Critical historiography

There is little doubt that the majority of the works in graffiti and street art has been produced outside of the institutional art system with its galleries and museums, curators and art critics, collectors and dealers. But considering the activities of UGA (United Graffiti Artists) and NoGA (Nation of Graffiti Artists) in New York during the early 1970s; graffiti as a part of the post-modernist art-scene in the mid 1980s; recent exhibitions at prestigious museums (such as Art in the Streets at MoCA in Los Angeles, 2011), and street artists such as Swoon and Banksy whose work often are exhibited at high end galleries and/or sold at international auction houses – it is obvious that graffiti and street art also have an institutional history.

The often highly opinionated debate within graffiti and street art communities regarding the institutional activities indicate a complex relationship between the non-institutional artistic production and institutions. Many rule out any such activity as fake or based on pure exploitation. Others hail it, e.g. as an acknowledgement of the movements’ artistic legacies. But very few consider it as a history in its own right, with its own complex logics. It seems deemed to play the role of a seemingly paradoxical Other, in the real – non-institutional – history of street art.

This paper is an attempt to take this institutional history into serious and non-judgmental consideration, by asking the following questions:

a) Which actual institutional activities with links to graffiti and street art are traceable?

b) What types of relationships is possible to identify between specific artists, institutions and the non-institutional tradition?

c) What results may these institutional activities have had on the non-institutional production, for example in terms of artistic influence or on the understanding of graffiti and street art among a wider public?

THE NECESSITY OF THE STUDY OF HUMANITIES IN ANALYSIS OF INTANGIBLE ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF EUROPE IN THE 1930S: MOHSEN FOROUGHI, THE STUDY OF EDUCATION AND INHERITED CULTURE OF ARCHITECTS LINKED TO THE POWER

The general perspective of the chapter is based on the thematic argumentations as follows. Prior to that, a brief presentation of characters who played focal roles in exposing power in the thirties in Europe and the Middle East seems indispensable. The first character is the Persian monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi (15 March 1878 – 26 July 1944) was the King of Iran from 15 December 1925 until he was forced to abdicate by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran on 16 September 1941.He founded the Pahlavi dynasty in 1926 in Iran. Reza Shah and his role in making new Iran is also detected further on in the chapter. The presence of the king in the process of modernization of the country is unequivocal. In this regard, his role is highly comparable to the Italian conductor of fascism Benito Mussolini in the interwar period.
The nationalist system founded by Reza shah, had sensitive affinities with the fascist system in Italy whereas both were flourished amidst a somewhat romantic interpretation of their respective histories.

This article explores the phenomenon of nation as narrative. This approach is rooted in political theory, more specifically, in post-foundational thought and poststructuralist narratology. The article is significantly informed by the so-called performative turn, especially in historiography. It will therefore focus on narrative and hi/story, as it is understood by Rancière: as a discourse which originally belongs to literature yet keeps escaping it. Relying on a literary technique, history constitutes itself as a science: this is why we can approach it by employing methods similar, albeit not identical, to those used to approach literature. The main argument put forward in this article is that society, understood in Laclauian terms, does not exist, whereas the (Croatian) society effect, that is, the illusion of society as a totality, is produced by the narrative of the so-called Croatian thousand-year dream. In other words, what Hobsbawm dubs the invention of tradition is founded upon the narrative’s past, while the impact of the present of this narrative’s narration is excluded from the mechanisms of the ontology of nationalism.

L’IDEAZIONE DEL PROGETTO DELLA CITTÀ UNIVERSITARIA DI TEHERAN
VICINANZE E LONTANANZE DALL’EUROPA

Durante il primo Novecento iraniano (1905-1940) si assiste a fondamentali cambiamenti culturali e architettonici in Persia, fino ad allora radicata nelle proprie millenarie tradizioni. Mutamenti che ancora oggi identificano ampiamente le tematiche architettoniche e urbanistiche integrate profondamente nell’ideazione formale e progettuale e si presentano ai nostri occhi in forma distintamente riconoscibile, seppur implicitamente tendente verso una conservatività allusiva verso le sue radici consuetudinarie. Radici robuste dei suoi poeti millenari come Firdusi, le antiche religioni e la continuità storica territoriale che origina - per mezzo di prove sicure - la presenza di un popolo antico composto da diversi gruppi etnici e tribali che, nel primo Novecento, mettono in luce propositi di dimostrare e di affermarsi autenticamente fra i paesi del mondo attraverso la cultura, la politica e l’architettura.
La ricerca tende ad analizzare l’architettura del primo Novecento iraniano in relazione ad una comparazione estesa con l’architettura europea.........

