In the Wake of the “Global Turn”: Practices for an Exploded Art History
without Borders

A Clark Conference

Conveners: Jill Casid and Aruna D’Souza

October 28-29, 2011

The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

This Clark conference on art history in the wake of the “global turn”
takes up, and yet departs from, decades of the critique of Eurocentric
priorities and presumptions of the discipline of art history. What would
it mean to understand the global turn as something that does not merely
expand but potentially explodes the borders between fields and even the
discipline itself? The conference, then, aims to address methodologies,
research practices, and models for not just a de-centered but also a
reoriented practice of the global, one that reckons with radical
difference, unevenness, and even the untranslatable. And it will do so
from an eccentric, agonistic position. Rather than seeking a unifying
conceptual term or method that merely expands the discipline as we know
it, the conference starts from the position that confronting the
challenge of developing practices of and for “the global” necessarily
involves learning how to engage with a range of irresolvable frictions,
disunities, and incommensurabilities. Pushing beyond the questions that
have arisen over whether there is or even could be a global art history
or histories, the conference is dedicated to developing practices of and
for a fractured conception of the global.

The first of the key issues to be addressed is not just what geographic
and cultural areas should be addressed by a “global” art history, but
the far more vexed and complicated problem of what is the relation
between these geographic and cultural fields. Should, for example, the
discipline pursue a radically de-centered or polycentric art history or
one re-centered around a different locus, such as Africa rather than
Europe? And what, exactly, does thinking the “global” in "global art
history" entail? The conference takes issue with the “global” as merely
a synonym for “greater coverage.” Instead, we assert that accommodating
the “global” raises methodological and theoretical questions that demand
the shift of prevailing assumptions of art history itself, even the art
history of “canonical” fields. And we seek to develop practices of “the
global” that do not depend on the creation of a new, assimilationist
universal but are rather capable of acknowledging and working with
deeply conflictual concepts, narratives, and methodologies that put into
question the notion of art history as a unified field.

The second key issue is how the global may be reconceived as a new
regionalism in practice. The breaking up of the monolithic, expansionist
version of the "global,” the challenge to the political presumptions of
national schools of art, and the shift toward the study of "regions"
(which are themselves subject to interrogation) raises the related
problem of the ways interactions between regions are conceived, as well
as the potential for certain versions of regionalism to become their own
reifications or even chauvinisms. Thus, the conference will also ask for
proposals that think about the benefits of a new regionalism in relation
to other ways of reconceiving the art historical map such as thinking in
terms of "area studies," hemispheric models (the Western hemisphere),
trade routes (the Silk Road, the spice trade, the Triangular Trade),
bodies of water (the Atlantic World, the Mediterranean World),
linguistic affinities (Francophone, Anglophone), and religious ties
(Jewish Studies, Abrahamic religions, Islamic art). At the same time, it
seeks to raise questions about the potential downsides of such
methodological shifts in the conception of geography and the place of
culture – not only what is gained but also what is lost.

This is not merely another conference about the geo-politics of art
history. The third key issue addressed by the conference will have to do
with necessary confrontation of the intersections of space and time in
developing practices of and for the fractured global. Postcolonial
theory in the past 15 years has raised questions about how time is
conceived within and between art historical fields and how assumptions
about the nature of historical time drive research practice, analysis,
and narrative. Thus, participants will also be asked to address the
problematic of time and related issues such as how we understand
influence in and over time. Critical attention to the asymmetries and
discontinuities of time may offer ways of countering narratives of how
artistic development and even historical time itself have been diversely
attributed to geographies and cultures. It might also provide ways of
radically rethinking the history in art history from the eccentric
position of sustained grappling with the deeply divided global.

We invite proposals for papers on the above topics for presentation at
the conference and subsequent publication in the series “The Clark
Studies in the Visual Arts.” Please submit a 1-2 page abstract, brief
c.v. (2 pages max), and full contact information by January 15, 2011 to
jhcasidwisc.edu and adsouzaclarkart.edu.