Art and migration

Revisioning the borders of community

Amelia Jones, Bénédicte Miyamoto, Marie Ruiz

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526149695
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This collection offers a response to the view that migration disrupts national heritage. Investigating the mediation provided by migrant art, it asks how we can rethink art history in a way that uproots its reliance on space and place as stable definitions of style. Beginning with an invaluable overview of migration studies terminology and concepts, Art and migration opens dialogues between academics of art history and migrations studies through a series of essays and interviews. It also re-evaluates the cultural understanding of borders and revisits the contours of the art world – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed here as structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints, gatekeeping and patronage networks.

1 Revisioning art and migration

Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz

I’m often asked the same question: What in your work comes from your own culture? As if I have a recipe and I can actually isolate the Arab ingredient, the woman ingredient, the Palestinian ingredient. People often expect tidy definitions of otherness, as if identity is something fixed and easily definable. (Antoni and Hatoum, 1998: 54)

Art history and migration studies in dialogue

How can we rethink art history to uproot its expectations of ‘tidy definitions of otherness’? The borders of cultural identity are often drawn according to a ‘fiction of authenticity’.¹ Plural art histories help us challenge the discipline’s geographical subfields. They tap into the artistic communities’ experiences of ‘transcultural or hybrid forms of subject formation and construction of cultural identities, … the multi-directional processes of migration [affecting] migrating individuals as much as it does the receiving communities’ (Chikukwa, 2016: 80). Transnational artistic influences and the migration of artistic communities have long challenged national definitions of identity and heritage. In essence, transnationalism ties international communities through networking and the circulation of ideas between migrants’ home countries and receiving lands. Art and Migration: Revisioning the Borders of Community focuses on the conceptual link between art and migration, challenging physical, political and ethnic frontiers, as well as the frontiers of the art community itself – a supposedly globalised community re-assessed in this volume as also structurally bordered by art market dynamics, career constraints and patronage networks for example.

What are the reasons that propel artists into migration and what goals do they pursue? How much does migration impact work and career? What does assimilation, integration and/or multiculturalism mean for artistic encounters and creation? What does art history have to bring to migration studies? These questions highlight the need for an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history and migration studies. Such an exchange helps uncover how impactful and manipulative the representations of migration have been and continue to be, offering critical tools to those who study the contours of so-called migration ‘crises’, their reception and the resulting policies they trigger. In an increasingly international art scene and market, art challenges the structural forces that expound migration as disruptive and that construct the migration experience as an anomaly and impoverishment, when it is in fact a long-standing and fertile human phenomenon. Through its intensifying transnational display and visibility, artistic creation acts as a unifying and global power on our perception of current events, having both the potential to shed light on and overcome physical frontiers and human stigmatisation. Migrations studies increasingly emphasise that ‘the cultural construction of citizenship does not take place only within the confines of the policy sphere, but it is also shaped by the continuous re-elaboration of discourse in the public sphere’ (Ambrosini et al., 2020: 9) The arts are undoubtedly one of the most powerful discursive structures of the public sphere, actively renegotiating the definition of borders and identity.

In keeping with the objectives of the Rethinking Art Histories series, Art and migration challenges the geographical dividing lines conventionally imposed on art history. It aims to bring to the fore how the myriad trajectories of transnational artworks and artists’ careers, far from being marginal phenomena, are the very fabric of the art worlds, sustaining international art centres by the density and dynamism of the networks they create through cross-border movements. If migration has increasingly taken centre stage in contemporary art, this mainly derives from artists claiming the universality of the experience and artistic paradigm of migration – an in-depth re-evaluation that is far more than a reaction to a sense of current ‘crisis’ (Mathur, 2011). Shifting geographies of artistic encounters are a historical continuum in art, as exemplified by the cyclical relocation of art centres underpinned by migration as well as the waxing and waning of cities’ economic attraction and critical mass. This has seen power transfer from Rome and Florence in Italy, to Delft and Antwerp in the Netherlands in the Early Modern period, to the markets and cultural centres of Paris and London in the Modern period. Artworks and artists then transferred from Old Europe to the New World in the Gilded Age. Chinese art saw its attractive power centres shift from court to court, from the city of Chang’an to Luoyang under the Shang to Zhou dynasties, from Bianjing to Li’nan during the Song dynasty, and from Shangdu to Khabaliq under the Yuan dynasty – each move had repercussions on the hybridity and cosmopolitanism of the artistic styles developed.

