrived at this idiom. The presentation of discrete objects suspended over a wash of flat colour is unlike anything in Western art, and is therefore almost certainly evidence of the influence of Japanese paintings on Tanguys work. Rather than a response to Tanguys influence, it is possible that the similarity between Tanguy and Kitawaki is coincidental, as both are independently influenced by Japanese art. Like Fukuzawa and Takiguchi, Kitawaki connected contemporary Surrealist practice to developments in pre-modern Japanese arts. In Kitawakis work, Japanese culture is explored in line with Surrealist interests in myth, primitivism, and psychoanalysis, in ways determined by the culture and environment of Kyoto. In addition to the status of Kyoto as the Imperial capital and a major centre of Buddhist
MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

Above, objects appropriated by Kitawaki from temple sites, and below, Kitawaki, Mathematical Thrill, oil on canvas, 1942, both courtesy the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. 36

Kitawaki, Expression Of Dawn, from the Physignomy Series, oil on canvas, 1939, in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

worship, intellectual currents in early twentieth-century Kyoto, specifically the dialectical examination of Eastern and Western philosophies undertaken by Nishida Kotar (18701945) at the University of Kyoto, made the investigations of Kyoto Surrealists particularly germane to an appropriation of Japanese culture. Kitawaki was familiar with Max Ernsts use of late nineteenth-century sources, and in his notebooks he wrote on ancient Greek philosophy and Dals Metamorphosis of Narcissus (1937) simultaneously, revealing an awareness of the Surrealist quotation of historical material in the European case. He tentatively suggested a parallel between the varying symmetry of a dry garden, which depends on the mobile perspective of the observer, and Dals landscapes, in which the use of conventional linear perspective was destabilised by the viewers awareness that the horizon and vanishing point shift depending on whether one chooses to attend to the conscious (immediately apparent) or unconscious (hallucinatory) image. Kitawaki also held that the hallucinatory potential of mandalas (a devotional and sometimes abstract image used in Buddhist meditation) employed a similar mechanism to Dals hallucinatory paintings. Kitawaki attempted to apply these principles to his series of landscape physiognomies, based on Dals double images, describing these as connected to both the monomaniacal method and the symmetrical composition of a mandala. Kyoto provided a context in which these cross-cultural influences could be synthesised. The Kyoto school philosophers developed around the theories of Nishida, who attempted to combine Western intellectual tenets and East Asian culture, invoking Zen to challenge the binaries of Western philosophy. However, where the Hegelian
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERNISM 37

The Legend of Urashima Tar as published in Mizue, 1937.

dialectics drawn on by European Surrealists advocated resolution through synthesis, the Nishidan dialectic does not insist on any resolution; instead, a tension between opposites, the absolutely contradictory self-identity is an acceptable outcome. In attempting to synthesise Eastern and Western cultures without offering resolution of potential oppositions, Nishida laid himself open to attack from both conservative nationalists and internationally-oriented progressives. Kitawaki was an avid follower of Nishida, and it is surely this influence that distinguishes Kitawakis explorations of indigenous and local cultures, within an intellectual framework imported from the West. In Kitawakis paintings, form and content originate in two separate cultural traditions, the result being a tension, rather than reconciliation. In 1937 Kitawaki organised a group of painters to execute a collective rendering of the Legend of Urashima Tar, a Japanese folktale that is open to psychoanalytic interpretation and has come to be read as the Japanese counterpart to Oedipus. This work was an explicitly Surrealist undertaking, informed by psychoanalysis and the French Surrealist game of cadavre exquis. Kitawaki revisited collective work in the Kamogawa Topographical Series of 1940, with subject matter that could be received as nationalistic. This complex collaborative work, executed in various styles by a number of artists, depicts the Kamogawa, the river on which Kyoto is built, during different stages of its development. Kitawakis contribution is a series of town plans combined with topographical studies of Kyoto, seen from above, showing the negotiation of the river during different phases of town planning and expansion. By 1940, Kitawaki had become increasingly nationalistic, perhaps
38 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

under the influence of Imperialist military fervour as Japan mobilised in anticipation of the Pacific war. He submitted overtly nationalistic works to the exhibition celebrating the 2600th anniversary of Imperial reign, an exhibition that celebrated a myth of stable political authority in Japan; argued for its greater historical authority relative to Western nations; and promoted Japanese culture in the run-up to war. Amongst the Kitawaki, Cultural Morphology, both 1940, in the collection of the works displayed was Cultural National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Morphology, in which the Japanese Noh mask is presented as emerging from a synthesis of Greek and Indian art. The painting draws on Surrealist interest in primitive and ritual objects, particularly masks, but the triangular composition Kitawaki has chosen, whether consciously or not, introduces a hierarchical relationship which elevates Japan. However, it is not possible to explain Kitawakis interest in Japanese culture solely as the product of pre-war nationalism, Kitawaki, Explanatory Diagram Of Sesshus Paranoia, 1947, as his interest continued postcollection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. war; for instance, in the 1947 work Explanatory Diagram of Sesshus Paranoia. Sesshu Ty, a priest at the Shku-ji temple in Kyoto, is credited with having developed a Japanese style of ink painting, informed by Zen practice, and was also cited as a precursor to Surrealism in Fukuzawas 1937 encyclopedia. In Sesshus Paranoia, Kitawaki uses an explicitly archaic painting style for the first time, borrowing the thick brush stroke and jagged outline characteristic of Sesshus work. Kitawaki went further than many of his contemporaries in attempting to graft the Surrealist sensibility onto Japanese culture. Was his particular pursuit of this synthesis influenced by nationalism, or by Nishidas idyosyncrous synthetic East/West philosophy? While Nishida and nationalist concerns gave impetus for the generation of a Japanese
FOUNDATIONS OF MODERNISM 39

Kitawakis notebook, c 1937, reproduced courtesy the estate of the artist and the curatorial staff of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.

avant-garde, it was only through Surrealism that the reconciliation of the avant-garde and Japanese cultural values could be articulated, a capacity of Surrealism implied and publicised by Barr. In 1937, Kitawaki attended the International Exposition du Surrealisme in Kyoto. There he saw copies of Barrs 1936 Cubism and Modern Art catalogue, which Barr had personally loaned to the show. Kitawaki took care to copy the development diagram into his notebook, noting the dependence of Surrealism on Japanese prints. Thus, Barrs diagram came not only to describe, but also to determine, practice within the newly international context of the Surrealist avant-garde.
Notes My thanks go to Otani Shogo of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, for allowing access to many of the paintings reproduced in this essay. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 1 Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press, 2003, p22. 2 Fukuzawa Ichir, Furansu Gadan Kaerib (French Artworld Review), Mizue, no. 319, September 1931, pp5-8. 3 Takiguchi Shz, Zenei Geijutsu no Sho Mondai (The Many Problems of the Avant-Garde), Mizue, April 1938, pp2-7. 4 Takiguchi, Chogenjitsushui Kokusaiteki Kkan (Surrealism International Exchange), c.1937, reproduced in Korekushon Takiguchi Shz (Takiguchi Shz Collection), Misuzu Shb, 1991-8, vol. 9, pp110-112. 5 Takiguchi, 1938. 6 Hiroshi Nara, Introduction in Hiroshi, ed., Inexorable Modernity: Japanese Grappling with Modernity in the Arts, Lexington Books, Plymouth, 2001, pp1-13, p1. 7 Hasegawa Sabur , Old Japan and New Western Songs: Kurt Seligmann speaks, Atelier, May 1936, pp40-42. 8 Fukuzawa, Chogenjitsushugi to Nihontekina Mono (Surrealism and Japanese Things), in Surralisme: LIde et lesprit de lart moderne, Editions Atelier-sha, Tokyo, 1937, pp185-98. MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST 40

BETWEEN AVANT-GARDE CALLIGRAPHY AND ABSTRACT PAINTING THE ROLE OF THE BOKUJINKAI AND OTHER AGENTS EUGENIA BOGDANOVA Abstract This article is dedicated to the study of agents that jointly shaped the Bokujinkai avant-garde calligraphy group in the first postwar decade and participated in efforts to reform Japanese calligraphy. The Bokujinkai, founded in 1952 by Morita Shiry, Inoue Yichi and others, saw its programmatic aim as modernizing the art of calligraphy along with its opening up to the world, bringing calligraphy to equal terms with contemporary painting in Europe and America. This paper offers a close look at the key agents involved in artistic dialogue between Japanese calligraphy and Euro-American painting during the early 1950s, providing a comparative analysis of the most important positions concerning the place and role of Japanese calligraphy in the postwar world, and also its potential and limitations in terms of modernization. This paper shows that these discussions involved not only calligraphers, but also art historians, painters, aesthetics scholars and philosophers and, thus, deliver important insights into the cultural and artistic context of the Japanese postwar art scene. The study will outline the positions of Bokujinkai members (Morita and Inoue) and other avant-garde calligraphers (such as Ueda Sky or Hidai Nankoku). These will be presented alongside the opinions of abstract artists from the US and Japan (Franz Kline, Hasegawa Sabur and Yoshihara Jir), modernist painters from Europe (Picasso and Matisse), and Japanese philosophers informed by Zen (Ijima Tsutomu and Hisamatsu Shinichi). Finally it will highlight the role that these outsiders played in this process. My ultimate goal is to disentangle discourses underlying the formation of avantgarde calligraphy (as it is understood today) by singling out and analyzing the individual voices and agendas of the interacting artists and theoreticians who directly or indirectly participated in its configuration. Introduction: Calligraphy since the Meiji Period Ever since the opening of Japan to Western trade and influence in the Meiji period (1868-1912), the position of calligraphy within the Japanese art system has been contentious. During the Edo shogunate (1603-1868) the situation had been much clearer: calligraphy was one of six essential skills1 that educated people in China and then Japan had to master since the times of Confucius.2 By some it was even considered the highest of these.3
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However, with the Meiji Restoration much changed. In the overall process of modernization and westernization, a new system of categorization of the fine arts (or bijutsu) was created in Japan, following the European canon. In this process, calligraphy found itself cast overboard in favor of the new modernized and progressive state art system. At first calligraphy was separated from painting, and its portion in major exhibitions started diminishing. Then it was shifted to the marginalized section of crafts, together with photography and prints. Finally, it completely disappeared from the representative exhibition floors. Nevertheless, before the Restoration, calligraphy had occupied too high a place in the traditional hierarchy of Japanese arts to simply disappear from the Japanese art scene without a trace. Hence, it was shifted from the highly representative public spaces of the progressive young nation - museums and international expositions - to less representative domestic ones - schools, private collections, and numerous calligraphy clubs and groups. The later standing of calligraphy in the larger Japanese cultural context was twofold. Ousted from the mainstream art world, calligraphy found its niche in two spheres of Japanese society: among high ranking officials and politicians close to the Imperial court, and in school education. Initially calligraphys traditionally strong connection to court culture was maintained by officials who had started their career during the shogunate and brought Classical Chinese culture to the Meiji government. Unlike the imported fine arts or bijutsu system, which was meant to bring Enlightenment to the country and serve new national interests,4 calligraphy since ancient times has been the art of the noblemen, with its role to support, to maintain gravity, to polish decent virtues and to improve the character.5 Such an understanding of calligraphy - as a tool to forging a perfect personality rather than to express and manifest it contributed to calligraphys implementation as a compulsory subject in school education. It was allotted the role of shji, or learning characters; children in the Meiji schools were learning how to write beautifully and correctly through accurate copying of samples of characters by Kusakabe Meikaku (1838-1922) and Maki Ryko (1776-1843). Besides teaching children patience and good handwriting, calligraphy was supposed to promote their love of the national language, alongside classical literature and philosophy. Although calligraphy was not officially highly ranked as an art form - at least not one taught at the art universities and academies but rather at pedagogical institutions it was still very important for the formation of the young nation state and was used as a tool to foster patriotism and later also nationalism during the Second World War.6 It was cherished within the Japanese governmental and educational systems as an essentially East Asian cultural phenomenon, which could not find its place in the new Western system of the arts because of its exclusiveness and cultural refinement. Thus, it had to be specifically preserved and fostered by the Japanese. This was done in two important strategic spheres - high politics and elementary education - spheres that normally cannot be accessed by foreigners in Japan.

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The Postwar Cultural Environment and Calligraphy Given its difficult history - of being ousted from the official art system and isolated from the rest of the art processes, paralyzed in its development, and, finally, instrumentalized as a nationalistic tool during wartime7 - the quantitative and qualitative break-through in the calligraphic world that happened shortly after the war is even more striking. Japans defeat and the end of the war served as a great shake-up for virtually all spheres of Japanese society: politics, economy, education, culture and arts.8 As WintherTamaki puts it: The war withdrew Japanese protagonists from international artistic competition centered in Europe and permitted them to imagine a new supranational forum for international competition much more favorable to themselves. With the defeat of the Japanese empire in 1945, this empowering ideological framework collapsed, and Japanese artists found themselves back in the world system of modern art centered in Europe.9 Postwar Japanese realized how isolated their international standing of the last decades had been, and zealously focused efforts on reintegration into global political, economical and cultural processes. The first failures of contemporary Japanese art to gain attention at the international art exhibitions thinking for instance about the Imaizumi case10 - were disillusioning. Yet, they only reconfirmed the Japanese in their intent to redefine and internationalize their artistic and cultural practices, and to make them more fitting to the changed rules and new realities of global art competition. Sometimes such attempts at internationalization took quite radical forms. Among other measures aiming at the democratization of Japanese society many of which were initiated by Occupation forces - one aimed at the democratization of the Japanese language and script usage, in particular at simplifying it. The reform was much debated with some voices going as far as advocating the ultimate abolition of Japanese characters in favor of the use of Roman script.11 They reasoned that the usage of characters made the Japanese language difficult for foreigners to master and hindered free international communication. It is not surprising that such suggestions triggered outrage amongst traditionalists, and also made many calligraphers uncertain about the future of their art. Ultimately, the reform was not as radical as feared, but even the mere fact of discussing the abolition of characters changed the way the Japanese thought about their language in general, and script in particular. Such turbulent and formative times gave birth to many new experimental art forms, which can be considered children of the postwar international aspirations of the Japanese: new pottery that produced art objet deprived of any practical designation; ikebana that was not using flowers any more; and, finally, avant-garde calligraphy,12 which did not refer to Japanese characters.13 From then on calligraphy became something greater and more vague than merely an art of beautiful writing: it became the art of creating complex images where semantic and visual elements are competing with and complementing each other, sometimes driving out the verbal component completely.
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This article will analyze the multilateral discussions held in the representative postwar calligraphy group, the Bokujinkai. Particular focus will be put on the agents who were involved in developing the term avant-garde calligraphy (as understood by the Bokujinkai) and who gradually filled this term with concrete meaning. The aim will be to separate the individual voices of the main participants from this entangled discourse and to see how the agency of each of them contributed to the general picture. Agents who Shaped Avant-Garde Calligraphy and the Bokujinkai Art Group 1. The First Generation of Avant-Gardists: Pathfinders All of the calligraphers who played an important role in the formation of avantgarde calligraphy in the postwar years were students, or students of students, of Hidai Tenrai (1872-1939). For this reason he is often called the father of modern Japanese calligraphy.14 Tenrai, in turn, received his training from one of the most prominent calligraphers of the Meiji era, Kusakabe Meikaku,15 and inherited from his teacher liberalist views on calligraphy production and an emphasis on directly studying old calligraphy. Hidai was convinced that calligraphy should occupy a decent place in the art system and be able to compete with European painting on the world level. From as early as the 1920s Hidai had started to explicitly distinguish between practical calligraphy (shji or jitsuy-sho, the goal of which is to master the ability to write in a refined way) and artistic calligraphy (geijutsu-sho, which is supposed to teach the calligrapher to overcome himself and his weaknesses in order to give him the tools for the unhindered self-expression).16 Hidai urged his students to pursue their individual style through close study and reproduction of a great range of classical calligraphy pieces, the more diverse the better, and did not at all encourage them to take his own calligraphy as a sample. The following quote might give an idea of Hidais view on teaching calligraphy, which allowed him to raise a whole generation of calligraphers, who in the postwar years explored a number of new directions and potentials in this art form: There is a common proverb saying Exercising is better than learning. I do not just think that it does not make any sense, I also think that it disseminates a dangerous virus in peoples minds. While we learn something, our Self stays observant and inert, whereas while we practice things, our Self can be completely absent. The more we get used to this state, the less we notice that our heart and mind is not participating in what we are doing, and our actions become mechanic. This mechanical way of doing things spreads like a germ and intoxicates whatever it touches: it vulgarizes art, makes politicians blindly follow their party programs, turns officials into bureaucrats, teachers into soulless gramophone. It gnaws away at the society, and, finally, weakens the foundations of the entire state. Thus, I would like to revise this proverb and make it from now on say Learning is better than Exercising.17 Inspired and stirred by such principles, in the following decades Hidais students founded a number of progressive calligraphy associations and groups: at first, Shod
44 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

geijutsu sha,18 Heigensha19 and Keiseikai,20 then Niho shod bijutsuin in 1946, and later Shod geijutsuin. In 1952 some of the artists left the Keiseikai group and founded two new groups, Bokujinkai and Sjinkai. The great number of short-lived calligraphy associations and groups and the rapid turnover of their members indicates the intensity and mobility of calligraphers in postwar years. As a result of this continuous process of introducing, negotiating, defending and pursuing new ideas and practices, students of Hidai introduced into Japanese calligraphy three new art forms, completely unknown before, which made up the image of the new Japanese calligraphy.21 There are three most significant steps taken in the early 1950s by Hidais students that have molded Japanese calligraphy up to the present. The first is tei Kanekos (1906-2001) invention of kindai-shi bunsho (calligraphy of modern poetry). He defended the position that Japanese calligraphy should not (or at least not only) create works that refer to classical Chinese literature and philosophy, but also modern and contemporary Japanese literary works. Although this position might not appear extremely innovative or daring, it was hard to overcome the longestablished bonds between calligraphy and classical Chinese literati tradition and to persuade traditionalist calligraphers that it was possible to modernize the language component of a calligraphic work. As an ironic answer, Hidai sent a piece of his calligraphy to tei, reading , Demolishing Enlightenment.22 Despite initial resistance, teis inspirations were appreciated and implemented with time, and he became a co-founder of the first Nihonshod bijutsuin association, and later of the famous Mainichi newspaper calligraphy exhibition, which remains the largest and most influential annual calligraphy exhibition in Japan. In this exhibition, an individual section is devoted to the calligraphy of modern poetry.23 The new calligraphy genre called shjissho, or calligraphy of few signs also received its own section in the Mainichi exhibition. Founded and established by Dejima Ykei (1901-87), another Tenrai student, shjissho uses only few signs (characters or alphabet letters) as a lexical basis for the works. Through the reduction of lexical components it not only intensifies the reading and perceptual experience, but also leaves more freedom for a daring visual treatment of the signs. The reduction of characters also supported the potential for calligraphy to be understood abroad: it is easier to explain the connection between arrangement and meaning of one or two single characters than of the entire text. As a final step on the course to reconsidering and modernizing Japans calligraphic tradition and practice, Ueda Sky (1899-1968), Hidais first student, and Hidai Nankoku (1912-1999), Hidais youngest son, along with Uno Sesson, Osawa Gaky and others, developed a new view of calligraphy through the avant-garde calligraphy movement zenei-sho. The most evident characteristic of this new direction, at least until the mid1960s, was a tendency to separate calligraphy from verbal meaning, from the character itself.
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The characters in works such as Uedas Dont get off the wide path while walking (1951) are not treated as a text, but float in the space like independent abstract formations. The order of the characters building the phrase is not arranged according to the orthographical rules of the vertically written Japanese script, but is based on the expressive mode of the phrase or the authors intention. The characters are so strongly deformed and flattened that individual characters can only be identified through prior knowledge or by information provided by the phrase or title. Besides, unlike a traditional piece of calligraphy, the meaning of the saying in Uedas work is more explicitly visualized: looking horizontally, under the prolonged shape of the characters one can imagine a suggestion of narrow pathways, or of footprints on the road. Orthographical correctness in this case is partly sacrificed in favor of artistic expressiveness and persuasiveness. As a next step towards calligraphys emancipation as an art form, artists tried to exploit the ambiguities of characters that no longer represent their direct lexical meaning. In 1951 Ueda proposed his work entitled Ai (Love) for the newly reorganized exhibition of contemporary art, Nitten, where Ueda himself served as a judge.24 The character depicted in ink on paper had no resemblance to the ideogram of Ai, or , but with its triangular structure it more resembled the character shina, , meaning 'commodity' or 'goods'. This immediately met with disapproval and open critique from the traditionalist members of the selection committee, and from the very influential Matsubayashi Keigetsu (1876-1983). Matsubayashi publicly professed that We did not create the calligraphy section at our exhibition for this type of work,25 and Uedas Love was rejected. Offended by such treatment and tired of incomprehension, Ueda resigned as a Nitten selection committee member in 1955. He later commented that in his Love piece he actually tried to represent a memory of his baby grandson crawling on the tatami mat in front of him, a scene which he perceived as quintessential to his understanding of love.26 In a roundtable discussion about the future of calligraphy, staged by the Bokubi journal in 1951, the famous Kyoto aesthetics scholar, Ijima Tsutomu (1908-78), asked what is the difference between the traditionalists (whom he defined as representatives of the conservative literati tradition) and the new reformers of calligraphy. Here is what Ueda answered: The notion of elegance is what separates us - we understand good taste radically differently. Avant-garde calligraphers think about essential human nature and the fundamental features of art. It is not enough for us to consider calligraphy a piece of art just because it looks refined and elegant. The traditionalists would not understand such a position and that is why we can never agree with each others opinion.27 Such words may sound bitter, and they also contain a note of offence, the emotion that Ueda must have felt after the incident with his Love piece. But the development of avant-garde calligraphy went even further and Ueda is not considered to be the most radical in his experiments. As early as 1945 Hidai Nankoku
46 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

presented his work Den Variation of the Lightening.28 It represented the third and ultimate step towards emancipating calligraphy: its complete detachment from the lexical component. The author claimed that this piece was based on the character ten (lightening), but in fact it was just an abstract composition of rounded off lines, somewhat reminding of young sprigs or sprouts, and completely deprived of any, even distant, resemblance with the original character. This piece is believed to be the first of the kind of moji-wo kakanai sho calligraphy that does not use characters. Nankokus Lightening (re)created the bridge between Japanese calligraphy and painting, reuniting these two art forms, which were artificially disjointed during Meiji modernization, but in a new, transformational way. It took some time until the complete understanding of Nankokus action came,29 but the imaginary border between calligraphy and painting was crossed once and for all, and one could only wait to see how the border would be patrolled and administrated later. Avant-garde calligraphy, after overcoming the initial resistance of traditionalists, has since entered the biggest exhibitions in Japan: the aforementioned Nitten exhibition (section five); the Mainichi calligraphy exhibition (as section three from 1951); the Genbi exhibition of modern art, and some others.30 Despite the fact that avant-garde calligraphy was now exhibited shoulder to shoulder with traditional calligraphy, the conservative and innovative calligraphy worlds of Japan have remained separated from each other, with little interaction taking place between them. 2. Bokujinkai Calligraphers: Border Explorers The first generation of avant-garde calligraphers, headed by Ueda, Nankoku and Uno Sesson, was even more radical and zealous about reforming calligraphy and detaching it from characters than the second, headed by Morita Shiry (1912-1999), Inoue Yichi (1916-1985) and Eguchi Sgen (b.1919). That is possibly because in the early stages traditionalists played the role of constant antipode for the avant-gardists. With their blind adherence to old norms and rules, traditionalists were everything that avantgardists did not want to be: conservative, nationalistic, inflexible, and isolated from the rest of the art scene. But later, after the first important steps towards emancipating calligraphy had been completed and the two calligraphies started to coexist in time and (exhibition) space, the tension between them minimized. Later, keeping their identity as calligraphers and defining or defending the borders between calligraphy and painting was not less important than looking for new ways in which calligraphy could be made more expressive, apprehensible to a wider audience, and universal. Connection to the representatives of abstract art from Europe and America meant for avant-garde calligraphers a way to reach an international audience, as well as to be perceived as progressive and innovative. For Nankoku, when he was creating his Variation of Lightening, the main task was to push further the border of possibility for calligraphy and to demonstrate its potential for artistic expression. But for Inoue the aim must rather have been to establish dialogue with the abstract painting of Euro-America and to offer a decent Japanese counterpart
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Ueda Sky, (Dont get off the wide path while walking), 1951, ink on paper, 80.4 x 148.0 cms.

