Iconoclast Art History
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Iconoclast Art History
How do we rethink the "global" in art history?
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Caro Fowler and Scott Nethersole discuss the evolving stakes of Renaissance art history amid the rise of “global” approaches. Rather than assuming seamless networks of exchange, Nethersole questions whether such frameworks can obscure the uneven, often disjointed nature of historical encounters, particularly in early European-African contact zones. The conversation revisits foundational disciplinary tools such as comparison and periodization, while considering how attention to moments of disconnection might reframe familiar narratives. Together, they reflect on the methodological and ethical challenges of writing art history that resists totalizing claims without abandoning interpretive ambition.
Welcome to Iconic Class Art Histories with Carol.
SPEAKER_02The feel of art history has significantly changed since I was an undergraduate at New York University in the early aughts, where I took to discrete lecture courses on Italian Renaissance art, intro to Islamic art, Romanticism, and Neoclassicism, and there was never consideration of how some of the material I studied in the Islamic art survey might be relevant to Renaissance Italy, a place that is in fact geographically close to North Africa, and in fact thinking very deeply against the primarily Islamic world. In graduate school at Princeton, there was a professor who tried to convince me to write my dissertation on a Brazilian Baroque sculptor named Ali Hondinho when he found out I had been a Portuguese major at NYU. But instead, I wrote about a 17th-century drawing book by a rather obscure Dutch artist. Had I listened to that professor, I might very well have not spent eight years on the job market. But in any case, all this is to say the field has significantly changed since I was an undergraduate. And there is increasing pressure now to teach the Italian Renaissance vis-a-vis the Ottoman Empire, North African slavery, and an imperial expansion into the Americas. And this is a good thing. But people also point out that this turn to globalize, as it's so often called in the humanities, also often reflects a neoliberal worldview in which it is made of free trade and there's a frictionless exchange of goods and ideas creating an interconnected world. And even when the negative consequences of that interconnected world are taught, it nevertheless remains an uncritical category. Needless to say, many want to trouble this, and my friend Scott Nethersoul is one of those doing the hard work of thinking about what it means to write a different art history than the one we were raised on. So here's our conversation, and thanks so much for listening. So thanks so much for joining me today, Scott.
SPEAKER_04Hello, it's good to be here.
SPEAKER_02So as we're here to discuss the question of global art history and global renaissance. So just to get us warmed up, I thought it would be nice to just talk about your own training as a Renaissance art historian and what that looked like.
SPEAKER_04My own training. Well, it had nothing to do with the global. I suppose my training began in the mid-1990s as an undergraduate, right the way through to uh the first decade of the century as a doctoral student. And I trained at in London at the Courthold Institute of Art. And at that point, when I first started training, it was very explicit about Western art history. That's what it claimed to do. That has obviously changed a lot since then. But there was an idea that in London institutions, at least, the courthold only did Western art history, and that SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, was responsible for the kind of rest of the world. So my training, yes, was entirely in Western art. As a PhD student, I worked on Renaissance Florence called such, but my work was explicitly only really about the 15th century, which I responded to more aesthetically, I think, and which I where I found the questions more interesting than those of the of the 16th century.
SPEAKER_02What is it about the 15th century that you like?
SPEAKER_04That's difficult to quantify in a certain way. I I I I remember very clearly being in Florence as a PhD student at when Johns Hopkins still had the Villa Spellman, and the scholar who was running that year's seminars looking at me in the eyes and saying, you have to decide if the Renaissance for you is about continuity or change. And I remember thinking, no, I don't. I really don't have to decide that. And there's something about the 15th century that allowed me not to make that decision.
SPEAKER_02What would be a Renaissance that looked like that was about continuity?
SPEAKER_04Oh, so I well, that I I see a lot of continuity in the 15th century, a lot of continuity if you look at things like confraternities or visual traditions, or even people like Pierre della Francesca, where you you you think about complete visual change. In fact, I see a lot of Romanesque sculpture in that kind of form. So for me, that that really was about continuity of kind of devotional practices as well and the like. Whereas when I worked more on the 16th century, I I saw a lot more change. And so what I liked about the about the 15th century was precisely that I didn't have to make that kind of that kind of decision.
