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ANNOTATING ART'S HISTORIES

Introduction

series editor, Kobena Mercer

The Annotating Art’s History series was initiated by Kobena Mercer with inIVA (Institute of International Visual Arts) and MIT Press as co-publishers, following his role as Writer in Residence at inIVA in 2002, where he carried out an ‘intellectual audit’ of their programme of activities since their inception in 1994. Consisting of four volumes, the Annotating Art’s History publications strand foreground cross-cultural perspectives among established and emerging scholars in the field of historical studies of 20th century art. The theoretical basis for the editorial platform of the series was developed in two chapter-length essays devoted primarily to African American and Black British materials: ‘Iconography After Identity’ [2001], in David A Bailey, Ian Baucom and Sonia Boyce eds, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp.49-58, and ‘Diaspora Aesthetics and Visual Culture’ [1999, in Harry Elam and Kennel Jackson eds, Black Cultural Traffic, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005, pp.141-161. The editorial framework for the series is designed to address the gaps arising from monocultural tendencies in traditional art historiography and theoreticist tendencies in the visual culture paradigm, both of which reinforce the de-historicised conception of ‘diversity’ that tends to prevail in this field of study.

Each volume in the series has been organised on a thematic or topic-led basis and was preceded by a closed symposium in which contributors reviewed the literature and debates surrounding each chosen focus. The following capsule descriptions summarise Mercer’s individual chapter contributions in relation to both the evolution of his own research activities and to the added value that each volume embodies as an intervention in the discipline of art history and the contemporary practice of critical art writing.

Kobena Mercer ed., Cosmopolitan Modernism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press / 
London: inIVA, 2005, 208 pp., 30 color illustrations. 
ISBN-10: 0-262-63321-3. ISBN-13: 978-0-262-63321-5

Cosmopolitan Modernism, the first book in the Annotating Art’s Histories series, revisits the period in which modernist attitudes took shape, examining the ways in which a shared history of art and ideas was experienced in different nations and cultures. Joining cultural studies debates that have sought to re-think the ‘cosmopolitan’ from the bottom-up, this volume addresses the notion of the modern artist as world-citizen. Original essays by leading art historians and curators trace the dynamic interplay of cultures across the story of modern art, looking at moments of crisis and innovation in modernism’s cross-cultural past, from constructivism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism to neo-concrete art. Contributions include an interview with Professor Emeritus Partha Mitter on the reception of modernism in India; an exposition of the aesthetic philosophy of C.L.R James; and the first English translation of the influential essay, ‘Theory of the Non-Object,’ by Brazilian poet and writer Ferrra Gullar (1959). Mercer’s chapter examines the problem-solving trajectory pursued by Romare Bearden from the 1930s to the 1960s, demonstrating how the collage principle of his Photomontage Projections (1964 onwards) resolved issues in ‘The Negro Artist’s Dilemma’ that were theorised in 1946.

Contents:

  • ‘Introduction’, Kobena Mercer, pp.6-23
  • ‘Reflections on Modern Art and National Identity in Colonial India: An Interview’, Partha Mitter, pp.24-49
  • ‘White Walls, White Skins: Cosmopolitanism and Colonialism in Inter-war Modernist Architecture’, Paul Overy, pp.50-67
  • ‘Surrealism Faced with Cultural Difference’, Michael Richardson, pp.68-85
  • ‘The Post-modern Modernism of Wifredo Lam’, Lowery Stokes Sims, pp.86-101
  • ‘Norman Lewis: ‘How to Get Black’’, Ann Eden Gibson, pp.102-123
  • ‘Romare Bearden, 1964: Collage as Kunstwollen’, Kobena Mercer, pp.124-145
  • ‘C.L.R. James as a Critical Theorist of Modernist Art’, David Craven, pp.146-167
  • ‘Neoconcretism and Minimalism: On Ferreira Gullar’s Theory of the Non-Object’, Michael Asbury , pp.168-189

Kobena Mercer ed., Discrepant Abstraction, Cambridge, MA:MIT Press / 
London: inIVA, 2006, 224 pp., 29 illustrations, 
ISBN-10: 0-262-63337-X. ISBN-13:978-0-262-63337-6

Discrepant Abstraction is hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange. It includes almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for artistic purity. Drawing on the concept of ‘discrepant engagement’ in the literary model of cross-cultural studies proposed by Nathaniel Mackey, this second volume in the Annotating Art’s Histories series alters our understanding of abstract art as a signifier of modernity by revealing the multiple directions it has taken in wide-ranging international contexts.

