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This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye’s cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude’s insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with … Read more

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye’s cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude’s insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with … Read more

The author focuses on the project exhibition, “The Potosí Principle,” curated by Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann Initially installed in Madrid in 2010 and then traveling to Berlin and La Paz, the show cut across the institutionally defined and often rigorously guarded boundaries between curatorial practice, aesthetic expression, and scholarly research to explore global capitalism’s dynamics from the perspective of the Spanish colonial empire and its distinctive imagery. However, despite the exhibition’s creative installation techniques and revisionist history, it generated a considerable scandal when a self-organized group of La Paz-based artists and scholars committed to anticolonial practices accused … Read more

Elizabeth Harney’s “The Persistence of Primitivism and the Debt Collectors” (ARTM 11:3), p. 105-125 (https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_r_00327) contains an error. Joshua I. Cohen’s The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020) is incorrectly titled The Black Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents. We regret the mistake.

ARTMargins, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp. 124-124.

doi:10.1162/artm_x_00358

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/12/2/124/116472/Erratum-The-Persistence-of-Primitivism-and-The

Several of the texts and projects in this new issue of ARTMargins underscore the role of photography and performance in rendering visible our “ways of seeing” and what they occlude: forms of imagining and inhabiting urban space that are suppressed by official discourse, clandestine archives that simultaneously register and obfuscate the humanitarian crimes of the last Brazilian dictatorship, and deaths forgotten or naturalized as part of the AIDS epidemic, among others. The insistence of that which is alternately invisible and reified—illegible and overcoded— runs like a thread through this issue, raising questions about the nature and stakes of the interpretations … Read more

Exploring two major books on the visual and performance histories of the ongoing and historical AIDS crisis in the US and beyond—Brian Getnick’s edited volume Final Transmission and Avram Finkelstein’s firsthand account, After Silence—this review asks how we have come to contemplate and understand the intensities, losses, and absences of the AIDS catastrophe. Drawing on theories on death, dying, and the cultural expressions around them, the review puts pressure on the particular offerings of these two very different books, ultimately pulling out passionate moments of vulnerability and self-reflexivity in each book as the most effective and powerful ruminations on … Read more

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins, … Read more

This article reviews two recent books on Chinese contemporary art, Sasha Welland’s Experimental Beijing (2018) and Jenny Lin’s Above Sea (2019), concerned with the sociopolitical contexts of the 1990s–2000s’ globalizing Beijing and Shanghai respectively. By examining the two authors’ respective methodologies—Welland’s ethnographical field research and Lin’s urban cultural research—, this article interprets how these two books shed light on the role of tensions in the intersectional global-local spaces of Chinese contemporary art. It argues that this field of art history necessitates the employment of non-art historical methodologies, as shown by the two books, in order to locate and make visible … Read more

The book, The Asian Modern, by John Clark (with an Introduction by the Manila-based critic and curator, Patrick Flores) seeks to construct a “cross-Asian” account through a detailed historical and empirical focus on 30 artists spanning Southeast, East, and South Asia, as well as Australia. At the core of the book is the premise that the given place, “Asia,” is the locus for a critique of the normative account of modernism tethered to another locale, identified by Clark as “Euramerica.” These focused geographic arenas provide the basis for novel itineraries, dynamic dispersals, and alternative sightlines that reject the conventional … Read more

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins, … Read more

A reading of Hurufism, a Sufi movement based on the science and mysticism of letters, the authors consider a range of affective, performative becomings in this unlikely Persian and Anatolian movement. Hurufism sees multiples of 14 and 28 (from the Perso-Arabic alphabet) in the corresponding hairs of the human face. Accordingly, Slavs and Tatars consider the implications for gender variation and fluidity in these otherwise overburdened graphemes.

ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 89-104.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00328

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/3/89/114609/More-Phemes

The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations among men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man.1

ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 3, pp. 3-7.

doi:10.1162/artm_e_00322

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/3/3/114602/From-the-Editors

The introductory text situates the therapeutic practices of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley in relation to the work of Brazilian modernist artist Lygia Clark. Ferreira is a social psychologist who uses the arts—for instance, photography and film—for the socialization and treatment of psychiatric patients. Wanderley is an artist who brings creativity into the realm of psychiatric care. Both have significantly expanded the sites and amplified the applications of Clark’s Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) therapy sessions by working in public psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Rio de Janeiro and with marginalized populations. In “Lend Me Your Eyes,” Gina … Read more

The introductory text situates the therapeutic practices of Gina Ferreira and Lula Wanderley in relation to the work of Brazilian modernist artist Lygia Clark. Ferreira is a social psychologist who uses the arts—for instance, photography and film—for the socialization and treatment of psychiatric patients. Wanderley is an artist who brings creativity into the realm of psychiatric care. Both have significantly expanded the sites and amplified the applications of Clark’s Estruturação do self (Structuration of the self) therapy sessions by working in public psychiatric hospitals and clinics in Rio de Janeiro and with marginalized populations. In “Lend Me Your Eyes,” Gina … Read more

As the discipline of Art History increasingly aims to decolonize the gaze, questions have become paramount around cross-cultural influence and indebtedness, the traffic and translation of forms and ideas in the colonial modern era, and the mechanisms of postcolonial retrospection.Harney addresses these questions and the resonances of aesthetic primitivism in scholarship on African and diasporic modernisms and global contemporary artistic practices through a critical review of their weight within three recent volumes: Suzanne Preston Blier’s Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke UP, 2019), Joshua I. Cohen’s The Black Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism Across … Read more

“Meanwhile in China … Miao Ying and the Rise of Chinternet Ugly,” published in ARTMargins Volume 7, Issue 1, (https://doi.org/10.1162/ARTM_a_00199) has been retracted by agreement between the author, the ARTMargins editors, and the MIT Press. A reader conveyed concerns regarding the originality of parts of the author’s article in May 2022. The journal independently investigated the charges and verified them. Following Dr. Holmes’s admission of plagiarism in all the instances identified by the ARTMargins investigation, the journal informed the journals and authors whose work was left un-cited, as well as the Ethics Committee at the author’s university. Below … Read more