E D I T O R I A L S T A T E M E N T

FROM THE EDITORS

The articles in this issue belong to, or fall in between, paradigms consti-
tuted alongside or in response to the new world order of universal
global capitalism. While some articles fall within the purview of “global
art history” or “global art criticism”—a relatively recent epistemological
formation seeking ways to engage with the infi nite manifold of global
cultural production—others (in particular, the book review by Adriana
Michéle Campos Johnson and the artist project by Daniele Genadry)
gravitate toward “global environmentalism,” another form of world con-
sciousness that addresses nature, or what has become and remains of it.
Thus, the dialectics of culture and nature—or, put in more familiar
postmodernist terms, of the “post-cultural” and “post-natural”—set the
tone for this issue, as if reminding us of the basic premises of Western
anthropology, where the nature-culture dynamic provides the ontologi-
cal basis of the universal human condition.

This issue responds to some urgencies within the aforementioned

“global” paradigms. Their authors address a certain exhaustion of con-
temporary forms within the culture-nature dialectic: on one side, the
exhaustion of historical and critical models, the impoverishment of
social life, and the expediency of culture, and on the other, the depletion
of natural resources that has led to a catastrophic change in climate
patterns. The exhaustion or depletion of these categories resonates with
several of the discussions, in the guise of oppositions used to analyze

https://doi:.org/10.1162/artm_e_00251

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global cultural production in terms of the “public and private spheres,”
“class and nation,” “aesthetic internationalism and nationalist tradi-
tion,” “realism and abstraction,” or “’historical avant-garde and dissi-
dent late socialist art.”

Some articles attempt to overcome outdated critical models or rec-
oncile the dichotomies structuring particular fields of study. For exam-
ple, John Roberts’s “After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the
Center and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness” offers a new reading
of non-Western Conceptual art, focusing primarily on Moscow Con-
ceptualism. By departing from established readings of Conceptual art
in the United States and Western Europe in terms of “dematerialization”
or what Roberts calls the “formalist ‘hangover’ from modernism,” the
author highlights the political dimension of non-Western Conceptual
art. With a measured dose of what Soviet aesthetics once called “opti-
mistic pathos,” he invites us to consider various instances of conceptu-
alism from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the USSR/Russia in
terms of their resistance to imperialism. By establishing Moscow Con-
ceptualism along the historical trajectory of the Soviet avant-garde of
the 1920s (in particular, the Productivist ethos of bridging art and life),
the author seeks to reconcile the political and aesthetic programs of
artistic movements formed at opposite historical ends (1917’s commu-
nist revolution and 1989’s transition to democracy) of Russian/Soviet
history. Invested in the vitality of the “avant-garde,” Roberts invites us to
revisit forms of artistic production that occurred around the year 1989
(the neoliberal chronological monument to the “end of history”) within
a longer durée and a more complex field of aesthetic, ideological, and
political forces.

Nicholas C. Morgan’s “Forging a Public Sphere: José Leonilson
in the Folha de São Paulo,” addresses the role of art in the context of
Brazil’s “transition to democracy.” Morgan argues that Leonilson
inserted a voice of minoritarian politics into the mainstream public
sphere through the pages of the Brazilian daily newspaper Folha de
São Paulo. The author believes that, somewhat similarly to the Moscow
Conceptualists who actively contributed to the dismantling of Soviet
collectivity and the visuality of the totalitarian aesthetics of late social-
ism, Leonilson’s drawings imagine a different kind of relation to public-
ness, one emphasizing the micropolitical and the intimate that leads to
the reconceptualization of the public sphere as a fictionalizable, but
instrumentally useful, formation.

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The “individual” and the “private,” which became key signifiers
during the transitions to liberal market democracies in both Brazil and
Russia, have not always been a main concern for artists. Jing Cao’s con-
tribution to the Document section, composed of two dialogues between
David Alfaro Siqueiros and members of the official Chinese Artists’
Association, offers a glimpse into the kinds of questions that preoccu-
pied artists from nonaligned and socialist countries during the 1950s.
At that historical juncture, progressive international art made outside
of North America and Western Europe, both increasingly dominated
by the logic of the market, concerned itself with the question of what
a truly progressive art might be and how it could serve the masses. The
issue of what artistic form was best suited to the recently established
People’s Republic of China (1949) is not a simple matter of “propa-
ganda,” as the “free” Western cultural elites sponsored by the CIA
would have it; it also involves more complex political and aesthetic
problems regarding such matters as tradition (guohua, traditional
Chinese ink painting), Socialist Realism, progressive (Western) social
realism, and Western formalist artistic conventions. These conversa-
tions open toward new dimensions and other antinomies not unrelated
to the culture-nature dialectics that revolve around categories such as
“class and nation” or “realism and formalism” (or “abstraction”).

Fares Chalabi’s article “Art as Resistance in Postwar Lebanon” in its

turn invites us to consider a new “regime of visibility” that, as the
author argues, is characteristic of postwar Lebanese contemporary art.
Chalabi proposes a new interpretation of artists and writers of different
generations who emerged on the local and international art scenes at
the end of the Lebanese Civil War, an event that corresponded with the
fall of “really existing socialism” in Eastern Europe and the beginning of
global neo-liberalization. Similar in some respects to Roberts’s affirma-
tive reading of Moscow Conceptualism, Chalabi emphasizes the pro-
gressive contribution of post–Civil War Lebanese art to the construction
of a new visual language that allegedly questioned the hegemonic
regimes of visibility accompanying dominant Western ways of interpret-
ing phenomena, as well as their social and historical determinations.

The Lebanese-American painter Daniele Genadry, who belongs to

this new generation of Lebanese artists discussed by Chalabi, contrib-
utes to this issue with a project entitled The Material Conditions of
Representa tion that deals with a specific set of questions addressing this
journal’s materiality (paper weight, the die cut and trim, texture, tone,

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folding) and different modes of presenting information (image and text,
reality, illusion). Through an illusory image of a Lebanese landscape,
Genadry invites us to ponder the dialectics of the material and the ideal,
nature and culture, highlighting the reader’s phenomenological encoun-
ter with the material or “natural” aspects of culture through the materi-
ality of the journal.

Finally, nature and landscape reenter this issue through Adriana

Michéle Campos Johnson’s review article “Art and Our Surrounds:
Emergent and Residual Languages,” which raises the question of the
role of art in contemporary eco-activism and in other practices related
to climate change. Johnson reflects on a number of recently published
books (T. J. Demos’s Decolonizing Nature, 2016, and Against the Anthro
pocene, 2017, as well as Jens Andermann’s Tierras en trance, 2018) that
address the nexus of contemporary art and global environmentalism.
The reviewer highlights the paradigm shift in North and Latin
American literary and cultural studies that goes by the name of
“eco-criticism,” pointing to a gap (or undialectical separation) between
environmental thinking and cultural practices—a gap that contributes
to the “concealment” of, or even the failure of, contemporary cultural
forms to recognize the imminent natural crisis.

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