The current state of the emerging queer discourse in India is finding expression through incredibly bourgeois and idealised models — the tendency to extend queer identities into the infinitude of Indian history and the almost incessant combing through of Brahmanical texts and disparate cultural examples to string together the idea of an eternal homosexual and his place in Indian history is repeated ad nauseam in popular discourse.
But what does the queer identity mean? Where and when does it arise? How much historical truth is in these popular assertions? What ideas do they seek to construct about queerness and its space within the national imagination of India?
In my paper, taking cues from traditions of queer Marxism, I seek to draw a world-historical understanding of the queer identity and its emergence with capitalist accumulation — investigating how exactly the commodity form transformed the idiom on which “sexuality” was understood, as recently suggested by Christopher Chitty? Traversing the historiographical debate on the origins of the modern ideas of homosexuality, I seek to establish that “queerness” and it’s correlatives been inflected by particularities of caste, class and race; and that suggestions to build an ahistorical, and idealised notion of queerness that enforces idealisation of identity, while not reflecting on materialist politics feeds into the bourgeois need for such a class blind history that enables the policing of working class queer and trans people. Such blind mythmaking also allows bourgeois queers to pink-wash regimes of control like India’s involvement in Kashmir to indoctrinate the voices of Kashmiri queer organising in a bid to use their supposed condition of persecution by their own community to legitimise imperialism. Building from this argument, I seek to articulate how organising among queer and trans people — despite the origins of our identities from the freeing of wage labor under capital — has to be anti-capitalist and built on solidarities with the working class. No true emancipation for us lies in the vampiric system of exploitation under capitalism.

(A first version of this paper appeared in "Studia Sociologica", June 2014.)

This essay tries to sketch some possible avenues for a critical historiography through an inquiry into the status of archival documents, the main (re)source for historical narratives. Drawing on the Romanian post-socialist context, it focuses on the various ways in which archival documents are engaged and deployed in local political struggles. These struggles evince novel forms of employing archival records, different from both professional constraints and the public debates over the national past which have characterised the post-socialist period. Moreover, these ways of dealing with archival records represent local, institutionally-embedded historiographical operations which may bear significant social consequences. The main contention of this essay is that the historian’s methodological toolkit should be reconstructed through a constant dialogue with these historiographical operations while paying attention to the manner in which social actors frame their social critiques in these everyday struggles. By switching the attention to the archives as an institution, the second part of the essay makes the case for a historical anthropology of bureaucratic practices that may aid historians and marginalized social groups in engaging in debates over the status of the archives. This may help in undermining the monopoly that archivists and state institutions have over archival records.

This paper takes a critical look at  the work of the extraordinary popular historian Lev Gumilev. Writing in the late Soviet times, Gumilev has become virtually a cult figure after his death. He took up the ideas of the Eurasianists of the early twentieth century according to whom Russia's destiny is to be Eurasian power, and he reconfigured them  as a 'scientific' theory of ethnos. The ethnos is supposed to be a 'biological' entity determined by its place in natural environment, but at the same time, inspired by its leaders, each ethnos has its specific time of intense flowering (which Gumilev called 'passionary'). The article examins the contradictions  in Gumilwev's theory and its methodological flaws. It ends with the discussion of the political implications of Gumilev's popularity in post-Socialist Russia.  He is not only admired  by semi-educated people but it is also legitimised by sections of academy (a university is named after him in Kazakhstan). It is argued that his work lends a spurious credence to nationalism and anti-semitism.

This research has as main purpose, analyze the work Bolivar, Action Man's Utopia and Challenges (1977), Miguel Acosta Saignes as historiographical work. In this regard, the historiographical analysis is approached from the scientific rigor of practicing internal and external criticism of the document. It is of utmost importance to consider the academic intellectual author of the work, Acosta Saignes (1908-1989), a historian by profession and trade, with elaborate studies in history, anthropology and geography made to the Colegio de Mexico and Universidad Central de Venezuela. Similarly, the book presents a methodical historical research on Simon Bolivar and his time, relating the economic structures of caste struggles confronting present at the historic moment of the War of Independence, with a comprehensive presentation of primary sources, and the contextualization of events and developed from the theoretical perspective of Marxism. Furthermore, this work is distinguished significantly from other works, because it is not a biography of the Liberator but Acosta Saignes poses a Mantuan Caracas, as the expression synthesis of economic, political and ideological of the dominant caste in a cyclical time, which represents the breakdown of colonial rule and the establishment of a new political order that preserves the privileges in some sectors; inside this war against Spain is waged an internal civil war, a social war, colors, in which the formation of a social group in the plains would have a momentous impact.

