In Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire poetically laments the redevelopment of mid-nineteenth century Paris. In his well-known “The Eyes of the Poor,” he describes a fraught meeting between two lovers who sit in front of a café at the corner of a newly formed boulevard. The streets are still strewn with debris, yet they hint at the promise of a glorious city. A few moments pass and a family in rags walks by; they pause and stare in admiration at the scene in front of them. The man turns towards his lover with shame in his eyes and, to his dismay, she returns his look with disgust and asks if the waiter can send the family away. Reflecting on this scene, the late Marshall Berman asked: “what makes this encounter distinctively modern?” To him, the difference between this moment and earlier scenes of Parisian love and class struggle was the urban. It was the invention of the Haussmannian boulevard and all that it represented: streets that breathed movement, light, and air into the city, crisscrossing with no regard, displacing thousands of residents and replacing them with thousands of newly made forms that glittered and glistened in the backdrop of the lovers’ story. More pointedly, the refashioned streets made new encounters possible, including the uneasy collision of imaginations, politics, and people in their everyday lives.

Encounters such as these have prompted deep examinations of the modern idea: What are modernities points of origin and/or demise? Did modernisation efforts ever yield modernity? How have multiple or alternative modernities risen and taken shape across national borders and time, and what similarities or differences have they generated? These questions bring the major themes of the conference on “Global Modernisms: Contiguities, Infrastructures and Aesthetic Practices” into focus, which convened a number of social science and humanities scholars for two days to think about concepts of “global modernisms” between the years 1905 and 1965 from a transregional perspective. The scholars and discussants came from a wide range of disciplines and focused largely on the visual dimensions of modernisms, including art, architecture, film, photography, textiles, and the city; the commonalities of which largely rested on the importance of place and politics in conceiving how modernisms are staged. Yet, despite the broad geographic range of the talks and the examples that were presented, the discussions ran up against the inevitable limits of the “global”.

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[M]odernity is, as Appadurai noted at the end of his keynote, an endless game of catch-up. This, taken together with Latour’s proclamation that ‘we have never been modern,’ point to the idea that time and temporality are much-needed tools to inquire into the modern idea – but that an excessive focus on time also poses a risk that rests too much on belatedness or linearity. The conference’s thematic focus on aesthetic practices, then, was a conscious exercise in opening up a vocabulary of “modernisms” to global, regional, and local scales that attempted to sit in relation to one other as well as to time, without falling prey to Western universalism. Moreover, the talks served to highlight practical and aesthetic considerations that emerged in everyday examples – which perhaps could be an important take-away in a room full of scholars and practitioners. In the final roundtable discussion, for example, Berlin-based curator Clémentine Deliss spoke about the importance of creating individual biographies of art objects so museums can emphasize temporal and relational connections between objects instead of simply relying on exhibition and display. This method would allow for more flexible groupings of art objects from disparate geographies rather than narrow, regional ones. These institutional applications are key, as they force us to rethink practices related to conceptions of the modern and the forms, languages, and contexts that have given rise to them. To return to Appadurai and the story of Baudelaire’s lovers, these conversations also encourage us to examine how the visual and aesthetic contribute to “the work of the imagination” at the scale of the individual, the city, or the nation, and the ways in which they work together to produce varying discourses on the global modern.

The following interviews and contributions have emerged from the conference:

• Arjun Appadurai: “Indian Popular Cinema in the Making of a Decolonized Modernity”
• Saleem Al-Bahloly in conversation with Nada Shabout: “Freedom in the non-structure”
• Atreyee Gupta in conversation with Ming Tiampo: “It is difficult to change the DNA of a museum”
• Helene Bongers Tagungsbericht »Global Modernisms: Infrastructures, Contiguities and Aesthetic Practices«
• Hannah Baader and Atreyee Gupta Welcome and Introduction to “Global Modernism”