Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies by Farago, Claire; Lowish, Susan; Baumgarten, Jens;

Short description:

This edited volume de-familiarizes European conceptions of artistry and thinks its history anew. It represents a rethinking on a global stage of some of the most fundamental assumptions in what were once arguably helpful methodological tools in art history.

Long description:

This edited volume de-familiarizes European conceptions of artistry and thinks its history anew. It represents a rethinking on a global stage of some of the most fundamental assumptions in what were once arguably helpful methodological tools in art history.

As chapters in this book demonstrate, the category of artisanal knowledge opens up the history of culture, allowing discourse to be freed from a narrative of cultural development without excluding Art with a capital A from consideration. Our shared inquiry, approached through many different case studies involving many kinds of data and contexts, focuses attention on methodological aspects. Each chapter provides a sustained meditation on artisanal knowledge that includes intellectual, social, economic, and political factors without relying on universals, monolithic categories, hierarchies of genre and medium, or the use of binaries, least of all the global/local binary. As different as they are from one another, all the chapters in this book ask about various connectivities among peoples, ideas, things.

The book will be of interest to artists, critics, curators, and scholars working in art history, museum studies, history, material culture studies, performance studies, eco-criticism, Latin American studies, colonial studies, religious studies, anthropology, and Indigenous studies.

The Introduction and Coda of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

“Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to be Made is an impressive collection of studies from across continents that compellingly persuades art historians to bring making to the center of our enquiry into art. By placing the individual artist within a distributed network of places, peoples, materials, and technologies, it effectively undermines the evolutionist underpinnings of the discipline that flaunts the creative ‘genius’ at its pinnacle. The book shows the way to a non-hierarchical, transculturally formed art history to argue that the world’s conceptual knowledge about art was not exclusively produced in European lexical repositories.”

Monica Juneja, Senior Professor of Art History, University of Heidelberg, Germany & Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities, Shiv Nadar University, India.

“Transcultural Histories of Art and Artisanal Epistemologies: Knowledge to be Made invites us to reflect on 'artisanal epistemologies', exploring forms of knowledge that emerge from doings and materialities that cross worlds and intertwine with living cosmologies. The authors courageously open up the discipline to fields of knowledge and being that lie beyond its boundaries, suggesting the possibility of a radical and transformative interculturality, not only of the discipline, but of the relationship to the world that art engenders.”

Fernanda Pitta, Assistant Professor at MAC USP

“The editors are to be congratulated on producing a brave, engaging, and original volume. The book is superbly and collaboratively edited so that it can be read as a coherent whole. The concept of the artisanal challenges the distinction between “intellectual” and “practical” intelligence. Artisanal knowledge as a transcultural concept does indeed provide the basis for the development of cross-cultural art histories that focus on practice.”

Howard Morphy, Australian National University

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors 

Introduction and Acknowledgements 

  1.  Theoretical Introduction: Artisanal Epistemology as a Transcultural Concept 

     Claire Farago 

New Epistemologies in Formation 

2. The Making and Materiality of Kalaallit assilialiait:  

Inuit Artisanal Knowledge in the Global Nineteenth Century 

Bart Pushaw 

3. Artisanal Waste Construction in Contemporary Art and Architecture of Mexico City:  

The Conceptual Impact of Abraham Cruzvillegas 

Peter Krieger 

Transcultural Institutions 

4. Self-Reflexive Practices in the Arts of Luis García Hevia: From Colonial Workshop to Experiential Processes in Nineteenth-century Colombia 

Patricia Zalamea 

      5. “Para o inglês ver – para o brasileiro acreditar”:   

       Transcultural Discourses and Practices in Contemporary Brazilian Arts and Cultures 

Jens Baumgarten and Vinicius Spricigo  

Material Flows/Circulating Objects 

6. Artisanal Authority and Indigenous Knowledge in the Book Culture of Sixteenth-century Mexico 

Jeanette Favrot Peterson 

7. From Stone and Wood: Carving Christian Identity in Early Modern India 

Erin Benay 

8. Making and Sensing: Ceramics, Metalwork, and Aromatics in Transcultural Exchanges 

Leah R. Clark 

Knowledge-sharing Models 

     9.  Migrating Inventions: Brunelleschi’s Dome and the East 

Dario Donetti and Lorenzo Vigotti 

10. Material Concerns: Experiential Teaching and Learning with First Nations Artists in Australia 

Susan Lowish 

11 Coda: Collaborations, Transformations, and Continuing Conversations 

Susan Lowish, Jens Baumgarten, and Claire Farago