Preface: Is Postcolonial Art Contemporary?

In a number of discursive spaces, but perhaps most especially in artworld discourse, the idea of the “contemporary” (as the reflexive name for a state of time or a state of being) has gained considerable traction.¹ Beyond the familiar busyness of academic theory, this speculative concept-making is part of an important and provocative attempt to give the question of the present—the time we live in—some critical specificity with respect to temporal notions of pastness (what is no more) as well as futurity (what is not yet). There are many thinkers whose work might provoke us here, but in this very brief note the author whose work will frame my discussion is the prolific art critic Terry Smith, who is now almost never not writing about, or explicating, the contemporary.² For him, the contemporary in art is the name of a diverse set of responses to large, historical transformations in the global world we all—if differently—coinhabit. Part of what interests me about Smith is that in figuring the contemporary he has sought to incorporate reflections on the question of visual work being produced in the former colonial world. Indeed, for Smith the postcolonial is even one of the characteristic dimensions of the contemporary in global art. He incites us, therefore, to ask, What is the relation between the “contemporary” and the “postcolonial”? Is postcolonial art contemporary?

Smith writes of an epochal shift from the modern to the contemporary (via the postmodern) in global art. Globally, he argues, art today is above all contemporary. What does he mean by this? What is contemporary (as opposed to modern) about contemporary art? What is the story about modernism that it depends on for the contrast it stakes out? And how does the colonial and post-colonial figure in this story of global art? Finally, is there a sense in which this alleged historic shift is, in the end, primarily a story about Europe and the United States (or anyway a story primarily from their perspectives), the great centers of the hegemonic story of global art? Or, even if this is largely so, is this a distinction that has (or can have) some resonances with how we might think about art-making in the global South? This ultimately is what interests me here: how to write histories of art from the former colonial world. Thinking through Jamaica, in a tentative and exploratory way, I am going to suggest that there is indeed something profound going on in visual art today that is not reducible to the categories of modern and modernism as these have been conventionally deployed in art-historical discourse.

The story Smith tells is about the rise and fall of the discursive and institutional hegemony of the artistic sensibility that was part and parcel of the making of the modern world. And in particular, it is the story of the passing of the high point of that sensibility, namely, modernism, that came by the middle of the twentieth century to authorize which objects, styles, forms, and practices counted as art, which critical and commercial values to attach to them, and which venues (galleries, museums, exhibitions, publications) legitimized their visibility. On Smith’s account, in the latter half of the twentieth century, as a consequence of the world-remaking processes of globalization, decolonization, and transnationalism, this whole edifice was thrown into irretrievable question. Modern art has become conformist, modernism another name for cultural normativity. Today, Smith argues, what characterizes the production and distribution of art is a more horizontal sensibility marked by proliferation and diversity: “Contemporary art is—perhaps for the first time in history—truly an art of the world. It comes from the whole world, and frequently tries to imagine the world as a differentiated yet inevitably connected whole.” This work, says Smith, is contemporary inasmuch as it is “a vital part of our immediate experience of the present.”³ He acknowledges that something similar could be said about modern art when it was emerging as a critical response to the social and cultural forces reshaping the world that came to be called modern. But...