ACASA, March 31, 2004.

When Suzanne Blier first asked me to address the Arts Council of African Studies Association at the 2004 Triennial in Boston, I right away said yes, because it is a very great honor.

I was at the 1995 Triennial in New York City and remembered it vividly. I felt that something tumultuous was going on there. The field of African, African American, and Diaspora art embraced so much: aesthetics, politics, anthropology, ethnology, the past and the present. There were panels on contemporary Afro-Brazilian religions and on Ethiopian rock-cut churches, one on cultural theory, one devoted to guitars, others on film, photography and collecting, and several--no two alike--on dance. To me, this was awesome, a new kind of art history, and a glimpse into a future I wanted to be part of.

But after doing some thinking and doubting last fall, I e-mailed Suzanne again. I said that I would, with regret, have to decline the invitation after all. It was too great an honor, and I felt it should be bestowed elsewhere.

ACASA is a convocation of professionals in a field to which I come as an outsider--a passionately interested outsider, but still an amateur. My graduate work in art history is in a different area. And, more to the point, I am a journalist by trade, an art critic for a daily newspaper and so, almost by necessity, a professional generalist.

Clement Greenberg once said that training for an art critic's career consisted almost entirely of learning on the job. I think he was pretty much right. The job really is about self-education. And depending on your energy and interest, that education can be as broad or as narrow as you want to make it.

This suits me. My inclination has always been to look at lots of art, of all kinds. I can't think of any art that doesn't, or couldn't, interest me. And because for me art is as much about lives and ideas as it is about forms and dates, I tend to relate to it personally. For me, its history is organic and dynamic--not a straight line or even a set of parallel lines, but an immense databank of moving variables with more connections and more differences than any one of us can possibly see.

As stimulating as this wide-angle perspective is for me, it is also a source of frustration. Covering the art waterfront means not being able to linger long on any one view. I am all too conscious of how much I don't, and can't, know about objects and ideas that stir me deeply. I must console myself by thinking that what I am in a position to do is to convey some sense of my passion through writing, give readers a sense that those objects and ideas may be very pertinent to their lives, and point them in the direction of people who are in the business of taking a deep, focused view, meaning you: artists, scholars, curators, educators.

Over time, certain areas of art have become of particular interest to me. One is Asian art, the field of my graduate work. Another is African art. I have always been pretty clear as to where my interest in Asian art came from: early exposure to museum collections, objects in my family's home, school, a lot of early travel. But Africa and African art? There the connection has been largely indirect, informal, accidental, circumstantial.

That being so, you might well ask: So, where do you get off writing about it? The short answer, which may be the only real answer, is: It's part of my job. That may sound arrogant, but it's not meant to be. One of my editors used to say, when I was holding up copy to agonize over a phrase or a word, "Look, Holland, it's all going to end up on the bottom of a bird cage, anyway. So relax." Of course, he was right. If I ever had illusions of journalistic power, they pretty much ended there.

I don't think I do have illusions of power, at least not personal power. I guess this is a matter of temperament, or maybe an unreconstructed '60s mindset. I just don't trust personal power as an end in itself. The only power that seems of interest is the one that happens to be built into the job: The chance, which is both an obligation and a privilege, to say in print, "Hey, go take a look at this; it's interesting; it's wonderful. It could change your life a little, like it's changing mine."

Because, by and large, I get to choose what I write about, I get to write about what matters to me. So I write about African art whenever I can. I write about it partly as an advocate, because I think other people should know about it. But I also write about it because I feel a personal stake in it, one that goes back a long time, and one that I find difficult to explain except impressionistically.

For this very reason, I'd like to talk some about it. The first part is a kind of hit-and-miss reminiscence, not about art history but about my history. The second part, equally hit-and-miss, I'm afraid, is about art and art history as it looks to me at present.

I was raised in a small town, in a provincial country, on a colonized continent. The continent was North America, the country was the United States, the town was a Boston suburb. Not long before I was born, the country had won a big war, had become a superpower, and had aggressively begun to insert itself into the international landscape. Culturally, however, it stayed apart and guarded, suspicious of the world out there.

