Discipline Of Art History Research Articles

The Challenge of Kosovo

Abstract This essay offers a reflection on the vexed position of the pre-modern visual arts in Kosovo that sees medieval monuments under continuing armed guard. The violence that led to this state of affairs is sadly familiar, but this enduring phenomenon attracts little attention. The essay concentrates on the fate of the Serbian royal foundations in the region and suggests that it has important implications for the discipline of art history, whose established tools risk failing to find purchase on the polarised sectarian readings that have been forced on these monuments. The veneration of some of these nominally Christian sites by Muslims of varying ethnicities was well attested in the former Yugoslavia, but has not been integrated into their historical study. This essay proposes that the neglect of this experience, which is itself receding into an elusive past, raises questions about art history’s methods and scope.

Merging Philosophical Traditions for a New Way to Research Music: On the Ekphrastic Description of Musical Experience

Abstract This article addresses the subject of the ekphrastic description of experiencing music. It shows the main differences between ekphrasis and commonly used analysis in music theory and musicology. In approaching the problem of ekphrasis with what is called pure music, I emphasize its ancient understanding, thus differing from Lydia Goehr (2010) and Siglind Bruhn (2000, 2001, 2019). The ekphrastic analysis of the first movement of Arnold Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19 conducted in this article uses the methodology developed by Gottfried Boehm (2014) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2015, 2017, 2018) in the discipline of art history. This article aims to delineate a new way of researching the art of music, an essential feature of which is the combination of the traditions of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

The Importance of the Absence of Interpretation in the Museum Context in Promoting Children’s Participation in the Meaning-Making of Artworks

From its inception, the discipline of art history has involved developing and applying modes of interpretation to derive meaning from works of art. Art museums represent an institutionalized model of interpretation. Specialist guides and exhibition catalogs all represent ways of interpreting and understanding the meaning of works of art. However, based on a constructivist system of knowledge, such interpretations create preconceptions about the meaning of the work. It does not contribute to the diversity of its expression. For school-age children at the peak of their creativity, an overemphasis on the presence of interpretation removes their motivation to interpret on their own, making them become replicators rather than producers of the meaning of their work. At the same time, their contribution to the meaning of the work that their unique way of intuitively responding to it is ignored. This paper will, therefore, first argue for the importance of children in the multiple productions of meaning in works of art. It will then build on Davis and Gardner’s “Three-Window Approach” to show how the absence of expert discourse in museums (referred to as the absence of interpretation) facilitates the participation of schoolchildren in the meaning-making of works of art.

Art History, Postcolonialism, and the Global Turn

Abstract When taken as a conglomerate, the postcolonial, the global, and the decolonial might signal a coordinated “decolonizing” action—one of breaking with the Eurocentric, patriarchal, and nationalist foundations of art history. Yet from a disaggregating perspective, these three terms and their respective domains cannot be seen as synonymous or entirely harmonious. What particularly demands scrutiny is the tendency to dismiss the postcolonial, or announce its demise, by claiming it has been superseded by other paradigms, namely the global and the decolonial. This introductory essay, and its accompanying special issue of ARTMargins, seeks to trace the postcolonial, global, and decolonial as they have intersected with scholarship in art history over the past five decades, and to challenge postcolonialism's presumed obsolescence in the wake of the global turn. Postcolonial thought, we argue, has given rise to a generative series of critical interventions in art history at least since the 1970s and 1980s, and has proven to be nuanced and self-reflexive. Postcolonial lines of inquiry not only continue to offer ways of critically exploring colonial-era and subsequent artistic practices, but also allow for interrogations of formations of art and the discipline of art history as colonial forms of knowledge. As such, postcolonialism still vitalizes debates within the discipline regarding the constitution of its own objects, lineaments, and methods.

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Art Appreciation on Mughal Miniature Paintings from Islamic Art Museum Malaysia Kuala Lumpur

This paper discusses the art appreciation on Mughal miniature paintings from Islamic Art Museum Kuala Lumpur. The focus of appreciation is from five miniature painting had been exhibited at IAMM. Namely The exhibition of 14 Dynasties and a Region: The History and Culture of the Muslim World from 8th June until 16th October 2022. The analysis of the artwork is focused on the layout composition, variation of colors and the style The discipline of art history has been pioneered by the west and directly inevitably their formulas are also used in analyzing Islamic works of art.

