Third Text
Issues
Volume 38, 2024
Issue 1–2
Number 186–187, January–March 2024, ‘Polyphony: Voice, Method, Archive’, guest edited by Azadeh Sarjoughian, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Stacey Kennedy
Polyphony 1–20
Azadeh Sarjoughian, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Stacey Kennedy
This special issue explores the concept of polyphony in writing art history, using it as a methodological lens to examine diverse voices, along with their intricate interactions and contradictions, archival practices, and the collective creation of knowledge. Ranging from dialogic and experimental approaches to academic styles in writing, the authors embrace a spectrum of narratives in their writing to challenge canonical art history. Exploration of themes such as otherness, cross-cultural encounters, and relational aesthetics are also central, enriching the discourse with varied perspectives. Relational approaches to art history writing exemplify efforts in some of the articles to transcend conventional academic boundaries, offering writing nearby artistic practices and merging written with oral narratives. The issue also examines the role of archives, reflecting on racial and gender-based power dynamics and the concepts of living archive and archival rewriting. Several articles explore the implications of this approach, highlighting the need for a multi-dimensional narrative that acknowledges the complexities of the interactions between local and global discourses, transnational, transcultural and diasporic identities. In summary, this special issue invites the reader to reconsider the traditional frameworks of art history and to embrace a more inclusive, resonant, and interconnected understanding of the field.
The Tour: A Close Listening 21–27
Barbara Preisig
What if an artwork changes its shape and sense with every encounter? Is there such a thing as polyphonic meaning, resulting from the interactions with an artwork? Barbara Preisig’s semi-fictional play brings the reader to a scene at Kunstmuseum Bern. It tells the story of a guided public tour through El Anatsui’s solo exhibition ‘Triumphant Scale’. The curator, eager to provide key information about the works, finds herself in a vivid discussion around Anatsui’s work ‘Gravity and Grace’. Does the artwork’s shape resemble an elephant? Should the patterns remind us of the colourful Ghanaian fabrics or, in contrast, do they depict nothing but light, form, transparency and physicality? May El Anatsui be called an African artist or not? The audience – among them a protestant pastor, a musician, the artist, seven-year-old Emma – gathers on stage, observed by the narrator, who listens closely to their interpretations. When suddenly five historical busts, part of the neo-classical staircase, get involved in an argument with the artwork, the discussion threatens to get out of hand.
Writing with ‘Surya Namaz’: The Body as a ‘Living Archive’ of Diaspora 28–41
Deniz Sözen
This article reflects on notions of the embodied archive in diaspora art, with a particular focus on my situated knowledge and positionality as a diasporic artist of mixed Turkish and Austrian heritage who lives in the United Kingdom. Taking my multilingual video performance ‘Surya Namaz’ (2018) as a case study, I address the question of roots, ancestry or lineage that arose in the making of the video through writing with the practice, and critically explore the pitfalls of self-othering, the trope of the return and the problematic position of Spivak’s native informant in the context of diaspora art. Reflecting on the multiplicity of voices and encounters that shaped the making of ‘Surya Namaz’, I highlight the potential of Relation to resist an essentialist conception of identity while exploring the body as diasporic archive and site of multiple belongings.
Interlude 1: Crablike Collective Moves 43–66
Rex Butler, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Renate Dohmen, Stacey Kennedy, Astrid Korporaal, Marie Meyerding, Barbara Preisig, Azadeh Sarjoughian, Pfunzo Sidogi and Deniz Sözen
This interlude follows the AAH (Association for Art History) conference, when all of the authors who contribute to this special edition of Third Text are present. Their wide-ranging conversation covers the idea and possibilities of a polyphonic history of art. This interlude is a starting point, a jumping-off point from where a group of authors, researchers and artists reflect on new ways of thinking about, and new ways of presenting, art history. Their conversation develops an ambition to move away from the well-trodden and often reductive methodological frameworks of art history, as they debate ideas around transnationalism, globalism, artist-centric art histories and the idea of artist as author. This interlude is about collective endeavours, both by the subjects being discussed in each paper and by the authors who are writing about them.
The Origins of the Abbey: 1947–1950: An Artist Colony Without a History 67–81
Rex Butler and A D S Donaldson
One of the new models for thinking the production of art in a new decolonialised art history might be the artist colony. Certainly, in Australia, one of the revolutions Aboriginal art has brought about lies in the way it takes place in a series of artist colonies: self-identifying and self-regulating cultural centres that have little or nothing to do with any imagined national art. Australian artists have been involved with any number of artist colonies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not just in Australia but around the world. This article will address just one: the Abbey Art Centre in New Barnet, just outside of London. Owned by gallerist and ethnographic art collector William Ohly, the complex of studios operated from the late 1940s until the late 1950s as the base for a generation of Australian artists and art historians, who enjoyed an entrée into the English art scene offered to no others either before or after. In particular, we examine the artists Robert Klippel, James Gleeson and Mary Webb, who stayed between 1947 and 1949, and the art historian Bernard Smith, who stayed between 1949 and 1950.