The suburb I lived in was guarded, too. Basically, it was a gated community, white and middle-class. Even when I was young I felt out of synch with my surroundings. I hated sports, most other children, and authority in any form. I lasted one day in Cub Scouts. My Den Mother was a bully and I told her so, and that was that. What I didn't tell her was that I never wanted to be a Cub Scout. I wanted to be a Brownie or a Campfire Girl, and wear a beret and learn to sew.

As it happened, I ended up doing what I wanted to do most of all: stay home and read, listen to records and the radio, and watch TV. It was at home alone, through books and the mass media, that I came into touch, pretty early, with a larger world. A big part of that world, or the part that caught my attention, was Africa.

Africa actually came to me through African America and the greater African Diaspora, and through the kinds of pop-cultural channels that Robert Farris Thompson has been delightedly pointing out for years. It came through Harry Belafonte and the calypso craze in the late 1950s; through Xavier Cougat and his sambas and mambos; through Tarzan movies and Leontyne Price singing Aida, through National Geographic, the gumbo in Campbell's chicken gumbo soup, and Ricky Ricardo's "Babalu."

It also arrived via TV news, where I heard about Patrice Lumumba. I wrote poetry as a kid, so I was into language, the way words sounded. Probably for that reason Lumumba's name stayed with me. So did his image: a serious-looking black man wearing a suit and tie and glasses. He wasn't a National Geographic African. He was a modern, urbane, international African, and this identity was new to me. The adults around me clearly viewed him with hostility and fear, the way they viewed Malcolm X. Their attitude made both men interesting and appealing to me.

My father brought Africa into our home through jazz LPs, which he bought in quantity. I recently thumbed through his collection, more than half a century old now, and the names and the cover graphics were instant reminders of music in the air: Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Waller, Wilbur and Sidney de Paris, George Lewis, Jimmy Rushing, Fletcher Henderson, Bunk Johnson, Earl Hines, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, J. C. Higginbotham, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, and a non-jazz singer I loved as a kid, Mahalia Jackson.

Despite the constant presence of this music and the culture it evoked, I knew no African Americans personally. There were none in town, or in most of the places I went to outside of town. There was one Latino family, the Castillos. Mario Castillo, Mexican by birth, taught at a private "alternative" school. His two daughters, Marta and Consuelo (known as Cello), were among my good friends. They were older than I was, and precocious, and passed their books on to me. When I was around 14, Cello gave me Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. Its combination of racial politics and homoeroticism was a revelation to this restless, gay adolescent. I read it again, then read all the Baldwin novels I could get my hands on: Go Tell It On the Mountain, Another County. My world expanded.

In the summer of my sophomore year in high school, 1964, I ran away from home. A friend named Stuart, who for a lark had been breaking into homes in town, including my parents', had been sent to reform school in Austin, Texas. I wanted to visit him. So I borrowed money from friends, bought a $100-go-anywhere-good-for-a-year Greyhound bus ticket, and headed south.

Running away wasn't as dramatic as it may sound. I had family at various points along the way. But this was my first time on my own, away from home, and it was eye-opening.

My uncle Sampson lived in Washington, D.C., with my aunt Tessa and her two sisters, Josephine and Marie. On my second night there the three "girls" took me to an outdoor concert in Rock Creek Park. The performers were Harry Belafonte and Miriam Makeba, who was, my aunt Tessa explained, in political exile from South Africa. She also explained what "apartheid" meant, a word I didn't know. Again, something new and big filtered in.

Shortly afterward, I crashed with my cousin John Elliott, then a young professor at the University of North Carolina. He gave me a tour of the campus, very impressive, very green. Then, on my last afternoon, he said, "I want you to see the other side of Chapel Hill." He drove me what I remember as being a short distance away from the campus to a road lined with tiny, falling-down cabins where an African American community lived. I had never seen that kind of poverty.

He also asked me to show him on a map what route I was taking to Texas. "When you get to Mississippi," he said, "stay on the bus; don't get off." He explained that three civil rights workers, two of them white Northerners, had disappeared there and were presumed murdered. Later I learned that their bodies had been found and that "Freedom Summer""in Mississippi was producing other horrors: beatings, church burnings, and home bombings.

