HART3753W: Imaging the Other in Art

Though our time is often said to be post-religious and post-metaphysical, many continue to seek some encounter with otherness and transcendence in art. This book deals diversely with the issues of art, origins, and otherness, both in themselves and in philosophical engagements with the works of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Addressing themes such as eros and mania, genius and the sublime, transcendence and the saving power of art, William Desmond tries to make sense of the paradox that too much has been asked of art that now almost nothing is asked of it. He argues that there is more to be said philosophically of art, and claims that art has the power to open up mindfulness beyond objectifying knowledge, as well as beyond thinking that claims to be entirely self-determining.

Drawing together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds, Colonialism and the Object explores the impact of colonial contact with other cultures on the material culture of both the colonized and the imperial nation. The book includes intensive case-studies of objects from India, Pakistan, New Zealand, China and Africa, all of which were collected by, or exhibited in, the institutions of the British Empire, and key chapters address issues of radical identity across cultural barriers, and the hybird styles of objects which can emerge when cultures meet. Colonialism and the Object is essential reading for all those interested in post-colonial theory, museum studies, material culture and design history.

Cross-Cultural Issues in Art provides an engaging introduction to aesthetic concepts, expanding the discussion beyond the usual Western theorists and Western examples. Steven Leuthold discusses both contemporary and historical issues and examples, incorporating a range of detailed case studies from African, Asian, European, Latin American, Middle Eastern and Native American art. Individual chapters address broad intercultural issues in art, including Art and Culture, Primitivism and Otherness, Colonialism, Nationalism, Art and Religion, Symbolism and Interpretation, Style and Ethnicity, A Sense of Place, Art and Social Order, Gender, and the Self, considering these themes as constructs that frame our understanding of art. Cross-Cultural Issues in Art draws upon ideas and case studies from cultural and critical studies, art history, ethno-aesthetics and area studies, visual anthropology, and philosophy, and will be useful for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in these fields.

The first thematic and cross-cultural overview of the experiences of migration and displacement that characterize so much of twentieth-century art.Migration, whether freely chosen or forcibly imposed, has been a defining feature of twentieth-century modernity-and much of twentieth-century art. Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers examines life-changing journeys that transplanted artists and intellectuals from one cultural context to another, making clear the critical and creative role that migration, exile, and displacement have played in shaping the story of modern art. Whether manifested in the striking architectural innovations of Nigerian modernism in the 1920s or postmodern works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and black British filmmakers in the 1980s, the multidirectional appropriation and borrowing described in these essays give us new perspectives on twentieth-century art and modernity. Distinguishing between exile and diaspora, emigration and immigration, and "the stranger" and "the other," the book examines the different conditions that structure the artist's experience and aesthetic strategies. From indigenous artists and the question of authorship to the influence of emigre art historians on art history, from the aesthetics of the African diaspora to Adrian Piper's metaphorical exile between philosophy and art, these connections and disconnections in a network of traveling cultures continue art history's efforts to come to terms with the postcolonial turn.

Contemporary indigenous peoples in North America confront a unique predicament. While they are reclaiming their historic status as sovereign nations, mainstream popular culture continues to depict them as cultural minorities similar to other ethnic Americans. These depictions of indigenous peoples as "Native Americans" complete the broader narrative of America as a refuge to the world's immigrants and a home to contemporary multicultural democracies, such as the United States and Canada. But they fundamentally misrepresent indigenous peoples, whose American history has been not of immigration but of colonization.   Monika Siebert's Indians Playing Indian first identifies this phenomenon as multicultural misrecognition, explains its sources in North American colonial history and in the political mandates of multiculturalism, and describes its consequences for contemporary indigenous cultural production. It then explores the responses of indigenous artists who take advantage of the ongoing popular interest in Native American culture and art while offering narratives of the political histories of their nations in order to resist multicultural incorporation.   Each chapter of Indians Playing Indian showcases a different medium of contemporary indigenous art--museum exhibition, cinema, digital fine art, sculpture, multimedia installation, and literary fiction--and explores specific rhetorical strategies artists deploy to forestall multicultural misrecognition and recover political meanings of indigeneity. The sites and artists discussed include the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC; filmmakers at Inuit Isuma Productions; digital artists/photographers Dugan Aguilar, Pamela Shields, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie; sculptor Jimmie Durham; and novelist LeAnne Howe.

Mapping Modernisms brings together scholars working around the world to address the modern arts produced by indigenous and colonized artists. Expanding the contours of modernity and its visual products, the contributors illustrate how these artists engaged with ideas of Primitivism through visual forms and philosophical ideas. Although often overlooked in the literature on global modernisms, artists, artworks, and art patrons moved within and across national and imperial borders, carrying, appropriating, or translating objects, images, and ideas. These itineraries made up the dense networks of modern life, contributing to the crafting of modern subjectivities and of local, transnationally inflected modernisms. Addressing the silence on indigeneity in established narratives of modernism, the contributors decenter art history's traditional Western orientation and prompt a re-evaluation of canonical understandings of twentieth-century art history. Mapping Modernisms is the first book in Modernist Exchanges, a multivolume project dedicated to rewriting the history of modernism and modernist art to include artists, theorists, art forms, and movements from around the world.

Providing close readings of the ways in which the premodern or primitive is strategically deployed in contemporary critical writings, Li's interdisciplinary study is a timely and forceful intervention into current debates on the politics and ethics of otherness, the problems of cultural relativism, and the vicissitudes of modernity.

David Bate examines automatism and the photographic image, the Surrealist passion for insanity, ambivalent use of Orientalism, use of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism of the Surrealists. The book is illustrated wtih a wide range of surrealist photographs.

