Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #14
Editorial
by Elize Mazadiego and Daniel Ricardo Quiles
by Elize Mazadiego and Daniel Ricardo Quiles
September 24, 2024
What might a decolonized[1] understanding of transnational and transcultural Amsterdam, and the Netherlands as a whole, look like? The postwar artistic ecosystem of Amsterdam has often been characterized by its diverse international perspectives facilitated through Dutch institutions. We regard this issue of the journal as part of a larger corrective to international exhibitions about Amsterdam in the vein of MoMA’s 2009 In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976, which, through the prism Art & Project, unwittingly characterized the city’s art production in the 1960s and ’70s, through the prism of Art & Project, as overwhelmingly white and male. Proceeding from this position, we sought to reappraise the currents that flowed through Amsterdam and draw new connections not only produced through global processes of migration but also colonization and other postwar phenomena.
The fourteenth issue of Stedelijk Studies expressly builds upon previous framings of transnational art and exhibitions in this journal. This includes its first issue, “Collecting Geographies: Global Programming and Museums of Modern Art,” sixth issue, “The Borders of Europe,” and ninth issue, “Modernism in Migration.”
Among other questions, we ask how both artistic research and emerging scholarship might further complicate our very notion of the transnational as an art historical focus and, concomitantly, “Dutch” as a stable signifier of national identity for cultural practitioners.
Such a framework and critical orientation might attend to how the art world’s contemporary embrace of the “global” has been part and parcel of neoliberal extraction, as much as it has drawn more attention to collaborations across borders that have advanced modern and contemporary art experimentation. Yet the aforementioned framework also opens up the possibility of drawing attention to long-neglected histories of the Netherlands in parallel with developments in visual arts and decolonization and independence movements in Indonesia, Suriname, and the Antilles.
The “transnational” approach to tracing the peregrinations of modern and contemporary artists and exhibitions has itself undergone revision in recent years. Here we point to just a few examples beyond the Dutch context that have inspired this project. If an earlier methodology, as exemplified by the 1997 exhibition Exiles + Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, could be said to have leaned on biography and even gossip, this was nonetheless a reminder that individual psychology and what Edward Said has called “contrapuntal” experience are never far from any discussion of migration.[2] From the early 2000s, art historian T. J. Demos instead sought to identify what could be called “migrant aesthetics” in canonical transients like Marcel Duchamp or the international cast of Dada in Zurich, closely examining the materiality of works of art and performance to pinpoint precisely how Dada’s wartime cosmopolitanism, or Duchamp’s flight from the Nazis, registered as artistic strategies.[3] Demos’s historical investigations paralleled Okwui Enwezor’s foundational exhibition Documenta 11 in 2002, in which migration was front and center as both content and form in the work of contemporary artists Mona Hatoum, Isaac Julien, Yinka Shonibare, and many others.[4] Hiroko Ikegami’s 2011 book, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, subsequently employed a deceptively monographic framework that, while ostensibly following Rauschenberg on his myriad travels and ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, pronounced “Rocky”) initiative, repeatedly attends to subtle critique or resistance from local artists that he received in places such as Tokyo or Havana.[5] Many of these books update a more traditional method by adding the contingencies of transnational travel to the scholarship on a canonical figure, effectively “globalizing art” via the canon.
Edited volumes on the subject, such as Kobena Mercer’s Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (2008) and Burcu Dogramaci and Birgit Mersmann’s Handbook of Art and Global Migration (2019), have centered on migration and mobility’s role in shaping modernism and rethinking art historical methods. As Mercer states, “Previously minor strands in the received account of modernism and post-modernism […] do not simply demand a more inclusive narrative but a comprehensive re-conceptualization of the analytical tools through which the objects and materials of art historical study are examined and interpreted.”[6] The publication Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies (2018) accentuates the “close interdependence of migration and the city” in the way “cities constitute themselves through migration.”[7] While this study focused on case studies in global metropolises from the early twentieth century, we share a similar interest in capturing the effects of migratory flows on the city of Amsterdam.
