Teaching

Art & Design History

21st-Century Art History:

Global Reception

Contents
Janet Tatlock Catherine King Devangana Desai Crispin Branfoot Natasha Eaton Michael Moore Emma Loosley Thomas A Dowson Stephanie Koerner Preface Introduction Conventional and New Approaches to Art History in India Where on Earth is South Asia? Studying the arts of India in 21st-century Britain Art History, Globalisations and Sly Multiculturalism in the Academy The Secret History of Ceramic or The reluctant history of an applied art Art History and Cultural Belonging in Contemporary Syria Teaching the Art of Africa The End of Art' or Iconoclash: Crises of Representation and Attempts to Globalise the New Art History 2 3 5 11 16 20 24 30 34

Preface

his publication is the result of collaboration between the Association of Art Historians and the ADM-HEA at the Association of Art Historians 2005 Annual Conference Conception: Reception held in Bristol. I am grateful too for the financial contribution of the Archaeology section of HCAHEA that resulted in the inclusion of colour illustrations on the cover. The session that Cath King and I convened represented a desire to offer the opportunity to explore how recent attempts to globalise art history had impacted on research and on teaching and learning strategies. The sponsorship of our keynote speaker Devangana Desai by ADM-HEA enabled us to present the issues from an alternative global perspective and we were honoured to have her contribution.

The papers and abstracts included here offer just a snapshot of some of the much wider debates that are being undertaken in our discipline, many of which were stimulated by the GLAADH project. In addition, there is a paper from Michael Moore, who was not able to attend the conference. His paper explores some of the implications of what he terms practorians. Finally, my thanks to Jannet King, who has been so patient as the material for this publication has been brought together.

JANET TATLOCK
University of Manchester Art & Design History Subject Co-ordinator ADM-HEA

copyright the authors Published in 2006 by the Association of Art Historians and ADM-HEA.

Copies available free on request from: ADM-HEA University of Brighton 68 Grand Parade Brighton BN2 9JY UK adm@heacademy.ac.uk

Cover photographs Top: Devangana Desai Apsaras or surasundaris, celestial female figures, Vishvanatha Temple, Khajuraho, CE 999 Bottom: Thomas Dowson Leopards carved in ivory with copper inlay. On display in the British Museum, London

Copy editing, design and layout: Jannet King ed-bulletin@aah.org.uk Printed by The Print House, Brighton, Tel: 01273 325667

Introduction
Only when a multiplicity of perspectives exist, in dialogue, but with none granted in advance any particular priority, can we talk of art history as having become globalised, as a discipline. Globalisation requires an insight into the local nature of meaning, which rules out the possibility of a panoptic mastering viewpoint. David Clarke, Contemporary Asian Art and its Reception, Third Text, 16, 2002, pp23742 especially p241. minority. However, our experience with Glaadh was that about a quarter of the institutions teaching an art history degree in the UK were in a position to act as mentors and encouragers in the enterprise, while roughly another quarter were interested in making experimental changes to their teaching programmes. So, by 2003 half the departments in the sector had either shifted or were in the process of altering their policies to look beyond traditional geographical boundaries. One problem voiced during Glaadh conferences was the worry that core concepts and methods in the curriculum might be squeezed out of the timetable if new fields were explored. Yet, including new perspectives in cultural terms can arguably enhance teaching of core issues in historiography as two of our papers (those by Desai and Eaton) demonstrate. Equally, basic studies, such as techniques, genres, patronage, collecting, the art market, and display, could valuably include research concerning traditions other than the more conventionally taught European ones (as discussed by Branfoot and Dowson). One question addressed in this publication, therefore, is that of how art history is taught in areas outside the context of the UK. In this respect we are able to hear the views of Devangana Desai on Teaching History of Art in India with particular reference to Ancient Art. Desai is Visiting Professor at the Ananthacharya Indological Research Institute at the University of Mumbai. Desai stresses that teaching art made in Ancient India means explaining the complex interactions between ancient texts on aesthetic responses, and data about religious beliefs, dance, music and yogic practices. While colonial and nationalist historians have interpreted ancient art as relatively static and produced by anonymous artists, researchers working since independence have increasingly employed inscriptions and other texts to question these assumptions and to chart changes in the role of religious art and in the relationships between artists and patrons. This methodology requires rigorous socio-historical studies, which should inform an object-based approach, teaching the paramount value of scrutinising buildings and sculptures, and making deductions about them on site. As a complement to Desais paper on Indian historiography, Natasha Eaton scrutinises the way in which different academic traditions in the UK and the USA have pursued research into the arts of the Indian subcontinent. Eaton, who specialises in the

he purpose of the session held at the Association of Art Historians annual conference in Bristol, April 2005, was to continue the debate that had been the focus of the recent Higher Education Funding Council project Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History (Glaadh). That project had taken place between 2001 and 2003 and aimed to encourage art history departments to increase their consideration of issues of cultural congruencies and diversities in the curriculum. The project was led by Professor Craig Clunas, who was then at the University of Sussex. He invited Middlesex University and the Open University to join Sussex in a consortium to run the project. I became involved in broadening the curriculum with reference to issues of cultural similarities and differences through the work I had done as editor and author of an Open University teaching text entitled Views of Difference: different views of art (Yale University Press, 1999 ). This represented one sixth of a 60-credit point course at level 2, which was an introduction to some approaches to art history. As a consequence, I had some experience of the benefits of widening the teaching programme. At the final Glaadh Conference we agreed that we would keep the momentum going, by holding occasional sessions at our annual conferences. This was the first such session. I should emphasise that we used the ambiguous term globalising in the project title solely because it made a good acronym. But in actually running the project, we preferred to talk in terms of encouraging the introduction of a less Eurocentric curriculum. The aims of this session therefore drew on the aims of the Glaadh project: To carry on encouraging the introduction of less Eurocentric teaching and research programmes; To carry on discussing the problems and benefits linked with broadening the field of study It is often assumed that an interest in widening the curriculum to include discussion of cultural congruence and diversity is the interest of a small

21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

study of Indian and Colonial Culture, entitled her paper Art History, Globalisations and Sly Multiculturalism in the Academy. She suggests that UK pedagogy has not yet freed itself from certain post-colonial assumptions. This paper highlights the importance of encouraging reflexivity in the study of art histories. In Where is South Asia. Studying the arts of India in 21st century Britain. Crispin Branfoot explores how studies of Indian art can make an ample contribution to many core issues in the art history curriculum in the UK. Branfoot specialises in the history of Hindu temple architecture and sculpture, in Tamil Nadu, from the fourteenth century onwards. However, in his paper he explores a much wider field to demonstrate how a great diversity of examples of art made in India could be used in theme-based courses dealing with approaches to, for instance, portraiture, narrative or landscape. He also shows how they could be employed in a more concentrated way to examine change over time in one broad tradition, and to analyse the way art and architecture functioned in particular societies. Branfoot shows that the consideration of core issues can be expedited effectively by sampling a variety of traditions. Tom Dowson complements Branfoots paper in his consideration of Benin Art and its reception in Britain Today. Specialising in research in the field of archaeological approaches to art, Dowson has studied the rock arts of Southern Africa, North America and Western Europe. This paper, however, focuses on exploring the ways a study of the Benin bronzes has multi-faceted value for the enterprise of broadening the curriculum. The history of the contestation over who owns the Benin sculptures and their meanings, is just as important as the reconstruction of the interpretations of their makers and first viewers. The two final papers look at the benefits (Loosely) and the problems (Koerner) of widening the curriculum. Emma Loosleys paper, Art History and Cultural Belonging in Contemporary Syria analyses the benefits for the local communities of the new narratives of cultural and political identities that arise from research into ancient monuments. Loosleys research field comprises Oriental Christian Art, Architecture and Archaeology. She explores the ways in which the excavation of early Christian Aramaic churches in Syria means giving Christian communities in the area new understanding of their ancient roots. While art history may sometimes be thought of as a decorative activity enhancing leisure pursuits, or underpinning elite collecting policies, research in this field could have profound religious and political import for local societies whose ancestors had made the buildings and who still worshipped in some of them .An understanding of such consequences could in turn inform students responses. In contrast, Stephanie Koerner, probes some of the problems entailed in the term globalisation to describe new directions in the curriculum. Koerner researches in the field of Archaeology and the History of the Philosophy of Science, and her paper The End of Art or Iconoclash: Crises of Representation and Attempts to Globalise the New Art History uses examples drawn from teaching a new MA course entitled Debates in PreColombian and Latin American Visual Culture Studies. She asked how ideologies have legitimated the oppression of minorities. The last decade has seen an increase in interest in images of globalisation and multi-culturalism. However, there are considerable pitfalls facing any attempt to globalise the field of art history. What are these challenges and how does the notion of iconoclash bear on these problems?

CATHERINE KING

Conventional and New Approaches to Art History in India

DEVANGANA DESAI

n this paper I will briefly examine trends in the teaching of the history of Indian art in some of the Indian universities, before going on to make suggestions on the way it could be taught.

How Indian art is taught

Ancient and medieval art is taught under the auspices of the departments of History, Archaeology and Ancient Indian Culture, as well as Art History and Aesthetics. There is an emphasis on study of style and form, attribution of works to schools and regional styles. Iconography is an important subject and will remain so in India as numerous images of gods and goddesses are found in temples. In recent times, miniature painting, tribal, folk, popular and modern art have found a place in the curriculum, while ancient art and architecture have lost their earlier importance. Recently, I had an opportunity to visit the Art History and Aesthetics Department of the M S University of Baroda in western India. The history of Indian art is taught here, along with western art history and applied arts of sculpture and painting. Professors and students are familiar with the living traditions of arts and crafts. Rural and tribal arts are incorporated in the curriculum. Classes are offered at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels. This department has a grounding in Sanskrit language and ancient textual sources of sculpture and architecture, as well as in modern art and art criticism. There are art history specialisation courses as well as classes for general students. The time period of the studies on sculpture, painting and architecture is vast; the studies begin with the Harappan culture (2300 BCE) or the protohistoric period, and give considerable importance to contemporary arts. Modern Indian art as well as South East Asian art are included in the curriculum. There are 22 lectures a year on each of the subjects. Seminars are regularly held and proceedings printed. There is an Art History Archive, consisting of 60,000 photographs and colour plates and about 30,000 colour transparencies of works of art from various cultures of the world, which include special documentation of Indian painting, sculpture and architecture. This visual material is used during the lectures. In the Baroda art history department there is a growing interest in questions of caste, class, gender, sexualities, and socio-political dynamics. One notices a shift in the approach to the discipline of art

history from the conventional art-object oriented approach entailing issues of authorship, connoisseurship, attribution and chronology to a framework-oriented approach, which shift[s] attention to political, social, economic structures that under-gird the production of art.1 The Baroda art historians are moving towards a New Art History. Some other universities in India teach the history of Indian art, including the Punjab University at Chandigarh, Chitrakala Parishad, Bangalore, Chamaraja University, Mysore, the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, Calcutta University and Banaras Hindu University. The Shantiniketan University in eastern India teaches mainly history of world art, without specialisation in Indian art. The Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, offers a wide range of topics for dissertations, both traditional and contemporary, which include popular, mass-produced art, modern architecture, films and digital art. I saw the syllabus for the MA in the History of Art taught at Banaras Hindu University under Ancient Indian History, Culture & Archaeology. Historical background and basic teaching on Ancient Indian architecture and sculpture are taken care of with a conventional approach. Town planning, stupa architecture, temple architecture and sculpture are included in the curriculum. Students are taken out to visit sites, for instance to Sarnath, to see the art of the Gupta period. The Mumbai University does not have a separate department of Art History, but teaches Indian art under Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology. More recently, since 1999, an interesting curriculum is offered in the Art and Aesthetics (diploma) course under the Department of Philosophy. Aesthetic and religious background is emphasised in this course. An understanding of the philosophical and religious tenets of the period and ages forms the backbone of this study, as its website (www.aesthetics-rashmipoddar.com) states. The Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islamic, colonial and modern arts are included in the curriculum. Classes are held in the premises of the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai, and students have opportunity of visiting museum galleries. Without giving further details of teaching art history in different universities of India, we can say that broadly speaking there are two approaches:

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 21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

1 The conventional, associated with indology, archaeology and museology, focusing on stylistic analysis of art, dating of works, iconographic and narrative studies, and 2 What is called New Art History, with a framework-oriented approach to art, seeking to raise questions about the economic, political and social implications of art that enable the resituation of Art History among the Social Sciences, as Shivaji Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar of Baroda University mention in their Introduction to Towards New Art History. accordance with the convention of presenting a tree rather than according to what he actually sees or as it is in reality.3 The ancient Indian approach to the human body is influenced by the discipline of Yoga, yogic breath, and by the perspective of dance. There is no depiction of muscles and anatomical details. The interrelationship of arts performing and visual is emphasised in ancient Indian texts. One of the wellknown Sanskrit treatises, the 6th-century Vishnudharmottara Purana, states that in order to learn visual arts (painting and sculpture), the student should learn dance and music, for the principles of these arts govern visual arts. Similarly, the theory of Rasa, aesthetic emotion, considered to be the essence of art, and mentioned in the Natyashastra of Bharata of the 3rd century CE, needs to be taken into account while teaching Indian art, which is, to some extent, being done in Indian universities. Professor B N Goswamys exposition of Rasa in relation to visual arts is interesting.4 However, it should be remembered that originally the concept of Rasa applied to literary and dramatic arts and that not all categories of visual art arouse Rasa or aesthetic emotion. Religious icons are not Rasa-producing. The aim of the artist in creating an icon is not to elicit Rasa but to aid the devotee in a religious experience, a personal union with God, as Doris Chatham clarifies in her article, Rasa and Sculpture.5 Recently, Richard Davis in an article Devotional Aesthetics and Temple Icons, has drawn attention to devotional aesthetics of medieval south India, which considers the emotional experiences of devotee-poets in order to understand how Indian audiences would have seen and responded to all the objects we designate as Indian art.6 In its identification of the icon with a divine presence that extends beyond the object and its advocacy of a deeply interested interaction with the object, devotional aesthetics distinguishes itself from the Kantian aesthetics of art-as-such that has dominated modern Western understandings and institutions of art. Social history of art In the beginning of the art history course, some lectures can be organised to give an idea of the social history of art, or of a socio-historical approach to art. Students should be familiar with the basic social background of art. Art activity is a social process in which the artist, the work of art and the art public are interacting elements. The social history of art explores the dynamics of the relationship between the patron and public, the artist and the work of art in the context of the social formation of a given period of history.7