to American abstract expressionism or European informel, as in his Work A. This reference to the foreign Other, here embodied in Western abstract painting, can be observed from the very early stages of the formation of the Bokujinkai calligraphy group. Most of the five founding members were students of Ueda and participated in his Keiseikai group, but later felt able to become independent and to pursue their own methods of developing modern calligraphy, thus forming Bokujinkai, meaning Group of People of the Ink, in 1951. Already in the founding manisfesto they demonstrate their orientation towards radical innovations, directed in ways that consider the potential to internationalize the art of calligraphy: We fully realize that we now stand at a pivotal moment: can the art of calligraphy, which has been guarding its long tradition in one corner of the Orient, revitalize itself as a true contemporary art []?31 From this quotation it is obvious that by a true contemporary art they mean modernist and avant-garde painting, remote from the corners of the Orient, hence, from Europe or the US.32 The circumstances under which this manifesto was written are recorded in the manifesto itself: it was created in the house of Isamu Noguchi (19041988), a Japanese-American sculptor of mixed descent, who was hoped to become the guidepost for Japanese art in its struggle to (re)gain an international position.33 The fact that Bokujin were referencing Noguchi, who was not even completely literate in Japanese, has much significance. 3. The Anonymous Foreigner as Projected Audience The motif that recurred in numerous Bokujinkai discussions about the international potential and limits of Japanese calligraphy was the foreigner, illiterate in Japanese, and his
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ability or inability to appreciate and learn East Asian calligraphy. Bokujinkai calligraphers tried to imagine their art through the eyes of Others, who do not have knowledge of the written Japanese language, not to mention erudition in classical Chinese literature and history of East Asian thought. The (imagined) view of a foreigner served as a standard pitch for directing the development and transformation of Japanese calligraphy. The debate was started by Morita Shiry (1912-1998), who in his 1948 essay described a foreigner in Japan who was not able to read Japanese but who nonetheless demonstrated a great ability to differentiate calligraphic styles and to appreciate brushwork.34 This type of observation served as a confirmation for Moritas (or rather, Okada Kenzs35) theory about the tendency to universality and the world character of contemporary abstract painting. Morita pleaded for fostering such universality in calligraphy, so that it could reach audiences all over the world and be understandable irrespective of cultural background. This was the ideal type of perception, the ultimate public, for which the avant-garde calligraphers aspired. This strong concern about international perception and the perspective of calligraphy was also applied by the Bokujin to calligraphic production by foreigners. The avant-gardists were very generous in their appraisal of foreigners attempts to master (or imitate) the visual language of East Asian calligraphy, such as contemporary experiments in calligraphic informel or Mark Tobeys white writing. This favorable position of avantgarde calligraphers towards their European counterparts is, for example, clearly stated in Uedas roundtable debate with Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963)36 about the future of calligraphy: Tomimoto: When the foreigners write characters, probably because they dont know how to use the brush, it looks really poor to me. If they had not at first received the proper training in writing with the brush and mixing ink, I cant seriously speak about anything the Westerners are doing. Ueda: Arts departing point is the person itself, the way he or she is. The artist first has to embrace his or her deep essence, and then, for expressing it, might want to learn how to use the brush or to mix ink - that is the way we must think about making art.37 It is evident from this dialogue that avant-garde calligraphers were not claiming a cultural monopoly on calligraphy and were encouraging of the attempts of people from outside their cultural sphere to appropriate the long history of the development of calligraphy, and tried to be democratic in their views.38 Avant-garde calligraphers perceived artists from Euro-America as equal partners. Bokujin were convinced that they both have to learn from each other and to enrich each others artistic palette in order to carry on a continuous intercultural artistic dialogue.39 4. European Masters of Modernism: Topics for Conversation In the early 1950s, after decades of cultural isolation, Japan was enthralled by modern European art. In the immediate postwar years there were several large exhibition
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of the matres of European modern art Picasso, Matisse, Renoir, Cezanne40 - in order to re-familiarize the Japanese public with European art after the caesura of the war. It was particularly thrilling for Japanese art professionals - critics, theoreticians, artists, and calligraphers - to see in which direction these artists individual styles had advanced during years when the Japanese were not able to observe it. Naturally, this new art from Europe and America was also a great source of inspiration and (self-)reflection for Japanese artists. To their amazement, Japanese calligraphers found many points of contact with these remote art works. Already in 1948 Morita expressed his admiration of Matisses extreme reduction of all forms to pure and simplified line.41 Later, when the most recent works of Matisse were exhibited in Japan, they were not as unconditionally admired as the earlier ones. Matisses study of black and white contrasts, lithographic lines, and small ink compositions were often criticized within the Bokujinkai: they were not uncommonly called infantile, immature and unbalanced.42 Later, in 1954, Hasegawa called Matisses black lines deformation from photo-realism, far from the necessary qualities speed, strength, intensity and color.43 Yet, in the same article, he remarks that even though I have judged the later works of Matisse severely, we in the East must be grateful to him for the universality of his art, its connections with the great epochs of both the East and the West.44 Many other art discussions of this kind were taking place at that time, triggered by the wave of modern art exhibitions which travelled to Japan or reproductions of contemporary art published in one of the art journals. Starting from 1950s, the names of Matisse, Picasso, Mondrian, Klee, Cezanne et al. appeared regularly in various discussions, exhibition reviews and theoretical essays on the pages of Bokubi and Shono-Bi journals.45 Morita, Inoue, Ijima, Ueda and many others discussed the issues of primitivism in art, unconscious art production or the nature of avant-garde and abstract art in reference to the works of European artists, whose works were also compared to traditional East Asian art. For instance, in 1951 Hasegawa, who had just visited the first postwar exhibition of Picassos sculptures (which was a first chance to see in Japan so many original works of Picasso46) wrote that: Right after we left the exhibition, me and my friend decided to go to [Tokyo] National Museum, to confirm our impression. We have then looked carefully at old pottery from China and Japan. Speaking frankly, there was not much to talk about, - so child-like Picassos works appeared in comparison.47 Later in this essay Hasegawa argues that despite this relative lack of skillfulness and technique, in artistic spirit and freedom of expression Picasso outstrips the old Japanese masters, and this is the feature that young artists should learn from Picasso. Be that as it may, the very fact that these works were highly visible and placed in the centre of discussions initiated by the Japanese calligraphy group is most significant. Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne and others were invisibly present at most of the central discussions within avant-garde calligraphy circles, as can be seen from the protocols
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of the roundtable sessions. In these discussions European artists were not treated like unquestioned authorities representing the absolute truth, but more like successful fellow artists, who merit closer attention due to their popularity. Avant-garde calligraphers comparison of themselves to their European counterparts was a first step for the Bokujin to establish more direct connection to the contemporaneous international abstract art scene. Yet, while famous European masters remained unapproachable for the Bokujin, the younger generation of abstract painters from Europe and the US (mostly from the Informel and Abstract Expressionism circles) constituted a more suitable candidacy for the role of potential partners for direct exchange, that would help Bokujin to fulfill their long-cherished dream of the equal and mutual enrichment of Japanese calligraphy and Euro-American painting. 5. European and American Abstract Artists: Conversation Partners Among European and American artists who collaborated with the Bokujinkai were such famous names as Franz Kline, Hans Hartung, Stanley William Hayter, Georges Matthieu, Pierre Soulages, Lewin Alcopley, Pierre Alechinsky, Gerard Schneider and Berto Lardera.48 Their collaboration consisted of exchanging letters,49 subsequently published on the pages of Bokubi journal, where they introduced their new works to the Japanese readership, accompanied by comments by Japanese theoreticians, as well as coverage of Bokujinkais exhibitions abroad, or foreign artists shows in Japan. Sometimes foreign artists were asked to introduce or comment on their own works, or on the works of their fellow European or American painters for the Bokujinkai journal.50 One of the first of these younger artists who sparked the interest of the Bokujin was Franz Kline (1910-1962). Already the first issue of the Bokubi journal, published in August 1951, featured his painting on its cover and contained immediately after a section dedicated to rethinking the last one hundred years of Japanese calligraphy - a lengthy essay where Hasegawa introduced and analyzed Klines last works,51 reproductions of which Hasegawa had received from Noguchi. In this essay Hasegawa also included an excerpt from Klines letter in which the artist wrote how he had always been fascinated and inspired by Japanese art, and that he was extremely curious about the works of Japanese calligraphers. This was the starting point of collaboration. It was probably the linearity, use of space, and monochrome pallette in Klines works that drew the Bokujinkais attention, as it shared common ground with calligraphy. As Hasegawa writes: Starting from Pollock, who has already achieved a decent level of fame among general audiences, there is a group of young artists who spontaneously started to work in the style close to the calligraphic wild cursive, and some of them even restrict their color usage to black and white. Among them Franz Kline is a great newcomer, who most daringly and actively of all, stormed into the very depth of calligraphys terrain.52
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Indeed, the balance of lines, the elaborate use of blank space in the middle of the composition, and the overall concept of emotion expressed through the abstract form go parallel with the thinking of the calligraphers. In order to imagine how exactly the calligraphers were looking at Klines works, we can refer directly to their voices. Fortunately, Morita was so fascinated by Klines work that he published his impressions in the Bokubi journal, stepping back from his usual role of chief editor and acting as a reviewer himself. Here is Moritas opinion of Kline: I have only rarely in my life seen a piece of art, which would so simply and clearly demonstrate the possibility that both the external composition (formed by the combination of lines) and the internal composition (transmitted through the lines quality) would constitute the overall character of the work and supplement each other without any contradictions. Of course, in the best samples of ancient calligraphy we can find these features too, and I could give dozens of examples here. Yet, most of them are extremely complicated, in particular concerning the form. It is very difficult to distill underlying basic principles via analysis of these complex works. Besides, our eyes are so used to the shapes of the characters, that it becomes almost impossible to genuinely surprise us with the freshness of form. Whereas the works of Mr. Kline not only master the extreme brevity of form, they also make us experience absolutely new senses of perception.53 However, in the same article Morita admits that he can not consider Klines works calligraphy, because they do not bear any lexical meaning, or mojisei, which, according to Morita, is the ultimate hallmark of calligraphy. Morita admits, nevertheless, that compared to Klines abstractions, calligraphy by Bokujin lack rhythm and tempo. He concludes that from now on the Bokujin would have to focus on improving exactly these features in their art. This is direct evidence of not superficial, but deep and substantive exchange between calligraphers and painters. Interestingly, this exchange took place irrespective of their working in different forms. Around this time Inoue, one of the most active founding members of the Bokujinkai, assumed (or came to independently) some of the ideas behind Klines works. Between 1952 and 1956 he radicalized calligraphic practice even further by moving on to abstract calligraphy. This did not at all conform to Moritas idea of calligraphys vital bonds to lexical semantics, but was conceptually and formally extremely close to Klines visuality. Yichi completely refused to represent the written character. No kanji character was taken as a basis for what is simply titled Work A: here he entered the new realm of absolute abstraction. This provocative and risky step raised more questions than it answered, about the ultimate identity of calligraphy; the fear of being absorbed by painting; being badly perceived or even rejected by the majority of calligraphy audiences (mostly people with solid traditional education in classical Chinese and Japanese education); and many other sensitive issues. Hence, by the end of the 1950s, Yichi silently returned to making character-based calligraphy, without theorizing or loudly manifesting this return to the Sino-Japanese writing tradition. However, abstract works did occasionally manifest in his later oeuvre,
52 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

as if the artist was expressing his regret that the terrain of absolute abstraction was inherently painterly, rather than calligraphic. 6. Japanese abstract painters: theoretical counterparts Compared to European or American painters, the role allotted to the Japanese representatives of abstract painting in the formation of avant-garde calligraphy was much more active. The impact of theories by Hasegawa and Yoshihara Jiro (1905-1972) was particularly strong from the time of Bokujinkais formation. Hasegawa was one of the founders of Japanese abstract painting. He started studying oil painting under Narashige Koide at the Shinanobashi Institute of Oil Painting, where the academic style was cherished. He continued to develop his skills during his three-year trip to America and Europe (England, Italy and France, where he settled down in a Parisian atelier). In his art, Hasegawa went from post-impressionist compositions inspired by Gauguin to lyrical Fauvism, and, in the early 1930s was amongst the first Japanese painters to experiment with abstract painting.54 Hasegawa was most famous in Japan as a theoretician of art.55 After graduating from Tokyo Imperial University with a degree in aesthetics and art history, he published several significant works on modern art,56 and by the time he encountered the Bokujin calligraphers, he had formulated his theory of East and West in Art (bijutsu-no-tzai).57 This theory was aimed at establishing links between the ancient art of Japan (or the East, more generally) and contemporary art from Europe (or the generalized West). It questioned common (Orientalist) thinking patterns where the West is represented as a modern and progressive ground-breaker whose mission is to guide and direct the retarded and traditionalist East, enabling the latter to adjust adequately to modern civilization. Hasegawas view is quite different: Sometimes, the things that are considered very new and innovative in the West are very well-known and old in the East.58 By way of illustration he gives several examples from his personal experience of communication with Western artists: in one a French architect, seeing photographs of the Imperial Villa Katsura Riky for the first time,59 refuses to believe that this architecture is three hundred years old, so modern, rationalistic and functional seemed to him the principles of its architectural concept.60 Another example is the puzzled feeling of an American scholar of Buddhist culture when she finds out about a project where French potters teach the Japanese to produce ceramics, rather than the other way around.61 Similar examples involve Bauhaus design, Picassos works, Kenzans pottery, poetry by Matsuo Basho, and other (at first sight disconnected) illustrations. It is interesting how often Hasegawa refers to the impressions and opinions of foreigners in order to verify and confirm his argument, bringing to mind discussions in the Bokubi journal where the illiterate foreigner is at the center of attention, as if the view from the outside was more valuable in appreciating Japanese culture than that of the Japanese. It is also true that Hasegawa found fertile ground for these ideas. It was beginning of the Zen-boom in the US; of the still fresh memory of Japonisme; and the resurrection of nationalist thinking in postwar Japan. The common thread in Hasegawas East and West in art theory is the need for East and West to more closely study each other, as
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well as for the East to more strongly represent its agenda in the world and to overcome its inferiority complex towards the West. For Hasegawa, as an abstract painter, the epitomized representation of this Eastern inferiority complex was naturalistic painting, which he even denoted as a naturalistic disease, shasei-by. In such a theoretical framework calligraphy was a perfect exemplification for the much earlier development of abstract elements abstraction being for Hasegawa a synonym for progressiveness in East Asian art. Yet, Hasegawa was in no way a supporter of the conservative faction of Japanese art, to which belonged traditionalist calligraphers. According to him, tradition had to be kept and cherished within an on-going adjustment to the modern situation: The cultural legacy shall be inherited as something precious. Yet, it is an inexcusable attitude, when it is perceived gratefully and uncritically, and preserved formally and passively, without attempt to truly comprehend it from the essential positions and perspectives of architecture, figurative arts or industrial arts, as it is appropriate for a modern man.62 From this it is obvious how many points Hasegawas theory and Bokujins views of art (and calligraphy) had in common. The extremely active collaboration between him and the Bokujinkai calligraphers can be explained by assuming that he might have regarded them as a real-world evidence for his beliefs: as innovators of traditional Japanese art forms seeking international recognition for their art through the equal dialogue with the Euro-American artists. Of course, after his encounter with the Bokujin, Hasegawa was a frequent guest in their round-table discussions, and mediated between them and European and American painters with whom he had better contacts. Moreover, he acted as an editor for the permanent alpha-section in the Bokubi journal, where he introduced and analyzed abstract works in ink that could be situated somewhere between calligraphy and painting. The second big name among Japanese painters who participated in Bokujinkais activity was Yoshihara, founder of the Gutai group. Whereas Hasegawa played a great role in Bokujinkais engagement with Euro-American artists, Yoshihara helped them to articulate their position towards abstract painting. In contrast to Hasegawa, who was pleading for a return to the traditional concept of shoga (i.e. the indivisibility of painting and calligraphy), Yoshihara argued that calligraphy belonged to a different world, very distant from the art he was making. The biggest stumbling block on his way to embracing calligraphy was mojisei, which he perceived it as a restriction of free expression: This [mojisei] is a great restriction of calligraphy. I get the impression that calligraphy exists for the sake of mojisei. When I look at Alechinskys work, it doesnt matter where he draws a line, and where he puts a dot. Thats what gives his works endless freedom, I feel. But in the case of calligraphy, to write for instance the sign ga, it is predetermined that there should be three dots on the right, and where they have to be placed - this is very limiting. It is my personal opinion, but I really wonder whether such adherence [to the word] is really necessary? Shouldnt we overcome these restrictions and devote ourselves to pure figuration? That is how I feel about the calligraphy that came so far already63
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Of course for Morita such statements, which proclaim the superiority of abstract painting over avant-garde calligraphy, were difficult to agree with: I kept thinking about Yoshiharas abstraction, the abstraction that was self-sufficient. For us, calligraphers, the goal is to express ourselves, and to do it through commitment. We listen very carefully to our sensations when creating calligraphy. That is why the viewpoint that it is only the mode of the art work that counts was somehow difficult to digest.64 As a result of such discussions, and in a sense in contradiction to Yoshihara, Morita was able to define his notion of the essence of modern calligraphy. He characterized it in terms of three dimensions: spatiality, time dimension and word dimension.65 This type of debate helped Morita to establish his position and to realize that for him the word dimension was an indispensable part of calligraphy. Afraid or unwilling to assert calligraphys claims on complete abstraction, he left this to the realm of painting. Yoshihara, on the other hand, was inspired by the time dimension within calligraphy, which brought him to the idea of action in art (as a perfect way to demonstrate materiality).66 This idea was to become a distinguishing mark of the Gutai art group. The debate was arbitrated by the paradoxical pronouncement of Ijima that Calligraphys materiality consists in spirituality.67 His words bring the discussion to the next, metaphysical level. 7. Meta-agents. Japanese philosophers: commentators and international messengers of ideas From the moment of the formation of the Bokujinkai, its close relation with Ijima (a specialist in Japanese aesthetics) and Hisamatsu Shinichi (1889-1980, an expert in Zen philosophy and author of the book Zen and the fine arts68) was a feather in the cap of Morita and other founding members. Frequent guests in the Bokujinkais discussions, these philosophers often contributed articles and reviews to the groups journals. As Morita said, Even while I was simply transcribing the tape record of the discussion [between Hisamatsu and Ijima] for the journal, I learned a great lesson.69 Both were professors of Kyoto University and were related to the Kyoto school of philosophy, founded by Nishida Kitar (1870-1945). The Kyoto school represented a domestic stream of Japanese philosophy that aimed at reconsidering traditional and Zen-Buddhist Eastern thought through the notions and tools of the Western philosophy, thus challenging both of these systems.70 Much has been written about the philosophy of Kyoto school,71 but for the current study most pertinent are the viewpoints of Hisamatsu and Ijima on the place of calligraphy within Japanese arts and culture, and the direction in which it should develop. Since their positions informed Bokujins theoretical writings mainly on the issues of spirituality, abstraction, space and time in calligraphy - it undoubtedly had a big impact on their calligraphic works as well. It must first be mentioned that both Hisamatsu and Ijima were trying to narrate Japanese cultural history by essentializing the thought and tradition of Zen-Buddhism72 - Hisamatsu even more so than Ijima.
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Even though they disagreed over what the essentials of Japanese culture may be, one of the several points on which they agreed was in a critique of realism in figurative representations. Hisamatsu and Ijima saw realism as contradictory to the spirit of Zen arts. As Hisamatsu writes: In Zen painting, to copy external things means to express in them the True and Formless self. Such self-expression can take the form of a human figure, a bird, a landscape, and so forth. [] Because the Self does the expression, it manifests itself in all things; because this is an expression of the Formless Self, what expresses is what is being expressed, and what is expressed is the formless form.73 Such convoluted reasoning basically suggests that expressive subjectivity, as opposed to objective naturalistic depiction, is the true virtue of the Zen arts, and this is also true of calligraphy: In calligraphy there is usually a form or formality to be followed; in this it is not different from realism. But this is not true for Zen calligraphy, which is never bound by pre-established forms of letters. The unconstrained facility of Zen springs from this freedom. It matters not in the least whether the characters are distorted or not.74 Ijimas argument is different (in the following phrase one can notice similarities with Winckelmanns ideas, whom Ijima has intensively studied),75 but it brings him to the same conclusion: Modern art has passed the step of realism and gradually started moving in the direction of stressing the reality of the subjective emotional experience. To put it differently, it now focuses less on representing what is seen, but on representing the eye looking. [] Also in the sphere of traditional arts, such as calligraphy and ikebana, the technical step of simply following the form is not satisfactory any more, but rather an attempt to take a leap forward based on the self-definition as art76 The quotes show that Hisamatsu and Ijima agree on this point; the superiority of abstract expression over figuration and its concord with traditional Japanese aesthetic values. At the same time this thought serves as a bridge to the work of contemporary abstract painters and expresses the zeitgeist of the entire generation of artists - not only Japanese.77 It cannot be a coincidence that Hasegawa, with his notion of realistic disease, sounds astoundingly close to the ideas of Hisamatsu and Ijima. The same is true of Hasegawas study of the non-figurative expressiveness of traditional Japanese art, a large part of which was dedicated to Zen painting.78 There is one more aspect of the involvement of Zen philosophers that, for reasons of space, cannot be discussed in detail here, but must be mentioned as it might explain many of the striking theoretical and artistic parallels between the postwar avant-gardes of Japan and Euro-America. At this point the ties between Hisamatsu and D.T.Suzuki (1870-1966), the spiritual guru of a whole generation of postwar European and American artists interested in Oriental thought in general and Zen in particular, come into play.
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Inoue Yuichi, Work A (1955), Ink on paper, 87.6 x 115.2 cms. Collection of Kyoto National Museum of Modern Art.

Hisamatsu and Suzuki, spiritual leaders of the postwar era, attended the same Buddhist high school in Kanazawa, and in stayed in touch in later years. This allows me to conclude that some similarities between avant-garde calligraphy - inspired by Hisamatsu and Ijima - and European and American abstract art inspired by Suzuki - are not accidental but come from related sources, an hypothesis deserving of more detailed investigation. Conclusion This study briefly sketches the formation and earliest development of avant-garde calligraphy through the example of the Bokujinkai calligraphy group. It was important to notice details and relationships that are not obvious at first sight for instance, the similarities in Ijimas and Hasegawas art theories; or the differences in thinking between the first and second generation of avant-garde calligraphers. A further detail that only becomes apparent when we map and name all the interacting agents is the fact that most of the Japanese participants in this process come from a well-defined locality, the Kansai region, whereas their European and American partners were separated by thousands of kilometers. But most importantly, it has become obvious that avant-garde calligraphy as an
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(un)balanced and fluctuating unity with strengths and weaknesses was born as a result of heated multilateral discussions and difficult negotiations between several agencies. The situation depicted in this study corresponds to a synchronic cross-section of the early stage of avant-garde calligraphys development, occurring sometime between 1951 and 1954. Such presentation of the synchronic art situation can be regarded as an attempt to implement Tomii Reikos art contemporaneity concept for this subject matter, though testing its applicability was not the primary aim of this study. However, for any later studies, it is important to note that when superimposing on this cross-section the diachronic development of the situation, with all the ups and downs of collaboration, one must keep track of all the participants of this process and the changing degree of participation they demonstrate over time. For instance, when regarded from the viewpoint of the correlation of forces between agents, Hasegawas death in 1957 can explain the fact that by the late 1950s, Bokujin calligraphers had returned to depicting characters and abandoned absolute abstraction, which WintherTamaki attributes to the international spread of artistic nationalism in the postwar era. Rather, it was a result of the death of the most ardent supporter of the East-West dialogue and, his seat in the Bokujinkais roundtable becoming vacant, the overall gravity center of the Bokujin slipping to more conservative ground. Similar observation can be made regarding the role of the nameless foreigner: after the Bokujin calligraphers had reached a certain degree of fame and started to regularly exhibit and perform abroad, they had a chance to get to know more closely the wider audiences of European and American exhibition-goers, who turned out not to be quite as expected. Hence, the imagined nameless foreigner, who intuitively had a great respect for and interest in East Asian calligraphy, yielded to quite specific viewers, with their own random likes and dislikes, prejudices, and often Orientalist misinterpretations. Thus the myth of Europeans longing for education in the appreciation of calligraphy was dispelled, having an impact on the later art discourse of the Bokujinkai.

58

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Notes
1 These six skills included politeness, or good manners, music, archery, steering the carriage, calligraphy and mathematics and were implemented by Confucius as obligatory subjects in education of high-rank people 2 no Kanako, : ,[ Calligraphy is not Art: Art Policy of the Meiji Governement and Considerations about Japan's Calligraphy] Studies in Humanities, Social and Environmental Studies from Kanazawa University, no. 21 (March 2011), p39. 3 For example, according to Naruse Taiiki in Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, ed., [Koyama Shotar and the Times of the "Calligraphy is Not Art" Discussion] (Nagaoka: NiigataPrefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), p13. 4 Ibid. 5 Ihara Rokunosuke, [Various Stories about Teacher meikaku](Shbund, 1925). In the Confucian understanding, the character of the person is reflected in his calligraphy, and people who cannot write beautifully cannot be virtuous, and thus do not deserve to occupy high official posts. 6 no, Calligraphy is not Art, p43. 7 As Ueda wrote, in the war years calligraphy turned into a nationalist product and was flourishing. Ueda Sky, [ Sketch of the last fifty years in the development of Japanese calligraphy], Bokubi 1 (June 1952), p28. 8 Nakamura Nihei, [Modern art of calligraphy - the world of bokush] (Tokyo: Danksha, 1997), p4. 9 Bert Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), p16. 10 In 1952 the assistant director of the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art exhibited works by contemporary Japanese artists at the Salon de Mai in Paris, and was completely disappointed with their level and performance when he saw them next to art works from other countries. This impression made him publish two essays in the Japanese press which caused the Imaizumi storm, a debate about the future of Japanese art. See ibid. 11 Nanette Gottlieb, Language and Politics: The Reversal of Postwar Script Reform Policy in Japan, The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (November 1, 1994), p1178. 12 Another name for avant-garde calligraphy (zenei-sho ) in Japan is bokush , which literally means ink images. While the term zenei-sho highlights the radical innovativeness of the new calligraphy, the other term, bokush, is more precise in describing its essence. See Nakamura, Modern art of calligraphy - the world of bokush , p4. 13 Ibid. 14 Hidai Kazuko, , [Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy] (Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, 1999), p8. 15 Kusakabe Meikaku, Nakabayashi Gochiku and Iwaya Ichiroku are famous as the meiji-sanpitsu (the three most prominent brushes of the Meiji period). All three enjoyed direct communication with Chinese calligraphy scholar Yang Shoujing, who was active in Japan from 1880 to 1884, and introduced to Japanese calligraphers numerous original calligraphy rubbings from the Han, Wei, and Six Dynasties that he brought with him. This was the first time in a long time that Japanese calligraphers gained direct access to ancient calligraphy from the continent, which radically changed their views on the ways calligraphy shall be taught and practiced. For more see Oono, Calligraphy is not Art, p37. 16 Nakamura, Modern art of calligraphy - the world of bokush, p8. 17 Hidai Tenrai and Hidai Kazuko, - [Tradition and Creation of Calligraphy - Selected Talks with the Calligrapher Tenrai] (Yzankaku, 1989), cited in Hidai, Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy, p7. 18 The company of artistic calligraphy was founded in 1933 by Ueda Sky and published a journal Shod geijutsu (art of calligraphy) according to Hoshino Yoshifumi, ed., Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy (Nagano: Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, 1999), p97. 19 Founded in 1938 by zawa Gaky, zawa Chikutai, Okabe Sf, Takeshi Sf et al. 20 Keiseikai means Group of the Megrez Star. Megrez Star (the fourth star in the Big Dipper Constellation) is traditionally regarded as a star patronizing literature and writing. The group was founded in 1940 by Ueda Sky, Uno Sesson, Morita Shiry et al. 21 Nakamura, Modern art of calligraphy - the world of bokush, p5. 22 Hidai, Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy, p8 59 NEGOTIATING BORDERS