Latin American art history and curatorial practice have been particularly taken with the transnational as both paradigm and promotional hook. Among many other examples, the Stedelijk Museum presented the 2023 exhibition Felix de Rooy – Apocalypse, which referred to the networks of artistic influence departing from Curaçao and passing through New York, with Amsterdam as the final destination. Likewise, the 2017 traveling exhibition Hélio Oiticica eschewed the monographic retrospective in favor of lingering on the various networks of other artists and tendencies that the artist experienced in New York and London.[8] This welcome celebration of the Brazilian artist’s work by three institutions in the United States, however, bore a tragic irony. Some have linked Oiticica’s lack of success in the New York art world and threats of deportation to his early death. In contrast to the monographic model, there is the recent Americas Society exhibition and corresponding oral history This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, organized and edited by Aimé Iglesias Lukin.[9] Opting for a heterogeneous array of voices rather than focus on a solitary genius, Lukin embraces the complexity and difficulty of “Latin American” identity in the United States, both then and now. The exhibition coincided with increased calls in the field for a “Latinx” or Latine art history focused on producers of Latin American descent born in the United States (or migrants whose artistic work turned to issues of Latine communities).[10] Responding intentionally to this shift in the field, Lukin included perspectives of a range of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican activists, filmmakers, and artists in her show and oral history, and in doing so reconfigured the very ideas or expectations that we have about what a transnational “Latin American artist” looks like or makes.
The Netherlands, and Amsterdam in particular, provide a particularly conspicuous case of Latin American art sojourns. Relevant here are institutions located both within and beyond the city that served as finishing schools and feeders for the city’s cosmopolitan culture, such as the Jan van Eyck Institute, and crucial alternative spaces such as De Appel or the In-Out Center (1972–1974). The Dutch government also offered prolonged stays to immigrant artists and financial subsidy systems, like the Beeldende Kunstenaars Regeling (Visual Artists’ Program) that further sustained production by transnational artists.[11] While state and non-state mechanisms within Amsterdam afforded material sustenance, it was also the less tangible opportunities and effective means of support to international artists that sustained their stay in the Netherlands. It is in part thanks to the city’s diverse forms of hospitality that Michel Cardena, Ulises Carrión, Claudio Goulart, and Raúl Marroquín, but also Marlene Dumas, Marina Abramović, Kristján and Sigurður Guðmundsson, and many other artists, passed through from the 1970s through the present.
Despite the ways Amsterdam might have “given a place” to a segment of international artists, we do not pretend that the city extended its hospitality evenly. Michel Cardena’s (born Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas) Somos Libres?!, made in 1981 for De Appel’s series of video works for TV broadcasting, reflects this ambivalence. The videos narrate the journey of two gay men who flee a place characterized by violent oppression in the form of physical torture executed by representatives of the church, a militarized state, and the bourgeoisie, to eventually arrive to the Netherlands. The protagonists’ initial moments of celebration and exclamations of “somos libres” (we are free) upon arrival are quickly diminished by modes of exclusion in response to their presumed gay coupling and appearance in drag. The video work portrays Amsterdam as both a site of gay liberation, which in part motivated Cardena’s exile from Colombia in 1962, and oppressive homophobia, which perpetuated his marginalization in the country.
The crucial role played by Amsterdam as a potential haven for queer life in the postwar era warrants exploration beyond this issue. Among many other examples, Cardena as well as Ulises Carrión likely established themselves in Amsterdam and developed their artistic careers in the city partly for this reason. When asked why he arrived in the Netherlands, Cardena recounts,
In Barcelona, I made a very good Spanish friend who was also in the art school studying Graphic arts. He spoke to me about his friend in The Hague that had a gallery. In addition, he told me that in Holland there was a lot of tolerance of homosexuals. The so-called “gallery” was an antique store that did not interest me and the owner thought my work was scandalous and immoral. But a week later I met [curator] Wim Beerens and I invited him to see my artworks.[12]
Cardena’s anecdote speaks to how both art and sexuality shaped his migratory experience and orientation toward the Netherlands.
