art 315 Issues in Contemporary Art

Okay. Okay. What about the same number that we were going to tell me? How big is post-colonialism. What I’ve been doing is looking at sort of kind of big ideas in art. Sort of following the 93 Whitney and postmodernism. So post, postmodernism, if you want to think of it that way. Nearly. What is it? What is it exactly? But did you ever consider I’m going to put my chat up. If anyone wants to jump in on this. If post-modernism is from testing purposes, a reaction to modernism. What happens if you as a society we’re not Modernist to begin with. Or you didn’t subscribe to modernism. As many of you pointed out in your papers. Modernism came out of advancements in technology, right? Industrial Revolution. The idea that technology and modernization was going to move society forward. But we’re talking about things that were happening in Western cultures, right? Primarily Europe. And we can ask ourselves if this idea of modernism ever really took colder or had any kind of importance to other parts of the world, right? My question, the question is, can you be post-modern? If you weren’t? Modern to begin with, right? And so that’s kind of what we’re going to be talking about today. Okay, so post-colonialism is exactly what it sounds like. It is what happens after colonialism. And I think you’re probably familiar with colonialism. But I’m going to go over it with you. Okay? So colonialism is that aspect of history of various countries who went to other countries, other places and essentially claimed them, right? They took them over. And so that the practice is what we call imperialism. Practice, theory and attitudes of dominating, dominating metropolitan center, really a distant territory, right? So we have, you know, Spain and South America, France, UK, and the Netherlands. In Southeast Asia. You have France, Portugal, Great Britain again in Africa, right? So you have a number of continents where European metropolitan centers ruled. Okay? So that aspect of sort of taking over another space, another country, another land, both in practice and in theory is imperialism. And then colonialism is sort of the more physical aspect of establishing colleagues, right? So, okay, I’m back, sorry. Okay. So colonialism is this aspect of it. Spanish moving into South America, moving into the Philippines, the Caribbean, and establishing colonies there. And it’s important, whoops. It’s important to note that a lot of imperialism, I hate, I hesitate to say all of it, but I want to say all of it is really influenced by racism. Okay? I have to put it bluntly. And that racism was informed by science. Okay. I think I’m good. Let me jump ahead and then I’ll come back to this one. So joules our mind. This is a quote from him. He was a high-ranking officer in the British Navy. And he articulates this very explicitly. And I, I think we should not underplay the motivation of imperialism. It is necessary then to accept as a principal and point of departure the fact that these are my emphasis by the way, the red is mine. There is a hierarchy of races and civilizations and that we belong to the superior race and civilization. Still recognizing that while superiority confers rights, it imposes strict obligations and return. The basic legitimization of conquest of native peoples is the conviction of our superiority. Okay? So recall that a major aspect of enlightenment thinking is the belief and reliance on sites, right? And what these imperial powers are doing is essentially using science as a rationale for claiming their own superiority. And you can see in the first red that I’ve highlighted for you, they very much believe that there is a hierarchy of races and civilization. Okay, and so this goes back centuries and centuries. The Philippines was under Spain for 400 years, right? So that was starting in the 17th century. And again, using the Philippines as an example. Even in the United States. All sheet, I’m going to forget the president’s name. We have the president of United States calling the Filipinos his little brown brothers. And that’s this aspect. Obligation that because we’re a superior race, it is our obligation to sort of civilized, civilized, civilized, yes. Civilize these people, right? If you ever watched the musical, the Kenyan eyes, if there’s a funny number, I don’t know what is called the, but the, the women, the king’s wives, are having to dress up for a ball in Western clothing. And they are complaining that they’re being, it was, it’s a great, it’s a great phrasing. I just can’t remember exactly, but something to the effect of there. They want to civilize us by making us barbarians or something like that. It is, it is This point of, of imperialism that is racist. So just some examples of this expression behind the expression of the racism behind imperialism. I think you’re probably all familiar with Rudyard Kipling, English poet. He wrote The Jungle Book. That, That’s what I’m thinking. But then he has this poem called The White Man’s Burden. And it’s long, but this is a segment of it and it makes the point that I’m sharing with you, take up the White Man’s Burden, send forth the best you breed, go bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives, need to wait in heavy harness on fluttered folk and wild your new caught sullen peoples. Half devil and half child. So you can see he’s expressing that sense of obligation, right? This is like, you know, we’re superior. We’re going there and we’re going to better, better these, these captive natives who are half devil, half child. So they’re not, they’re not human, right? Is what is what he’s saying. And just to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is even much more explicit about that. We were wonders on a prehistoric art. Again, this idea that