How Indian art could be taught

Since the 19th century, when the history of art and architecture was written by archaeologists and engineers of the East India Company, it has been dominated by ideas of the superiority of Greece and the western standards of perspective.2 This approach has now been abandoned. In recent times Indian terminology of ancient architectural texts is being employed to describe monuments. Interpretative studies of texts by architectural historians in co-operation with practising traditional architects (sthapatis) have played an important part in identifying the terminology of various components of the temple, from the plinth to spirefinial. While I do not completely disregard the writings on Indian art by colonial writers such as Sir Alexander Cunningham, because they provide detailed accounts of the sites and monuments, I would certainly disagree with colonial historians in their views of Greek superiority to Indian art and other value judgements. The work done by colonial historians has been generally archaeological and historical, discussing chronological problems. This is useful, but one-sided, in that they have not taken into consideration aesthetic and symbolic aspects of Indian art, and its socio-cultural background. On Indian Aesthetics As Partha Mitter writes in his Preface to Indian Art, The interesting question is not what Indian art shares with western art, but how it differs from it. This point of difference in arts of diverse cultures is important to bear in mind while teaching Indian art. Ananda Coomaraswamy, nationalist historian of art in the first half of the 20th century, differentiated the approach to art as manifest in Indian culture from that of the West on the basis of their differing relationships with nature. His exposition of the Indian view of art helps us to understand the disregard or lack of scientific perspective in Indian art. His study draws attention to the hold of types in the presentation of an object. The traditional artist would present a tree in painting or sculpture in

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ART HISTORY IN INDIA

Recently, historians, in particular Professor R N Misra and his colleagues, have researched ancient Indian artists and their institutional set-up, based on epigraphical and textual material.8 Their study gives us an actual or concrete situation as regards the ancient artists, and their status in society. This material would help us to comment on the ahistorical and ideal picture of artists portrayed by nationalist historians such as Coomaraswamy and E B Havell, who said that the traditional artist was not interested in self-expression and remained anonymous. Instead of accepting a static and ideal picture of artists from the Brahmanic texts, we need to study texts in their historical contexts. The ancient Indian society was not static, as was generally assumed by colonial and nationalist historians. In post-Independence India, social historians Professor R S Sharma9 Professor Romila Thapar10 and others have drawn attention to different stages or periods in Ancient Indian history based on differing socio-economic conditions. The three broad periods in which the social milieu of ancient Indian art can be examined are11: c. 300 BCE CE 500 c. CE 500 900 c. CE 900 1300 Thus, in the period c.300 BCE CE 500, the period of heightened trade, commodity production and urban prosperity, the position of craftsmen improved considerably and money could be invested with their guilds, as we know from inscriptions. The urban or nagaraka class, consisting of merchants, traders, and artisans as well as common people and royal families, mainly patronised art. But in the period c. CE 500 900, when trade and commodity production was on decline, the samanta or feudal culture replaced the urban nagaraka culture. In the period CE 900 1300, the craftsmen could be pressurised to forced labour, though some of them were honoured with feudal titles and joined the feudal order. The inscriptions on numerous temple walls eulogise the might and prowess of patrons. The study of the social background of medieval temples reveals their affluent patronage. Templebuilding activity on a large scale is reflective of the social set up of medieval India. Numerous landowning wealthy patrons kings, queens, military chiefs, ministers, merchants built temples for fame as well as religious merit. There was a competitive spirit in the building of larger and more magnificent temples, which certainly influenced the art of the temple. The temple increased considerably in height, expanded in its size, and became a prosperous organisation, holding big estates and with a large number of functionaries in its service. The temples role to dazzle the public is clear in the content and form of its art. The changing relationship of patrons and artists in different periods, and the influence this had on the creation of art, its form and contents could be examined. Similarly, the use of art as a tool in the hands of the ruling power (a subject of study in art history of the West) could be considered when researching and teaching art under royal dynasties of medieval India. I have, in my work, Erotic Sculpture of India, a SocioCultural Study (1975), employed the social historical approach, rather than stylistic or aesthetic, which helped in understanding this phenomenon in the cultural context of India. I have examined the historical development and changes in the depiction of erotic motifs in the three above-mentioned periods of ancient India. I continued the social historical approach in my various articles on Ancient Indian terracottas, situating their art in the context of the urban cultural milieu. The classification of art in textbooks The classification of art based on Buddhist, Hindu and Indo-Islamic categories is still carried on in books, including Partha Mitters Indian Art, which deals with these broad divisions. This can continue until books on classification based on socioeconomic periods of history are written. One should recognise that these categories are not monolithic divisions, for within the Buddhist period, the Hindu temples were built, and similarly, within Hindu period, the Buddhist artistic activity continued. J C Harle in his Pelican History of Art, divides his chapters into: Early Indian Art, the Gupta Art, the Post-Gupta Art, the Later Hindu Period, Painting, Indo-Islamic Architecture, and so on. There are classifications of art according to ruling dynasties under which art was produced, for instance, Maurya, Kushan, Chandella. Though this is a convenient nomenclature still used in discussions on art, we can see that regional nomenclature has to some extent replaced dynastic labels in architectural history. The Encyclopaedia of Indian Temple Architecture, several volumes of which are published by the American Institute of Indian Studies, New Delhi and Gurgaon, has taken a lead in this direction, as their publications as well as archives are based on classification by region and period. The gender in art Representing the Body; gender issues in art, edited by Vidya Dehejia, is a significant book in Indian art historiography, which throws light on the way the human body, both female and male, is treated in Indian art. This approach can help us when teaching sculptural art, replete with figures of shalabhanjika, or woman and tree motif (fig 1).

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in sculptural art of temples from the 8th century onwards.13 In this context it is noteworthy that the text Shilpa Prakasha of Orissa in eastern India describes 16 types of female figures in various activities as looking into a mirror, holding a branch of the tree, and so on. This treatise ordains the carving of such female figures for the sake of fertility and fruitfulness. While the symbolism of sensuous female figures can be explained in the context of fertility and their luckbringing function, their actual rendering in art, their form, can be understood on the basis of the knowledge of yogic body and the perspective of dance. The female figures, while they fulfil the role of auspiciousness and good luck, are also used as an allegory, for instance, to represent characters of the philosophical play Prabodhachandrodaya, staged in the Khajuraho region. On the juncture wall of the Lakshmana (Vishnu-Vaikuntha) temple of Khajuraho (CE 954), the sculptured female figures represent characters of the Holy Lore, Peace, Wisdom, and also Error. 14
Fig 1 Shalabhanjika, woman and tree motif, Sanchi, Central India, 1st century BCE.

Shalabhanjika is shown as sensuous because she is meant to be so for fertility purposes. It was believed that there is a close relation between women and trees, both fertilising one another by their touch. There was a belief that woman by her touch could cause a tree to blossom, and she in turn would also become fertile by touching a tree. Buddhas mother Maya delivered when she held a branch of a Shala tree. Women played games associated with trees, such as the plucking of Shala and Ashoka flowers on spring festivals. The woman and tree became a motif in art from the 2nd century BCE, and is depicted until today in traditionally built temples. There is textual support for the depiction of shalabhanjika on buildings, as evidenced from literary texts. It is significant to point out that sensuous motifs are depicted on Buddhist monuments to which nuns and monks donated. Inscriptions at Bharhut, Sanchi and other Buddhist sites show that, as well as the laity, Buddhist monks and nuns donated for the constructions of these monuments. As Vidya Dehejia says, Consideration of the intended audience ... suggests a shift from the spectatorship model of the West. The Bharhut stupa was ritual space and public domain. The Bharhut images were neither necessarily commissioned by men, nor intended to be viewed solely by them.12 Similarly, the motif of apsara or surasundari, the celestial damsel (fig 2) occupies an important place

An approach to temple art In addition to the socio-historical approach to art, there is another approach that of the study of the architects design of the temple, and concepts presented through the sculptural scheme of the temple. When we employ a sociological approach to
Fig 2 Apsaras or surasundaris, celestial female figures, Vishvanatha Temple, Khajuraho, CE 999.

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ART HISTORY IN INDIA

temples, we talk in general about its art, without going into the intricacies of its specific imagery. Within the general and broad social framework, however, there is also possibly a closer view of the temple and its art. It is possible to get an internal view of the temple, a view into the design of the master architect. As a case study I will take my own field of research in the temple art of Khajuraho. There is an internal logic to planning the temple, which could be glimpsed from a minute study of the actual placement of sculptures in the architectural scheme of the temple. This occurred to me when I was looking at the sculptural schemes of three mature temples of Khajuraho, built between 950 and 1050 CE. Michael Meister had made a subtle observation on architectural punning by architects by noticing the placement of conjoint figures on juncture (kapili) walls joining the sanctum and the hall of temples at Khajuraho (fig 3) and Chittorgarh.15 While studying the placement of erotic figures at Khajuraho, a paper assigned to me for the Discourses on Siva Symposium at Philadelphia in 1981, my attention was also drawn to the well-planned placement of divinities in the temples. It seemed as if the architect achieved the balance between the left and right sides of the temple by pairing two opposite or complementary divinities such as Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, and Sarasvati, the goddess of learning. The cardinal niches on the south, west, and north walls of these east-facing temples represent the chief divinitys manifestations. Professor Stella Kramrisch, in her monumental book The Hindu Temple16 has shown how the centre of the sanctum the principal divinity is the energy centre, which radiates its power through the images of its manifestations in the cardinal niches of the sanctum faade. I closely observed the planning and design of the Khajuraho architect, how he had placed images in the temples scheme. It is important to study the underlying conceptual scheme in comprehending the monument. Medieval India, particularly in the 10th to 11th centuries, witnessed the building of some of the mature temples at Bhubaneswar, Modhera, Udaypur and Tanjavur, and also Khajuraho, just to mention some masterpieces of temple art and architecture. Aesthetically, these temples express a superb harmony of architecture and sculpture, of monumental and plastic form. While it is general practice to teach the historical development of temple art and architecture, describing different architectural elements such as the plinth, wall and tower (shikhara), these well-designed temples can also be presented to students by pointing out the placement of images in cardinal niches in relation to the central divinity in the sanctum. We should remember that the divinity in the sanctum is the nucleus of the temple. I would like to comment here on the role of iconography and iconology in the study of temples. To illustrate this point, I may mention that there are some important images on the plinth of the Lakshmana temple at Khajuraho, which were not earlier identified. These images represent six handsome divinities, along with Surya (Sun), Ganesha and Durga. Four of these have their mounts: goose, lamb, elephant and frog. I looked up the iconography of several mythological figures. It is the frog as the mount that gave me a clue to the figure being the planet Shukra (Venus, in India a male divinity). For a frog is the mount of the planet Shukra in sculptural depictions of central and eastern India, as also in the textual tradition of the western Indian texts.17 So, if the figure with the frog mount represents the planet Shukra, the rest of the six figures and Surya, being collective divinities, also represent the other planetary divinities. But we cannot stop with just conventional iconographic study and identifications. Identifications of individual images are important,
Surya = Sun, Soma = Moon, Mangala = Mars, Budha = Mercury, Brihaspati = Jupiter, Sukra = Venus, Sani = Saturn

Fig 3 Drawing of the ground-plan showing the juncture wall as an overlap of two squares, Kandariya Mahadeva temple, Khajuraho, CE 1030.

Fig 4 Drawing showing planetary divinities (Grahas) placed around the Lakshmana (Vishnu-Vaikuntha) temple, Khajuraho, CE 954.

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but not an end in themselves. It is equally important to take into account the configuration of images, and not just study these as isolated images. This identification of the seven figures as planetary divinities brings us into the field of iconology, concerned with the meaning and context of images. If you see these figures of seven planets in the context of their placement of the temple (fig 4), you notice that they encircle the temple and form, as it were, a Graha-mandala (magical circle) around the temple. This imagery of planetary divinities encircling the temple is of great significance. For it makes the temple imaged as Mt Meru, the cosmic mountain in the centre of the Universe, around which the planets revolve. This is a cosmic imagery, which we would miss if we do not have knowledge of iconography in order to identify the images, and see their configuration in the temples scheme. We have to perceive the intimacy of architects ideas and their visualisation into his design of the temple. This approach of the study of actual context of images helps us in comprehending temple art and understanding its designers. I recently visited Cambodia, and noticed that there the temples are structurally shown as Mt Meru, whereas at Khajuraho, the temple is shown as Mt Meru by projecting concepts through the sculptural scheme. do not make students art historians, theoreticians ungrounded in reality. but

In addition to the art-object oriented approach, however, the framework-oriented approach should be considered and introduced in teaching methods. The teaching of art in its social milieu, and in the context of gender issues, combined with a study of style and form, will give a wider perspective to students of art history. End Notes
Photographs by Devangana Desai. Drawings courtesy of the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, and Franco-Indian Research, Mumbai. 1 Shivaji K Pannikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, Deeptha Achar, Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art, DK Printworld, New Delhi, 2003. For different views, see Catherine King ed., Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, in association with the Open University, 1999. Devangana Desai, Reflections on Coomaraswamys Approach to Indian Art, in Paroksa, Coomaraswamy Centenary Seminar Papers, Lalit Kala, New Delhi, 1984. B N Goswamy, The Essence of Indian Art, Asian Museum of Art, San Francisco, 1986. Doris Chatham, in Kaladarsana, American Studies in the Art of India, ed. Joanna Williams, E J Brill, Leiden, 1981 Richard Davies, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai, vol 79, 2004, p 59. Devangana Desai, Social Dimensions of Art in Early India, Presidential address, Ancient India, Indian History Congress, Gorakhpur Session, December, 1989. R N Misra, Ancient Artists and Art Activity, Simla, 1975. R S Sharma, Perspectives in Social and Economic History of Early India, New Delhi, 1983.

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Conclusion
The latest technology is proving useful in the study of Indian temple art. Satellite photography of monuments, which is now available around the globe, is a helpful tool for the study of architectural monuments within archaeological contexts. I could see this being used, for example, in a presentation on the World Heritage Site of Champaner-Pavagadh in western India. Digital photographs, which can be enlarged on computer to show details of facial features, ornaments, drapery, etc of sculptural figures, are also proving useful in the teaching of the stylistic features of art. Another practical tool is the preparation of models as a way of helping students to grasp and understand the principles behind the construction of architectural monuments. I have seen this used by students in Adam Hardys classes (earlier at Leicester, now in Cardiff), and by students in western India, where they prepared models of stepwells and other monuments. The dynastic histories of the patrons are still being taught, and this should continue. We have to know the dates of art works and monuments. The basic art material has to be taught, as is conventionally done. Otherwise we will be talking empty theories, which
8 9

10 Romila Thapar, Ancient Indian Social History, New Delhi, 1978. 11 Devangana Desai, Social Dimensions of Art in Early India, 1989. 12 Vidya Dehejia ed. Representing the Body, New Delhi, 1997, p 5. 13 Devangana Desai, Surasundaris, Celestial Beauty in Indian Art; in Saundarya, The Perception and Practice of Beauty in India, ed. Harsha Dehejia and Makarand Paranjape, New Delhi, 2003. 14 Devangana Desai, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho, Mumbai, 1996, pp 1819. 15 Michael Meister, Juncture and Conjunction: Punning and Temple Architecture, Artibus Asiae, vol. XLI, 1979. 16 Stella Kramrisch, The Hindu Temple, Calcutta, 1946. 17 Devangana pp 13543. Desai, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho,

Author biography
Devangana Desai is the author of Khajuraho Monumental Legacy, 2000, The Religious Imagery of Khajuraho, 1996, Erotic Sculpture of India - A Socio-Cultural Study, 1985, and over 70 papers on various aspects of Ancient Indian Art. Dr Desai is General Editor of the Monumental Legacy Series on the World Heritage Sites in India, being published by Oxford University Press. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Mumbai. She is currently researching on the Museum Images of Khajuraho, as a project of Franco-Indian Research, Mumbai.

