E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

ESTADO EDITORIAL

FROM THE EDITORS

Nosotros, the editors of ARTMargins, wish to express our solidarity with the
antiracist protests taking place around the world, triggered by the kill-
ings of African Americans by police in the United States. We stand
alongside our Black colleagues and students fi ghting against white
supremacy and racial inequality, and we support the ongoing mass
movements demanding racial justice and concrete social change from
within the public health uncertainty of a global pandemic. We take the
opportunity to restate here, forcefully and unequivocally, that Black
Lives Matter.

•

The extraordinary scale of the antiracism protests that took over U.S.
cities and spread rapidly around the globe beginning in May has con-
ferred a sense of urgency to struggles against the deep-rooted injustices
that pervade our societies. Whereas the reach of current demonstrations
is in some ways unprecedented, their cause and demands are not new.
The rallying cry “No justice, no peace,” which echoed throughout
American streets, has a long history in antiracist protest culture. Popu-
larized by the Baptist minister and civil rights activist Al Sharpton dur-
ing the 1986 protests that followed the murder of Michael Griffi th in
Howard Beach, Nueva York, the chant resurfaced in numerous protests
against police brutality targeting African Americans over the past few

https://doi:.org/10.1162/artm_e_00269

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décadas. At least once the phrase entered the art world, as the title
of an exhibition of Social Realist–inspired works by artists Mikkel
Flohr and Rasmus Nielsen in 2011, at Gallery Arttra in Frederiksberg,
Dinamarca. In its poignant concision and almost poetic reduction of
syntax, “No justice, no peace” can be heard as a response to the paradox-
ical demand for “peaceful” protests in the face of violent oppression.
Por último, what is at stake here is the characteristic double bind of
antiracist, anti-imperialist struggle, whereby every call for peace tacitly
resonates and simultaneously silences the cry for justice for the
oppressed.

The same dilemma informs and conditions Alioune Diop’s “Art
and Peace,” written on the occasion of the First World Festival of Negro
Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, 1966, and republished here for the first time.
This issue of ARTMargins presents Diop’s historical document with an
introduction by Lauren Taylor. A central figure in the Négritude move-
ment and a founding editor of the deeply influential journal Présence
Africaine, Diop was well aware that “real peace”—not the “peace of
diplomatists” but the one that “spring[s] from the heart of the people”—
entails justice. He knew that justice, in the cultural arena, also means
recognition. The establishment of such peace was for Diop one of the
missions of art. As Taylor puts it in her introduction, the goal was “to
create mutual understanding between peoples by fostering a depth of
intercultural empathy that was unattainable through political agree-
ments or persuasive language.” And yet, as Diop noted, African artists
“are little known. Generally speaking, they are not given their proper
lugar, lost as they are in surroundings often indifferent or hostile to
their talent or their problems.” In framing the problem in these terms,
Diop’s text, as Taylor points out, anticipates the paradoxes and chal-
lenges that the globalization of the artistic circuit would impose on
African artists.

Shifting from peace to controversy, and to a later stage of cultural
and economic globalization, this issue’s review article presents Ghalya
Saadawi’s critical take on Chad Elias’s Posthumous Images: Contemporary
Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon (Universidad de Duke
Prensa, 2018). The book under review interrogates the memory of the
Lebanese civil war era through the work of numerous contemporary art-
istas, photographers, filmmakers, and architects. Central to Saadawi’s
assessment is the argument that Elias’s book dehistoricizes contempo-
rary art in Lebanon, while at the same time relying on the ideological

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narrative of post–civil war reconciliation. Elias’s work ends up reinforc-
ing a certain neoliberal version of the human rights discourse. It misses
the opportunity of real critique and fails to theorize the crucial relation-
ship between past and future in Lebanon’s post–civil war cultural and
political context.

Beyond the artistic circuit, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s

Artist Project Jugaad tackles informality as the determinant mode of
labor in the periphery of capitalism. As Aamir R. Mufti argues in his
commentary on the Project, worldwide integration, of which the con-
temporary art world is a cogent example, constitutes one of the key chal-
lenges of our time. Extrapolating from its original north Indian context
where the word jugaad refers to a “frugal, nonstandard innovation or
solution to a problem posed by a standard (and by implication, foreign)
technology” —akin to a “hack” or “workaround”—Elizabeth and Iftikhar
Dadi highlight a relationship towards technology that is characteristic of
the adverse, informal conditions of labor in the Global South. Jugaad, en
the Dadis’ view, anchors the artists’ interrogation of informality as a cru-
cial aspect of contemporary labor, cual, they claim, is often overlooked
by artists whose perspective is inevitably shaped by the Global North.

The featured articles in this issue take us to two different moments

in East European art of the mid-20th century. Caterina Preda proposes
to reconsider conventional accounts of the establishment of Socialist
Realist art in Romania from the 1950s onward, which tend to reduce
the phenomenon to an imposition on the local art scene from above.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Preda discusses the crucial role
of local artists’ collectives such as “Progressive Art” and “Th. Aman” for
the consolidation of Romania’s Socialist Realist movement. She argues
eso, far from a simple government-led process, the rapid spread of the
new political art in the early 1950s owed at least as much to the artists’
own initiatives and was driven by economic considerations. By analyz-
ing the institutional structure and mode of operation of the Romanian
Artists’ Union and the Syndicate of Fine Arts—formed as production
collectives that, through various state commissions of murals, posters,
decorated panels, and other public works, provided artistic material for
the ideological education of the masses—Preda presents a complex
model of the adaptation of Socialist Realism in Romania.

Meghan Forbes’s piece, finalmente, sheds light on the Czech avant-
garde of the interwar years, problematizing another blind spot in the
established narratives of East European art. At stake here is the failure

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of conventional art history to acknowledge the significance and original-
ity of Czech Dada, particularly as embodied in the activities of the
Deveˇtsil group, which included among its members (even if for a
brief period) the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson. Forbes explores
Deveˇtsil’s unique blend of Russian Constructivism and Dada with its
original proposal of Poetism—an “art of life” or “art of living and enjoy-
En g,” according to the group’s manifestos—as a triangular set of rela-
tions that informed the group’s activities. According to Forbes, fue
most of all the pessimistic, nihilistic, overall negative, and anti-artistic
aspects of Dada that became crucial for Deveˇtsil’s avant-garde mix. En
the words of Karel Teige, one of the group’s central figures, to them,
Dada was above all “Nothing. A glorious and banal nothing.” Yet, como
Forbes notes, “from nothing, art and poetry might come to life.”