other, other cultures, non-Western cultures, brown people as prehistoric, right? There’s not, not modern. So these are cultures not embracing modernism in the way that the West was. So kinda continues where we were wanders. I’m a prehistoric earth. As we struggled around the band, there will be a glimpse. Rush walls of peak grass roofs, a burst of Yale’s, a whirl, a black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, a feed stomping, body swaying of eyes rolling. It was an earthly. And the men were, no, they were not inhuman. Think that’s to say they were not humans. They held and leap and spine and made hoard faces. What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity like yours, the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar, ugly. Okay, So that is, that is the underlying sentiment of imperialism and colonialism. But my point and establishing this for you is that when we talk about post-colonialism on it, there is an awful lot to unpack there. Because colonialism certainly was the foundation of slavery, right? And so when we are talking about Black Lives Matter and contemporary race issues, we are going all the way back to these colonial, colonial times and colonial attitudes. So some examples for you in art. What, what western artists, European artists in particular were doing was using images. And I’m going to show you images of African people, of Africans as this kind of exotic being. And so the images that they chose to paint, if they chose to, to share back in, back in your y’s of kind of the most exotic, like the most, the most the opposite of what one might expect from European, European culture. So this is where we get this idea of kind of otherness, right? And this idea, or this kind of what Edward say, the historian called Orientalism, which is a really important book and idea and post-colonial discussion. This idea of Orientalism is very much about this exotic other B, that’s very opposite of. Western civilization as the Europeans knew it. But this is, I’m going to show you some images that matches the artist. Pair my keys painted in Morocco. And they very much fell into this category of kind of Orientalist exotic imagery. And the point here is that is what is being said here by the, by the writer lo te. French novelist decried the modernization of those cultures by European colonialism, considering that it destroyed their authentic, quote unquote, character and defense. Okay, so there’s this idea that on the one hand, the colonial powers, the imperialist needed to better, needed to better the kind of the natives that they were colonizing. And at the same time, there’s this idea that There’s an authenticity to that native culture that people, many of them in the arts did not want to see compromised. Right? So it’s a weird, It’s a weird coin with these bizarre two sides, right? But you can see how they’re both the same. They both have the same foundation. This idea of the otherness of these people. So this was actually an exhibition that was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I’m not sure where it originated, but it did come. This is many, many years ago, probably before some of you were born. Anyway, is called Matisse in Morocco. And colonizing aesthetic. I’m not sure if the subtitle was for the exhibition or just the writing on the exhibition. Anyway. So my TCE spend quite a bit of time in Morocco, which had been settled by the French, right? Matisse’s French. And the images that he chose to portray file this idea of sort of the authenticity of Moroccan, Moroccan life. And here, this is how he described this painting. This is how he described it to his daughter. A portrait of a refund, a magnificent mountain near type savage as a jackal. They like, they like this idea of wildness. And that there’s something wild about, about these natives. And so he Matisse. He was God just going around Morocco painting. But yeah, so this also sort of exemplifies what the colonial presence was about. So much cheese would go and he would make these paintings of what he thought he should, he should share about morocco. When in fact, just by going out in public and painting, he was violating sort of cultural codes. So that the very last part there, as he transcribes out in public, the forall arches of the saints to write. So they were I mean, he was actually, I’m going to go to Jack’s question here. I mean, he, this is the irony of it. I think he was admiring this culture. He was admiring the people he was admiring, I think the aesthetics and everything about it. But the point is that he was admiring it in relation to his culture and his, and his background. And this is, we’re going to get into this more. But this is the sort of the very point of post-colonialism. And the question that I’m posing for today, which is who speaks for whom? Right when we’re talking about representation. Matisse was going into Morocco and he was representing the people and the culture through his own lens, right? Which I think in and of itself. How can we, any of us do otherwise? The point being that for one, he was doing so I love this phrase here, the sovereign self-assurance. He was doing so actually from a position of privilege, right? So it wasn’t this kind of anthropological and sociological, don’t interfere with the culture kind of deal. Was, you know, I want to paint, I’m going to paint, right? So it was not at all x exploitative, but it was ignorant, for lack of a better word, because he was going about this in a way that he wanted without thinking about. The culture itself and how, and how he was depicting it. Okay, so that’s, that’s sort of the basis there, the basics of this idea of post-colonialism. And literally, right, It’s after colonialism deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. The