Modernisms and modernities

Dos exposiciones, que tuvieron lugar en un corto intervalo de tiempo, sirven como punto de partida para examinar la red de intercambios artístico-culturales entre la modernidad india y la vanguardia alemana a comienzos de los años veinte. En 1922 una muestra con obras de la escuela de arte Bauhaus fue inaugurada en Calcuta. Al año siguiente, 1923, acuarelas modernas indias se exhibieron en Berlín. En torno a estas dos exposiciones se generó un debate teórico, tanto en la prensa india como alemana, que formuló la modernidad india y proclamó las afinidades entre la vanguardia alemana e india ya en los años veinte, planteando así la existencia de una modernidad mundial.


Two exhibitions, which took place within a short space of time, serve as a starting point to study the network of artistic and cultural exchanges between Indian modernism and German avant-garde in the early twenties. In 1922, a major Bauhaus art exhibition was held in Calcutta. In 1923, the following year, modern Indian watercolours were shown in Berlin. These two exhibitions generated a theoretical debate in both the Indian and the German press, in which Indian modernism was formulated and the affinities between Indian and German avant-garde were acclaimed as early as the 1920s, thus establishing the existence of a worldwide modernism.

Decenterings and Regionalisms: An Intercrossed History of the Havana and Dakar Biennials

This research intends to investigate the role of two strategic projects in the visual arts field – the biennials of Havana (1984) and Dakar (1990/92) – in view of political, intellectual and cultural exchange between Africa and Latin America during the 1980s and 2000s. These exhibition platforms are discussed with regard to their programs, agents and discourses, and reviewed in light of the recent contributions from the history of exhibitions to the discipline of Art History, from a non-European perspective. In order to map and confront their historical and social insertion modalities, I make use of the notion of Histoire Croisée, put forth by Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, as a methodological tool in the field of relational theories. This premise enables a broader contextualization of the exhibition platforms at hand, putting in perspective the emancipatory projects carried out by the non-aligned countries during the Cold War, the emergence of the notions of pan-Africanism and blackness in the Senegalese context, and Cuba’s anti-imperialistic ideology and cultural policies outlined between the 1950s and the 80s. In addition, it is worth noting that this research is underpinned by a set of perspectives that converse with the fields of anthropology of art, sociology of culture and political geography.

This is a book review of S. A. Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe, From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); it originally appeared in: The Art Bulletin 82 no. 4 (2000): 781–85.

A lot has happened since this review; I've summarized and rethought the material in several places. But I am reposting it here because its original context is important: Mansbach's book is still one of the clearest examples of an attempt to think outside the central canons of modernism while remaining in their methodological domain.

This review is being reworked as part of "North Atlantic Art History and Worldwide Art," which is posted on www.jameselkins.com and partly here; in particular please see the essay "Writing About Modernisms Outside Western Europe," posted on www.jameselkins.com.

Among the early responses see “Response [to Anthony Alofsin’s letter regarding the review of Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe],” Art Bulletin 84 (2002): 539.

Franks, P.E.  (2004) Managing in a rural context: Notes from the frontier.  Invited paper presented at Äfrocentric Management Approaches in South Africa. International Expert Meeting/Workshop jointly organized by the Department of Management and Organisation and the Department of Culture, Organisation and Management, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 24-25 June, 2004.

