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Atreyee Gupta

University of California, Berkeley, History of Art, Faculty Member

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Papers by Atreyee Gupta

During 2020 and 2021 , 54 invited artists, curators, historians and writers each selected five ar... more During 2020 and 2021 , 54 invited artists, curators, historians and writers each selected five artworks and wrote brief texts about them. The artworks have all been made since 1900 by artists either living in India or identifying as part of its diaspora. The following register details each nominator's selections and texts.

A Questionnaire on Global Methods, edited by George Baker and David Joselit, October 180 (Spring 2022): 44–9.

Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of ... more Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the "comparative" method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history's primary tools-formal analysis and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization-carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse "local" values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding of the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex interrelationships?-George Baker and David Joselit for the Editors ct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00453/2032554/octo_a_00453.pdf?casa_token=cVbwiSGojQsAAAAA:njBp146xWtn4DZ4uCScZ3pzfuU8cSAIxzYjAFuDN2brfzR9fGY21BCjtMw8k9Cb2qJwkT6in3do by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN ATREYEE GUPTA Art history's "global turn" was exhilarating, especially for those of us who emerged as intellectuals in the past decade; the multimodal creative practices shaped by disenfranchisement and sovereignty struggles had remained opaque to the discipline for far too long. Exhilaration, however, was not without trepidation. Was the "global" merely a supplement for what was formerly known as the non-West? Or was something far more constitutive at stake? I was still ruminating when a fortuitous encounter with an art-historian colleague in New Delhi revealed that an eminent university in India was actively seeking to expand its faculty lines to address global modernisms and contemporary art. In New Delhi, however, the "global" functioned as a moniker for the art of the North Atlantic worlds, thus substantially re-constellating the "non-Western" geocultural directions that the term appeared to have garnered in European and North American academic settings. With hindsight, it seems to me that the term and the very concept of the "global" are necessarily conjunctural. Put differently, there is not one "global" but many. And this sheer multiplicity demands a mode of address that is not only attentive to dissonant histories and geographies of art but also alert to its capricious, and indeed shape-shifting, conceptual configurations. Not one, but many. Allow me to turn to a somewhat more distant historical conjuncture to synoptically trace the contours of yet another global arrangement, one whose futuristic aesthetic and political assignations orient my own thoughts on global modernisms and contemporary art. The year 1936. A confounding collage appears in an artist's book that Abanindranath Tagore completed in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Excerpted from the glossy pages of a magazine, the monumental figure of an African man emerges out of the narrow opening of a comparatively miniaturized Arc de Triomphe in Paris with a force that causes a sharp rip in the flimsy newsprint photograph of the gateway. The heightened blackness of the figure's face and its exaggerated facial features indicate that the image repurposed by the artist had gained its initial signification within a racial and racist OCTOBER 44

Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge. Jonathan Harris * Birmingham City University * Jonathan Harris studied art history at Sussex University, 1980-8...

"Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color”

The Art Bulletin, 2021

Review of Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, by David Teh, in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 2, no. 1 (March 2018): 223–28.

Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy

Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Visual and Media Histories Series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020)

This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that ... more This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.' Amita Baviskar , Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective

The challenge of globalization and the "decolonization" of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the "decolonization" of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the "Global turn"-a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books-we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge.

Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Post-War Art

Third Text, 2017

"After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World," Postwar – Art between the Pacific and Atlantic 1945 – 1965, Exh. Cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2016), 632–637.

"The Global, The Local, The Contemporary, The Collaborative," in Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, edited by Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 78–93.

On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art world '. Source: ... more On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art world '. Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action Mumbai. contemporary art. My aim will be to probe the ways in which projects such as Char Pe bring to the surface fissures within recent conceptualizations of the contemporary while disrupting the discursive hold of artistic autonomy in current critical engage ments with community-based collaborative art projects .

“Kitchen Conversations,” Prajakta Potnis: Store in a Cool and Dry Place, Exh. Cat., Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2014 (Bönen: Verlag Kettler, 2014), 52-57.

“Belatedness and Simultaneity: A Short History of Photography from India,” Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, Exh. Cat., San Jose Museum of Art, 2015 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 24-35.

