
Type : Conférence
Date : 2 mai 2017
Lieu : Florence, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, Palazzo Grifoni Budini Gattai, Via dei Servi 51.
Encounter of (Colonial) Encounters: Methods, Epistemologies and Terms for a Transcultural Art History
Workshop organized by Jens Baumgarten and Marco Musillo
The first art-historical debates on colonial artifacts focused on the so called “mixed” aspect of their creation; by stressing either their appearance or focusing on the main actors such as the makers, or those who marked processes of appropriation. Terms like syncretism were coined to understand the diversity of objects not epistemologically defined by disciplines – like art history – that based their vocabulary on foundational terms, such as “artist”, “aesthetic value”, or “authenticity”. In turn, the art-historical analysis of such artifacts, seen as products of a colonial encounter, was shaped by the same essentialist perspective. In the last decades many scholars of various disciplines have proposed different approaches for a transcultural – and in some cases trans-historical art history – mainly by focusing on the early modern period. For example, in her fundamental text on materiality, Elizabeth Edwards states that the colonial culture is deeply material. However, even in these cases, the diversity represented by theoretical and historiographical traditions of different countries or regions have often not been taken into account. Continuer la lecture de Conférence : Encounter of (Colonial) Encounters