23 For the structure of the Mainichi exhibition, see exhibitions official web site: http://www. mainichishodo.org/ex_top.php?psi=NDNNNNNNNDNI&psi=NDNNNNNNNDNI (accessed on June 2nd, 2012). 24 Hidai, Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy, p8 25 For the reproduction of Uedas Love and quote, see http://www.all-japan-arts.com/ rekishi/0801rekishi.html (accessed on June 2nd, 2012). 26 Ibid. 27 Uno Sesson, ,[Future Calligraphy: Roundtable Discussion in Kyoto] Bokubi, 3 (August 1951), p5. 28 For reproduction of Hidais Lightening and quote, see webpage of the Chiba City Museum of Art: http://www.ccma-net.jp/collection_img/collection_03-06_hidai.html (last accessed on June 2nd, 2012) 29 Uno Sesson, one of Nankokus fellow students from Hidai Tenrais workshop and a famous avantgarde calligrapher himself, commented that this work Nankoku must have created under influence of his elder sister, a painter, and guessed that it must have been done in oil (which it was not). From these words of Uno it is possible to judge that even for other progressive calligraphers, who adhered to a similar position to Nankoku, this step was difficult to process. See Hidai, Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy, p8. 30 Inamura Unt, , [History of Avant-Garde Calligraphy] in Mainichi Calligraphy Course11Avant-Garde Calligraphy (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1988), p7. 31 Quoted from the text of the original 1952 manifesto, reprinted in [Fourty Years of Bokujin], 1991, 8485. Translation by Winther-Tamaki, Art in the Encounter of Nations, p78. 32 At the times when this manifesto was created, the dualist thinking in terms of antithesis ancient Orient and modern Occident was widely circulating in the Japanese art circles. Even the prominent Japanese abstract painter Hasegawa Sabur, who inspired many of Bokujins ideas, had a series of publications about contemporary art entitled Thoughts about New West and Old East (see, for example, Hasegawa Sabur, , [News from France and America: Random Thoughts about New Occident and Old Orient] Bokubi, no. 1 (June 1951), pp3549. 33 For the study on the role of Isamu Noguchi in American-Japanese artistic exchange , see WintherTamaki, pp110173. 34 Ibid, p76. 35 Ibid. 36 Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886-1963) was a famous Japanese potter who in 1955 was awarded with the status of living national cultural treasure of Japan. 37 Uno, Future Calligraphy: Roundtable Discussion in Kyoto, p9. 38 Much later, starting from the 1970s, for a variety of reasons (be it personal disappointment or general trends within the international and national art scenes) Morita Shirys opinion about foreigners changed drastically. He accused the majority of them of unwillingness to learn and lack of interest towards calligraphy and Japanese culture and philosophy in general. zaki Shinichir, Morita Shiry, and Tsuji Futoshi, [Interview: About Calligraphy and Abstract Painting] 1992.02.05, in [Morita and "Bokubi"] (Hygo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1992), p23. 39 Morita Shiry has called this artistic concept a rainbow, which is standing with one leg on the West and the other one in the East. Winther-Tamaki, p76. 40 According to the National Art Center Tokyo, http://db.nact.jp/exhibitions1945-2005/index.html (last accessed on June 2nd, 2012). 41 Winther-Tamaki, p76. 42 As Ijima Tsutomu expressed through his student Uno, Future Calligraphy: Roundtable Discussion in Kyoto, pp9-11. 43 Hasegawa Sabur, [Paintings and Theories - Hasegawa Sabur], Inui Yoshiaki ed., vol. (Theories) (Sanaisha, 1977), p249. Originally published in Hasegawa, Matisse Through Japanese Eyes, Art News, Vol.53 No.2 (1954). 44 Ibid, p248. 45 Hasegawa Sabur and many others. 46 Hasegawa, Painting and Theories by Hasegawa Sabur, Vol. Theories: 122. 47 Ibid, p123. 48 Hygo Prefectural Museum of modern Art, ed. Morita Shiry and Bokubi(Kobe, 1992), pp94 99. 60 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

49 A typical example for such (selective) publishing of the letter exchange between the artists is Hasegawas article in the first Bokubi issue entitled News from France and America (Hasegawa, , pp3549). Here Hasegawa has presented the responses he received from a French artist Pierre Tal-Coat, and from the American Franz Kline regarding their works and willingness to cooperate with their Japanese counterparts as well as some general outpourings about the greatness of Japanese culture and universality of art. 50 For examples see Alcopley, [ Reflections about Positioning], Bokubi 16 (September 1952), p12. Where Alcopley comments about his undestanding of position in art, or Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, [About Works of Mr Alcopley], Bokubi 16 (September 1952), pp1112. in which both authors comment Alcopleys works. 51 Hasegawa, News from France and America, pp3549. 52 Ibid, p42. 53 Morita Shiry, [Looking at the Last Works by Kline], Bokubi, no. 12 (May 1952), p5. 54 Sabro Hasegawa - His Art and Thought, in Hasegawa, Painting and Theories by Hasegawa Sabur, Vol. Theories, pp240241. 55 Atsuo Imaizumi, Personality and Art of Sabro Hasegawa, in Ibid, p244. 56 Hasegawa Sabur, [Abstract Art] (Atorie-sha, 1937), and Hasegawa Sabur, [Modern Art] (Tky-d, 1950). 57 The final version of this theory was formulated in the series of article in the Sansai journal in 1950: Hasegawa Sabur, ,[East and West in Painting] Sansai, no. 40 (March 1950), pp4348; Sansai, no. 41 (April 1950), pp4045; Sansai, no. 42 (May 1950), pp4044. 58 Hasegawa Sabur, , [East and West in Painting] in Paintings and Theories - Hasegawa Sabur, vol. Theories, p88. 59 Katsura Riky is a detached imperial palace build in the outskirts of Kyoto in the early Edo period, 17th century. It is famous as one of the highlights of the Japanese shoin-zukuri architectural style and for its garden architecture. 60 Ibid, p86. 61 Ibid, p87. 62 Ibid, p88. 63 Suda Kokuta et al., ", , [Calligraphy and Abstract Painting: Roundtable Discussion], Bokubi, no. 26 (August 1953): 15, quoted in zaki Shinichir, , [Yoshihara Yoshihara Jir and Calligraphy] in 20 [Twenty years after death Exhibition of Yoshihara Jir] (Ashiya City Art Museum, 1992), p180. 64 zaki, Morita and Tsuji, Interview: About Calligraphy and Abstract Painting, 1992.02.05, p19. 65 zaki, " [Yoshihara Jir and Calligraphy], p181. 66 Ibid. 67 [Problem of Materiality - Roundtable Discussion], Bokubi, no. 93 (January 1960). 68 Shinichi Hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts, 1. ed. (Tokyo [u.a.]: Kodansha, 1971). 69 zaki, Morita and Tsuji, Interview: About Calligraphy and Abstract Painting 1992.02.05, p22. 70 See S. Clarke, Jr. Introduction, in Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarou (Berkeley [u.a.]: University of California Press, 1991). 71 For studies on the philosophy of the Kyoto school, see Kobayashi Toshiaki, Denken Des Fremden (Frankfurt am Main; Basel, 2002); Keiji Nishitani, Nishida Kitar, Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of Calif. Pr., 1991); Bret W. Davis, ed., Japanese and Continental Philosophy, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011); Nishida Kitar, Die Philosophie Der Kyoto-Schule, ed. Rysuke hashi (Freiburg; Mnchen: Alber, 2011). 72 Hisamatsus most famous study in this direction is Hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts. 73 Ibid, p72. 74 Ibid, p73. 75 Ijima Tsutomu, [Winckelmann] (Shbund, 1948). 76 Ijima Tsutomu, " [Calligraphy and Aesthtics 2], Bokubi, no. 3 (August 1951), p36. 77 Clement Greenberg in a sense also pleas for the superiority of abstract art over other art forms, even though with quite different national premises than Japanese philosophers. Nevertheless, the conclusions to which he and Ijima come, are astoundingly similar. 78 Same as Hasegawa, Ijima also considers calligraphy an abstract art that, according to his NEGOTIATING BORDERS 61

classification, together with the representational art (bysha-geijutsu, implying realistic painting) forms the category of visual arts. Ijima Tsutomu, [Calligraphy and Aesthetics 1], Bokubi, no. 1 (June 1951), p50.

Bibliography
Alcopley, [ Reflections about Positioning], Bokubi, 16 (September 1952). Davis, Bret W. ed., Japanese and Continental Philosophy, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2011). Gottlieb, Nanette, Language and Politics: The Reversal of Postwar Script Reform Policy in Japan, The Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 4 (November 1, 1994). Hasegawa Sabur, [Abstract Art] (Atorie-sha, 1937). , [Modern Art] (Tky-d, 1950) , ,[East and West in Painting] Sansai, no. 40 (March 1950), pp4348; Sansai, no. 41 (April 1950), pp4045; Sansai, no. 42 (May 1950), pp4044. , , [News from France and America: Random Thoughts about New Occident and Old Orient] Bokubi, no. 1 (June 1951), pp3549. Hidai Kazuko, , [Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy] (Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, 1999) Hoshino Yoshifumi, ed., Hidai Tenrai and the Way of Modern Japanese Calligraphy (Nagano: Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum, 1999). Ihara Rokunosuke, [Various Stories about Teacher meikaku](Shbund, 1925. Ijima Tsutomu, [Winckelmann] (Shbund, 1948). , [Calligraphy and Aesthtics], Bokubi, no. 1 (June 1951), p50 and Bokubi, no. 3 (August 1951), p36. Inamura Unt, , [History of Avant-Garde Calligraphy] in Mainichi Calligraphy Course11 Avant-Garde Calligraphy (Tokyo: Mainichi Shimbunsha, 1988). [Koyama Shotar and the Times of the Calligraphy is Not Art Discussion] (Nagaoka: NiigataPrefectural Museum of Fine Arts, 2002). Inui Yoshiaki ed., Hasegawa Sabur, [Paintings and Theories - Hasegawa Sabur], (Sanaisha, 1977). Hisamatsu, Zen and the Fine Arts, Tokyo: Kodansha, 1971. Kobayashi Toshiaki, Denken Des Fremden (Frankfurt am Main; Basel, 2002) de Kooning, Willem and Franz Kline, [About Works of Mr Alcopley], Bokubi 16 (September 1952), pp1112. Morita Shiry, [Looking at the Last Works by Kline], Bokubi, no. 12 (May 1952). Nakamura Nihei, [Modern art of calligraphy - the world of bokush] (Tokyo: Danksha, 1997). Nishida Kitar, Die Philosophie Der Kyoto-Schule, ed. Rysuke hashi (Freiburg; Mnchen: Alber, 2011). Nishitani Keiji, Nishida Kitarou (Berkeley [u.a.]: University of California Press, 1991). Oono Kanako, : , [Calligraphy is not Art: Art Policy of the Meiji Governement and Considerations about Japans Calligraphy] Studies in Humanities, Social and Environmental Studies from Kanazawa University, no. 21 (March 2011). zaki Shinichir, Morita Shiry, and Tsuji Futoshi, [Interview: About Calligraphy and Abstract Painting] 1992.02.05, in [Morita and Bokubi] (Hygo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1992). Ueda Sky, [ Sketch of the last fifty years in the development of Japanese calligraphy], Bokubi 1 (June 1952). Uno Sesson, ,[Future Calligraphy: Roundtable Discussion in Kyoto] Bokubi, 3 (August 1951). Winther-Tamaki, Bert, Art in the Encounter of Nations (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).

62

MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS: BUTOH, BELLMER AND ACTIONISM LUCY WEIR In its earliest incarnation, beginning with the premiere of Kinjiki in 1959, the dance/theatre hybrid Ankoku Butoh (translated as dance of absolute darkness1 or dark soul dance2) encompassed a deconstructive and often grotesque range of live performances, an art form that shocked Japanese audiences with its occasionally controversial subject matter. Today, however, Butoh has exploded in popularity, garnering appreciative audiences and even generating imitation in the Western hemisphere, particularly in Germany and the United States, and this newly international following has reinforced the idea of Butoh as representative of a form of cultural isolation a peculiarly Japanese art form. The following paper challenges this assumption that Butoh is uniquely Japanese in character, and will attempt to re-position Butoh in the history of twentieth-century performance as part of an international, reciprocal dialogue. It begins by tracing the history of Butoh from its emergence in late 1950s Japan and its engagement with early modern dance in Germany, before drawing parallels both with Hans Bellmers controversial doll series of the 1930s and the extreme performances of the Viennese Actionist collective in postwar Austria. Focusing on early Butoh practice, particularly that of Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986), this paper seeks to demonstrate a line of continuity that connects Butoh with Weimer-era modern art and dance, as well as visceral live art Happenings in the post-Second World War period. In doing so, the discussion will also explore the political reference points that link these seemingly disparate elements across cultures, as manifested through the recurring themes of fragmentation, distortion, confrontation and the grotesque. Early twentieth-century German Ausdruckstanz, or expressive dance, sometimes translated into Japanese as poison dance,3 was perhaps an unusual point of exchange with Japan. Nonetheless, it has been argued that the practice of Butoh emerged from exposure to German modern dance technique throughout the early twentieth century, a cultural export passed on by such influential figures as Takaya Eguchi, Baku Ishii and Kosaku Yamada (the latter responsible for introducing Emile-Jacques Dalcrozes Eurhythmics technique to Japan4). It is noteworthy that even present-day Butoh practitioners have maintained this link with European early modern dance; New York-based Butoh artists Eiko and Koma studied under the German teacher Manja Chmiel, who was in turn a pupil of Mary Wigman during the 1970s.5 Kazuo Ohno (1906-2010), one of the founding fathers of Butoh, undertook instruction from Eguchi, another pupil of Mary Wigman in Dresden before the outbreak of the Second World War,6 and in 1933 Ohno took classes with Ishii, who himself had studied with Isadora Duncan.7 It is also known that Ohno had attended performances by the Ausdruckstanz dancer Harald Kreutzberg during his 1934 tour of Japan, a connection that further emphasises the influence of early German modern dance on this first generation of Butoh performers. This cultural influence formed a reciprocal dialogue between East and West; Western dance took on many Asian-inspired characteristics in the Modernist attempt to evolve a new and distinctively
63

twentieth-century aesthetic. In her 1926 solo Witch Dance (Hexentanz II 8), for instance, Mary Wigmans Noh theatre mask, Chinese brocade costume and soundtrack of gongs and percussion instruments represented a dramatic departure from traditional Western stage dance. Susan Manning has observed of this piece that: Seated on the floor throughout, the Gestalt sways from side to side and claws at the air, as if straining against its boundness to the ground. Once set in motion, the mask and the exposed body parts appear animated by a life-force of their own. The dance reverses the usual relation of stillness and motion: rather than moments of stasis punctuating a continuum of motion, gestures punctuate the stillness. The alternation of sound and silence follows the same patterning. Underscoring the gestures, the percussive accents of drums, cymbals, and gong focus the spectators attention on durations of silence The gestures contain more energy than they release. 9 Witch Dance, with its mask and brocade costume, alludes to a kind of superstitious Orientalism. It is an approximation of Japanese traditions like Kabuki and Noh in a Western dance context such a connection to the aesthetics of Japanese theatre could be explained by Wigmans geographical proximity to the Dresden ethnological museum.10 In this piece, Wigmans use of non-Western costume and music, and particularly her adopting the Noh mask, demonstrates the visible, direct influence of Far Eastern sources on the European avant-garde. Equally, seventeenth-century Japanese art, particularly in the form of textiles and woodblock prints, was extremely popular throughout nineteenth-century Europe; some of the best-known Victorian artists such as Aubrey Beardsley and James McNeill Whistler drew heavily from woodblock print designs and motifs. Such Western interest in Far Eastern artefacts remained popular over time, and in turn proved a great influence on numerous German Expressionists, a movement which itself was later to become an inspirational factor for Japanese postwar performance. The European fascination with a newly opened Japan, known as Japonisme, spread to the USA around the turn of the twentieth century, although American interest in the Far East was to wane in the period building up to the Second World War.11 Paradoxically, Butoh is regularly defined as a uniquely Japanese art form, even though the influence of Germanys Ausdruckstanz is clear to see in the aesthetics of Butoh performance, as well as embedded within its historical roots. Accordingly, one is led to wonder whether Butoh is representative of the search for a postwar Japanese identity, much in the same way as Ausdruckstanz, Dadaist performance, rejected the norms of Weimar German society. While the case has been made that Butoh was a form of artistic protest against the increasing Westernisation of Japan, it is essential to note the foreign, and specifically Western, influences on the creators of this art form. Hijikata, who along with Ohno founded many of the principles of Butoh performance, controversially claimed to have become interested in German dance as a result of watching Hitler Youth parades in Japan.12 The Fluxus artist Nam June Paik later drew comparisons between Hijikata and Joseph Beuys, stating, both were unheimlich inscrutable and scary.13 Ohno later
64 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

converted to Christianity, which itself was to become a major influence on his creative output. It seems significant that, for an art form supposedly rejecting Western culture, the twin influences of Germanys National Socialism and the predominantly Western export of Christianity to Japan became such important influences for the founding fathers of the genre. Nonetheless, it must be noted that Butoh did not develop purely as a result of foreign cultural influence; Japanese traditional culture played a major role in the evolution of its aesthetic. Like Ausdruckstanz before it, Butoh can be seen to draw influence from Noh and Kabuki theatre practice; consider in the context of contemporary Butoh the use of white face and body-paint; the extended duration of performances and the dancers slow, drawn-out movements; as well as exaggerated facial expressions and, often, the accompaniment of traditional Japanese music. In many ways, then, Butoh is an amalgamation of Eastern tradition and external specifically Western influence. Bearing in mind the very darkness illustrated by the term ankoku butoh, an emphasis on darker themes bears similarities to the modern dance of German artists such as Mary Wigman and Pina Bausch, as has been acknowledged by Sondra Fraleigh in her observation that Butoh and German Expressionist [sic] dance both acknowledge dark emotions and subconscious content.14 There is a strong sense of primal energy in Butoh performance that links to this idea of exoticism, as well as a focus on themes of death, regeneration, and the darkness of its title. The first full-length piece of Butoh choreography, Kinjiki, was premiered at the All Japan Dance Festival in 1959.15 This work, based on the Yukio Mishima novel of the same name (usually translated into English as Forbidden Colours), was a performance that shocked audiences with its graphically sexual and violent content. There were no accompanying programme notes, and instead the audience was left to decipher the action through gesture and implication. The piece featured a young man (Yoshito Ohno, son of Kazuo) attempting to escape the aggressive sexual advances of an older male figure, played by Hijikata. Even today, Kinjiki remains infamous for its use of taboo subject matter in exploring a paedophilic, homosexual relationship,16 and controversially involved the younger Ohno crushing a live chicken between his thighs before Hijikata eventually broke the dead animals neck over the body of his young counterpart, followed by Hijikata simulating anal sex with the passive Ohno. The piece ended with the stage in complete darkness to a soundtrack of running footsteps, indicating the boy fleeing his predatory stage partner.17 Of course, this kind of visceral imagery is not unique to postwar performance in Japan: artistic and theatrical culture in the country has incorporated elements of grotesque and violent imagery for centuries, for instance, in Kabuki plays based on violent samurai myths or moralistic ghost stories; in popular literature; and even in the same ukiyo-e woodblock prints that gained an international following. The artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) is one example of the popularity of fairly extreme violence in visual art. Yoshitoshis The Lonely House on Adachi Moor (1885) featured a graphic retelling of a Japanese myth concerning an old female cannibal. In the print, Yoshitoshi has presented a heavily pregnant woman hanging upside down while the old woman sharpens her knife. It has been argued that the imagery in fact represented
INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS 65

Yoshitoshis anger at increasing Western influence in Japan, and that the cannibalistic hag is his impression of the encroaching, destructive Western influence on fertile Japanese society. While Kinjiki was a collaborative performance between Hijikata and Ohno, its embodiment of such disturbing, almost primal subject matter was far more characteristic of Hijikatas oeuvre than that of his elder counterpart. Hijikata was born in the rural, agricultural region of Akita, northern Japan, in 1928. Along with Ohno, he is generally considered one of the founders of Butoh, and choreographed for solo and group performances in an intense period of activity before his death from liver failure in 1986. Both men, despite their age difference (Ohno was born in 1906) shared the experience of living through the Second World War in Japan, consequently observing the enormous shifts in society from the prewar years into the postwar. Ohno was enlisted for military service and served nine years in China and New Guinea.18 As a performer, Ohno toured extensively throughout the world, whereas Hijikata never in fact left Japan, and was too young to serve in the war. Three of his brothers, however, were killed in action. The effect of the war experience on Hijikata cannot be underestimated, as the dance format he was to develop exhibited an obsession with death and mining the graveyards of the recent past; Stephen Barber points out that Hijikatas Ankoku Butoh formed a multiple excavation of death [He] conceived of his audience as being that of the dead.19 The Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, The Lonely House on Adachi movement technique he developed featured recurring use Moor, woodcut, 1885. of a stooped back, with the dancer in a hunched posture, and knees swayed out sideways, to create a bow-legged appearance, with the dancer deeply rooted to the ground. This distinctive aesthetic has been variously attributed to Hijikatas fascination with the movements of polio victims, as well as the malnourished inhabitants of his home region, their legs deformed by attacks of rickets on top of the burden of carrying endless heavy loads of rice across the fields of northern Japan. Nikutai no hanran (1968), in English, Revolt of the Flesh, Hijikatas last solo performance.20 Prior to its premiere, he had been living a pseudo-ascetic lifestyle, which involved a near-starvation diet and excessively heavy tanning of his skin, to create a shocking physical presence for the performance of this piece. Revolt of the Flesh was unfortunately recorded only in short segments of film footage and photographs, and audience accounts are similarly fragmentary; thus, like Kinjiki, it is a semi-lost piece.21 From the surviving documentary evidence, however, we can surmise that the dancers body was presented like a sacrificial Christ figure, with Hijikata committing small acts of self-harm interspersed with absurdity. In this piece, he donned an enormous golden
66 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

Kinjiki, 1959. Photograph by Kurokawashasinkan. Collection Butoh Laboratory Japan Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, Keio University Art Center, Tokyo.

phallus, grimacing at the audience as he repeatedly slammed himself against a large brass panel at the side of the stage. A dead chicken was hung upside down on the back of one of these panels. Thus, the performers body is both distorted and abused in a quasiritualistic setting. This was a fairly long piece the full programme lasted approximately an hour and a half, possibly longer, in comparison to the fifteen-minute first version of Kinijiki. Bruce Baird notes that the performance was accompanied by live piano and a recording of harsh engine noises.22 Hijikata entered the stage carried on a litter, passing first through the audience, and the full work can be separated into scenes differentiated by his changing costumes. The golden phallus was hidden under a series of different traditional kimono, and thus the performer transcends gender boundaries by entering the stage akin to a beauty queen, dressed in womens clothing, and moves on to thrust his exaggerated, grotesque manhood into the walls of the stage. Numerous writers have claimed this piece was a turning point for Hijikata, that it represented not only the end of his brief career as a solo performer, but that it signalled the end of his interest in Western source material, seeking instead to immerse himself in a new and uniquely Japanese counter-cultural movement vocabulary. I would contest this, however, as the influence of Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud, and, crucially, Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), lived on in his work even towards the final years of his career. Hijikatas scrapbooks from the development of Revolt of the Flesh showed a number of
INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS 67

images of Hans Bellmers dolls, and notes and images playing with the idea of the increasingly fragmented body. A fascination with Bellmer endured throughout Hijikatas final works, with the choreographer even calling his trio of female dancers, the Bellemers.23 In order to comprehend the profound influence Bellmer has on this Japanese dancers work, one must look backward in time to 1930s Germany, and examine the significance of Bellmers grotesque mannequin series. Generally labelled a Surrealist photographer, Hans Bellmer was an avant-garde German artist most recognisable today for his disturbing series of constructed female doll figures that he subsequently photographed, the first appearing in his (then anonymous) 1933 publication Die Puppe (The Doll). Bellmer maintained links with the Berlin Hijikata, Revolt of the Flesh, 1968. Dada group through his work with Photograph by Torii Ryozen the publishing house Malik Verlag, Collection Butoh Laboratory Japan Courtesy of the Hijikata Tatsumi Archive, but consciously gave up every Keio University Art Center, Tokyo aspect of his working life that could be seen as beneficial to the German state with the coming to power of the Nazi party.24 Sue Taylor comments on Bellmers awareness of dada performance in recounting an anecdote about his playful, public cross-dressing (much to the embarrassment of his father) in his early twenties, something she reads as both evidence of his Oedipal distaste towards this parental figure as well as an underlying curiosity regarding gender and performance.25 There is an understandable temptation to focus on Freudian psychoanalytic readings when considering the doll series, particularly in the context of Bellmers own writings (for instance, his peculiar and disturbing essay Memories of the Doll Theme), and considering his emphasis on the childlike form. However, in exploring Bellmer in relation to Butoh and Japanese avant-garde performance, I would like to draw attention in particular to themes of fragmentation and destruction of the physical body as they occur in the artists doll series. Bellmer constructed his first doll in 1933, a figure with movable limbs that he
68 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

photographed around thirty times. Two years later he was to make his second doll. The objects themselves, but perhaps more so his photographic series with the dolls as subject matter, have raised objections and controversy regarding his representation of the passive, adolescent female (the artists fascination with his adolescent cousin Ursula was a potential inspiration for the dolls). He called the making of these dolls, the remedy, the compensation for a certain impossibility of living.26 Therese Lichtenstein has constructed an engrossing argument that holds that Bellmers adolescent girl-dolls represented his reaction to the expansion of Nazism in Germany, and in particular, formed a grotesque alternative to the stereotype of the idealised Aryan body, which was to become such a significant aspect of German identity under Fascism.27 The photographs of his first doll are mostly close-ups, fragmentary impressions reminiscent of Dada collage, though this also has the rather unsettling effect of further fragmenting the already distorted impression of the female form. The body is continually broken up, rearranged, grotesquely displayed, reminiscent of a dismembered victim of sexual violence perhaps, or a grimly comical mangling of limbs. In light of the approximately eighty thousand German soldiers returning from the battlefronts of World War One with missing limbs, a conservative estimate at that, it is not difficult to identify parallels between Bellmers mutilated women and widespread scenes of human suffering throughout Germany in the interwar years. One need only briefly consider the preponderance of war cripples throughout the work of Neue Sachlichkeit artists such as Otto Dix and George Grosz to illustrate how ubiquitous these distorted impressions of broken, mechanised humanity were to become for audiences in the aftermath of the First World War. Hijikatas bowlegged, post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki dancers reflect similar imagery; while the geographical and temporal space may be far removed from Bellmers Nazi-era dolls, the emphasis on the grotesque and broken body is remarkably similar. Bellmers publication, Die Puppe, was dedicated to his young cousin Ursula. The opening images of the book chart the progress of his construction of the doll, as well as forming a strange photographic tribute to this, his model. Lichtenstein comments that, each image reveals a new combination of fragments, evoking a different hybrid and a complex psychology of death, despair, and eroticism.28 The fifth portrait of the first doll is particularly disturbing, as the mannequin is partly clothed, twisting its head around in a grimly coquettish manner, voluptuous buttocks exposed. The sexual features of the doll are emphasised, though the figure is limbless, balanced on wooden stools; a curious similarity could thus be drawn with Dixs Card Players (1920). The body of Bellmers model is incomplete, broken, or dismembered, resembling a decaying victim of some horrible sexual game. His dolls rarely feature much in the way of facial expression they remain chillingly blank, in contrast to the bodily manipulations of the artist; Bellmer places himself in the mindset of a child at the age where he or she traditionally begins to mutilate their playthings. It is possible to read Bellmers actions as akin to those of a fetishist or sexual criminal, ritualistically documenting each step of his process; after all, Lichtenstein identifies certain sadomasochistic impulses in numerous photographs of the doll, with the artist as sadist and doll as subject.29 Lichtenstein has also drawn comparisons between Bellmers dolls and George
69

INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS

Hans Bellmer, Poupee, as published in Japanese fine arts journal, Atelier, October, 1939 (left); and (right) Yamanka Tiroux, ed., LEchange Surrealiste, Libraire Bon, Tokyo, 1936.