How did art history explain and analyse these shifts of power and their relation to creativity? It is well documented in art history that after the First World War, some American artists continued to train in France, which had become a destination of choice for artists in the nineteenth century, with internationalising art schools (such as the École des Beaux-Arts) and galleries. In turn, these American artists introduced French artists to new artistic forms, and during the Second World War, some French artists fled to New York, which subsequently became a booming art scene attracting a diversity of rich artistic currents and developing the movements of surrealism, expressionism, and abstractionism, among others. In the same vein, in the 1870s, London artists welcomed and supported the integration of many activist artists and Impressionists fleeing the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris siege and the aftermath of the Paris Commune. This also influenced French artists’ use of colour, and Monet famously came back at the turn of the century to produce a large collection of London paintings. These interactions between French, British, and American art have long been celebrated with blockbuster exhibitions and museum shows that underline the interplay of artistic influences – but until recently, these Western-centric art histories tended to be narrated with the vagaries of war as contextual background, and rarely with these cross-border experiences as the backbone and catalyst of artistic creation.

Artistic centres in Europe and America have ceded some power in the twenty-first century to more regional locations through globalisation, with the art market allegedly recently experiencing an ‘Asian century’. The rise of new markets in the Global South – a term encompassing such diverse country profiles as South America, Africa, India, South-Eastern Asia, and Southern Europe, for example, and used to refer to emerging economies – has disrupted the art market worldwide, also thanks to South–South cross-cultural flows. Increasingly recognised as persistent and specific, the Global South’s contribution to the worldwide art market has persuaded art historians to revise how they construed local art as ethnic and embedded in local networks, and international art as highly marketable and universalist, since these labels proved progressively ineffective due to their Western-centric hierarchy. The realisation that the study of art, artists and currents has much to gain from highlighting the inextricable link to migration has sent the discipline of art history itself in a propitious flux: ‘The “whither” may go hither and thither, but perhaps in the crisscrossing of space and time, art history, though it loses its connecting thread, may gain in its conceptual amplitude’, concludes Parul Dave Mukherji in her analysis of the global turn (Mukherji, 2014).

Art and migration acknowledges the cultural relevance of mediating the migrant experience to the world at large. Artworks are semiotic goods, bearers of signs that are perceived in a specific cultural context, and which at the same time disrupt this context. As such, they are both potent revealers and irritants of complex cultural links, of shared beliefs and values (Luhmann, 2000). Historically, even national art schools or academies have somehow questioned national perspectives and values, and canonical art has largely been influenced by international artistic heritage. Artworks on migration – and discussion of artworks on migration – have increasingly escaped the tropes of exile and have defeated binary analyses that position migration-inspired artworks as the visions of mere in-betweeners and insist on their hyphenated status (Kaplan, 1996). For instance, artists such as Icy and Tot cannot be summed up by the binary label of Iranian-born and Brooklyn-based artists – migration has been a recurrent art theme for them, and has arguably contributed to a celebration and inquiry of rootlessness and displacement, their street art mixing, as it does, cultures and languages, on walls in Shanghai or Norway. These artists revision art’s histories by challenging our localised understanding of art, and showing us that the artist, ‘protean in its adaptative capacity and signif(ying) a subversive force from within any system’, mirrors the experience of migrants who ‘operate at the thresholds of space and politics language and power and in so doing constantly negotiate and produce new concepts of transcultural identities, both personal and collective, that are destabilising to established orders, systems, and codifications’ (Lum, 2020: 140).

