A Questionnaire on Global Methods

Abstract

Abstract October distributed a questionnaire about Global Methods, asking the following: “Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the ‘comparative’ method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history's primary tools—formal analysis and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization—carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse ‘local’ values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding of the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex interrelationships?” The following authors responded: Zainab Bahranì, Peter Brunt, Zirwat Chowdhury, Iftikhar Dadi, Nikolas Drosos, Jaś Elsner, Finbarr Barry Flood, Gao Minglu, Atreyee Gupta, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Jennifer Josten, Joan Kee, Anneka Lenssen, and Steven Nelson.