SPEAKER_02So obviously the field has changed a lot since the 90s. So when did you first start thinking about the limits, or when did you first start thinking about the global vis-a-vis the 15th century in Florence?
SPEAKER_04When I personally think start thinking about that, that's far more recently. When when did I become aware that there was a broader field to deal with? That's longer ago. And I don't know how personal you want this this conversation to. You can answer both.
SPEAKER_02I would I would be curious in both areas.
SPEAKER_04And where this is very personal and research always is, I suppose. I I mean I as you know, I was born and brought up in South Africa and then moved to Europe to do my studies in the mid-90s, which meant that when there were articles about uh particularly about Europeans in Africa, I would periodically read them and was interested in them, particularly even in an undergraduate. I remember very clearly reading Suzanne Blier's article about otherness and ivory, imagining otherness and ivory in the 90s as an undergraduate, but not thinking that was somehow part of my field. That was something that was I was curious about just because of where I came from. I then do remember I was appointed at the courthold as a as a lecturer in 2010, and shortly thereafter I was on a panel to appoint another scholar to the courthold in my general field. And I remember going to the dean and saying maybe we should make this about the global renaissance. And I remember the dean so there had been a change, at least I recognized there was a change in the field that I had seen. But I do remember the dean saying very clearly clearly to me, well, is this a thing? Is this such a thing? But nonetheless, I mean I was the the panel still decided at that point that they were going to seek an appointment in Renaissance or Spanish art history. Yeah. That they didn't think the field was broad enough to actually make an appointment at something called global, global renaissance.
SPEAKER_02And so that also gets to my next question, which is throughout all of these, you've maintained the word renaissance. And so I'm I'm curious about that because I know that's something that you've thought about. I'm not just asking that.
SPEAKER_04I should say very clearly, I'm very skeptical about the use of the word global, and I dislike intensely the phrase global renaissance. It's the kind of shorthand that we have to use, but I I think it's deeply problematic. From in the global renaissance from two perspectives. The one is that I think the word renaissance I'm I'm very beholden by the word. I think it retains a critical edge for people working on the 15th and 16th century Italy. And not even the in the entire peninsula, I mean certain parts of it. I mean, if you I think if you're working on Lecce in the middle of the 15th century, it has no purchase at all. But i for Florence or some of these kind of canonical places, it really this very strange idea that to go forward you have to look backwards. It really is a critically useful idea, and a period one of course. I'm not sure it's useful for the rest of Europe. And I'm absolutely convinced that it is a uh problematic term to apply to other parts of the world because it amounts to a form of intellectual imperialism as far as I'm concerned.
SPEAKER_02And then tell me about the term global.
SPEAKER_04Oh, but before we get there, I should say one thing that I I the only place that I do think the global renaissance is helpful is actually within the field of Italian studies, uh Renaissance, whereby it has broken down an idea that this homogeneous world, that the Renaissance is somehow some kind of monocultural project. It has allowed that to break down. So it's helpful internally. I don't think it's helpful to impose elsewhere.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04The global, it's we no, we can't get rid of this word now. But the the But we will get rid of it.
SPEAKER_02I'm sure in a decade. No, maybe in a decade they'll be using something else. I don't know what it'll be, but it'll be something else.
SPEAKER_04It's it's it's just a problem because it's not about the whole globe at the most basic level. I mean, you see this when you're teaching first-year undergraduates, right? They're kind of confused about what this this word this word means.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. It's but it's interesting because the field tries to make it about the whole world. But it's like the field tries in all those essay compilations.