10

Where on Earth is South Asia? Studying the arts of India in 21st-century Britain
CRISPIN BRANFOOT

he GLAADH (Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History) project highlighted the presence of pockets of expertise and teaching in non-Western art and design around the United Kingdom, and brought many scholars together to address how 21st-century art history might be reshaped to reflect our globalised world.1 The teaching of the art produced by the cultures and communities of South Asia over the past 2,000 years modern India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and the Maldives is striking for its neglect in British universities in the early 21st century. India and British imperial history from the 18th century to the 20th century is widely taught as part of history degrees, the ethnography of South Asia is a common element in many anthropology degrees, and Indian religions are a central part of any religious studies programme. Even South Asian archaeology is currently taught in four British universities (UCL, Cambridge, Bradford and Durham). But where is the art history of this large, diverse and wonderful region? My focus is on South Asian art, but some of the issues raised are equally applicable to anyone interested in how less familiar art and cultural contexts such as those of Japan, China, Latin America or Africa can be introduced into more Eurocentric curricula. These have often been marginalised as non-western art. A key challenge for art history in 21st-century Britain is to abandon such divisive terminology and recognise that the art of these regions must be addressed on an equal footing with that of European art. A central theme in my discussion is the separation and distinctiveness of South Asian art. Partha Mitter has written that the interesting question is not what Indian art shares with western art, but how it differs from it.2 I would agree that this is indeed one interesting question, but such an approach has led to the underdevelopment and limited integration of South Asian art into the art historical mainstream. Presenting South Asia and its art as separate as an insular academic domain is misleading and, I would argue, damaging to its conception and reception as part of the academic discipline of art history. Why should students study South Asian art history in Britain? Many undergraduate students will have encountered South Asian culture before arriving at university, either in Britain and the nations favourite dish is not insignificant here or through

travelling. The 21st-century gap-year equivalent of the Grand Tour is not travelling around Europe but involves longer round-the-world trips to India, Nepal, Thailand and Australia. Many of our undergraduates are as likely to have seen a Rajasthani palace or the Taj Mahal as the paintings in the Uffizi in Florence. Britain and India have a long imperial and colonial relationship stretching back to the foundation of the East India Company in 1600 and the gradual establishment of British rule in India during the 18th and 19th centuries. This long period of cultural engagement has resulted in major collections of Indian sculpture, painting, textiles and decorative arts in British museums, both large national and smaller local ones. Introducing South Asian art into the art history curriculum will ensure that museum curators will not only have the skills to analyse objects but will have the specific knowledge to understand their whole collection. The creation of numerous South Asia specialists is not required, but Asian art and culture should be part of everyones general education, and that of South Asia is especially important given the history of colonialism. Another legacy of Britain and Indias shared history is the significant South Asian communities in many British cities. Students with families from South Asia may want to know more about their cultural background, from pure curiosity, or also to apply that knowledge to creative art, design or architectural projects. In an increasingly globalised world, awareness of cultures beyond Europe is essential; given the growing economic might of India in the world economy, studying the art and culture of this region should be part of every students degree. Included under the umbrella of South Asian or Indian art is a huge range of art and artefacts, with great cultural diversity over 2,500 years and a vast geographical area. Around a quarter of the worlds population now lives in South Asia, and all the major world religions are represented there: Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Judaism. An argument against teaching the art of areas beyond Europe and North America is the lack of direct experience by undergraduates with those cultures and their art. Can you teach South Asian art, for example, without a field trip to India? Many

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21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

existing degree courses, or as part of more specialised degrees in South Asian Studies. The first emphasises the Art, the second emphasises South Asia in South Asian art history. A reflection on the issues involved in these two learning contexts will highlight how and why a closer integration of South Asian art with the wider art-historical discipline can be mutually beneficial.

South Asian art and art history

The majority of UK art history degree courses include sections on methodology or approaches to art history. Instead of presenting students with material they may already know, exercising their skills of visual analysis with an unfamiliar painting a Rajasthani court painting rather than an Italian Renaissance one can enhance their grasp of methodological issues by focussing on the approach over the objects specifics. Discussions of portraiture, its conception and reception, could include a South Asian example. A course on cities might use a South Asian example, such as Vijayanagara, the 14th to 16th century City of Victory in southern India (Fig 1), 17th-century Old Delhi or Lutyens early 20th century, colonial New Delhi. Many of the issues studied in South Asian art are broad art historical ones. The analysis of visuality and ways of seeing in Western Art, whether of a Byzantine icon or a Renaissance painting, is just as problematic as understanding the use of Hindu images. A course on religious architecture and sculpture might include seminars on wooden origins and the formation of the architectural tradition or language; narrative sculpture and iconographic programmes; myth, ritual and image-worship; festivals, processions and sacred landscape; and, religious architecture and political patronage. Such an approach applies equally to a course on the ancient Greek temple as much as the Hindu temple. A course on early modern art, looking at the techniques of painting, drawing and sculpture; the nature of workshop practice and its relationship to how artists worked; the range of subject-matter represented; the relationship between artists and patrons; the social context of works of art; the different function and meaning of particular paintings, sculptures and buildings; or the relationship between art and religion, could equally examine these issues in the context of 16th century Italy or the contemporary courts of north India. Thus, whilst the context may be new to students, the approaches to understanding the art are familiar. If a whole block of India may seem too much to introduce to an existing degree programme, then there are accessible ways in which existing material can be diversified. A course on European art in the

Fig 1 The City of Victory or Vijayanagara in Karnataka, south India, mostly 14th to 16th century.

students would be delighted to have a field trip to Delhi as part of their undergraduate degree, instead of Paris, Rome or Berlin. But South Asian art is never far away in Britain. In terms of educational resources, there are substantial and accessible collections of sculpture, painting and decorative arts in London and Oxford; many local museums, such as in Edinburgh, Birmingham, Leicester or Durham, have a few examples of South Asian art. It is even possible to study architecture, given the construction of temples and mosques in many British cities from the 1990s. The conversion of old buildings is now giving way to the construction of wholly new temples or mosques, often with the involvement of traditional craftsmen from South Asia. Good introductory literature is available to support teaching, alongside the increasing number of web-based educational resources. The expanding role of museums in education has led to excellent websites that can support a teaching programme.3 Some museums even offer specialist short courses for students who have not been able to study South Asian art as part of an art history degree.4 South Asian art history may be taught in two ways: as small sections or optional modules within

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WHERE ON EARTH IS SOUTH ASIA?

18th and 19th centuries might easily expand beyond Europe to address how European artists depicted India or how Indian artists responded to European patronage, developing the Company style of painting in the early 19th century. The history of Victorian architecture could profitably include the Indian context, where the dilemma of style was not just between Neoclassical and Gothic Revival, but between these two and a third option, the equally historicist Indo-Saracenic style that sought to emulate the architecture of Indias past for the colonial present. Examining moments of cultural encounter, such as Company painting or Indo-Saracenic architecture, is an excellent way of making this material more accessible to undergraduates unfamiliar with South Asia. Two other moments of cultural encounter between the West and South Asia that can profitably be studied include the Buddhist art of ancient Gandhara, looking at the impact of the Classical Mediterranean on Central Asia in the early centuries CE, and the artistic culture encountered by European travellers and missionaries at the Mughal court of north India in the 16th and 17th centuries. A problem with this approach to Indian art, however, is that it is only seen as interesting when there is some European connection, which excludes huge areas of study such as the temple architecture and sculpture discussed in Devangana Desais chapter in this volume. Ages of global encounter such as the period 15001800, when South Asia was central to the expanding networks of political, economic and cultural exchange between Asia and Europe, are exciting for the great source material and material evidence they provide. Examining how Europe viewed South Asia and the reverse, how South Asia viewed Europe, is fascinating, as the Victoria & Albert Museums exhibition Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 15001800 in autumn 2004 demonstrated.5 But we need to remember that South Asian art in this period, or indeed the 19th century colonial period, is not solely defined by its relationship to Europe. There are plenty of traditional art forms in South Asia that have little relationship with the encounter with Europe. Eurocentrism may thus persist in curricula that neglect to address South Asian art beyond the impact of Europe, however well intentioned and admirable including any mention of material from outside Europe might seem. The pioneering scholarship, largely by Europeans, in the later 19th and early 20th centuries tended to emphasise the connections with the West and the influence of Achaemenid Persia, Classical and Hellenistic Greece or Rome on the formation of Indian art. The Nationalist response in India was to stress the independent development of, for example, early architecture or the Buddha image. Both Colonial and Nationalist viewpoints shared in the view that early Indian art from the formative period of the 3rd century BCE to the 5th century CE was worth studying. Later Indian art from 500 CE onwards was good if it was Islamic, such as Mughal painting and architecture; ignored, considered degenerate or not even art, if Hindu; and when it comes to the impact of 500 years of interaction with Europe this period was not usually considered to part of the Indian story of art at all. Such views have changed very positively over the course of the later 20th century, not least because of archival art historians assessment of the historiography of art history and archaeology as disciplines in 19th and early 20th century India. Much of this new postcolonial literature by, for example, Partha Mitter and Tapati Guha-Thakurta makes for stimulating discussion with undergraduates.6 It can, however, become a subject in itself divorced from actually critically assessing sculpture, paintings, textiles or architecture in the museum or on the ground in South Asia. From my experience of teaching Indian art history to students of Western art history, and art & design in British Higher Education, I have encountered great enthusiasm for studying a wholly new topic that they have not previously studied at A level or in the first year. The initial bafflement with new names, new geography, technical vocabulary in Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, and a great variety of religions is quickly overcome. Lecturers teaching Mediaeval or Renaissance European art will find that the iconography of Christian saints or Biblical narratives may be as unfamiliar to many 21st century undergraduates as that of the multitude of Hindu deities. Introducing students to the basic principles of Indian iconography is straightforward and empowering and they get some great stories to read. In terms of practicalities, the majority of secondary literature on the arts of South Asia is in English. Can students study the arts of India without knowledge of Indian languages? Does the same objection apply to current undergraduates absence of Dutch when studying Golden Age painting? Overall, students have responded very positively to the opportunity to approach art in new ways and new contexts. Before reflecting on positive future directions for art history in the 21st century, I wish to consider another way in which Indian art is currently studied, as one aspect of specialised studies of South Asian culture.

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21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

Fig 2 The Taj Mahal, Agra, north India, mid-17th century.

Indian art and South Asian studies

Where Indian art has been taught in British universities it has often been within specialised institutions such as the School of Oriental and African Studies, or as part of larger courses on Asian art. The arts of India may be placed alongside the arts of the Islamic world from Spain to Central Asia, or Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia) and East Asia (China, Korea and Japan). Existing lecturers in Indian art history have often come from an Indological background and are steeped in Indian religions, ancient and mediaeval history and literature. This is potentially positive for the interdisciplinary depth of their studies. The downside, however, is that Indian art is often presented as a subject separate from art history in general an interest in India can override an interest in art. There are culturally specific features to traditional Indian art, such as the aesthetic theory of Rasa, which privileges viewers emotional responses, or the complex iconographies of Indian religions with their multi-headed, multi-armed gods and goddesses but this insularity can lead to the persistence of Indian art history as a ghetto subject, only comprehended by those who have received initiation into India as a whole. The Islamic art of India is good example of this. Islamic culture has been present in South Asia since the 8th century, and there is a continuous record of Islamic art and architecture from c.1200 on the Taj Mahal is the best-known example (fig. 2). But until very recently Indian Islamic art has been treated separately from mainstream Islamic art in the

Middle East and North Africa. Islamic art historians withdrew, like Alexander the Great, at the border of India. The Islamic art of South Asia was then only understood through an Indian lens and not as part of the wider Islamic world. Specialised courses on Indian art often dwell at length on either the iconography of sculpture, with interminable lists of deities names and attributes, the art often appearing only to illustrate the religions. Or the discussion may focus excessively on stylistic analysis for the court paintings of north India. This may be fine for students already converted to South Asian culture, who want to know the subject in great factual detail. But this approach is very methodologically limiting, especially when the student moves outside South Asia, and it enhances the external view of Indian art as a purely connoisseurial discipline. A key problem with South Asian art at present is its relative enclosure, its insularity as a specialised field of area studies and not as an essential element of art history. Many broader art historical issues and approaches have yet to filter in to many areas of South Asian art history to any substantial degree, partly a reflection of the small number of scholars of South Asian art worldwide. Teaching South Asian art alongside other more traditional areas of art history is mutually beneficial: South Asian art can develop in positive, new directions, and more Eurocentric art history programmes can reflect on their methodologies by looking at alternative views of the production and consumption of art in, for example, a South Asian context.7 Embedding South Asian art within art history as a discipline is very positive for South Asian art

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WHERE ON EARTH IS SOUTH ASIA?

historians, as it encourages new avenues for research and teaching, beyond the obsession with early Indian iconography and the connoisseurial analysis of style in north Indian court painting. There are comparatively few scholars examining South Asian art worldwide and that includes in India and Pakistan. There is much material waiting to be documented and analysed for the first time, and new approaches to be formulated. For undergraduates and indeed postgraduates, the wealth of material available for original study is vast. This does mean that undergraduates can easily pose questions to an experienced lecturer that the scholarly body has yet to adequately address, but it also means that final-year dissertations can embody original work whether from brief fieldwork in vacations or museum study. The globalisation of the art, architecture and design history curricula is essential to the continued vitality of the 21st-century academic discipline. With a diminishing number of art history applicants across Britain, one way in which our particular university courses can be made distinctive and more attractive is to diversify our curricula. The distinction between art history as the history of Western art from the Renaissance to the present, and the teaching of the art of areas beyond Europe and the West as part of Area Studies, must be dissolved. North American universities are ahead of Britain in this respect. Are we ready to discard the term non-Western art? Art history must include all areas without having to precede the phrase with world. Flexibility, variety and a wider choice for students can only be a good thing for art history in 21st-century higher education. End notes
1 2 3 4 www.glaadh.ac.uk Partha Mitter, Indian Art, OUP, Oxford, 2001, p1. The Metropolitan Museum in New York and the British Museum in London are two good examples. The British Museums postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art, which includes a 15-week intensive course in Indian art, is the best current example. Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer (eds.), Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe 15001800, V&A Publications, London, 2004. Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1977; and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India Columbia University Press, New York and Chichester, 2004. A related issue to the Area Studies nature of much current South Asian art history is its presentation, whether via conferences or publications to a specialised audience alone. South Asian art historians in Britain should present their research at mainstream Art History conferences and publish in journals such as Art History or The Art Bulletin.

Author biography
Crispin Branfoot has taught South Asian art history at SOAS, De Monfort University, the British Museum and Oxford University. His research is focussed on the Hindu arts of southern India. He is the co-editor of Pilgrimage: The Sacred Journey (2006) and a forthcoming monograph, Gods on the Move: architecture and ritual in the south Indian temple (2006).

