The Journal of Art Historiography 

About: The Journal of Art Historiography is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): History of art & Contemporary art. Over the lifetime, 249 publications have been published receiving 808 citations.

The Islam in Islamic art history: secularism and public discourse

Abstract: In 1951, Richard Ettinghausen, one of the founding fathers of the discipline of Islamic art history in the United States, explained,Muslim art can also have a special significance for the Muslim world of today. Since this is its one cultural achievement widely accepted and admired by the West, a rededication to it can compensate the East to a certain degree for its scientific and technological retardation, something which neither the oil fields nor strategic location can achieve. Be that as it may, there has been and still is no better ambassador of good will than art. If these considerations are more widely understood, Muslim art and its study will have an important role to play in the future.1Attitudes towards cultural diversity have become less patronizing over the decades, particularly among those who study cultures that are not their own. Nonetheless, historical objects from the Islamic world continue to be called upon regularly to reduce intercultural tensions in the contemporary world in a manner that often elides differences between past and present, religion and culture, geography and religion. This conjoining of art historical meaning with contemporary social function is not only an inevitable means through which the humanities often justify their funding and position within a broader public sphere, it also reflects the sociopolitical contexts in which all academic work, from the classical philology critiqued in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) onwards, has been and continues to be conducted, underwritten and disseminated. While the rhetoric of civilizational hierarchies and alterity revealed in the words of Ettinghausen may have become socially unacceptable in the interim, the practice of using art to represent broader culture continues to the present day, as do perceptions of the Islamic 'other' as something that is radically different from the West.Survey exhibitions produce an apparently holistic vision of 'Islam,' most often glorifying the dynastic, or sometimes problematizing pan-regionalism through an emphasis on specific examples. Such exhibitions often offer a counterpoint to presumed contemporary prejudices through a sensory appeal to the splendour of Islamic civilization.2 In attempting to resolve the present through narratives of the past, such exhibits not only fail to correct presumed contemporary prejudices (associations with terror, patriarchy, authoritarianism and so forth), but in fact enhance them by reflecting the glories of 'Islamic' culture as part of a bygone golden age, or by suggesting that the appropriate environment for religion (and in particular Islam) rests in the past rather than in the present. Through an aesthetic measure based on regional practices that are framed as unadulterated, timeless, or authentic, the emphasis typically placed on form over content in such displays has also enhanced the association of the term 'Islamic' in artistic contexts with the era before colonial interaction with Europe, thus taking the Islamic world up to around 1800 - the implicit assumption being that the increasingly 'hybrid' arts generated through Westernization proclaim the secularization of modernity. Thus movement away from aesthetic forms designated as 'Islamic' has come to signal a presumed modern movement away from Islamic theological and intellectual discourses. This in turn implies a metanarrative of triumphal secularism and constructs a gross division between the Islam of art and the Islam of Muslims. Rather than being represented, Islam as a contemporary faith becomes the subaltern of Islam as a historical culture.Despite well-meaning and well-informed scholarly and museological intentions, Islamic art history has had limited success as a good ambassador for Islam. Rather than suggesting that it should not be expected to take on this public role and cannot responsibly make such an attempt, or that the problem should be avoided by jettisoning the term 'Islam' from the name 'Islamic art history', this paper proposes the following. …

Surrealism and Australia: Towards a World History of Surrealism

Abstract: There have been over the past few decades several art shows dedicated to global aspects of well-known art movements World Impressionism, Feminism and Conceptualism have all had their turn at being anthologised1 But there has not been to our knowledge a similar exhibition undertaken with regard to Surrealism We attempt to write here the Australian entry for such an exhibition However, before doing so, we might speak for a moment about the special place such a project would have because, if Surrealism can now be seen from a global perspective, it also like those other art movements casts a particular light upon this globalism In some ways, we must try to think the fact that, if today Surrealism can be seen from a global perspective, the very notion of globalism is 'surrealist': not only an aspiration of the original movement (as globalism was also implied in Impressionism and Feminism), but itself a 'surrealist' ideaOf course, Surrealism is famously - at least at the beginning - a movement strongly identified with a single figure, a single place and a single time: Andre Breton in Paris in 1924 Breton's particular genius, we might say, was to take the post-War energies of Dada, which happened variously in Zurich, Hanover, Berlin and New York, and involved artists from many different countries (Belgium, Romania and Holland), and out of this dispersal constitute a coherent, centrally organised art movement And he was able to keep its fire alight - for Surrealism was a particularly long-lived art movement - for some 30 yearsBut at the same time Surrealism - we might say due both to Breton's own personal inclinations and the very nature of the movement - was also expansionist With an internationalism already built into his Communism, Breton's expatriatism in New York during the 1940s became crucial to that city's artists And equally important at the time was Breton's engagement with Surrealism in Mexico, which found its ultimate expression in the International Surrealist Exhibition, held in Mexico City in 1940 And equally Breton's famed collection of the art of the Sepik River in his flat at 42 rue Fontaine in Paris just after the War was also an attempt to take Surrealism around the world, in something like an extension of Picasso's and others' 'primitivism' some 30 years previouslyHowever, more than Breton's own actions, the logic of Surrealism is already effectively globalist - and perhaps even more so than those other art movements It is not about an outer landscape (like Impressionism) but about an inner landscape It is not about a particular social subject (like Feminism) but about a universal unconscious subject It attempts to put forward an argument not about art (like Conceptualism) but about life And, more than this, once Surrealism is proposed, it is seen to be everywhere That is, for all of Breton's efforts to take Surrealism to Mexico, he found that once there Mexico was already surrealist Japan too, which Breton never visited, not only had itself its own identified Surrealist movement, but this movement subsequently discovered that Japan was surrealist before Surrealism2 More particularly, from the perspective we undertake here, following on from (but in a way reversing) the 'primitivist' logic of his interest in the art of the Sepik River, Breton discovers that Australian Indigenous art is already surreal, as he acknowledges in his Preface to Czech artist Karel Kupka's Un art a l'etat brut [The Dawn of Art: Painting and Sculpture of Australian Aborigines], a forerunner to Kupka's later Doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne3 Thus it was that Paddy Compass Namatbara's large bark depicting two Maam figures ended up on the wall of Breton's studio on the Left Bank after the War (It is also somelike this that can be seen in Adelaide-bom Stella Bowen's Le Masque (1930), painted in Paris deep into the failure of her marriage to Ford Maddox Ford, with its extraordinary split image of a white bourgeois woman holding up an African mask, her right hand with white bracelet and ring and her left hand with black bracelet and ring …

