Project Objectives
The central aim of Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms is to examine how empire functioned as a mechanism through which artists migrated from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to London and Paris, and how those two cities functioned as crucibles of global encounter and cross-fertilization among the many artists who passed through them. This research seeks to de-imperialize current narratives of Modernism, which posit Western Europe as the point of origin, disseminating its insights to assumed peripheries. In contrast, this research will demonstrate how migrant artists brought new insights to the metropoles, sites of “transmodernity” (Dussel, 2002), where they co-constituted modernisms as a global phenomenon. Furthermore, this study seeks to turn its gaze back on what was perceived as the centre, in order to illuminate the ways in which these putative centres, sites of domination that were the beneficiaries of imperialism and colonialism, also functioned as transnational and transregional contact zones (Pratt, 2008), enabling carefully negotiated cultural borrowings, interventions, responses, solidarities, rejections and debates that were informed by a critique of centre born from experiences of migration, political turmoil, imperialism, and colonization.
Modernism, Other Modernisms, Global Modernisms
Until just 25 years ago, the history of modern art was written as an entirely North Atlantic story, leaving out the artistic production of the rest of the world. Cultural borrowings taken from the peripheries, such as Japonisme, Primitivism, Chinoiserie and Orientalism, were cast as “affinities” or “inspirations,” (Rubin, 1984) whereas modern visual vocabularies at the art world’s so-called peripheries were used and characterized as derivative (Mitter, 2007) through a process of “cultural mercantilism” (Tiampo, 2011).
In area studies, most work being done until about twenty years ago ended with the beginning of the modern period, as Western contact was seen as the death knell of authentic tradition in disciplines created to know and dominate the “Other” (Said, 1979). With increasing international economic integration in the 1990s, scholars began writing more monographs and regional histories of the 20th century in Asia, Africa, and Latin America (Munroe, 1994; Andrews, 1995; Kasfir, 1999; Weisenfeld, 2002; Ramirez and Olea, 2004).
More recently, scholars have also begun to think beyond the boundaries of nation, producing studies that engage explicitly with the transnationality of modern art beyond the North Atlantic (Tiampo, 2011; Dadi, 2012; Kee, 2013; Erber, 2014; Okeke-Agulu, 2015; Small, 2016; Tomii, 2016; Lenssen, 2020). These studies have both added new knowledge, and re-theorized modernism as a fundamentally transnational phenomenon.
Despite the research, collecting, and exhibition activities that have been done in global majority modernisms however, they continue to be perceived as “not necessary to modernism” (Elkins et al, 2015) unless they reproduced the structures of North Atlantic modernism. This is the result of theoretical discourses in World Art History (the study of all parts of the world) and Global Art History (the study of all parts of the world that are interconnected), which– although ostensibly global– use Europe as a frame of reference for defining artistic practices, chronologies, and theoretical structures, and furthermore neglect the role of migration in co-constituting modernism as a global phenomenon (Summers, 2003; Kaufmann, 2004, 2015; Elkins, 2007; Smith, 2012, 2015; Belting et. al., 2013; Joyeux-Prunel 2019).
Why London and Paris?:
In order to truly rethink modern art from a global perspective, this research program proposes that European centres also need to be interrogated and re-theorized as contrapuntal spaces. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi’s pivotal exhibition Unpacking Europe (2001) asked the question “How European is Europe?” It is now yielding a small but growing movement to rethink (post) imperial metropolises as contact zones, anti-colonial hubs, and sites of South-South encounter (Hassan and Dadi, 2001; Harney 2004, 2010, 2019; Cohen 2020; Bruchet and Tiampo 2021; Cabanas, 2021; Tiampo forthcoming 2022; Singh forthcoming 2023).
Scholarly studies have tended to treat London and Paris separately, except where it comes to the question of migration, where investigations of both cities have proved fruitful in other disciplines (Favell, 2001; Murdoch, 2012; Guha, 2015; Umoren 2018; Gill-Khan, 2018; Escafré-Dublet et. al., 2019). By bringing research on London and Paris together, this project seeks to decentre the metropolis as (post) imperial and artistic capital, and focus on the artists as mobile subjects.
