Traveling and the global world.
IMAGINARIUM: An Alternate History of Art
Welcome to Imaginarium: an alternate history of art. A podcast where we delve in to the most obscure parts of art history.
dear listeners, I’m your host Nadjah, and in this podcast, we try to shed light on less studied parts of the history of art and visual culture. In today’s episode, we are going to travel the roads of history and discover how art and travel went hand in hand, and especially the way travels from non-western artists were depicted in visual history. We will try to shift the usual perspective on that topic and travel down the road of visual representations and examples of cultural exchanges and traveling, in a way that tries to centers non-western narratives, artists and craftsmen, we will try to explore and understand how that change in point of view can radically change the way we view art history and cultural history. After all, the ways we think of art history, even in an era where the subjects of decolonization and post-colonialist theory are some of the hottest topics of conversation in the air when it concerns history and art and the way we understand and present history, and even that, there is a eurocentrism and western country being always part of these conversations, that I think is essential to unpack if we want to be able to move forward. I am not pretending to be the foremost expert on the subject, nor am I offering up a solution to a problem that is way bigger than you and I.
However, I think it is interesting to reflect on the concept of an art history and history that does not necessarily involve white people, or at the very least, does not center them at the core of the conversation. And even if you do not live in a western country, this perspective is difficult to shake off, because white supremacy is something that is extremely insidious and prevalent in the way knowledge and learning has been set up. After all, one of the main exports of colonialism was the widespread principles and tenets of western education, which have now have been disseminated everywhere. Nonetheless, there were exchanges of culture, art and language that simply did not have western countries perspectives at their heart and center, and there is a whole wide world that simply exists outside of the western world, and this feels very simple and obvious, and yet. Is it really ? I don’t think it is.
When it comes to the view of travels and of other people in art, the main source that we have had in terms of art, has mostly been the one from a western perspective. I mean, it is only recently that the shift in the discourse about the quote unquote discovery of the americas or the Australian continent has been slowly shifting. After all, how can a land that has been inhabited for thousands of years be discovered ? Indigenous people were aware of it, after all they were living there. The perspective in which we see things from is incredibly important, there is no surprise the orientalist travel arts of the 19th century continues to be the main understanding in which a lot of non-western cultures are still seen, and more perniciously, still see themselves.
It is no mistake that the art canon is the way it is, and that the perspective in which it has been constructed is so western centric, I have written an article on the subject that is available on my blog, and I will link it down in the notes, but long story short, well, there is something to be said about the way history and art history has been constructed in a way that truly puts western, and once again, putting western in a very … like huge quotes around the word, because it is definitely as much a concept to unpack as the concept of the East and the Orient, however it does help to evoke a very specific idea of a western and white society that exists in the zeitgeist. Basically, it is all about white supremacy and a way to assert that notion through imperialism and cultural hegemony, and a ranking and listing of works of art that are considered to be the best example of art and culture being mostly works of art created by white European artists just says a lot.
The prevalence of imperialism and the way it shaped our modern world means that there is a certain type of history being told but when comes the time to open one’s eyes and you can see so much wonder in front of you. I think Art history is a discipline that has often been told in a very simple and straightforward way, this event happened which led to this and then this is the conclusion of these artists meeting and collaborating. However, history is anything but simple and straightforward, and when you start digging a bit deeper, it gets infinitely more complex and complicated, but also, so much more fascinating. My goal is to really make you see and understand how wide the world is. How wide history is, art history and culture is, and how much more complex it is than it may seem at first sight. I do not know if we will ever be able to comprehend it truly all in its entirety, but we might as well try.
The world we live is an interconnected one. It is naive to pretend that what happens elsewhere does not concern us, especially in a world as bound by mass communications and media as ours is. However, this is not a new concept nor a new reality. We have always been interconnected and influencing each other, even in the centuries and millenniums past, even though technology has made it easier, but people have been going on adventures, trying to meet the strange people who live far beyond, and bringing back souvenirs. However, despite that, despite all of that, the world is just … bigger than that very narrow idea of what the world should look like, and people are better than that and the way cultures interact and are shared often can be beautiful and meaningful. The exchange of trade and of commerce has always been one of the driving forces of sharing of culture and art. And let’s never forget, that after all, we are so much more alike than we are different, and that it is a good thing to be curious and appreciative of other cultures, as so long as you are respectful and kind.
