by Jon Lackman | 8 October 2010 | Uncategorized
This Sunday witnesses the premiere of a new 13-part national public television series Art Through Time: A Global View, “a production of THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG for Annenberg Media.” The entire series can be streamed online, on the show’s website, which also includes images and transcripts and bonus material.
What is the show’s approach?
Rather than a linear chronology, Art Through Time explores connections in Western and non-Western art … Each half-hour episode focuses on a particular theme … Art Through Time reveals connections among the many ways people have visually articulated their basic political, spiritual, and social values. The thirteen episodes examine the universality of the human impulse to create art, as well as the persistence of basic themes.
This kind of ambition, to follow large themes (such as death, domestic life, and the urban experience) across vast differences of space and time while remaining faithful to local contexts, is often criticized in museum exhibitions. It’s rarely seen in scholarly books. Nonetheless, it resonates with a growing desire within contemporary scholarship to create a “globalized” or “international” or “world” art history (a topic I’m currently writing an article on) — with books like David Summers’ Real Spaces. World Art History, The Rise of Western Modernism, David Carrier’s A World Art History and Its Objects, and the volume Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins. Also the recent Art Bulletin “intervention” by Partha Mitter, and the recent debates over modern-art and Art-101 survey textbooks.
How successful is Art Through Time? I’ve only watched the first episode so far. To its credit, the show uses top-notch commentators, it resists gimmicry, it takes on themes and art that risk offending some political and religious sensibilities, and it doesn’t refract everything through a Western lens — the first thing it examines is interactions between Islamic and Chinese artists along the Silk Road. Alas, although the episode was often stimulating, it took on so many different topics that very few could be handled subtly. In just this one episode, there were segments devoted to The Silk Road, Venice and the East, The Spanish Conquest, Portuguese Trade, Japan and the West, and Latin Connections. I was also disappointed by the fact that the episode didn’t attempt any points much larger than:
There are certain very interesting convergences of culture that lead to the creation of hybrid works of art, that under other circumstances never would have been produced.
Forms of hybrid art actually create something new and powerful that belongs to two cultures, and sometimes taps in even to a greater cultural ambiance.
There were many different moments where the ancient world, or traditional world, was interconnected.
It’s creating a universal language, but based on local cultures and histories.
The “lead content consultant” for Art Through Time was former Guggenheim education director Marilyn JS Goodman. Its on-screen contributors are:
Ladan Akbarnia
Melissa Chiu
Alan Chong
Christa Clarke
Sarah D. Coffin
Jesse Coffino-Greenberg
David Patrick Columbia
John Costello
Thomas Crow
Deborah Cullen
Anne D’Alleva
Julie Nelson Davis
Vidya Dehejia
Vishakha N. Desai
Layla Diba
Mónica Domínguez Torres
Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw
John Elderfield
Olafur Eliasson
Lalla Essaydi
Angelo Filomeno
Susan Galassi
James Ganz
Christine Giviskos
Jane Golden
RoseLee Goldberg
Stacy Goodman
Oleg Grabar
Alexandra Griffith Winton
Cynthia Hahn
John Hanhardt
Melissa Harris
Robert E. Harrist
Lothar Haselberger
Steven Heller
Patrick Hunt
Anna Indych-López
Robin Jaffee Frank
Kimberly A. Jones
Rosemary Joyce
Tarek Kahlaoui
Pepe Karmel
Santhi Kavuri-Bauer
Shigeyuki Kihara
Vitaly Komar
Babatunde Lawal
Soyoung Lee
Jay Levenson
Sharon Liberman Mintz
Yukio Lippit
Chao-Hui Jenny Liu
David Lubin
Miguel Luciano
Anne McClanan
Pamela McClusky
Melissa McCormick
Fred Myers
Mary Miller
Barbara E. Mundy
Mary Nooter Roberts
Tavia Nyong’o
Anne Pasternak
Stephen Perkinson
John Pohl
Adriana Proser
Romita Ray
Nasser Rabbat
Faith Ringgold
Jon Ritter
Kishwar Rizvi
Peter G. Roe
Jeff L. Rosenheim
David Ross
David J. Roxburgh
Lisa Saltzman
Carolee Schneemann
Thomas K. Seligman
Karen Sherry
Yoshiaki Shimizu
Susan Sidlauskas
Larry Silver
Sandy Skoglund
sm3tcoom (Delbert Miller)
Freyda Spira
Jeff Spurr
Natasha Staller
Ilan Stavans
Andrew Stewart
Lowery Stokes Sims
Edward J. Sullivan
Yui Suzuki
Ann Temkin
Barbara Thompson
Robert A. F. (Tenzin) Thurman
Kay-UAmihs (Winona Plant)
Marc Van De Mieroop
Deborah Vischak
Susan Vogel
Lynda S. Waggoner
Kay WalkingStick
Eugene Wang
Arthur K. Wheelock
Kehinde Wiley
Sylvia Wolf