Groszs interest in the automaton, as well as to Oskar Kokoschkas life-size fetish doll of his former lover, Alma Mahler.30 This rather grotesque mannequin regularly accompanied him out in public, and featured in a number of his paintings too. He was eventually to destroy the object, on account of its failure to live up to expectations, whatever the artist precisely meant by this. The use of the doll or mannequin as a human substitute, and the consequent effect of the doll on the spectator, becomes an increasingly popular trope in experimental theatre in the twentieth century. Forty years after Bellmers doll series came Tadeusz Kantors seminal work, The Dead Class. Kantor claimed this performance was not a piece, but a sance, part of his concept of a Theatre of Death.31 Inspired by Bruno Schulzs short story, The Pensioner, The Dead Class sees a small group of grown men and women returning to the schoolroom after death, carrying wax dummies as representations of their younger selves. In this dimly lit stage space, the adult ghosts are forced to confront their younger, puppet selves, the weight of which threatens to overpower them. It was a groundbreaking work of theatre that cannot accurately be described as a play, but more appropriately as a sequence of images, memories, and fantasies: a performed collage that plays out issues around infantilism and the deconstruction of humanity. Jan Klossowicz observes: the dummy is a symbol of artistic creation, of debased reality, of an awkward, cheap imitation of life.32 This innovative use of the mannequin, or performers adopting puppet-like tendencies, becomes a characteristic connecting Bellmers obsession with his female dolls to much avant-garde performance of the later part of the twentieth century. Hijikatas use of his human puppets, the Bellemers, in his increasingly extreme late choreographies brings this concept full-circle. Evidently, there is a clear line of influence that stretches across German and Japanese cultural borders. Parallels have been drawn previously between the German
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postwar choreographer Pina Bauschs work and confrontational aspects of postmodern visual and performance art movements; consider Andr Lepeckis comment that [Bauschs] Tanztheater comes out of a deep dialogue with other antirepresentational forces in early 1970s visual arts and performance (Joseph Beuys social sculpture, Fluxus).33 In a similar vein to Bauschs Tanztheater, Butoh is an art form deeply concerned with loss, hence the darkness of its title. It developed as an attempt to reinvigorate, or arguably restructure, Japanese visual culture after the Second World War. Dealing with this legacy of loss is comparable to the similarly difficult postwar legacy in Germany and the concept of Vergangenheitsbewltigung (coming to terms with the past); despite Japans postwar economic successes, Japanese society remained haunted by memories of the Second World War. Central to the postwar and post-atomic legacy in Butoh is its emphasis on death, both in exploring themes of death and destruction within the performances themselves, and in the sense that death itself is present at all times in the life of the individual, like a permanent shadow that in turn informs the development of the performance. There are numerous personal examples of this among noted Butoh performers; Hijikata was apparently greatly affected by the death of his sister, and stated that he carried her with him in everything he does. Similarly, Butoh dancer Yumiko Yoshioko is on record as noting, somewhat poetically: I hope that my friends will crush my bones and eat them when Im gone, so that I may dance forever.34 Ohno took the notion of death to refer to the dead body, claiming that he used the concept of the dead body as an artistic tool, that Butoh practitioners use the idea of the dead body as something into which the dancer places an emotion which can then freely express itself. Without this technique, the living body would divert the emotion, drawing it into its own logic. He tells us that as the puppeteer pulls the strings, the soul should guide the world.35 In some ways, it is almost too easy to draw a parallel between Butohs nearobsession with death and its place in time and space, since the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Japan brought with it the terrible fall-out of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Jean Viala has indicated, the 1960s were a tumultuous period for the Japanese, beginning with the Mutual Security Treaty that marked the beginning of the decade.36 Carol Martin has also written about the influence of postwar reconciliation attempts on the theatre tradition in Japan, claiming that the renewal of the security treaty between the USA and Japan (AMPO) in 1960 played a major role in shaping the cultural climate of Japanese experimental theatre.37 In the same article, she briefly discusses the theatrical form shingeki (new theatre), which has been described by Takeshi Kawamura as emblematic of Japanese self-hatred.38 Martin argues that the influence of Western, specifically European, theatre on Japanese performance caused a number of practitioners to turn their backs on new theatre, embracing alternative formats such as Butoh in the hope that they represented a uniquely Japanese perspective in art. It is perhaps something of a contrast, then, that Martin describes postwar Japanese art forms like Butoh and angura (underground) theatre as representing component parts of a globalised avant-garde tradition, rather than being imbued with what she terms the intention of reinventing an indigenous experimental Japanese theatre.39
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 It is into this troubled sequence of events that Butoh was born, and thus it is perhaps not surprising that Hijikata has spoken of the significance of crisis in his dance: When Mr. Mishima Yukio saw my work, his first impression was just that a sense of crisis. I demand a sense of crisis. I am not being visited by a sense of crisis, rather I am demanding it.40 This embracing of individual crisis equally connects to the postwar Japanese identity crisis, something David Goodman has linked to the role of the emperor in the collective social identity: The Emperor is not held to account, and therefore the nation is not held responsible. Japanese imperialism, war, death, and destruction somehow lack reality The popular evasion of responsibility is by no means a purely Japanese phenomenon. In Japan, however, the continued existence of the emperor system remains synonymous with a system of historical irresponsibility.41 Goodman is possibly somewhat harsh in his criticism of the sense of forgetting in postwar Japanese society, but he touches on an interesting point, in that avant-garde theatre sought in its own way to heal some of the wounds of the recent past. For many fledgling theatre companies, there was a strong desire to break away from increasing Western influence on Japanese society, yet this was countered by an equally strong resistance to continuing with Japanese cultural traditions, so loaded were they with political implication. The situation, then, was an exceedingly complex one, not unlike that facing German and Austrian artists in the same time period. The collective anger of a younger generation was directed at the so-called generation of perpetrators,42 and the art that emerged was designed to be a complete break from the pre-Nazi lineage. Having identified direct links between prewar German culture and postwar Japanese performance, as well as considering thematic similarities between the two otherwise distinct arenas, I would like to draw this paper to a close by discussing hitherto unexplored parallels between Hijikatas visceral early Butoh performances and the extreme, public Happenings of Viennese Actionism. Actionism cannot be strictly defined as a movement; rather, it was a small collective of artists who occasionally collaborated with one another, but largely produced individual actions, without wishing to set up an established school of practice.43 This short-lived burst of activity was characterised by the use of extreme shock tactics, including urination and defecation, bloodletting and animal slaughter. It is highly significant that the four artists primarily involved in this first period of Actionism, Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, while markedly distinct from one another in temperament and aesthetic style, held in common powerful, personal connections to the Second World War. Muehl actively served as a soldier on the front line; Nitsch had lived through the firebombing of Vienna; and Schwarzkoglers father had committed suicide following the loss of both legs at Stalingrad.44 Their frequent use of animal sacrifice and the mutilation of carcasses can be linked to a primitive ritualism totemic meals and the primal excess, in Nitschs own words45 a continuity of ritualised behaviour evident also in Bellmers methodical mutilations and Hijikatas obsessive, ascetic approach to creating Butoh choreographies. The highly sexualised nature of much Actionist artwork, and in particular the emphasis
72 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

on the male body, also bears resemblance to Hijikatas oeuvre including Kinjiki and Revolt of the Flesh. The bloody, grotesque live events of the Actionists were designed to turn the stomach of the audience, by creating as uncomfortable an environment as possible. Pieces that involved the mutilation of dead animals, as well as human sexual acts and defecation, were particularly notorious: Orgiastic actions, in which the blood of freshly slaughtered lambs flowed over the bodies of naked women, the whole room stank of innards and Hermann Nitsch appeared in a priests vestments, found no sympathies outside Austria either. An audiotape with the sound of squealing pigs in a slaughterhouse could, for instance, only be heard on WDR following a long academic discussion.46 Actionism represented an absolute break from what was interpreted as the stifling nature of art institutions, and even from other contemporary live art avantgarde movements, as the following statement from Muehls Manopsychotic Institute Manifesto illustrates: we feel and sadly I am forced to see, that precisely these people who make Happening and Fluxus are the ones who collaborate with the state, and respond to its manipulations and are simply idiots creating entertainment. And view themselves vainly as revolutionary or as the socalled shitty avant-gardists.47 Contemporary newspaper reports paint an image of hysterical audience reactions, spectators storming out in protest or fainting in response to the violent and sexual acts being presented. As time wore on, however, and the notoriety of the artists grew (which included numerous arrests and criminal charges on grounds of obscenity), audiences grew increasingly aware of what to expect; a 1966 review in Time Magazine of the Destruction in Art Symposium refers to four Viennese men from something called the Institute for Direct Art who held an audience of 100 spellbound. The review concludes with the wry observation that the London Times art critic, on viewing the actions, was trying very hard to be broad-minded about it all.48 The groups brutally visceral work sought to shock Austrian society, in itself, not necessarily a difficult task. The postwar landscape in Austria was conservative and reluctant to revisit the recent past, let alone to put itself through the intense process of denazification that had occurred in Germany. Brus, in an interview with Catherine Grenier, observed that at the beginning of his career this country had been abandoned, not by a Catholic god, however, but by the rest of the world.49 In the same discussion, he described residual Nazism in Austria as follows: I saw Austria as a sort of saucepan in which brown soup had been cooking and which people had managed to scrub spotlessly clean, but where they had missed the dirty marks around the edge of the lid. Austria not only gave rise to the pan-smith of National Socialism, but also put the lid on its creation.50

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73

Rudolf Schwarzkogler, 6. Aktion, 1966.

With such comments in mind, perhaps it is not surprising that there is a strong emphasis on sacrilege in much of the work of the Actionists. Nitschs Manifest das Lamm (1964) involved the crucifixion of a flayed lamb and the publication of a manifesto alongside the action. It was a performed, pseudo-Christian but primarily Dionysian ritual in which the audience often ended up splattered with blood, and the artist seemingly revelled in a primordial mutilation of the animal. Unsurprisingly, Nitsch along with his fellow Actionists regularly faced charges of blasphemy. At the University of Viennas Art and Revolution event in 1968, Brus performance saw the artist cutting himself, drinking his own urine, covering himself in excrement and as a grand finale, masturbating while singing the Austrian national anthem. He was awarded a six-month prison sentence as a result.51 Rudolf Schwarzkoglers actions, perhaps not as public in nature as those of his colleagues, featured recurring iconography that included dead fish and chickens, light bulbs, a stark interior environment, and a man usually bound in gauze. The photographs documenting his first six actions frequently depict a sterile, medicalised environment, yet often featuring instruments of mutilation or torture, such as the corkscrew in this third action, and giving an impression of a pseudo-Nazi medical experimentation chamber. At the same time, perhaps Schwarzkoglers actions were designed as a kind of healing
74 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

ritual, attending to the very open wounds of war memory Eva Badura Triste has made the point that Schwarzkogler took on the role of a priest, presiding over these purging actions.52 His clinical works stand in stark contrast to the other Actionists use of human bodily fluids; they confronted the audience with the body turned quite literally inside out, in response to the intensely conservative, introverted stance of postwar Austrian society. Schwarzkoglers frequent use of dead chickens in his actions lends a tone of primal spirituality to the works, something that was reflected in his lifestyle. In this period of intense creativity, he became obsessed with Eastern philosophy, adopting ascetic, fasting rituals akin to Hijikatas at the time of developing Revolt of the Flesh;53 maintaining this thematic connection to Hijikata, it should also be noted that Schwarzkogler was the first member of the Actionist circle to begin working with Artauds texts in devising his performances.54 Where Nitsch, Muehl and Brus sought to evoke an intense response from their audiences, Schwarzkogler looked inward, transforming the performers experience into a trance-like ritual. This spiritual element contrasted sharply with the violent, self-mutilating aspects of his work, and ultimately with his sudden death at the age of twenty-eight, falling from his apartment window.55 The scope of art and performance culture addressed in this paper is wide-ranging in terms of physical geography as well as its place in time. It is obvious that the artists surveyed here had never met one another or collaborated in a creative sense, and in many respects they remain quite distinct from one another. However, it has been the purpose of this paper to illustrate a rather different point than merely drawing personal connections; that is, constructing a more complex analysis of three controversial art movements. Throughout the twentieth century, the scars of war memory are sharply evident across a variety of Japanese and European modern art forms. It is my assertion that this visceral manifestation is representative of a collective desire to both address the traumas of the past as well as break away from the ties of guilt to the previous generations actions; using a somewhat Zen-like rhetoric, this has been called a purge of history, a beginning from absolute nothingness.56 As Fraleigh has noted: Butoh, like the Tanztheater of German choreographer Pina Bausch, began to revive concerns for conscience and introspection in dance, while Americans concentrated more objectively on movement and form. Butoh and Bausch both had roots in German expressionism and its acceptance of the grotesque, but they were also responding to the graveyards and ruins of World War II.57 Taking the broken, fragmented or mutilated form as an aesthetic baseline, one begins to see potent links emerge that connect three very distinct moments in twentiethcentury art history. Bellmers dolls, academic discussion of which is often confined to psychoanalytic investigation, exemplify a grotesque form of protest against the idealised Aryan body, at the same time playing on the imagery of the reconstructed war cripple. Actionisms vicious treatment of the human form and its bodily secretions symbolised a primal response to the perceived covering-up of Fascist atrocities in wartime Austria. The Actionists played out rituals of purging and healing, both in the violently sexual and ecstatic works of artists such as Nitsch, and in Schwarzkoglers more meditative
INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS 75

performances. Hijikatas Butoh was characterised by an obsession with death, the deformed body and pushing the performers body to the limits of its capabilities these are all tendencies held in common with European performance traditions including Actionisms Happenings and German Tanztheater. All of the artists and performers under discussion here exemplify elements of ritualised performance or artistic practice, seeking to address broader social and political issues that have come to dominate their national landscapes. Thus, in considering more closely these rather divergent strains of Modernist extremes in visual art and performance, it becomes ever more clear that as cultural historians, we need to reposition Butoh in the history of twentieth-century performance, rather than isolating it or writing it off as an art form that lies beyond the full comprehension of the Western audience. It has been the intention of this paper to acknowledge instead that Butoh belongs to the complex and interconnecting twentieth-century performance landscape, a factor that is underlined by parallels in both postwar and prewar visual and performance art in the defeated nations of the First and Second World Wars. Notes
1 Paul Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 (ex. cat. Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Thames & Hudson: New York, 1998), p142. 2 Judith Mackrell, Reading Dance (London: M. Joseph, 1997), p108. 3 Sondra Fraleigh & Tamah Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo (London: Routledge, 2006), p2. 4 Ibid, 14. 5 Bonnie Sue Stein, Butoh: Twenty years ago we were crazy, dirty and mad, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1986), 111. 6 Fraleigh & Nakamura, 9. 7 Ibid, 14. 8 The 1926 version of this piece is often confused with Wigmans earlier, but very different, Hexentanz (1914). A filmed section of the reworked piece is available in Allegra Fuller-Snyders documentary film, Mary Wigman 1886-1973: When the Fire Dances Between Two Poles, (Pennington: Dance Horizons Video, 1991). 9 Susan Manning, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 128. 10 Ernst Scheyer, The Shapes of Space: The Art of Mary Wigman and Oskar Schlemmer, Dance Perspectives, no. 41 (Spring, 1970), p20. 11 Bert Winther-Tamaki, Japanese Thematics in Postwar American Art: From Soi-disant Zen to the Assertion of Asian-American Identity in Munroe, ed., Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (ex. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994), pp56-57. 12 Fraleigh & Nakamura, p20. 13 Nam June Paik, To Catch Up With Or Not To Catch Up With The West: Hijikata and Hi Red Center in Munroe, ed., p77. 14 Fraleigh, p39 please note that the use of Expressionist dance as a translation of Ausdruckstanz is inaccurate. The most appropriate translation would be expressive dance, but for the sake of clarity, and avoiding drawing direct parallels between German Expressionist visual art and this distinct form of modern dance, I will leave terms such as Ausdruckstanz in the original German. 15 A second and rather different performance of Kinjiki was subsequently given, which included a group sacrificial dance after the opening solo. For a detailed description and analyses of both versions, see Bruce Baird, But and the Burden of History: Hijikata Tatsumi and Nihonjin (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2005), pp32-75. MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST 76

16 It should be noted that Yoshito Ohno was twenty-one at the time of the performance, thus in reality it could hardly be argued a paedophilic relationship, but costume and action dictated this element of the narrative for instance, Ohnos character is extremely passive in the face of Hijikatas sexual advances. 17 Munroe, Revolt of the Flesh: Ankoku Butoh and Obsessional Art in Munroe, ed., p190. 18 Fraleigh and Nakamura, p25. 19 Stephen Barber, Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (London: Creation Books, 2007), p3. 20 Original title: Hijikata Tatsumi to nihonjin: nikutai no hanran. Baird, p136. 21 Barber, p70. 22 Ibid, p137. 23 Barber, Revolt of the Body, p67. 24 Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p5. 25 Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p18. 26 Bellmers letter to Jean Brun (3rd April 1936), quoted in Peter Webb & Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985), p4. 27 Lichtenstein, pp127-138. 28 Ibid, p25. 29 Ibid, pp80-81, 96-97. 30 Ibid, p13. 31 Klossowicz, Kobialka & Schechner, Tadeusz Kantors Journey, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 30, no. 3 (Autumn, 1986), p108. 32 Ibid, 107-108. 33 Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2006), pp136-137. 34 Fraleigh, Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), p244. 35 Viala & Masson-Sekine, Butoh: Shades of Darkness (Tokyo: Shufunotomo, 1988), p22. 36 Ibid, 10. 37 Carol Martin, Japanese Theatre: 1960s Present The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring, 2000), p83. 38 Ibid, 83. 39 Ibid, 84. 40 Akihiko Senda, Tatsumi Hijikata & Tadashi Suzuki, Fragments of Glass: A Conversation Between Hijikata Tatsumi and Suzuki Tadashi The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring, 2000), p64. 41 David Goodman, Japanese Political Theatre in Context, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 19, no. 2 (June, 1975), p38. 42 Bosmajian, Hamida, German Literature about the Holocaust: A Literature of Limitations, Modern Language Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (Winter, 1986), p56. 43 It should be noted that, while references to Actionism generally refer to the activities of Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler in the 1960s, technically the movement continues today; consider, for instance, Nitschs ongoing Orgies-Mysteries-Theatre project. 44 Barber, The Art of Destruction: Films of the Vienna Action Group (London: Creation Books, 2004), p8. Schwarzkogler himself was rumoured to commit suicide at a young age. Having become obsessed with Eastern mysticism and adopting an extreme ascetic lifestyle, he fell to his death from his apartment window; the exact circumstances of this event are rather unclear, and the reader would be wise to avoid any writing that adamantly characterises his death as definite suicide, or even more ludicrous, mythologises the tragic event as an extreme Aktion. 45 Nitsch quoted in Malcolm Green, ed., Brus Muehl Nitsch Schwartzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists (London: Atlas Press, 1999), p134. 46 Original text: Orgiastische Aktionen, bei denen das Blut frisch geschlachteter Lmmer ber nackte Frauenkrper strmte, der ganze Saal nach Innerein stank und Hermann Nitsch im Priesterornat auftrat, stieen auch auerhalb sterreichs auf Unverstndnis. Ein Hrspiel mit quiekenen Schweinen im Schlachthof konnte z.B. im WDR nur von langer Expertendiskussion begleitet gesendet werden. Elisabeth Jappe, Performance, Ritual, Prozess: Handbuch der Aktionskunst in Europa (Munich: Prestel, 1993), p22. 47 Muehl quoted in Green, ed., p121. 48 Review of the Destruction in Art Symposium, Time, 23rd September 1966, reprinted in Green, ed., p45. INTERNATIONAL VOICES IN THE DANCE OF ABSOLUTE DARKNESS 77

49 Grenier, Interview with Gnter Brus, in Catherine Grenier, ed., Gunter Brus: Limit du visible (ex. cat. Centre Georges Pompidou Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993), p272. 50 Ibid, p273. 51 Oberhuber, Gedanken zum Wiener Aktionismus, in Helmut Klocker, ed., Wiener Aktionismus: Der zertrmmerte Spiegel (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1989), p17. 52 Badura Triste, Kunst als Purgatorium der Sinne, in Klocker, ed., Rudolf Schwarzkogler: Leben und Werk (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1992), p257. 53 Barber, The Art of Destruction, pp43-44. 54 Ibid, p40. 55 Klocker, Biographie, in Klocker, ed., Rudolf Schwarzkogler, 19. 56 Munroe in Munroe, ed., p22. 57 Fraleigh, Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p174.

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Baird, Bruce, But and the Burden of History: Hijikata Tatsumi and Nihonjin (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 2005). Barber, Stephen, The Art of Destruction: Films of the Vienna Action Group (London: Creation Books, 2004). , Hijikata: Revolt of the Body (London: Creation Books, 2007). Bosmajian, Hamida, German Literature about the Holocaust: A Literature of Limitations, Modern Language Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (Winter, 1986). Fraleigh, Sondra, Dancing Into Darkness: Butoh, Zen and Japan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). , Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). Fraleigh, Sondra & Tamah Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo (London: Routledge, 2006). Goodman, David, Japanese Political Theatre in Context, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 19, no. 2 (June, 1975). Green, Malcolm, ed., Brus Muehl Nitsch Schwartzkogler: Writings of the Vienna Actionists (London: Atlas Press, 1999). Grenier, Catherine, ed., Gunter Brus: Limit du visible (ex. cat. Centre Georges Pompidou Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1993). Jappe, Elisabeth, Performance, Ritual, Prozess: Handbuch der Aktionskunst in Europa (Munich: Prestel, 1993). Klocker, Helmut, ed., Wiener Aktionismus: Der zertrmmerte Spiegel (Klagenfurt: Ritter, 1989). Klossowicz, Kobialka & Schechner, Tadeusz Kantors Journey, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 30, no. 3 (Autumn, 1986). Lepecki, Andre, Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (London: Routledge, 2006). Lichtenstein, Therese, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p5. Mackrell, Judith, Reading Dance (London: M. Joseph, 1997). Manning, Susan, Ecstasy and the Demon: Feminism and Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Martin, Carol, Japanese Theatre: 1960s Present The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring, 2000). Munroe, Alexandra, ed., Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (ex. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum/San Francisco Museum of Modern Art New York: H. N. Abrams, 1994). Scheyer, Ernst, The Shapes of Space: The Art of Mary Wigman and Oskar Schlemmer, Dance Perspectives, no. 41 (Spring, 1970). Schimmel, Paul, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949-1979 (ex. cat. Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art Thames & Hudson: New York, 1998). Senda, Akihiko, Tatsumi Hijikata & Tadashi Suzuki, Fragments of Glass: A Conversation Between Hijikata Tatsumi and Suzuki Tadashi The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring, 2000). Stein, Bonnie Sue, Butoh: Twenty years ago we were crazy, dirty and mad, The Drama Review: TDR, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1986). Taylor, Sue, Hans Bellmer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000). Webb, Peter & Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985). 78 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART

ALEX ULKO I would like to begin this paper with the following quote from Victor Misiano, a prominent Russian curator: The art of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is perhaps the last territory which is unclearly marked on the global artistic map.1 That modern Central Asian art is relatively unknown to the outside world is mostly due to the relative obscurity of Central Asia itself. This fact is graphically (and humorously) illustrated in a map published in The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook where the whole territory between Afghanistan and Poland is marked with a single caption: Superb fighters.2 Not only is the identity of the whole of Central Asia a big question mark to the world, but it is also quite confusing for Central Asians themselves, partly due to the complex interaction between multiple, overlapping and contradictory sub-identities found in the region. In this paper I would like to discuss some ways these multiple Central Asian identities are expressed through various facets of modern art in the region and, more specifically, in Uzbekistan, drawing on various theoretical domains and schools of thought, supported by my own experience and reflection. I have deliberately chosen to discuss general tendencies and phenomena in the art of the region rather than to focus on one particular area, aware of the inevitable risk of over-generalistaion and shallowness of argument. Yet, taking into consideration the scarcity of publications on this subject outside the area of Central Asian studies per se, especially by an insider, I hope that this approach is justified. This cross-disciplinary effort should therefore be regarded as an attempt to pose questions and outline some directions for possible discussion of modern Central Asian art. I use the terms modern to denote of the early twenty-first century without any further connotations and contemporary to denote a certain type of art particular to this period. This distinction is necessary because, as I am hoping to demonstrate further in this paper, not all forms of modern Central Asian art are, or intend to be, compatible with the philosophy underpinning the main manifestations of contemporary art. Central Asian identity At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cultural landscape of Central Asian states is being shaped by the following three factors: a lingering Soviet legacy; ethnic and traditional heritage; and the demands of the modern globalised world. Gamal Bokonbaev, one of the most influential art critics from Kyrgyzstan, gives his own summary of the threefold force influencing local art: the whole visual environment can be divided into three parts: the Soviet past, the patriarchal past and Western influence.3 The article on Central Asia in Wikipedia describes these forces in a slightly different way: institutionally speaking, some fields of art were regulated by the birth of the art market, some stayed as representatives of official views, while many were sponsored by international organisations.4 Artists reactions to these kinds of pressures are either compliance or resistance, or usually a combination of both. These influences and responses are taking place in a wider context of the search for new (or old) identities
79

by artists and society alike. Looking at these interactions, one can see that they occur within several descriptive meta-languages and narratives, problematising even the most basic definitions. Firstly, the geographical definition of Central Asia requires further clarification. The few proposed definitions of the borders of the region can be broadly subdivided into two groups, each bearing its own connotations. The first, which originated in geographer Alexander von Humboldt's 1843 formulation and is favoured by many scholars outside the region, emphasises a common long-term historical heritage and geographical integrity. It views Central Asia as a vast territory that includes Mongolia, Tibet, northern parts of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, central-east Russia and the former Central Asian Soviet republics, the stans. The second, rooted in the Russian and later, Soviet geopolitical concept, defines Central Asia as the five former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and is as close to a self-definition as it can possibly be. In the Soviet times these two concepts used to be referred to as (Central) or (Middle) respectively. Soon after the collapse of the USSR, the five stans reached a kind of compromise by retaining a modified Soviet geographic definition (which had originally excluded Kazakhstan) but now described by the internationally recognised term.5 More interesting and important than purely geographic definitions, at least for the purposes of this paper, are the cultural and social connotations underpinning these. The first definition seems to reflect the popular perception of the region as a vast land, sparsely inhabited (mostly by nomads) and historically associated with the Great Silk Road. This essentially Orientalist definition, supported by UNESCO, suggests a greater unity between different Central Asian peoples and a broader interpretation of their historical and cultural heritage. However, it seems to take little notice of the profound changes caused by Russian expansion in the region in the nineteenth century and the subsequent seventy-year Soviet rule, until very recently associated only with industrialisation, Rusification and suppression of local cultures.6 This definition, although both contemporary and traditional, lends a conceptual support to post-colonial discourse on Central Asia. The latter definition tends to focus on the traditional culture of urban centres to the north of the Amudarya (Oxus), which later became the centres of the colonial Turkestan, and finally, the cities and capitals of the new Soviet nations and the modern national states. Although derived from the Soviet socialist experiment of nation building, this vision of the region was adopted by governments and citizens of these newly independent countries for two reasons of their own. Firstly, it legitimises the relatively recent national history and cultural development of the region, viewed by post-colonialists as a mere aberration. Secondly, it supports the official myth of centuries-long nationhood, first conceived by Soviet scholars and then firmly established as part of national ideology in each of the stans, which will be discussed below.6 Thus this definition and the concept underpinning it can, following Margaret Dikovitskayas suggestion, be associated with post-socialist rather than post-colonial discourse.7
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 It is possible, therefore, to speak of two broad groups of overlapping and interacting Central Asian definitions and self-identities. What implications does this dichotomy have for the artists of the region? The post-colonial narrative, adhered to by the outside global world, causes Central Asian artists (comprising the ingroup) to strive for positive distinctiveness against the outside world, primarily the EU, the US and to a lesser extent, the Russian-centred artistic community (together comprising the outgroup), thereby trying to acquire at least some of the attributes and rights of the Other. In search for such recognition, many artists consciously and unconsciously develop a stronger affinity with the greater Central Asian identity, with its emphasis on centuries-long traditions, nomadism, closeness to nature, possibly even shamanism and other cultural clichs firmly ingrained in an external public perception. It should be noted that this Orientalist trend is discernible in a wide range of genres and kinds of art; from commercial to avant-garde, from neo-traditional to contemporary. Interestingly, such self-categorisation seems to come easier and more naturally to artists linked to traditionally nomadic subcultures (in particular, those in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan). One of the most internationally recognised contemporary artists from the region, Almagul Menlibayeva, boldly explores the boundaries of nomadism in her controversial installations often featuring naked Kazakh girls adorned with intentionally brutal Central Asian imagery (severed heads of lambs, fur hats, abandoned clay huts and railway carriages, the barren steppe and so on). One can argue whether these works represent fascination with naked black bodies under imperialist observation8 or a feminist deconstruction of Islamic taboos, but their reference to the Orientalist narrative is clear. Another, albeit very different, example is maqom, a range of traditional Central Asian non-chromatic music modes with Arabic roots, which are played on traditional music instruments (such as nai) across the region and are juxtaposed against the national, Westernised even-tempered versions of the same modes. Yet another kind of generic Centralasianness is particularly visible in a wide range of commercial, touristoriented objects of applied art, with its emphasis on the use of rough natural materials that can be found in art boutiques across the whole region. By contrast, attempts to assert a narrower, post-Russian, post-Soviet Central Asian identity, rooted in the less exotic but more specific urban tradition, have been less successful, at least internationally. Although the obvious explanation that it does not fit external perceptions seems simplistic, it is, in fact, more of an overarching statement. The sophisticated urban culture of the region, by and large depleted by the eighteenth century, is of interest to only a relatively narrow circle of art historians and archaeologists. It was badly served by the Soviet Kulturtrgers who brought from oblivion the names of some artists, poets and scholars only to assign them the mythical titles of fathers of Uzbek/Kazakh/Tajik literature/painting/philosophy. Nevertheless, despite crude attempts to develop authentic national socialistic culture and art in a couple of decades, the Soviet effort ultimately led to a deep transformation of the very foundations of local art, as well as of society as a whole. This cultural transfer is often overlooked by the external Eurocentric observer, and in many ways it is similar to the transfer discussed by Maria Todorova in Imagining the Balkans, where she defines Balkanism as something
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 81

entirely seperate to Orientalism.9 Again, the narrower, more fragmented and complex vision of the culture of the region can be illustrated by a range of examples from different genres, periods and styles. The Soviet-era school of Central Asian painting, ranging from the cubist Alexander Volkov, to the impressionist Pavel Benkov; from the realist Semyon Chuikov to the romanticist Ural Tansykbayev, has provided numerous examples of the fusion between regional themes and Russian (or Western) artistic methods and techniques. In a somewhat similar way the traditional music of the region has been creatively adapted by several generations of composers, spanning from Victor Uspensky and Mukhtar Ashrafi to Felix Yanov-Yanovsky and Dilorom Saidaminova, to produce eclectic forms of modern Central Asian classical music. An interesting example of the complex relationship between the post-colonial and post-Soviet discourses of authenticity is the development of a hugely popular kind of machine-made silk fabric, khan-atlas, based on traditional and more complex hand-made fabrics known as ikats. Spread across the whole of Central Asia (though concentrated in Uzbekistan), khan-atlas is often dismissed by Western consumers as too bright and glossy. In the 1990s the revival of a more subdued variety of ikat has been brought about by several small projects motivating small entrepreneurs,10 almost solely produced for tourists who prefer its pale hues and more authentic look to the ubiquitous khan-atlas. In view of these complex relationships between different concepts of regional identity one may therefore consider whether Centralasianness can be a useful concept in its own right, or whether it is subsumed by a larger Orientalist discourse. National identity While Centralasianness remains an interesting, but largely abstract or unconsciously perceived, notion to many artists of the region, their national identity is a far more tangible and powerful factor directly influencing their artistic and personal practice. The concept of nationality in modern Central Asia is even more confusing than that of Central Asia itself. The Soviet determination to create new Socialist nations and incorporate them into the USSR led to a split national identity, especially amongst peoples that had never experienced the concept of a nation state before. On the one hand, they were proclaimed fully fledged citizens in their respective republics (Uzbeks in Uzbekistan, Kazakhs in Kazakhstan and so on); on the other, they were regarded as national minorities, or nationalities within a larger Soviet context. An individuals nationality was defined first and foremost in relation to ones ethnic origin (jus sanguinis) and recorded in the passport, while the overarching institute of Soviet citizenship effectively functioned according to jus soli or place of birth. Applied to culture and arts, the adjective national came close to meaning traditional. In this context the term acquired the connotations of the Other, as in everyday life it was often juxtaposed against another euphemism, European. The elements of a
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post-colonial narrative can be seen in the strengthening of multiple nationalisms across the region shortly before the collapse of the USSR, which necessitated the formulation of an Uzbek/Kazakh/Turkmen national idea and the revival of national cultures and art.11 Now the term national culture is often used to express both meanings at the same time: the traditional culture of the titular nation and the culture of a newly independent country. It is easy to see certain parallels between these two phenomena and the dual Centralasianness discussed above. However, I would like to argue that the authorities of all Central Asian states chose to continue the Soviet practice of artificially creating new national cultures, ostensibly based on, but in reality often at the expense of, the authentic artistic tradition indigenous to a particular country.12 Let us look at one of the most telling examples of the development of this neosocialist national traditionalism in the art of the region, capturing the evolution of the central sculptural image in Ala-Too Square, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In 2004 the original statue of Vladimir Lenin that had stood there was replaced by the Statue of Liberty, an angel-like winged figure of a woman holding the symbol of Kyrgyz freedom, unity and nationhood, the tunduk (a centerpiece of a yurt), which, according to Kyrgyz tradition, a woman should never touch.13 In 2011 this statue was replaced by that of the Kyrgyz epic warrior and ruler, Manas the Gracious.14 Such a shift from liberal, abstract and even feminist imagery towards more nationalistic, masculine and authoritarian symbology is microcosmic of the evolution of a mainstream post-colonial artistic narrative in modern Central Asia as a whole. Of course, endeavours to express a new national idea are not monopolised by totalitarian art. A wide range of artists, writers and musicians are genuinely striving to reflect and work within a broad frame of reference known as national traditions. This concept, developed by Soviet cultural theory, seems fairly vague and innocuous, but, in my opinion, it is substantially flawed. Tradition is defined as a belief, custom or way of doing something that has existed for a long time among a particular group of people,15 thereby firmly placing it in the domain of practices as well as values, attitudes and beliefs. There is no doubt that Central Asian peoples have developed a wide range of centurieslong artistic traditions and that today some of these are practiced by artists of the newly independent nations. However, these folkloric art forms comply with definitions of traditional art: Art that comes from a community or family, expresses their heritages, and has usually been practiced for several generations. The communities can be ethnic, tribal, regional or religious. The skills usually are passed on informally, for example through some sort of apprenticeship, rather than through academic training.16 The problem is that the very terms tradition and nation belong, in this context at least, to different domains. As I have already mentioned, from the viewpoint of mainstream post-colonial discourse, the Soviet period of nation-building looks a mere temporary aberration in the long and turbulent history of Central Asian peoples, their rulers, conquerors, dynasties and even empires.17 According to Sergey Abashin, the
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 83

The Statue of Liberty (Erkindik) that stood on the central square of the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek from 2004 to 2011. Photograph by Umida Akhmedova.

Sovietologists viewpoint therefore fits the modern ideology of national independence, while Constructivist criticism undermines it.18 This criticism dismisses the essentialist views of Sovietologists and maintains that the formation of nations in the twentienth century has been a quantum jump from one set of identities and institutions to an altogether different paradigm.19 It should also be remembered that, contrary to popular opinion, the borders of the new Soviet Central Asian republics were not drawn on the map by Stalin, but were entirely the product of the intense negotiations between local ruling elites.20
84

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 This conceptual difference is becoming increasingly acknowledged by Western researchers of the subject as well, and as Ronald Grigor Suny notices, scholarship on Soviet nationalities shifted from a dominant view that the USSR was primarily a 'prisonhouse of nations' [] to a new paradigm that emphasises the constructive formation of national identities and the social consolidation of nations.21 The folkloric cultural and artistic traditions of indigenous people who identified themselves as Muslims rather than Uzbeks, Kazakhs and so on one hundred and fifty years ago (ethnies, in Anthony D. Smiths terms) have had a long and complicated past, based on shared memories and myths of common ancestry. On the other hand, the cultural traditions of the new Soviet and then post-socialist nations have not; they are very much in the making, reflecting different attempts to exercise a right to a culture by a wide range of artists.22 As I have argued elsewhere, mainstream Central Asian art and art theory have almost subconsciously assimilated some of the main principles of Socialist Realism, having replaced Marxism with national traditions as the key element of their ideology.23 Although never recognised as such locally, these national ideologies are primordialist in nature. In all Central Asian states they are based on the premise of the immutable and centuries-long dominance of the culture of the respective titular nation in the region. Some elements of these ideologies have taken quite grotesque shapes. It is maintained that Uzbeks have been the core of Central Asian populations since the eleventh century;24 that Tajiks have preserved the culture of the ancient Aryans since the third millennium BC;25 Turkmen are credited with sustaining their civilisation for 5,000 years since Noah;26 while the Kyrgyz language is identical to the Sumerian language of the Bible.27 Given the significance of such national myths, a reference to some ancient traditions is therefore a must for most mainstream pieces of modern Central Asian art. However, following Pierre Bourdieus distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practice, it can be noticed that, at least in modern art, the intention to comply with primordialist pressure goes hand in hand with modernist and even post-modernist artistic practice. Let me give a very recent example of an annotation to a picture by Akmal Nur, one of the most established modern Uzbek artists, written by one of the leading art critics of todays Uzbekistan, Kamola Akilova: The picture is directly linked to the traditional culture of the Uzbek people, in particular, the wedding rituals. We can see a pomegranate in the young mans hands, the symbol of love and fertility in the traditional Uzbek art. The triangular scarf covering the girl is typical of the brides from Samarkand. With such a scarf girls shyly cover their face after the wedding. The girl also holds a kumgan (water jar) which also symbolises purity and virginity. Bright cushions piled together provide a hint that the pictures subject is not just love, but a young family. Remarkable elements of the dcor typical of the local embroidery cover the whole surface of the diptych: circles, whirl-like rosettes, stalks and petals. Circles and whirl-like rosettes always denote a solar cult, i.e. the cult of love and its continuity. The Uzbek wedding has kept its centuries-long traditions
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 85

and rituals starting from the marriage proposal to the birth of a child.28 What is remarkable about this elaborate annotation to the beautiful decorative painting? Apparently it explains the traditional Uzbek symbolism abundant in the picture to an audience unfamiliar with it. The annotation to the picture does not suggest any characterisation; it does not narrate any story, conflict or psychological interaction; it does not pose any questions. It interprets the painting as a purely decorative representation of a young woman and a young man, their only specific feature being their ethnicity or nationality: an Uzbek woman and an Uzbek man. The picture itself is stylistically rooted in the Soviet ethnic decorativism of the 1980s and, while explicitly referring to perennial Uzbek values and traditions, the artist feels free to ignore Central Asian canons of traditional art, which strongly feature in the works of some other artists. It is easy to trace in the picture the influence of the works of Alexander Volkov (for example, The Pomegranate Choykhona) and other Soviet Central Asian artists, and therefore to consider it in the broader context of Soviet nation building policy, carried over into the twenty-first century. This approach, subject and even genre may be regarded fairly typical for modern mainstream Uzbek art. Galleries and museums are filled with numerous paintings depicting weddings, circumcision ceremonies, feasts, Nawrus celebrations, or stylised scenes from the predominantly rural everyday life. A more abstract variant on a similar theme is pictures with a stronger reference to the past or an imagined world of legends and fairy tales.29 Evidently, not all the elements of Soviet art were appropriated by post-socialist artists, so some interesting conclusions can be made by identifying the parts of Soviet artistic heritage that have not been taken on board by mainstream Uzbek (or Central Asian) artists. For example, what is obviously lacking in modern Uzbek painting is a link with the whole range of genres broadly defined as realist, i.e. portraiture, genre painting, history painting, sculpture and to a lesser extent, still-life. Landscape seems to be the only realist genre still favoured by Uzbek artists. A similar situation can be observed in other Central Asian countries, the only noticeable exceptions being some official pseudo-realistic works promoting local leaders. The reasons for such a dramatic shift from realism to ethnosymbolism are multiple. One of the technical explanations is the decline in the quality of academic artistic training, (a necessary background for realistic painting) across Central Asian schools and institutes of art.30 Another, deeper reason is the apparent association of realistic works with the Western, materialistic, base world outlook often contrasted locally with the more spiritual Eastern artistic traditions: In the art of Central Asia there have never been a period when such aesthetic categories as ugly, base, terrible, tragic, comic and so on were developed. The main idea that Eastern art carried on irrespective of the historic period is good wishes.31
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Finally, in more authoritarian states like Uzbekistan, realism is often quietly

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discouraged as potentially harmful to national interest and national mentality. This point requires further expansion. In Uzbekistan, the revulsion against a realistic representation of society, culture and quotidian life, which may imply a critical view of these, has reached such proportions that in 2009 the authorities brought charges of defamation, insult and slander of the Uzbek nation against well-known Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova for her photographs and documentaries showing the everyday life of ordinary rural Uzbeks. An expert panel of specialists in the fields of religious affairs, spirituality, and psychology found that her images portrayed Uzbekistan in a negative light to Western audiences, as a backward country inhabited by poor and unhappy people a crime which was tellingly deemed insulting to the mentality and traditions of the Uzbek nation.32 Such a demarche can be interpreted as a strong negative reaction to the deconstructivist discourse suggested by Akhmedovas photography. It would be wrong, however, to view this persecution only in the context of authoritarian state politics. The ensuing intense debate across the internet revolved around the issue of the artists identity as much as of the contents of the photographic works and revealed a lot about the attitudes of Akhmedovas critics to the way in which national traditions should be represented in documentary photography. Her critics evoked familiar Soviet anti-Western rhetoric, interspersed with post-colonial phraseology: an ethnic Uzbek herself, Akhmedova was labelled a traitor, a serf of the West, a proponent of amorality, an agent of imperialism and so on.33 This incident points at some cultural differences within the Central Asian community as to the interpretation of the principles and limitations of realism in relation to national identity, and is a good illustration of the tension between affirmative post-socialist and deconstructivist discourses in modern Central Asian art. Multiple group identities While Central Asian and national identities are by nature overarching, all-inclusive concepts, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic group and other categories, although significant in their own right, are usually viewed as fractions of a larger whole. In day to day life these are often represented as binaries, for instance, in the pairs European/ Asian; Muslim/Christian; Russian/ Uzbek; urban/rural and so on, again reinforcing the Orientalist perception of cross-cultural contacts in terms of the opposition. Unlike in the orthodox Orientalist model, in Central Asia these basic personal identifications do not coincide, but overlap, creating a wide range of complex and fluid sub-cultural identities and loyalties. For example, not all ethnic Uzbeks (Tajiks, Kazakhs) speak Uzbek as their first language; often religious ceremonies and rituals are viewed as part of national traditions which sometimes merge and intersect and vice versa. In applying a formula similar to Norman Tebbits infamous cricket test to Central Asians, one may be surprised to find that many Tajiks or Uzbeks supporting one or another Russian football team would be unhappy to see their son dating a Russian (or any other Christian) girl and so forth. These mixed and often context dependent identities indeed require deep and professional observation and analysis which I cannot even attempt within the scope of this paper; instead I would like to outline several possible ways of looking at how certain
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Akmal Nur, A Pomegranate Girl, image courtesy GranArt Gallery, Tashkent.

art forms function as expressions of these shifting identities. I would argue that although many of these overlapping identities are the result of interaction between indigenous and Russian (or, indeed, European) cultures, these interactions do not follow the simple Orientalist model but should be interpreted in terms of more complex multiple cultural transfers.34 It can be argued that all forms of modern Central Asian art are the result of these transfers, be it Kazakh symphonic music, Uzbek oil painting or Turkmen monumental sculpture. As I have already mentioned, these art forms, cultivated and institutionalised for many decades by and within the Soviet system as the core of the new local art, express the conscious intention of Soviet authorities to amalgamate local authentic artistic traditions with Russian tradition on the new basis of Soviet national ideology. In this sense Soviet Central Asian art was already post-colonial. How can these multiple temporal, ideological and narrative shifts be explored in relation to the multiple identities I have just mentioned? One way of exploring the relations between narrower identities and art is by examining various art genres, in particular, less established art forms which are often associated with certain social groups or even grassroots movements. Some of these art forms are eclectic and imitative; some are by far more marginal than others; but they all function in a binary opposition to mainstream post-Soviet art. As an example let us look at the interesting phenomenon of Central Asian rap music. It has become wide spread across all Central Asian countries and in most cases
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is performed by urban young people from titular ethnic groups in their native language. The affinity with black musicians from Anglo-American countries is quite surprising given the completely different social context in which this music genre has emerged. Although musically speaking this genre is derivative of Western (or Russian) rap or hip-hop, it has made explicit a powerful shift in the use of local vernacular language in stark contrast to the formal literary norm promulgated by government-controlled mass media. It is based instead on strong urban youth sociolects containing slang words interspersed with Russian and English words, thus making it deliberately dirty. Here we come across an interesting combination of identities: in Uzbekistan music obviously borrowed from black Western subcultures serves as a tool for expressing Uzbekness, opposed not so much to white Russian culture but to a sanitised and pseudo-traditional official Uzbek culture. On the other hand, some hip-hop artists openly oppose the Westernisation and liberalisation of local culture using imagery and arguments similar to those of the critics of Umida Akhmedovas photography. In one of his videos, Kyrgyz rapper Tata Ulan criticises the Kyrgyz youth for wearing modern clothes; destroys such symbols of Western consumerism as cars, money and credit cards; and finishes by eating a traditional Kyrgyz meat dish with his hands whilst standing next to the national Kyrgyz flag. Irrespective of political content, Central Asian rap is ethnically conscious, urban, confrontational, male, secular and ostensibly underclass (although most performers come from middle class families). It is an example of art which, on the one hand, reflects some real identities and, on the other, aspires towards expressing some assumed or desired identity. Another example of this mixture of assumed and real identities is found in commercial Uzbek cinema. Produced in relatively large numbers, these low-budget but highly popular films collectively seem to form the episodes of one large series, often involving the same actors in familiar settings. They have departed from the conventions of Socialist Realism in favour of those of Bollywood cinema or South Korean TV serials (for example, Superkilinchak, Telba, Jannat Qaydadir and others). Focusing on the identities these fantasy films deal with, it is easy to notice that they follow a restricted pattern: they all are set in the capital, Tashkent, and its suburbs (while other cities of Uzbekistan may be shown only as a tourist destination, rural life is never depicted), but the urban landscape is almost always typical. All characters are ethnic Uzbek, and the presence of other ethnic groups or languages is minimal; the same is true about the rich diversity of regional Uzbek types which is never played upon. The common theme of these films seems to be conflict resolution and the achievement of social harmony. Despite this, modern commercial Uzbek films do tend to explore overlapping urban/suburban, westernised/traditional, rich/poor dichotomies in great detail and may provide a rich resource for social anthropologic studies. Another way to examine the artistic expression of group identities is through analysis of these categories (for example, language, ethnicity, religion, gender and so on) and the ways in which they are expressed across a wide range of artistic practices. For example, one of the few narratives prominent in society but underrepresented in art is the whole scope of religious concepts and identities. The secular society of Soviet Central Asia was replaced by an interesting symbiosis of secular, religious and traditional
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 89

Umida Akhmedova, Sunnat-toi. A boy gets gifts and money on the day of his circumcision (sunnat).

concepts and lifestyles, and in all five Central Asian countries the issue of religion causes some controversy if it falls outside the borders tightly regulated by the government. Generally speaking, Islam is viewed as part of the cultural identity and spirituality of the titular nation and its neighbours.35 The late Professor Pyatigorsky reprimanded the Russian proclivity for interpreting philosophy first and foremost in terms of culture.36 I have extended this criticism to the areas of art and religion and argued that this culturecentred approach is equally characteristic of modern Central Asian art, philosophy and religion.37 Thus it is difficult to discuss modern Central Asian art in terms of Muslim art, although Islamic artifacts and practices are often mentioned or even focused on in a range of paintings, photos, films and even music pieces. There are also some interesting attempts to express religious concepts through Sufi-flavoured symbols and artistic imagery or, as more often seen in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, through pre-Islamic, shamanic motifs. In most cases, however, artists assume the viewpoint of an outsider, talking about one or another religious ritual or item, rather than expressing a certain religious feeling or idea directly. Finally, one may take a more social anthropologic approach and examine different target groups: for example, artistic communities, consumers of art products, or groups with a specific identity. As an example I would like to touch upon the issue of ethnic minorities and the relation of their artistic activity to larger issues of Central Asian art.
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The topic itself merits, perhaps, a few fully-researched academic works thanks to both its sheer scale and complexity. The pivotal issue around which the whole concept of multiple ethnic identities in Central Asia revolves is a shift in ethnic hegemony. Although the Soviet system was based on Socialist internationalism, in everyday life a great number of concepts, rituals and items were borrowed from the Russian/European praxis, as would be expected of a colonial society. In the broader Soviet context the Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and so on were national minorities, while in the later Soviet republics they became titular nations, and Russian, German, Jewish, Armenian, and Korean populations found themselves the ethnic minority. Questions of identity are by no means unique to Central Asia with its obsession with primordialism and ethnicity; yet the extent of overlapping and often incongruous identities in the region is indeed remarkable. Should a painting by an ethnic Armenian living in Uzbekistan by definition be regarded as a part of modern Uzbek art by virtue of its geographic location? Or must it comply with some other criteria to be perceived as such and, if so, which criteria? Or should it be viewed as part of Armenian cultural heritage on account of the ethnic and cultural origin of the author? These and similar questions are by nature descriptive and aim at the classification of the processes that can be observed and interpreted. However, what is even more pertinent in the Central Asian context is a range of prescriptive issues that are explicitly or implicitly forced on artists belonging to one or another minority group. What kind of art is such an artist expected to produce in order for it to be regarded as part of a local heritage? Is there any moral obligation to reflect the everyday life or the symbology of titular ethnic group(s)? Or should an artist be primarily concerned with artistic values and forms inherent to their own ethnic group? Such questions related to the conscious and subconscious intentions of an author bring us back to the broad issues of Centralasianness, and their impact on local artistic discourse. Central Asian world art In 2007, at the International Tashkent Biennale, an art critic from Turkey asked the following question after watching a number of experimental films from Uzbekistan: The East is slow, quiet and meditative. All your films are too fast and unsettled, they dont look like theyre made in Central Asia. Why is this so? As the author of some of these films, I responded that both the Centralasianness and Uzbekness of local art, including experimental cinema, should be taken for granted and subsequently described, interpreted and deconstructed as such, rather than judged according to a pre-conceived stereotype. Since that time I have discussed this issue in more detail;38 rather than repeat the same arguments here, I am instead going to examine the principal differences between contemporary theories of art and Central Asian art criticism in relation to identity issues in regional art. In his paper, dedicated to modern Kyrgyz art, Gamal Bokonbaev maintains that the Soviet style is presented only as nostalgic projects; and the greater its ideological motives, the lesser it is apprehensible now.39 This is probably more true of Kyrgyzstan than Uzbekistan, but as I have argued throughout this paper, the generic link between Soviet and modern Central Asian art is stronger and deeper. Amongst the most important
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 91

commonalities between the two I would specifically like to mention the search for one true artistic reflection of the singular true doctrine (Socialist realism in the past, national traditions at present); a vision of art as a reflection of social life; an aversion to art theories and intellectual art; the predominance of the cultural perspective on art; and an obsession with the concept of national art. This is a very different picture of a post-colonial art to the one portrayed by such authors as Ian MacLean, who maintains that the idea of national art lost traction in contemporary art practice at least forty years ago.40 On the contrary Masut Fatkulin, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Confederation of the Artists' Union from Uzbekistan, believes that only by referring to traditions, artists find their identity, come to realize their place in the global artistic process, search for their own path41 Elmira Gul, another art critic from Uzbekistan, is convinced that time itself will give priority to those art works that had archetypal features of the local culture.42 In Kazakhstan ethnocentrism has been officially adopted in the form of the concept of ethno-cultural art education which proscribes continuity of educational activities aimed to the ethno-cultural needs of a person and society; adoption of the local programs of ethno-cultural education tailored in accordance to ethnic and confessional specificity.43 The intention to keep away from the contemporary vision of art as global, contradictory, worldly and transitional is by no means confined to conservative art critics and administrators. For many prominent artists and critics of the region the Orientalist dilemma of the Self versus the Other is reversed in many ways. They often refuse to make attempts to catch up with the rest of the world and take an explicitly pessimistic view of contemporaneity and the wordliness of contemporary art. The well-known film director and philosopher from Kyrgyzstan, Emil Jumabayev, published a large programmatic article Of Tradition where he distinguishes spiritual Tradition (which he identifies with sanatana dharma, 'eternal law') from traditionalism which begins when a people or a culture weakens or severs its links with Tradition in an attempt to preserve the body without the soul.44 At the same time he sees the contemporary world as a huge parody full of base, perverse, random and grotesque imitations [coming from] what was labelled progress in Europe in the 18th-19th centuries.45 To Emil, the contemporary intention to refute the notion of art as a transcendent aesthetic category beyond the material reach of history46 is just a symptom of the gradual but inevitable decline which he describes in the following words: The world has shrunk to the physical matter and quantity, and the human being to the corporeal and the sensual. His existence has been gradually and slowly deprived of the transcendental element. The sky has closed, but the abyss has opened. The plague of West has spread across the planet.47 On a more prosaic level, Jumabayevs sentiment is echoed by Oleg Karpov, the curator of the largest festival of independent cinema in the region, CAFIF (Central Asian Festival of Independent Films): When they [Western curators] come here and start talking about message management, artistic outcomes, curatorial strategies and target audience coverage in purely logical terms, I cannot but look at
92 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