Review: Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities, edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

Review: <i>Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities</i>, edited by Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky

The Persistence of Primitivism and the Debt Collectors

Abstract As the discipline of Art History increasingly aims to decolonize the gaze, questions have become paramount around cross-cultural influence and indebtedness, the traffic and translation of forms and ideas in the colonial modern era, and the mechanisms of postcolonial retrospection. Harney addresses these questions and the resonances of aesthetic primitivism in scholarship on African and diasporic modernisms and global contemporary artistic practices through a critical review of their weight within three recent volumes: Suzanne Preston Blier's Picasso's Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece (Duke UP, 2019), Joshua I. Cohen's The Black Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents (UC Berkeley, 2020) and David Joselit's Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, 2020).

An Evaluation On Decorated Female Gravestones In Mardin

Ölüm, insanoğlunun var olduğu andan itibaren yaşam döngüsünden ayırmadığı, kafa yorduğu, tanımaya ve tanımlamaya çalıştığı bir olgudur. Ölümün bir son olmadığı, ölen bireyin bu dünyadan ayrılarak başka bir aleme göç ettiğine, o alemde yaşamaya devam ettiğine inanılmıştır. Öteki dünya anlayışıyla birlikte insanlardaki ölüyü gömme ritüelleri birbirinden farklı mezar çeşitlerinin ortaya çıkmasında etkili olmuştur. İnanca bağlı olarak ortaya çıkan mezar çeşitleri ait oldukları toplumun sanat zevkini, inancını ve kültür düzeyini yansıtan önemli belgelerdir. Üzerlerinde ihtiva ettikleri başlık, yazı, figür ve nesneli bezemeleriyle yatanın cinsiyetini belirtir özelliktedirler. Erkek mezar taşlarında serpuş denilen başlık yer alırken, kadın mezar taşları daha zarif, süslü ve dönemin sanat zevkini yansıtan yoğun süsleme kompozisyonlarıyla kadının ruhunu yansıtır özelliktedirler. Binlerce yıllık geçmişi ve sayısız uygarlığın izini taşıyan Mardin, savaş ve istilalar sonucu birçok kez yakılıp, yıkılmış, mezar taşları da bu olumsuzluklardan nasibini almış ve günümüze yakın tarihli örnekler dışında gelen örnek olmamıştır. Mardin’de Muhammed Zırar (Dırar) mezarlığında 19. yüzyıl sonu ile 20. yüzyılın başına tarihlenen bezemeli kadın mezar taşlarından birkaç örnek Sanat Tarihi disiplini çerçevesinde değerlendirilmiştir. Değerlendirilmeye alınan örnekler kadın mezar taşları olup, şahideli, sandukalı ve pehle taşlı olmak üzere üç grupta tanıtılmıştır. Ele alınan örneklerin malzeme, form, teknik ve süsleme özellikleri bakımından bölge ve yurt genelindeki örneklerle benzer ve ayrılan yönlerine değinilmiştir. Sonuç kısmında ele alınan örneklerin Cizre, Savur, Nusaybin, Siirt gibi merkezlerde yer alan mezar taşlarıyla benzer form ve süsleme özelliklerine sahip oldukları tespit edilmiştir.