However, it is impossible to deny how these exchanges have now been indissociable from Empire, and two concepts that are more interwoven and intertwined than we think, after all, the world that we see today has been built by Empire. The Empire, and the possibility for its citizens to go visit and travel into the colonies have been an immense source of forced cultural exchanges and art, and the relationships of imperialism is always something extremely important to keep in mind while thinking about art of people traveling to other places. There was a culture of travel art that developed along with the rise of traveling, but most importantly of tourism, as technology also progressed. I know this sounds like it is the same thing, however it is not really, there truly is a nuance to the terms. Where traveling often has a more practical purpose, it is simply to get from a certain place to another place and all the sightseeing and visiting that is made is incidental and not the goal in itself of the trip. However tourism is an industry, and while that started from the concept of the Grand Tour, a voyage that aristocrats and upper class European young men, specifically french and British, were leaving on that tour as their coming of age moment, they would go to visit a few chosen countries in Europe, they would go drink in the culture, the arts, the food, and come back with a new knowledge of the world. The idea of the grand tour was to open up the minds of young rich men to classical culture as a sign of status and prestige. And from that idea of the Grand Tour, the concept of tourism got established as a whole corporate enterprise and industry, where you would go somewhere purposefully to visit and eat the food and visit notable cultural touchstones truly got started, as science and technology developed.
And so the fact that more people traveled made it so that artists were also traveling more, with such tools as portable easels and paints. Having those art supplies that were easily portable created an environment where artists could actually draw paint outside, and create their whole work of art from sketch to final painting without having to retreat to their indoor studios. The artists who loved traveling were finally taking this opportunity to paint these new sights as they came across them. Artists sketched and painted and represented the new and foreign sights, and to capture the experience on canvas. After all, even if people have always traveled, it was never as widely accessible as it is now. And travelogues and travel sketches were a way of showing the people back home about all of the wonders and new discoveries one made when one was so far from home. It has to be said, nonetheless, that even though some artists would actually leave, a lot of artists would paint and draw from the testimonies of someone describing those new sights to them, which makes it that a lot of that art is based on fantasy and extrapolation, rather than reality. For example, I think that’s the main reason why, in the middle ages, someone would draw a lion or a giraffe like that, they would just hear a vague description and just … put something together.
Traveling artists were of course not exclusively western artists, even though a lot of the most well known ones are, but there are notable examples of artists, such as Hiroshi Yoshida whose travel art is absolutely marvelous and so lovely to look at. I do think it is important, as he is Japanese, to mention Japanese imperialism which was at its height during Yoshida’s working years, and which places his art in a particular context historically and artistically. This is the same of the Ottoman empire and the various dynasties and empires through the centuries, where the nuances of race, power shift and morphs, and so does our understanding of them.
Hiroshi Yoshida was born in 1876 and died in 1950, and so the bulk of his career was in the late 19th century and the early years of the 20th century, a time of constant change and a period of transition with endless possibilities, and the opening up of a world that was suddenly seemed boundlessly accessible. With the trains and boats that were faster than ever, and the start of the plane being slowly introduced, it was now easy to go from one place to another, and it not having to take.. Literal years out of your life. The culture of travel was one that was incredibly vibrant and thriving in Japan, as early as the beginning of the 19th century, with a wide interest in travel and visiting landmarks. There are a lot of a examples of woodblock prints that show this new engouement and possibilities of individual mobility and the ease that was now available to the normal person to simply visit cultural monuments, temples and shrines, just to name a few examples. Those woodblock prints are not only beautifully colored, and terribly elegant in my opinion, but are a good look into, not just the way people enjoyed the travels, but also the way places and architecture. looked during that era, becoming thus a historical witness to the past. Those easily made and reproduced works of art were snapshot of Japan as it fell into modernity, such as Picture of the Railway at Shinagawa from the series Mirror of the Pride of Tokyo Prefecture by Utagawa Hiroshige III.