Paris, Capital of the Arts:
Benjamin begins his influential essay, “Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935) with an epigraph taken from Vietnamese poet Nguyen Truong Hiep’s Paris: Capital of France (1897), revealing in one faint stroke of the pen, the fundamental inextricability of France’s colonies to the metropolis, and the outsized role of Paris in the project of modernity. Despite Benjamin’s early recognition of transnational Paris, as well as the well-documented and influential activities of the “École de Paris,” until quite recently, much of the scholarly art historical literature on Paris, “capital of modernity” (Harvey, 2006), focused on French artists as paradigmatic modernist subjects, as the “painter[s] of modern life.” (Baudelaire, 1863; Clark, 1984). Re-evaluations of the field evoke its entanglements with other places to reaffirm the “centrality of Paris,” evoking its entanglements with other places as evidence of Paris as “the epicenter of modernity’s international reach” (Marès and Milza, 1995; Casanova, 1999; Wilson, 2002; Ernoult and Hirai 2007; Adamson, 2009; Carter and Waller, 2015; Clayson and Dombrowski eds., 2016; Grenier, 2013; Guilbaut, 2018). Other studies trace bilateral relationships between the city of lights and artists from a single country of origin or region (Rimer and Takashina et. al., 1987; Bomani and Rooks, 1992; The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1996; Guth et al., 2004; Lefebvre, 2011, An, 2015; Dal Lago, 2011). More recently, scholars have begun to research transcultural exchanges not dominated by French artists, often focussing on Paris as a site for articulating regional identities (Greet, 2018; Harney, 2010, 2019; Malaquais and Khouri, 2016; Kuban and Wille, 2020).
London: “We’re here because you were there”:
While Paris has long been imagined as the capital of modern art, London has emerged only recently as a significant site of study in this respect (Applin, Spencer and Tobin eds., 2018; Crow, 2020). Of particular importance, is a reassessment of its status as a (post) imperial capital and its role as a contact zone for artists from the (former) British empire (Nasar, 2017; Bruchet and Tiampo, 2021), which includes research projects such as the London, Asia project at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (Nasar and Turner 2018-2023 with participation from Tiampo) as well as public presentations such as Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain in 2012 (co-curated by collaborator Goodwin), ‘Speech Acts: Reflection– Imagination– Repetition’ at Manchester Art Gallery in 2018–19 (co-curated by collaborator Nasar), Strange Universe: Explorations of the Modern in Postwar Britain at the Barbican in 2022 (with Nasar, Tiampo and Turner’s participation in public program) (Alison, 2022). Also significant, and with a longer historiography, are treatments of the British Black Arts Movement (Araeen, 1989; Hall, 2006; Chambers, 2014; Mercer, 2016; Orlando, 2016; Kerman, 2017; Wainwright 2017; Mason and Busby, 2018; Bernier, 2019; Bailey and Thompson, 2021) including the Thin Black Line(s) display at Tate Britain in 2012 co-curated by collaborator Goodwin; UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Black Artists and Modernism project (2015-2018), in which collaborators Goodwin and Nasar participated; Life between Islands at the Tate Britain in 2021 (with public program presented by WPC Goodwin and Tiampo); and the June 2021 issue of Art History on Black British Modernism.