"The perspective in this paper is somewhat critical of the Western scientific approach to social problems. It is considered that this approach is especially inappropriate in the third world context of which South Africa is a part. The writer is not attempting to speak for others, be they black, brown, or white; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Animist, or whatever. The writer is rather, attempting to look on the situation through his own eyes in an attempt to come to terms with the problems facing South Africa as a whole.
Rejecting both the ideology of apartheid and the ideologies of liberal integrationism, communism and capitalism, the writer hopes to critically evaluate the situation in terms of a realpolitik untainted by ideological -isms which have in the past trapped debate within the dominating dialogues: apartheid-integration, and capitalism-communism.
It is not the writer's intention merely to criticise the Government or its opponents, or to laud them. It attempts rather, to place the South African situation within a critical context of concepts, and to extend the boundaries of the present dialogue by means of a critical assessment of the conceptual dimensions within which dialogue can become bogged down.
As has been noted elsewhere the African and Afrikaans sectors of this land are the elements necessary to a peaceful solution (Ngubane, 1979). If there is to be a solution at all, South Africans (in a broad sense) have to discover a language, and symbolic universe that can satisfy the aspirations of all South Africans. This can only come about if we come to terms with our quandaries, face the facts of unworkable solutions and polices, and face the future anew. This can only happen if the key elements are satisfied by any new dispensation. This satisfaction cannot be captured by the media of mass communication, for it happens through everyday life. Human beings act on their lived experience. No matter how clever and subtle the propaganda, if it is contradicted by the 'receivers' everyday experience, it is all to nothing. The terrorists of today are nothing to what our technological future holds in store. With the information revolution the vulnerability of the system becomes a thousand times greater. It is, perhaps, a moment for decision, with a pregnant pause.
There can be no pretence that the problems of South Africa can be easily, or summarily solved, it is merely the hope of this writer that in a small way he can add to the store of information and analysis necessary for a dialogue that can contribute to a resolution of these problems.
I bring a certain perspective to the situation. I carry with me a critical view of both dominant ideologies and a healthy distrust of all ideology, which itself may be an ideology I have to admit. In my own way I cannot avoid the risk of utopianism, for without running that risk there can be no solution to our problems. For this I cannot apologise. I have attempted to ground this essay in the South African reality of today. The fact that I attempt to make my assumptions and perspective clear, cannot fool anybody that it is totally self-disclosing. Nevertheless, it is as truly 'objective' as anything one will find, and, more objective in its context of disclosed (explicit) assumptions and perspective, than that presented by a positivist 'fact'."


Franks, P.E. (1984) : Notes Towards a South African Resolution. Johannesburg: National Institute for Personnel Research.

Home is where the heart is :
Perspectives of migrants and Commuters in South Africa

By
Peter E. Franks
Dean, Faculty of Management Sciences
Professor  of Industrial and Organisational Psychology
University of the North
Republic of South Africa


In the rural areas of South Africa the vast majority of workers are either migrants or commuters. The Northern Transvaal, like other rural regions of South Africa, has many more people who consider it 'home' than reside there all the time. The migrants work in the industries of Gauteng (Johannesburg and environs) but remain committed to their 'homes' sending remittances there. The commuters reside in the villages and townships around the major administrative, and sometimes industrial ,centres of the Northern Transvaal (Pietersburg, Thoyondou, Giyani, Lebowakgomo, Potgietersrust, Nylstroom etc.),and commute to work in these centres.
The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) says the following about the migrants: "Migrant labour, a consequence of past recruitment policies, will persist in the immediate future". If this simple explanation were true we would not expect to find migrancy where these recruitnment practices did not exist. However we find migrancy to be a somewhat universal phenomenon, sometimes for economic reasons (work seekers), sometimes for political reasons (refugees) and sometimes even environmental (There being something like 15 million refugees from environmental degradation worldwide.).
Simplifications such as those found in this regard in the RDP further disempower the migrant in that they ascribe his/her behaviour to the recruitment policies of the apartheid era rather than recognising the pragmatism of the migrant him or herself. While commuting and migration resulted somewhat from the white by night policies of the Apartheid era and the recruitment systems of the mines etc., at the same time these processes also support the continuity, diversity and development of the local communities i.e., 'home'. Migrancy and commuting need to be recognied as pragmatic strategies for the dynamic development of rural communities in the face of an alienating modernity.This complexity provides the key to the empowerment of these migrants and commuters rather than their disempowerment by either the apartheid systems or the RDP.
Policy planning in the Northern Transvaal, and other largely rural regions, needs to take this complex pattern of migration and commuting and, especially, the needs and wishes they imply, into account. Unfortunately there has been little intensive research into the perceptions of either migrants or rural commuters, except so far as the taxi industry and transportation in general are concerned.

The migrants form a major force for the development of the Northern Region and other rural regions. This vast stock of human resources must be capitalised upon for the reconstruction and development of the region and their contribution to the economy of the region via remittances must be fully encouraged and supported. In addition the migrants provide a vast human resource pool for the industrial and commercial development of the region. Their perceptions require close attention in the formulation of policies aimed at the reconstruction and development of the Northern Transvaal and other rural areas of South Africa and elsewhere.

Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full

Avant-garde calligraphy, often mistaken for abstract painting by its contemporaries, is a rich and understudied field in postwar Japanese art. While a few studies began to examine the place of this art form in the postwar art landscape, specific aspects of this phenomenon warrant further investigation.

This paper argues that in the postwar decades the dynamics of calligraphy as an avant-garde “traditional art” became increasingly issue-driven, rather than remaining community oriented. This feature distinguished avant-garde calligraphers from their traditionalist counterparts. New important theoretical issues―such as attention to materiality―connected previously separated art forms and brought artists from neighboring fields into conversation.

An example of this development is the postwar perception of the medium of ink rubbings. In 1952 the Japanese abstract painter and art historian Hasegawa Saburō (1906 - 1957) created a series of rubbings, reminiscent of surrealist Frottages by Max Ernst (1891 - 1976). In the very same year, the avant-garde calligrapher Inoue Yūichi (1916 - 1985) integrated calligraphic inscriptions into rubbings from tatami mats, and creative printmakers such as Onchi Koshirō (1891 - 1955) experimented with rubbings from stone, wood, or even leaves and shells. Calligraphers noticed that the success of ink rubbings was indebted to their quality of rendering traces of the direct physical contact with the imprinted objects. This paper investigates how the postwar interest in materiality incited the calligraphers to adopt the medium of takuhon rubbings—previously used primarily as a means of copying earlier calligraphic styles—to conduct groundbreaking calligraphic experiments.

This panel addresses the rapid radical modernization in Japanese “traditional arts” (geidō), which in their more conventional forms typically materialized and performed an idealized view of the Japanese past. Well-known examples of such transformed arts include abstract calligraphy, avant-garde ikebana and experimental garden design, which all emerged forcefully in the first decades of the postwar era and continue to flourish today.

The two approaches most commonly employed in recent scholarship of such avant-garde formations are investigating them in relation to hierarchical European concepts of “art” and “high culture” and in contrast with practices that are represented as being authoritative exemplars of venerable unchanging practices of the past. This panel takes a different tack; postwar avant-garde art forms are scrutinized within a horizontal paradigm of art experiments sharing three essential features in different media: a common time frame, a similar social and gender structure (often they are perceived as leisure activities of upper middle class women), and the same structural pattern (they incorporated elements from modern Euro-American 'high arts' into various forms associated with Japanese tradition).

Furthermore, this panel seeks to develop a common understanding of the term “avant-garde” (“zen'ei”) within the context of “traditional arts”. How does this concept relate to the conventional practices of calligraphy, ikebana or the tea ceremony, as well as to other Japanese and international postwar  avant-garde movements in painting, sculpture or performances?

Franks, P.E (2000) Myth, The Tragic Flaw: Issues in South African Public Servicing. Paper presented at the International Conference on “Challenges to the Social Sciences in Africa in the Twenty First Century. Faculty of Social Sciences, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, 25th – 27 October and published in the Proceedings. Kampala, Uganda: Makarere University Press.

This chapter focuses on Clement Greenberg, the New York art world's foremost Jewish critic during the postwar period, for the purposes of bringing to the surface the unacknowledged role of Jewish and their negotiations of their place in the history of American art, the "New York art world," and art criticism, In this book, Greenberg serves as a place holder for naming a set of problems around the whitening of Jewish immigrants and immigrant culture in the United States, a process that indeed established a monolithic and flattened idea of Jewishness in the 1940s. The mechanisms through which the American art establishment banished specificity with claims to the universal, most notably through the writings of Greenberg, promoted art world dogmas and norms (Abstract Expressionism, the myth of the individual genius, New York as the center of the art world) that silenced Jewish specificity and Jewish identity, just as Jews were becoming, for the first time, a strong visible presence in the arts.

Franks, P.E (1988) : Favouritism:  a dynamic process in organizational politics.  South Africa Journal of Labour Relations 12 (1), pages 21 - 25.

Franks, P.E (1987) : Favouritism : a dynamic process in organizational politics.  Paper presented to the 5 National Congress of the Psychological Association of South Africa, University of Cape Town, 7 - 9 September.