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Art History, Globalisations and Sly Multiculturalism in the Academy

NATASHA EATON

his paper questions whether a global worldview of/for art history is on the agenda. My intervention plays off art history in the UK against art history in two alternative locations India and the USA with a focus on South Asian/diasporic visual culture in/outside higher education. I explore why repercussions of a certain 19th-century/imperialist exhibitionary complex still determines British ideas of governing art history and how Britain deploys this perspective for evaluating other ideas of art histories. In this reckoning (concerned with critical dialogue between museums, galleries and art history departments), art history in India, by rejecting/mistranslating this status quo, must be in crisis. But we must take into account the dynamic interactions between art historians, artists, curators, and public speech that articulate productive disjunctures in the postcolonial, vernacular practices of art history in South Asia where several of the leading scholars of visual culture are not art historians at all. Given the legacy of the Subaltern Studies drive to provincialise European/colonial history by disrupting the hegemonic idioms of the western (especially US) academy, this paper considers whether British universities qua their Indian/US counterparts, are taking these challenges seriously. Is this a question of lack of resources in marked contrast with the Asian endowments of the USA (e.g. Asia Society), where non-western art is a conspicuous agent (often equal player) in university education, or is it. more ominously, steeped in sly multiculturalism i.e. a strategy for its institutional inclusion and simultaneous confinement in terms of authenticity/difference and the marginal?

According to Tony Bennetts seminal work on the evolution of museums in mid-19th-century Britain, the development of a new mode of sovereignty governmentality involved a degree not only of social- but also of self-surveillance.2 Parallel to the institutionalisation and increased public invisibility of corporeal punishment, the establishment of museums, art galleries etc, formed what he terms an exhibitionary archipelago for understanding histories and cultures through their material traces. It also premised a form of self-control intimately linked to the carceral, but which also involved increased access to and participation within a modern, and I would stress a colonial regime that was intensely visual. Encouraged (perhaps by their employers at times even coerced) to attend worlds fairs and evening views at museums, workers were encouraged to inculcate certain object lessons. In this ideology, both the objects and the temporal gaps between them as in the case of the natural history typological displays exemplified by the Pitt Rivers Museum, were intended to immerse the viewer within a certain civilising process that made s/he aware of the metonymic power of the visual. This object-oriented experience bled from fairs to museums, to anthropology, archaeology and to the new, perhaps always precarious, discipline of art history. Promoted in institutions exemplified by SOAS, art historys orientalist legacy and specialised program demand that students make a commitment to nonwestern art prior to entry. The recent retirement or relocation of several leading specialists (Partha Mitter, Giles Tillotson) has seemingly created a lacuna, which sits uneasily with the wealth of south Asian archival materials available for academic research. But are we looking in the wrong place? The high profile GLAADH project underscored the need, the urgency for a forum for prising open the British university curriculum. In simple terms, this three-year project called for a certain structural readjustment to the ways in which British institutions think art. Principal issues involved the dilemma of a certain sly multiculturalism i.e. the ways in which older programs could invest in a liberal/funky outlook through the inclusion of colonial or non-western art without seriously challenging the hegemony of western European art. Most universities have yet to address issues of outreach and the ways in which South Asian art can attract students otherwise unconcerned with

The exhibitionary complex in the UK context

The very ambiguity of what might be South Asian art in art history stages the polarities of a radical chic [or crasser] version of Raj nostalgia1 and the popularity of contemporary South Asian imagery (e.g. film/posters) in public culture. Art history rarely addresses the oscillation, even schizophrenia, between these spheres, preferring to retreat into its westernised canon. I propose this discomfort traces its genealogy to the colonial project of Victorian Britain grounded in worlds fairs and a certain romanticism displaced from the Arts and Crafts Movement to the colonial agenda.

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studying art history but engaged with, experiencing identity politics that thread in and out of academic environs. I propose one point of entry through a turn to the contemporary the agency of diasporic and South Asian art which fleshes out our comprehension of the modern and the postcolonial. From my own experience teaching Indian and British colonial art in Britain and the USA, students are attracted to seminar presentation/essay topics which locate India in the present. At Manchester University I taught/supervised both undergraduate and MA courses centred on Indian and colonial art, 17002000. At undergraduate level, (not always of their own choice I later learnt!), the enrolment for this weekly two-hour seminar was filled to the maximum of 16. At Masters level, however, the number never exceeded five. Although both courses were favourably received, feedback from four sets of students (several of whom came from anthropology and history) revealed that they were attracted to this subject area primarily for its marginal/novelty value rather than viewing it as an essential component of the curriculum. This turn to the contemporary is also reflected in the proliferation of online and image archives of South Asian art exemplified by Leicester-based SALIDAA (South Asian Literature and Diasporic Art) established in 1999, Birmingham-oriented Sampad (established1990) and the Horizon Gallery a continuation of IAUK (Indian Artists in the UK). These projects alongside GLAADHs online resources of non-western art experts, university experiments in curriculum reform and bibliographic tools are the dynamic outcomes of partnerships between artists, curators and art historians who seek to foreground South Asian and British Asian cultures, not only through their archives but through a series of links to like-minded galleries, museums and artist websites. Nevertheless, these initiatives have yet to penetrate the western Eurocentric agenda of the British university system. location between these two eastern players, the arts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are, as in Britain, dramatically under-represented. Paradoxically, in the last 20 years diasporic endowments for language (especially Hindi and Telugu) and South Asian history programmes in the US academy have increased ten-fold. But these endowments do not make space for the study of Indian art, which is a frivolous addition to the serious study of law, medicine and computer science. In those pockets of the US academy concerned with Indian art, the main thrust has been towards the history of architecture and urban planning in 19thand 20th-century India exemplified by the dynamic promotion of South Asian art by Frederick and Catherine Asher (at Minnesota). But outside these specialist-driven centres, ancient/ medieval/modern India are increasingly marginalised from art history programs assigned to archaeology, anthropology and the history of religions or to the first few sessions of Asian or Islamic art survey classes whose cut off point is often c.1850. This marginal and non-modern presence of South Asian art further distances it from political representation and the type of funds lavished on China and Islam. As in Britain, attempts to readdress the balance is coming less from the academy than from alternative artistic collectives exemplified by the Asia Societys drive to promote contemporary South and South East Asian art through such high profile shows as Edge of Desire.

Art history in India: Provincialising the West

So, given these two western contexts, what is the status of artistic production in relation to art history in India? Despite the variety of well-appointed actors in the theatre of Indian art was until recently an aspiration for the artist to become a central national figure. It was hoped that this trope of the artist might be able to articulate in work and speech an historical position that work clearly demarcate a national space. This ideal of an integrated identity had as much to do with the mythic imaginary of lost communities as with nationalism and its political utopia. But it also had to do with third-world antiimperialism and postcolonial personae. In the post-Independence ethos, M F Husain (b.1915) is the primary example of the national artist marking the conjunction between the mythic and the secular and then between secular and aesthetic space. He also embodies the paradoxes and tensions of the status of the postcolonial artist in India. At once claiming a socialist register using his work to expose political tensions such as communalism nonetheless Huseins idea(l) of the autonomous artist still works within an institutionalised notion of

South Asian art in the US academy

How far do the same or alternative problems of cultural imperialism/negligence arise in the US academy? 9/11 accelerated academic endowments and engagement with the arts of Islam.3 Is it to be expected that post-tsunami a new focus in South/South East Asian art history will emerge out of a different state of emergency? In the larger art history schools of the USA, the choice of art operates through requirements that both encompass and divide oriental from occidental visual cultures. This non-western focus deals primarily with the principal political others of the USA: Islam and China. But what is the status of South Asia, which after all has a far less obvious presence in American political discourse? In spite of its strategic

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bourgeois society. But how far is this bourgeois society shot through with fragments of the colonial exhibitionary complex? According to one of Indias leading writers on visual culture, Professor Tapati Guha-Thakurta, in her new book Monuments, Objects, Histories, the museum and the discipline of art history i.e. the ingredients of the metropolitan exhibitionary complex, failed to take root in India.4 We need to ask what makes for particular disciplinary trends and tags in these areas of knowledge in India, UK and USA, and whether the changing faces of these subjects in the western academia are reflected in the making or unmaking of fields in India. In spite of the ideological drive of the South Kensington Museum, whose 1870s curriculum was exported to the colonial art schools of Madras, Calcutta, Lahore and Bombay, the tensions of translation and split publics for the reception of Indian art prepared the ground for its ambiguities and innate anxieties. The object lessons of British museums instead became enmeshed with spectacle translated into wonder houses (ajaib jadu ghur), which effectively transformed the colonial art laboratory into magic space, blurring the boundaries between public and private, bazaar, temple and educational institution. According to certain authors exemplified by GuhaThakurta the contemporary study of Indian art history is grounded in the tensions and controversies that have riddled the competing spheres of archaeology and art history.5 From her perspective, when they are not targets of attack or remake, monuments and museum objects in India today stand strangely emptied of meaning and value whereby they are left to fight for a new curse of obsoleteness in the nations public life. Most damningly, she condemns museums as being as fossilised as the desiccating objects they contain. More urgently, she argues for the inseparability of the spheres of professional and public knowledges, of academic and nationalist motivations, which forms an underlying visual culture of which art history is a minor player. Taught in art schools and history departments, art history acts within a certain national paradigm that incorporates and is infused with the visual. This hybrid or sub-discipline discipline (for want of better terms), alerts us to the possibility of rethinking the space for South Asian art history in India, Britain and the USA which already has a certain genealogy in late 19th-century India. Anxious to preserve disappearing Indian crafts embodied by the simultaneously atemporal and yet medieval and vanishing artisan the economic drive of the colonial state relied on the fees of the westernised elite keen to educate their sons in European fine arts. Even the reforms from the swadeshi era (c.1905) the art administrator E B Havells act of throwing all European paintings into the Calcutta Art Schools tank; the establishment of a collection of Mughal miniatures and the mobilisation of art as central element in the Bengali struggle for swaraj (self rule) provide the complicated legitimisation for the contemporary predicament of Indian art history. Not only the Bengal School but also its self-constructed antithesis the Victorian sensuality of the south Indian artist Ravi Varma claimed to exist outside of the exhibitionary complex. In the myths and practices of Indian nationalism, these artists especially Abanindranath Tagore turned British object lessons inside out. They moved in alternative, panAsian collaborations, which promoted the performance of genius based on yoga and intuition, inspired by bhav (emotion), Buddhist art, Sanskrit epics and more problematically by the legacy of the Mughals. Refusing to participate in the rigorous civilising process of either metropolitan or colonial governmentality, from the 1890s Indian art and its relationship to a certain historicity restaged itself in terms resonant with the struggle for the modern. Primarily involving the intervention of art critics and historians exemplified by political activists/aesthetes Sister Nivedita and Ananda Coomaraswamy this collective refigured the nexus between art schools, museums and art history. This then was not so much the failure of art history in the colony so much as its radial deconstruction and application to alternative more urgent networks that involved the political and a certain casting of what should be the ethically superior, essential aspects of Oriental art. Post-Independence, Indian artists, exemplified by the Bombay Progressives, saw themselves as belonging to a collective of social-democratic or leftliberal Nehruvian intelligentsia, whose identity must engage with the modern. And if that questioned modernity it did so on the basis of a tradition that had been, despite the innovations of sacred myths and symbols, invented during a nationalist resurgence and was therefore sufficiently secularised. Or this seemed to be so until we began to interrogate the past. These debates concerning what type of visual past should be invested in, take place not so much in art history departments as in the art school and gallery space exemplified by the Fine Arts program at Baroda. As one of Indias leading art critics Geeta Kapur suggests, in India, the terms modern and secular so completely stood in for contemporaneity that modernism as such was never really problematised. It was made into a matter of aesthetic choice, existential temperament, this or that style and the auteurs characteristic

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SLY MULTICULTURALISM IN THE ACADEMY

signature.6 But all these modernist assumptions, covered over by the jargon of authenticity, soon required an overhauling of both practice and discourse. Kapur suggests that eclecticism in Indian modernism has been too unquestioning: I take this critical position because once hybridity is established as a multicultural norm within the postmodern then hybridity could mask the sharper contours of an identity forged by the diverse pressures of a cumulative modernity, decolonisation and global capitalism.7 A continued insistence on eclecticism and its conversion to various ideologies of hybridity within the postcolonial can serve to elide the diachronic edge of cultural phenomena and thus ease the tensions of historical choice. It leads not only to nostalgia but also to a kind of temporal recoil. Rather, critics like Kapur and Guha-Thakurta advocate that Indian artists look not for hybrid solutions but for dialectical synthesis. A space for contradictions has to be opened within the national/modern/postcolonial paradigm so that there is a real (battle) ground for cultural difference and so that identities can be posed in a far more acute manner than postmodern notions of hybridity can accommodate. Neither Kapur nor Guha-Thakurta is a practising art historian. In all three academic environs I have briefly mapped, art history suffers from being compared with the success of South Asian history as a discipline. In this field, critical theorists are less concerned with the failure/fate of metropolitan disciplinary/discursive machinery than with recuperating and refocusing the fragments of pasts unconfined by colonial discourse. Might this not also be an inspiration for the study of Indian visual cultures admittedly from subject positions which refuse to be confined by what we understand as disciplinary boundaries? has been associated with the packaging of this history as the embodiment of the nation. We must open up a critical position that lies both within and outside the disciplinary bounds: a position from which we can grasp the broad discursive contours of the field. There is an urgent need for such an intermediary space that can span the outside/insider divide, for it has remained largely unconcerned about the ways in which it has cast or created its objects of knowledge. In all three contexts, to study art historically we must caution against the risk of performing an uncritical multiculturalism (now so often garbed as globalisation) in and for the curriculum but, instead, seek out alternative, less predictable perspectives to create new edges of desire.

End notes
1 2 3 Nicholas Dirks, Introduction, Dirks (ed.) Colonialism and Culture, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1993, p3. Tony Bennett, The exhibitionary complex, Bennett, The Birth of the Museum, Routledge, London & New York, 1995. One fallout from 9/11 in terms of South Asian art was the removal of all Islamic i.e. Mughal materials from the south Asia section of the Metropolitan Museum, New York to the Islamic section which is now under refurbishment. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, objects, histories: Institutions of art in colonial and postcolonial India, Colombia University Press, New York, 2004. See also Gyan Prakash, Science gone native in colonial India, in his Another Reason, Princeton University Press, New York, 1998. Geeta Kapur, Dismantling the norm, Contemporary art in Asia: Traditions/tensions, Asia Society Galleries, New York,1998, p64. ibid

Conclusion: Dismantling the Norm

Museum visitor statistics in Britain, the USA and India demonstrate the sustained popularity both of permanent Indian collections and exhibitions. In the British and Indian contexts, in particular, Indian art

Author biography
Natasha Eaton is Lecturer in the History of Art at University College London. She has recently completed a book concerned with the critical cross-cultural exchanges between India and Britain, 17501850. Her current research focuses on missionary collecting strategies and visual ethnography in South Asia.