Hiroshi Yoshida is an artist whose love and passion of traveling and visiting new horizons permeated his art in many ways, and took him far away from home. He was one of the first contemporary Japanese artists to exhibit and show in Western artistic institutions, despite the fact that I really want to attest that western validation is not the end all be all of an artistic career, and that we absolutely don’t need it for any kind of legitimacy. However, in this article, we will focus on a very specific part of his career, the art he created out from his various travels around the world. Before I move on, I just want to mention that he was the son of a former samurai who then went on to become an elementary school principal, which I find absolutely so hysterical as a fact. He travelled across the world, from his own native Japan and created several pieces of art of amazingly beautiful locations across Japan, from Kyoto and Canada, to India, Egypt and the United-States. His art really forces you to consider that when looking at cultural exchange and travel, it does not have to include white people and I love it. The depiction of those travels do not involve a Eurocentric gaze to them the same way the orientalist paintings of the 19th century will have for example. Yoshida’s woodblock prints are truly an absolute joy to look at, not only in the way they show the technical skills of Yoshida, but also in the way they depict those images of travel, of a beautiful and vast world to explore. His prints of the Sphinx, of the ravines of the Grand Canyon, of the beautiful Taj Mahal and the Acropolis in Greece these places as they existed in the years he was traveling on.
The world we have has never been the closed off exclusionary world that some people are trying to sell. That vision of history is a simplistic one and a blatantly false one. First of all, we have to wonder, why is this perspective being presented as one that is held as the universal truth of history ? I think it’s true that it’s much easier to explain to the normal person in terms of homogenous societies and cultures, without going into the complexities of what multiculturalism might have looked like and appeared during the past, after all, if you are going to teach history to a group of elementary school kids, there is a limit to how complexy you can describe things, so this simplistic way of understanding history is more often than not the norm. But this way of thinking about history in terms of us against them, is one that is often misused by groups with a specific agenda, and it helps for a lot of political reasons to be able to simplify history in such a way. But history is always more complex and interesting than we expect it to be, and the way people have been interacting with other cultures is absolutely fascinating, especially considering what has been exchanged and what has travelled from one culture to another across the length of time. The unilateral vision that this perspective imposes on our history, as well as our understanding of it is a tool of white supremacy and fascism. Thinking about the diverse world of the past forces you to challenge a world that you thought was made only of white people, and was seen only by white people, and accept the constant truth of multiculturalism on earth and that our world has always been an international and global one. People have always been going from one part of the world to an another, there has been always been a constant trade back and forth, albeit way more slower than it currently is. It might have taken weeks, months or even years, but people were leaving and seeing the world and exchanging and trading goods.
Besides, the relationship toward the Other used to very different from the one that currently exist today. I always love to say that the past is a whole other culture, and the book The past is a foreign country by David Lowenthal is an entire dedicated study to this relationship that we have with the past. Even 50 years ago in the same city that you live, where your parents and grandparents might have been living, and it was another culture, with different mores, clothing, slangs and codes of behavior. So the further removed from today, the more it is different and unfamiliar to us, and yet, I do think it is important to remember that people were always people.
The English were well aware of the big wide world they were colonizing and exploiting. After all, they prided themselves on it. The colonial British empire was a source of pride for the crown, bringing civilization and education to the poor barbarian societies, or something of the sort. There is always a way of turning things around as to make them palatable for yourself. While I don’t think the layman British person in the 18th century had truly any control on the British empire, there is always a sense that a lot of profit has been gained from the Empire, and that is a nasty truth that many do not want to face. After all, the reason the UK is such a rich country today is because of the assets it gained and stole with its Empire. The East India Company is a clear proof of the link between capitalism and imperialism, after all it was a corporation that was holding the interests of the British Empire abroad, but it was also independent for so long from the British Crown. It was a lawless and violent enterprise whose financial interests were based on taking advantage of non-western countries and people. The book «The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire» by William Dalrymple really goes in depth specifically about this topic, and the way they asserted their dominance both through corporate and capitalistic violence as well as physical violence, and it is through that cruelty that they managed to gain a foothold in India and in Hong Kong. It is only after the East India Company got too powerful that there were regulations placed on them by the Royal Crown, but only so that the Company was still under the thumb of the royalty, however they were all but too happy to let them do their dirty work in the colonies as their emissary, as long as they got a part of the pie and that the reach of the British Empire was furthered in the east.