SPEAKER_04You can feel them pushing for the Arctic and the Antarctic and So when it when it's when it is when it is useful to me, and when I and what I think global means or should mean for us, is about connectivity in some sort of way. When two or more cultures come to be connected somehow, at least in terms of, again, talking about my education, there was always a program run at the University of East Anglia called on World Art. And to my mind, world art was everything on this planet, right? In Antarctica, on the in uh isolated islands on the in the Pacific.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But what distinguished the global was that it was somehow about ways in which things interacted or connected. And therefore it can't be about everything. It's really quite specific. It is about two things, and that that connection is can be fundamentally different based on the two cultures that are somehow being connected. And so that's really my problem because the work I now do, which thinks about different African communities connecting with different European communities and all the networks that are behind that moment of connection, is very culturally specific about the cultures that are coming together. And the kind of answers that one might try to find are very different than if one's talking about connections that happen along, say, the Silk Roads or connections that happen between the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas. And yet it all gets lumped together under one label called global.
SPEAKER_02So one of the things that you've outlined in some of your work is looking at different methodological ways by which to think about this. And one thing that you've taken on is this question of comparative material within global art history, which is such a which is in the DNA of Western art history as it's practiced, from connoisseurship to slide projection. So, how do you think about the use of comparison within these moments in which two cultures first come into relationship with one another?
SPEAKER_04You're right, the comparison is in our DNA, and it's it's also what allows our discipline to be visual, right? It's a it's a fundamental basis of visual analysis, is comparative. What worries me is that that is all it can become in a certain way, because all that you end up left with sometimes is formal comparisons between between between objects. There was a fascinating exhibition in Berlin at the 2019 or so, just before COVID, called um Infegleich. So that it and literally beyond comparison. And it brought together African objects from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin before they were uh redisplayed with uh European objects in the Odo Museum. In to these rather wonderful comparisons. But whereas the curators intended this idea of beyond comparison to suggest that these objects were stellar, really fantastic, what it actually also suggested is that really what is there to compare here? Is this comparison uh beyond comparison? So the first thing you saw when you went into the exhibition was a a small bronze by Donatello from the 1420s, but together with a small figure from Benin, probably from the 16th century. And the question was, well, is there anything to compare here historically, right? You could you could certainly compare things and find things formally, but they had no historical basis all. These are two cultures that, although they were completely unaware of each other, Donatello had no idea about a place called Benin. And certainly by the 16th century, the the uh the brass caster in Benin, yes, it would have been contact with the Portuguese by that point, but not a uh a contact that would have allowed them to know works by the the likes of Donatello. So it's it seemed to me looking at these things that there was very little in terms of what could be said in terms of similarity, but that you did learn a lot in terms of difference. And so that a comparison you you could and it's certainly it's very useful for teaching, that you can draw out how different cultures are, and it was useful for making the West strange again.
SPEAKER_02How did Donatello become strange when seen in relationship to 16th century Benin?
SPEAKER_04Well, because you you could you can s you could imagine a world seen out of a perspective of of whether Benian sculpture is the norm, not the ways in which the Renaissance sculpture has been normalized within. So the extraordinary movement of that figure. Why is there how very odd it's a small putto playing a tambourine standing on a shell that seems completely normal to people working within the West tradition, but do you realize this is a naked baby standing on a shell. It's a very weird idea, right? And that but then went on a baptismal font. How that you know prestige people into a Christian life is is extremely odd, but has been normalized in our tradition. And so what it allowed then was for the comparison not to be stabilized in one tradition. It was always dynamic. You could always try to see one culture from the perspective of another culture, and so that's where I thought it was useful, but where the real risk is is that everything just descends into formal comparison, and that is is historically not very useful, I didn't think.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, and does it also feel a little bit like, and I'm not saying that this is what you were doing, but does it also feel a little bit like that then as someone coming in as a scholar of the Italian Renaissance, African sculpture from around the same period becomes a means by which to see the Italian Renaissance again and make it interesting to yourself again. Does that make any sense?
SPEAKER_04Yes, and there's obviously a a huge attendant problem of kind of cultural appropriation that's that sits behind that. I should say that's that's absolutely not what my work does or I'm seeking to do any. No, no, no, but but it's it's as a way of trying to revive what might have seemed an increasingly stale field. I can see how people might be wanting to do that. I can also see how Africanists might feel very strongly that the likes of me are poaching on their material to try and make a field that has for so long had a cultural dominance relevant again somehow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So yes, there's there's certainly a problem behind those kinds of methods, I think.
