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167 Pages·2019·7.443 MB·English
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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi CONDITIONS OF VISIBILITY OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi VISUAL CONVERSATIONS IN ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY General Editor: Jaś Elsner Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a comparative conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve collectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within defined, but broad, historical trajectories. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Conditions of Visibility Edited by RICHARD NEER 1 ••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936325 ISBN 978–0–19–884556–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to their students and to the attendees at the Global Ancient Art conferences, whose conversation and debate have inspired these essays. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi PREFACE Richard Neer The Chicago Center for Global Ancient Art was founded in 2009 by members of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Its animating idea is that a new research paradigm is emerging within art history. Antiquity was, of course, one of the original topics of this discipline as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. For many years, however, art history derived its basic research questions and its accepted ways of answering such questions from the study of more recent epochs: the Latin Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, nineteenth-century Paris, 1960s New York. That situation is changing: as the discipline grows and expands, new questions and new ways of answering them start to appear. The Center, in particular, explores two developments in recent scholarship: an increasing tendency amongst art historians to study archaeological corpora, and a corresponding tendency amongst archaeologists to move beyond functionalism into “art historical” topics like beholding, iconography, materials, phenomenology, stylistics, and aesthetics. What happens when these two worlds collide? We define ancient in procedural terms: wherever it is from, whenever it was made, art is ancient if our knowledge of it derives to a significant degree from archaeological data: stratigraphic, archaeometric, typological/stylistic, even quanti- tative. Antiquity is, in short, a function of method. Because these methods apply to a broad range of regions and corpora, this definition makes it possible to speak in global, comparative terms—a comparativism, however, not so much of the objects of knowledge as of the ways of producing and ordering them. Scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Mexico may work with radically different materials and possess radically different research skills, yet they all use similar kinds of data, produce facts in similar ways. In a discipline that still partitions itself according to nation, religion, and date (we have sinologists and classicists, modernists and Islamists), these affinities of method provide a new, “horizontal” way to organize research. On offer, in short, is a comparativism of method. Perhaps the most controversial, even tendentious aspect of this program is the apparently cavalier use of the term art. Art, we are sometimes told, is a quintes- sentially modern concept that can be applied to older or alien materials only on pain of gross anachronism. We do not pretend to know in advance the compass of this term or the limits of the aesthetic. On the contrary, it is only by testing the OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi viii PREFACE methods of art history against the materials and protocols of archaeology that we may be in a position to discover whether our questions are well formed, our answers cogent. Like global and ancient, in short, our use of the term art is pro- cedural, a function of method—a usage that, in its turn, enables comparison across cultures, times, and places. Each volume in this series examines and compares a basic concept or category of art historical and archaeological inquiry. Unlike the widely available hand- books or companions to standing fields of inquiry, these books do not codify or survey well-defined bodies of knowledge. They are, instead, exploratory: at once primers for students seeking to expand their research horizons and provocations to specialists. They offer, in short, theory from the ground up: an apt description, we hope, of a truly archaeological history of art. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi CONTENTS List of Illustrations xi List of Contributors xv Introduction 1 Richard Neer 1. Three Types of Invisibility: The Acropolis of Athens 7 Richard Neer 2. What Lies Beneath: Carving on the Underside of Aztec Sculpture 43 Claudia Brittenham 3. Concealment and Revelation: The Pola Casket and the Visuality of Early Christian Relics 74 Jaś Elsner 4. The Archaeology of Passage: Reading Invisibility in Chinese Tombs 111 Wu Hung Index 147

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