Trajectivity in Art: Toward a Horizontal Art History of Styles

We call styles grouped by artists “movements,” but where do styles go? Art historians constrict movements to “centers” (e.g., Paris, New York) and time periods. Considering styles’ movements in a horizontal art history, we can discover how styles’ canonicity, materiality, their artists’ reputations and their market values are transformed across borders, oceans and continents. “Trajectivity” can mean orientation toward (Paul Virilio): artists often orient their styles toward permanence, popularity, universality and transcendence. It may mean deraciné, ungroundedness (John Rajchman). In a horizontal art history challenging the center-periphery binary and provincializing “centers,” “peripheral” artists can transmute, de-and re-territorialize and re-invent styles through their local conventions; peripheries are not passive recipients of styles but recreate them, denying the essentialism and universality ascribed to European styles presumably grounded in centers (Piotr Piotrowski): The Metropolitan Museum’s “Surrealism Beyond Borders” (2021-22) covering 45 countries and 80 years exhibited Surrealisms that absorbed local visual idioms beyond Europe.

Possible questions are (but not limited to):

• How do styles’ meanings, market values, histories, significations and authority change when styles cross borders?
• What art events (exhibitions, biennales) stimulate styles’ mobility?
• When centers are provincialized, what happens to “universality” and “transcendence” ascribed to centers’ styles?
• Do new traits from places they traverse adhere to styles?
• Do reputations of artists associated with centers change when styles migrate?
• What agency do artworks have to transform styles when introduced into "centers" or “peripheries”?
• How can critical museums display and exhibit styles’ cultural exchange transformations?
• Do political events—colonialism, war, emigration—affect styles’ transmissions and transformations?