After North Carolina, the trip was different because I was different, on the alert, an outsider in strange land. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street, a name I knew from Gone with the Wind, I saw a sit-down restaurant with a side window for serving black people, and drinking fountains labelled "Whites Only." I saw more of the same in Louisiana and Mississippi. When I finally got to Austin, I wasn't permitted to see Stuart. He had been misbehaving and wasn't allowed visitors. Anyway, I was exhausted. I headed home, glad to be doing so, through Arkansas and Kentucky.

Two years later I was in college here in Cambridge. At that time, Harvard freshman had to take an introductory course in each of three areas: humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Science posed a problem; I had flunked chemistry in high school. But after scouring the course catalog I found a solution: an anthropology course titled "Primitive Art."

It met in the Peabody Museum, which I had visited as a kid with my grandparents. The place hadn't changed much since then. African sculptures and masks were still locked up in Victorian vitrines and identified with time-stained labels. The Peabody's Oceania collection looks exactly that way today.

"Primitive Art" was my first college class, the beginning of my adult education. I loved everything about it: the objects, the lectures, the reading. As it happened, one of my roommates, William Martin, was a history major concentrating in African politics. He had just returned from a summer in Malawi. While I was caught up in the Thoreauvian romance of Colin Turnbull's Forest People, he was giving me reports of the contemporary, complicated, cosmopolitan Africa I associated with Lumumba. Bill understood something I did not: the difference between cultural tourism and reality.

What really thrilled me about the course, though, was the art itself. Naive as it may sound, this was the first time I was aware of art that had not been created for static display in a tomb, or a church, or a museum, that was alive and animated, designed to move, dance, be handled or worn, to be kept close to the body, to change the lives of whoever it came in contact with.

Later I would learn that much religious art in many cultures, including that of India, is similarly vivacious. But my understanding of that principle started here. It completely reshaped my thinking about art, freed up and intensified my relationship to it. And this came in a cultural moment of many liberations, when my views of the world I had grown up in and of my place in it were under radical revision.

In a strife-filled, racially torn, Vietnam-era America, African culture, to the degree I knew about it, represented an ideal of social balance and philosophical probity. Again romantically, I saw African art as a form of moral theater. The '60s were a time of theater: street theater, guerrilla theater, protest marches with choreographed chants and gestures, Bread and Puppet with its colossal danced masks based on Africa prototypes, Hare Krishnas with drums and cymbals, rock concerts as communal rituals, with Jimi Hendrix, like some kind of shaman, ritualistically demolishing guitars at Boston Garden.

Some days it seemed as if everyone in Cambridge was wearing some fabulous costume or other and participating in impromptu ceremonies at once sacramental and hilarious. Art was activist in every sense of the word. It did not belong in museums; it belonged in the world. It did not belong to Them; it belonged to Us. African art, and the South Asian Indian art that I was just beginning to learn about, made equal sense to me in this context.

Let me skip over some years and a jumble of jobs in computing, medicine, and journalism to the late 1980s, when I went back to school in a doctoral program in art history. My field of study was Indian art. It might just as easily have been African art but for a chance trip to Asia that more or less made the decision for me.

My interest in India was, in fact, like my interest in Africa, long-developing and mostly happenstantial. It was a product of my father reading "Rikifikitavi" aloud, newsreels of Gandhi on TV, Around the World in Eighty Days, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar, love feasts at a Hare Krishna temple near Central Square, and the amazing Indian sculpture collection at the Museum of Fine Arts.

I began a dissertation in 1991 on early Indian Buddhist art, specifically on reliefs from the site of the great stupa of Amaravati. One of these reliefs is in the Museum of Fine Arts collection. I first saw it when I was in my teens. I know now that it perfectly embodies spiritual joyousness, the distinquishing emotion of the Amaravati style, with figures of humans and gods dancing together so ecstatically that they seem to fly.

But soon after starting the project, I got a call from the New York Times and started writing for them. I originally meant to keep the gig very part time, but it soon overtook everything. Recently, I picked up the dissertation again and went back to work on it. But in the intervening decade or so, the field of South Asian art history had undergone significant changes, as has, I believe, the field of African art. In fact, I think the two share certain similarities.