The Canon in Art History: Concepts and Approaches

Abstract: Although the canon has recently been increasingly the focus of art-historical research, there does not seem to be clarity, much less agreement, on how such research should be conducted. Art historians have taken various positions on the subject. This article intends to explain the main positions that dominate literature on the canon and canon formation, the theoretical and methodological starting points that provide the framework for such research, as well as to propose that social art history offers a more comprehensive approach that might overcome the strict separation between these positions.

Historical ironies: the Australian Aboriginal art revolution

Abstract: First published bilbiography of works relating to crafts, design and decorative arts in Australia, mainly items pre 1994, based on McNeil's MA Thesis Australian National University 1994

Studying Islamic Architecture: Challenges and Perspectives

Abstract: This article examines how the study of medieval Islamic architecture is currently being practiced. It explores the multiple implications of the much greater volume of scholarship devoted to Western architecture, which extend from library provision to job opportunities, from richer resources to a greater theoretical sophistication. It discusses the specific problems encountered by those who study Islamic architecture, for example the paucity of documents, the range of languages required, the near-monopoly of this subject (until recently) by Western scholars operating outside their cultural comfort zone, or the unfamiliar privileging of epigraphy and vegetal or geometric ornament rather than sculpture or painting. It highlights the glut of unpublished material available. Finally, it outlines the types of research that most urgently need doing in a context of mass tourism and rampant urban development; and the pleasures and rewards, notably the scope for original work, which the study of Islamic architecture brings in its train.Keywordshistoriography of Islamic architecture, teaching modelsOpportunities to attempt a bird's-eye view of a field are rare,1 and my thanks go to the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for providing the forum for just such an exercise.2 Most scholars, after all, spend the research part of their academic careers doing what seems best suited to their tastes and abilities and hoping to make a good job of it. There is little time for navel-gazing; and besides, most people have little time for it. Certainly scholars will consider the kind of methods to follow in order to bring their research to a successful conclusion: the 'how' in both practical and intellectual terms. But unless they are naturally of a theoretical turn of mind, they are more likely to spend their time with the what than with the why, let alone the whence and the whither. It is those issues that will form much of the substance of this paper. There is no intention here to peddle some theory; instead, the focus will be on how work on Islamic architecture and its history has been, is being and should be done. The approach will thus be more practical than theoretical.At the very heart of the enquiry is the question of how, in practical terms, the study of Islamic architecture differs from that of Western architecture. It seems sensible to set up this dichotomy in the clearest binary terms from the outset, simply because the vast majority of the world's architectural historians concern themselves with Western architecture. It is worth stopping to ponder that fact. Is Western architecture really so much more intrinsically interesting or otherwise more worthy of study than the architecture of 'the non-Western world'? Incidentally, that latter phrase, which is in common use - not, of course, by people from that world - is itself a somewhat offensive rubric, for (in the present context of buildings) it subsumes into one vague portmanteau term the architecture of, for example, ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian America, Japan, Hindu India and the Islamic world. And the phrase defines all those cultures not in their own terms but by using the West quite blithely and unapologetically as the obvious benchmark. It is surely worth asking oneself how the study of Western architecture has achieved such dominance, and what is implied by that. It is hard not to recognize here, in all their distorting power, the long shadows of colonialism and EurocentricityIn particular, what message is being transmitted to students learning about the history of architecture if they can reach the end of their degree without ever having had to grapple with any 'non-Western' tradition? Yet nowadays young people in particular, but also tourists of all ages, travel far more widely than did any previous generation. It is surely a pity that, precisely at a time when the world, with all its manifold architectural treasures, has indeed become smaller, people should view the architecture that they encounter in their global travels with an uneducated eye. …