Recent curatorial concerns about the visibility of migration in collections and archives are not just reactions to the heightened visual presence of the so-called migration ‘crisis’ in the media and popular discourse. These concerns tap into a reappraisal of the historic formation of national identities increasingly seen as constructed under international visual influences. Yet, if hybridisation of stylistic references, formats, and subject matters have time and again demonstrated the mediating powers of artistic production, the art world has not yet completely erased the North–South divide. For example, in the case of African and African diaspora artists, ‘several factors serve to undermine their visibility; among the mix is the exoticizing taste of gatekeepers of international cultural platforms and the lack of cooperative engagement of concerned bodies inside and outside the continent’ (Hassan and Oguibe, 2001: 5). In reaction, museums have taken steps more recently to give centre stage to transnational artistic influences. In 2012, the Tate Britain exhibited Migrations: Journeys into British Art. In 2014 the Smithsonian American Art Museum debuted Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art, an exhibition that toured America. In 2015, the MOMA reunited, for its One-Way Ticket exhibition, the 60 panels of Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series, thereby sealing its iconic status in history painting. In 2018, the Kunsthaus Dahlem in Berlin staged New/Old Homeland – Artist’s R/emigration, reinvestigating post-war Germany’s artistic practice in the light of exile and its connections to international modernity. And the thirteenth edition of Senegal’s Dak’Art, one of the most important African art biennials, was inaugurated by the arrival of six artists in a yellow molue – an iconic Lagos bus – having conquered the incessant checkpoints along the South–South migration road from Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast under the initiative of the Nigerian installation and performance artist Emeka Udemba. By celebrating migration, curators and artists concur that artistic styles and currents are profoundly impacted by migration, and that the will to create is often the origin of migration itself. The Singapore-based Malaysia-born artist Heman Chong’s short-term migration to Berlin in 2006 meant ‘circulation’ and ‘the access to a huge pool of people that could either influence or extend your practice’, escaping the craft tradition transmitted by Singapore’s colonial past, for example (Chong, 2006: 33–35). Experiences vary widely, with artists migrating in search of a better life, of an international career, of more enlightened patrons, or to escape censorship or neo-imperial patterns, but artists’ interviews often underline the defining impact of circulation on their work.

As such, Art and migration investigates how movements and exchanges become producers of culture. Art – through the visual materiality of artworks – gives shape and form to the dynamic relationships between artistic communities and both host and home cultures. Art is always a representation of borders, and a commentary on the contours of cultural exchanges, may these artistic encounters be local, regional, or international – and even museums result from these exchanges. Many museums were originally endowed with a historical mission, that of articulating and consolidating a national identity – but they have long been in fact the products of transnational networks of personnel, objects, technologies, and ideas, and are increasingly seen as conduits of diversity, documenting how sedenterisation has rarely been the norm for artists or works of art (Meyer and Savoy, 2014; Whitehead et al., 2017). In successfully bringing together the Dutch and Flemish scene and the English practice of sociability, as in An English Family at Tea (Tate Britain, c. 1720), migrant painter Joseph Van Aken became a successful artistic mediator in Georgian London. So much so that his works, like many of his contemporaries and fellow nationals, have often been attributed to leading British painters (Tate Britain, 2014, ‘Collection and Display’ #5: Former Hogarths). Recent vigorous research in art history has emphasised that the worlds of art have historically operated on a transcultural system, which involved migration for training, the reliance on transnational finances and commissions, and intercultural provenance trails (Wrapson et al., 2019). With artists travelling from court to court, and with guilds struggling to repell artists from other cities, while academies fostered training across borders, the art worlds have contended with art crossing borders. Since medieval and pre-modern times, artists have travelled from court to court, crossing the borders of communities, patronage, and polities. Artists, as highly skilled migrants, built upon kinship and merchant networks to gain craft guild membership in host cities and citizenship rights, while academies fostered training across borders (Ojala-Fulwood, 2018).

Erasure and appropriation are not new phenomena but are still at work in contemporary museums. In their manifesto for curatorial activism, Maura Reilly and Lucy remind us that only 14 percent of the works displayed at MoMA in 2016 were by non-white artists (Reilly and Lippard, 2018). This racism inherent in the display of collections intersects with the lack of representation or even erasure in art history at large of artists who have migrated. British-Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor’s 2001 A Section of Lord Byron’s Drawing Rooms, or the 2010 series of ‘Self Portrait as a White Man’ by the Angolan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Revisioning art and migration – Bénédicte Miyamoto and Marie Ruiz
• Part I: Art, migration, and borders
• Part II: Migrants’ paths in the arts
• Part III: Mapping the researcher’s identity
• Index