Introduction to Art Worlds II
Spring 2009
Professor: Nina Hien
Email: nh27@nyu.edu
In the second part of the “Art Worlds” sequence, we will continue to
examine how the meanings and materialities of art have been shaped by
global exchanges, colonial encounters and cultural differences. This time,
however, we begin our exploration from the vantage point of nonEuropean countries that have been colonized, and/or affected by these
imperial projects. We will turn our attention towards understanding the
optics of nationalism and the uses and practices of art in post-colonial
and transnational contexts. Here, we will consider the influence of
national ideologies and postcolonial experiences, new technologies and
ways of looking on the construction, circulation, evaluation, display, and
reception of art, artifacts and visual objects. We will examine vision and
visual practices and the ways in which they are produced by the
economic, political, and cultural forces in specific times and particular
locations, and look to see how some of the key concepts that underlie
European-American visual theory are maintained and/or flipped on their
head as they become reconfigured into contexts with alternate visual
cultures, scopic regimes and aesthetic histories.
The reading list will engage works of philosophy, government studies, art
history, anthropology, journalism, literary theory, and cultural studies
including: Benedict Anderson (selections from Imagined Communities
and The Spectre of Comparisons), Achille Mbembe (On the Postcolony),
Thongchai Winichakul (Siam Mapped), Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber
(selections from Religion and Media), Michael Herzfeld (Cultural Intimacy),
Alfred Gell (“The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of
Technology” in Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics), Clifford Geertz (“Art as
a Cultural System” in Local Knowledge), Shelly Errington (The Death of
Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress), Karen Strassler
(Refracted Visions: Indonesian Appearances in Popular Photography),
Jessica Winegar (Creative Reckonings), Christopher Pinney (Camera Indica,
“Notes from the Surface of the Image” in Photography’s Other Histories
and “Piercing the Skin of the Idol” in Beyond Aesthetics), Rey Chow
(Primitive Passions), Roland Barthes (Empire of Signs), Deborah Poole
(Vision, Race, and Modernity), Barbara Bolt (Art Beyond Representation),
Peter Jackson (“The Thai Regime of Images” in Sojourn), Rudolf Mrazek
(Engineers of Happyland: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony), Hue
Tam Ho Tai (“Faces of Remembrance and Forgetting” in The Country of
Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam)
Films will include: “Maison Tropicale” directed by Manthia Diawara and
“Afro@Digital”
directed
by
Balufu
Bakupa-Kanyinda,
and
directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom.
“Shutter”