Artl@s Bulletin

Volume 6
Article 6
Issue 1 Art History and the Global Challenge

2017

Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical

Perspective
Patrick D. Flores
University of the Philippines, [email protected]

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 The Global Challenge

Art History and the Global Challenge:

A Critical Perspective

Patrick D. Flores *
University of the Philippines

Abstract
The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have
become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the
impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it
materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we
nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new
practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic
traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions,
and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline.
This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow
and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the
Global challenge.

* Patrick D. Flores is Professor of Art Studies at the Department of Art Studies at the University of
the Philippines, which he chaired from 1997 to 2003. Flores is also Curator of the Vargas Museum
in Manila, and Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. He was one of the curators
of Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art (2000), and the Gwangju Biennale
(Position Papers) in 2008. He was a Visiting Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C. in 1999 and an Asian Public Intellectuals Fellow in 2004. Among his publications are Painting
History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (1999); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and
the National Museum (2006); and Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (2008). He was a
grantee of the Asian Cultural Council (2010); a member of the Advisory Board of the exhibition
The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 (2011), organized by the Center for Art and
Media in Karlsruhe; and a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council (2011). He co-
edited the Southeast Asian issue with Joan Kee for Third Text (2011). On behalf of the Clark
Institute and the Department of Art Studies of the University of the Philippines, Flores organized
the conference “Histories of Art History in Southeast Asia” in Manila.

32 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2017)

 Flores – Art History and the Global Challenge

1. In your mind, is there today a global field of 3. What is, or could be, the role of the Internet
Art History? Since the publication of James and the digital in this globalization?
Elkin's Is Art history Global? in 2006, art
I think it is critical in opening up networks and
history has become more international, but has
facilitating the dissemination of knowledge. It
the discipline really opened to non-Western
becomes part of a new archive of the art historical
(non-North-Atlantic) contributions?
or the material life of the current world.
I think there is a field of global art history, but only
if we reconceptualize the notion of the global and
recalibrate the registers of the discipline of art 4. What is the impetus for this globalization?
history. Such an effort to reconceptualize and Does it only rest on art historians’ willingness
recalibrate is not motivated by the project of and political engagement? Or has the global
inclusion or extension; it rather acknowledges the approach also become a career strategy? Do
limits of the current norm and tries to begin the demands from our universities, which seek
elsewhere or be attentive to a different range of to attract more international students and
materials to constitute both the global and the art incite us to publish internationally, have a real
historical. It is a deconstructive and a foundational impact on research?
maneuver: to initiate post-colonial critique and to This anxiety for global art history conditions a
transcend the critique so that a different different subjectivity, a different art historical
theoretical cosmos comes into being. So it’s not agent who does research and circulates
just a matter of opening up to the non-western. It knowledge. In other words, a different subject is
rethinks the western and how supposedly the non- formed, speaking a language and interacting with
western has constituted it and in fact should feel other people in different conditions of
entitled to its own promise of emancipation, in its intersubjectivity. How this subject mediates
capacity to renew itself. universities or curricula is contingent on the
subjectivity.

2. Would you say that there are platforms

(conferences, journals, blogs, etc.) which play a 5. Is Art History still dominated today by the
more important role than others in the “continental frame of art historical narratives,”
internationalization of Art History? so much so that the globalization of art history
I can mention Third Text as an important platform. is in fact the hegemony of a Western way of
The recent endeavors of Clark Institute and Getty thinking history, art, and the history of art,
Research Institute have been significant in this rather than a diversification of thinking
regard. paradigms? More generally, what do you think
of the phrase “continental way of thinking”?
In the west, the work of Hans Belting in terms of
writing art history, curating contemporary Unfortunately, it is still dominated by the canon.
exhibitions, and developing links across continents This can only mean that the efforts to expand are
has been crucial. And I am sure that the processes not enough and are only productive at a certain
of weaving the narratives of art in various level. There should be more collaborations
ecologies of art making contribute to this field of between colleagues and disciplines to produce a
art history even if they are not collected under its more idiosyncratic narrative of sensible life and
auspices. not only art as we know it.

The Global Challenge 33 ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2017)

 Flores – Art History and the Global Challenge

6 - Have we, as art historians, progressed in the could adapt these ideas to Art History and its
‘decolonization’ of our points of view (I am globalization? Do you notice, in your own
referring here to the ideas of Walter Mignolo scholarly, editorial, or critical work, a
and Boaventura de Sousa Santos)? To speak of multiplicity of strategies and discourses from
“global Art History,” is it still germane to use the local to the global?
frames of interpretation inherited from the
Yes, it is a question of latitude and coordinates.
reception of thinkers such as Bourdieu,
How does one map out the global? How does one
Derrida, or Foucault, and that have been
connect? How does one weave into matrices of
pervasive in postcolonial approaches since the
relations? These are the questions.
1980s, and the binary vulgate often derived
from their writings. Should we, and can we, go
beyond the models dominant/dominated, 8. To conclude, what you see as the most
canon/margins, center/peripheries? important challenges facing the international
The binaries are important at a certain phase or field of Art History today?
level of analysis. But they have to be rethought in It is method. The procedure of sensing material
the process. In responding to this question, I might and worlding it with urgency and sympathy.
have to invoke Brecht’s notion of refunctioning. In
a context of combined and uneven modes of
production, it is necessary I think to re-possess
whatever device that can be transformed and
make things happen in very unlikely places.
Moreover, a new theoretical vernacular should
also emerge, one that is honed in the post-colonial
crucible, taking liberties with English and at the
same time risking the untranslatability of certain
lexicons.

7. In the history of global circulations of art,

there have been many Souths and many
Norths. Circulations are not as hierarchized
and vertical as a quick and easy postcolonial
approach could suggest (cf. the convincing
positions of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and
Michel Espagne). Working in the perspective of
cultural transfers and geo-history, one sees
very well that through their circulations, ideas
about art, and the receptions of artworks
change greatly—the artworks also change,
according to what Arjun Appadurai calls the
‘social life of object.’ A transfer from the North
to the South can be used by the South in local
strategies that will not necessarily benefit
what comes from the North. Do you think one

ARTL@S BULLETIN, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2017) 34 The Global Challenge