term has been used by literary critics to discuss various cultural effects of colonization. So this idea of post-colonialism, depending on the field that you’re in or who your reading, can be very specific or it can be very bright. From my perspective. As an artist, I think of it very broadly. The idea of post-colonialism, I think not, not really different from the idea of postmodernism lends itself to a kind of chronology, right? By postmodernism comes after modernism, post-colonialism comes after colonialism. But I would say that once we get to this concept of post-colonialism, it is not for me, literally or technically after colonialism. Because I would find it very hard to say that although colonialism, as it existed, say in the 19th and 20th centuries, is not necessarily the same. That it still exist. I would say that this is a whole other conversation. But the capitalist economy that we live with right now is an expression of colonialism. What we see happening to communities of color today is an expression of colonialism. Not just this kind of base, racism, but just the idea of a hierarchy, right? And recall that that’s very much part of modernism. That there is in modernism. The kind of the haves and have-nots or those with the knowledge and those who don’t have the knowledge. And the system is very much structured to perpetuate, perpetuate that. So that’s where postcolonial, in fact gets three by political. Yeah, Even today. And it was very interesting. This is just an aside, but I was going to join a grant project. Which I ended up not doing. And then I found out afterwards. And this wasn’t why I didn’t do it. But I find out afterward that my component, which would have been on post-colonialism may have eliminated from consideration. And the grant. Apparently it was, it was a government organization. I can’t remember what it was. It wasn’t it wasn’t art specifically. But anyway, the the the funders, whoever was doing the grant, the granting, decided they were not going to find anything that address post-colonialism, right? So I mean, that’s how political I got it at, at 1. I’m going to talk more about that and contemporary, contemporary terms. But yeah, so I mean, you can see that like I said, there’s, there’s a lot to unpack with these concepts. And so this also I think, is a key, a key idea behind all of this. Some of you may know Bell Hooks. She does spell her name all lowercase like that. African American. I guess her background is literary theory. I’m not actually sure. But she writes about race sort of across the board. Race, gender, feminism. Anyway, this is a very important idea that she shares with us. It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse, which talks the most about heterogeneity, the de-centered subject. Declaring breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness still directs its critical voice primarily to a specialized audience that shares a common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims challenge. Okay. What does that mean? That means that that 990 three with me with all its so-called identity politics and all the work that was trying to include itself in this canon of art. Basically, all of that is working within the system. Okay, That’s what bell hooks is saying. She’s she’s like, how can we, oh shoot somebody. Somebody tell me whose, whose quote, This is perfect. You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. So one of you feminist scholars out there, somebody tell me who was it? Audre Lorde. All right. I’m sorry, I cannot not look this up because it’s too important. Dismantle submit going to beat me too big for me. All right. Okay, that’s basically what they say. You cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. We need to find another way. That’s kind of like defund the police, right? Which is not to say we’re actually taking money away from the police. It’s to say we are looking at how to reorganize the system so that the responsibility is shared and the police don’t have to shoulder all of these responsibilities that they do currently. And that makes their job very difficult. Again, see, it gets me really political and I’m trying not to do that, but I can’t help it. Okay. So how do we do that? Right. How do we not use the master’s tools when that’s all we’ve been taught, right? The only thing we know is the masters students. How, who’s going to teach us? He’s going to teachers other tools. Where, where are these other tools going to come from? That’s, that’s the question to think about. This is part of a series of work by the artist Martha Rosler. You can see this is from the mid-seventies. And the title of the series is the battery into inadequate descriptive systems. Martha Rosler lived in the Bowery. She became very active with fighting gentrification in the neighborhood because she recognized as many artists did, that. Artists moving into a neighborhood quickly invited gentrification of that neighborhood, right? Artists who have no money look for the cheapest places to live. They move in there, they make, we’re, suddenly it becomes a really good place. Developers are like, well, let’s, let’s build condos. And all of a sudden, people who are living there can no longer afford to live there, right? What Martha Rosler was doing in this particular work was trying not to speak for people who lived in the Bowery. Okay. So she felt that by photographing the individuals, like showing their faces. Like by her exhibiting or her showing the work that shows their faces. But she would somehow end up speaking for them. And by that, I understand it to mean that when we see a person who looks a particular way, we have our assumptions of who that person is and what that person may be about. Martha Rosler did not want to do that. Right? And what