Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of Art History Autumn Semester 2024
The Local in the Global Context: Code: FF: DU2401 Credits: 4
COURSE OUTLINE
Throughout the 20th century it has become increasingly accepted that we live in an interconnected world. Global, national, regional and even local cultures do not exist in mutual isolation but, rather, shape each other. At the same time, international cultural trends are given a national character, while regional and local cultures make use of universal ideas and practices. As a result, we live in a mixed, hybrid world - the "local in the global". This course examines this issue as it relates to visual culture since 1900. Using a range of case studies, from modernist architecture in Africa and India to Mexican & Native American art, from ethno-fashion to Moravian folk art, it explores the ways in which artists, designers and architects have exploited this intersection of cultures in productive ways. The course also pays attention to the practices at museums and galleries that address the topic of local and global in their exhibitions. Alongside discussion of individual examples, the course examines the different theoretical concepts that have been used to describe and understand this phenomenon of intersecting practices.
Objectives
The course objective is to explore the ways in which local, national, regional and global practices in visual culture interact, and to provide students with the understanding of relevant concepts and methods for analysing them.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the course, students should be able to:
• Demonstrate a critical knowledge and understanding of key examples that exemplify the intersection of the local, the national and the global in visual culture
• Demonstrate a critical knowledge and understanding of the debates, concepts and methods used to interpret the interaction of the local and the global.
• Identify and analyse selected examples of the "local in the global" in visual culture since 1900 in the light of the concepts, debates and methods discussed in the course
• Exhibit advanced writing and oral skills
Teaching
The course will be based on a combination of mini-lectures, seminar group discussion of case studies, and student presentations
Assessment
In order to gain credit for the course, you are required to prepare a poster on an agreed topic which will be presented in class. The topic should be related to the lecture series, but it should not use the same examples as those discussed in the lectures. The poster should be based on your research and should be supported with a bibliography.
Course Timetable:
The course will be taught from 10.00 - 11.30 on Fridays as follows:
27/9/24 Introduction & Ideas, Methods, Debates: Critical
Regionalism, Creolization, Hybridity, Glocalism
4/10/24 Mexican Modernism
11/10/24 Global Folk Art?
18/10/24 Tropical Modernism: Architecture in the 'Global
South'
25/10/24 Ethno / Fashion
1/11/24 Universal and Vernacular, Abstract and
Decorative: Modernist Encounters with Ukrainian Folk Art
8/11/24 The Avant-Garde, Liberation and the Transmodern
15/11/24 Museums show their colours. Inclusive exhibitionary practices
22/11/24 Reading week
29/11/24 Indigenous Design
6/12/24 Glocal Contexts of Native American Art
13/12/24 Poster Feedback & Ideas
20/12/24 Student presentations
10//1/25 Student presentations
Dr. Marta Filipová, Prof. Matthew Rampley
Dr. Julia Secklehner Dr. Marta Filipová Prof. Matthew Rampley
Dr. Julia Secklehner
Dr. Katia Deny sova
(Courtauld Institute of Art, London)
Dr. Christian Kravagna (University of Applied Art, Vienna)
Prof. Kitty Zijlmans (University of Leiden)
Dr. Marta Filipová
Dr. Emily Burns (University of Oklahoma)
Recommended Course Reading Ideas, Methods, Debates
• Bill Ashcroft, ed., Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London, 2013)
• Peter Burke, Cultural Hybridity (London, 2009)
• Kenneth Frampton, 'Towards a Critical Regionalism' in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle, 1983) pp. 16-30.
• Kobena Mercer, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London, 2005) Mexican Modernism
• Alejandro Aureus and Leonard Folgerait, eds, Mexican Muralism: A Critical History (Los Angeles, 2012)
• Analisa Taylor, 'Malinche and Matriarchal Utopia: Gendered Visions of Indigeneity in
Mexico,' Signs 31.3 2006, 815-10.
Global Folk Art?
• David Hokin, 'Regionalism and Folklore,' in Regionalism and Modern Europe. Identity Construction and Movements from 1890 to the Present Day, eds. by Xose M. Nunez and Eric Storm (London, 2019)
• Kobena Mercer, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London, 2005)
Tropical Modernism
• Lukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton, 2020).
• Christopher Turner, Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence (London, 2024)
For Czech speakers:
• Adolf Hoffmeister, Mrakodrapy v pralese [Skyscrapers in the jungle] (Prague, 1964) Ethno / Fashion
• Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory, Cambridge: Polity 2023 (2000)
• Miriam Oesterreich, ' "Ethno Fashion" in Modernist Mexico. Transfer Processes between Anachronistic Recourse, Individual Identity, and Transnational Conceptions of Modernism', in Burcu Dogramaci and Kerstin Pinther, eds., Design Dispersed: Forms of Migration and Flight (Bielefeld, 2019) pp. 190-211.
Ukrainian Modernism
• Katia Denysova, 'From Folk Art to Abstraction: Ukrainian Embroidery as a Medium of Avant-Garde Experimentation,' Arts, 11, 2022.
The Transmodern
tbc
Museums show their colours. Inclusive exhibitionary practices?
• Mariska ter Horst, eds., Changing Perspectives: Dealing with Globalisation in the Presentation and Collection of Contemporary Art (Washington, 2012), 189-95.
Indigenous Design
• James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), see Introduction (pp. 1-17).
• Dori Tunstall, Decolonising Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook Cambridge, Mass., 2023).
Glocal Contexts of Native American Art
• Emily C. Burns, 'Circulating Regalia and Lakhota Survivance, c. 1900,' Arts 8.4, 146. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8040146.
• Elliot H. Blair, 'Glass Beads and Global Itineraries,' in Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice, ed. by Rosemary A. Joyce (Chicago, 2015).