International exchanges and commerce have always been happening, but they are so often viewed in the lens of including white people in the conversation, and presenting them as the central point of view and the one who sees the other. And today, well my angels, we will not be doing this. There is so much more to history that happened in the margins and the empty spaces left by imperialism and a narrow view of history. After all, Zheng He, a chinese diplomat made several travels and visits as far away as to Somalia during the early 15th century. and established trades and diplomatic relations between East Africa and East Asia. And still today, there are commercial and political relationships between Africa and Asia, that are independent of the western world.
The reversal of the gaze in art history is something that will always extremely powerful, because so much of art and our comprehension of art history is from the perspective from which we look at it. There are three component to a work of art, the work of art in itself, the artist, and the last one : the spectator, which in my opinion is maybe the most important one. It is the way we look at thing that will determine how we interpret that information. And so, the reversal of the gaze becomes essential to commit to a real work of decolonizing the discipline of art history, and create an art history that becomes more inclusive and truthful. I do love those pieces of art, where the subject of art is about the way white people understand and imagine non white people, à la Jean-Léon Gérome visiting North Africa, but the ones where non-white people interpret and represent white people. And, sometimes, that perspective can be painful, as these works of art are often a consequence of imperialism, such paintings as Missionary being eaten by a jaguar, by Noé León in 1907, and the entire body of work of native Canadian artist Kent Monkman, which focuses on the relationship between the indigenous people of the American continent and the white coloniser.
The book The Crusades Through Arab Eyes by Lebanese author Amin Maalouf is a literary example of this reversal, one that subverts the narrative of the historical event that was the Crusades and the way it has been understood historically. It is a book that shifts the perspective that the story has been told through, and while this does not seem like a revolutionary thing, however it is. With how silenced and ignored some perspectives has been by the mainstream understanding of history and art history, taking the time to simply change the point of view does a lot. And I will say, this sort of reversing of the perspectives of is not something that is new, I am not here to say that people have only started telling their stories in the past twenty years, what I am saying is that it is only recently that we have stopped and listened. After all, the Muslim and the Arabs who were there during the Crusades had their own version of their history and tales of the events as they experienced them. Looking at history and travel and the ways people moved and lived as perceived by non-western cultures will give us a better overview of history itself. Of course, all perspectives will always be biased and have their own set of prejudices and preconceived notions, however it is better to explore and expand our awareness rather than to restrict the knowledge and perception of the world.
Travel was happening back in the medieval era. I just want to take this moment to think about the way we frame the medieval era, more often than not as the Dark Ages, and first of all, even that notion of dark ages is one that is currently being debated with the historians. It is important to remember that this notion of dark ages very much narrows down to western Europe and excludes Al-Andalus which is roughly the modern country of Spain. Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan scholar from Tangier in the 14th century who traveled across the world, and leisurely took his time to get around, firstly from Morocco to Egypt, all the way to Mecca for his pilgrimage of Hajj, the muslim pilgrimage which took pilgrims their home country to Saudi Arabia, a travel that used to be the travel of a lifetime for some, considering how long it took for people to accomplish it, and depending of course on your starting point. Battuta traveled from 1325 to 1354, and was one of the most busy travelers of the time, from North Africa to the Middle-East and the east coast of Africa, to Egypt and to India, and all the way to China so that was a trek for sure. His trip, if it can be called this journey across the world that took more than twenty years to accomplish, after all, let’s not forget that this was the age before planes and cars, and going anywhere was a huge ordeal. I can only imagine his poor mother receiving a letter every five years like oh he is still alive I guess ?
The mediterranean and the West Indian seas had a huge role in helping the travels and the exchanges of art and culture, before the age of globalization and the modern era of mass communication, the main mode of transportation was either through the roads or the seas. The world has always been a multicultural and cosmopolitan one, where civilizations and people met and collided, where craft and art merged and blended. It was a traveling not only of people, but of ideas, of culture and of art. Of techniques and art styles and artefacts were shared and exchanged. And especially as travel and tourism was becoming a commodity that was more accessible to the ordinary person. Even though it was becoming more democratized, there is still something to be said about the privilege and the ease of access that being rich and having more free time to actually travel and visit the world.
