The Tartan

by Adrien Marenco
Staffwriter

On April 15, the College of Fine Arts hosted a lecture by Dr. Joan Kee, the director of the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. Her lecture, titled “Afro Asia: The Many Inseparables,” explored the inequality of Western art history rhetoric and pedagogy.

Kee, in introducing her lecture, asserted that the academically standard art history is not reflective of  the world’s population. Though 80 percent of the world’s population lives in Africa and Asia, the corresponding percentage of academic art history that prioritizes these continents’ artistic traditions is abysmal. 

To those in academia, art history is a function of Euro-American history, primarily traced through the historical movements in Western Europe. 

“Art history isn’t something that happened,” she said, “it’s something that we actively do,” questioning how art histories can account for more of the world, rather than less. 

To start, Kee displayed how the Indian Ocean Trade routes facilitated the spread of culture and art along the East African Coast and South Asian countries. She explained how cartography, such as Hajime Narukawa’s “AuthaGraph Map,” can be utilized to reverse the Western conception of the “Global South.” This term, Kee said, is “so deeply entrenched in Western economic models that, to me, it has no credibility.” 

The separation of the globe, she noted, was solidified by imagery like the Brandt line, which depicts a north-south divide based on economic inequality. Kee described it as an “imaginary line drawn across a world map” and “a testament of colonial epistemology”. 

Narukawa’s map, on the other hand, attempts to preserve the sizes and shapes of the world’s landmasses and can be tiled in any direction. Although imperfect, Kee noted that the map’s “seamlessness draws us closer to our sense of mobility,” offering a new way to conceptualize circumnavigation and the two-dimensional world map.   

A piece in Kee’s presentation was “The Human Race (or Maja)” by Zainab Reddy, finished in 1962. The 6-by-3-foot oil painting depicts seven people from different racial backgrounds, none of the individuals fully visible, their forms overlapping in a cacophony of “deep mahogany, ochre, and emerald green … always seen through the refraction of other bodies.” 

Reddy painted the piece during South African Apartheid, and emigrated to London shortly after she finished it, motivated by the injustices she experienced in the segregated state. Although the picture is inspired by German expressionism, Reddy’s refracted portraiture is a mirror of the South Africa of her time and is currently displayed in the Iziko museums of South Africa. 

Kee further characterized this depiction of how “westerners” conceptualize Afro Asia: something that “cannot be seen head-on — it is a composition of angles, fractured and splintered, and arranged accordingly.”

Kee’s presentation touched on art-motivated travellers in Africa and Asia, namely Howardena Pindell. An artist and curator born in Philadelphia in 1943, Pindell lived in Japan for a year starting in 1981. She, in her travels, found that “life in Japan was an endless list of instructions that she was constantly violating.” Pindell, while in Japan, created a written artwork composed nearly entirely of variations of the Japanese word for “sorry,” a form of apology for these “violations.” It ends in the Japanese phrase “Shikata ga nai,” meaning “it can’t be helped, there’s no other way.”

Kee’s presentation also involved photography, including “Tetley Bitter Men” by Symrath Patti, taken in 1983. A play on an English pale ale which had a wildly popular television ad campaign called “Tetley Bittermen” in the eighties. Patti herself is featured in the photograph, which encapsulates a working-class party: soot-stained men and women, some looking at the viewer, all drinking. 

Kee noted, the image represents a dichotomy: bitter is the ale, and “bitter as well is the brutality of the world where women’s labor is often reduced to very rough choices.” 

“Either you’re objectified as a flight attendant,” she observed, “or you’re invisible as a cleaning lady.” Kee described Patti’s image as an example of “perfectly timed art,” a picture of  “non-performance” grounded in the time’s popular culture while, she said, displaying the inherent inequality that perforates women’s access to livelihood. 

After her lecture, Kee elucidated what originally drew her to study the arts of these regions. “A lot of research projects are veiled autobiographies,” Kee joked, “but this was not a type of work that was considered important.” Afro Asian art, she said, has long been characterized as marginal, a fact that never made sense to her, given the world’s geography. When working on her book, she travelled to Cape Town and sat in on art history classes to deepen her understanding of how art history is discussed in non-Western academic spaces. 

Although she questions if “any of us are truly free from the hegemony of European-American academic systems,” she found that learning who the South African students quoted, what they cited, and what terms they used to be illuminating and “far more generative” than those taught to her as a student in American higher education.