Between 2000 and 2022, we organised face-to-face situations between Courbet's paintings, hunters and inhabitants of the places he represented; but also between 19th century works gathered for their ...topic - the peasant worlds - and farmers. This gesture was intended to put to work a way of inheriting from the painter, borrowing or reiterating some of his: the transport of beings into spaces that would not be their own, and the construction of a presence of those represented in the instances of their representation. The situation, constructed and ephemeral, inscribed in contrast with the usual distribution of legitimacy to say what a painting is, is a moment of political critique.This text intends to produce an analytics of the latter, between inscription of knowledges on the surface of the images and percolation of life experiences, between the paradigm of representation and the arrangement of experiences.
This paper presents an analysis of ‘image-within-image’ in Panel VII, Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, Structure 33 of the ancient Maya city of Yaxchilan, considering the position it occupies in the set of ...panels and its integration in the architectural setting. It will also examine the narrative registered in the embedded text and the subject of both text and image. It will argue that the recursive device of ‘image-within-image’ in the Panel extends to the totality of the staircase with the other twelve that compose it, and to the ritual activity celebrated on it. The analysis will provide an opportunity to explore reflexivity and self-referentiality and their implications for insights on ritual and personhood among Late Classic Maya. To do this, I will build on anthropology of art approach and its notion that visual devices may elicit ontological conceptions.
This paper presents an analysis of ‘image-within-image’ in Panel VII, Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, Structure 33 of the ancient Maya city of Yaxchilan, considering the position it occupies in the set of ...panels and its integration in the architectural setting. It will also examine the narrative registered in the embedded text and the subject of both text and image. It will argue that the recursive device of ‘image-within-image’ in the Panel extends to the totality of the staircase with the other twelve that compose it, and to the ritual activity celebrated on it. The analysis will provide an opportunity to explore reflexivity and self-referentiality and their implications for insights on ritual and personhood among Late Classic Maya. To do this, I will build on anthropology of art approach and its notion that visual devices may elicit ontological conceptions.
Este artigo apresenta uma análise da ‘imagem dentro da imagem’ no Painel VII, Escada Hieroglífica 2, Estrutura 33 da antiga cidade maia de Yaxchilan. Considera-se a posição que a imagem ocupa no conjunto de painéis e sua integração no cenário arquitetônico. Examinase também a narrativa registrada no texto insertado no Painel e o tema do texto e da imagem. Argumenta-se que o dispositivo recursivo da ‘imagem dentro da imagem’ no Painel se estende à totalidade da escada com os outros doze que a compõem e à atividade ritual celebrada nela. A análise fornecerá uma oportunidade para explorar a reflexividade e a auto-referencialidade e suas implicações para conhecer o ritual e a personalidade entre os maias clássicos tardios. Para tanto, me baseio na antropologia da arte e em sua noção de que os dispositivos visuais podem extrair concepções ontológicas.
Este texto reflete teoricamente sobre as capulanas na região norte de Moçambique, e é baseado em trabalho de campo realizado nas cidades de Nampula e Ilha de Moçambique em 2015 e 2017. A partir de um ...diálogo com as proposições teóricas de Alfred Gell e Bruno Latour, proponho pensar como fazer capulanas não se restringe à produção, mas passa, principalmente, pela circulação e suas múltiplas formas de uso. Reflito, também, no que as capulanas fazem-fazer, e, sobretudo, no que fazem não-fazer. Ao cobrir os corpos e transmitir mensagens acerca de temas sensíveis como a doença, a morte ou a menstruação, elas permitem manter a esfera do invisível e do indizível, e, assim, “guardam segredo”
Through a detailed case study of investigations on beauty, I demonstrate that a thoughtful consideration of empirical evidence can lead to the disclosure of the fundamental assumptions entrenched in ...a philosophical discipline. I present a contrastive examination of two empirically oriented approaches to art and beauty, namely, the anthropology of art and the anthropology of aesthetics. To capture these two different ways of interpreting the available evidence, I draw upon a debate between Alfred Gell and Jeremy Coote on the understanding of beauty and art in the Dinka community. Following Gell, I reveal that the Western-centric predilection of Coote, who uses traditional aesthetic categories, leads to his failure to grasp the functional and causal roles of beauty in the social relations of the Dinka. In more general terms, my study reveals the inherent limitations of aesthetics as developed in the Western tradition and its Kantian legacy. Being steadily driven towards purely abstract and speculative concepts, such as ‘work of art,’ Western aesthetics has lost the ability to account for the causal role of beauty in social relations. By contrasting this approach with Gell’s anthropological approach to art, I indicate those fundamental assumptions of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline that apparently confine it to a particular cultural context, compromising its ability to account for the universal human condition. As my study illustrates, this limitation could be overcome by a thoughtful and unprejudiced examination of empirical evidence.
We focus on the anthropology of art from the mid-1980s to the present, a period of disturbance and significant transformation in the field of anthropology. The field can be understood to be ...responding to the destabilization of the category of "art" itself. Inaugural moments lie in the reaction to the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 exhibition
"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art
, the increasing crisis of representation, the influence of "postmodernism," and the rising tide of decolonization and globalization, marked by the 1984
Te Maori
exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Changes involve boundaries being negotiated, violated, and refigured, and not simply the boundaries between the so-called "West" and "the rest" but also those of "high" and "low," leading to a re-evaluation of public culture. In this review, we pursue the influence of changing theories of art and engagements with what had been noncanonical art in the mainstream art world, tracing multiple intersections between art and anthropology in the contemporary moment.
This is an investigation of arts and aesthetics in their widest senses and experiences, presenting a variety of perspectives which range from the metaphysical to the political.
This article aims to discuss a discursive turn of Chinese visual arts, using landscape representations from old and contemporary photographs of China, as well as painting and film materials. The ...discussion starts from showing the differences of defining the term landscape between Western and Chinese painters, arguing that they point to two types of realism underpinned by two kinds of cultures of seeing. It then moves on to the anthropological analysis of the landscape and how this analytical framework is useful in terms of understanding the 'emotive reality' in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. Lastly, the essay attempts to point out that this legacy has been inherited by contemporary Chinese visual arts in form of a 'roots-searching' sentimentality, either in explicit or implicit ways, participating in the construction of the new reality and identity recognised by and shapes contemporary Chinese artists.
Este texto pretende estabelecer inicialmente um diálogo entre el arte primitivo y las vanguardias artísticas de comienzo del siglo XX. A partir de esta idea se presentan las aportaciones de los ...primeros antropólogos que reflexionan sobre el arte desde un punto de vista evolucionista, se exponen algunos de los debates germinales sobre el arte primitivo para concluir con un breve estudio sobre la antropologia del arte de Franz Boas.