What Comes after World Art? Taking a Creative Commons Approach to PedagogyClaire Farago

A ‘worlded’ art history conceives of the global as constituted from multiple and entangled geocultural perspectives, not centred on assumed commonalities of ‘global’ art. One of the few occasions when the discipline of art history is conventionally conceptualized as a whole is at the introductory level, where untenable narratives and nomenclatures inherited from nineteenth-century European art historians are continuously replicated. (How) can a ‘worlded’ introductory course avoid the problems of taxonomy in conventional schemes organized according to Beginning of page[p. 52] canons of monuments, period, and national styles, a linear timeline focused on European events, and all the other headaches associated with West-and-the-Rest thinking?

Collaboration is a necessary and crucial part of a worlded approach because no one has the expertise to do it alone. In 2012–13, six teaching assistants, numerous guest lecturers, and I introduced the discipline of art history to 400 first-year university students at my home institution, the University of Colorado Boulder. We developed the syllabus in collaboration with my art history colleagues. The course used no textbook and we posted all materials on a website designed and maintained by our graduate student teaching assistants (TAs). The experiment was a success and continued for three years with different instructors who inherited the course materials and contributed new lectures to the shared ‘creative commons’ archive for future iterations of the course that fulfilled a core undergraduate humanities requirement for students in the College of Arts and Sciences and was the required foundation course for all art and art history majors.

The course began with the major shift in art history towards cultural history, gender/ diversity issues in the early 1970s. Each lecture was accompanied by a short, accessible reading. The idea was that the course could be changed, making use of the assembled ideas, and/or adding new notes or lectures, as long as the basic course goals agreed upon by the permanent art history faculty were met. The faculty were to discuss the course annually and take turns teaching it. In my inaugural version of the year-long course,Beginning of page[p. 53] the first semester was devoted to critical issues without relying on chronological development or a canon of monuments, while the second semester focused on the history of trading networks, beginning with two of the oldest maritime trading regions, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, later joined by the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds. The Atlantic Ocean network was established in the sixteenth century, while the vast area defined by the Pacific Rim involves regional migration patterns of great antiquity. Lectures alternated between case studies and overviews of trading regions. This organization of world culture into regional spatio-temporal networks positioned land routes as connections between maritime networks. The fundamental problem of how regions might be integrated into a global network of trade and interaction first surfaces in the sixteenth century, when exchanges of goods and ideas became far too complex to be parsed into autonomous geographical regions or in many cases archived according to European categories such as artist, patron, place of origin, and so on. The course narrative focused on cultural exchange within and also between more and less tightly organized trading regions of various scales, using the rubric of stationary and mobile as a dialectical play of place and displacement (following Irit Rogoff).11Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (Routledge Press, 2001). The interaction between regional and global flows and local art traditions and inventions became the core ‘object’ of study.

This was an enormous and very complex project, difficult to convey in the abbreviated format of this publication. Each lecture presented an argument within the larger Beginning of page[p. 54] structure of the syllabus, beginning with an overview (also posted on the course website, along with images). This organizing principle accommodated many different speakers without resulting in an incoherent narrative. The teaching assistants were invited on a volunteer basis to develop a lecture in their area of expertise. One was authored by graduate student Katie Morrison, entitled ‘The Atlantic World: The Slave Coast and African Diaspora: A Double Consciousness’, illustrated here with two images (Figures 1 and 2).

Morrison’s engagement with historical and contemporary issues of social justice, spanning five centuries in Beginning of page[p. 55] a single lecture, exemplifies our transcultural approach to economic and cultural globalization as a dialectical play of place and displacement:

W. E. B. Du Bois explains the idea of double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk: ‘One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’ Here Du Bois refers specifically to the Beginning of page[p. 56] experience of Blacks in America post-slavery, but in a wider sense this concept of double consciousness speaks to the experience, cultural, and artistic production of post-slave societies at large. This lecture will first address the inescapable hybridity seen in architecture on the Slave Coast of Africa (particularly the controversial, culturally important Goree Island) and contemporary reactions to those paradoxical spaces in the art of Carrie Mae Weems. As a counterpoint to the grand colonial architecture on the Slave Coast, the next part of the lecture will focus on black cultural and artistic production in the United States. Things such as Black churches and quilts show the slipperiness of double consciousness in Africans’ displacement to the United States during the Atlantic Slave Trade.22Katie Morrison, ‘The Atlantic World. The Slave Coast and African Diaspora: A Double Consciousness’, lecture notes for the large lecture course, ‘World Art Studies 2’, Department of Art and Art History, University of Colorado Boulder, 14 February 2013.

Organizing the history of art and material culture into historical spatial networks led to an entirely different, but extensively documentable, history focused on transcultural processes that does not rely on modern categories such as nation-states, continents, period styles, and other monolithic and often anachronistic entities to organize the material. The course introduced first-year university students to cutting edge research and disciplinary critique, without an overarching concept of the global or a single linear narrative or chronology, while remaining focused on the art and material culture.Beginning of page[p. 57]