she did instead was she photographed kind of places. And you could see this is like kind of a close-up of a place. And then she gave us words that we might use to think about that place. It’s not unlike what we saw earlier with the work of Lorna Simpson. And carry me means now where they showed us now black individuals and then gave us words. Implicate our own thinking about how we how we understood those words relative to the images. Oh, she’s trying to do the opposite by not showing you the person. And then offering these words. She’s kind of saying these words apply to this, right? To what you see, not to the person. Does that makes sense? Because she doesn’t want to speak for the person. She’s not saying that the problems don’t exist. Right? She’s not trying to hide that. She’s just saying she’s not going to represent the person in this particular way. And here’s more of that particular series. Okay? So this may be where she would see an individual. And instead of taking an individual’s picture, she photographed the setting and then she offers us words. Now, it’s kind of easy to think of colonialism in terms of kind of global imperialism, right? France, England, all of that. But really one of the most glaring examples of colonialism that we, that we live with today is that of the Native Americans. And as we saw with some of the artists that we looked at from the eighties and nineties, we, Whitney, there’s a real concern. Language, and that’s the way they are, they are represented. And so we have American Indian artists who are using language almost more than other conventions to define who they are and what they’re about. This is actually from an article I didn’t give it to. You. Can remember the tunnel, but it has to do with photography and indigenous peoples. And this is a key idea that I’m pointing to here, which is that it’s not like Native Americans had a problem with photography per se, right? Or are having their picture taken, right? That old stereotype of the camera’s going to steal your soul or whatever. It’s, none of that. It’s much more practical and pragmatic. It was that this last answer, publicly, many feel they have to adopt a political position against photography to be careful of what they say or what others will say about them. Meaning, when an image, I’m going to jump ahead. When an image like this is published for public consumption. We can ask ourselves what, what is being told? Like, what is the story, what is the information that is being shared? And that, that recent reading that I gave you an international or national Geographic is awesome for that. It’s an awesome, awesome little piece for thinking about these issues. So I mean, basically get, sorry, I keep flipping back. But this idea of the relationship of this, then this example, Hopis to photography, has to do with this idea of representation. Like how are they being represented? And in that representation, how much is being left to the viewer to decide about the subject as opposed to the subject being able to provide a kind of necessary information to the viewer. Manifest destiny. Those of you study American history. Well, remember this concept, we’re actually doctrine. It was literally kind of mandate. That part. Why did somebody say something? Anyway, this idea that Americans, the colonists, had a right. To move westward, right? The concept was invoked, this justification for the Spanish-American War. The US had the duty and the right to expand historic galleries and influence throughout North America. I mean, that’s basically, it’s this idea of civilizing the brown people. And I think I mentioned to you before the schools that American Indian children were placed and that basically kind of taught them to be like white kids. Taught them that culture. Okay, So there’s this concern for imagery. I just like this image. I can’t even remember where this came from. Yeah. So this is, this is that idea that regardless of what the image shows, the viewer has already received a certain level information about the subject. And then bring those ideas to the image, which is why the representation is so problematic, right? Also this idea that photography tells the truth somehow. And again, we’ll see that with National Geographic issue. These are images, obviously American Indian people. And I mean, I think one of the things that you can ask yourselves as you see these kinds of images is sort of what, what comes to mind. And that is, the image of the Indian in American culture is such that the, the American Judaism cells did not want to be represented. So as to kind of further, further these ideas, this idea of truth. And then of course there’s just the stereotypes that I portray. And so you can sort of relate these kinds of images to the texts that we looked at. Some Kipling and from Conrad, right? And you might recall. Also that the piece by Jimmie Durham, which show vocabulary and how certain vocabulary will be applied to Indians. And another vocabulary was applied to mainstream white society itself. When we say representation matters or when people say representation matters, I think we need to be consistent and understanding what matters about the representation. I mean, would we rather not see representation of American Indians or have this representation, right? That’s sort of where does part of the question anyway. So, okay, this is the National Geographic piece that I’ve referred to, which I just think is kind of amazing. So this was in April I believe, April of 2018. Now you can see the citation down there. The entire issue was about race. And the editors of National Geographic decided that they could not have an issue about race without examining their own culpability in perpetuating racist ideas. Okay, and when you hear about mainstream culture