Some are obvious, and old. Both are focused, as least in Earl on an activist spiritual art. Both involve cultures with a turbulent twentieth-century political history. Both fields are, so to speak, outsider fields, existing on the far margins of most American art history departments. Neither attracts students or money; both tend to be absurdly understaffed. A survey of Italian Renaissance art and a survey of four thousand years of Indian art are not at all the same thing, though departments treat them as if they were.

Until fairly recently, the history of Indian art--which is often still routinely taken to include Southeast Asian and Himalayan art--was very much an archeological field. But in the 1980s and 1990s, activity began shifting from documenting to theorizing, and from ancient to modern material.

At first, I had serious reservations about these changes. Countless premodern sites in India have never been more than minimally studied. This is true, in some cases, even of well-known monuments. In addition, a political climate of right-wing nationalism puts Hindu and Muslim art alike at constant risk. So there are compelling reasons for art historians to be on the ground there, measuring, photographing, and

looking hard. Also, there is the question of the pertinence Western theory has to South Asian art, which emerged from its own highly developed bodies of aesthetic theory. When does the West surrender its tools and accept instruction from others?

I now feel my concerns, while not baseless, were exaggerated. I didn't trust enough in the resiliency of art history as a field. Nor did I accurately gauge its conservatism. At present, young South Asian art scholars are showing about equal interest in ancient and modern. They're studying centuries-old temples; they're studying temples being built today, viewing them as parts of a continuum. Research on photography, theater, dance, gender has been folded into the archaeological mix. Gender studies, diaspora studies, and subaltern studies are having a big effect and, again, have changed my view of what art history can be: a study of the politics of human experience. So Indian art history is slowly acquiring some of the multisciplinary richness I associate with African art history.

For me, the most exciting development for both fields is the florescence of internationally visible Asian and African contemporary art. I remember a conversation with a South Asian student in Sanskrit class in 1990. When I mentioned Indian contemporary art, she said with authority, "There is no contemporary art in India." The same year, when I met with a member of my orals committee for the first time and threw out the idea of doing a dissertation in contemporary art, it was clear that she regarded the notion as at best whimsical, and at worst a cop-out.

And contemporary art has turned out to be a contentious presence in some non-Western fields. In some cases, it has virtually split a field into two. That's what seemed to be happening with Chinese art. Traditional genres like calligraphy and ink-and-brush painting have always been imbued with tremendous political, moral, and cultural authority. They represent Chineseness, or at least an elite version of Chinesesness, with an authority strong enough to have survived the Cultural Revolution. The divide between these genres and a contemporary avant garde Chinese art sampling Western styles and media has seemed absolute. Some, though not all, historians of "classical" Chinese art have regarded the new art as entirely outside their range of expertise or interest. To them, it even represents a betrayal of a great tradition.

But now that the initial shock-of-the-new has passed, another cultural revolution, a benign one, appears to be underway. The unbridgeable gap between old and new is shrinking. I don't know exactly how this happens. Mostly it's about adjustments in perception, familiarity over time. My education worked like that. It's also a function of what kind of art is being produced. Some of these young Chinese artists are interested in the same things that old Chinese artists were interested in--language, political commentary, the role of the intellectual in society, a sense of alienation from the present, nostalgia for the past--but all in a changed context.

Probably just because I've been looking at traditional and contemporary art in certain non-Western cultures for some time now, I have little trouble keeping old and new in the same frame. They just seem to belong there. All of these changes in the art landscape were beginning to crystallize just about the time I started writing for the Times. It was an exciting moment to be on the scene. Things were happening fast, and there was much to learn, not all of it easy.

The New York art world is a lot like the town I grew up in. It, too, is a gated community with a small, tightly networked population; its values are territorial and entrepreneurial and therefore conservative, it is leary of everything "out there" beyond its control. This was certainly true in the 1980s.

But when the US economy bottomed out at the end of the decade and the art market fell into disarray, gates opened and all kinds of new art came in: street-based graffiti, self-taught and so-called outsider art, identity-oriented work. Not only did the long-marginalized art of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos gain admittance; so did art from Africa, China, and India that we barely knew existed. Suddenly, this art was appearing in a growing number of international exhibitions, of which the Johannesburg Biennial was paradigmatic. The complexion of the art world changed, I believe, permanently.

