Transnational Art Research Articles

Regional Claims Through Exhibitions—The Transnational Circulation of Włocławek “Fajans” in East Central Europe

The article examines the exhibition history of hand-painted ceramic objects from the “Fajans” factory in Włocławek and the politics of regional contextualization during the period of détente in the 1970s and 1980s. It extends both existing scholarship on transnational art history in socialist Europe and the notion of cultural diplomacy, approached here in the context of regional politics and economic frameworks. The paper highlights the peripheral networks and movements that developed in relation to the socialist cultural politics of working-class artistic engagement and artistic practice as labor. Questions of cooperation between Poland and other socialist states are of particular interest, as are the implications of détente for East Central Europe. The reconstruction of the transnational circulation of “Fajans” objects is based on a comparative analysis of international “Fajans” exhibitions, using documentation from the archives of the Faience Department of the Museum of the Kujawy and Dobrzyń Land, as well as from the archives of the city of Novi Sad. Based on the researched material and the conceptual framework of transnational art history, the article proposes a concept of regional cultural diplomacy.

Intermedialita kaligrafických inspirací v poválečném umění a filosofickém diskursu

In this study, based on my dissertation thesis, I focus on the issues of circulation and various methods of appropriating calligraphic practices within the framework of transnational art history, predominantly in the context of the post-war European and North American art scenes. Due to the multi-layered and intermedia nature of the topic of calligraphic inspirations, I have chosen the motif of the circle as a certain unifying element, through which I attempt to reflect the given issue within two distinct circles. The first topic is the examination of the possibilities of artistic or philosophical expression of the ontological meaning of corporeality and the circularity of the body in the process of creation. The circle also reflects the issue of periodic renewal and regeneration of mythical and historical time. I examine the issue of the cyclical nature of time in the context of post-war art, when the necessity of a new beginning arose, which would not only enable a deeper intercultural dialogue, but also strengthen the need to re-examine the original artistic roots and sources.

Critique of Cultural Populism: An Overview of Reflections on the Western Analytical Thought

The postmodern age, which, like the age of contemporary art, is considered by most analysts to have started in the period after Second World War, can be viewed as an umbrella term that encompasses many competing paradigmatic stratagems and diatribe definitions, including the terminologically instable definitions of“postmodernism,” “post-postmodernism,” “metamodernism,” which some critics prefer to consider “high,” “late,” “distorted,” “pseudo-modernism” or “digi-modernism.” In the process of this ongoing discussion, society is periodically informed about the “death” or “end” of art and art criticism. In this context of raging discourses that openly compete with each other, there is one rather significant contextual layer related to the critique of cultural populism, the subject of which is the confrontation between two social constructs: democracy and biopower. The acuteness of the discussion is amplified by the situation of almost total crisis of the modern cultural activity, in particular, of the neoliberal visual practices, which since the millennium have come under the strict patronage of the transnational art business, whose creative projects are corrected by market and benchmarking policies. The latter has completely supplanted/replaced the politics of aesthetics, so all this has a negative impact on the current development of global art, calling into question the future of the national image of Ukraine, which can be annihilated in the “post-ethnic” substratum of global public art. Therefore, in the difficult conditions of resistance to the Russian invasion, Ukrainian humanities and art must thoroughly study this huge cluster of problems, in particular in the context presented by Western European analytical thought, in order to strengthen its own self-identification potential of the cultural and artistic narrative, offering the West its own position and vision of creative liberation activity from the manipulative pressure of the culture industry.

Contributors

Contributors

Interdisciplinary Critique of Cultural-Industrial Creativity as a Bio-Necropolitics of Contemporary art

Since the turn of the 21st century there have been debates about the condition and future development of art theories and visual practices that acquired the status of global contemporary product in a post-Fordist society of quasi-consumption, when cultural-industrial ideology of transnational art market conquers the creative intentions of artists, transforming the artist, and his work on the product. An important aspect of this discussion is the problem of biopower, which determines the necropolitical paradigm of contemporary culture, depriving the absolute freedom of creativity by instilling servile commodified consciousness, manipulating the imagination in favor of art business, spreading across public globalized art space re-reified patterns. Dominant in the field of popularization of contemporary art, private capital denies adherents of transcendental aesthetics the right to freedom of expression outside the recognized brands legitimized by the World Biennale events. The anarchy of consumerism contributes to the eschatological predictions of the death of art and art criticism, the end of art history, the final annihilation of traditional art life through the socio-political turn of performative activism. Still, interdisciplinary critique, based on the theory of catastrophes, offers another way out of cultural entropy: transcendental aesthetics’ experience and judgment’srecycling as a way to overcome the hysteresis of art theories and practices.