or white culture, working hard to sort of undo, undo this racist history. This, this would, to my mind is an example of that. It’s very hard to, I think, acknowledge racism. In any case this is, I find this fascinating. So this is just a little quote from that. Until 19 seventies nasa geographic all but ignored people of color who live in the United States, rarely acknowledging, acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile, the magazine picture natives quote unquote elsewhere as exotic, famously and frequently unclothed, happy Hunters, noble savages, every type of project, right? And so that’s going all the way back to Matisse. If you’re familiar with Gauguin’s painting from Tahiti. All of that. Let me even Van Gogh’s interest in Japanese prints. The Europeans who traveled to other countries were really enthralled by other cultures. And again, it was not exploiting. It was not malicious. It was just, I think ignorant. They were approaching other cultures from this position of privilege and not recognizing how that privilege was affecting their perspectives, right? So anyway, this is what essentially National Geographic did. Nasa geographic looked at its work. And it said, You know, we are totally guilty of presenting Africa, this vast, diverse continent in a particular way. Think yeah, they were talking about I can’t remember what the incident was now. Something in South Africa. They did a story on South Africa. And you can see this quote, there are no voices of black South Africans. That absence is as important as what is in there. The only black people, the only black people in the article, they actually like doing exotic dancers. They’re servants or workers. It’s bizarre actually consider what the editors writers have photographers had to consciously not see it. Okay? And when they say they consciously did not see these things, I don’t think it was, again, malicious, Right? It wasn’t this idea of all these black Africans there. They’re inferior to us, their animals, blah, blah, blah. It wasn’t that, it was just simply an inability to see the bigger picture. That sounds oversimplified. But I mean, that’s, that’s part of the problem, right? Overall. With this kind of racism is that it just becomes a natural part of how you see the world. Therefore, you can’t really be critical of it. And that’s what National Geographic did, was it turned its lands on itself as a way to be critical of it’s own practice. I would be interesting if somebody do a study of how how the magazine may have changed since this issue? I haven’t seen anything like that, but it would be curious. See, James Clifford is an anthropologist and he actually wrote on, you can see this is a quote from an essay notes on traveling theory. He had this travel theory basically. And it’s this idea. Well, I’ll just read it. Location here is not a matter of finding a stable home or of discovering a common experience. Rather, it is a matter of being aware of the difference that makes a difference. In concrete situations. Recognizing the various inscriptions places our histories that both empower and inhibit the construction of theoretical categories like women, patriarchy, or colonization. Categories essential to political action, as well as serious comparative knowledge. What he’s saying, I think kind of in a nutshell, is that the idea of place. When we think of when we think of a place, we have to somehow be able to be open to how the people of that place see it and not how we see it through our length. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t see if violence, I mean, we do, right, We can’t help but do that. The real issue is, can we also expand how we see this place, right? I think we’re going to look at a film that I think really illustrates these ideas very well. So just to show you, I’m going to call these post-colonial responses. In a way. These are, obviously, these aren’t native artists, I think actually may have seen some of this already. These are, these are native artists and they are addressing the issue of place, their place, right? This is a billboard. Actually, I’m not sure that the piece itself, it’s based on a billboard that talks about Obama and totally disregards any aspect of native presence. And so this piece, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the artist’s name. I’m not sure if it’s Zake. I don’t think it’s sick. When I might have notes on this. So this is a kind of obviously scrapbook piece. This is the artist here in the center, the, the main, the main image. It’s a very long name. Her last name is sin t. Like I said, it’s on I will put these names in the notes for you. When I, when I post the lecture recording, there’s a, I think Zig we looked at before. Again, kind kind of re presenting place as a way of acknowledging the Native American claim to the land. Right, which is widely, widely overlooked. I came across an article recently, if I can find it, I’ll share with you. I just think it was really interesting. It has to do with the practice that I didn’t know about. And I actually experienced this past weekend at a symposium. It was, the article was talking about. I forget how they phrased it. But they were analogize a, this practice to the presentation of pronouns. Pronouns have become right. Giving one’s pronoun is fairly convention at this point. But also, academics have been doing this other thing which I did not know about, which is that they, in presenting at conferences or other kinds of toxic things. They acknowledge the land that they are on. So they’ll say, I want to acknowledge that I’m speaking to you from so and so land owned by so and so tribe or whatever. Pretty fascinating. But the article itself really called out that practice and said it was like a double violation. Yeah. I mean, it was it …