A Surreal Relation with Otherness in Shirin Neshat’s ‘Land of Dreams’ 82–105
Azadeh Sarjoughian
Since her early photographic series ‘Women of Allah’ (1993−1997), the Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat has been either praised for her alternative representations of veiled Muslim women or criticised for practising self-Orientalisation. This article reflects on Neshat’s ‘Land of Dreams’ (2019) where the artist turns her lens towards American people and landscapes, investigating how her aesthetic and dialogic search for the Other within a demographically diverse state in the US, New Mexico, challenge the pre-conditioned expectations of her works as art from the Middle East. Engaging with Neshat’s surreal interactions with her sitters in this photographic and video installation, the focus is how she becomes a mediator to show a dynamic of Relation, in Édouard Glissant’s sense of the term, and the complexity of the individuals’ minds and life experiences through blurring the lines between dream and waking life, fiction and reality, past and present. The analysis further explores Neshat’s viewpoint as a diasporic artist manifested in her visual strategies to facilitate a nuanced and fluid understanding of the artist’s own sense of identity, belonging and homeland.
Differential Dispossession and the White Indigenous Counter-Reformation 106–136
Elizabeth Povinelli and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll in Conversation
A history of inheritance in the thinking of Karrabing Film Collective, from Belyuen, the small Indigenous community in Australia. Speaking across from Oceania to Alps, to Central Europe via Australia, and finally on zoom between New York and Vienna, Elizabeth Povinelli and Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll discuss relations to Country through the voices of ancestors. This is a polyphony in an everywhen in which everyone is present. Possessive individuals appear as zombie, while inheritance can also be a way of hearing the consequences of not listening, in a process Elizabeth Povinelli calls the white indigenous counter-reformation.
Peripheral Visiting: Invitations from the Karrabing Collective’s Living Archive 137–153
Astrid N Korporaal
Decolonial perspectives on art history have elaborated on the ways visual representations and documentary media are intertwined with the colonial project. The visual regime is associated with the coloniser’s Eurocentric, objectifying and territorialising gaze. Can the visual still play a part in healing colonial wounds? The Karrabing Collective, a majority Indigenous group based in the Northern Territories of Australia, seems to engage with this question. Studying their video art as a form of invitation, I question how these works address inhospitable zones in the imaginations of the modern world and settler-colonial legacies. Extending Donna Haraway’s metaphor of visiting as a mode of ethical attention, I posit that these works destabilise Western understandings of hospitality, memory and image-making. I argue that their re-visiting of settler-colonial encounters rejects the primacy of archival integration and access, inviting the viewer to visit the lived space of peripheral vision that shifts between remembering and re-imagining.
Miss Chief and the Art of Decolonial Tease: The Mixedblood Urban Earthdiver and the Flâneur 154–179
Renate Dohmen
This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor, as well as the postindian approach to translation. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on the notion of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve he proposes. The discussion concludes by positing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a decolonial era of the future, supplanting the urban flâneur of modernity.
Interlude 2: Trickster Abrakadabra: The Art of Hosting or Declaring Yourself a Guest 180–188
Renate Dohmen and Astrid Korporaal
The Early Black Printmaker(s) in ‘Ilanga Lase Natal’, 1903–1905 189–206
Pfunzo Sidogi
Art historians trace the history of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people in South Africa to the mid-twentieth century. While these genealogies are valuable, they exclude and are silent on the deep history of printmaking as both an artistic and trade skill within the Black press. Using a polyphonic art-historical framing, I tap into the Black archive to demonstrate how printmaking was cultivated as both a creative and a visual communications strategy by Black artists during the early 1900s. By examining printed images published in the ‘Ilanga Lase Natal’ newspaper from 1903 to 1905, I propose a revised chronology of printmaking as a creative endeavour among Black people. The formative Black printmaking tradition I discuss was enabled by colonial-era multinational pharmaceutical enterprises that commissioned many of the etchings and engravings that appeared. A speculative art-historical approach is used to analyse and interpret the various visualisations of New Africans created by these early Black printmakers.
Photography between Publicity and Politics: The Life and Work of South African Photographer Georgina Karvellas 207–227
Marie Meyerding
Georgina Karvellas was one of the few women photographers documenting apartheid South Africa for several decades. She produced work for the fashion and music sector next to striking documentary work with a clear stance against the government’s segregationist policy. Inscribing Karvellas into the histories of photography, film and art, this article highlights the intersections of her work between commercial and political photography as well as between issues of gender, race and class through a careful reading of the various frameworks into which it has been placed and the reasons for them. As she worked at a time when the freedom of movement of South Africa’s majority population was severely restricted, a particular focus is on Karvellas’s transnational approach and the question to what extent her choice of commercial photography might have closed doors for her, such as inclusion in the artistic canon, while giving her greater freedom in crossing borders.
Unsettling the Archive: Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and the Danford Collection 228–244
Stacey Kennedy
This article contributes to debates around African cultural heritage preserved in European archives and museum institutions. It offers a critical analysis of the Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts (University of Birmingham) that unsettles the collection to reveal its archival silences. Unsettling the archive reveals the power relations underlying practices of accumulation and exhibition. Yet although exposing silences and elisions, it reveals surprising and overlooked presences, such as a rare painting from 1960 by Nigerian artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. The article focuses on Ugbodaga-Ngu’s life and work so as to enrich and expand our understanding of the Danford Collection and the way in which the heritage it contains is presented and understood. It sheds light on the way institutions, such as the University of Birmingham, have historically gathered material originating from or relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, whether of colonial or more recent production, which in turn reveals the need for more inclusive approaches to reading the archive that recognise the multiplicity of voices therein.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group