19

The Secret History of Ceramic or The reluctant history of an applied art

MICHAEL MOORE
hat does one think of when one uses the word craft? Perhaps an historical, rural activity? Or a skill-based production of useful objects such as cutlery, footwear, clothing and food containers? If one attaches the word contemporary this may then attach associations of the urban, domestic, culinary or interior adornment. In relation to ceramics, as with textiles, craft also historically has an industrial association; Stoke-on Trent kilns have been firing drainpipes, house bricks, and tableware and roof tiles since the industrial revolution. Ceramic is indigenous. Clays from different parts of the world fire to different colours and have particular characteristics, which eventually influence the way in which each clay is used: porcelain for fine tableware, stoneware for pitchers and crocks, earthenware for house bricks. Each potter is partially influenced by the clay they choose to work with, and their practice becomes unique to the characteristics of that particular clay. The craft history of ceramics therefore differs from region to region, country to country, with different practitioners developing individual techniques and solutions to the challenge of their medium. In a broader sense, this led historically to the establishment of guild and apprenticeship systems, intended to preserve, protect and indeed keep secret, particular techniques and practices. Whether it was from town to town or through matriarchal or patriarchal lineage, craft technique was protected. During the Middle Ages in Europe, working men of particular trades joined associations called craft guilds. These guilds were forerunners of the modern unions and served to regulate and preserve a monopoly of crafts. Weavers were probably the first to organise. Quickly Goldsmiths, Silversmiths, Fishmongers, Bakers, Dyers, Glove makers and other craftsmen saw the benefits of organisations and formed their own separate fraternities Qualifying for membership in a guild involved a long and unpaid apprenticeship. The apprentice was bound out by his parents to an employer for approximately seven yearsWhen the apprenticeship was completed the apprentice was free to pursue their craft for daily wages. Often though, they chose to travel from town to town seeking more knowledge of their craft.1

Has this led to a 21st-century dilemma when it comes to the accurate documentation and preservation of craft practice? Consider the following question: Is the silence or reluctance to talk about craft in some way connected to the long tradition of not writing about craft? Historically craft knowledge was not written down, but guarded and protected in guilds and handed on through the apprentice system. However in todays fast moving culture, and a craft community now dependent to some extent on public funding, it seems impertinent to expect others to talk intelligently about crafts if those in the field are not prepared to do so. It is to their credit that these reluctant makers considered the debate important enough to contribute to this project. 2 This paper sets out to consider the matter of writing about the applied arts. It will consider the above comments by Pamela Johnson, and remarks made by others, to offer the perspective of an applied art practitioner, in relation to applied art writing.

An Irish approach to ceramics training

As the writer is a maker, trained and working in Ireland in ceramics, these remarks on issues of education, training and studio practice inevitably comes from an Irish perspective. Consider the comments of Justin Keating, former Irish Minister for Trade and Enterprise, who discusses how Irish cultural history excelled in literature, music poetry and song throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to a far greater extent than in the visual and applied arts. The whole thrust of our cultural preoccupation was verbal. Remarkable playwrights, novelists, poets, a great focus on the Irish Language and on traditional music and song, but concern for material culture was light. The brightest children of the new proprietors of new farms were busy making money in the retail trade, primarily drink, and their grandchildren were rushing to become doctors, lawyers and priests. Their ideal of a beautiful house was a desirable bungalow residence the type that would have been at home in Cheltenham or Croyden. They furnished this in the style of the British mass-produced furniture and textiles of the time, either imported directly of copied here. There was no William

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THE SECRET HISTORY OF CERAMIC

Morris strand in the national revolution. The thirties, forties and fifties were a time of terrible pious, petty bourgeois respectability, for the craftsman and artist, a period of disaster.3 To define the applied arts, let us consider the applied art object or material as either that which has, or has had, an association with craft and function. As already discussed, craft was a tradition passed on from generation to generation, through apprenticeships, families or villages and towns, involving secrecy, hidden techniques or processes or effects. Is this the world that Johnson speaks of and how does it fit today in the 21st century? Consider the glaze recipe book in ceramics for an example of an historical practice that still continues today. This book is always a factor in the potters studio, and even to this day students in art school ceramics departments are encouraged to keep a glaze book, like a list of recipes from a cookery book. And why? To avoid the situation where an effect is achieved but cannot be repeated. A marvellous effect that deems an object a complete success that can never be replicated. The glaze book, if properly updated, avoids this. But what if this were lost or stolen? Disaster. Historically, there is a tendency to guard and protect elements of applied art process, and this may have only encouraged a level of secrecy. An example is early 20th-century Irish studio potter Gratten Freyer of Terrybaun Pottery in County Mayo, whose wife and studio partner Madelaine Freyer did not even know the recipe breakdown of her husbands decorative slips. 4 In terms of ceramics education in Ireland, the Crafts Council of Ireland (established in 1971) is significant in that its one-year pottery-skills course trained wheel-based potters for a growing craft pottery market. This programme, established in 1990, was the first ceramics training provided outside in Ireland outside art schools. Potteries were established in Ireland before this time, for example Carrigaline Pottery, in 1928 and Arklow Pottery in1934, but the ceramics industry broadly came in for severe criticism under the Scandinavian Design Report, commissioned by the Irish Government in 1962. Here, six Scandinavian Designers were invited to Ireland to assess the standards of design, design industry and design education: The Scandinavian Design Report of 1962 identified the problems facing industrial design in Ireland, namely a general lack of design awareness in the country, inadequate higher education for designers in the art colleges and universities and the absence of effective design managers. 5 Their concerns relating to ceramics in Ireland point to a lack of indigenousness, production quality and innovation: The main criticism of the ceramics industry was that what was produced was based on bad English production both as regards design and form, decorated with transfers which had been imported from England and elsewhere. The solution was in education and the training of decorators, casters and printers. They stressed the importance of smaller potteries in design innovation as well as providing opportunities for potters to develop their work. 6 Ceramics as a taught course was first set up by Peter Brennan at the National College of Art in Dublin in 1963. Perhaps this was a direct consideration of the improvements recommended by the Scandinavian Designers. Within Ireland, since 1990, two strands of training have existed for ceramics: the Pottery Skills Course, intended to create skilled production potters, and the art school degree courses, which create graduates with both production skills and the intellectual skills needed to debate conceptual issues. Perhaps here there is a potential for tension, which may have fostered unwillingness by potters and applied artists to enter into dialogue and debate, or to document the history of their activities. If the potter is trained in terms of function and use and the artist is trained in freer less skill-based practice, consider American historian Howard S Beckers statement: Just as the standards of utility are devalued, so, too are the old craft standards of skill. What the older artist-craftsman has spent a lifetime learning to do is suddenly hardly worth doing. People are doing his work in the sloppiest possible way and being thought superior to him just because of it. 7 Surely this must create some tension between the artist and potter that may have an influence on Johnsons comments. In 2003, the Irish Craft Councils Pottery Skills Course was extended to a two-year programme to offer each participant not only a base training in production, but a chance to focus more pointedly on design and aesthetics. This may, in future, further blur the distinction between the artist and potter.

Towards a hybrid
There are practitioners who seem to step outside the issues of utility, while still working with an applied art medium. A recent copy of the Irish Arts Review, published in August 2005, points to one particular artist, Deirdre McLoughlin, who may epitomise a

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hybrid entity, perhaps indicating a way through this unending debate. McLoughlin won the German Westerwald Vessel prize in 2004. The Westerwald judges wrote: ... there is the elegance of the material component, of the exquisite technique which also corresponds to the language of ideas: finest marble seems to have been used rather than clay, warmth and skin-like surfaces are to be found where unglazed surface defines spatial volume. Unpretentiously, nonsense is made of the ceramics discussion about vessel and sculpture.8 The comments of Becker are also useful, both in defining craft and also in defining use, which is historically associated with craft. ... defining craft as knowledge and skill which produce useful objects and activities implies an aesthetic, standards on which judgements of particular items of work can be based, and an organisational form in which the evaluation standards find their origin and logical justification.9 Here, Becker defines craft as having both functional and aesthetic qualities. Or in simple terms, it must work and have an aesthetic appeal. This then invites someone other than the maker to make that appraisal. Does it work? Does it appeal on both these levels? Is that even important? Considering the range of debate that has occurred 10 there are many who consider this issue in earnest. Rob Barnard considers a different use for use and considers how it has evolved in the modern day: That fundamental act of choosing to use an object rather than merely placing it on a shelf is what permits the user to become part of the aesthetic equation that addresses all our senses in an elemental but nonetheless powerful way. 11 So, a sequence can be identified in which the maker makes a useful object or an object with an historical association to a use, incorporating techniques handed down, passed on and also picked up along the way. Then the buyer of that object, acquires that object and makes a series of decisions about how to interact with that object, how to use the object: as a functional tool or as an ornament. If the object is located in the public forum of a gallery, then the critic, curator and writer enter the frame. This then calls for an analysis of that sequence of decisions and who is best suited to make that analysis, the writer or the maker? What Johnsons comments actually invite is to open up the forum of makers writing about their applied art practice and to consider why this has been historically a reluctant entity: the writing maker. As a maker myself, I find writing is a very different world to my dusty Dublin studio. Hardest of all is to write about ones own practice. Slightly easier is to write about other artists work. This was echoed during the Interpreting Ceramics writing seminar held in Bath Spa University in September 2005, organised by Dr Jo Dahn and Dr Jeffery Jones. How does one get a potter to talk about their work if this reluctance to talk does exist? One solution appeared in the journal Ceramics Art and Perception, where critic and maker Rob Bernard interviewed two potters: Julian Stair and Edmund De Waal. Stair commented that if practitioners of the applied arts fail to document the evolution of their practice, they run the risk of others doing it incorrectly: So if makers are not going to get involved in writing the definitive history of their own past, not only are we going to have inaccuracies about our work in a contemporary sense, but also have inaccurate versions of the history of our own discipline written for us. So I think it is imperative that makers are involved in writing in a contemporary vein as well as on the historical developments in our field. 12 So where does this leave the applied art historian? Is there a concern in the world of the applied art practitioner that historians, writers or critical theorists will not understand their practice? And if so, which element or elements of the practice? Technical? Aesthetic? This takes one to the fundamental concern of this paper: yhe documentation of the applied art practice of the 20th and 21st centuries. Do the historians, the writers and critics need to understand technique to truly document the reluctant history of the applied arts? If, according to Stairs comments, practitioners do not do it for themselves and their peers, then it may be done inaccurately. However, can the applied art practitioners document their own history properly? There are practitioners, such as Stair and De Waal and Alison Britton, who are gifted writers, but are they in the minority? I consider them to be so because for the vast majority of applied art practitioners, their immediate tools of expression, the media with which they choose to reveal their innermost thoughts are the materials they have been trained to use clay, metal or glass not the written word. The applied art historian or writer is essential to the accurate archival documentation of the applied arts. But who needs, if anyone, to be convinced of this need? It would seem that the issues raised in Rob Barnards interview, and the comments by Pamela Johnson, do indicate that there is a problem here, be

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THE SECRET HISTORY OF CERAMIC

it mistrust, traditional forms of rural secrecy, or a dissatisfaction with the manner in which the applied arts have been documented. Yet there are certain things the applied art historian must realise, and this realisation has been lacking to date. To fully understand a traditional craft-based applied art practice, the historian should have direct, regular contact with, and understanding of, the processes of the applied arts in order to accurately document its historical evolution. And that is not achieved by reading about it or watching it, but by actually doing it, thereby creating a hybrid applied art practorian. And does it follow that the opposite must then happen? Do the practitioners need to become writers, critics or historians? As more and more makers write, for example those involved in the University of East Anglia and Northumbria research fellowships chaired by Tanya Harrod, Pamela Johnson and Julian Stair, this is already happening.13 Can either do both? One does it when teaching, at university level when one engages ones students in making, writing and research. As most teachers of the applied arts at university level also studied at art school, they will have some writing experience through essays and theses. But of those practitioners who go forward into the professional world of the applied arts, how many become writers and how many become makers? Or consider how many writers or critics of the applied arts actually abandon their writing to become makers?

Marcus O'Mahoney, Glencairn Pottery, Lismore, Co Waterford.

Theory meets practice

In 1999, as a practising studio ceramic artist, I embarked on a masters by research at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. For over two years I travelled Ireland, interviewing potters and ceramic artists to document the history of 20thcentury studio ceramics in Ireland. I most certainly did, on a very practical and intimate level, encounter reluctance on the part of makers to talk about their practice. Why? Because the makers felt isolated; this was the first time many had been approached to discuss their work outside of bite-size artists statements for the front of exhibition catalogues, or fizzy interviews by interior design magazine journalists interested in what must be in the latest interior photo shoot. I often encountered a sense of intrusion. Why was I interested in their work after all these years of isolated and silent practice? What was the reason for the research, and could the practitioner review the text before it was formally published? It seemed that years of isolation led to a hint of paranoia. Who is this person and why are they interested in my work and why now, after all these years?

This required much explanation on my part, and frequent persuasion. But I always held my trump card until the last moment, and where possible only when I met the maker in person. To reveal to them that I was a qualified maker with international recognition was akin to tearing off the clothes of the enemy to reveal a comrade, an equal, someone on the same side. The sense of relief for many was tangible. Why? I can only reason that this was due initially to plain human suspicion. Interviews, photographs, anecdotes of similar kiln-firing disasters for example, all contributed to a more amicable air. Of the more than 50 makers interviewed, this was the first time most had been interviewed to any great depth. However, the actual analysis of that gathered material at interview would probably have been best left to a critical theorist, as once the information had been gathered I struggled seriously to analyse it and to come to any viable critical outcome. It was only thanks to the intervention of art historians and writers that any decent level of critical analysis was drawn from this raw research. This level of critical interdependency within the process of documenting the applied arts again supports the argument for a hybrid theory for the applied arts. Whether it is the practitioner writing or the writer making, a forum is created for debate and documentation of the reluctant history of an applied art. Reluctance, as referred in this paper, may be due to isolation and a lack of critical or historical gathering and analysis in Ireland, but as the spotlight is turned on the applied arts in Ireland, their history and current context, perhaps this reluctance will abate.

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End Notes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 History of Guilds. http://Renaissance-Faire/Renfaires/Entertainment/Historyof-Guilds.htm Pamela Johnson, Ideas in the Making, 1998, p 10. Justin Keating in Tim Pat Coogan eds., Ireland and the Arts, Namara Press, London, no date, p 232 Peter Lamb, a kiln fired of turf, Gratten Freyer and the Terrybaun Pottery, Irish Arts Review Yearbook, 1995, p 70. Paul Caffrey in Sara Prendergast ed., Contemporary Designers, London, no date, p 373. Paul Caffrey, The Scandinavian Ideal, a model for design in Ireland, Scandinavian Journal of Design History, Copenhagen, vol 8, 1998, p 39. Howard S Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley, 1982, p 279. Audrey Whitty quoting Westerwald Prize Judges in: Not Just Pots, Contemporary Irish Ceramics at the National Museum of Ireland, The Irish Arts Review, vol 22, no 3, 2000. 11 The Crafts Council supported conferences: The Body Politic chaired by Julian Stair, 2000; Ideas in the Making, chaired by Pamela Johnson, 1998; Obscure Objects of Desire, chaired by Dr Tanya Harrod, 1997, under University of East Anglia and University of Northumbria research fellowships. 12 Rob Barnard, A New Use for Function in Julian Stair ed. The Body Politic, London 2000, p 71. 13 Julian Stair, Rob Barnard interviews Julian Stair and Edmund De Waal, Ceramics Art and Perception, Issue 38, 1999, p 44. 14 Consider for example the range of research fellowships mentioned in reference 10.

