In the book, Contemporary Art World Currents by Terry Smith, we are given an overview of the patterns of emerging modern and then contemporary art forms, observing artists of various backgrounds and their divergent bodies of work in attempts to navigate the newly formed definitions and bounds of the evolution of artistic expression within a regional context by exploring the effects of globalization within the local art schemes and its implications on the regional culture of art and contemporaneity.
Early on, within the introduction, Terry smith recognizes the challenge to identify these global patterns within the context of the unjust regional divisions of the world, quoting Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen who state that although the global art movement towards contemporaneity is less Eurocentric than it's geographic implications, it still traces its origins within the Eurocentric disposition of modern art currents. Although this is true, it depends on which lens this topic is observed from.
Terry smith also points out in the introduction of the text that it is important to acknowledge political dominance and subordination without privileging it in the context of observing regional relationships between peoples and cultures within the realm of the arts. In a subconscious sense, however, how can one separate the notion of political subservience from intellectual art values while actively keeping an awareness of it?
Isn't this a western gaze with which to view art? Could it be possible that modern and contemporary art existed disregarding the concept of globalization, yet these movements are not recognized by the western world because they do not fit within the western definition of contemporaneity because they are unfamiliar due to a lack of regional cultural comprehension? The history of the world goes beyond current political dominance and regional struggles and thus modernism within the regional context cannot be separated from longstanding regional history. This text, in a sense, discredits the internal and regional intellectual advances of whole civilizations in favor of emphasizing the definition of advancement and modernity based on Euro-centrically defined criteria.
one interesting artist and artwork that successfully communicates this concept, or in a way, nods at it is Mladen Stilinovic in his work "An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist." This piece consists of a pink silk cloth with the words sewn into the fabric in the form of embroidery in English lettering. the phrase being highlighted is ironically true both in the literal sense and in a more conceptual manner. Throughout present history, post-globalization, after the period of political dominance shifts resulting from colonization, and during the process of decolonization and recovery, many non-western artists chose to adopt a western visual etymology as part of their efforts to join the process of modernization and in a more underlying manner, a sense of cultural development that would allow them to be part of the contemporary conversation of the arts, assimilating the value of their art to be accepted and deemed developed enough to enter the western scenes without such labels as primitive, oriental and culturally charged, so that if lucky, they are picked up, covered, and recorded within the English/Western/"First World" documentations of the arts. With local art historians also choosing to write about their regional art based on similar biases, how much of the authentic art practices are recorded that are truly free of politically dominating implicit and explicit biases?
In the book Duty-free Art by Hito Steyerl, she references Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and the adoption of the Ark of the Arts, which is meant as a safe haven to protect the precious arts from destruction within the context of a dystopian, nearly apocalyptic society. The irony lies in the governing bodies with control over the art, who seem to be the only ones capable of seeing the art. As she describes, " art is not art if it cannot be seen. and if it is not art, there is no point in conserving it."
So what then, is seen when taking a global approach to viewing art? What is recorded, and what is failed to be conserved from the standpoint of influential dominance? A close look at the same book, Contemporary Art World Currents clearly reveals the answer to this question.
The first section of this book is dedicated to the modernization resulting from the inter-relational transactions between Europe and America, touching on the revolutionization that resulted from the liberatingly changed definition of the arts as brought about by such artists as Jeff Koonz, referencing historical and political contexts of the time that led to this age of enlightenment. The upward-down, hierarchical worldview of art, recorded observations, and the lens of personal biases or even the objectivity to call things "as they were historically observed" at the time, the linguistic choices adopted in this process discount and dismiss the idea that non-western art was advancing within this period within its subjective definition of progress, and instead, regards non-western progress of art directly dependent on the implications of the western counterparts, predominantly viewing the observed nations as those pre-exposed to suffering through colonization or rebelling against 'Second World' communist dictatorship, a stereotypical view of the arts that doesn't necessarily open perspective as to why the regional artists of the time created what they chose to create.
As a direct example: the art of Iran is introduced through the work of Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, a predominantly Islamist Caligraphy-arts-portraying artist, who recreated Islamic scriptures in modern formal arrangements, moving further to introduce Iranian artist, (I, unfortunately, forgot her name), whose work was directly influenced by the work of Andy Warhol, denying representation of art that assumes any regional and personal sense of human identity that is implicit and not subject to the view of the west.
It is expected of a western observer to be particularly interested in non-western art in the context that they are already familiar with; however, this collective of countries and ancient cultures have art that is far more complex than a mere response to the struggles of colonialism and totalitarian regimes. Their identity exceeds their struggle under the title of the undeveloped, recovering nation, freed from or struggling in the grips of totalitarianism. for this reason, when books surveying global art movements begin their research on the narrow scope of colonialism and its effect on art practices, it takes away the possibility of a balanced survey of the world, but instead, focuses on a western gaze on merely the art of recovery from captivation, and a turn towards modernization as a means of gaining relevance.
Why is this troublesome? If global art history does not allow for a humanized perception of the modern artist within their regional context and intellectual journey, how can we begin to identify with, and understand our fellow humans without viewing them through the lens of the other who is living in a different dimension than we are? How might we begin to see them as fellow contemporaries whose lives are not summed up solely in their depictions of their collective struggles with injustice? In this sense, the normalized scene of oppressed communist nations and the middle east in general under the totalitarian rule isn't so differently portrayed by art historians than by Hollywood film directors: the struggle is the accepted sense of their identity, and beyond the struggle and obscurity, they simply do not exist.
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