Week 5 - Art/(ifacts)

  

The differing ways Anthropology and Art as disciplines approach African and African Diasporic Art according to their own values through the examples of the Harvard Art Museums and the Peabody Museum highlights the underlying assumptions about their engagement with material culture. I title this blog post “Art/(ifacts)” in light of the readings this week which showcase the fluidity between these nomenclature as representative of differences associated with incurring market value, ideologies of post-Enlightenment rational thought and discipline-specific values from a western perspective, despite empirical commonalities.

 

The art museums position a more universalised approach to knowledge regarding art/(ifacts). Their approach to their value of Truth’ and ongoing dialogue indicates this implied tending towards a something honest that reflects our life through engaging with the art/(ifacts) as a reflection of life in a nuanced (but perhaps still corny) manner. This multidisciplinary approach through multiple sites of inquiry, multimedia engagement  points toward a cross-referencing system of engaging with art/(ifacts) as a way to bringing truth to the fore. This is manifested in way Art of the Black world exhibition as well as other Black art/((ifacts) are displayed – within a wider global context where cultural historicity are touchpoints of information placed in a wider universal (temporal and geographic) context. The curation encourages thought across and between disciplines at a base level of humanity. Expressions of life that come from a sense of core “truth” in culturally and temporally informed positionalities and subjectivities are presented.

 

Contrastingly, the Peabody museum’s aims centre moreso an emphasis on difference, and of separated treatment of art/(ifacts) according to geographical location despite there bids no dedicated space for African Art itself. There is immediately a desire to capture commonalities across continents through their arrangement of collections. There seems to be a removal of artist agency in the discussion of the artifacts, although all crafted likely by an individual or group of individuals that leads to an empirical assessment of objects regarding their visual features across time and between geographies across Africa. with a view to learn more about people of the past, the museum privileges engagement with art/(ifacts) as scientific objects in an aim to foster community between people of the past and contemporary audiences’ relevant diaspora. They allow for this transtemporal connection at the level of ethnic heritage in a political climate where ideas of race, origin and difference hold increasing amount of value and importance for self-definition and justification of behaviour within a wider society. Given the history of its discipline this aim of regaining the trust of the descendants of communities’ arts that are on display are extremely pertinent in an effort to not continue the extractive processes that often led to these art/(ifacts) presence.

 

 

It is interesting how the Appiah article notes the commercial value of art I the transition of African Art from artefact to art. Whilst in collecting and curation , anthropological approach centres on sameness in order to tell us about art/(ifacts) of the Black world, in this exploration, its art is positioned separately from the rest of the world in often an atemporal standing in a way that centres on difference. Contrastingly, the individualism sought in art museums’ treatement of art/(ifacts) highlights specifically seeks to draw parallels across and between individual subjectivities, allowing for a more universal engagement with art across sociocultural, geographical and temporal lines, perhaps with an unsaid but very pertinent base assertion of genius and innovation.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 1 Sept 9 Introduction

The first work I am interested in learning more about is October Gone...Goodnight, 1973 by Barkley L. Hendricks. This was the first work I was drawn to, in part because of its size and the representation of a Black female subject with glasses and an afro looking not unlike myself. Upon closer examination, the presentation of the body in 3 profiles presented some sort of commodification of the body as object through this presentation. I also noticed the detailed shading of the body and skin against a very flat and 2D white shape that look like a dress but also has no shading and no shape within the whiteness which makes me consider the relationship between Blackness and whiteness and how one is defined against the other in complex ways. It is interesting that the detail presented here is in the Blackness. The second work I am interested in is Plate Four 1992 by Glenn Ligon. The print becoming increasingly unclear upon and increasingly populated background also highlights the definition ...
Read more

Chromatic Blackness and Expression + Project Proposal

Image
 The metaphor of chromatic blackness with African-American perspective is one I find deeply compelling both aesthetically as well as a sense through which to read work. It reads to me in some ways an emphasis of the way that darker pigmented eyes let in less light/are less light sensitive than lighter coloured eyes and therefore a way to culturally and subjectively situate an African-American perspective in these contexts. For this post I would like to expand upon my discussion of Roy DeCarava's Graduation, 1949. The clear binary of light concentrated in perhaps a third of the image where the subject is positioned whilst the rest of the image is mainly darker hues of grey and black is poignant from many perspectives with regard to reading American culture. The first being the subject bathed in light in her Graduation gown, whereby this tradition of a white graduation gown is aligned with EuroAmerican whiteness in many ways. White often associated with purity and wisdom and new begi...
Read more

Week 4 Visual Description

Image
    Alexis Peskine, French, “Aljana Moons 3,” 2015. Color archival ink photograph on Hahnemüle paper. Aljana Moons 3, Alexis Peskine 2015 depicts two boys sat at the beach with the waves behind them. Both are dressed in astronaut-esque attire using tomato tin cans of the brand “Dieg Bou Diar”, a tomato paste brand that is commonly used in Francophone West African, especially Senegal. This particular print from the packaging has been used across other art works including in a necklace made by Senegalese Moussa Thiam with Dutch Mieke Groot and Edwin Dieperink called  Dieg Bou Diar 1  2006 and on a Metal Case that was auctioned online in 2022. The central older boy stares directly at the camera with a collected assertiveness, whilst the younger is positioned on the diagonal, sat looking at the older boy with a same collected astute gaze.    Dieg Bou Diar 1  (no date)  Smithsonian Learning Lab . Available at: https://prod.learninglab.si.edu/resources/...
Read more