by Jon Lackman | 16 February 2009 | Theory
Partha Mitter, author of The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde 1922-1947 and Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850-1922, kicks off the latest Art Bulletin “intervention,” “Decentering Modernism,” in the December 2008 issue, with another critique of the four-year-old Foster/Krauss/Bois/Buchloh survey, Art Since 1900:
… the last two decades have witnessed serious soul-searching among art historians about the future of the discipline. This is strikingly expressed by Hans Belting … However, his fear that the canon looks increasingly vulnerable may be somewhat premature. Take, for instance, Art since 1900, the magisterial volume on the avant-garde published in 2004 … The four authors display intellectual sophistication, an exemplary attention to detail, and a masterly grasp of the broader picture of Western avant-garde art in the twentieth century … which brings into question the triumphalist discourse of modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century … Nonetheless, perhaps because my own work has dealt with artists in the periphery, I would have liked to have seen the authors filling more of the gaps in our knowledge of world art. The book contains few references to notable artists living outside Europe and the United States who have made significant contributions to the global processes of modernity … the canon is not significantly enlarged. Rather, the non-Western artists are brought in primarily on account of their compatibility with the avant-garde discourse in the West … since the authors aim to deal with “art” as a universal category, readers will inevitably demand much of these scholars … none of the issues raised here would be problematic if the title of the book were, for instance, Western Avant-Garde Art since 1900 or Western Art since 1900.
The book’s wider global ambitions nonetheless offer me a starting point to situate its “universalist” canon within an epistemological framework that goes back to the Enlightenment. The book follows a well-trodden path that equates Western norms with global values, having the unintended consequence of excluding the art of the periphery … Despite its serious intentions, the “universalist” project of art history remains trapped within the constraints of Western epistemology, which cannot be remedied simply by a culturally determined self-reflexivity. The wide acceptance of the Western modernist canon as self-evidently universal (even in non-Western regions, I must add) does not give sufficient weight to the role of convention in artistic production.” In the social sciences, this use of the universal for the specific is described as an unmarked case. Modernism in this sense is an “unmarked case” that implicitly stands for “Western” modernism. By this token, a qualifying epithet becomes necessary to speak of any other: East European modernism, Chinese modernism, Indian modernism, and so on. It is perhaps no accident that following Immanuel Kant’s a priori view of aesthetics, the concept “art” is often regarded as neutral and disinterested, which systematically ignores the implications of race, gender, sexual orientation, and even class (by the latter I mean all forms of folk and popular art that are excluded from the master narrative). The universal canon of art subsumes either the classical canon or the modernist canon that supplanted it in the twentieth century.
Alastair Wright, Rebecca M Brown, Saloni Mathur, and Ajay Sinha respond, then Mitter concludes:
With “Decentering Modernism,” I hoped to provoke a debate on “modernism and its discontents,” which is possibly one of the central art historical concerns of our day. In the process, I proposed a more critical and open-ended global art history for the twenty-first century, one that challenges Hegelian teleology and allows different trajectories to flourish. I feel vindicated that the respondents in general share my objective of “decentering” the discourse of modernism, although it is quite natural that their interpretations would express different inflections from mine … It is perhaps a reflection of the fact that all the respondents belong to the younger generation of art historians. Unsurprisingly, there are no “dyed-in-the-wool” modernists among them who are prepared to uphold the universal values of modernism to their dying breath. Is there a danger of flogging a dead horse, or one that is about to expire? Perhaps we are witnessing the dissolution of the heroic modernism that prevailed during much of the twentieth century?
“since the authors aim to deal with “art” as a universal category…”
Did Mitter bother reading Art Since 1900 before making this critique? It’s a deeply flawed book, but not one of its authors would even think about positing works of art as at all “universal.” Which, exactly, is the author committing the fallacy of copping to Kant’s universalism? Please. The book’s coverage of non-canon work is regrettable, but accusing those particular writers of universalism seems awfully misguided.