SPEAKER_02Well, this also gets to one of the things that I know you're really interested in, which I love, which is instead of thinking about an interconnected world, thinking about specific moments of disconnection.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So maybe you could talk a little bit more about that.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. And I should say at the very outset, having just told you that for me the global is about connection, I'm I am fundamentally undermining what I think the value of the global global is. This comes out in different ways, and it might be easier to talk it through a series of examples. I love that. So one of them was because I've been trying to look at ways in which the first contact between particularly the Portuguese and some of the other mariners on their ships in the late 15th century, the second half of the 15th century, what that contact with different African coastal communities might have been like to try to find evidence for the other side of that contact, which is the fundamental part of my project, right? Is trying to understand a scene what evidence there might be to correct the documentary bias towards the European side of that contact on the other side. Where the visual material is so important, right? Particularly with oral traditions where you don't have that long de-ray of information, as it were, that the visual traditions can supply some of that information. And I was looking at the Cape in South Africa for any kind of evidence, and there's uh some rock paintings which might have been made by San or Cuckoo artists, or although the authorship is much disputed, of ships painted on the sides of rock faces, but often several days' walk from the sea, so painted definitely from memory. Now I should say before we go any further, these are these are paintings that are uh much disputed in terms of their date. Some of them are clearly Dutch ships, and so they're slightly later. The one that I'm really interested in is I I think, although some scholars disagree with me, painted potentially at the end of the 15th or in the early 16th century because it I think it might show a Portuguese ship. And I I then suddenly thought, yes, I now have an instance of some inhabitant of the Cape responding to these Portuguese voyages around it, which occur for the first time in 1487. But I quite quickly realized that, of course, it doesn't do that at all. All that it really provides evidence of is that somebody uh saw a ship. And what's so interesting about that is it provides absolutely no evidence of contact at all, but it does provide evidence of visual contact, of some kind of visual engagement. When you start reading the mariners' accounts of all the way around West Africa, and it's obviously highly biased accounts, but they they speak again and again about people's interaction and response to their ships far more very often than the response to these kind of white people turning up for the first time on those on those on those coastlines.
SPEAKER_02But it's also it makes sense if you think about it that they'd be interested in the technology of the ship. I mean, the ship is an extraordinary technology, and of course that's more interesting than people. But because we live in such a race society, it's hard for us to recognize the technology of the ship as being so revolutionary as opposed to meeting someone of a different skin color.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. And that's where we want to find evidence that it's actually not necessarily what is of importance to them. And also because, but at least in the Cape, the the cultures that the Portuguese first come into contact with are not maritime cultures.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04They move across across the land, but they don't move onto the sea. So these ships are really the thing that is most seems to be really quite impressed in a certain way. And that brings you to this kind of second example where disconnection really encountered for me, is you say about us trying to find evidence for what we are interested in in a particularly racialized society.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04One of the other objects that I've been thinking a lot about are the padroid. These are these stone monuments that the Portuguese put up from the 1480s for about 20 or 30 years as they moved around the African coastline. And they ostensibly are markers that subsequent ships can see where they go. But they are stone crosses carved in Lisbon in Portuguese limestone that have a cross on them, but also have inscriptions in in Latin and in Arabic, and the Portuguese coat of arms. And they plant these at various parts on the coast, and they for us are the most kind of archetypical colonizing symbol, right? You arrive and you put something on the ground and you say, You're claiming this for Portugal, I'm claiming it for Christ. It is it that this is the beginning of settler colonization. And so it's it's the kind of thing where we really want to see that history coming out. And so I've been trying to find evidence for how Cuckoo or San or later Ahmedasa communities in South Africa reacted to these monuments. And there's very, very, very little evidence. But in one instance, I have a letter for a monument that was put up by Bartholomew Diash in what's now the Eastern Cape in South Africa in early 1488. But it's a letter only from the 18th century. But it's it's a member of the Veo Safe, the South East India Company, are reporting on finding this monument. They're reporting that the women of Amagosha have been using it to rub themselves against as a form of to increase fertility. Now, this is a really odd piece of evidence because it doesn't actually accord with anything we know about practices of this community in the late 18th century. So it's an outlier in that terms. But what was interesting to me is that it would suggest that by the late 18th century at least, this object had been com when I should say these people are at war with the Dutch, who were at that point controlling that part of the world, this object has seemed to be completely released from a history that associated with the people who were taking the land, as it were. You can't imagine it having that kind of significance for people if it was tied to that history. And so it had almost a non-reception as this colonial object. It didn't, in a sense, document for me anything about connection between people, but rather that it had nor did it give me any evidence about wanting to reject a kind of foreign presence on the land or this kind of colonial thing. It was doing something completely else, as if it had a no reception at all of this kind of colonial object.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell But is that also colonialism if something isn't planted and then it appears to have no reception because it just becomes part of the landscape, so to speak?