Çankırı Müzesi’nde Bulunan Tekke Şamdanları

Dini ve sivil mimaride birer aydınlatma aracı olmaları açısından işlevsel olarak kullanılan şamdanlar özellikle ışık simgeselliği çerçevesinde birçok inançta sembolik anlamlar yansıtmış ve bu sembolizm eserlerin tasarımını da etkilemiştir. Seramik, cam, maden gibi malzemelerden üretilen şamdanlar kullanıldıkları yere göre farklı boyutlarda üretilmiş ve buna bağlı olarak isimlendirilmiştir. Türk İslam toplumlarında dini ve sivil mimaride kullanılan şamdanlar tekkelerde de işlevselliğin yanı sıra sembolik anlamlar ifade edecek şekilde yer almıştır. Bu çalışmada tasavvuf ve tarikatlarda şamdan-kandil-çerağ kavramlarının işlevsel ve sembolik yönleri konusunda bilgiler verildikten sonra Çankırı Müzesi’nde yer alan ve Çankırı Taş Mescid Mevlevîhânesi’nden müzeye getirilmiş olan on üç adet tekke şamdanı sanat tarihi disiplini çerçevesinde malzeme-teknik-süsleme açısından tanıtılmış, tarihlendirilmeleri yapılarak değerlendirilmiştir. Bu çalışma ile tekke şamdanlarının tasavvuf literatüründeki sembolik ifadelerinin yanı sıra eserlerin sanat tarihi disiplini çerçevesinde incelenerek Türk İslam sanatındaki yerinin tespiti ve bu konuda yapılmış çalışmalarla birlikte sonraki araştırmalar için literatüre katkı sunulması amaçlanmıştır. Kaynaklarda tekkelerde kullanılan aydınlatma araçlarından çerağ ve kandiller fazlaca zikredilse de gerek yazılı gerekse görsel eserler ve müzelere farklı dergâhlardan gelen, 13-14. yüzyıl civarına tarihlendirilen örnekler şamdanların da tekke aydınlatma aracı olarak erken dönemlerden itibaren kullanıldığını göstermektedir. Bitkisel, geometrik, figür ve yazılı kompozisyonların yer aldığı bu eserler önemli bir sanat objesi olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Günümüzde farklı müze ve koleksiyonlarda yer alan tekke şamdanları biçimsel olarak farklılık göstermektedir. Genel olarak meydan-ı şeriflerdeki şamdanlar benzer olmakla birlikte Bektaşiyye’deki Kırk Budak Şamdanı ya da Mevleviyye’deki on sekiz kollu şamdan gibi farklı örnekler de mevcuttur. Bu farklı formların oluşumunda genelde tasavvuf literatürünün özelde ise ilgili tarikatın İslam inancı çerçevesindeki sembolik yansımaları etkili olmuştur. Şamdanların formunu etkileyen sembolik unsurların yanı sıra bu eşyaların temsil ettikleri bazı anlamlar da vardır. Tekkelerdeki şamdanlar tıpkı çerağ ve kandiller gibi dervişe seyr-i sülûkunda sürekli takip etmesi gereken ve yolunda yürümesini sağlayan Allah’ın nûrunu, Hz. Peygamber’i (s.a.v.), Kur’ân-ı Kerîm-i, ilgili tarikatın pirini hatırlatan bir unsurdur. Tekkelerdeki aydınlatma araçlarından kandil ve çerağlardan özellikle Bektaşiyye tarikatına ait olanlar özel isimlerle adlandırılmaları ve tasarımlarındaki sembolik yönler ile farklı araştırmalara konu olmuştur. Gerek tasarımları gerekse kandil ve çerağlar gibi yansıttıkları sembolik anlamlarla Türk İslam sanatının önemli örnekleri olan tekke şamdanları hakkında çalışmalar azdır. Bu makalede incelenen tüm şamdanlar madeni (pirinç) olup dövme ve döküm teknikleri ile üretilmiştir. Farklı mumluk, gövde ve kaide formlarına sahip eserlerden bazıları çift olarak üretilmişken tek olan örnekler de vardır. Eserlerden bazılarında mumluklarda görülen lale formu ve bir eserdeki yazı dışında süsleme unsuru yoktur. Üzerlerinde tarih ibaresi bulunmayan şamdanlar farklı müzelerde yer alan benzer vakıf ve tekke şamdanları ile karşılaştırıldığında ve Çankırı Mevlevîhânesi’nin tarihi süreci dikkate alındığında 19. yüzyıla ait örnekler olduğu görülmektedir. Yine farklı koleksiyonlarda yer alan birçok şamdanın üzerindeki ibareden vakıf eseri olduğu anlaşılırken çalışmadaki eserlerde böyle bir kayıt da yoktur. Tarihlendirme dışında önemli bir durum da sanatçı konusudur. Eserlerin üzerinde sanatçı-usta ibaresi mevcut değildir. Ancak eserler aynı döneme ait farklı alanlarda kullanılan şamdanlarla karşılaştırıldığında 19. yüzyıl şamdanlarında rastlanan ortak formları sergilemelerinden dolayı dönemin ortak dilini yansıtan eserler oldukları görülmektedir. Üretildikleri devrin özelliklerini yansıtan bu eserler gerek formları gerekse sembolik anlamları ile Türk İslam maden sanatının önemli örneklerindendir.

Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2021, 320 pages, hardback, ISBN 9781942130475, £28.00.

Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent work, Absentees (2021), gathers literary figurations of the absent(ed) or missing to consider the personhood of ‘nonpersons’ from antiquity to the present. With reference to contemporary analogies of virtuality, this critical review highlights the ghosts – or absences – in Heller-Roazen’s book, and proposes the discipline of art history as its spectral afterimage.

Daniel Heller-Roazen, Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2021, 320 pages, hardback, ISBN 9781942130475, £28.00.

Daniel Heller-Roazen’s recent work, Absentees (2021), gathers literary figurations of the absent(ed) or missing to consider the personhood of ‘nonpersons’ from antiquity to the present. With reference to contemporary analogies of virtuality, this critical review highlights the ghosts – or absences – in Heller-Roazen’s book, and proposes the discipline of art history as its spectral afterimage.

Editorial Commentary

Editorial Commentary

Virtual Reality and Learning: A Case Study of Experiential Pedagogy in Art History

While images are central to the discipline of art history, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the uses of digital environments for teaching in the discipline. Over the past decade, more studies have emerged considering the egalitarian space that can be used by students and teachers in web-based applications and social media. A body of literature has begun to emerge out of a small network of scholars and educators interested in digital humanities and art history, providing examples of how new tools can be integrated into the standard slideshow and lecture format of the field. At the same time, the latest technology that proves revolutionary for the field has had very little study-virtual reality (VR). Additionally, sensory evidence for digital art history and the creation of immersive interactive and multimodal environments for knowledge production is still underexplored. As multiple educational metaverses are currently under development, understanding best practices and pedagogical use of VR has never been timelier. This study seeks to review the pedagogical use of VR in art history current in the field and introduces results from a study of the most effective ways to use these immersive experiences using Bloom’s revised taxonomy. Results confirm that the most effective method to structure VR assignments is to provide training on the technology, provide students with the necessary instructional material to introduce the concept, skill or technique to be learned, create or select an immersive experience that reinforces that topic, and conclude with a debrief or discussion about major takeaways from the experience.

Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment

A groundbreaking ecocritical exploration of American art that examines the complex and evolving relationship between art and the environment Public awareness of environmental issues has never been greater, nor has the need for imagining more sustainable and ethical habits of human action and thought, including environmentally informed ways of understanding art history. This multidisciplinary book offers the first broad ecocritical review of American art and examines the environmental contexts of artistic practice from the colonial period to the present day. Tracing how visions of the environment have changed from the Native-European encounter to the emergence of modern ecological activism, more than a dozen scholars and practitioners discuss how artists have both responded to and actively instigated changes in ecological understanding. Far-reaching in its interpretive approach, Nature's Nation looks at artworks across genres and media-including painting, sculpture, prints, photography, decorative arts, and video-revealing important new discoveries about creative encounters with environmental history and politics through materials, techniques, subjects, and ideas. The book features work by more than one hundred artists, from Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Cole, and Winslow Homer to Georgia O'Keeffe, Jacob Lawrence, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Providing a fascinating and timely reframing of more than three centuries of American art, this volume is a powerful example of how greater ecological consciousness can expand and enrich the discipline of art history.

The issue is moot: Decolonizing art/artifact

This article seeks to step back from the long-standing debate between art and artifact—aesthetics and science-- understood as terms that reference central concerns of the quintessentially modern Western disciplines of art history and anthropology. In their landmark edited volume The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, George Marcus and Fred Myers explored the growing convergences exhibited by the concerns and methods of practitioners of the two disciplines, both in the academy and the museum. By training our attention on contemporary artworlds—understood as systems—they illuminated the exchanges of aesthetic and conceptual ideas and forms that have brought Western and non-Western arts into shared discursive and real spaces. Yet in the quarter century since the book’s publication there has been a noticeable retreat from attempts by the proponents of visual studies and an expanded visual anthropology to actualize disciplinary convergences. The boundaries that separate art and anthropology have not been dissolved. Art historians and anthropologists continue to ask different questions and to support different regimes of value. From the author’s vantage point in a settler society currently directing considerable energies to institutional projects of decolonization the old debates have rapidly been receding as a new ‘third term’ – Indigenous Studies-- intrudes itself on the well trodden terrain. Not (yet) definable as a discipline but, rather, maintaining itself as an orientation, Indigenous Studies nevertheless renders the earlier disciplinary debates moot. Place, rather than time-based, collective rather than individual, holistic rather than either disciplinary or interdisciplinary, Indigenous Studies formulations exert decolonizing pressures on institutions that are rapidly mounting. Using Anishinaabeg: Art and Power, a show in 2017 at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), as a case study, this article shows how an exhibition moved representation away from the art/artifact dichotomy as well as from contested strategies of ‘inclusion’ and pro forma recognitions of ‘Indigenous ontology’ toward a genuine paradigm shift.