In this first critical edition of the Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana, the author offers a more analytical take on the study of the Silpasastras. Contrary to the received opinion that the past is directly accessible to us via the sacrosanct fragments of the texts, the author argues that they only make sense within a framework, which is necessarily contemporary.

In the introduction, the Citrasutra, comprising nine adhyayas or chapters of the third khanda of the Visnudharmottara Purana, is posited as a much "discovered” and interpreted text. As a result, it has a long history of interpretation by pioneering art historians of the 20th century like A K Coomaraswamy, Stella Kramrisch and C Sivaramamurti. Interest in the text is triggered by a set of concerns of the art historians, which tied up with questions of Indian identity and the construction of an authentic past. The author locates her own interpretation of the text within the tradition of hermeneutics forming around this text.The second section, divided into three parts – Text, Translation and Notes, takes up the nine adhyayas from 35-45.

The Text puts together a critical apparatus which incorporated fresh evidence from two new manuscripts from Nepal and Bangladesh, hitherto not considered by the earlier editors. The Notes are detailed and bring in the interpretations by the earlier scholars to indicate important deviations from the official line of interpretation. It is followed by a detailed Glossary, the first of its kind, which focuses on the technical and context-specific sense of the terms.

Art History as a discipline arrived in India by the late eighteenth century under the aegis of colonialism. This historical fact has far-reaching philosophical implications for the way the discipline has taken shape in India even in the postcolonial era. The cultural nationalists who appropriated Art History turned that which had started as a colonial enterprise—to discover the forgotten past of the colonized and inculcate a sense of history into its subjects—into the recovery of native civilizational pride. This chapter revisits the overlooked theory of anukaraņa vāda via critical historiography, the problematic of translation and examines its contemporary relevance. It aims to recover the debates and discourse surrounding this theory found in the Abhinavabharati (circa 11th CE) through the lens of comparative aesthetics.

In The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, Kalle Pihlainen pays tribute to Hayden White’s work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. The book’s seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with Pihlainen’s 2013 essay on narrative truth and ending with his 2006 essay on the confines of the form. The Work of History is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as Pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical constructivism. At the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as White states in his foreword: it critically scrutinizes and explains White’s work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. Although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, Philainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. One misconception is that constructivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. Pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same.

Crack Is Wack Playground is a small park along the Harlem River Drive in New York City. It earned its name after a graffiti mural painted, without permission, by Keith Haring in 1986. The mural was a message of awareness to the acute problems of the so-called crack epidemic circa 1985-1993. The name is consecrated and the official website of New York City tells the history of both the park and its name. The painting has thus transformed from a crime committed in the park to a landmarked painting naming the entire park. This is most likely a unique transformation, but then again Haring is often described as a unique talent among the graffitists. In art historical surveys he is commonly one of few graffiti artists with a biography. The New York City website (http://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/M208E/history [2012-01-15]) explains his artistic path as following:

"In 1978, Haring came to New York with a scholarship to the School of Visual Arts. The graffiti he saw throughout the city immediately appealed to Haring’s artistic sense of spontaneity and the possibilities for political messages. Haring began using building facades and subway walls as canvases for his own graffiti art. Most of his subway graffiti was benign, as it was done in white chalk on the blank black background of unused advertising panels."

The use of the word benign here is interesting. Apart from indirectly placing graffiti both within the realm of art and of illness, it indicates that there might be a difference between Haring’s graffiti and another opposite type – malign graffiti – assumingly the graffiti that inspired him.

However, within the New York graffiti subculture and the literature describing it Haring seems to be considered as an outsider, and at times even completely omitted. Within the context of this subculture the most prestigious artists are considered as style masters and Haring referred to as an artist without style.

The paper will be an attempt that from the case of the Crack Is Wack Playground map out the different notions regarding graffiti as benign and malign, bordering both art and crime, of style within contemporary fine arts and graffiti subculture. Of interest are also the possibilities of writing both academic and popular art history that seek to describe the different circumstances regarding Keith Haring’s art and the art of style masters such as Dondi, Part One and Noc 167 without constructing them as oppositions: either good/bad, present/missing or superior/inferior."

Art History as a discipline arrived in India by the late eighteenth century under the aegis of colonialism. This historical fact has far-reaching philosophical implications for the way the discipline has taken shape in India even in the postcolonial era. The cultural nationalists who appropriated Art History turned that which had started as a colonial enterprise—to discover the forgotten past of the colonized and inculcate a sense of history into its subjects—into the recovery of native civilizational pride. This chapter revisits the overlooked theory of anukaraņa vāda via critical historiography, the problematic of translation and examines its contemporary relevance. It aims to recover the debates and discourse surrounding this theory found in the Abhinavabharati (circa 11th CE) through the lens of comparative aesthetics.