Express Yourself
In Search of Expression... View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eveline Boudreau
This paper looks into untapped potentials in performance art and spoken language. Both are means of questioning and telling, seriously and in fun. The spoken language is everywhere in our society while performance art is a special and more unusual form of communication. Can the spoken realm and performance art be explained through philosophy? What is the axiom of the spoken language and its relationship to movement and other techniques of performance art? Michel Foucauld’s concepts and explanations show links expressed between spoken language and performance art. The spoken language community uses words to go beyond simple communication, to think, to express emotion, and explore the world. The performance artist is, first and foremost, the medium, the performer and the author of their piece. Like the spoken expression, performance art is currently highly valued – for both, their impact may be pleasant, educational, or disturbing, and may carry important messages to spectators in a scopic way, beyond the ephemeral and the visual. I discuss those interacting linkages between those two forms of expression, important in our daily lives and in our desire “to build an epistemic community”.
Texts on Han Jade and Its Implications View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eileen Hau Ling Lam
Texts and images are commonly found on ancient ritual objects. These ritual objects, whether made of bronze, jade, lacquer, ceramic, or textile, frequently bear decorative motifs or pictorial images on the surface. Inscriptions or texts are somewhat less prevalent. Apart from the inscriptions on bronzes, texts or words on ancient ritual objects are brief and tend to be subordinate, or serve to provide information related to their manufacture. Interestingly, during the Eastern Han period, some inscriptions or texts on a wider range of ritual objects appeared as separate motifs, or were placed in a more important position on the objects. This paper selected jade, a material of object that usually are plain or have decorative motifs on the surface, and rarely bear texts or inscription, as a starting point. By examining the content and the way the texts are displayed on jade objects, this paper discusses the role and implications of texts on jade and other ritual objects during the Han era, particularly in the burial context.
In ‘Pursuit of Intimations’: In Praise of Non-methodologies in Writing Art History View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lizzie Lloyd
What happens when a work of art reminds us of a work of literature or another work of art despite bearing no clear historical, thematic or causal relationship? What value is there to following up on such resonances? How might this approach enable us to better understand the objects of our attention, or our responses to them? And how might our method of writing be harnessed to generate (not just communicate) such kinships? Michael Oakeshott – philosopher and political theorist – criticised the imposition of abstract theoretical models without adapting to the needs or requirements of the real-world situations. Thinking, he says, is developed not by applying preexistent methodologies but by ‘exploring and pursuing what is intimated’ by real-world situations. Political thought, he believed, should be adaptive and responsive. This paper argues that the same goes for art history. Methodologies and approaches should not be imposed upon artworks but should be allowed to emerge by intimation, from our encounters with them and our writing through those encounters. I characterise the contingent, individuated and associational nature of this kind of research – in which supposedly unconnected artworks and texts are brought into shared orbit by the art historian – as non-methodological. Non-methodologies, which pursue unforeseen intimations, are more receptive to the subjectivity of the viewer/researcher/writer allowing for a more open and emergent art-historical discussion in which the outcomes might be more reflective, creative and performative.