Other remaining threads for further study are overlooked histories of postcolonial artists from former Dutch colonies who established themselves in Amsterdam or nearby cities in the postwar period, such as Armand Baag, Agus and Otto Djaya, Felix de Rooy, and stanley brouwn. Such considerations touch on a major and ongoing revision in our field of just what constitutes “Caribbean art,” as led by a series of recent exhibitions. Attending to the region’s “archipelagic” or diasporic networks, such correctives challenge the very geographical category of Latin American art by exploring the region and its diaspora’s commonalities beyond imposed (post)colonial divisions of language and culture.[13] Of critical importance are the Maysa Foundation and Srefidensi Gallery in 1971, as key sites for the work of Caribbean artists, and the involvement of Surinamese welfare organizations in this supportive network. Beyond the scope of particular artists and their networks and spaces, there is the need to address larger systems and institutions that were operative in abetting or negating Amsterdam’s transnationalism in relation to its colonial entanglements.
There is also the question of how recent reconsiderations of the African diaspora, as exemplified by Adriano Pedrosa’s 2021 exhibition Afro-Atlantic Histories, might bear upon histories of transnational Amsterdam.[14] Here we signal this through a single example that does not come to light in our selection of articles but which was nonetheless a point of curiosity as we were devising this issue of the journal. In the summer of 2022, stanley brouwn was given a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago that later traveled to the Stedelijk Museum.[15] Going expressly against the grain of a spate of shows about Black and Indigenous artists following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, curators Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter followed the wishes of the artist’s estate in providing neither interviews nor a catalogue that added any further language, let alone interpretation, regarding brouwn’s austere conceptualism. Arguably one of the most radical examples of late 1960s “dematerialization” in the history of art, brouwn’s works frequently offer minimal information on distances or walks that the artist may or may not have taken. In turn, despite ostensibly being the body that carried out walks, the artist-as-subject is rendered a void at the center of a near-invisible life project, emblematic of the Foucauldian figure of a modern subject erased “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” What, then, are we to make of the fact that brouwn also happened to be a Black, Suriname-born artist who worked in Amsterdam for much of his career? On the one hand, we may follow the curators in respecting the artist’s wishes to effectively “blank,” or ignore, his subjective position (which might revive a debate regarding the frontier between “blankness” and “whiteness” inherent in other major postwar artists; consider Rauschenberg and Ryman’s monochromes, among other gestures). On the other, perhaps it is possible to defend a Black artist’s right to make radically dematerialized conceptualism if they so wish, while also examining their unique position in Dutch art history, both as a personal migration story and an institutional case study. We leave this brief reflection as a call for further scholarship on this delicate topic.
More generally, we are also at pains to distinguish between a certain melancholic “postcolonial” register and a more activist “decolonial” one that is intent on change.[16] This places our approach in contradistinction to that of recent group exhibitions like Massimiliano Gioni’s The Restless Earth (2017), which doubled as part of the Milan Triennale, and Ruth Erickson, Eva Respini, and Ellen Tani’s show When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2019.[17] Even Adriano Pedrosa’s much-lauded 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, risks this position in its insistently global approach to migration, which flattens out differences in class, race, gender, and national minutiae in order to present the migration crisis as a truly global phenomenon.[18]
Our hope for this issue is that it nuances some of these current debates as much as generates future research aimed at remedying the erasures of critical artistic encounters and histories that ultimately shaped Amsterdam’s global character. The contents of this issue take many different directions, ranging from (post)imperial cultural relations vis-à-vis local institutions and new media to artistic forms of transnational collaboration or art-making that addresses globalization. Taking the role of institutions and curators as its point of departure, the first articles in this issue focus on the Stedelijk Museum’s exhibition history.
Stephanie Huber focuses, for instance, on the collaboration between the Curaçao Museum’s founder, Chris Engels, and Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg in making the exhibition Curaçao, Painting and Painted at the Stedelijk in 1953. Huber sheds light on the dialectical relationship between the two directors and role of the postwar government agency Stichting voor Culturele Samenwerking (Sticusa), which facilitated the mobility of modernism between Curaçao and the Netherlands. This case study opens up a larger discussion on Curaçao’s place within a pan-Caribbean modernism and the reception of this in Amsterdam. At the same time, her analysis reveals the colonial framework that shaped this show.
The politics of (de)colonization reemerge in Kerstin Winking’s essay on Sandberg’s organization of Zaritsky/Rusli – two monographic exhibitions that were presented together at the Stedelijk in 1955. The author discusses Sandberg’s political solidarity with a newly independent Indonesia and the recently established state of Israel, which likely inspired his curatorial pairing of Rusli and Joesph Zaritsky, but was never explicit in the institution’s presentation of their work. Rather, the two artists were largely compared through their formalist resemblances. In doing so, Winking argues that art history has overlooked how these artists’ portrayal of their Eastern environments were intertwined with global postwar memory and geopolitical processes.
