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Civilization beyond earth wallpaper1/31/2024 If the artworks embody theorization-in-the-making, they do not-indeed cannot-reify history or theory. The materials I am considering here are as historical as they are contemporary, and as contemporary as they are timeless insofar as they all comprise dynamic sites of practice-led research. From the subterranean vantage point I am attempting to sustain, where roots take hold but also grow and branch, historical conditioning proceeds from the work of art as much as precedes it. ![]() The premise effectively denies the multiple contemporaneities of historical objects even as it seeks to reactivate them. The gesture is premised on the image of a static-dynamic tandem in which contemporary art is a site of research into fixed things. Taking “tradition” as a starting point strikes me as an increasingly anachronistic gesture, be it on the part of the artist or the art historian. Here, rather than hoisting myself up to peer obliquely over the edge of the past, as I am wont to do, I am trying to eke out an existence within, probing where meaning might take root underground-between the two. I have tumbled into its depths more than once. Attempts to bridge the chasm are engineered, usually from the contemporary critical edge, through constructs of continuity and change, indigeneity, alternative modernities, and decoloniality-all frequently underpinned by deference, sincere or feigned, to classical knowledge-and harnessing the subaltern to the past through anthropological research. On the other is theoretical exploration, where artistic and art historical practices meet to sound objectivity as a means not of abandoning the pursuit of truth but of reinforcing it, to query codification, and to push boundaries of interpretive foreclosure. On the one side is the devotional object, iconographic signification, politico-religious context, and material means-largely bound together today as in the past century by a scholarly investment in the empirical reliant especially on archaeological investigation and connoisseurial skill. There is a chasm between classical and contemporary Southeast Asian art-as there is between specialists in the former and the latter. ![]() Thompson’s essay is accompanied by a two-week screening of select clips from Nguyễn’s video work. In relation to the Māravijaya, an occurrence in the Buddha’s life that is commonly represented in Cambodian art, and Letters from Panduranga, a video work by artist and filmmaker Nguyễn Trinh Thi, art historian Ashley Thompson discusses ideas of land, gender, and colonial history.
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