Bijiasuo and Truth: Modernism Reassessed in an Era of Globalization
- Submitting institution
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Birmingham City University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32Z_OP_C0040
- Type
- C - Chapter in book
- DOI
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10.1002/9781118639948.ch12
- Book title
- A Companion to Modern Art
- Publisher
- Wiley
- ISBN
- 9781118639948
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This substantial essay, a chapter in one of Wiley-Blackwell’s well-known ‘companion’ books series, embodies the researcher’s summative historical assessment of the status of T. J. Clark’s work on the social history of art. Harris subjects Clark’s influential body of work on European and American modernism from the 1860s to the 1960s to critical interrogation based on a consideration of the impact of globalization on art production, its critical study and relevance in a world beyond the cultural hegemony of Parisian and New York modernisms.
‘Bijiasuo’ is the Chinese ‘pin yin’ spelling of ‘Picasso’—a term the researcher shows is emblematic of a diversifying global interest in the latter’s oeuvre (radically escaping the value-laden presuppositions of Euro-American art historiography). It is also representative of a contemporary global art productivity now substantially unrelated to the traditional historical schemas of western modernism and the era of its metropolitan imperialisms within which modern art developed. Examining a number of contemporary artworks, the chapter examines some of the uses to which Picasso’s key works have been put by Asian artists attempting both to utilize the reputational power of these icons and release new energies related to pressing contemporary socio-political issues. Chief amongst this group of works are a series of anonymous murals based on Picasso’s <Les Demoiselles D’Avignon> painted onto the walls of Delhi’s J. Nehru University in 2014 by women students protesting against recent violence against women in India. The researcher includes photographs he took himself in Delhi to illustrate these paintings and texts which constitute both detournements of and homages to Picasso’s 1907 work where the artist’s use of ‘primitive’ iconography tied his creativity, controversially, though in politically divergent ways, to non-European sources in sculpture and image-making. The researcher’s finding is that global contemporary artworks arise out of a complex sui generis conjunctural moment.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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