August 2, 2003

Samina Choonarareviews the latest edition of an art textbook that is at pains to be politically correct

Interesting how the world has changed over the past couple of years, especially after what is now euphemistically referred to as “9/11”, affecting major publishing houses and the authors they patronize to produce popular textbooks. Take McGraw-Hill’s art textbook for high school-goers, Living with Art, that is now in its sixth incarnation since 1995, except that this revision by Mark Getlein is politically sensitive with major sections written in to include art from other cultures : Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, African American, and the Pacific Islands.

This sensibility is reflected on the cover and back cover where Renoir’s The Swing has been used as front illustration to be complemented by a miniature painting at the back, The Swing from the Punjab Hills, Kangra School. In all, this 600-page tome is a luscious production with over 700 full colour illustrations due to the commendable photo researcher, Robin Sand, with almost every page carrying photographs of “western” and “other” art when issues of theory or method are being discussed.

Informed by contemporary sensibility, the book is organized in a non-linear manner, its focus not being the chronological history of art and its origins but production techniques, experimentation, art personalities, and critical art issues.

Some of the more interesting issues it raises in separately marked sections are: who is an artist, meaning what qualifies as art and thereby what is “outsider” art, the work done by people not trained in the western academic medium. This opens up the debate to what has been called “primitivism”, “naive” or “vernacular” art. It also puts in question the status of what is often called “craft” or “traditional practice” as counter distinctive to art proper.

Another close scrutiny is brought to bear on the cultural artefacts of less powerful communities that have been vandalized and “grave-robbed”, as the author puts it, by the western art academia. Although the practice continues to date with the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq where ancient museums were robbed, the example taken in the book is the excavation of Egyptian mummies, particularly that of Tutankhamen.

“The basic issue is a clash of cultural values. To the Egyptians, it was normal and correct to bury their finest artworks with the exalted dead. To us, all this beauty being locked away forever seems an appalling waste.

“We can almost forget that a mummy is an embalmed body of a dead human being pulled out of its coffin so that we can marvel at the coffin and sometimes at the body itself.”

In another entry, the author goes out on a limb when he brings up the issue of preservation. This time he is talking about Angkor Wat, the exquisite 15th-century temple site located in war-torn Cambodia/Kampuchea, discovered by French colonials.

“The greatest challenge facing the restoration is one they cannot control. Unless peace can be maintained in this region, Angkor Wat is doomed. No temple, however magical, can survive the brutal assault of war.”

Another entry titled Africa Looks Back talks about how tribals in Nigeria, for one, have incorporated the white, male, western anthropologist with his obsession to ask foolish questions and take copious notes, in their traditional dance- masquerades.

Getlein is not patronizing towards less developed communities because he also looks at resistance art in the Euro-American context, for instance at censorship issues concerning Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography, or the curating concerns of the Guerrilla Girls, a New York based group of women art activists who question why women artists are given short shrift by the larger art galleries and museums. ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ they ask, quizzing the predominance of the female nude in western painting by male artists.

Getlein also brings up the issue of public art and the lack of art funding for people like Christo, the man who likes to work outside the art academia and market on his own funds to drape monumental buildings, bridges and even landscape in cloth and other soft, shiny materials as part of the human intervention, taking the work down in a matter of days.

For a popular textbook on art, this is pretty volatile material. Perhaps out of a fear of having said too much, the author prefaces his work by advertising the book with a title ‘A Strengthened Western Core’.

“Interrupting this story on the brink of our modern era, are three chapters new to this edition that look at the historical development of art beyond the West.

“As in past editions, the core of this book focuses on the western tradition.”

Clearly, Getlein is trying to find some distance from his own radical posture, perhaps to find a neutral voice more suited to textbook writing.

The rest of the book is written by an earlier author, Rita Gilbert, without too much attention to style and, perhaps, even an overt emphasis on substance. It may be a useful guidebook for art educators who would then need to put the flesh on these bones of subject matter. This weakness of the book may also be called its greatest strength. Like any grand-scale map, it points toward many of art’s concerns — history, method, people, issues — without necessarily taking a position, or going anywhere itself.