Review: Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico, by Monica Bravo

Review: <i>Greater American Camera: Making Modernism in Mexico</i>, by Monica Bravo

Socio-Philosophical Critique of the Global Public Art’s Visual Order: The Context of National Self-identity

Today a necessity has arisen in a critical socio-philosophical analysis and the development of such a theoretical framework for contemporary globalization that will consider this latter as a visual and ideological impact of cognitive biocapitalism on the collective consciousness of nations, which manifests itself as repressive pressure in the form of Aesthetics of Globalization. This distorts the art system, distorting the fundamental freedom of creative expression of artists, critics and academics, as abstract mass hybridization of professional thought in the context of global public art’s visual order is implanted by the cultural-industrial logic of the transnational art market ruled and managed by globalized capital, which has transformed the art, the artist, and the analyst into merely trivial commodities. Since the millennium, commodified art production in the world is perceived exclusively as a business integrated into politics and economics, but the capitalization of the arts ignores the national interests of unbiased processes of culture-creation, unifying artistic expression, depriving it of spiritual need for self-identification. This latter needs to be further researched, in particular in the context of the development of Ukrainian image-formation practices, which devalues its potential in the new socio-political conditions. Therefore, the article emphasizes the need to return to the Ukrainian socio-cultural dimension of the evaluation criteria of transcendental aesthetics, especially since cordocentrism and Christian kalokagatia have historically formed the basis of Ukrainian culture and mindset.

YU.Go Girl: Transnational art and its role in the (re)construction of memory and identity in post-conflict societies. The case of the Bosnian female artists in Vienna.

YU.Go Girl: Transnational art and its role in the (re)construction of memory and identity in post-conflict societies. The case of the Bosnian female artists in Vienna.

From the Editors

From the Editors

Foreign (In)Direct Investment in Chinese Contemporary Art Game: The Case Studies of Uli Sigg, Guy Ullens and beyond, 1989-2013

The boom in Chinese contemporary art is the result of China’s opening to foreign investment and private entrepreneurship in 1978, and the significant contribution by the transnational art enterprises of long-term patron-investor-collectors, such as Uli Sigg and Guy Ullens, between approximately 1989 and 2013. Through the opportunity offered by the gap between the private market mechanism and national heritage process for the “art game”, these investors used a variation of the controversial “Saatchi model” to generate high ROI. A further effect has been to bring CCA onto the global stage and complete the ecosystem of the art industry, building a foundation for the art economy of post-Mao China.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s melodramatic masculinities

Melodrama is a genre with deep roots in Mexican cinema with distinct conventions and particularities. Alejandro González Iñárritu (AGI) demonstrates a fluency in this genre integrating it into the conventions of transnational art house cinema. As someone whose auteur status is conferred both through multiple prestigious awards and articulations of his creative self as originator of his projects, AGI’s play with genre is often overlooked. Using videographic criticism as a tool for analysis, this article considers the actor’s dynamic performances in AGI’s male-centred melodramas Amores perros (2000), 21 Grams (2003), Babel (2006), Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) and The Revenant (2015).

Queering the Rise of China: Gay Parenthood, Transnational ARTs, and Dislocated Reproductive Rights

Queering the Rise of China: Gay Parenthood, Transnational ARTs, and Dislocated Reproductive Rights

Queering the Rise of China: Gay Parenthood, Transnational ARTs, and Dislocated Reproductive Rights

Queering the Rise of China: Gay Parenthood, Transnational ARTs, and Dislocated Reproductive Rights

Integration of aspiring artists: Japanese music students in Germany

The article examines how students from Japan who attend German music colleges become integrated into Germany’s art worlds while also maintaining connections to transnational art worlds. Although Japan is one of the major countries that sends young music talents to Germany, only a few studies have examined this migration. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Japanese music students in Germany that were conducted as part of the Asian Educational Mobilities Project, the article shows that the reasons for such migration, as well as its effects on music practices, and that future perspectives need a theoretical reorientation toward a transnational perspective. The results indicate that the art practices of aspiring Japanese students depend not only on institutional conditions in Germany but also on students´ transnational networks.

The Enthusiastic Objectifications of Skaz: Mikhail Zoshchenko and the “Simple‐Souled” Soviet Reception of Jazz

Skaz, an experimental narrative form popular in the early Soviet years, has been defined by its orientation toward orality and the voice of a lower‐class other. Skaz's most widely read practitioner, Mikhail Zoshchenko claimed to speak on behalf of proletarian writers, who, according to revolutionary vanguardist theory, could not yet speak for themselves. Sympathetic and antagonistic critics alike have presented Zoshchenko as a pessimist hostilely inclined to the linguistic consciousnesses depicted in his fiction and to the revolutionary project as a whole. In this article, skaz is reconsidered in relation to its roots in enthusiastic aesthetics and politics, an ancient philosophical tradition which since became central to the analysis of feeling and class in revolutionary societies. Following the Russian Revolution, populist intellectuals “spoke in the tongues” of the lower‐class other in an attempt to step outside their own subjective vantage points. The result was a dialectic made up of the “illusory” objectification of the revolutionary subject and a reciprocal defamiliarizing self‐objectification through this imagined consciousness. The enthusiastic aesthetics of skaz do not enable their object to speak, but they do facilitate a movement toward it. This article makes this case using the example of Zoshchenko's 1927 “Simplicity of Soul,” a prose miniature about Soviet shoving framed by the narrator's recollections of remarks on the matter made by members of a so‐called “Negro‐Operetta.” The anecdote originates in a real feuilleton recounting the impressions of the Chocolate Kiddies, an African‐American jazz ensemble that toured the Soviet Union in 1926. Read alongside Soviet reviews of the Chocolate Kiddies, the story is revealed to be a nuanced critical response to the misguided, racist, and, at the same time, well‐meaning internationalist enthusiasm that defined the Soviet response to jazz. Zoshchenko's point in exploring the crude objectifications which obscured Soviet critics' reading of this emancipatory, transnational art form is to articulate–and offer a qualified defense of–the contingent, illusory, and problematic images produced by his own enthusiastic performances of proletarian voice.