Decolonizing Paris and London:
Any assessment of modernism’s founding figures in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas soon reveals a common trajectory of study and expatriation in Paris and/or London. The list of artists who spent time in these cities is long, diverse, and international. To name but a few of the best known: Paris– Saloua Raouda Choucair (b. Lebanon), Chung Sang-Hwa (b. Korea), Lygia Clark (b. Brazil), Wifredo Lam (b. Cuba), Julio LeParc (b. Argentina), Lee Ufan (b. Korea), Ernest Mancoba (b. South Africa), Walasse Ting (b. China), Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (b. Japan), Pan Yuliang (b. China), Amrita Sher-Gil (Hungary/India), Matsutani Takesada (b. Japan), Tōgō Seiji (b. Japan), Zao Wou-ki (b. China); London– Zainul Abedin (b. Bangladesh), Rasheed Araeen (b. Pakistan), Ben Enwonwu (b. Nigeria), Li Yuan-Chia (b. China), Kim Lim (b. Singapore), Anwar Jalal Shemza (b. Pakistan), Vivan Sundaram (b. India), Cecilia Vicuña (b. Chile). Notable artists who spent time in both cities include Zubeida Agha (b. Pakistan), Skunder Boghossian (b. Ethiopia), Zarina Hashmi (b. India), Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. Sudan) David Medalla (Philippines), Aina Onabolu (b. Nigeria), Krishna Reddy (b. India), and Tseng Yu (China). Celebrated as the founding figures of modernisms in their countries of origin (whether or not they actually returned), these imagined trajectories create a map that has been perceived as modernism’s dissemination to the periphery. These narratives of pilgrimage and return contribute to an additive globalization of scholarship that does not demand anything from the centre other than tolerance, and neglects to change the fundamental terms of engagement. As a result, modernisms from the rest of the world are often received in the self-declared centres as always-already derivative. This project will make major theoretical and empirical contributions to the field by re-integrating these artificially disentangled art histories, addressing “the contribution to modernism of decolonization resistance culture, and the literature of opposition to imperialism” (Said, 1993).
Particularly important to this research is the literature on Paris and London from cultural studies and the social sciences that consider the relationships between both cities and their former empires through the lens of migration (Paris: Ross, 1998; Stovall and van den Abbeele, 2003; Lebovics, 2004; Boittin, 2010; Vergès, 2013; Stovall 2015; Bancel, 2017; Solheim, 2018; Amine, 2018; Silverstein, 2018; London: Gilroy, 2006, Perry, 2015; Gates, Hall and Mercer, 2017; Hirsch 2018; Gopal, 2020; Patel, 2021) Of particular significance is Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Goebel, 2015), a political and intellectual history of the generation of Paris-trained students who became leaders of Third World nationalist movements that postulates Global Urban History as a model for writing counter-histories of migrant subjects in Paris. However, by identifying and researching key sites of entanglement and hinge figures, this project goes further in breaking down the “ethnic lens” typical of migration studies (Glick Schiller and Çağlar, 2009).
Decolonizing Data Practices:
Digital humanities uses cultural analytics (computational and design methods, data visualization, statistics and machine learning) to question stereotypes and assumptions (Manovich, 2020). This data centric approach answers questions that require evidence of a different scale and complexity than traditional art history, and challenges monographic and centrist studies (Jaskot, 2019). As the Manifesto by the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective in Radical History (2018) argues, “researchers need to ask new questions together and encourage practices that do not reinforce the hierarchies that the decolonising world sought to overcome.” They advocate for collaborative digital practices in creating bottom-up histories that they use to map non-state centred Afro-Asian networks.
Bringing together data from multiple specialist sources, this project tracks diasporic artists of colour working in London and Paris and uses artistic network visualizations to make visible the transversal lines that can be drawn between them, activating a central principle of data feminism that “what gets counted counts” (d’Ignazio and Klein, 2020). Yet, this project goes beyond merely increasing representation and visibility, to explore the epistemological underpinnings and uncertainties of knowledge production behind the design of databases, ontologies, and data visualization (Risam, 2019) and to critically intervene in digital methods (Jaskot 2019; Manovich 2020).
This project also draws from critical archival studies to interrogate colonial systems, structures, and relationships in archival source materials and documentary practices (Stoler, 2009; Fraser and Todd, 2016; Ghaddar and Caswell, 2019), and seeks to critically evaluate the handling of art historical archive records. It deploys and tests strategies to decolonise the database, interrogating and developing ontologies and systems of structuring and retrieving information in order to contribute to methodological change in collaboration with the WPC Decolonising Data research cluster (Manovich, 2015; Risam, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2021). The project adopts data visualization methods that have been used to deepen and challenge the understanding of artistic schools and styles as networks (Suarez et al., 2013; Lincoln, 2017) and the spatial configuration of artistic centers and markets (Fletcher and Helmreich, 2012; Dossin, 2012), yet, it intends to use them as “technologies of recovery” (Gallon, 2016; Gardner-Huggett, 2017) with the aims of unmasking power structures and rejecting top-down ideas of influence and transmission.