Author biography
Michael Moore is holder of a Master of Arts from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, and is Reader in Fine and Applied Arts, University of Ulster. He is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, Geneva. He has works in permanent collections in The National Museum of Ireland, the Library of the National Museum of Ireland, the Australian National University, the World Ceramic Exposition Foundation, Korea, International Museum of Ceramics, Czech Republic, and Panevezys Civic Art Gallery, Lithuania.

8 9

10 Howard S Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley, 1982, p 274.

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Art History and Cultural Belonging in Contemporary Syria

EMMA LOOSLEY

his paper has evolved out of a series of community projects that I have initiated in Syria since 1997. My hypothesis is that a knowledge of the artistic traditions of a region bring local people more in touch with their cultural roots and encourage a sense of belonging. This is particularly the case when a religious minority feels disenfranchised by the majority group. In 1997 I began taking groups of Christians from Aleppo to the Limestone Massif, to the west of the city, in order to explain to them the abandoned lateantique villages that dominate the landscape. These groups ranged in age from late teens and early twenties through to pensioners. During the course of these visits people questioned why there is no formal training in Art History in their country, and discussed how this kind of cultural awareness tied them more closely to the land than they had previously thought. In turn, this caused them to question their self-imposed perception of themselves as outsiders and caused them to think in terms of a wider Syrian identity. From 2000 onwards I have worked with a community in the Syrian desert that mixes Christians and Muslims, bedu and agricultural workers. Boundaries are fluid and village worship centres on the ancient monastery of Mar Elian. Mar Elian (St Julian) is venerated by all villagers, and this perception of ancient ties means that art historical research into the site has been welcomed by the community as a whole as it is seen to validate their claims of the power of their saint. Taking these two projects as case studies I shall try and evaluate the importance of Art History as an academic discipline in the contemporary Middle East.

status subjects will be closed to them. Every Syrian schoolchild aspires to be a doctor or an engineer, as these are the professions that grant the highest social status, the steadiest and most lucrative career prospects and, an important consideration in an economically precarious society, the most valuable skills on foreign visa applications. In this way other disciplines are downgraded as unimportant a student studying history for example, is pitied as someone who was not bright enough to gain a place to study a more exclusive subject. Whilst many young Syrian history students are bright and enthusiastic, a significant proportion makes it clear that they are only in the subject because they failed to get high enough scores to study engineering. This obviously has a demoralising effect across the board for all subjects and the students themselves are often pushed into studying subjects they have no vocation for, but their parents will force them to accept the highest status option offered by the state. There is no conception of a western, some would say privileged, ethos where students choose subjects simply on the basis of personal preference, where A-starred students are just as likely to fight each other over a place to read English as they are over a place to read Medicine, and where Engineering has a recruitment problem. In an educational system such as that in Syria there is little incentive for young people to study their past. Knowledge of history is vague and highly partisan. Schools concentrate almost exclusively on Arab history after the advent of Islam, with ancient Mesopotamian and Syrian culture encompassed only at university level. The level attained by most students is relatively low, due to a lack of books and access to foreign language material. This general malaise with regard to the past spreads to related disciplines, such as art history, that are not recognised as courses of study in Syria, and to a general lack of interest in the conservation and preservation of historic sites. With this kind of cultural background, history is largely the hobby of a few interested amateurs but not the day job of many people in Syria. Foreigners who study the past are viewed as exotic eccentrics who must be wealthy in order to pursue a study with no commercial value. The idea of bursaries for anything other than absolutely essential studies in medical research or civil engineering is seen as frivolous in such a poor society.

The Syrian education system and the study of the past

In Syria the choice of subject studied at university is decided by the state with a points system. Students can request preferences for the five national universities, but they have little choice over destination and practically no options when it comes to choosing a subject. Places are allocated according to the points gained in the baccalaureat examination taken at seventeen or eighteen. Students choose at the age of 14 to study a science or arts baccalaureat and most choose science, knowing that if they take the arts and literature pathway then the highest

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Aleppo 199798
In 1997 I moved to Aleppo in Syria to undertake fieldwork for my PhD. My aims were threefold: I wanted to visit a group of churches first surveyed by Georges Tchalenko in the 1950s1 to assess their condition 50 years on, to study Syriac an Aramaic dialect that is the liturgical language of the Syrian Orthodox Church and to study the contemporary Syrian Orthodox liturgy. This was to gather data for a thesis studying the architecture and liturgy of late antique Syrian churches. Having been welcomed into the local Syrian Orthodox community in the Hay Suryan quarter of the city, I quickly settled into a routine of Syriac lessons, church attendance and days spent hiking across the Limestone Massif to the west of the city. Without any contemporary maps I was hoping to use the knowledge of local people to help me find the villages where the churches were located, but I soon discovered this to be impracticable. The inhabitants of the villages were Kurds who had only settled in the region as a result of the political upheavals of the 20th century and therefore were not especially knowledgeable about the history of their settlements. Back in Hay Suryan I discovered that the whole population were the descendants of people from the contemporary Turkish city of anliurfa, formerly Edessa. Their families had been evicted by the Turks in 1924 and had walked to Aleppo, where they had stayed ever since. Therefore, despite the fact that the whole region was a traditional heartland of the Syrian Orthodox Church from late antiquity to the middle ages, the current Syrian Orthodox population of Aleppo felt divorced from the countryside and saw themselves as outsiders. Within the Christian community of Aleppo as a whole, very few people took an interest in the wider Christian heritage of the region. The few exceptions were local engineers who had written books on the Limestone Massif and published them through Aleppian Church presses. In Syria doctors and engineers are seen as the most learned members of society and so few people sought to question the accuracy of these unedited works that were largely plagiarisms of Butler and Tchalenko2. After attending several community lectures given by engineers that were largely inaccurate plagiarism, I began to question the widespread ignorance of the local community with regard to their cultural heritage. There were of course, several notable exceptions. The local Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo proved to be knowledgeable, although his information was largely theoretical rather than empirical, which was also the case with my Syriac tutor, Fr Antoine, a Syrian Orthodox Priest, and with the Archbishops former secretary and local English teacher, Farida Boulos. All three had read widely on the Limestone Massif but had only actually visited rarely. The final exception was a local engineer and amateur historian whose hobby was visiting these sites for his own curiosity, Samir Katerji. Samir quickly adopted me and we spent many days hiking across the hills guided by shepherds and villagers who remembered seeing ruins answering to the descriptions we gave and who accompanied us for the pleasure of hearing city gossip from Samir. Back in Aleppo the community of Hay Suryan were beginning to question why this strange foreign girl was disappearing frequently and returning sunburned to the city, and Farida, Samir and Fr Antoine let it be known that I was there to study the Christian heritage of the region, which was their history. Informal questions over coffee with local people led to invitations to talk to the various community groups linked to the church. Samir had instituted an organisation of Families social groups that met once a month for a lecture, meal and dance and who went away together on holiday each summer. The aim was to cement community ties and to provide a friendship network outside the family groups that dominate the lives of most Syrians. There were seven groups arranged around middle-aged couples, young families, young graduates, those who cared for disabled relatives and so on. Fr Antoine quickly involved me with his group of middle-aged couples who were interested in local history and Syriac. Whilst they were generally not too keen on hiking and leaving the comfort of the city, they were happy to listen to lectures on the churches scattered in the hills to the west of the city. This also awakened a general interest in church history, encouraged by Fr Antoine. An immediate effect of this was increased church attendance as the group confessed that after Fr Antoines guided tour of the church they understood the Syriac liturgy for the first time. Trips into the past Having been befriended by the Mar Grigorios group, I was spending my evenings in the church coffee-shop-cum-community-centre with a group of people my own age (late teens to mid-twenties). This group comprised largely of those with vocational qualifications rather than graduates, and the leading members were carpenters, plumbers, mechanics and secretaries. After a few weeks I was asked by the leader of the group, a carpenter named Yusuf, if I would lead the group on a visit to some of the places that I was working on. A Sunday was chosen and Yusuf instructed the group to dress practically in jeans and trainers, with hats, suncream and plenty of water. As the trip was taking place in early July we planned to leave at 5.00 am, eating

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CONTEMPORARY SYRIA
In one ruined chapel the men spontaneously called upon a deacon amongst them to lead prayers.

breakfast en-route and planning a typical Syrian lunch (3.00 pm) on the return home to the city. I planned an itinerary that started with easily accessible monuments. Many of the villages were beside country lanes and it did not require any strenuous exercise to reach them. However there was one village that was a walk of between 3 and 4 km from the nearest road. I had not had the opportunity to visit this site before and, since Yusuf had said to include some sites that were new to me so that I would also benefit from the trip, I included this village on the list. I had carefully checked beforehand that it would prove an interesting site for the group. Unlike the majority of the villages of the region that were occupied solely from the 4th to 7th century CE, Kafar Nabo was one of the villages that had been occupied from the first century BCE, and the church I was seeking was built on top of a Roman temple to the god Nabo. By teaching the group something about the continuity of the historical record I hoped to ignite interest in these sites and spark some enthusiasm for the subject. Immediately it was clear that the sexes took radically different views of the subject. The men, and two older female community workers, my friend Farida and another teacher, were instantly caught up in the excitement of exploring a new site. They rushed around calling me to come and look at every new discovery Roman statues and a long Greek inscription among them. They also listened courteously to the local Kurdish population, who herded sheep in the area, and asked many questions of the shepherds, as well as keenly examining the photocopied plans from Tchalenkos book that I carried with me. By contrast, the women were largely concerned with their (unsuitable) footwear, scorned the local shepherds and only became animated when a Kurdish farmer lent them a donkey to ride back on.

Back at the restaurant, as the females miraculously recovered enough to spend hours dancing the dabkeh, Yusuf, Farida and a small group of community leaders decided that the day had been a success. Many of the young men and a smaller proportion of women had requested further information and professed their shame that they were unaware that they had spent their entire lives only 40 km away from these places and known nothing about them. Yusuf had spoken sharply to those with unsuitable footwear and pointed out that this was a valuable exercise in regaining their history. The inhabitants of the region had disappeared, it was presumed northwards into contemporary Turkey in the 7th century, and in the 20th century the ancestors of the population of Hay Suryan had moved south from Turkey. Therefore he reasoned that understanding these monuments was a vital part of understanding the Christian heritage of the region, a heritage that transcended the modern state boundaries and was more understandable as a region ruled as the hinterland of the great city of Antioch. It was decided that I would photocopy my site notebook for Farida, who would then translate the information and act as guide on a series of future trips. When I returned in 1998 I found that this had worked well, and that the trips were still continuing a year later. It was on my second period of research in Syria, in the autumn of 1998, that I was approached by Samir Katerji to achieve the same objective with an altogether less willing group. For months Samir (a devout atheist) had been annoyed by a large group of elderly men playing backgammon in the church community centre when they should have been attending mass. To Samir this was extremely disrespectful and, one Tuesday during the evening mass, he gave them an ultimatum. If they were found playing backgammon the following Sunday morning he was taking a monetary forfeit from

27

21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

them. Predictably, on Sunday morning they were all there as usual and Samir took a token amount of money from each man (they were largely middleaged to elderly and relatively poor) and ordered them to meet at the community centre at 6.00 am the following Sunday. Then he telephoned me. Considering himself an atheist who had properly considered all the options, Samir felt that these men were alienated from the Church through ignorance and needed to be educated about their past. I was to turn up at 6.00 am the next Sunday and lead the group on an exploration that would cause them to question their relationship with the past and with the Church. I turned up early on that Sunday morning because I was staying with Farida, who, unusually in Syria, was exceptionally organised and woke me at 5.30 am with a picnic of iced water, cucumbers and fruit to take on my travels. On reaching the church I was amazed to see that most of the men had already arrived, some bringing sons and grandsons with them, but I was to be the only female. Generally, they were practically dressed, but one man in his eighties was sporting his best black suit with shirt and tie. Despite their age, these men could walk for miles and were bursting with questions. They were as curious about the lives of the Kurdish farmers they found living in the region as they were about the monuments they were exploring, and frequently stopped to talk to the local villagers. In one ruined chapel they spontaneously called upon a deacon amongst them to lead prayers, and even Samir was to be found crossing himself as they sang the Lords Prayer. The highlight of the day was when a passing farmer gave us all a lift in his trailer to the ruins we were searching for. The success of the trip was illustrated by the fact that before we reached Aleppo, the men had already chartered the bus for the following Sunday and ordered me to devise a new itinerary for them. I have been back to Aleppo every year since 1998, and from Yusuf, Farida and Samir, I know that these trips have continued and, indeed have spread. Farida now takes her all-women Bible study groups on trips to the Limestone Massif and other Christian sites further afield. The community groups still go on visits-cum-picnics and there is a demand for local speakers to talk about the Christian history of the region. It is perhaps also telling that those who have fully embraced this interest are those least likely to emigrate. Samir has an engineering degree and lived in Sweden for a while but says that he was unable to live so far away from his cultural roots, and Yusufs social circle is far less likely to move away than the graduate groups not least because they have such a strong sense of community and home. In June 2005 I was in Hay Suryan visiting friends and, naturally, I went to the community centre to drink coffee and be seen the central point of social life in the area. The old men were still playing backgammon and, after admiring the improvement in my Arabic (non-existent when I lived in Aleppo) took my elbow and drew my into the snooker and ping-pong room. There on the wall were two photographs I had taken of them, blown up to poster size. One showed them praying in a ruined church and the other showed them standing on the back of a tractor driven by a smiling Kurdish farmer.