Turning to the Stedelijk’s exhibition history under the direction of Wim Beeren, Madelon van Schie examines the organization in 1989 of U-ABC: Paintings, Sculptures, Photos from Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil, Chile. The exhibition was part of Beeren’s strategy to renew relations with South American countries recently under dictatorial rule. It was perhaps Beeren’s curatorial approach to work in close collaboration with local institutions and contemporary artists that distinguished this show from contemporaneous exhibitions of Latin American or global focus in Europe and the United States. Despite the show’s lamentable reception in the Netherlands, Van Schie highlights how U-ABC negotiated but also perpetuated Western and non-Western divides.
The journal issue then pivots to artists’ use of new media to formulate their sociopolitical positions on a number of transnational and postcolonial realities. Janna Schoenberger analyzes a 1967 interview with former members of the Koninklijk Nederlands Indisch Leger (Royal Netherlands East Indies Army, KNIL) featured in a television episode of Hoepla, a short-lived experimental television program produced by artists Wim T. Schippers and Wim van der Linden together with filmmakers Hans Verhagen and Trino Flothuis. The author investigates the multilayered “misunderstandings” inherent in the interview’s communication and reception in the Netherlands. Schoenberger unpacks the relationship between a form of “ludic conceptualism” to the postcolonial context that led to the KNIL interview’s broadcasting and public disregard of it.
Subsequently, Juliane Debeusscher’s essay turns to alternative artistic projects based in Amsterdam between the 1970s and ’80s that worked with new media to challenge Cold War geopolitical divides. DIY publications, mail art, video, and other media were used as a critical form of communication between Western and Eastern Europe. The essay works back from the multiday artistic event Europe Against the Current in 1989 to draw a longer genealogy of transnational artistic relations facilitated by De Appel’s Works and Words in 1979 and Ulises Carrión and Henryk Gajewski’s artistic practices.
Finally, Pablo Santa Olalla discusses the artist Claudio Goulart (1954–2005), who similarly worked with experimental new media and performance in Amsterdam from the 1970s until his death. Originally from Porto Alegre, Brazil, Goulart’s migratory experience to the Netherlands and transnational subjectivity in turn informed his artistic practice. Santa Olalla situates Goulart’s varied artistic work within postwar immigration policies in the Netherlands and the country’s emergent multiculturalism in the 1980s to underscore the ways the artist attempted to negotiate his own identity and interrogate discourses of diversity and inclusion within Amsterdam.
In addition to this issue’s peer-reviewed scholarly contributions, we include an interview offering personal perspectives on transnational Amsterdam. Elize Mazadiego and Charl Landvreugd lead a conversation with Els van der Plas, currently director of the Allard Pierson Museum, on her central role in supporting art and artists from the Global South within Amsterdam from the 1980s until today, through initiatives like the Gate Foundation and Prince Claus Fund. Her recollections highlight the forms of marginalization by hegemons such as the state and large-scale art institutions that artists in Amsterdam faced, but also the city’s place within the global discourses in art that were then taking shape. This conversation reveals Amsterdam’s multiple spheres of art, segregated by colonial notions of “art” and “modernism,” and the ways Van der Plas sought to bridge such divides.
Elize Mazadiego is Assistant Professor in World Art History at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Mazadiego works on Modern and Contemporary art from a global perspective. Fields of interest include postwar modernities and contemporary practices, with a focus on Latin America, the relationship between art and politics, global conceptualism(s), artistic mobility and migration, spatial praxis, feminist and queer histories. From 2019-2023, Mazadiego was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and co-coordinator of the research group: Global Trajectories of Thought and Memory: Art and the Global South at the Amsterdam School of Heritage, Memory and Material Culture. She is author of Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955-1968, recipient of the 2022 section award for Best Book in Latin American Visual Culture Studies from the Latin American Studies Association, and editor of Charting Space: the cartographies of conceptual art.