SPEAKER_04It's it it's well, it doesn't it doesn't, to my mind, well, i insofar as One would really love to find instances what instances of it being rejected.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, because I know you have other examples in which they took them down, right? Like they they put the they come and put these crosses up and they would just take them down after they left.
SPEAKER_04And and what and and that's what sort of colouring some of that. So I'd previously written an article about a uh cross on a Pedrau that was put up by Vashkuzagama ten years later, so in early December 1498, in what's now near Mosul Bay in South Africa, if you know the area. And there we have the rutter that was written on board one of the boats, that so it doesn't matter if it survived, has survived by a miracle. But where we have a document of two weeks' interaction between the Portuguese and the cuckoo that starts very well. They play music together, they offer meat to each other, and then it starts going, there's a dispute over water, and then they start fighting, and it goes wrong. But on the final day, having chased these people away, the Portuguese having chased the people away, they mount a cross and a separate stone monument on the harbour, and as their boats pull out, they they note that the cuckoo throw them down, cast them down. And and I really wanted that to be about the first moment of kind of indigenous resistance in South Africa to a colonial presence. Roads must fall. 500 years before roads must fall, right? Uh that is that part of that body of research, I interviewed a series of leaders who now identify as of the others coup in the area, and they didn't have continuous oral histories of the histories. They were working from the same European sources that I was working from, but they had very different views on what actually happened there and how it was interpreted. And their view was all about fundamental disconnection in a certain sense. That the Portuguese did not understand what the the the what the what the coup were doing. And in that sense, then we can't impose what is a kind of Western idea of damnatio memoriae, right? That you cast down monuments and things onto what they they did, however much I want this to be that first instance of legal destruction.
SPEAKER_02But you're saying that for them it's just there's not that it's an act of iconoclasm or taking down this monument, but just that there's not even necessarily a sense that this is that one would necessarily keep something up. That it was just like, oh, that time they've left and we're gonna now remove get rid of the take this down and move on with our lives, and that there wasn't necessarily a sense of resistance within it.
SPEAKER_04Not necessarily at uh at all. Or we can't be certain of that, right? And or that it it might have been somehow foreign and that needed to be removed, but not not resonant of either Christianity or or colonization in any way. It it just needed to go as it were.
SPEAKER_02It's like when that house guest come who came, comes who leaves who gave you something that you don't really like, but you put it out while they're there.
SPEAKER_00And then once they take it away.
SPEAKER_04But but I I suppose in the the the the in trying to answer your question about about connection, if you if you if you're looking for connections as the kind of source of colonization, you get a very different way of thinking about these these instances. And if you think, well, actually, this is fundamentally disconnected, they don't know what's going on, you might come up with a different way of thinking about them.
SPEAKER_02So if we pull this out more and think about what it means to to bear down on these moments of disconnection, where does that leave us?