Qaryatayn, 2000 present

During my time in Aleppo I became friends with a monastic community in central Syria, in a monastery approximately 90km north of Damascus. Whilst Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi3 (the monastery of St Moses the Abyssinian) is relatively well known, due to the mediaeval fresco cycle in the monastery church (the only complete cycle still extant in the Levant4), in 2000 the community was given another, less glamorous and visually spectacular monastery. Dayr Mar Elian esh-Sharqi (the monastery of St Julian of the East) today stands approximately 500 m to the west of the town of Qaryatayn, a shabby mud brick structure; very little of the ancient monastery remains above ground today. As the last settlement before Palmyra, Qaryatayn was a staging post for the major caravan routes until the advent of motor vehicles killed the towns most lucrative trade as a rest-stop on the Damascus-Palmyra journey. Unfortunately, the town, with its current population of 28,000 people, approximately 20 per cent of whom are Christians, descended from an unbroken Christian tradition of at least 1,500 years, forms one of the most economically and socially deprived communities in contemporary Syria. It was with this knowledge that I arrived in Qaryatayn in 2000, and immediately it became apparent that the attitude of the local population was unlike that of Hay Suryan in Aleppo. Whereas in Aleppo I had been treated as an eccentric, but young and enthusiastic, student and quickly assimilated into local society, in Qaryatayn I was viewed with suspicion. Firstly, they were not used to outsiders and the concept of foreign extended to anyone from outside the village. Fr Jacques, from the Community of Deir Mar Musa, who had recently been appointed parish priest, was viewed with suspicion as he came from the unimaginably distant city of Aleppo. Second, any outsider interested in the monastery was viewed as a potential graverobber come to despoil the tomb of Mar Elian (St. Julian). Having established that the last overseas residents of the village were an eccentric Danish Protestant

28

CONTEMPORARY SYRIA
missionary who slept with her gun, and Gertrude Bell, who was a frequent visitor in the early years of the 20th century, I set about trying to make contact with the villagers by displaying my ignorance. Finding that the town was inhabited by a mixture of bedu and fellahin, I befriended the patriarch of the largest Christian bedu clan and questioned him about his childhood. Over a series of meetings in the home shared by the whole vast Bayt Habib when the herds were in town I spoke to Abu Naseef about his memories of the monastery going back to the 1920s and 1930s. Slowly, other members of the family began to visit me at the site and his daughter was able to give me valuable information on her life as a resident of the monastery until almost all the mud brick structures had collapsed in the 1980s due to termite infestation. In 2001 on 9 September, the annual festival of Mar Elian, I arranged a small display in the church explaining who I was and why the exploration of the monastery was important. Over the course of the day between 1,500 and 2,000 people read this display. They then began to approach me over the coming months with their recollections of the site and stories of vanished village traditions. As these were collated they were made into a small exhibition in one of the three remaining mud brick chambers on site. Local people always recognised the importance of the site and now they felt that they would like others to share their saint with them. In talking to local people Fr Jacques has discovered that many villagers feel that the arrival of foreigners somehow validates their belief in the sanctity of the site, and that if more were to appear as tourists, then history may prove the way to revitalise a dying community.

The author collecting oral history data inside the Church of Dayr Mar Elian

encourages a sense of cultural belonging that creates a cohesive social force and that will hopefully stem the widespread emigration that threatens to destroy the Christian communities of the Middle East within one or two generations.
This text is a variation on a paper published with a more archaeological focus in World Archaeology. World Archaeology, vol 37, no 4, Dec 2005, pp. 58996.

End notes
1 G Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord. Le Massif du Blus a lpoque romaine, Vols. 13. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1953. G Tchalenko, glises syriennes bema. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1990. H C Butler, Ancient Architecture in Syria. Leyden 1909. Tchalenko1953 and 1990 op cit. The standard English transliteration for monastery is Dayr but Deir Mar Musa was restored by an Italian group and has an Italian Abbot who use the Italian spelling Deir. The monastery is now so widely known by this spelling that it is best to preserve it as all literature relating to the site is spelt in the Italian manner. E C Dodd, The Monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, near Nebek, Syria, Arte Medievale, 1992, pp.61132. E C Dodd,The Frescoes of Mar Musa al-Habashi. A Study in Medieval Painting in Syria, 2001.

2 3 4

Conclusion
Over the course of almost ten years working with Christian communities in Syria I have found that it is a feeling of dislocation and rootlessness that is most likely to bring about emigration in the younger generations of Christians. Whilst the reason for emigration is most commonly given as economic, it is clear that people will brave economic disadvantage if they feel that they are part of a growing and vibrant community. By putting younger people in touch with their past and reminding them of the historical continuity of their ancestral past, as illustrated by the vast wealth of late antique monuments in contemporary Syria, many are now questioning their role in society and seeing that cultivating social responsibility and community feeling may be a more satisfactory answer for their future than flight to an alien and possibly unsympathetic culture elsewhere in the world. Ultimately, this kind of community project

5 6

Additional references
Baccache, E., under the direction of G. Tchalenko, glises de village de la Syrie du nord, vol.2, Planches. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1979. E Baccache glises de village de la Syrie du nord, vol.1; Album. Paul Geuthner, Paris, 1980. Toronto: Pontificial Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Kaufhold, H. 1995. Notizen ber das Moseskloster bei Nabk und das Julianskloster bei Qaryatain in Syrien, Oriens Christianus 79 (1995), pp.48-119

Author biography
Emma Loosley studied the architecture and liturgy of the Syrian Church for her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, before moving to Syria to work as the art historian and archaeologist of the monastic community of Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi in the Syrian desert north of Damascus. Since January 2004 she has taught Oriental Christian and Islamic Art at the University of Manchester.

29

Teaching the Art of Africa

THOMAS A DOWSON

s an archaeologist I began my research and teaching career on Southern African rock art in South Africa at the beginning of the 1980s. This was a time when Jan Vansina remarked that it was impossible to write an art history of Africa, as too many scholars in the field of African art have been allergic to historical pursuits.1 He also pointed out how very restrictive the notion of African Art was, and how it ignored vast parts of the African continent, including Southern Africa. Of Southern Africa, the annihilated Bushman communities and the impact that their well-known rock art has had on the formulations of the subcontinents history [were] of scant interest to many southern African academics.2 South African Art historians, for instance, generally believed that the multitude of images engraved and painted on the stone surfaces survive to tantalise archaeologists and to fascinate students of aesthetic form.3 This sort of view is perhaps not surprising, as rock art was all but ignored in undergraduate art history curricula. For art historians, rock art served only as an introductory device to their magisterial accounts of art in Southern Africa. By the beginning of the 1990s there was a significant literature on rock art, mostly produced by archaeologists or in archaeology publications. While it is true there was considerable and often heated debate amongst archaeologists about the meaning and significance of rock art, at least there was a debate. The idea that at the beginning of the 1990s rock art merely tantalised archaeologists is evidence enough of how uninterested art historians were.

Much has been written on the centuries of appropriation of so-called non-Western art by the West, and its reception and continued representation there.5 The Wests interest, whether it is academic or popular, in African art has always been constructed around a series of paradoxes; although rarely articulated as such in a sustained manner. The very idea of African art itself stands in conflict with widely held notions and ideas about Africa, the continent and its people. And this fundamental conflict permeates all other aspects of the reception and representation of African art in the West, resulting in yet further paradoxes and tensions.

Paradoxes of Reception and Representation

Perhaps the most fundamental paradox of all in African art is that the meanings of such concepts as Africa and Art, and how these terms have come to acquire their meaning in the West, are in direct and continuous conflict with each other. Widely held perceptions of Africa as a continent do not easily allow us to think of Africans as producers and consumers of art. Our collective imaginations of Africa and Africans are deeply entrenched, originating in the accounts of European explorers and missionaries to Africa over the centuries. Early European accounts of Africa and its people are filled with highly judgemental comments about barbaric practices and intellectual capabilities (or lack thereof). In an account of travels during 1797 and 1798 into the southern African interior, then largely unexplored by Europeans, Sir John Barrow6 wrote of the rock art he saw there: The force and sprit of drawings, given to them by bold touches judiciously applied, and by the effect of light and shadow, could not be expected from savages. The same applies to many, if not all, artistic traditions of Africa; Europeans simply could not accept that Africans had made the art they were encountering and looting. Some of the early Benin bronze work, for instance, was initially thought to be far too sophisticated to have been made by indigenous people of the area; after all Benin was known as the City of Blood. Early Portuguese traders, the ancient Egyptians and, for some, even the lost tribes of Israel were more suitable candidates. And still today there are people who find it more palatable to believe that southern African rock art was made by aliens than by indigenous hunters and gatherers.

In my research on Southern African rock art, and the socio-politics of its contemporary reception, I soon came to appreciate that if ever there was an artistic tradition that was excluded by popular and academic perceptions of African Art, it was rock art from any part of the African continent. In attempting to get to understand the reasons for this exclusion I was interested to know what was quintessential African Art. Vansina provides a clue: African art is the label usually given to the visual and plastic arts of the peoples south of the Sahara, especially those of western and central Africa.4 And, if there is one tradition that stands out from these, in so many different ways, whether historically, financially or intellectually, it is the art from Benin and in particular those objects looted by British armed forces after the sacking of Benin City in 1897.

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TEACHING THE ART OF AFRICA

The racist notion that Africa was full of savages with barbaric practices was used to justify what can truly be termed barbaric acts carried out by Europeans for their colonial agenda. One of the two surviving soldiers of the ill-fated (and ill-advised) mission on 4 January 1897 that led to the massacre and sacking of Benin City later in the month wrote: The loss which the British nation has sustained during the last sixty years, through the deaths of so many brave soldiers, bluejackets, and civilians in the glorious work of rescuing the native races in West Africa from the horrors of human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the tortures of fetish worship, must ever be a matter of deep regret and sadness to all.7 Having all but raised the City of Benin to the ground, and exiling the King of Benin, British troops both officially and personally looted artworks from the royal residence. The British Foreign Office sold off its war booty to defray costs of the punitive expedition, while individuals sold their personal loot in various auctions in Europe. There are now, spread around the world, numerous artworks from the City of Benin that were taken as part of the raid on the city. In April 2003 an object that was looted from the city of Benin after the raid went up for auction with an estimate of between US$60,000 $80,000; it actually sold for US$185,000. In 1907 the Pitt Rivers Museum bought a bronze plaque from Benin City, said to have been hidden away from [British] soldiers after the capture of Benin on the Punitive Expedition of 1897 and brought to Lagos by a native trading woman, for the then princely sum of 5.8 Three years later the Pitt Rivers Museum paid 10 for 178 pieces of miscellaneous West African art. The raid provides a unique provenance to these objects that afforded them enormous monetary value after the raid, a value that is still recognised today. But the Punitive raid only ever receives scant attention in books about, and museum displays of, Benin Art. In a recent attempt at providing a history of art in Africa, A History of Art in Africa,9 the coverage of African arts is refreshing: there is considerable attention to pre-historic traditions and archaeological research, as well as the art of Ancient Egypt. But in attempting to write a history of art in Africa the socio-politics of that history are only really ever mentioned in passing, as a way of imparting straightforward empirical detail, or as an obligatory introductory chapter (although Bliers introduction to this volume is in stark contrast to the approach adopted in the rest of the volume). In the chapter that discusses Benin art, the Punitive Raid is used to explain how Benin Art comes to be in the

A letter from W J Hider, a British naval officer present at the sacking of Benin, to the Horniman Museum offering to sell the curios he had taken from Benin to the museum. He states that he is certain that the pieces he had taken were the only ones to have survived the sack of Benin.

museums and private collections it can be found in. Nowhere is there any meaningful consideration, not even in the bibliography, of the impact Benin art has had in the West since 1897, nor is there any discussion, no matter how brief, of how the raid is constructed as a single cataclysmic event rather than as one event in a number of historical disruptions.10 Simply including in the bibliography Coombess11 groundbreaking study of the reception of Benin art in the West would have gone some way to acknowledging different conceptions of African art. The real business of the study of African art as seen in A History of Art in Africa12, and others like it13, is underwritten by an approach that provides distinct ethnic histories of as many creative traditions as possible. Magisterial accounts such as these celebrate rather than challenge the Wests construction of African art14 a construction that creates meaning and value according to a dealer critic system. What is overlooked in these constructions of African art is the way in which the presence of these objects in Western institutions is justified on the basis that they are part of a national heritage. Claims for the repatriation of the so-called Benin bronzes, for example, are often dismissed because these objects are said to be an integral part of a British national heritage. It was a result of the arrival of the Benin objects after the raid that we saw the setting up of the Ethnography Department at the British Museum. It is not surprising then that the real provenance of these objects is overlooked or downplayed the presence of these objects in the British Museum, and other pubic and private collections, results from the colonial and imperialist

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21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

activities of the British Government. The sacking of Benin City in 1897, and the distasteful reasons behind the massacre, is not an event that is openly celebrated as such today as are other military endeavours of the past. In an attempt to avoid the real reasons why these objects are a part of British national heritage, they become an international heritage; these object are held in trust for mankind.15 It is as a result of the paradoxes and tensions I have briefly outlined above that many creative traditions of Africa have become objectified. These objects have been removed from their social and political settings, and been denied their initial and developing subjectivity. They are rarely seen or presented as part of ongoing, developing traditions; they are placed in distant pasts or ethnic others. Objects produced more recently are often catalogued as crafts and dismissed as tourist art.16 Second, students should acknowledge that Africas creative traditions have come out of Africas complex past, and the production and consumption of these were integrally linked to prevailing sociopolitical contexts. We should not deal with arts as exclusively ethnic traditions, thus proclaiming the otherness of African peoples. On the contrary, all the peoples of Africa, including for example, Middle-Eastern and European traders and conquerors, missionaries, explorers, have been caught up in various ways in the production of certain creative traditions. Third, the specific historical context of the arts production and consumption can and should be extended. Our knowledge about African arts, past and present, is constructed in the present, and we need to think very carefully about what that knowledge is saying to us today, about ourselves as well as Africa. It is all too easy for us to impose our contemporary, Western attitudes about class, gender, race, sexuality and age on to those of African people in our constructions of Africa. Fourth, the technical aspects of the arts production should be located within the social and historical conditions of that production. Far too often, even today, people use apparent technical expertise in art as an indicator of intellectual sophistication. African arts have often been classified according to skill and abilities, where some preconceived notion of what is simple often stands for childlike and primitive. Such classifications are then used to construct temporal schemes that see the art evolving from simple and primitive styles to more complex and advanced styles. Producers of material culture use particular techniques and formal qualities, etc, for particular reasons; these are socially and historically contingent, not simply historical markers. And finally, the manipulation of African art in contemporary material culture, such as art, advertising, or souvenirs for tourists, should be critically examined. Some of these representations do indeed reinforce widely held stereotypes about Africa, its people and their artistic traditions, but some do in fact challenge these and force people to think about Africa in different ways.18

Aspects of African Art

One of the primary aims of teaching African art in the United Kingdom for me has been to challenge the ideologies on which these paradoxes and tensions are founded not to present a series of ethnic traditions in time and space. I do so by explicitly exploring some of the socio-political aspects of artistic traditions, not just the formal qualities of the art, their chronologies and meanings.17 I recognise five aspects that require particular attention. First, I believe students need to actively challenge the idea we can never really know anything about certain artistic traditions. This idea comes from the belief that to fully understand an artistic tradition we need direct textual information relating to the arts production and consumption. In some instances colonialism is used as an expedient marker: what happened before colonialism is lost, what happened after the arrival of Europeans is recorded and documented and hence accessible. As archaeologists have shown, there are indeed ways to know about these traditions. It may be a difficult enterprise, one that is fraught with numerous epistemological problems, but it is certainly not an impossible exercise. These epistemological problems should be specifically addressed because, like all academic enterprises, they are not socio-politically neutral. It is no longer, if ever it was, sufficient to write off Africas pre-colonial artistic traditions as merely tantalising archaeologists and fascinating scholars of aesthetic form. Once we accept that there are different ways of knowing about the past, we should foreground the intellectual complexity of all African creative traditions, not just those that are obviously produced in post-colonial contexts.