Link to the published version of this paper:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/cX9c6FgEddNGAg7eqeq9/full

This paper addresses ground-breaking experiments with materials and techniques by a new generation of postwar Japanese avant-garde calligraphers, who, sharing a more reflective and innovative views on calligraphy's materials, set out to challenge calligraphy's conventional “four treasures”― ink, paper, ink stone and brush. This study argues that attention to materiality, as a large feature of postwar art worldwide, was used by calligraphers as a means to enter the art processes of the larger national and international scale. It served as a common ground for starting a conversation between several groups of artists, such as printmakers, abstract painters and calligraphers.

In particular, this study focuses on works of two Bokujinkai artist, Inoue Yūichi (1916-1985) and Shinoda Shōji (1927-2000). Inoue's experiments revived takuhon ink rubbings as a modern art medium. His cooperation with abstract painter and art theoretician Hasegawa Saburō emphasized its relatedness to the surrealist technique of frottages by Max Ernst. At the same time, Shinoda integrated carved calligraphy into the avant-garde calligraphic practice, actively establishing a connection with the contemporaneous sōsaku hanga print makers, such as Onchi Koshirō and Munakata Shikō. While the phenomenon of avant-garde calligraphy in postwar art landscape of Japan recently inspired several studies, the specific role that the interest in materiality played in it remains understudied. By closing this gap, this paper specifically demonstrates that addressing a common issue of materiality helped the postwar calligraphers overcome boundaries between different art forms and contest the established art hierarchies.

Paper presented at the seminar:
Organizational  Communication _A  Top  Priority. Heia  Safari  Ranch, 12 - 13 March, 1992

Published verbatim as:

Franks, P.E (1992) : Organizational communication through effective environmental management.  In Nieumeijer L, (Ed) Organizational Communication a Top priority. Pretoria : Human Sciences Research Council.

Submission requested by the Premier of Limpopo Province, South Africa, the Honourable Sello Moloto at his advisory Committee Meeting in August 2007. Originally titled, "Notes Towards Dealing with the Lack of a Work Ethic in Limpopo and Beyond."
Presented to the Premier in October of that year, just prior to the Polokwane ANC Conference that led to the resignation of Mbeki and sealed the fate of the Premier, just as he was beginning to come to terms with the real challenges of the office and Limpopo..

Publicado em "almada nada — manual de leitura", Teatro Nacional de S. João, Porto, 2014.
A partir de "Saltimbancos — Contrastes Simultâneos" de José de Almada Negreiros, analiso a actividade artística de Almada abordando alguns exemplos-chave e desenvolvendo a ideia de que essa actividade foi marcada pela pintura mesmo quando a linguagem era outra, e por uma concepção da arte que exige tanto a liberdade individual como a sua expressão pública perante uma audiência.

Glass, H.G.L and Franks, P.E (1989) : The implications of migrant labour for the development of a post-modern South Africa.  Paper presented to the XXIXth International Congress of the International Institute of Sociology, Rome, Italy, 12 - 16 June.

Em 1929 foi mostrado em Madrid um espectáculo de lanterna mágica concebido por José de Almada Negreiros para acompanhar a partitura de Salvador Bacarisse para voz e orquestra, e o libreto de Manuel Abril, com o título La Tragedia de Doña Ajada. Tendo em conta a recepção do espectáculo noticiada na imprensa madrilena da época, importa localizar esta obra feita entre três artistas, um a cargo da parte plástica, outro da música e outro do texto, no âmbito das várias colaborações artísticas que Almada Negreiros protagonizou nos cinco anos passados em Madrid. A escolha de mostrar La Tragedia de Doña Ajada através de um dispositivo de projecção já então obsoleto, bem como a decoração que faz para o Cine San Carlos por ocasião da inauguração do aparato sonoro daquela sala de cinema, fazem destas obras o ponto de partida para uma análise da relação de Almada Negreiros com a linguagem moderna cinematográfica, estando atento ainda aos trabalhos e textos posteriores que faz sobre, ou em torno do cinema.

Franks, P.E. (1988) Perception and Misconception in the Workplace: Towards a management beyond Baasskap. enviroscan, Institute of Personnel Management (IPM) Information Services Unit: Briefing Document #2, April.
Based on an earlier version of this paper:
Franks, P.E (1987)  Perception and misconception in the work place.  Invited address, Perceptiology/Persepsiology: Seminar on Perceptions presented by the Public Relations Institute of South Africa (Southern Transvaal), Witwatersrand Technikon, Johannesburg, 29 September.