2.7: Art History
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- Susan Rahman, Prateek Sunder, and Dahmitra Jackson
- CC ECHO
Art history is the study of objects of art considered within their time period. Art historians analyze visual arts’ meaning (painting, sculpture, architecture) at the time they were created (International studies in history and business of art & culture 2021). For many who take what is considered a survey course as an introduction to Art History, they would likely be exposed to art and artists who come from or resided in Europe and Euro-America. Positioning what is often called western art as normative and placing other art in relation to it is another form of privilege that sets the standard for valuing certain types of art, humans, and cultures,over others. Scholars such as Edward Said have long argued that the term non-western itself is pejorative (Said, 1979). Additionally the term “western” in regard to art when discussing a geographic region is inaccurate. In most survey art history courses, a study of “western” art would include European and Euro-American artists which leaves out much of the geographical west which includes multiple indigenous western people (Kerin & Lepage, 2016). Many scholars in the field of Art History are grappling with this centering of whiteness and seek to move the discipline in a different direction. There is a move to create what is called a multi-survey model (MSM) approach. This would decenter what has historically been taught in the standard general education (GE) art history classes and instead offer multiple art history courses that focus on different geographic regions and highlight the type of art historically created there (Kerin & Lepage, 2016). Considerations for transitioning to this model would depend on the size of a school and departmental faculty trained in these areas of art history.Departmental hirings and future course creations can also be part of a move in a direction to de-center white art as the only art of historical significance. While the traditional survey art history course is one piece of the history of Art as an academic discipline, it is not the entire history. Positioning European and Euro-American art works as the standard content of what is art worth appreciating in the GE course college, means that students learn about the history of art which privileges white art over all others. Yale University has decided to revise the traditional course taught there on art history. They made this move based in large part on student response to what they saw as an idealized“Western canon, a product of an overwhelmingly white, straight, European and male cadre of artists”(Hedeman & Kristoffersen,2020).While there are critics of a less Euro-centric approach to art history, the Art History faculty see this as a way to be more expansive and less reductive (Greenberger, 2020).Adding to the complexity of what is considered historically significant to the world of art, is the art historians themselves and how they hold beliefs about what was seen as artistically pleasing to early artists. Case in point is early Greek and Roman sculptures often highlighted as artistic greatness and as a window into what was held as beauty for the people of those eras. When learning about these sculptures, we are often presented with stark white images sculpted out of stone. Archeological discoveries of statues in ancient Greece reveal that in fact, many of these sculptures were painted to reflect features such as red lips or black coils of hair. These findings change the way art historians interpret perceptions of worth and beauty, and according to Mark Abbe, professor of Art History at the University of Georgia, the notion that pure white sculptures were used to represent the human form were the ideal artifacts of the time“is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Westernart.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear” (Talbot, 2018).The notion of whiteness equating beauty and purity has led to an act of what he sees as collective blindness which leads historians to tend towards understanding art through a lens which privileges art that aligns with whiteness as beauty and even misidentifies how ancient sculptors meant for their pieces to be seen. A process to resurrect what some art actually looked like can serve as a tool to debunk this notion that whiteness was the standard of beauty and that in fact, polychromy, the art of painting or sculpting in many colors, was used in much of ancient artist rendering of beauty.This clip shows the resurrection process on the Treu Head, a Roman sculpture:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRMPYh2QdSM&feature=youtu.be
The art history department at Yale is not alone in its thinking regarding representation; a move to decolonize higher education is also taking place in many art departments nationwide and there is a great deal of art being done by BIPOC artists both in the US and abroad that deserve study and recognition. By searching for those who are not found in many standard art history texts, Art History teachers have the ability to introduce students to a wide variety of up and coming artists as well as those historical artists who did not get a place in the standard history books yet whose work is no less significant. Students can also engage in the process of finding new artists they are excited about and share with their classmates. Access to information is so prevalent at this point, students can easily access artists they find compelling and assignments can be tailored to encourage searches that find diverse artists. One artist of note is Irene Antonia Diane Reece https://www.irenereece.com . A self-described intersectional womanist visual activist, her use of art as both message and catharsis bring voice to the often voiceless.Her celebration of “Black Everything” is a welcomed reprieve in an art world filled with a predominance of white voices dominating art history.