Daniel Ricardo Quiles is an art critic and Associate Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His academic research has focused on Argentinean conceptualism as well as broader questions related to new media and politics in Latin American art. Quiles teaches courses on the theory and history of postwar art of the Americas. His research has appeared in academic journals such as Art Journal, ARTMargins, and Caiana. He has written for Artforum, Art in America, and DIS Magazine, among other publications. In 2017 he published a book-length conversation with Jaime Davidovich as part of Fundación Cisneros’ interview series with Latin American artists.
[1] By employing the term “decolonial” we refer to a growing imperative within art history, informed by the theories of Maria Lugones, Françoise Verges, and many others, to critically reassess and ultimately disrupt canonical narratives that have been historically Western-centric, imperialist, white, male, and heteronormative, in order to make visible marginalized histories and correct the erasure of Black, Brown, and other postcolonial art histories that also constitute understandings of the Netherlands. For recent debates on decolonization processes within the field, see Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, eds., “Decolonizing Art History,” Art History 43, no. 1 (February 2020): 1–66; and Tatiana Flores et al., eds., The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (London: Routledge, 2024).
[2] Stephanie Barron, Sabine M. Eckmann, and Matthew Affron, eds., Exiles + Emigrés : The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1997).
[3] T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). See also Demos’s consideration of contemporary art about migration: T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
[4] Enwezor addressed diasporic experience and the Black Atlantic through the paradigms of créolité and creolization. See Okwui Enwezor, ed., Créolité and Creolization: Documenta 11_Platform3 (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2003).
[5] Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
[6] Kobena Mercer, ed., Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers (Cambridge, MA: Iniva/MIT Press, 2008), 7.
[7] Burcu Dogramaci et al., eds., Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the 20th Century (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2018), 9.
[8] There are important precedents for this exhibition’s methodology. Among others, see Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo, eds., Oiticica in London, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2007).
[9] Aimé Iglesias Lukin, This Must Be the Place: An Oral History of Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975, exh. cat. (New York: Americas Society/ISLAA, 2022).
[10] Among other recent sources, see Tatiana Flores, “‘Latinidad is Canceled’: Confronting an Anti-Black Construct,” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 3, no. 3 (2021): 58–79; Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art: Artists, Markets and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); and Elizabeth Ferrer, Latinx Photography in the United States (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2020).
[11] Christine Delhaye, “Immigrants’ Artistic Practices in Amsterdam, 1970–2007: A Political Issue of Inclusion and Exclusion,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 34, no. 8 (2008): 1301–1321.
[12] Miguel Ángel Cardénas, “Miguel Ángel Cardénas y la verdad del video: Entrevista a Miguel Ángel-Cardénas por Sebastián López,” Errata, no. 3 (December 2010): 211. Our translation.
[13] See, among other examples, Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, eds., Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, exh. cat., MOLAA (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); and Carla Acevedo-Yates, Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today, exh. cat. (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2022).
[14] See Adriano Pedrosa, Tomás Toledo et al., Afro-Atlantic Histories, exh. cat., Museu de Arte de São Paulo/Instituto Tomie Ohtake (New York: DelMonico Books, 2021).
[15] See Jori Finkel, “The late conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn would not want you to read this article,” The Art Newspaper, April 3, 2023, accessed September 12, 2024,
[16] Of course, this shorthand vastly simplifies two subdisciplines, postcolonial and decolonial theory, that have developed internationally over some four decades. See Olimpia E. Rosenthal, “Academic Colonialism and Marginalization: On the Contentious Postcolonial–Decolonial Debate in Latin American Studies,” Postcolonial Studies 25, no. 1 (2022): 17–34.
[17] See Massimiliano Gioni, ed., The Restless Earth, exh. cat. (Milan: La Triennale di Milano, 2017); Ruth Erickson, Eva Respini, and Ellen Tani, eds., When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, exh. cat., ICA/Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
[18] In the curator’s words, Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale included many “artists who are themselves foreigners, immigrants, expatriates, diasporic, émigrés, exiled, or refugees—particularly those who have moved between the Global South and the Global North.” See curator’s introduction, Biennale Arte 2024, accessed September 12, 2024; and Adriano Pedrosa, Biennale Arte 2024: Foreigners Everywhere, exh. cat., La Biennale di Venezia (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2024).
Mazadiego, Elize, and Daniel Ricardo Quiles. “Editorial.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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