 To others it is not the contemporary West per se which is alien, threatening and corruptive, but its impact on the local artistic community and their identity. Commenting on the activities of foreign NGOs in the arts, Gamal Bokonbaev said that in our region artists should avoid grants as much as they can. Grants kill the inquisitive nature of art. An artist, who is not ready to make art for free, does not deserve to be paid.49 The artist and art historian from Samarkand, Andrei Kuznetsov, expressed his view of current artistic practices that aim to revive local traditional imagery and to make it contemporary by representing it through formats and styles that were current in Western modern art in the following words:50 Lets make installations of the traditional embroidered skullcaps thats where it all usually ends up and it is sad [...] There may be people who want to make installations not of skullcaps, but Im afraid they want to make installations of naked bodies. That is all what is happening, it is just a mixed ethnography.51 In my opinion, one of the problems with contemporaneity in Central Asia is that it often functions as a new paradigm, a new dogma forcefully imposed by the West. There is nothing wrong about Central Asian contemporary artists desire to learn to speak an artistic language understandable in the West, but the perceived need to gauge precisely what kind of language it should be, what kind of mix between the local and the Western will be accepted by international curators, what kind of cultural message would match the current expectations at the art market, is worrying. On the one hand, it reinforces cultural stereotyping by focusing on the most digestible (attractive or provocative) elements of the local lore (such as local decorative symbols and folkloric artifacts, dilapidated Soviet factories, naked Muslim women, desert landscapes and so on). Centralasianness wrapped in the contemporary cover becomes the hallmark of future expectations: the West does not need abstract painting or conceptual art from the region; it needs a new Other, or references to the Great Silk Road, nomadism, shamanism and so on. On the other hand, this perceived need to comply with the tenaments of contemporaneity distorts individual (or group) artistic processes towards (possible) social and cultural recognition by trying to tweak and tailor art to meet the demand of an external market, a search for the answer to the question: How to qualify for postcolonial discourse?52 I have argued that a search for a contextually appropriate artistic expression of authentic cultural identities should not become a moral obligation for an artist and that art critics should be more concerned with what modern Central Asian art is and not about what it should be.53 I am convinced that the best way a Central Asian artist may develop art in the region is not by trying to reflect local identities in an internationally comprehensible way and not by competing for the attention of international curators, but by trying to re-connect with his or her inner spiritual plane through their own artistic
EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 93

them with a kind of sympathetic condescension. To them the world is still like a bar of Ritter chocolate quadratisch, praktisch, gut. It has never been that simple and it has never worked, at least here.48

work. If Marsha Meskimmons conviction that art is absolutely embedded within the geopolitical conditions of its time54 is true, then there is no need to worry about the relevance of ones art to the contemporary world. At the same time I personally believe that if this is so, then arts entrenchment in the world has another dimension, overlooked or simply dismissed by such writers as Meskimmon, Smith, Arthur Danto, George Dickie and many others. One of the greatest thinkers of the past century, Rudolf Steiner, asserted that a human beings involvement with the world is based on the breathing cycle: an individual inhales the immaculate and neutral cosmos but exhales into it his or her own moral judgement, thereby contributing to its development. Commenting on abstract and lifeless modern theories of art, Steiner believes that a true artistic vision is necessary to bring life back to arts and to human thinking in general. Remarkably, he calls not for the abandonment of purely logical thinking in favour of some more basic, affective human faculties, but for filling these logical thoughts and concepts with a spiritual life.55 Seeing art as an important tool in the transformation of the world, Steiner maintains that true art should not intend to mean anything external, that can be verbalised as an answer to the question: What does that signify?, but that every form is intended to be something in the genuinely artistic sense; it means itself, expresses itself.56 If there is anything in contemporary theories of art that focuses on the need for it to be something rather than about something, it is the recognition of arts agency in world-making [] the potential to make the world otherwise in the future.57 Evoking the ethics of the gift within the market, contemporary art brings together aesthetics and ethics and establishes social relations open to transformation and difference in time.58 This understanding echoes Steiners vision of art as a form of world cognition as well as a free sacrifice, when the artist finds he can maintain himself by sacrificing, in a certain sense, what the world has made of him; he shapes himself as the world has shaped him, but he creates as a free being from out of himself.59 These arguments are extremely relevant to the theme of this paper. Modern Central Asia is a world in the making and probably will not remain off the global artistic map for much longer. Striving to discover their multiple identities and to make themselves heard, local artists should neither become fossilised in the essentialist myths that have spread across the region, nor should they try to embrace contemporaneity simply as a new fashionable trend. By working artistically and ethically from within, they have a unique chance to take part in the making of their local worlds and not only will the outcomes of these sincere efforts strengthen the identities of their countries and communities, but they will also contribute to the development of the global artistic world as a whole.

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Notes
1 Misiano, Victor, Iskusstvo centralnoi Azii. Aktualnyi arhiv (Uzbekistan, Kazahstan i Kirgiziya), Innovatsia, 2006, available at http://www.ncca.ru/innovation/shortlistitem.jsp?slid=11&contest=10&no m=2&winners=true, accessed 10th May 2012. 2 Barr, A. and P. York, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (London: Ebury Press, 1982) p9. 3 Bokonbaev, Gamal, The Epoch. Visual culture: cinema, advertising, painting, contemporary art, photo, unpublished manuscript, 2006, p4. 4 Central Asia, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Asia#cite_note-3, accessed 5th May 2012. 5 Bisenbayev, Asylbek, Ne vmeste: Rossiya I strany Tsentralnoi Azii (St Petersburg: Piter, 2011), p13. 5 Suny, Ronald Grigor , Constructing primordialism: old histories for new nations, The Journal of Modern History, 73, 2001, pp862-896. 6 Roy, Olivier, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd.) 2000, p163. 7 Dikovitskaya, Margaret, A response to Ekaterina Dyogots article: Does Russia qualify for postcolonial discourse?, ART Margins online, 2002, available at http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2articles/324-a-response-to-ekaterina-dyogots-article-does-russia-qualify-for-postcolonial-discourse, accessed 18th June 2012. 8 Enwezor, Okwui, The postcolonial constellation: contemporary art in a state of permanent transition, Research in African Literatures, 34:4, 2003, pp57-82, available at http://www.jstor.org/ stable/4618328, accessed 8th August 2010, p64. 9 See Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 10 Justin, Valerie, Vanishing textiles Rug Buzz, 18th October 2010, available at http://www. vanishingtextiles.com/blog.htm, accessed 19th June 2012. 11 Abashin, Sergey, Vozvraschenie sartov? Metodologiya i ideologiya v postsovetskih nauchnyh diskussiyah, Antropologicheskii forum, no.10, 2010, pp252-277, p255. 12 Roy, 2000, and Ilhamov, Alisher, Arheologiya uzbekskoi identichnosti, Etnicheskii atlas Uzbekistana, (Tashkent: OSI, 2002), pp268-302 have made similar arguments. 13 Claytor, Ian, Postcard from Bishkek, 2011, available at http://ianbek.kg/?p=5155, accessed 15th June 2012. 14 Ibid. 15 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 6th edition, 1976. 16 As proposed by the South Dakota Arts Council, quoted in Sherman, Fraser, Definition of traditional art, 2012, available at http://www.ehow.com/about_6367589_definition-traditional-art.html, accessed 10th June 2012. 17 See Pipes, Daniel, The third world peoples of Soviet Central Asia, in W. Scott Thompson, ed., The Third World: Premises of U.S. Foreign Policy, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1983) pp155-174, available at http://www.danielpipes.org/1025/the-third-world-peoples-ofsoviet-central-asia, accessed 13th February 2012, and Dickens, Mark, The Transoxiana pages: Central Asian history, languages, literature and culture, 1988, available at http://www.oxuscom.com/centasia.htm, accessed 18th June 2012. 18 Abashin, 2010, p261. 19 Ilhamov, 2002. 20 Halid, Adib, Uzbekistanrojdenie natsii, Neprikosnovennii zapas, 4:78, 2011, available at http:// magazines.russ.ru/nz/2011/4/ha5-pr.html, accessed 5th January 2012. 21 Suny, 2001, p871. 22 See Abashin, 2010; Roy, 2000; and Ilhamov, 2002. 23 Ulko, Alexey, The paradigm shift in the modern Central Asian culture, unpublished manuscript, 2011 and Ulko, Alexey Socialisticheskii hudojnik, Evraziistvo i sovremennaya klassovaya borba, Literaturnoanaliticheskii jurnal dlya chteniya Soyuza hudojnikov Kyrgyzstana: 6, 2012, pp62-68. 24 Yakubovskii, Alexandr, K voprosu ob etnogeneze uzbekskogo naroda (Tashkent, 1941). 25 Umarzoda, Ibragim, Istoriya civilizacii Ariicev (Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 2006) v.1. 26 The Ruhnama, 2001, available at http://www.ruhnama.info/ruhnama-en/kitap-htm/s9.htm, accessed 18th June 2012, p9. 27 Razgulyaev, Yuri, Adam and Eve spoke the Kyrgyz language?, 2002, available at http://english. pravda.ru/russia/politics/02-09-2002/1040-kyrgyzstan-0, accessed 18th June 2012. EXPLORING CENTRAL ASIAN IDENTITIES IN MODERN ART 95

28 Akilova, Kamola, Annotation to a painting by Akmal Nur, translated by Alex Ulko (Tashkent: GranArt Gallery, 2010). 29 Sanat, accessed http://www.sanat.orexca.com, accessed 15th May 2012. 30 Bulkina, Irina, Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo Uzbekistana segodnya: spektr poiskov i socialnyi status in Urs Herren et al., Iskusstvo Uzbekistana na sovremennom etape socio-kulturnogo razvitiya (Tashkent: Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, 2005) pp136-169, available at http://www.cultureuz.net/ analitica/coll/1/first.html, accessed 18th August 2011, pp140-141. 31 Gul, Elmira, Nasledie v tvorchestve hudojnikov stran Centralnoi Azii (rol v sovremennoi hudojestvennoi praktike, specifika lokalnyh interpretacii), 2008, available at http://www.fdculture.com/ nasledie, accessed 12th September 2011. 32 Aspden, Rachel, Uzbek documentary maker found guilty of slander, The Guardian, 11th February 2010, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/11/uzbekistan-umida-akhmedova-slander, accessed 5th September 2011. 33 Suny, 2001, p864. 34 Espagne, Michel, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999). 35 Karimov, Islam, Vysokaya duhovnost- nepobedimaya sila (Tashkent: Manaviyat, 2008). 36 Pyatigorsky, Alexander, Individ I kultura, Voprosy filisofii, no. 5, May 1990, pp93-104, p96. 37 See: Ulko, Anti-intellectualism, STILLS, 2009, available at http://www.stills.kz/en/texts/61, accessed 23rd March 2012. 38 See: Ulko, Alexey, The paradigm shift in the modern Central Asian culture, unpublished manuscript, 2011; Ulko, Alexey Socialisticheskii hudojnik, Evraziistvo i sovremennaya klassovaya borba, Literaturno-analiticheskii jurnal dlya chteniya Soyuza hudojnikov Kyrgyzstana: 6, 2012, pp62-68 and Ulko, Alexey and Andrei Kuznetsov Chastnye, sovershenno chastnye mneniya, Kurak, 2010-2011: 4, pp62-75. 39 Bokonbaev, 2006, p4. 40 MacLean, Ian, The world art artworld, World Art, 1:2, 2011, pp161-169, p163. 41 Fatkulin, Masut, View on contemporary art, Sanat, January-March 2007, available at http:// www.sanat.orexca.com/eng/1-07/contemporary_art.shtml, accessed 15th May 2012. 42 Gul, 2008. 43 Muzafarov, Rustam, ed., Art Education in the Republic of Kazakhstan: Perception of the National Traditions and Rapprochement of the Cultures (Almaty, Kazakhstan: UNESCO, 2010) p18. 44 Jumanbayev, Emil, O traditsii, Literaturno-analiticheskii jurnal dlya chteniya Soyuza hudojnikov Kyrgyzstana: 6, 48-59 (Bishkek: Arts Council, 2012) p57. 45 Ibid, p58. 46 Meskimmon, Marsha, Making worlds, making subjects: contemporary art and the affective dimensions of global ethics, World Art, 1:2, 2011, pp189-196, p188. 47 Jumabayev, 2012, p54. 48 Oleg Karpov in correspondence with the author. 49 Gamal Bokonbaev in correspondence with the author. 50 Smith, Terry, Currents of world-making in contemporary art, World Art, 1:2, 2011, pp171-188, p181. 51 Ulko and Kuznetsov, 2011, p66. 52 Dyogot, Ekaterina How to qualify for post-colonial discourse, ART Margins online, 2001, available at http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/2-articles/325-how-to-qualify-for-postcolonial-discourse, accessed 18th June 2012. 53 Ulko, 2009. 54 Meskimmon, 2011, p192. 55 Steiner, Rudolf, Die Grundimpulse des weltgesichtlichen Werdens der Menschheit (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, v. 216, 1988). 56 Steiner, Rudolf, Anthroposophy and visual arts, (1922) available at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Arts/ VisArt_index.html, accessed 17th June 2012. 57 Meskimmon, 2011, p192. 58 Ibid, p194. 59 Steiner, 1922.

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pp155-174, available at http://www.danielpipes.org/1025/the-third-world-peoples-of-soviet-central-asia, accessed 13th February 2012. Pyatigorsky, Alexander, Individ I kultura, Voprosy filisofii, no. 5 May 1990, pp93-104. Razgulyaev, Yuri , Adam and Eve spoke the Kyrgyz language?, 2002, available at http://english.pravda.ru/ russia/politics/02-09-2002/1040-kyrgyzstan-0, accessed 18th June 2012. Roy, Olivier, The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations (London: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd., 2000). The Ruhnama, 2001, available at http://www.ruhnama.info/ruhnama-en/kitap-htm/s9.htm, accessed 18th June 2012. Sherman, Fraser, Definition of traditional art, 2012, available at http://www.ehow.com/about_6367589_ definition-traditional-art.html, accessed 10th June 2012. Sanat, accessed http://www.sanat.orexca.com, accessed 15th May 2012. Smith, Terry, Currents of world-making in contemporary art, World Art, 1:2, 2011, pp171-188. Steiner, Rudolf, Anthroposophy and visual arts, (1922) available at http://wn.rsarchive.org/Arts/VisArt_ index.html, accessed 17th June 2012. Steiner, Rudolf, Die Grundimpulse des weltgesichtlichen Werdens der Menschheit (Dornach: Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe, v. 216, 1988). Suny, Ronald Grigor , Constructing primordialism: old histories for new nations, The Journal of Modern History, 73, 2001, pp862-896. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Ulko, Alexey, Anti-intellectualism, STILLS, 2009, available at http://www.stills.kz/en/texts/61, accessed 23rd March 2012. , The paradigm shift in the modern Central Asian culture, unpublished manuscript, 2011. , Socialisticheskii hudojnik, Evraziistvo i sovremennaya klassovaya bor'ba, Literaturnoanaliticheskii jurnal dlya chteniya Soyuza hudojnikov Kyrgyzstana: 6, 2012, pp62-68. Ulko, Alexey and Andrei Kuznetsov, Chastnye, sovershenno chastnye mneniya, Kurak, 2010-2011: 4, pp6275. Umarzoda, Ibragim, Istoriya civilizacii Ariicev (Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 2006) v.1. Yakubovskii, Alexandr, K voprosu ob etnogeneze uzbekskogo naroda (Tashkent, 1941).

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DEBUNKING MODERNITY: FRANCIS ALS, SANTIAGO SIERRA AND TANIA BRUGUERA

ANDRS DAVID MONTENEGRO ROSERO Francis Alss, Santiago Sierras and Tania Brugueras artistic practices occupy an in between space, lodged between Western constructions and non-Western counternarratives, active as a site for transcultural dialogues. Born in Belgium, Francis Als moved to Mexico City in the late 1980s. Similarly, in the early 1990s, the Spanish artist Santiago Sierra also relocated his artistic practice to Mexico City. Inverting this migratory pattern (from North to South), in the late 1990s, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera migrated to the United States. These physical displacements, along with their ensuing cultural dislocations, have effectively exposed these three contemporary artists to different notions and understandings about the benefits and shortcomings of both the ideology of modernity and the historical construction of the West. This paper seeks to explore how these narratives have been debunked, appropriated and criticised by works such as Politics of Rehearsal (Als), Jewels Collection (Sierra), and Ctedra Arte de Conducta (Bruguera). By paying close attention to each works contexts and conditions of possibility, I will investigate how each work articulates a complex process of critique of three of the main tenets of modernity: the teleological orientation of time, the emancipatory role of art and the separation between art and life. On Debunking Although popular in 'common' speech, the concept of 'debunking' rarely appears in 'serious' academic publications on art. Overshadowed by concepts such as 'irony', 'transgression' or 'subversion,' the notion of 'debunking' has played a minor role in much art history and theory. An exception to this rule can be found in Hal Fosters 1985 essay "The Expressive Fallacy. In this essay, Foster launches a critique of the German neoexpressionist movement (artists such as Georg Baselitz or Jorg Immendorff) by arguing that the promulgated artistic 'freedom' of such artists was, in fact, a conservative ideological construction that brought back into artistic discourse notions such as authenticity, originality and subjective expression as the basis for the creation, reception and interpretation of works of art. Disguised as stylistic pluralism, Foster argues that the neo-expressionist movement was a 'convention' that re-instated the belief in the value of the original over the copy; in the expressive genius of the artist; in the materiality of the artistic object (demonstrated by the important role played by large scale paintings), in other words, it was an ideologically retrograde and nostalgic proposition sold as progressive. Against this group of painters, Foster identified a group of artists (Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince) who 'debunk' these notions by rejecting the 'expressive self and the empathic viewer' model articulated by neo-expressionism. According to Foster, these artists collapse the oppositions of original/copy, inside/ outside, and self/society; and highlight identity as a highly codified process, not as a static concept with a definite end. In their works, the transparency of the real and of the
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self, as assumed by the expressive model of art, is rendered problematic.1 Foster uses the verb 'debunk' only once. It can be argued that Foster's brief use of the concept has two important implications. In the first place, to 'debunk' entails a process of critique of an established model; there must be an order or a system to be debunked. Secondarily, 'debunking' entails an unveiling of the processes through which a system operates. In this sense, it can be argue that Richard Prince's Untitled (cowboy) (1989), by focusing on an image of a male cowboy extracted from a Marlboro advertisement, discloses the manipulative drive behind advertisement; a push for the consumer to identify with an archetypical 'male' model. Dislocated from its context, Prince's blatant appropriation of the Marlboro cowboy not only reproduces the stereotype; it renders it arbitrary, generic, yet paradoxically seductive. Mocking the mechanisms of identification championed by the neo-expressionists, Sherman or Prince's work "may tell us two things: that far from univocal (images) are riven with (conflicted) motives, and that our explanations, far from neutral, use these motives ideologically.2 In other words, artists such as Sherman and Prince unveil, and simultaneously critique, the 'false consciousness' sponsored by neoexpressionism. Foster's notion of debunking, however, does not directly mention a second characteristic of the concept. According to its definition, to 'debunk' is not only "to expose the sham or falseness3 of something, but also to "expose while ridiculing; especially of pretentious or false claims and ideas.4 To debunk, as a means, involves parody, irony and exaggeration; as an end it involves the re-evaluation of certain foundational premises, such as identity formation, the conceptualisation of time, or the role of the arts. To debunk, therefore, is to mockingly disprove something. One could argue that Cindy Shermans Untitled (1982) debunks the types presented by the media as women by making evident the complex process of masquerading at the heart of processes of female identification while, simultaneously, highlighting the malleability of the subject. According to Danielle Knafo: ...like a child putting on her mother's clothes, Sherman playacts by wearing the mask of grown up female stereotypes. Behind the feminine costumes, however, her gaze remains empty, demonstrating that exchangeable exteriors and environments are not sufficient to fill a vacuous interior. One can dress up as a grown up woman; but to be convincingly taken for a grown up, one must have lived the life of a grown up.5 Shermans work not only critically engages the gaze that usually defines womens identity as a fixed position subjugated to the males gaze desire, but does so by parodying, mocking and exaggerating the very mechanisms meant to support such hierarchies, such as advertisement and movie stills (media icons and stereotypes). Her works turn the spectators gaze not only to the photographs themselves and to their critical content, but also to the ways through which we gaze. In her works, both the process of identification of a particular subject and the complex economy of seeing, involving seeing ourselves seeing (and therefore defining) something else, are brought to the forefront and collapsed. In what follows, I will argue that three contemporary works, Als' Song for Lupita (1999), Sierra's Jewels Collection (2006), and Bruguera's Ctedra Arte de Conducta (20022009), operate in similar ways to the works aforementioned. In these works, the artists
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articulate a critique of the ideals espoused by the project of modernity by underscoring the discontinuities, frictions, translations and misunderstandings inherent to the exportation of modernity to peripheral locations. Informed by their constant geographical displacements, these artistic practices show how modernity is not a successful project of smooth imposition but a process fraught with uncertainties, reversals, and sometimes, outright failure. Lampooning several principles of modernity, these artworks mock the pretentious aspirations of total control and the universalising hierarchy implied by modernity. Modern Mobility The artistic practices of Francis Als, Santiago Sierra and Tania Bruguera can characterised by an extreme geographic mobility, amongst other factors. These three artists have articulated a plastic language that, although derived from personal experiences, has allowed them to intervene in multiple and very dissimilar locations, from North Korea to Havana, from Hong Kong to Mexico City, from Kassel to New York. These itinerant artistic practices, nurtured by the current transnational artistic circuit and by individual desires, articulate a position in which physical displacement is understood as an opportunity that creates a critical encounter with a determined context. Displacement, instead of being understood as a condemnation, a violation or a forced exile, is articulated as a tool for cultural dislocation that encourages the emergence of different points of view around a situation, context or specific reality. In its broadest understanding, displacement implies a re-evaluation of certain consolidated perspectives and the constant questioning of sedimented concepts. Born in Belgium in 1959, Francis Als migrated to Mexico City in the middle of the 80s. In 1986, as part of his mandatory military service, Als departed towards Mexico with the objective of working as an architect for nongovernmental organisations.6 Leaving behind Europe, its productive ideology and its system of artistic categorisations, Mexico would become his new locus, a witness of Als abandonment of his architectural career in favour of an experimental artistic practice. Santiago Sierra also migrated toward Mexico City from Madrid. In 1995, and as a direct reaction to a stifling, conservative cultural and artistic milieu, Sierra found in Mexico the appropriate place to develop an artistic vocabulary that was critical of the humanist values assigned to art in Europe. Contrary to these two artists who drew a migratory route from North to South, the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera temporarily relocated to Chicago for the duration of an artistic residency. In 1999, re-tracing the history of thousands of Cubans (or Latin Americans) who migrate to the United States or Europe, Bruguera decided to move to Chicago in order to complete a Masters Programme at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.7 It is important to mention that these artists exiles were provoked by personal reasons and not due to political, social or economic pressures that would drive them to travel to other latitudes. Their voluntary exiles, therefore, are not comparable to forced migrations imposed through an economic, political, religious or ethnic ultimatum. In this sense, it is clear that their displacement is not framed by the same conditions of possibility that frame the displacement of political refugees or immigrants seeking asylum or refuge.
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Similarly, the relocalisation of the three artistic practices is different from, for example, migratory waves triggered by economic disparities between nations or continents.8 This, however, does not mean that their displacements do not engage in complex processes of transcultural mediations. As in the case of any immigrant, these three artists have had to negotiate between cultural differences with the intention of establishing a locus of enunciation. Modernity For the purposes of this paper, Modernity is understood as an economic, political and social organisational scheme that has been systematically imposed over territories and regions and that has been historically commanded by the West. It presupposes that there is a hierarchical scale of progress, of development, where the previous is transcended and even derided by the future. The notion of primitivism', as it circulated in relation to African sculpture vis-a-vis the historical avant-darde at the turn of the twentieth century, for example, assigned to its source material a set of values that defined it as barbarian, out-dated, irrelevant, exotic, bad. In a broader context, the notions of the developing country or the third world, for example, clearly demarcate a location for a particular place in relation to another (exemplified in the dichotomy of center-periphery where the periphery is always defined in relation to, and from, the center). In this demarcation, the developing country is conceptualised as being, not only categorically different, but also somehow of less value than the developed one. This implies a vertical organisation that locates the developed above and on top of the developing while, at the same time, plotting a horizontal axis that locates the developing as being before (in terms of progress) the developed. The developing are, thusly, understood as lacking something that the developed have; the developing are incomplete in the eyes of modernitys wholeness. Modernity, therefore, clearly advocates for a ...movement from tradition to modernity.9 As such, the concept promotes the idea that the more modern you are the better. This means that there is a progressive, productive, efficient implication intrinsic to the notion of modernity that dictates the motions of the past (paradoxically termed developing) towards the future (developed). Under this rubric the developed and the developing are categorically differentiated and only related by a causal link (the developed believe they have surmounted their primitive past). As Jervis argues: As rationality, science and civilisation came to constitute the legitimising framework of modern Western values, so ideas of evolution could serve to locate the primitive as the other that is past...10 Modernity posits the existence of radical ruptures between categories, identities and realms of life; a series of hermetic models that run parallel to each other. Choosing to ignore the discontinuities and contradictions inherent to universal identifications and master narratives, modernity parcels, taxonomises and controls the subject and its process of construction: making modernity a project for the creation of subjects.
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From this construct, one can extract three driving premises for the project of
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modernity: 1. a clear orientation towards the future; 2. a necessary division between categories (be it subjects, or realms of activity -such as life and art-); and 3. a goaloriented culture ...geared to the achievement of practical, secular goals".11 Translated into experience, modernity seeks to accurately measure time through the invention of several, distinct units of measurement that, although related are categorically different (as in, for instance, the relation of seconds to minutes), and in constant projection to the future. Similarly, past, present and future are understood as being different from each other: the past is a foundation, in the sense of being buried, invisible, beneath other strata --present by its very absence, upon which the future is constantly being built. Under this model, the present is always becoming past. The categorical and instrumental differentiation of units of time are also transposed to other dichotomies fostered by modernity. Just like time units, which are, self-reflexively, independent from each other and simultaneously defined in relation to other categories, modernity also creates categorical differentiations between realms of experience. Contrary to previous models of subjectivity (Medieval subjectivity, for example, was deeply relational and in constant interaction with different signs that served both religious, artistic, social and cultural purposes --life, religion, culture, art were collapsed into one12), modernitys desire for instrumental knowledge dissects the human experience into operative units for analysis. In this sense, disciplines and fields of knowledge, along with their ensuing systems of classification, exclusions and contradictions, are created; strict divisions between categories are established. Under this compartmentalising rubric, the connection between poetics and politics is severed, life and art become separate realms of experience geared towards their own specific goals and become independent of each other.13 Life is geared towards the productive, purposeful, future (and work) oriented activity of the economically and socially regulated subject; art towards the transcendent experience of aesthetic pleasure. Art becomes a means for the transcendence of the experience of living in modernity; an entertainment that provides a spiritual balm for the subject involved in the experience of modernity; a carefully constructed escape-route geared towards the supposed emancipation (either through aesthetic transcendence or pleasure-derived experiences) of the subject. Francis Als: Rehearsals and palimpsestic time Francis Alss understanding of modernity is informed by his experiences in Latin America and, in particular, his interaction with Mexico. In his opinion, Latin America is a society that embraces certain aspects of the modern programme while, simultaneously, rejecting and resisting others. According to him, Latin America desires to be modern. The continent wants to fulfil the dreams instilled by the modern project as articulated by North America at the end of the Second World War and developed as a North Atlantic project of economic domination after the Cold War. But the continents efforts are continually thwarted, either by poor local planning and execution (i.e. by corruption and bureaucratic excess), or because its sponsors (i.e. the developed countries) have stopped their support midway through the implementation of such programmes. At the same time, there are dominant and fundamental aspects of modernity that, Als believes, are rejected by Latin American society; mainly exploitation and cultural expropriation and
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imposition. In this sense, Als believes that Latin America dances with modernity, trying to posses it but at the same time rejecting its grasp. Als argues: Its this capacity of flirting with modernity without giving in that fascinates me.14 An interview between the artist and Russel Ferguson sheds light on his views: RF: One of the things that seems very characteristic about Mexico City at least from outside - is a constant pushing back and forth between the embrace of modernity and a resistance to it. FA: It probably happens in other places too, but this is the one I know the best. It seems particularly palpable in this part of town, the old city centre with all its anachronisms. Its three layers - pre-Hispanic, colonial and modern - co-exist more than overlap. I think you could say that all the ingredients are present for Mexico to enter modernity, but there is this inner resistance. Somehow its a society that wants to stay in an indeterminate sphere of action as a way of defining itself against the imposition of modernity.15 Song for Lupita (1998) is a simple looped animation that depicts a woman endlessly pouring water from one glass to another. The action depicted has no clear beginning or end; the woman seems to not have a purpose in mind beyond the sole action of moving the liquid from one container to the to the other. According to Boris Groys in Song for Lupita ...we find an activity with no beginning and no end, no definite result or product...We are confronted with a pure and repetitive ritual of wasting time; a secular ritual beyond any claim of magical power, beyond any religious tradition or cultural convention.16 The importance is on the action itself, not its origin or its conclusion; perhaps it does not even matter whether it even has a beginning or an end. Resisting the pressure of always producing something,17 the work ...staged a kind of resignation to the immediate present by introducing a complete hypnosis in the act itself, an act which was pure flux...18 Emphatically prioritising the means rather than the goals, Song for Lupita literalises what Als calls a Mexican sense of time, described as ...'el hacerlo sin hacerlo, el no hacerlo pero haciendolo' - literally the doing but without doing, the not doing but doing.19 As a result, the work offers a different model of time that collapses the past, present and the future and, therefore, denies the teleological, project-driven, result-oriented drive of modernity. By not having an identifiable start or end-point, it is impossible to locate any sense of when in the work; there is no straightforward sense of what is previous nor of what is to come. At the same time, we cannot determinately say that the woman is either emptying or filling a glass - in fact, the dichotomy between empty and full is collapsed, as both glasses are simultaneously half-empty and half-full; although at some point during the animation they are both empty. Song for Lupita, therefore, creates a space that rejects simple and rigid measurements of time while simultaneously juxtaposing these notions. Precisely by collapsing the past and future into the present, the work articulates a deep present characterised by the palimpsestic co-existence of past and future in the eternal present of the animation. For Rehearsal I (1999), in Tijuana, Als drove a red Volkswagen Beetle up and down a hill. While listening to the recording of a brass band practising a Mexican danzn, he tried to climb the dusty slope of a peripheral location in the city. As the band stopped
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Francis Als, Song for Lupita, animation (still), 1998, Mexico City. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