SPEAKER_04Well, you it it it it doesn't it doesn't leave global art history in a good place because as I said at the beginning, if global art history is about connection, it creates something very different.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I think what it uh where it leaves us is having to interrogate these moments of connection or disconnection in a very localized way, uh, rather than trying to fit them into global schema, which don't work as far as I'm concerned. And then what happens, say, on the southern Cape Coast, is very different to what happens when the Portuguese end first arrive at Berlin in the 1480s, and we then start in the 16th century to see all these Portuguese figures turning up in in Bernard's culture, right? So it's it's where where there might be a really good argument for connection rather than disconnection.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean I love your point, and I 100% agree with you. I think I'm what I'm curious to think about or draw out is then how do we A, how A, how do we advise students in moving forward in their careers? Because I think that then runs the risk of creating these hyper-localized projects that then maybe in some ways reproduce the the field, some of the problems of the previous field in which it just becomes these hyper-localized case studies. Like I'm just coming back from the field conference, our annual field conference in New York. And one thing I was talking to a friend about is that everything has become super polite and hyper-localized. And that's lovely on the one hand, but on the other hand, we don't have major scholars like Rosalind Krauss getting furious because no one can agree on a definition of the surface, which is not to say that we need to go back to that. But how do we bring in stakes so that art history feels deeply relevant and maybe some people are engaged in some really fundamental questions of engagement so we can have arguments instead of feeling like we just are always in our hyper-localized space and we can't have arguments.
SPEAKER_04But we really should be able to have arguments and we really should be, yeah, we really should be allowed to get offended. I really dislike the fact that you you can't be offended anymore.
SPEAKER_00Maybe in other traditions you can. I don't know.
SPEAKER_04That's that's certainly true. Um I I I would like to see what an art history of disconnection would be like, precisely because it's what it would create is uh is a it would stop trying to smooth out difference and and allow for everyone to be happy together, which is one of the one of the one of the aspects of the global that I'm r I really dislike is this idea of this kind of free flow of objects and sort of neoliberal paradigm in the in the in the in the in the 15th or 16th century. I think disconnections does potentially have some kind of mileage in it, insofar as it doesn't suggest that it we know it's not from the 15th century onwards, it's not heading in a good direction, right? And it's going to have a very unhappy outcome, these kinds of connections. So that it's yes, it it might not create this smooth world. It it also it also breaks down the idea of you you you're allowed to you're able to see things that don't develop anywhere. I remember this even from working purely on 15th century Florence, that there were artists like Andrea del Castaño who presented a stylistic dead end. And Dunlop tried to think a lot through because it he it doesn't really go anywhere, but an art history of disconnection allows for that in some sort of way.
SPEAKER_01Oh really? Will you see more about that? I'm curious about that.
SPEAKER_04Well, it's it's because it doesn't have to fit into a neatly connected set of in this case a stylistic history that works, right? But it can be a different form of history that uh allows for dead ends, precisely because they don't connect to some other part.
SPEAKER_02But do you also think realistically, at least in the and well, I know Europe has a different framework than the US. But do you see, would you be able to see a PhD student being able to get a job and start a career on a project that they argued was a kind of dead end?
SPEAKER_04I think any PhD getting a job at the moment is difficult enough. And I don't know what what projects would do that. Because students that you advise to work on something inadverted traumas global because you think that's going to get them a job.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Invariably, in that instance, the word global is being used as a code word for non-Western, and it's absolutely not what I understand the word global to be. And then they tend to be doing field work or on a very specific culture in a very specific time, with it with the same kind of focus that I was working on 15th century Florence two, two or three decades ago. So that it's in that sense, it's it's it's no different to what you know in terms of what we're advising them, whether or not that helps them get a job at the end.
SPEAKER_02No, but I also think it's yeah, I think it's a matter of perspective too. I think many projects that were once seen as very fulsome might might be seen as dead ends now. So I think it it also depends on the historical perspective.
SPEAKER_04That's that's probably true. What is going to be the big idea that brings us all together, or all together shouting at each other? I I must admit I I I personally I remain slightly skeptical about it. I mean, and and then that's why the global has been so stimulating to think through, precisely because I don't think it is useful.
