LACMA

larger question persists: would the inclusion of Chicano art supplement or chal- lenge the art historical paradigm (assuming there is a single paradigm and corre- sponding canon at this point)? In either case, I suspect that what proves most difficult to historical thinking is the introduction of the "meanwhile"—that is, those troubling exceptions that were happening concurrent with the canonical history, rather than after. Consider the textbooks that in subsequent editions added a chapter on women, and later one on minorities, rather than shift the paradigm. These supplements get coded as what comes next, rather than as a "meanwhile" that actually complicates the dominant historical narrative. 37 THE WHITE ELEPHANT In recent years, American art history has started a "global turn" that attempts to move beyond the old paradigm for the field: namely, "What is American about American art?" In September 2006, the Smithsonian American Art Museum addressed this global turn in a three-day conference, "American Art in a Global Context," which started with a panel aptly called "Looking for the Big Picture." The phrase big picture is at once a metaphor for context (or paradigm) and an invocation of the art object itself. The search for context and object of study are intertwined. Thus, if placing American art in a global context will require asking new questions rather than the familiar one about an essential national identity, it should also lead us to look at artwork outside the existing canon of big pictures. Or so one might expect. If it is now imperative that we view ourselves in a global context, it is also important to note that doing so is not new. 38 Indeed, even American exceptional- ism and American isolationism operate in a global context—they do not make sense otherwise. Furthermore, shifting to "the global" in no way undoes the ques- tion of national identity—that is, who we mean when we say "we." As Mark Twain might say, the death of the nation as a critical and social concern is greatly exagger- ated. In that sense, the study of American art has always been much more grounded in "identity politics" than the minority practices that have been left out of its framework. But, interestingly enough, the global turn tends to be articulated along- side a vociferous critique of "identity" and "community" that is largely focused on excluded groups. 39 As Rupert Garcia explained in 1993, "It almost makes me crazy when I hear or read that we have a problem with identity, as if it fell from the sky directly on us and somehow missed so many other folks, and, hence, that we alone created this problem." 40 In looking for the big picture vis-à-vis the above issues, I am reminded of an etching by Anna Medina called White Elephant (2003). When I first saw this work at an exhibition, I thought, "What a big picture!" (And then I bought one of the prints.) Here, a human is dwarfed by an elephant—although at a comfortable scale—and the elephant is dwarfed by two ancient statues that look vaguely 38 Anna Medina, White Elephant, 2003, etching, 2 x 1 3 /4 in., private collection

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