And still, even though not everyone can travel grandly, or have the freedom to do so on a whim, the way people just, exist and travel from place to place and discover new sights, new people, new food and enter in contact with the beautiful world that we inhabit, it feels very momentous and yet so very mundane, doesn’t it.
There are a lot of examples of works of art and artefacts that show the way cultures shared and come together to create something that is unique and quite exceptional. The 15th century Timurid Qur'an that was transcribed on Chinese paper from the Ming Dynasty is an extraordinary piece. Once again, it is a proof of the cultural exchanges that were happening long before we had planes and cars. This work of art, because it is one, has been sold in an auction to a private buyer for the staggering price of more than 7 millions GBP. I spent sometimes in episode ten of this current season talking about the way works of art are priced and valued, so if you want to know more about this particular topic, please listen to that episode later ! These two distinct cultures really brought together the height of art and craftsmanship from both the Islamic arts of calligraphy and decoration and the magnificent paper of the Ming Dynasty, a paper that was declined in beautiful hues of pinks, blues, purples and greens with flecks of gold, all to create a work of art is one that is absolutely sublime and that showcases the search for beauty and art.
I think, the point that I want to convey, is that, of course, it is almost self-evident that history happened and continues to happen between non-western and non-white countries and societies, and that there is a whole world of sharing and experiences and exchanges that happened without white people being involved in any sort of ways. It feels like it should be unneeded to be said, and yet. And yet. In a world where the way history has been written with a specific euro-centric perspective that was always being centered and included in the narrative, the simple fact of looking at a history that simply removes that perspective, that point of view from the equation feels almost revolutionary in a way. After all, there is a whole wide world out there that exists, and that is much more complex than we think. I say this, because I know some people might react like « oh of course it is OBVIOUS » that non-western cultures and societies were interacting without white people in their midst, and I agree that it should be obvious, however, the dominant narrative does not.
And it is this dominant narrative that I’m looking to deconstruct, just in my little corner of the internet. I have no pretension that I am going to change the field of history and art history all on my own, however, if I can somehow start a dialogue or make you think about history in a way that is new to you and make you consider a different perspective to the one we know, and use critical thinking and compassion and kindness in your study and understanding of history, then I will have been successful. So many books or documentaries that want to look at a global history of a certain subject, and yet fall short, because when you try to do complete overview of a whole entire subject, inevitably it will be lacking, because there is always more to investigate, and there is always more depth to go into, and so I think it is better to be more precise and narrower in your subject, and do your best, rather than pretend at an exhaustive compilation of absolutely everything.
And yet, those books and documentaries that pretend to be a global history of a certain subject still have the bulk of their content being centered around Europe, and North America, and then you have maybe a little fifty pages at the end that are dedicated to the whole of Africa, Asia and Oceania, and of course. This sort of treatment tends to flatten and simplify cultures and societies that are extremely distinct and different, and shows implicitly what is valued and what is not. Even within the borders of a country, borders that were often dictated by imperial powers without any thought to the interaction and dynamics between cultures, and even within those borders, the subtleties of dress, of speech can be drastic. It is easy to conflate a country to a very stereotypical image, and to conflate history into an easily digestible narrative, and to think that things are linear and simple, that progress simply goes forward, and yet. And yet, it is not like that, is it ? The way the world works is infinitely more complicated and precious than anything we could fathom it as it being. And I think it is absolutely beautiful, I love learning the ways people of the past created and exchanged and lived, and all the ways they were extremely different to us, but all the ways they were human and just like us. And I hope we can just continue to deconstruct the paradigm of thoughts built around the way we understand art history.
On this, my darling listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of Imaginarium, I hope it was fun and we’ll meet again next month for a new episode and a new deep dive into another lesser known subject of art history and visual culture. If you want to support this podcast, you can do so on patreon @ patreon.com/nadjah. Otherwise, talk about it to anyone you’ll think will like it. And as the youtubers say, like and subscribe, and give us a good rating if you enjoyed. As always, all the relevant images will also be on all of our social platforms @ imaginarium_pod on instagram as well as on twitter. This podcast was written, narrated and produced, by yours truly, Nadjah. On this, I wish you all a very lovely day, evening or night, and I hope to see you again very soon.