SPEAKER_02And I'm presenting So the Global was a dead end.
SPEAKER_04Potentially, yes. Certainly.
SPEAKER_00Global art history has been a dead end.
SPEAKER_04I probably shouldn't say that on a recording.
SPEAKER_00It's okay. I think many people in the field have actually tried to argue that to some degree or another and something like that.
SPEAKER_04So I I I think breaking down national boundaries and thinking about connections or disconnections across the globe is helpful. But the global, I'm not sure how much further that's going to get us. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So I wanted to ask you, and you've already referred to it a little bit in your interviews with elders, but there is a term that's sometimes used global washing, which kind of refers to a superficial multicultural framework by which people then receive grants and funding or get fancy fellowships, but that doesn't actually enact structural change within scholarship or within arts institutions. So I have two questions. So one, and I and you've talked about a little bit kind of ways and methodological ways, and I'd love to hear more about that, about how you think about that. But also, do you really think as academics we have the power to enact structural change through our methodological practices?
SPEAKER_04In in society, you mean.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So yes and no, it's impossible to quantify. And this is where I teach in in the Netherlands, I formerly taught in Britain. Britain particularly was obsessed by ways in which you could kind of quantify the impact of your of your research. It's also deeply ignorant as far as I'm concerned. Insofar as you can, if you look at May 68 as a what are the outcomes of that when there's a there's a kind of a political failure, it doesn't really achieve anything. And yet, if you look at what French universities subsequently were teaching over a course of three decades perhaps, and what students were then learning through that, and how that might have very slowly affected change in gender balances or whatever as a consequence of teaching new kinds of of courses. I do think it makes an effect, but not in a way that is at all quantifiable, or that you can sort of say, because this court course was taught at the Sabon in 1972, this person appeared on a board in 1985, right? But I do think that world change is a consequence of that. So back to your questions about structural change. Well, it also depends what you mean by structural change. If you're talking about can we uh change the it is about the change of the nature of what we're teaching, I think that is happening, it should happen, it can happen. Although I I do believe very strongly that the Western tradition shouldn't be thrown out entirely. But I think what you're referring to is more about a change in demographic representation within the discipline or more broadly.
SPEAKER_02I mean that too. But I guess also I think maybe even more economic inequalities that are reflected in society, economic inequalities more globally. How much does a researcher from one country, perhaps in the global north, engaging with indigenous sources, let's say in the global south, um, which I think is necessary, but does that research then really uh lay the groundwork for ending a long history of economic inequalities?
SPEAKER_04Again, no in any direct way. Yeah. Um but I think it does matter to be asking certain kinds of questions. So if I talk about the South African example, so particularly to I was brought up in a part of the South Africa, and we were taught that history began in 1652. That's when the the Dutch formed a trading poster, not a trading poster, a refreshing poster at what's now Cape Town. And there was no as far as that that racist history that we were taught, there was no history before that, right? Initially, even not 150 years of of contact with the Portuguese. And so to ask questions about contact and to ask questions about the history of people who have in a sense been denied a history, is I think absolutely fundamental. I think it's also fundamental to and could shift perspectives. Some of the work I'm doing, I've repeatedly come up against colleagues who tell me, oh, this is a great idea, but you fundament it's just not possible to do. You don't have the sources. But where how much you would like to know what what say somebody in Sierra Leone thought about the Portuguese asking them to produce ivory things in the 1490s? You just can't get that kind of information. It's a kind of wish project. And to my mind, that amounts to a denial of history to a group of people on the basis of how the West has sought to define history that is based on textual or certain kind of documentary evidence. And that has to be undermined. And I I don't think undermining that is going to necessarily lead to economic prosperity, but it can lead to a valuing of a recognition of the extent to which the way in which history and art history is framed for a Western audience effectively undermines and denies that to a certain group of people. And that can, I hope, only be beneficial.
SPEAKER_02And so just to draw it out more for our listeners, so what are some of the basic methodological tools that you've started to incorporate into your work in this project that you see as fundamental?