Also changed was curatorial thinking about the presentation of non-Western art in museums. The Museum for African Art in New York broke ground with exhibitions like "Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas" in 1993. And the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles continues to do so with shows like "A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal," in which transcendant ideals and right-now realities came together and distinctions between art made then and art made now dissolved.

At the same time, other exhibitions opened up entire areas of visual culture that many of us knew almost nothing about. "In/Sight: African Photography, 1940 to the Present" at the Guggenheim did so in 1996. So, more recently and on a truly grand scale, did "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994."

With so much fresh information coming at us, it was and is hard to keep up and, to be honest, not always possible to do so. As things go in mainstream journalism, when you are writing fast and in many directions, it is sometimes only in hindsight that some subjects, and your ideas and opinions about them, become clear.

One solution is to simply stay away from any but the most familiar material. But who would want to do that? I have a big stake in keeping this job interesting for myself. I don't want to just write the thousandth review of Matisse, not that there's anything wrong with him. For a Western artist, he was okay, even if he did owe his best ideas to Persian, Indian, and African art. But I'd rather write about those cultures than about him.

As to the present, from what we're hearing in the newpapers and mass-circulation magazines, postmodernism is obsolete, a phantom, a fraud. The multicultural vogue is a thing of the past. Political art is out; Beauty with a big a B is in. Or so say some pundits in a New York art establishment who were never fans of postmodernism and multiculturalism from the start and who have lately been making a big fuss about the vaunted return of painting and drawing, which, of course, never left.

One critic recently wrote that, at last, after fourteen or fifteen years of confusion, contemporary art in New York is beginning to assume a comprehensible shape again. For him, evidently, the confusion started around 1990, when all those gates were opening up. And he is not alone. It is surely no coincidence that a vocal section of the American art establishment has taken to expressing disdain for international biennials, which have come to be primary vehicles for introducing new non-Western art. And the same voices have little but praise for the proliferating numbers of "international" art fairs, Euro-American trade events from which non-Western participation is all but excluded.

But such attitudes crop up primarily in New York, which is, I'm afraid, the cultural capital of a decadent empire. They emerge from an increasingly provincial art establishment fighting hard, not unlike the present American government, to shore up and maintain a declining power.

The reality is that power has long since moved away from America or, more accurately, it has expanded and absorbed America. Whatever your definition of postmodernism may be, to me it has always meant one thing above all: The world has gotten bigger. Villages are exchanging important news. Boundaries are in flux. And the West is, finally, becoming part of the big picture.

No matter how reactionary the political climate grows in this and other countries, there is no going back now. The art and thinking that matter, and that will flower, are cosmopolitan in spirit. Actually, to some degree that spirit has always been here. I picked it up, entirely by chance, as if by osmosis, as a kid, through seeing Patrice Lumumba on television, through hearing Miriam Makeba in a Washington Park on a summer night, and through seeing those ready-to-dance masks in a natural history museum a few blocks away from this room. And I was pretty sure I would feel that spirit at this symposium, which is why I said yes--said yes twice, in fact--to Suzanne's generous invitation to speak.

The activist, lesbian-feminist, African-Caribbean-American poet Audre Lorde wrote, "We are making the future, as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present. And that is what it means to be a part of history." I like being a part of history in this cosmopolitan world. It's exhilarating, and challenging, and soul-stirring. And all you have to do to be part of it is show up, and be as alert and as open as you can.

As to "making the future," that's different. That's hard. That's work. That's what you do. I'm looking forward to the day when African art historians, African American art historians, and art historians from the great African Diaspora will be writing the surveys of world art and the histories of American art. I suspect those surveys and histories will be different from the ones that exist now.

Critical judgements that look so right, so unassailable today, may well be discarded. An artist whom no newspaper critic in 2004 knew about, or bothered to write about, may turn out to be the crucial one, the artist who shapes the future-future. Possibly those surveys and histories are already taking form in the minds and in the laptops of people sitting in this room tonight. Speaking as a writer long on words, short on time, and hungry, very hungry for new ideas, I cannot wait to read you.

Thank you.