Dancing Modern China

This paper puts dance at the pivotal centre of the transcultural exchange characteristic of early modernism. I argue that modern dance in the West was essentially a transnational art form, emerging directly from encounters between Asia and the West and that the geographic migration, multidirectional travelling, and reciprocal exchange of modernist cultural expression in the early 20thc was made visible by dancers in perhaps the most literal iteration of Hayot and Walkowitz’s description of ‘modernism as a particular kind of response to a modernity defined as a novel experience of the globe’(7) Yu Rong-ling, daughter of a Qing diplomat posted in Paris, in 1902 studied under Isadora Duncan, pioneer of American modern dance.On her return to China she performed her own hybrid dance creations at the court of Empress Cixi.

The ‘primal scene’: Memory, redemption and ‘woman’ in the films of Paolo Sorrentino

This article examines the representation of gender and the marginalization of the female subject in the films of Paolo Sorrentino – especially La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty) (2013) and Youth (2015) – and the TV series The Young Pope (2016), to better understand the significance of ‘woman’ for the cinematic and mnemic constitution of the Sorrentinian subject. I situate Sorrentino’s work in the context of the post-war Italian, European and now transnational art cinemas, and the new era of prestige television. Finally, in a shift from the desiring and objectifying intra-diegetic gaze to what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in the context of disability studies calls ‘the stare’, I briefly analyse Sorrentino’s fascination with non-normative identities whose on-screen function as locus of a radical alterity serves in the end to throw an even sharper, more ironic light upon the masculine subject at the centre of each story. From film to film to TV series the treatment of gender grows increasingly complex, particularly with respect to the nexus of memory and whatever secular or post-secular redemption awaits the protagonist.

Yugoslavia as World History: The Political Economy of Self-Managed Art

Branislav Jakovljević's study on performance and self-management in Yugoslavia and Armin Medosch's research on New Tendencies and post-Fordism share a number of analytical frameworks that the review argues partake in a broader shift towards political economy as a key framework for art historical inquiry. This shift elicits what could once again be called a world-historical perspective: both of these books anchor their narratives in post-war Yugoslavia but only in order to show that the telling of the story of Yugoslav art requires the telling of the story of the world, a story that is not simply an instance of global or transnational (art) history. Instead, these accounts affirm a certain political teleology; they (re)turn to Yugoslavia to recall something that is lost, a ruptural, future-bound history that never saw its future, and whose interrupted course they historicize, offering a recourse to historical understanding as a step towards a new strategy of resistance.

Abstract Narratives

The first retrospective exhibition of Chinese-French artist Zao Wou-ki (1920-2013)2 in the United States, No Limits: Zao Wou-ki, was on view at the Asia Society, New York, from September 9, 2016 to January 8, 2017. In the age of globalization, the exhibition’s title “No Limits” not only refers to Zao’s first name, which literally means limitless in Chinese, but also implies the expatriate experience of Zao and the transnational art world in which Zao was actively involved.

LEARNING HOW TO WORK IN THE ARTS FIELD IN PORTUGAL: A BIOGRAPHICAL APPROACH TO THE MIGRANT ARTISTS’ TRAJECTORIES

The article considers the key dimensions of the life trajectories of the immigrant artists living in the Lisbon metropolitan area focusing on those related to the socialization process both in formal institutions and in a broader setting of informal learning. The authors conducted a sociological analysis of 20 biographical interviews with a heterogeneous set of individuals, including musicians, dancers and plastic artists. These interviews were a part of the research project on the social trajectories of migrant artists from the non-European Union countries living in Portugal. The results of the analysis show that formal and informal learning together with the migrant experience are intertwined and constitute the key factor in the configuration of migrant trajectories. There is often a mobility pattern across art styles, which makes differences between formal and informal circumstances in the life trajectories of migrant artists evident. Migration has a strong impact on the artistic work; this impact affects different areas of biographical experience: contact with the Portuguese culture, development of ethnic references, and participation in transnational art movements. The condition of immigrant artists generally implies a long trajectory of artistic training, including significant experiences of formal and informal learning in multiple social contexts throughout the life course. For those dedicated to the new transnational urban cultures (hip hop, graffiti, etc.), informal learning is the most important element. For those engaged in the traditional arts, the attendance of lengthy artistic programs seems to be a fundamental prerequisite for training and recognition. Together with the long and significant artists’ investments in their education, the sociological study also revealed the great vulnerability (and precariousness) of their life trajectories, and the lack of structures supporting their access to the labor market.