Countering universalism Decolonisation and the order of art

This study explores the relation between colonialism and art, and analyses decolonial practices of contemporary Indian and Israeli artists. Adopting a discursive and historicist framework, I contour the emergence of a new approach to what came to be known as “art” in the eighteenth century. Designated in this study as the order of art, this new mode of distributing artefacts was responsible for several developments which are usually understood as separate phenomena: the establishment of the modern museum, the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics, the consolidation of art as an autonomous field, and the appearance of artistic styles such as Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism. This study argues that these developments were linked to colonial expansion and the coloniser’s endeavour to universalise the domains of knowledge and culture. It distinguishes between two colonial devices which were designed to facilitate the operation of the colonial matrix of knowledge: while the differential apparatus functions through the construction of differences and binary oppositions, the uniformal apparatus creates a smooth space of universal sameness. The analysis of the order of art and its relation to colonialism serves as a background to explore decolonial art practices. One of the central arguments of this study is that the order of art began to decline in the last century; this watershed enabled artists from non-Western societies to question the order’s premises. Each of the chapters of this study delves into the convolution of art and coloniality and examines artistic strategies that attempt to delink the two.