What Will We Do Without Barbarians?

This panel aims to comprehend the conceptual opposition between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’: both its structural function in the foundation texts in art history – in providing the criteria for what art is and is not – and its place today within the frame of the new global art history. How has the opposition between civilisation and barbarism been adapted and transformed under different historical circumstances? For example, the discourse of artistic modernism that came to transform art over the 20th Century defined itself - in Okwui Enwezor’s words - through ‘the enduring idea of an ever creative self destruction and constant reinvention’. These transformations were animated through the mobilization of antinomies: magic and science; communism and fascism; modernity and primitivism, unleashing civilization’s ‘other’ from within to reconfigure artistic form and subjectivity. Whilst the conjunction of modernist artistic strategies and primitivism has been critiqued - with artists being condemned or retrieved by current critical standards - less attention has been paid to the dialectic between revolt and conservatism that was at play within the historical avant-garde. This unresolved dialectic is instructive and should lead us to consider what might remain repressed within our own attempts at historical correction, as well as at other historical moments when the category and function of art and 'civilization' was questioned.

We encourage contributions from art historians working on all historical periods, from ancient to contemporary.