Impure, imperfect, and incomplete, the version of abstraction that emerges from this global journey shows how the formal ingenuity of abstract art has been cross-fertilized, from abstract expressionism onwards, by creative discrepancies that arise when disparate visual languages are brought into dialogue. Contributions span from Malevich’s monochromes, through Yves Klien and Robert Rauschenberg to in-depth studies of materials originating in Hong Kong, Sudan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran as well as in Asian American, Canadian, Australian and Caribbean contexts. Mercer’s chapter follows on from his essay, ‘Frank Bowling’s Map Painting’ in Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell eds. Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, Venice and London: Forum for African Arts, Prince Claus Fund, inIVA, 2003, 139-149; here, the use of abstraction to address trauma in the diasporic formation of Caribbean subjectivity is explored by way of the concept of ‘fossil identities’ proposed by novelist Wilson Harris, who was also the subject of a commissioned interview in the book’s closing chapter by Nathaniel Mackey.

Contents:

  • ‘Introduction’, Kobena Mercer, pp.6-29
  • ‘Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-colonial Approach to “American” Art’, David Craven, pp.30-51
  • ‘To Avoid the Inscrutable: Abstract Expressionism and the “Oriental Mode”’, Stanley K. Abe, pp.52-73
  • ‘Abstraction and Modern Chinese Art’, David Clarke, pp.74-93
  • ‘Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism’, Iftikhar Dadi, pp.94-115
  • ‘Abstraction as Infection and Cure’, Mark A. Cheetham, pp.116-133
  • ‘Autobiography of an (Ex) Coloured Surface: Monochrome and Liminality’, Angeline Morrison, pp.134-153
  • ’’It’s Not Enough to Say “Black is Beautiful”’: Abstraction at the Whitney, 1969-1974’, Kellie Jones, pp.154-181
  • ‘Black Atlantic Abstraction: Aubrey Williams and Frank Bowling’, Kobena Mercer, pp.182-205
  • ‘Quantum Ghosts: An Interview with Wilson Harris’, Nathaniel Mackey, pp.206-221

The third volume in the Annotating Art’s Histories series is the forthcoming Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007). Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures examines pop art through a post-colonial lens that expands the study of ‘high’ and ‘low’ boundaries to include artistic practices in Third World settings that employ vernacular sources to question categories of ‘folk,’ ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in relation to issues associated with the visual realm of consumerism. Contributors include Geeta Kapur, Colin Richards, Gavin Butt, Sonia Salzstein, Martina Koppel-Yang, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto and Holly Barnet-Sanchez. Mercer’s essay, ‘Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant Garde’, draws on the analytic methods of M. Bakhtin to examine the dialogical principle in African American art history, with reference to the appropriation of stereotypes, the parody of history painting and the practice of critical ‘debasement’ in works since the late 1960s and early 1970s by Betye Saar, Robert Colescott and David Hammons.

Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (forthcoming, 2008) is the final volume in the Annotating Art’s Histories series, re-traversing the chronological terrain of the first volume by mapping art since 1900 in light of migration and displacement as key characteristics of 20th century art. Ruth Phillips and Ian McLean question the ‘apprenticeship’ model in Native North American and Australian Aboriginal histories; Steven Mansbach documents the influence of emigre art historials from Central Europe in American universities after 1945; Ikem Stanley Okoye offers a case study of modernist architecture in Nigeria in the 1920s; Sieglinde Lemke accounts for diasporic forms of modernism and postmodernism in close readings of Aaron Douglas and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Amna Malik and Jean Fisher address migrant aesthetics in practices from the 1970s and 1980s. Mercer’s, ‘Black Britain: Three Moments in Diaspora Formation,’ examines three international arts festivals—in Sengal 1966, in Guyana 1972 and in Nigeria 1977—arguing that de-historicised narratives of ‘black British arts’ are predicated on a misfit between the nation-state model in art history and the ex-centric logic of belonging embodied in modern diaspora formations. The specific problems associated with conceptualising ‘Black Britain’ were addressed in Mercer’s 2006 keynote at Howard University, ‘Diaspora Didn’t Happen in a Day: Reflections on Aesthetics and Time,’ in Victoria Arana ed, Black British Aesthetics Today, Cambridge Scholars Press (forthcoming, 2007).

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