Beáta Hock

Is there Life after Canonical Certainties?

My response engages with Matthew Rampley’s quest for fertile ways to incorporate east-central European art history within a shared larger framework: why should, and how could, modern art from east-central Europe have pertinence for audiences elsewhere? While I agree with Rampley that the materiality of center/ periphery-relations cannot be simply thought away by the force of mental magic, I insist that (art historical) scholarship need not reproduce unjust geopolitical givens. Indeed, a beauty of our profession is the pursuit and production of potentially transformative knowledge. In this conviction, I (re-)directed Rampley’s quest towards intellectual agendas that contributed to the renewal of art historical scholarship a couple of decades ago: ‘history-from-below’, post-structuralist and post-colonial critique, the social and spatial turns, the concepts of multiple modernities and alternative geographies of Modernism and, perhaps most importantly, feminist epistemology and art history. Exposing the false universalism of earlier approaches, these narrative projects put forth more inclusionist demands and followed up the logical consequences of opening up (art) history for marginal or non-European cultures. A further aspect of a shared alternative framework appears to be a reduced emphasis on aesthetic-only concepts or stylistic labels as primary analytic concerns. I also estimate that both the producers and the most eager audience of these more inclusive narratives will be found in a quickly growing intellectual community of ‘minor transnationalists’ and proponents of ‘transmodernity’ or a transperipheral conversation.

Beáta Hock: beata.hock@leibniz-gwzo.de

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