“Ghar Pe/At Home in the Margins of Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Vol. 13, No. 2 (March/April 2014): 53-61.

“In a Post-colonial Diction: Postwar Abstraction as Aesthetics of Modernization,” Art Journal Vol. 72, No. 3 (Fall 2013): 30-47.

“The Promise of the Modern: Silpi Chakra and the Politics of Art in New Delhi,” in Partha Mitter, Parul Dave-Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram, eds., Twentieth-Century Indian Art (New York: Skira Rizzoli, April 2014).

“Modern and Contemporary Art of South Asia,” in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Art History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Benezit Dictionary of Asian Artists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Entries on Qin Yufen, Tsou Choi Tsang, Ho Siu Kee, F. X. Harsono, Heri Dono.

"Cosmopolitan Modernism and a Politics of the Self in Muslim South Asia," Review of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, by Iftikhar Dadi, Art Journal Vol. 71, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 117-119.

“On Territoriality, Temporality, and the Politics of Place,” The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on The Contemporary, Field Notes, Asia Art Archive Journal Vol. 001 (2012)

“Is Art History Global? Responding from the Margins,” in Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins, 348–57. New York: Routledge, 2007.

by Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray

No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any el... more No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

During 2020 and 2021 , 54 invited artists, curators, historians and writers each selected five ar... more During 2020 and 2021 , 54 invited artists, curators, historians and writers each selected five artworks and wrote brief texts about them. The artworks have all been made since 1900 by artists either living in India or identifying as part of its diaspora. The following register details each nominator's selections and texts.

A Questionnaire on Global Methods, edited by George Baker and David Joselit, October 180 (Spring 2022): 44–9.

Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of ... more Coming to terms with global modernisms and global contemporary art calls for an understanding of the different histories, social functions, and aesthetic genealogies that inform art of the 20th and 21st centuries in different localities throughout the world. Is the "comparative" method (foundational in art history, elaborated in comparative literature) adequate anymore to the questions raised by global modernisms and contemporary art? Or are other critical categories or tools such as entanglement, assemblage, or intimacy more appropriate? Western art history's primary tools-formal analysis and nation-, community-, or subject-inflected historicization-carry inherently imperial hierarchies that tend to inscribe value judgments and artificially consolidate categories like race and nation. To build a genuinely global art history thus requires more than addressing an expanded archive. It also demands new theoretical perspectives founded in diverse "local" values and functions of art as well as attending to the distortions that occur when they encounter one another in global circulation. What models for doing so have you developed in your work? What are their advantages and disadvantages? How can we expand our understanding of the global condition by proposing multiple models of modernity and their complex interrelationships?-George Baker and David Joselit for the Editors ct.mit.edu/octo/article-pdf/doi/10.1162/octo_a_00453/2032554/octo_a_00453.pdf?casa_token=cVbwiSGojQsAAAAA:njBp146xWtn4DZ4uCScZ3pzfuU8cSAIxzYjAFuDN2brfzR9fGY21BCjtMw8k9Cb2qJwkT6in3do by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORN ATREYEE GUPTA Art history's "global turn" was exhilarating, especially for those of us who emerged as intellectuals in the past decade; the multimodal creative practices shaped by disenfranchisement and sovereignty struggles had remained opaque to the discipline for far too long. Exhilaration, however, was not without trepidation. Was the "global" merely a supplement for what was formerly known as the non-West? Or was something far more constitutive at stake? I was still ruminating when a fortuitous encounter with an art-historian colleague in New Delhi revealed that an eminent university in India was actively seeking to expand its faculty lines to address global modernisms and contemporary art. In New Delhi, however, the "global" functioned as a moniker for the art of the North Atlantic worlds, thus substantially re-constellating the "non-Western" geocultural directions that the term appeared to have garnered in European and North American academic settings. With hindsight, it seems to me that the term and the very concept of the "global" are necessarily conjunctural. Put differently, there is not one "global" but many. And this sheer multiplicity demands a mode of address that is not only attentive to dissonant histories and geographies of art but also alert to its capricious, and indeed shape-shifting, conceptual configurations. Not one, but many. Allow me to turn to a somewhat more distant historical conjuncture to synoptically trace the contours of yet another global arrangement, one whose futuristic aesthetic and political assignations orient my own thoughts on global modernisms and contemporary art. The year 1936. A confounding collage appears in an artist's book that Abanindranath Tagore completed in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Excerpted from the glossy pages of a magazine, the monumental figure of an African man emerges out of the narrow opening of a comparatively miniaturized Arc de Triomphe in Paris with a force that causes a sharp rip in the flimsy newsprint photograph of the gateway. The heightened blackness of the figure's face and its exaggerated facial features indicate that the image repurposed by the artist had gained its initial signification within a racial and racist OCTOBER 44

Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective

The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the “decolonization” of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the “Global turn”—a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books—we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge. Jonathan Harris * Birmingham City University * Jonathan Harris studied art history at Sussex University, 1980-8...

"Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color”

The Art Bulletin, 2021

Review of Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary, by David Teh, in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia 2, no. 1 (March 2018): 223–28.

Developmental Aesthetics: Modernism’s Ocular Economies and Laconic Discontents in the Era of Nehruvian Technocracy

Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence, Visual and Media Histories Series (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020)

This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that ... more This eclectic collection of essays attempts to capture an ineffable quality of waterscapes: that they shape imaginations and actions in ways both fluid and enduring. At a time when the challenge of climate change calls for creative cultural politics, this exploration of ways of seeing and being is all the more valuable.' Amita Baviskar , Professor of Sociology, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi

Art History and the Global Challenge: A Critical Perspective

The challenge of globalization and the "decolonization" of our way of thinking have become a majo... more The challenge of globalization and the "decolonization" of our way of thinking have become a major concern for most art historians. While it is still too early to assess the impact on the discipline of the "Global turn"-a turn that is all the more timid that it materializes more slowly in public collections and public opinions than in books-we nonetheless wanted to probe scholars who are paying close attention to the new practices in global art history. Coming from different cultural milieus and academic traditions, and belonging to different generations, they agreed to answer our questions, and to share with us their insights, questions, doubts, but also hopes for the discipline. This survey must be regarded as a dialogue in progress: other conversations will follow and will contribute to widening the range of critical perspectives on art history and the Global challenge.

Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Post-War Art

Third Text, 2017

"After Bandung: Transacting the Nation in a Postcolonial World," Postwar – Art between the Pacific and Atlantic 1945 – 1965, Exh. Cat., Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016 (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2016), 632–637.

"The Global, The Local, The Contemporary, The Collaborative," in Rethinking Place in South Asian and Islamic Art, 1500–Present, edited by Deborah S. Hutton and Rebecca M. Brown (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 78–93.

On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art world '. Source: ... more On February 25, 2012, far from the institutional ambits of the contemporary art world '. Source: Photograph by Neville Sukhia, courtesy SNEHA, Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action Mumbai. contemporary art. My aim will be to probe the ways in which projects such as Char Pe bring to the surface fissures within recent conceptualizations of the contemporary while disrupting the discursive hold of artistic autonomy in current critical engage ments with community-based collaborative art projects .

“Kitchen Conversations,” Prajakta Potnis: Store in a Cool and Dry Place, Exh. Cat., Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, 2014 (Bönen: Verlag Kettler, 2014), 52-57.

“Belatedness and Simultaneity: A Short History of Photography from India,” Postdate: Photography and Inherited History in India, Exh. Cat., San Jose Museum of Art, 2015 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 24-35.

“Ghar Pe/At Home in the Margins of Contemporary Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Vol. 13, No. 2 (March/April 2014): 53-61.

“In a Post-colonial Diction: Postwar Abstraction as Aesthetics of Modernization,” Art Journal Vol. 72, No. 3 (Fall 2013): 30-47.

“The Promise of the Modern: Silpi Chakra and the Politics of Art in New Delhi,” in Partha Mitter, Parul Dave-Mukherji, and Rakhee Balaram, eds., Twentieth-Century Indian Art (New York: Skira Rizzoli, April 2014).

