“Inhabitants of rustic parts of the world”: John Locke’s collection of drawings and the Dutch Empire in ethnographic types. History and Anthropology, 2017. (original) (raw)
Related papers
In: Allegory of the Cave Painting, (Mihnea Mircan & Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Eds.) Milan: Mousse, 2015., 2015
Paul Klee’s framing remarks set three agendas, along which I would like to elaborate this article: 1) artistic creation may originate from a single originating originator, yet it mediates relational situations that go beyond singular authorship; 2) works of art are often not starting points of such situations, but connectors, conduits of existing social, political, aesthetic dynamics; and 3) while artistic creation problematizes difference andduplication, forms of analysis are often either already a part of them, or implied by them, making them apt sites for a reflection on social relations or political subjectivity. This article seeks to contribute to a discussion on what sets such artistic and anthropological workings and collaborations in motion. In order to do so, I discuss specific conjunctions between ethnographic and artistic investigations that have sought cross-fertilizations, before elaborating the particular case of Ethnographic Conceptualism (ec). Following this conversation with anthropological and artistic theories of relationality and representation, I discuss works by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jonas Staal as ethnographically-inspired inquiries into colonial (self-)replication. Their projects give substance to my claim that by recourse to ethno- graphic conceptualism, they can be analyzed as social infrasculptures exposing non-identical forms of replica- tion and repetition.
The woodcut images that were deployed within early geographies and on maps helped to establish the racialised imaginary within which the people of the south become known. One of the first sets of images of the peoples of Africa and the ‘new’ world was the woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair, published initially as an independent wall frieze (1508). Their reappearance within varied textual forms over the next century provides an intriguing case study of the impact of textual structure and context on imperialist intelligibility. Arranged within a single broadsheet, De Novo Mondo, the Burgkmair images helped to fuel a partisan ‘new world’ discourse and establish equivalences between regions of the global south, many of them long known to Europeans.
Inroads to Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting
Nederlandsch kunsthistorisch jaarboek, 1997
Durch lands capes of the seventeenth century are a veritable phenomenon in the history of Western painting: to paint landscape at all as a subjecr in its own right was almost unprecedented, and the proliferation of this genre and the unforgettable quality of the pieces produced have arrested the attention of viewers for generations. Yet much of past scholarship substitutes extensive formal analysis for serious inquiries into the meaning and function of these works. I propose to explore the issue of meaning more critically through an appeal to semiotic analysis, in the mode of anthropologist C1ifford Geertz. 1 In his groundbreaking article 'Art as a Cultural System', Geertz argues that the traditional formal analysis ofWestern aesthetics altogether misses the apprehension of meaning, which draws instead on the whole cultural context from which any particular art has sprung: 2 'The means of an art and the feeling far life that animates it are inseparable ... '3 Instead Geertz advocates semiotics, 'a science which can determine the meaning of things for the life which surrounds them'. He conceives of semiotics in broadly anthropological terms as a 'natural history of signs and symbols', an 'ethnography of the vehicles of meaning' ... 'Such signs and symbols, such vehicles of meaning, playa role in the life of a society, or some part of a society, and it is that which in fact gives them their life ... Here, too, meaning is use, or more carefully, arises from use, and it is by tracing out such uses ... that we are going to be able to find out anything general about them.'4 'Such signs and symbols, such vehicles of meaning, playa role in the life of a society, or some part of a society, and it is that which in fact gives them their life ... Here, too, meaning is use, or more carefully, arises from use, and it is by tracing out such uses ... that we are going to be able to find out anything general about them.'4