Methodology of the history of non-european art: which art? which history? which methodology? (1st part)

Abstract

If the Euro-Western project of technical, scientific, political and economic modernity produced the belief in the inexorable march of history, and if such progress was drenched by the constitution of the Enlightenment reason with not a few paradoxes present in intercultural relations, the 20th century exposed the contradictions of this same ideal of modernity, starting with the review of the harmful effects of an asymmetric globalization, whose roots are established in humanism, mercantilism and European colonialism promoted since the end of the 15th century. Starting from this premise and considering that History of Art is constituted as a more or less autonomous field of knowledge precisely in the midst of this journey of modernity in collusion with coloniality, this research project proposes to discuss the aesthetic confrontations present in intercultural frictions arising from globalization, in order to understand how art, with its theories and methodologies, has become a privileged field of aestheticization of racism and ethnocentrism since the beginning of colonialism, permeating the genesis of modern art as "oriental exoticism" or as “African-American primitivism”, until reaching the absorption of these artifacts by contemporary art systems and markets. What has changed meantime? Which value systems served as triggers for this “passage” to the multicultural context? Which aesthetic confrontations were assumed and which were subsumed by the modern-contemporary historiography of art? In an attempt to highlight the texture of these issues, the research has a historical-iconographic character installed in an interdisciplinary dialogue that involves History, Anthropology and Sociology, a dialogue that comes through authors such as Aby Warburg, Sally Price, Adolfo Colombres, Estela Ocampo, Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Philippe Dagen, Éric Michaud, Alfred Gell, Simon Gikandi, Achille Mbembe, Frank Willet, Inaga Shigemi, Hamid Dabashi, James Clifford and Edward Said, among others.