for comments or to perfect a particular segment of the tune, Als stopped pressing the gas pedal on the car and allowed the car to roll downhill. The cyclical motion, reminiscent of a pendulum,20 articulates futility, the impossibility of reaching a specific goal. At the same time, it restores the notion of attempting, of the present-ness of trying. It is an allegory for delay; a reflection on the palimpsestic co-existence of different times in the present. As an exercise in will, but also as a comment on the modern notion of time, this work characterises one of Alss artistic strategies: the rehearsal. Speaking of the work, the artist argued: The stubborn repetition effect hints at a story that is constantly delayed, and where the attempt to formulate the story takes the lead over the story itself. It is a story of struggle rather than one of achievement, an allegory in process rather than a quest for synthesis.21 Rehearsal I is also explicitly about the relationship between modernity and Latin America. The car, engaged in an impossible task to cross the horizon and, it is
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Francis Als, Rehearsal I (stills), 1999-2001, Mexico City. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

implied, to reach the other side of the border, the US, serves as an allegory for ...the struggle of Latin American societies to adjust to the social and economic expectations of their northern neighbours.22 Although it seems straight forward, the car is trapped in an impossible maze; its attempts are heroic but decidedly thwarted. As the action is repeated in an apparently endless loop, feelings of frustration, and irony, are conjured by the work; eternal repetition of a Herculean task with no significant progress. As Mark Godfrey argued: For Als, the rehearsal serves precisely to allegorise the processes of modernisation in Latin America, where economic changes are always promised but never ultimately achieved.23 Alss practice is not about blaming or assigning responsibility to anyone for the failure of the modern project in Latin America, but to reflect on the process of rejection/acceptance of modern paradigms. He argues that there is a direct tension between the desire to modernise and ...a compulsion to resist the imposition of Western economic practices. In the resulting impasse, all that is left is the process of
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Francis Als, Politics of Rehearsal (still), 2004, New York. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.

always working towards an always-deferred result: it is akin to the process of rehearsal.24 Politics of Rehearsal (2001-2006) is a further problematisation of modernitys understanding of time. In this video, a stripper dances on stage while a pianist and a soprano practice, rehearse, a song. Als described the mechanics of the work as such: While the pianist plays and the soprano sings, the stripper undresses. When the soprano or the pianist loses track over a musical phrase and pause, the stripped halts her act. While the soprano and the pianist discuss the musical phrase in question, the stripper dresses up again. The rehearsal session will go on until the stripper completes her act.25 The work is a reworking, an expansion, of Rehearsal I and similarly, articulates a particular sense of time, Als Mexican time. According to this notion, time does not flow in a fluid and straightforward line of progress from one step to another, but loops around itself through failed attempts at reaching satisfaction. By using the image of a stripper, a symbol of desire and quick satisfaction, Als alludes to the seductive power of attaining a particular goal, in this case, seeing the stripper naked. Combined with the rehearsing musicians, desire, in this piece, is satisfied drop by drop, time moves forward (the woman takes clothes off) only to retreat two steps back (the woman puts clothes back on). Politics of Rehearsal also materialises Als concerns about modernitys time and its relationship to Latin America. The artistic mechanism, rehearsal, is combined to
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a political claim where modernitys promises are equated with the desire for seeing the stripper naked, a desire that is fed drop by drop. In the video documentation, the stripper never seems to be close to being fully naked on stage, as for every piece of clothing she removes she has to put two or more back on while the musicians discuss. By delaying satisfaction, Als was able to explore ...another dimension that interested me, the way in which through repetition the narration could be indefinitely delayed, recalling the Latin American scenario in which modernity is always delayed. The recourse to the mechanics of rehearsal was more a method to physically render this constant postponement, the avoidance of the conclusion.26 It is clear that for Als, delay and postponement do not mean stagnation but a process in another direction, an advancement in resistance, for example, to imposed modes of social regulation, such as time. According to Cuauhtmoc Medina: ... the Rehearsals evoke lntreinte qui ne peut sachever, lorgasme jamais repouss (the embrace that cannot be achieved, the orgasm forever delayed), for only in relation to the longing for satisfaction can we understand the impulse of modernisation. The rehearsal also stands as a means of social critique, in as much as it exists in an ambiguous affair with modernity, forever arousing, and yet always delaying the moment it will happen.27 In this sense, Politics of Rehearsal tries to render a different understanding of time where past, present and future are all simultaneous and in constant tension with each other. The struggle enacted by Als practice produces a non-linear conception of time, a reflection of what he sees as a characteristic trait of Latin America. The region, he argues, creates a sense of time that debunks the notion of teleological progress as envisioned by modernity as a project. His works highlight the importance of process, the present-ness of the struggle, rather than its future-oriented goal. What is important is not the end point, after all the stripper is only naked for a short period of time and the glasses are half empty for an instant, but the means and mechanisms through which either she removes her clothes or Lupita administers the water. In their circularity, these works speak about the cyclical crisis of modernity in Latin America, ghosts of past desires that dictate the present of the region. Als Song for Lupita, Rehearsal I and Politics of Rehearsal make evident and lampoon the eternal loop that traps Latin America in a constant struggle with modernity; an epic negotiation that creates its own sense of time and its owns rules of resistance. Santiago Sierra: Art-iculating a critique of Modernity Unlike many contemporary artists, Santiago Sierras practice is not concerned with alleviating or bettering a conflictual situation. Unlike many of his peers - artists who believe that art can offer a glimpse outside the state of affairs, or a poetic pause in our depressing everyday - Sierra explicitly denies arts potential as social activism and acknowledges arts complicity with the project of modernity, specifically with the importance of capital exchange. Under his perspective, art is nothing but a commodity, a luxury object that does not provide the slightest glimpse of emancipation to either the artist nor the spectator. In his practice, neither artist, spectator or hired labourer are disassembling or dismantling any hierarchical or exploitative process of subjectification,
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Santiago Sierra and Chus Burs, Jewels Collection, 2006, Madrid. Reproduced courtesy of Chus Burs.

nor are they involved in processes of activation of political agency. By avoiding giv[ing] a voice to the underprivileged,28 or propos[ing] new modes of sociability,29 Sierras work strips art of its supposed moral superiority;30 it undo[es] the halo of humanist moral purity around the making of art.31 As Sierra argues: Art is like a pretentious furniture store or a complicated jewel. It might be a complex jewel, but first and foremost it is a luxury object.32 To understand art as directly collaborative with economical and cultural coercive practices inherent to the modernist project, has deep implications. Describing art as a luxury object implies that both the artist and spectator have access to artistic products and their platforms for circulation. This, in turn, defines these subjects as belonging to a specific social group with access to both the spaces and the objects pushed by this cultural industry. In this sense, both artist and spectator are located within a specific social group that, according to Sierra, ...is not the whole of society but only its superior body - lets call it the most favoured classes, the ones that offer employment.33 Under this rubric, both the producer and receptor of the artistic object or event are described as ...welleducated people, people who belong, at least, to a cultural elite,34 the social group that is on top.35 Art, for Sierra, circulates only within the historically privileged, highly specialised elites. As a result, and because of arts direct involvement with the system of categorisations and subject management of modernity as a project, art, according to Sierra, offers no route to emancipation, neither through aesthetic transcendence nor
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through a detachment from the social field. Art, therefore, cannot offer a perspective beyond the conditions of modernity that construct it, it cannot provide a way out if it is configured by the desires of modernity itself. This implies that art ceases to play a role in the pursuit of political or subjective emancipation from totalising narratives; quite the opposite, it directly implicates art as yet another process for the creation and regulation of modernitys subjects. Jewels Collection (2006), a collaborative project between Sierra and the Spanish designer Chus Burs, is a good case study to explore Sierras understanding of the relationship between art and freedom. Described by some critics as jeweldenouncements,36 Jewels Collection was the result of an artistic exchange between the artist and the luxury-goods designer (who had preciously worked on similar projects with film director Pedro Almodvar and artist Louise Bourgeois37). The project materialised in the form of a collection of handcrafted, traditional goldsmith work:38 rings, bracelets and necklaces. They were made either of gold or diamonds and depicted one of the following two sentence respectively: GOLDTRAFFICKKILLS or DIAMONDTRAFFICKILLS. On one level, these works ...denounce the exploitation suffered by some countries in the Third World39 by boldly stating that the international market in precious stones is fuelled by the blood of Others. From this one could derive that all kinds of luxury markets, including the realm of art, are imbricated and directly participant in processes of subjugation; not separate from the realm of life but actively complicit in producing a specific kind of subjectivity. Contrary to modernitys insurmountable separation between art and life, on one level, Jewels Collection collapses in a series of objects the luxury quality of both jewels and art while demonstrating them to be deeply engrained in processes of social, cultural and economic exclusion. These works engage with the world of art and vehemently, and unapologetically, affirm that, as a system belonging to a larger project, art perpetuates social distinctions and subject categorisations. The works delineate the ways in which the artwork is inextricably imbricated with the economic realm, and therefore, its complicity in the construction of a specific modern subject. As Sierra argues: There is nothing outside the system and the system is exploitation, therefore the people in the system are roughly divided between the exploited and the exploiters. I can say it louder, but I cant say it clearer: us, the world of culture, are on the winning team, we are, surprise, the exploiters.40 In 2000, at P.S.1 in New York, Sierra produced A Person paid for 360 continuous working hours. For this work, the artist divided the exhibition space with a brick wall that created an isolated, small room (reminiscent of a prison cell) within the museum. Sierra hired a worker who was willing to inhabit the constrained space and remain isolated yet paradoxically on display - for the duration of the exhibition. The worker was paid ten dollars per hour and was fed through a small hole in the wall at ground level.41 The piece was characterised by the separation and partial invisibilisation of a worker who remained trapped behind a massive wall. For the hired labourer, the work had an actual physical effect upon him; it imposed isolation from others while at the same time subjugating him to the gaze of others (not to mention the implied economic subjugation). In this sense, the work operated paradoxically: it physically secluded and hid the worker which
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confirmed his presence through absence; only through traces or body fragments do we know that there was actually someone in there. Although the public could never fully grasp, or even see, the worker, Sierras division underscored the actual existence of a person willing to perform abject forms of labour as long as they signify an economic gain. One of Sierras most polemical pieces was Line of 30cm tattooed on the back of a remunerated person (1998). For this work, Sierra ...looked for a person who had no tattoos and did not want to have any, but who, for financial reasons, was willing to have a line tattooed on his or her back for fifty dollars.42 The work was an actual inscription on someone elses body, a violent act that implies a determinate hierarchical arrangement where the artist is superior and the labourer inferior. In this work, it was not the artist who underwent a physical alteration but someone who was hired precisely for that task. Sierras violation can happen because the workers are willing to submit to his humiliation as long as they receive a nominal fee. In this scenario, Sierras act of inscription is an index of the physical colonisation of an economically conditioned Other. Most of Sierras work tackles the articulation between art and freedom. Freedom, emancipation, as articulated by his works, is not only a founding promise (and premise) of modernity but, ultimately, is a fallacy, an impossibility in which art plays a complicit role by offering a seductive, yet also hollow, promise of transcendence from the conditions of modernity. As a result, to think that art is in any way linked to freedom, to the possibility of emancipation from the shackles of our constructed subjectivity through art, is only a mirage implanted by a system that, while promising liberty, economically and ideologically dominates its subjects. As Sierra argued: I would say that instead of creating subversion, we are confirming, yet again, the falsity of all liberatory maximalisms, of all the maximalisms of human emancipation.43 From his perspective, freedom is only a broken promise and art is just another tool for deception. As Cuauhtmoc Medina has noted: In Santiago Sierras case, it is obvious that the motorforce of his works is the need to remain faithful to the modern notion of freedom, which involves the memory of liberation. The brutal unmitigated negativity of his works and actions traces in negative a whole catalogue of modern aspirations from the past that not only are lost but in fact have been almost erased from modern memory - the freedom of circulation without state interference, the pursuit of liberation from economic coercion, the pursuit of freedom of determination, even the freedom of cultural selffashioning. Sierras works draw their energy from the task of describing modern freedom in negative. A design that, at times, adopts the appearance of a true monstrosity: the mirage of an organic artwork that truly represents the values of the era. If Stendhal famously inaugurated modernity by describing the work of art as a promise of happiness, Santiago Sierra shows it as unhappiness realised.44 Tania Bruguera: Arte de Conducta In 2003, Bruguera established Arte de Conducta in Havana. The programme, the
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only educational programme dedicated to the study of performance art in Latin America, was conceived as a long term, public art piece that took the form of an experimental art school created in collaboration with Cuban and international artists and institutions.45 The school worked under the general operation of the Instituto Superior de Arte, a government organisation that sanctioned the contents of the Cuban public educational system.46 The school, however, remained independent in its decision-making process, creating a completely new curricula decided upon by the schools interests and desires.47 Working with ISA, however, was fundamental for two reasons: in the first place, counting with ISAs support facilitated the invitation of international artists to the island (in bureaucratic terms such as expediting visas and visiting permits). Secondly, given its envisioned temporality (five years) and non-commercial emphasis, Ctedra Arte de Conducta could only be viable in partnership with an established institution. As a pedagogical project, Ctedra Arte de Conducta: combines and nourishes different aspects of creativity, and its program includes varied instructors: a mathematician who explains the axiom as a creative tool; a lawyer who discusses intellectual property law; an architect who talks about concepts of public space; an anthropologist who lectures about the cultural value of myths; a journalist who gives assignments on how to construct truth; and a sociologist who explores her disciplines methods for thinking about and analysing societies. Also included are artists and critics whose research and production focus on the socio-political, the performative, and the behavioural.48 The classes (Bruguera called them workshops) mainly took place either at a professors home or at a park and were decided upon through mobile phones, rumour and gossip, creating a mobile platform for the production and debate of socially engaged and politically responsible artworks. As Bruguera argued: This project is a dialogue, a centre of energy, a space for discussion about art, life and society, as well as the possible means by which to combine these elements in an artistic way. We are interested in creating new ways of thinking through the use of art on society and by questioning the relationship artists have to social responsibility.49 Ctedra Arte de Conducta invited to Cuba a series of international guests for teach-in-residence programs. The list included important Latin American artists and critics, such as Carlos Garaicoa or Gerardo Mosquera, as well as important voices from the West, such as Thierry de Duve, Claire Bishop, Nicolas Bourriaud, Boris Groys, Thomas Hirschhorn or Artur Zmijewski. Responding to a desire for directly exposing its students to the "changing situation of contemporary art and culture,50 the programme encouraged a political artistic practice centred around the investigation of how behaviour can become material for an art that challenges social limitations.51 According to Bruguera: We explore how behaviour endures as well as how it can be transmitted especially through rumour and other narrative means of expression. We question the limits of artistic media and the paradoxes of cultural identity: cultural representations, representational conventions and

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memory, historical conditions and ideology and, more specifically the uses of art as a politically expressive tool. We focus on different elements of structure involving the making of this kind of art and employ multiple models of discourse.52 Arte de Conducta's goal, one can argue, was the creation of a socially useful art that instead of focusing on the representation of reality studied its historical configurations in order to actually produce a change for the present. As a school of political art, Ctedra Arte de Conducta understood behaviour as "the language that society uses53 in order to regulate subjectivities, and focused on the production and study of behaviour as a tool for political and social change. It is important to mention that Ctedra Arte de Conducta's emerged out of a particular and specific context. In the first place, one must not forget that in Cuba, a country characterised by "political aspirations and doctrines,54 art is seen as a useful tool for either ideological, propagandistic control or as an effective agent of change, mostly through education.55 In this sense, Ctedra Arte de Conducta consciously rejects the notion of autonomous art, and instead posits an art that that can have real consequences in its immediate context. The project was "created and tailored for a young generation of Cuban artists who face the question of how to combine old values with new ones, as alien as they are confusingly desired.56 This means that the Ctedra Arte de Conducta had an immediate concern, that is to mediate between Cuban artists, grown and groomed under the decaying Cuban socialist regime, and the new conditions of the island. Paradoxically, however, the programme's results can only be measured with the passage of time, in "four or five years,57 as a new generation of Cuban artists will emerge. As such, Ctedra Arte de Conducta is a "long-term projectthat tries to fall within social dynamics and, therefore, make use of social tempo for production and for the implementation of the project.58 Similar to other works where the tools wielded by power are appropriated and "corrupted" or "perverted", such as Memoria de la Postguerra I (1993),59 Ctedra Arte de Conducta subverted the notion of the obedient yet somehow revolutionary Cuban educational system and posited education, specifically arts education, as an effective agent for the reconfiguration of the present and for the activation of a new kind of useful art. As the project statement reads: It is a long term intervention focused in the discussion and analysis of sociopolitical behaviour and the understanding of art as an instrument for the transformation of ideology through the activation of civic action on its environment. It was created as a space for the practice of Arte de Conducta. Actions aimed to transform some spaces in society through art, transcending symbolic representation or metaphor and meeting with their activity some deficits in reality, in life through Arte til, are prioritised. This site and political-timing specific piece is displayed through the creation of a pedagogical model that makes up for the lack of civic discussion spaces on the function of art in present Cuban society and promotes new generations of artists and intellectuals. This work offers a political discourse stemming from art and promotes the exploration of relationships between art and context.60
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Tania Bruguera, Memoria de la Postguerra I, 1993, Havana.