20세기 초반 서구 학자들의 중국회화사 정점기 규정

Most Chinese painting histories written in the West in the early 20th century define the Tang and Song dynasties, especially the Song dynasty, as the pinnacle of Chinese art. In general, the rules of canon in art history are agreed upon by the interaction between academic achievements and art mechanisms such as art museums, art markets, and art education. However, in the early 20th century, Chinese art was not sufficiently distributed or educated in Western society. Therefore, understanding how scholars’ viewpoints were formed under these conditions is an example of what the discipline of art history depends on in a specific situation.<BR> Japan was the first country to publish the history of Chinese art, including the history of Chinese painting. What is noteworthy is the fact that the viewpoint of Japanese academics has changed from Tang-Song in the late Meiji period to the Yuan zenith theory of the early Taisho period, and there was a political intention behind this background. Although Western researchers had no political intentions, they were greatly influenced by Japanese publications such as Histoire de l’art du Japon and the Japanese and English versions of Kokka . Accordingly, in the early Chinese painting history in the West, the view of the Song dynasty as the apex was dominant. And it is inferred that the reason why the Yuan zenith theory was not accepted in the West was due to Western art history which viewed the Renaissance as the apex, and the prejudice against literati painting. In other words, it can be said that the Western Chinese painting history in the early 20th century was formed by the insufficient data for knowledge accumulation, the cultural power of Japanese art history academia, and the prism of Western art history.

“Potentially the Pompeii of East Africa”:

Focusing on a quotation by Mortimer Wheeler from the year 1955, when he called the ruined Swahili stone town of Kua on Juani island in the Mafia archipelago in today’s Tanzania “potentially the Pompeii of East Africa,” this article unravels some of the many layers encapsulated in this statement. The article contextualizes the passage by Wheeler with regard to the history of archaeology, colonialism, and tourism in the region. It interrogates ways how the discipline of art history can contribute to studies of the built environment along the East African coast. And it illuminates both the necessity and the potentials of decentralizing studies of the humanities on empirical-historical and methodological levels for future scholarship on the art and architecture along the Swahili coast as well as within the field of transcultural art history more generally.

Thoughts on the "global turn" as a disciplinary future

With a special emphasis on regional studies, this chapter takes up the challenge to theorize about the complexities of cultural interaction without imposing ethnocentric categories such as those that historically defined the discipline of art history on Euro-American terms. One of the primary obstacles to rethinking the discipline of art history has been the segmentation of our archives by period style and national culture. How can we access this past (and present) without also passing on values that may no longer be tenable but are inherent in our classifying terms and structures? I review issues of shared concern across a wide expanse of methods and subjects under four categories: (1) the problem of universals and universalism; (2) working within a national culture model in a transcultural setting; (3) the epistemic and ontological ground of research; and (4) the ethics of scholarship. I advocate for a material-based, non-transcendental ontology capacious enough to appeal to many different interpretative aims at the center of transcultural approaches, such as what happens when values, beliefs, and information are not held in common. In such cases, interpretation focuses on the heterogeneity of the artwork itself.

A Critique of the ‘Author Function’ Concept in Art History

Since the 1970s, the incorporation of European critical theory into the academic discipline of art history within the Anglophone context has become an established scholarly convention. This article aims to attend to one example of this institutionalised referencing practice: Michel Foucault’s notion of the ‘author function’ as explicated in the famous essay, ‘What is an Author?’ From Craig Owen’s attempt to develop a ‘materialist cultural practice’ to Caroline Jones’s recent exploration of the ‘artist-function’ in the reception of Robert Smithson’s work, Foucault’s concept has proved to be a rich source for art historians. That being said, the deployment of ‘author function’ has, as I will show, come at the price of a more careful examination of Foucault’s essay – one that does not permit the seamless reproduction, via a citational practice, of a concept from one study to the next.