“Modern and Contemporary Art of South Asia,” in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, ed., Oxford Bibliographies in Art History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Benezit Dictionary of Asian Artists (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Entries on Qin Yufen, Tsou Choi Tsang, Ho Siu Kee, F. X. Harsono, Heri Dono.

"Cosmopolitan Modernism and a Politics of the Self in Muslim South Asia," Review of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia, by Iftikhar Dadi, Art Journal Vol. 71, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 117-119.

“On Territoriality, Temporality, and the Politics of Place,” The And: An Expanded Questionnaire on The Contemporary, Field Notes, Asia Art Archive Journal Vol. 001 (2012)

“Is Art History Global? Responding from the Margins,” in Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins, 348–57. New York: Routledge, 2007.

by Atreyee Gupta and Sugata Ray

No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any el... more No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers.

Non-Aligned: Art, Solidarity, and the Emerging ‘Third World'

by Atreyee Gupta and Adair Rounthwaite

A “third” alternative to the Cold War’s bipolar politics, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) generate... more A “third” alternative to the Cold War’s bipolar politics, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) generated a transcontinental network across Asia, Africa, East Europe, and Latin America. Studied extensively in the social sciences, the NAM is acknowledged to have shaped global politics, making space for the articulation of a critical “Third Worldism.” Yet, even as the Cold War remains central to discussions on postwar art, we are yet to engage with the NAM’s art historical resonances. What new forms of transcultural intellectual and artistic solidarities did non-alignment engender? How did non-alignment exert pressure on Cold War cultures? Might a renewed alertness to the NAM shift temporal, spatial, and conceptual categories within modern and contemporary art? We invite scholars, curators, and artists to examine creative practices in non-aligned worlds; investigate collaborations, exhibitions, and art writing as zones of interlocution; or even approach non-alignment as a method for art, art history, and exhibition practices today.

Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetic Practices

by Atreyee Gupta and Forum Studien

Taking the years between 1905 and 1965 as the temporal frame, this conference seeks to rethink Gl... more Taking the years between 1905 and 1965 as the temporal frame, this conference seeks to rethink Global Modernisms from a transregional perspective. Current conceptualizations of avantgardism and formal innovation often related to places like Paris, New York, Weimar or Moscow continue to inform Global Modernisms’ intellectual field. Global Modernisms are often presented as a symptom for new Westernism that masquerades as the universal. This conference seeks a more constitutive conceptual vision.

Understanding Global Modernisms as clusters of artistic, intellectual, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, and political arrangements, the conference focuses on this field as an effect of contiguities and infrastructures. We approach contiguities as global and local zones of intellectual and artistic proximity and difference, and infrastructure as a combination of physical, political, social and intellectual formations. The conference then aims to situate the concept of Global Modernisms within the scalarity of the macro, meso and the micro and within the plurality of temporal and geographical spaces, movements and events.

To what extent did the relation between material infrastructure (institutions, the formation of disciplines, public policy, architecture, and engineering) and immaterial infrastructure (domination, freedom of movement, gendered hierarchies of power) generate semantic conditions for articulating aesthetic, intellectual, and critical concerns in dispersed parts of the world? Might thinking in terms of contiguities and infrastructures allow us to jettison conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation that continue to haunt modernisms’ perceptual field?

The conference is an invitation to engage the architectonics of such contiguities. How, for instance, did innovations in science, technology, and engineering affect Global Modernism/s’ zones of contiguities, around the globe? Did museological discourses and modernist display techniques contribute in creating a new domain of visibility? To what extent did new infrastructures generate the semantic conditions for articulating the aesthetic, intellectual, critical, art historical, and curatorial concerns of Global Modernism/s? What, for instance, were the formal and aesthetic outcomes of Global Modernism/s, and how might we, in retrospect, recognize formal contiguity and distinguish it from more conventional conceptions of repetition, influence, and derivation?

Postwar – Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965

Ghar Pe/At Home in the Margins of Contemporary Art

Contemporary art at its limits, or, Can all contemporary art be collected?