Brugueras notion of Arte de Conducta has been further explored through the Tatlins Whisper series. The series is composed of a combination of actions in which the artist activates, as a direct participatory experience, images that have circulated in the press and other mass media outlets and which, by virtue of their ubiquitous presence and circulation, have loss their mobilising power. Paradoxically, however, in the Tatlin's Whisper series, the images undergo a process of "de-contextualisation" where the images are plucked from their everyday circulation, and from the "event that gave way to the news", in order to be "staged as realistically as possible in an art institution.61 Under these
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Tania Bruguera, Tatlins Whisper # 6 (Havana version), Havana, 2009.

parameters, Bruguera has produced several actions in different geographical locations, such as London, Moscow or Madrid, seeking to de-anaesthetise images sedimented in the social imaginary with the intention of formulating a critical re-evaluation of the present. Tatlins Whisper # 6 (Havana version) (2009) was presented at the Centro Cultural Wifredo Lam in Havana as part of the X Havana Biennial. Bruguera constructed and installed a stage where a podium and microphone allowed a minute of free expression to any person that wanted to speak. The podium was flanked by two performers dressed in military uniforms who placed a trained dove on the shoulder of each one of the participants.62 Before the action had officially started, Bruguera distributed two hundred disposable cameras among the public, surrendering any authorial right over the documentation of the action. Nearly forty people took the stage, some clamoured for freedom, some demanded radical change, others, overflowed by emotion, simply cried. Although the work was heavily criticised and rejected by the official Organising Committee,63 according to Gerardo Mosquera the work created an actual public tribune within the repressive context of Cuba.64 By taking advantage of the relative permissibility that characterises the world of art, through Brugueras work freedom of expression became a reality - albeit ephemeral - and not a perennial broken promise. As Helaine Posner argued: By providing a public platform for the audience to speak out against
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Tania Bruguera, Tatlins Whisper # 6 (Havana version), Havana, 2009.

censorship, to call for liberty and democracy, or to state whatever was on their mind, the artist tested the limits of acceptable behaviour under a totalitarian regime in an attempt to create a socially useful forms.65 Tatlins Whisper # 6 created a public platform in the public sphere in a context where government (and self-) censorship is a common practice. As a result, the work did not only offer a representation of the repressive conditions in Cuba but actually enacted a moment of political freedom and agency. The work successfully instrumentalised an artistic platform in order to give that space to other, marginalised and silenced voices (for example the dissident blogger Yoanis Snchez66). The work not only created an opportunity for political action, but effectively enacted it for thrity-nine minutes and for thirty-nine different people. By imitating a foundational historical moment, Tatlin's Whisper # 6 mobilised Cuba's historical memory by bringing to a present characterised by government repression and control the ghost of one of the foundational moments of the contemporary Cuban state - paradoxically, a moment of public expression. Brugueras (and Castros) privilege, the power that made it possible for him to address an entire nation, was dispersed and atomised towards the silenced members of the audience. In this way, Tatlin's Whisper # 6 not only opened to contemporary critique and debate the existing conditions of repression in Cuba, but also made possible a critical re-evaluation of the past through a democratic and participative dialogue. This characteristic, the enactment of a situation in the social field, is defined by Bruguera as ...hyper-realism that doesnt try to represent reality but to be inserted in it.67
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Notes 1 Foster, H., The Expressive Fallacy. Recodigs: At, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, New York: The New Press, 1985. 2 Ibid. 3 Meriam-Webster Dictionary, available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/debunk, accessed June 1st 2012. 4 Thinkmap, Visual Thesaurus, available at http://www.visualthesaurus.com, accessed June 1st 2012. 5 Knafo, D., Dressing Up and Other Games of Make-Believe: The function of Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman, American Imago, 53, 1996. 6 Ferguson, R., Interview, in Medina, C., Fisher, Jean, and Ferguson, Russell, eds, Francis Als, Phaidon, 2007 (a). 7 It is important to mention that, ever since 1999, Bruguera has maintained her links with Cuba. During this time, the artist hasnt only lived for long periods of time in the island, but has also actively participated in the cultural and artistic milieu of the island through several exhibitions and pedagogical projects (such as Arte de Conducta). Brugeras itinerancy is not only a challenge to Cubas official government policy, which during the 90s condemned anyone who left the island as traitors, but also demonstrates a political commitment to establish continuities with the artists original context. In this way, Brugueras work not only comments about Cuba from the outside, but also seeks to act from within Cuba simultaneously. 8 Brugueras case is peculiar; the artist does not identify herself as an exile, because in the context of the Cuban diaspora, this identification implies several ideological and political affiliations which the artist does not share. According to Gerardo Mosquera, a possible taxonomisation of the Cuban diaspora at the end of the 1990s , would sketch, at least, six different ways of dealing with the issue of belonging/notbelonging that characterise the epoch; those who are (islanded), those who left (deislanded), those who are here but are crazy about leaving (involuntary islanded), the ones that left and come back for vacations (low intensity exilees), those who come and go (papinization) and those who emerge. Mosquera, Gerardo, Crece La Yerba, in Magaly, Espinosa, and Kevin Power, eds, El Nuevo Arte Cubano: Antologa De Textos Crticos, Perceval Press, 2006. 9 Medina, C., Fable Power, in: Medina, C., Fisher, Jean, and Ferguson, Russell, eds, Francis Als, Phaidon, 2007. 10 Jervis, J., Transgressing The Modern, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 11 Ibid. 12 In The Rape and Romance of Nature, for example, Jervis argues that, during Medieval times, there was a ...sense of community or continuum between Animals and Humans; a shared, relational subjectivity where there is no clear distinction between the legal, moral, social and behavioural attributes of animals on the one hand, and humans on the other... In the same chapter, Jervis traces how this notion radically changed through a process of strict differentiation between humans, animals and nature fostered by the Enlightenment and consolidated through The Sublime. Again, although he does not mention the realm of art directly, it could be argued that a similar model applied to the relationship between art and life. Cathedrals or sculptures were more than aesthetic objects; they played a crucial role for indoctrination. See ibid. 13 For a detailed account of how such compartmentalisations operated, see Carnival Pleasures and the Spectre of Misrule in ibid. Although this chapter does not directly mention the realm of art, Jervis traces a genealogy of the process of exclusion of carnival practices from the civilised order. 14 Ferguson, 2007 (a). 15 Ibid. 16 Groys, B., Comrades of Time, in Aranda, J. K., Wood, Brian & Vidokle, Anton, eds, What is Contemporary Art? Berlin: Sternberg, 2010. 17 Ferguson, 2007 (a). 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Medina, 2007. 21 Ferguson, Politics of Rehearsal, in Ferguson, ed., Francis Als: Politics of Rehearsal, Los Angeles: Steidl, 2007 (b). DEBUNKING MODERNITY 117

22 Als, F. M., Cuauhtmoc 2010. Entries, in Godfrey, M., ed., Francis Als: A Story of Deception, London: Tate, 2010. 23 Godfrey, M., Politics/Poetics: The Work of Francis Als, in Godfrey, ed., Francis Als: A Story of Deception, London: Tate, 2010. 24 Ferguson, 2007 (b). 25 Als, 2010. 26 Ibid. 27 Medina, 2007. 28 Vilela Mascar, P., Not in my name: reality and ethics in the work of Santiago Sierra, in Santiago Sierra: 7 Trabajos/ 7 Works, ex. cat., London, 2009. 29 Ibid. 30 Schneider, E., Minimal as camouflage, in Schneider,ed., Santiago Sierra: 300 Tons and previous works, Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004. 31 Medina, An ethics achieved through its suspension, in: Kotsopoulos, N., ed., Contemporary Art in Latin America, London: Blackdog, 2009. 32 Mircan, M, Interview, in Frances, F., ed., Santiago Sierra (2 Volmenes), Mlaga: CAC, 2006. 33 Ibid. 34 Wagner, H., Interview, in op. cit. note 32. 35 Ibid. 36 De Los Monteros, P., Chus Burs, entre las joyas rebeldes y benditas, ABC, 2006, available at: http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-05-08-2006/abc/Sabados/chus-bures-entre-las-joyas-rebeldesy-las-joyas-benditas_1422753146179.html, accessed June 1st 2012. 37 Burs, C., Chus Burs, available at http://www.chusbures.com, accessed June 1st 2012. 38 De Los Monteros, P., Chus Burs, entre las joyas rebeldes y benditas, ABC, 2006, available at: http://www.abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-05-08-2006/abc/Sabados/chus-bures-entre-las-joyas-rebeldesy-las-joyas-benditas_1422753146179.html, accessed June 1st 2012. 39 Mellado, S., Santiago Sierra exhibe en Mlaga sus cuatro ltimas creaciones, El Pas, 27th May 2006, available at http://elpais.com/diario/2006/05/27/cultura/1148680807_850215.html, accessed June 1st 2012. 40 Wagner, 2006. 41 Sierra, S., Santiago Sierra, available at http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php, accessed June 1st 2012. 42 Ibid. 43 Mircan, 2006. 44 Medina, 2009. 45 Posner, H., Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, Milano, Charta, 2009. 46 Di Nardo, F., Arte de Conducta (interview), Janus, I, 2007. 47 Ibid. 48 Posner, 2009. 49 Bruguera, T., When Behaviour Becomes Form, Parachute, Quebec, January 2007. 50 Espinosa, M., Arte de Conducta: A Pedagogical project based on art, Buenos Aires: Ramona, 2009. 51 Posner, 2009. 52 Di Nardo, 2007. 53 Tenconi, R., Interview (with Tania Bruguera), in Phobia Paper: A publication for the Fear Society, Pabelln de la Urgencia, Venice: Murcia Cultural, 2009. 54 Posner, 2009. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Di Nardo, 2007. 58 Helguera, P., On Transpedagogy (interview), Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009. 59 Memoria de la Postguerra I was the first edition of a self-funded editorial project initiated by Bruguera in Havana in 1993. Born in a country where the media, newspapers, televisions, radios, etc. are tightly controlled by the State, Memoria de la Postguerra I established a unique platform for freedom of expression. For this project, Bruguera appropriated the written press, one of the most important elements of power of the Castro regime, and fostered individual independence in a tightly regulated world. Contrary to other media sources of the time, the newspaper offered the opportunity to participate in a 118 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

collective and critical evaluation and reflection of the past, the present and the future of the Island. The collaborative newspaper featured the voices of artists, intellectuals and other cultural players from both sides of the Florida strait, from Cuba and the United States. Appearing at a moment characterised by a sense of cultural vacuum, the project was the only platform for the discussion of important, usually state censored, topics such as human rights abuses, the implications of the Cuban revolution and other controversial issues. For an in depth discussion of the work see: Camnitzer, Luis, Memoria de la Posguerra, in Art Nexus, no. 15, Jan-March, 1995, and Pinto, Roberto, Ejercicio de Resistencia, Galeria Soffiantino, Torino, Italy, 2003, both available at http://www.taniabruguera.com, accessed June 1st 2012. 60 Bruguera, Tania Bruguera, available at http://www.taniabruguera.com, accessed June 1st 2012. 61 Perez. 62 It is important to mention that this detail, the placement of a dove on the shoulders of the speaker, activated an important local referent: In 1959, Castro made a public address in Havana. Surrounded by uniformed men and engaged in a passionate delivery, suddenly, a white dove landed on his shoulders. To many Cubans, followers of afro-cuban religious practices, the fact that a white dove had landed on Fidels shoulders meant a divine seal of approval, a new mystical act of recognition and validation of the new national leader. Santiago, F., Artists work lets Cuban speak out in Havana for freedom, Miami Herald, 2009, available at http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/217-0-Artists+work+lets+Cubans+speak+out+in+Havana +for+freedom.htm, accessed June 1st 2012. 63 Organizador, C., Comunicado Oficial, available at http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2009/n412_03/412_50. html, accessed June 1st 2012. 64 Santiago, 2009. 65 Posner, 2009. 66 Snchez, Y., And they gave us the microphones... Havana: Generacin Y., 2009. 67 Goldberg, R., Regarding Ana (Bruguera interview), Tania Bruguera, Venice: Prince Claus, 2004. Bibliography Bogot or Pinto, Roberto, Ejercicio de Resistencia. Ed. Galeria Soffiantino, Torino, Italy, 2003 Bruguera, T., When Behaviour Becomes Form, Parachute, Quebec, January 2007. Tania Bruguera, available at http://www.taniabruguera.com, accessed June 1st 2012. Burs, C., Chus Burs, available at http://www.chusbures.com, accessed June 1st 2012. Camnitzer, Luis, Memoria de la Posguerra, in Art Nexus, no. 15, Jan-March, 1995, available at http:// www.taniabruguera.com, accessed June 1st 2012. De Los Monteros, P., Chus Burs, entre las joyas rebeldes y benditas, ABC, 2006, available at: http://www. abc.es/hemeroteca/historico-05-08-2006/abc/Sabados/chus-bures-entre-las-joyas-rebeldes-y-las-joyasbenditas_1422753146179.html, accessed June 1st 2012. Di Nardo, F., Arte de Conducta (interview), Janus, I, 2007. Espinosa, M., Arte de Conducta: A Pedagogical project based on art, Buenos Aires: Ramona, 2009. Ferguson, R., Interview, in Medina, C., Fisher, Jean, and Ferguson, Russell, eds, Francis Als, Phaidon, 2007 (a). , Politics of Rehearsal, in Ferguson, ed., Francis Als: Politics of Rehearsal, Los Angeles: Steidl, 2007 (b). Foster, H., The Expressive Fallacy. Recodigs: At, Spectacle, Cultural Politics, New York: The New Press, 1985. Frances, F., ed., Santiago Sierra (2 Volmenes), Mlaga: CAC, 2006. Godfrey, M., ed., Francis Als: A Story of Deception, London: Tate, 2010. Goldberg, R., Regarding Ana (Bruguera interview), Tania Bruguera, Venice: Prince Claus, 2004. Groys, B., Comrades of Time, in Aranda, J. K., Wood, Brian & Vidokle, Anton, eds, What is Contemporary Art? Berlin: Sternberg, 2010. Helguera, P., On Transpedagogy (interview), Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009. Jervis, J., Transgressing The Modern, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Knafo, D., Dressing Up and Other Games of Make-Believe: The function of Play in the Art of Cindy Sherman, American Imago, 53, 1996. Medina, C., Fable Power, in: Medina, C., Fisher, Jean, and Ferguson, Russell, eds, Francis Als, Phaidon, 2007. , An ethics achieved through its suspension, in: Kotsopoulos, N., ed., Contemporary Art in Latin America, London: Blackdog, 2009. DEBUNKING MODERNITY 119

Mellado, S., Santiago Sierra exhibe en Mlaga sus cuatro ltimas creaciones, El Pas, 27th May 2006, available at http://elpais.com/diario/2006/05/27/cultura/1148680807_850215.html, accessed June 1st 2012. Meriam-Webster Dictionary, available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/debunk, accessed June 1st 2012. Mosquera, Gerardo, Crece La Yerba, in Magaly, Espinosa, and Kevin Power, eds, El Nuevo Arte Cubano: Antologa De Textos Crticos, Perceval Press, 2006. Organizador, C., Comunicado Oficial, available at http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2009/n412_03/412_50.html, accessed June 1st 2012. Prez Moreno, Y., Nobody is ready to wipe the slate clean (Bruguera interview), available at http://www. cubaencuentro.com/entrevistas/articulos/nadie-esta-dispuesto-al-borron-y-cuenta-nueva-171188. Pinto, Roberto, Ejercicio de Resistencia, Galeria Soffiantino, Torino, Italy, 2003, available at http://www. taniabruguera.com, accessed June 1st 2012. Posner, H., Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, Milano, Charta, 2009. Snchez, Y., And they gave us the microphones... Havana: Generacin Y., 2009. Santiago, F., Artist's work lets Cuban speak out in Havana for freedom, Miami Herald, 2009, available at http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/217-0-Artists+work+lets+Cubans+speak+out+in+Havana+for+freed om.htm, accessed June 1st 2012. Schneider, E., Minimal as camouflage, in Schneider,ed., Santiago Sierra: 300 Tons and previous works, Bregenz: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2004. Sierra, S., Santiago Sierra, available at http://www.santiago-sierra.com/index_1024.php, accessed June 1st 2012. Tenconi, R., Interview (with Tania Bruguera), in Phobia Paper: A publication for the Fear Society, Pabelln de la Urgencia, Venice: Murcia Cultural, 2009. Thinkmap, Visual Thesaurus, available at http://www.visualthesaurus.com, accessed June 1st 2012. Vilela Mascar, P., Not in my name: reality and ethics in the work of Santiago Sierra, in Santiago Sierra: 7 Trabajos/ 7 Works, ex. cat., London, 2009.

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IMAGES BETWEEN: PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

BHAVANI ESAPATHI A photographer selects an image out of the messiness of the world whereas an artist starts with a blank canvas.1 Stephen Shore What is an image telling the West about the East? This is the problematic that I am going to be battling in this paper: the idea of creation and invention, and the practices that naturalize these into our everyday lives. The photographic process was incepted into our social lives from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, a period that also saw the height of the capitalistic division of labour. Capitalism brought with it separation, not just between classes, but also between specialisms. Specialization reinstated binary oppositions. Mary Warner Marien in Photography: A Cultural History writes that midnineteenth century photographers sought to highlight cultural differences,2 and goes onto reveal how such differences were reinforced through binaries, such as active and passive, childlike and mature, feminine and masculine, and so forth. These binaries later became thriving wholesale social labels, and are some of the binary oppositions reinforced by, or which can be called the effects of, modernism. I am going to consider the binary opposition between East and West in terms of the process of narrating a story with images. The objective of this paper is to elaborate on the conception of photography as brought about by emerging technologies. I should, perhaps, take a moment to explain the necessity of such an indulgence. My paper is going to trace the relevance of a shift away from the locus where Modernism with a capital M began: the West. The conception and evolution of modernism in places such as Asia and most of the non-West is often overlooked. I will be looking specifically at India, and the ambiguous influence of Modernism as imported from the West. Throughout Asia, the practice of photography directly followed the expansion of Western interests, writes Marien when historically tracing the production of photography in India, China and Japan.3 These early Western photographers were mostly concerned to reflect the aesthetics of non-Western spaces. Very little has changed since these colonial times, as David Clarke affirms when discussing digital technologies, which essentially stand for liberation from the binary control of the West: Despite vastly increased possibilities for travel and the massive high-speed flows of information between cultures in our electronic age the asymmetry of knowledge which prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s still exists: it is the Asian contemporary artist who knows what his or her American counterpart is doing and not the other way around.4 Internet technologies have becomes so intricately entwined with our daily practices and experiences that it is necessary to seriously look at these technologized circuits and the technology mediated identities thus produced says Nishant Shah, the
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Director of Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India in his essay Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps.5 These technologically mediated identities invariably originate stereotypes that are institutionally maintained. He goes onto say that following the trajectory of the development and spread of internet technologies, academic attention and research has primarily emerged in the North-West and slowly penetrated through disciplines and contexts in other parts of the world [] This has led to the production of a narrative where the digital technologies of information and communication (like the internet) are looked at as being seamlessly exported from the West to the East, without any attention given to the geo-political contexts and sociocultural changes that accompany this penetration of technologies.6 It is this politics of space that the Digital Natives explore and these very politics invariably creep into the relationship between photographs produced be it in the West or the East. Even within digital theory, the constitution of a Digital Native has been highly controversial. Though Marc Prensky first introduced the term Digital Native to us in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001),7 it has always been a volatile concept. Besides the general consensus that it describes the generation that have grown up with digital technologies, other definitions are arguable. However, it is the polemic character of its inherent definition that allows one to excavate deeper into the problematics that contested definitions pose. Within digital spaces, which are comprised of the geo-political spaces of both the East and the West, there exists a unique amalgamation of politics. Such a politics needs to be acknowledged as a category of its own, rather than by ascribing historically proven methods of understanding politics, whether those be connected to the West or the East. One of the first few stories of a photographic presence within India unsurprisingly comes to us from the West. Samuel Bourne (1834-1912), a British photographer, is said to have climbed the Himalayas in 1863 and published his photographs in the British Photographic Journal. After this, James Robertson (1813-1888) travelled, with photographer Felice Beato (1832-1909), through the Middle East, publishing their photos of the Middle East and India under the name of Robertson and Beato, despite the fact that it is popularly believed that Robertson never actually visited the subcontinent. These photographs, that travelled back to the West from the East, were taken for the specific purpose of sharing information about the land unknown, almost completely ignoring the everyday life of the Indians and instead focusing on specific touristic attractions. Marien was hence not wrong to say that Throughout Asia, the practice of photography directly followed the expansion of Western interests.8 These photographs were also credited in the name of an author whether or not one was actually present in the place at the time. Indeed, it is even believed that when Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) invented the calotype process that eventually lead to the development of photography, he was pleased that he no longer needed to depend on artistic skill but could capture images at will, naively believing his invention to be doing away with subjectivity and authorship. This absence of authorship continues to affect modern day politics of information dissemination, as photographs about the East circulated in the West gain legitimacy without any authority.
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 When a photograph is taken, let us say in a country like India, it comes with its own set of rules and laws that bind the image to the photograph. Taking a photograph of a slum worker is not just showing the slum worker, but asking that he or she be understood within the larger context of the significance of slums in India, and the staggering quantity of manual labour that is produced purely by workers in the slum. Looking at such a photograph within the comfortable, familiar frame of a computer screen divorces the image from its larger context, and additional contexts are inserted into the digital frame (for example, in the form of advertisements). The idea of a context-driven support to photography is constantly in flux when it comes to viewing photographs in digital spaces. Luminous photographs by Tim Mitchell, described by Simon Bainbridge in his work A Photographic Journey from Britain to India, provide easy access to such scenes of every day Indian life, from recycling operations through to bustling market places.9 The colourful discarded clothes featured in the photographs all come with a history of hardwork, sweat; some are perhaps donated, some thrown away; but the scant information that the internet provides about the series omits a massive amount of its history. What is peculiar to the internet is that it is filled with contradictions: the internet feels like an open window, open to infinite possibilities, filled with potential; however, at the same time, this illusion blinds us from actually seeing the amount of information that is restricted to us, how much less we actually have access to. In fact, over the past decade governments across several Asian countries have dedicated much of their labour force to understand, control and monitor internet access. India ranks as the second most interventionist in its internet censorship within Asia, according to the 2011 Internet Censorship Report. A report published the same year titled Reporters without borders has added several countries within Asia as countries under surveillance (which in fact includes most of the countries in Asia). The relevance of such censorship is that it brings to our attention that the Internet is not indeed free, and that the communications, information, and images exchanged between the East and the West are both monitored and governed by larger institutions, such as the government and courts. As an answer to the question, what is the image telling the West about the East?: it is highlighting the politics of free speech. The continued practice of photography today owes to the widespread use of the digital camera. In fact, cameras were first introduced into our everyday lives in 1880 by George Eastman, the American inventor and entrepreneur of the Eastman Kodak Company, who made photograph mainstream with the maxim You Press The Button, We Do The Rest. Eastmans faith in the power of photography in the age of film remains relevant to the mass consumerist society of images that we experience today. As Victor Burgin reminds us in his essay Looking At Photographs, it is almost as unusual to pass a day without seeing a photograph as it is to miss seeing writing.10 The Kodak slogan stands true to this day, except now the we is greatly altered. The we has moved along from the politics of institutions and organizations to one of networks, from one to many. The person clicking the photograph is almost definitely not the one deciding upon what the photograph will come to be: rapid circulation on the Internet has invariably expanded we to its utmost potential plurality. We is no longer an organization but is the politics of the internet, which will determine how an image is viewed. For when one uploads a photograph its meanings
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Eric Fisher, See Something or Say Something, 2011.

are constructed by the number of people accessing it at any given moment, hence the necessity to pay attention to censorship laws governing viewer across the East and West. Digital Natives force us back and forth through the history of photography, and this is a crucial point most digital theorists miss; that the digital is not something entirely new. While it might seem unfair for an author to be given credit for images which do not in reality belong to that persons output, this in fact becomes something to celebrate in the early twenty-first century. Authorship is not validated in the same way within the economy of digital spaces; anonymity is more often than not taken for granted. People invariably suspect that you are not who you say you are on the Internet. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, writes Margaret Harkness, the better for the work of art.11 The digital economy allows for this kind of anonymity to be made possible. Photographic modernism brought with it the creation of medium-specificity, but the medium that enabled photographs to be produced has also changed over the years. Eric Fisher has efficiently produced a self-contained world in the work See Something or Say Something that is taken in a mysterious place with no name.12 The picture is formed by tiny little dots comprised of statistics of the number of images uploaded by users across the globe via different social media networks.It is interesting to see that they themselves form a kind of a world, a map that looks uncannily familiar. Fisher suggests how our worlds are being transformed through the sharing and circulation of such images. In order to understand a new world order as put forward by Fisher, it would be helpful to look again at Prensky, who introduced the concept of Digital Natives, defined as someone who has a natural predisposition towards new and emerging technologies. The idea of having a natural connection with technology inherently contradicts boundaries
124 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

that had previously been conventional. While modernism has evolved in rather intriguing ways across the globe, it would seem that only technology is a common factor bringing together these varying notions of modernity. Given that digital natives number over 1.2 billion globally at present, photographic modernism does not stop at the camera; the medium is now determined by space, digital spaces. Thousands of images are uploaded everyday onto the internet from all over the world, and most of these do not conform to the stereotypical underpinnings that have hitherto been put forth to maintain the binary opposition of East and West. Of course this works in two ways: digital space has made it possible to appropriate artistic photographs from various sources, but this also means that when you type into a search engine keywords as clich and archetypical as an Indian woman or an Eastern family you are presented with contradictory images. Burgin talks about how meanings are always formed through social and psychic discourses that are characteristic to the spaces in which said discourses are undertaken.13 The problem with digital spaces is that there might occur dominant modes of discourses, but none are given sufficient time to stabilize. Hence meaning is suspended in digital spaces, as consensus cannot be reached. When Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) made a claim for the crisis of the image in modernity, I wonder if he realized the gravity of his statement or, more importantly, what his statement makes possible. We are indeed saturated with images today, but most of our perception is based on afterimages, and the experience of the unevenness or contradictions that make up our modern society allow the modern and the pre-modern to co-exist.14 Ackbar Abbas was hence not wrong to assert the social experience of modernity is the larger context that allows us to see what is involved in the practice of the image.15 Practicing the image in the age of digital natives involves creating a social existence that is partly based in the virtual and partly in the real. Even though Benjamin suggests that modernity has been saturated with afterimages, photographic modernism allows for these images to float in-between. In reference to perceptual social changes, digital theorist Ester Weltevrede says that the digital is not the virtual, and goes on to elaborate digital life as comprised of both reality and virtuality.16 Returning to Fischers reconstruction of the global as digital, the massive amount of photographs uploaded by individuals via social networking sites is indeed changing our social perceptions of people who we would perhaps never otherwise have encountered in our daily lives. As was the case at the outset of the importation of photography from the West to the East, Western interests are now replaced by the interests of digital natives. Weltevrede further develops this idea: Currently, the web as well as digital natives are able to produce quality information, but instead of relying on an editorial understanding of quality, it is now found in the network effect.17 Such a practice of people uploading and downloading images influences dominant views of stereotypes and makes them float, rather than being rigidly situated; the afterimages of modernism which were in one sense a surplus now form afterIMAGES BETWEEN 125

images, the images that come after-modernism. In photography the inability to have a pure, unblemished meaning or experience is the problematic that postmodernism has left us with.18 The images that have come after-modernism have not done away with the problems instigated by modernism, but instead carry within them both binaries and suspicions towards such binaries. However, the life of photography within digital spaces is essentially based on the premise of not having a pure, unblemished meaning or experience, as digital natives entertain the idea of playing with these categories. As co-dependent as these binary oppositions are, digital natives simply do not engage with either-or situations. The central point of focus in the birth of digital spaces was one of multiplicities, a network of people and machines coming together. A good response to most of the problems posed by Marien in her analyses of the Western ideas dominating non-Western photographic representations can be found in the work of Luiz Fernando Moncau and Eduardo Magrani, both of whom extensively discuss how digital spaces are a two-way communicative platform, through which participants are not just passive receivers of content.19 So what are these images telling the West about the East? The digital natives who dismantle binary constructions such as East/West make this question obsolete. What we are left with instead are images between: between discourses, between spaces and, most importantly, between binaries. Notes
1 Shore, S., The Nature of Photographs, London: Phaidon Press, 2007. 2 Marien, M.W., Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2002. 3 Ibid. 4 Clarke, D., Contemporary Asian Art and Its Western Reception, Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 2002, pp237-42. 5 Shah,N., Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps, (2011) available at: http://cisindia.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps, accessed 9th July 2012. 6 Ibid. 7 Prensky, M., Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, (2001), available at http://www.marcprensky. com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20digital%20immigrants%20-%20part1.pdf, accessed 9th July 2012. 8 Marien. 9 Bainbridge, S., A Photographic Journey from Britain to India, (2008), available at: http://www. bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/blog-post/1651479/a-photographic-journey-britain-india, accessed 9th July 2012. 10 Burgin, V., Thinking Photography, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1982. 11 Harkness, M., quoted in Tagg, J, The Burden of Representation, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p177. 12 Fischer, E.,See Something or Say Something, (2011), available at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ walkingsf/sets/72157627140310742/, accessed 9th July 2012. 13 Burgin. 14 Benjamin, W., The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (1936, available at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm, accessed 9th July 2012. 15 Abbas, A., On Fascination: Walter Benjamins Images,New German Critique, 48, 1989, pp43-62. 16 Welteverede, E., Book 2- To Think- Digital AlterNatives With A Cause, Netherlands: Print 2 Last Solutions, 2011. 17 Ibid. 18 Shah, Digital Natives With A Cause?, (2009), available at http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/ uploads/dnrep1, accessed 9th July 2012 . 19 Moncau, L.F., andMagrani, E., Digital Natives and Policy Making, available at http://digitalnatives. in/admin/blogs/digital-natives-policy-making-thoughts-participation-0 , accessed 9th July 2012. 126 MODERNISM BEYOND THE WEST

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