Over the past decade, historical studies of photography have embraced a variety of cultural and disciplinary approaches to the medium, while shedding light on non-Western, vernacular, and “other” photographic practices outside the Euro-American canon. Photography, History, Difference brings together an international group of scholars to reflect on contemporary efforts to take a different approach to photography and its histories. What are the benefits and challenges of writing a consolidated, global history of photography? How do they compare with those of producing more circumscribed regional or thematic histories? In what ways does the recent emphasis on geographic and national specificity encourage or exclude attention to other forms of difference, such as race, class, gender, and sexuality? Do studies of “other” photographies ultimately necessitate the adoption of nontraditional methodologies, or are there contexts in which such differentiation can be intellectually unproductive and politically suspect? The contributors to the volume explore these and other questions through historical case studies; interpretive surveys of recent historiography, criticism, and museum practices; and creative proposals to rethink the connections between photography, history, and difference. A thought-provoking collection of essays that represents new ways of thinking about photography and its histories. It will appeal to a broad readership among those interested in art history, visual culture, media studies, and social history.

n this book the author takes an unusual multi-disciplinary approach to debates about contemporary art and poetry, ideas about the mind and its representations, and theories of knowledge and being. Arts practices are considered as enactments of mind and as transformative modes of consciousness. Ideas drawn from poetics, philosophy and consciousness studies are used to illuminate the conceptual and aesthetic frameworks of a diverse array of visual artists. Themes explored include: the interconnectedness of existence; art as a way of interrogating appearances; identity and otherness.

Catalog of an exhibition at the Alternative Museum, Jan. 7-Mar. 4, 1989.
Subject: Blacks in art -- Exhibitions

Alterity is not a mere synonym of difference; what it signifies is otherness, a distinction or separation that can entail similarity as well as difference. The articles collected here explore ways to define, situate and negotiate alterity in a manner that does not do away with the other through negation or neutralization but that instead engages alterity as a reconfiguring of identities that keeps them open to change, to a becoming without horizon. Alterity and its situated negotiations with identity are configured through the body, through the psyche and through translational politics. From critical readings of angels, specters, grotesque bodies, online avatars, Sex and the City, pornography in French literature, Australian billboard art, Pina Bausch, Adrian Piper, Kashmiri poetry, contemporary German fiction, Jacques Brault and Northern-Irish poetry, there emerges a vision of identities as multi-faceted constructions that are continually being transformed by the various alterities with which they intersect and which they must actively engage in order to function effectively in the social, political, and aesthetic realm.

In the 1920s and 1930s, anthropology and ethnography provided new and striking ways of rethinking what art could be and the forms which it could take. This book examines the impact of these emergent disciplines on the artistic avant-garde in Paris. The reception by European artists of objects arriving from colonial territories in the first half of the twentieth century is generally understood through the artistic appropriation of the forms of African or Oceanic sculpture. The author reveals how anthropological approaches to this intriguing material began to affect the ways in which artists, theorists, critics and curators thought about three-dimensional objects and their changing status as 'art', 'artefacts' or 'ethnographic evidence'. This book analyses texts, photographs and art works that cross disciplinary boundaries, through case studies including the Dakar to Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, the Trocadéro Ethnographic Museum, and the two art periodicals Documents and Minotaure. Through its interdisciplinary and contextual approach, it provides an important corrective to histories of modern art and the European avant-garde.

Cultural Encountersexamines how 'otherness' has been constituted, communicated and transformed in cultural representation. Covering a diverse range of media including film, TV, advertisements, video, photographs, painting, novels, poetry, newspapers and material objects, the contributors, who include Ludmilla Jordanova and Ivan Karp, explore the cultural politics of Europe's encounters with Brazil, India, Israel, Australia and Africa, examining the ways in which visual and textual art forms operate in their treatment of cultural difference.

Essay from the year 2018 in the subject History Europe - Other Countries - Modern Times, Absolutism, Industrialization, grade: 1,7, University of Sussex (School of History, Philosophy and Art History), language: English, abstract: On the 1st of May in 1851, the opening of the Great Exhibition marked the beginning of the creation of a corporal British identity which was drafted through dissociation from other foreign stereotypes. Although Prince Albert, head of the organising Royal Commission, wanted the Great Exhibition to create international family-like ties among the exhibiting states, it stressed the differences between those nations and supported rising nationalism instead. The very fact that the Royal Commission structured the exhibition into the United Kingdom, its colonies and foreign countries, revealed its focus on British instead of global achievements. However, as well as the exhibition's location, the manner in which it was presented is also of great significance, since it demonstrated superiority.

In five wide-ranging essays, A. David Napier explores the ways in which the foreign becomes literally and metaphorically embodied as a part of cultural identity rather than being seen as something outside it. Pre-classical Greece, Baroque Italy, and Western postmodernism are among the artistic domains Napier considers, while the symbolic terrain ranges from Balinese cosmography to body symbolism in biomedicine.

This book explores the fusion of myth, history and geography which leads to ideas of primitivism, and looks at their construction, interpretation and consumption in Western culture. Contextualized by Susan Hiller's introductions to each section, discussions range from the origins of cultural colonialism to eurocentric ideas of primitive societies, including the use of primitive culture in constructing national identities, and the appropriation of primitivist imagery in modernist art. The result is a controversial critique of art theory, practice and politics, and a major enquiry into the history of primitivism and its implications for contemporary culture.

The idea of African Otherness has occupied a central role in discourses on cultural production in Africa, whether film, literature, music or the arts. These claims, articulated both by ‘Western' and ‘African' critics and consumers, means that particular criteria and standards are adopted in relation to cultural production in Africa. The claim to African Otherness is gaining new strength in the wake of globalization, but it is also increasingly challenged by a number of contemporary artists. This book deals with the question of relevance and meaning of the signifier in various fields of contemporary cultural production in Africa.