SPEAKER_04So fundamental is collaboration with other people. Right. And and the humanities and the West are not very good at doing that, however much we're always told to do that, but we write books on our own, and and we and there is no way I have the set of skills to be able to answer the questions that I want. So I have to rely on other people and other people in different economic environments, in universities with different funding systems, in in instances where there isn't any art history at all, right? Beyond South Africa, art history is not taught as a discipline within within the continent of Africa. There are lots of people doing art history in different places, but not within a university, within a faculty called art history. There's one aspect of collaborating. The second is to do with trusting visual evidence, which despite being an art history, art historian, strangely, my training has all been about the kind of an empirical reliance on the document, and particularly coming from 15th century Florence, right? There's an extraordinary repository of documents. You can always find an answer by going into the archive. And and suddenly actually the the archive now is a body of people and there's a body of objects, and learning to trust that, or or learning to trust that it's never going to give you the quasi certainty that the document does. I realize that the document doesn't give you a certainty, but it it it provides the You're looking for a contract. Yeah, it provides a fantasy of something, right? That suddenly you have something like a painting of a ship on a rock wall and no contextual information, perhaps not even a continual tradition of the same people occupying that part of the world, right? You can interview in terms of oral history. And so that has been hugely important, trying to understand, trusting what the visual can or can't do, and and allowing for the its potential. And then there's also being talking to other people who have an interest beyond beyond art history. So there they are a community of people around Mossel Bay and South Africa for whom that first moment of contact with Fashkoda Gama is immensely important in terms of what one of the one of them described to me as a an indigenous look onto Western history. That there was a body of evidence that they were having to use the same material as I was, but that that they could claim some of that. And I remember struggling to figure out how to use that in an article. Obviously, with all the necessary acknowledgement of the people that I'd spoken to. And what I ended up deciding was you just had to allow it to be juxtaposed to what I was writing and let it sit there and see if it created meaning. And that was very destabilizing for me, trained to write an argument that came to a conclusion, even if the conclusion was that we couldn't know something, that I had to leave it something almost floating, just juxtaposed to what I had said, to see what meaning it would create for the reader.
SPEAKER_02And so it's it's And did you get good feedback to that article?
SPEAKER_04Did you not not that anyone's telling me, perhaps people absolutely loathe it?
SPEAKER_00But the the Isn't that amazing when you publish something in the magnetic over and it's crickets? It's just crickets.
SPEAKER_04But it's I I I don't really care in a certain sense because I I it for me was it was was ethically important.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04But it's completely undermining of all that I was trained to do. But I I'm rather enjoying that.
SPEAKER_02That's great. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. And final question that I always ask, which is what's something that's giving you deep pleasure in your life right now outside of your academic work?
SPEAKER_04Oh, that's a different. I mean, I'm not allowed to say anything inappropriate, I suppose, as well.
SPEAKER_00It does open that up. It does open it up.
SPEAKER_04What gives me a lot of pleasure outside of academic work?
SPEAKER_02Which is also assuming I guess that academic work still gives you pleasure, which is it sounds like it still is, but I mean so much of what gives you pleasure, kind of travel or whatever else invariably touches on academic work.
SPEAKER_04What really isn't academic is gardening. And this sounds very middle-aged, but I get immense pleasure out of gardening, and that's because it requires you to do something that is exactly unlike our academic work. Academic work is so linear and is so directed towards a result. You do a body of research, you publish the article, you turn it into a book or whatever else, and it's this long line, and as your career does something along a trajectory, which is you always feel like this hamster constantly trying to run around its wheel. But it's linear. And gardening is cyclical. It you just you you cut the things, you prune it, it then grows, and it something might die, something might grow. There's never an end in sight, it's never linear. That gives me immense amount of pleasure. The sense of just being part of a cycle that it never ends and never has a kind of goal inside.
SPEAKER_02I love that.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much for listening to Iconoclast Art Histories. The music today was brought by Diego Mong. Uh, sound editing was done by CJ Day Gennaro, and additional support was provided by Noelle Jurkson and Shauna Smalls.