Cultural biographies: objects as subjects

By explicitly dealing with the issues I have only briefly outlined above in specific epistemological contexts I believe we can come some way to restoring the subjectivity of the material cultures we often label as ethnographic objects. In other words, looking at the narratives of these objects to restore their subjectivity, or as Mieke Bal19 suggests, using objects to tell narratives. I end with one example, different objects and events, to present a tentative but different and tantalising narrative.

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TEACHING THE ART OF AFRICA

Leopards carved in ivory with copper inlay. On display in the British Museum, London.

The British Museum has many pieces of art in its care that were taken after the raid on Benin City. Some of these are on display in the museum. Two of these that are on display are on permanent loan from the Queens collection. They are ivory and copper leopards. They are exquisite pieces and are often reproduced in publications on Benin art. But the focus in these publications is on the significance of leopards for the people of Benin, and that they are probably from the Late period of Benin art. These leopards provide evidence for an idea that ivory carving, unlike brass casting, did not suffer a decline in the Late period. Whatever the take on this sort of analysis, these leopards have become two objects slotted into a Western idea about the development of artistic style. This kind of analysis ignores so much in the biography of these beautifully produced leopards. The rump of one of them can be seen in the muchreproduced 1897 photograph of members of the British punitive expedition in the royal compound of Benin City seated amongst their war booty. Also, in the National Archives (Kew Gardens, London) there is a letter that relates specifically to the passage of these two Leopards to London and their current owner. On 20 March 1897 the British Commissioner and Consul General at Old Calabar, Nigeria, wrote to the Marquess of Salisbury, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: My Lord Marquess Referring to my despatches Nos 17 and 23 reporting operations against Benin City I have the honour to state that it was the wish of Rear

Admiral Rawson and the officers engaged on the expedition that some memento should be sent to England which Her Majesty the Queen might be graciously pleased to accept as the Imperial forces were engaged. I have selected two carved ivory tusks and two leopard figures made from ivory which I am sending home in charge of Major Landow who will deliver them at the foreign office and I would respectfully suggest that Your Lordship bring the matter under Her Majestys notice for gracious approval. The ivories would require polishing and putting in good order as they were unfortunately slightly damaged by fire though first rate specimens. I am, My Lord, Your Lordships most obedient, Humble servant, R Moor Commissioner & Consul General I argue these other objects, the photograph and the letter to the Foreign Office, should not be perceived as interesting documents associated with the two leopards. On the contrary, they are an integral part of the biography of these two ivory leopards, and they should be treated as such, in publication and display. Together they enable and empower a telling and different story.

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21ST-CENTURY ART HISTORY

End notes
Photographs: Thomas Dowson 1 2 Jan Vansina, Art history in Africa: an introduction to method, Longman, London, 1984, p1. Thomas A Dowson and David Lewis-Williams, Myths, museums and Southern African rock art, South African Historical Journal, volume 29, 1993, p60. Esme Berman, Painting in South Africa, Southern Book Publishers, Halfway House, 1993. Vansina, op.cit., p1 (note 1). For the most sustained discussion on these topics for Africa see Annie E Coombes, Ethnography, popular culture and institutional power: narratives of Benin Culture in the British Museum 1897-1992, Studies in History of Art, volume 47, 1994, pp.143-157; Annie E Coombes, Reinventing Africa: museums, material culture and popular imagination, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994; Elazar Barkan, Aesthetics and Evolution: Benin Art in Europe, African Arts, summer, pp. 3641. John Barrow, An account of his travels into the interior of southern Africa in the years 1797 and 1798, Volume 1, p. 237, Cadell & Davis, London, 1801. A Boisragon, The Benin Massacre, Methuen, London, 1897, p189. Coombes, Reinventing Africa, p. 148 (note 5). Monica Blackmun Vison, Robyn Poynor, Herbert M. Cole and Michael D Harris, (eds), A history of art in Africa, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000. in Benin City African Arts, autumn, pp5463. 17 The approach I adopted was greatly inspired and influenced by Catherine King King ed, Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, in association with the Open University, 1999; and Rachel Mason, Art Education and Multicultralism. NSEAD, Corsham, 1995. 18 For the use of southern African rock art in contemporary material culture, see Thomas Dowson, Re-production and consumption:the use of rock art imagery in Southern Africa today, in Miscast in history: the making and breaking of the Bushman (ed. P. Skotnes), pp: 31521. Cape Town: UCT Press, Cape Town, 1996; and Thomas Dowson, Off the rocks, onto T-shirts, canvasses, etc. power and the popular consumption of rock art imagery, in, Rock art and ethics: a dialogue (ed. W D Hyder), pp: 114. American Rock Art Research Association, Tuscon, 1999. 19 Mieke Bal, Telling objects: a narrative perspective on collecting in, The cultures of collecting (eds J. Elsner and R. Cardinal), pp: 97115. London: Reaktion Books, London, 1997.

3 4 5

7 8 9

Acknowledgements
This piece has its origins in a project I carried out as part of the Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History Project (see www.glaadh.ac.uk), and is part of ongoing research into the reception and representation of African art in the West today. I acknowledge funding received from the GLAADH project and the University of Manchester. I thank Ed Evans, Mark Zlotowski and Emma Poulter for their assistance with archival research. I thank the Horniman Museum for permission to photograph and publish the Hider letter. I also thank San Jones, Helen Rees Leahy and Louise Tythacott for stimulating discussions about some of the issues raised here. Finally, I thank Janet Tatlock and Catherine King for inviting me to take part in the AAH conference session at which I presented an earlier draft of this paper.

10 Joseph Nevadomsky, Studies of Benin art and material culture, 18971997, African Arts, summer, pp. 1827. 11 Coombes, Reinventing Africa (note 5). 12 Vison et al op. cit. (note 9). 13 See, for example, Tom Phillips (ed.) Africa: art of a continent, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1995. 14 See, for example, Olabisi Silva, africa95: cultural colonialism or cultural celebration, in, Art criticism and Africa (ed. K. Deepwell), pp1520. Saffron Books, London, 1997. 15 Sir David Wilson, 1989, the then director of the British Museum, cited in Coombes Ethnography, popular culture and institutional power , p154 (note 5). 16 Joseph Nevadomsky has published a valuable piece on contemporary art in Benin City, Contemporary art and artists

Author biography
Thomas Dowson is an independent researcher, having held research and lecturing positions at leading South African and British Universities. His research includes shamanism and the interpretation of rock art, theory and methodology of archaeological approaches to art, and the reception and representation of African art. His publications include Rock Engravings of Southern Africa (1992, Witwatersrand University Press) and, with David Lewis-Williams, Images of Power: understanding San rock art (1989, Second edition 2000, Struik).

34

The End of Art' or Iconoclash: Crises of Representation and Attempts to Globalise the New Art History
Abstract for a paper by STEPHANIE KOERNER

he last century has seen a series of crises of representation whose causes and consequences are the foci of proliferating debates across diverse theoretical literatures, areas of research and teaching, and programmes for public understanding expert knowledge. The most influential paradigms for the new art history emerged in relation to wider crisis in the human sciences and humanities of the 1960s and 1970s. Major differences among these paradigms have turned upon principles drawn from the different ways in which the founding figures of the analytic, continental and sociological philosophical (or theoretical) tradition responded to crises in physical science and natural philosophy during the first half of the 20th century to conflicts between Relativity Theory and positivist theses on scientific unity, social progress, and the idea of an (impartial) universalisable (empiricist) language for distinguishing true and false knowledge claims (cf. Kuhn 970 [1962]). Major differences between these traditions turn on principles intended for new approaches to (a) objects of research, (b) methods for explaining or interpreting a, (c) researchers relations to a and b, (d) the contents and social contexts of a, b and c, and (e) how ad relate to social and moral accountability (Koerner, S. 2006). Neither of these crises occurred in a social vacuum. Crises in the human sciences and humanities over hitherto authoritative paradigms for research and teaching developed in the midst of the Cold War and escalating post-colonial conflict over social inequalities based on race, class and gender. Crises have been experienced especially by artists, academics, and public media practitioners who have seriously reflected upon historical roots that these paradigms have shared with some of the most powerful colonialist, imperialist and nationalist political ideologies of modern times. Loss of naivet about the dynamics of political history, pedagogical institutions, and public affairs became a core concern of the new art history (Harris 2001). Unfortunately, many responses have been entangled in tendencies to reduce concrete social and ecological crises to pedagogical wars over rival paradigms that agree on what and who are excluded from debate (cf. Benjamin 1978 [1937], 1994 [1940]; Latour 2000). The turn of the 21st century is seeing the situation change as crises traversing the physical sciences, human sciences and humanities converge on discrepancies between core-periphery

representations of globalisation and the social geography of ecological risk, sustainable development and exposure to political violence (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1996; Irwin and Wynne 1996; Friedman ed. 2002; Inda and Rosaldo eds. 2002). New spaces are opening to discuss problems of the Eurocentric focus of many undergraduate courses in the History of Art and Design (Branfoot 2005) and iconoclast notions of the end of art (Weibel 2002). Strongly relativising ideas of globalising multi-cultural political identities, alternative realities, and the new cosmopolitanism are being questioned (Latour 2004; Koerner, S. 2006). Truths are not contested across mutually exclusive worlds. Different things matter to people living in the same one. Wars are not fought over different worlds, but over conflicting views on what is most important in the world that rivals both inhabit. Research on the long history of paradoxically devout iconoclast beliefs in belief especially in beliefs of others in deceptive images can illuminate contradictory views on these matters and the end of art (cf. Benjamin 1977; Toulmin 1990, J.L. 2002; Weibel 2002), which relate to challenges that a common world is not something we can come to recognize, as though it had always been here. A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we have to build, tooth and nail together (Latour 2004: 455). My presentation has two aims. Part 1 identifies several requirements of strongly reflective approaches to notions of the end of art and globalising the new art history in light of themes in the session and Walter Benjamins works: (1) the historical contingency of reductions of existential human crises to pedagogical wars, (2) the normative roles of state of emergency in views that philosophys main task is a standpoint beyond local situations for judging true and false, fact and fiction, friend and foe, (3) going against the grain of myths that a clean slate divides moderns from pre-moderns, (4) questions of whether Platonist and Aristotelian views on philosophys tasks, ethics and human capacities for poetic (creative) expression have exhausted their usefulness. Few 20th century scholars have worked more urgently on such matters than Benjamin. The theme crises of interpretation runs through works motivating his arguments that the state of emergency in modern times is not an anomaly but a

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ruling principle, and that insight of the problem can help us to combat forces that threaten variability of human life-worlds (Benjamin 1992 [1940]). Benjamin spoke too early and too late. Increasingly phantasmagorical ideologies have been employed to legitimate the marginalisation, exploitation and oppression, even until death, of minorities. In 1949, Theodore Adorno (1973) argued that 20th century events undermined the credibility of universalising claims about reconciling all-encompassing ideals with concrete historical reality. Critical theory, Adorno said, faced a turning point in the dialectic of culture and barbarism; it would be barbaric to hoist images of redemption arising from this dialectic - yet we cannot do without culture. It bears stressing that, for Adorno, Hanna Arendt (1989 [1958]) and others who have argued against cultural treatment of terrible historical events as redemptive, crucial questions are: How can humanity continue (we live)? How can we anchor our various fields of practice to one another, some common sense of good, and hopes for the future? At stake is not the end of art but how we can deal with the ways in which culture can and has deceived without abandoning hope that the arts can help us to proceed. The arts (and whatever we call culture) form our conditions of possibility for creating spaces of reasons contexts where reasons given and asked for by mutually susceptible and accountable intentional beings create the we for whom things matter (cf. Brandom 1994; Barnes 2000; Habermas 2003). Strongly reflective approaches to bringing an end to problematic notions of the end of art can build upon the long history of arguments for the poet-orator rather than the philosopher-king as pedagogical and political ideal. Part 2 illustrates how these issues relate to challenges facing art history research and teaching at the turn of the 21st century in light of materials for the seminars of an MA course entitled, Iconoclash: Debates in Pre-Columbian and Latin American Visual Culture Studies, dealing with such topics as: (a) art, cosmology and converging Old and New Worlds, (b) realism, abstraction, crises of representation, (c) destruction of idols and colonial expansion, (d) contextualizing the baroque, surreal and exotic, (e) mural painting and changing views on popular culture, (f) carnival and social critique, (g) art, poverty, other modernities, (h) image wars in an age that some call that of risk society. End notes
Adorno, TW [1963] 1973. Negative Dialectics, E B Ashton (transl.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Arendt, H 1989 [1958] The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barnes, B 2000. Understanding Agency: Social Theory and Responsible Action. London: Sage Publications. Beck, U Giddens, A and Lash, S. 1994. Reflexive modernisation. Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benjamin, W. 1977. The Origins of German Tragic Drama. London: Fontana Press. Benjamin, W. 1978 [1937] Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian, in A Arato and E Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Oxford: Basel Blackwell, 225-255. Benjamin, W. 1994 [1940]. Theses on the Philosophy of History, in H Arendt (ed.) and H Zohm (transl.), Illuminations: Works of Benjamin. London: Fontana Press, 245-255. Benjamin, W. 1992 [1936] The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in C Harrison and P Wood (eds.), Art in theory. London: Academic Press, 513-520. Brandom, R. 1994. Making It explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Branfoot, C. 2005. Where is South Asia? Studying the Arts of India in the 21st Century, a paper presented in the session, 21stCentury Art History: Global Reception, convened by C King and J Tatlock for the AAH conference, April 2005, Bristol, UK, and published herein pp1115. Friedman, J. (ed.) 2002 Globalization, the State and Violence. Oxford: Altamira. Habermas, J. 2003. Truth and justification, transl.) Cambridge: Polity Press. B Fulner (ed. and

Harris, J. 2001. The New Art History. London: Routledge. Inda, J and Rosaldo, R.(eds.) 2002. The Anthropology of Globalization: a Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Irwin, A and Wynne, B (eds.) 1996. Misunderstanding science: the public reconstruction of science and technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koerner, J.L. 2002. The Icon as Iconoclash, in B Latour and P Weibel (eds.), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. London: MIT Press, 194-213. Koerner, S. 2004. Agency and Views Beyond Meta-narratives that Privatise Ethics and Globalise Indifference, in A Gardner (ed.) Agency Uncovered: Archaeological Perspectives on Social Agency, Power, and Being Human. London: UCL Press, 211-240. Koerner, S. 2006. Rethinking Media and Image: How Archaeological Objects and Practices Relate to Pasts that Matter, in M Britain and T Clack (eds.), Archaeology and the media. London: UCL Press, chapter 16. Kuhn, T. 1970 [1962]. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Second edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Latour, B. 2000 Pandoras Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B and Weibel, P (eds.) 2002. Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. London: MIT Press. Latour, B. 2004. Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolis? Common Knowledge 10(3): 450-462. Toulmin, S. 1990. Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weibel, P. 2002. An End to the End of Art? The Iconoclasm of Modern Art, in B Latour and P Weibel (eds.), Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. London: MIT Press, 587-670.

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