Ways of Experiencing Art: Art History, Television, and Javanese Wayang (original) (raw)

2008, What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek

A thing, such as an art work, is perceived and experienced differently by different people and in different situations. This obvious fact, and the fact that art history makes people experience things in specific ways, is often concealed by the pretension of the discipline that its way is the most informed and objective way of seeing art. This chapter shows the limits and prejudices of art historical vision by reflecting on a particular Javanese artistic and cultural phenomenon, wayang, which can be preliminarily glossed as shadow puppet theater. Delicately carved and painted wayang puppets are presented as "art objects" in some art history books, museums, and art history classes. One of the points of this chapter is that the "wayang" of mainstream art history, or wayang as "art object," is a different kind of animal than the wayang that people most commonly encounter in Java, even though art history pretends that its "wayang" is the Javanese wayang. In the later part of the chapter, I will look more broadly at the encounter of art history with Southeast Asian art, and finally I will briefly relate my ideas to other chapters in this volume. (This text was published as the introductory essay in _What's the Use of Art?: Asian Visual and Material Culture in Context_, edited by Morgan Pitelka and Jan Mrazek, University of Hawai'i Press 2008).