— Emily Bauman
In the second edition of Shawn C. Smallman and Kimberley Brown’s Introduction to International and Global Studies the authors pose a telling question to their student readers: “Why do you think the fine arts are sometimes forgotten in studies of globalization?” (97). And it is true that global studies has found industrial art forms like TV, film, architecture, and commercial music more useful in its investigations, and even when it departs from these is more likely to look to literature than the fine arts as capable of representing and expressing globalized realities (as recent examples see Dierdra Reber’s Coming to our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture and Akinwumi Adesokan’s Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics). In asking this question about “forgetting” Smallman and Brown imply a potential incompatibility – rather than simply distance – between the fields of global studies and art appreciation and art history. This opposition is useful in pointing up a deeper tension between global studies and the humanities at large: the fine arts represents something about humanistic study that appears to be incommensurable with the study of transnational processes, systems, and movements that we call global theory. Why should this be?
One answer takes us to the question of the status of the artwork from the perspective of global theory, which is to understand it insofar as it circulates, reproduces, and “flows” – in other words, insofar as it exists as media. In all of Arjun Appadurai’s “scapes,” for instance, there is no place for consideration of art, broadly conceived, as such. Like McLuhan’s global village or Castells’s networked society, Appadurai’s mediascape would seem to demarcate all relevant cultural production in its horizon. Global studies’ focus on media and flows stands in stark contrast to the humanistic focus on canon and aesthetics familiar since the Enlightenment. Of all fields of cultural production in the West, the fine arts has been perhaps the most aestheticized, at least institutionally (see for example Philip Fisher’s work on the museumization of art since the eighteenth century), and in good measure relies on institutions for its dissemination. This hyper-aestheticization may be one reason for the fine arts’ neglect within global studies, and it raises the question of what, if anything, the aesthetic project has to offer the field and vice-versa. The Enlightenment conceived of aesthetics as the study of human universals, whether of taste, capacity, or experience; postcolonial studies, however, has long since critiqued those vaunted universals as Eurocentric particulars merely masked as such. Is there a different basis on which the study of the arts as such may be approached from within global studies, or is the only way in through communication and media?
A couple of examples from the field of global fine arts may be instructive. One is a recent exhibit at the National Museum of African Art in Washington DC. “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by African Artists” constructs itself as a modern-day demonstration of the “global relevance” of Dante’s text. It would seem to be an adaptation, but the exhibit was much more, reimagining and metaphorizing concepts of the Divine Comedy through various bodily and landscape images of African and Afro-diasporic social issues (purgatory, for instance, was presented as a borderlands). The epic became very much a “scape” within which the exhibit assembled its art so that issues pertaining to globalization, like migration and conflict, could be experienced as objects of contemplation. This example reinforces the embrace in postcolonial studies of creolization, crossover, and diaspora as central features of a global aesthetics (see Hall). Yet such an approach can limit the global to an essentially post-national construct; on the contrary, one of the features of globalization is its retention (and even exploitation) of the nation-state, and of contemporary culture that it may deal with global issues without necessarily hybridizing forms of expression or even identity. Here Okwui Enwezor’s “All the World’s Futures” 2015 Venice Biennale is provocative. An again epic attempt to convey visual responses to the problems of globalization (late stage capitalism, uneven development, violence, and environmental depredation), the event showcased the work of famous and little known artists across the globe within a constructed “flow” of national pavilions and transnational thematics that rendered even the most abstract and generalizable items (Chiharu Kiota’s “Key in the Hand” at the Japan Pavilion for instance) wholly present to their origins; the artworks seemed to alternate between pedantic and suggestive, locating the global epic in an unstable and even unfinished place.
It may be then that an aesthetics of globalism, participating in but not reducible to some of the definitive qualities of media, is best understood in relation to collective/collected artworks as an immanence emerging from and becoming visible under conditions of artistic assembly and association. This kind of counter-marketplace would be a departure from Enlightenment universalism, in which an individual work, complete unto itself, yields and may be judged according to objectivized criteria; in each of the exhibits above judgment arose from the interaction of the artworks and within the totality itself (and beyond, I would argue, the curatorial vision). It would also mean a different role for criticism and theory, which would lose their power to set the standards and steer the discourse, shifting back to the role of interpretation and reception. But as criticism today turns increasingly toward positivist physiological methods of assessing “universal” responses to culture and representation, such as neural pathways and networks, global studies may have the most to offer a reinvigoration of the study of art as an enterprise inspiring imaginative reflection about the world, rather than just manipulating it – if it chooses to remember it.
Works Cited
Adesukan, Akinwumi. Postcolonial Artists and Global Aesthetics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990), 295-310.
Castells, Manual. Communication Power. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” In Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Ed. Anthony King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 19-39.
Fisher, Philip. “Art and the Future’s Past.” In Bettina Messias Carbonell ed. Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, second ed. Chichester, UK: Blackwell, 2012, 457-472.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Reber, Dierdra. Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Smallman, Shawn C. and Kimberley Brown. Introduction to International and Global Studies. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.