This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent c... more This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, or Miss Chief for short, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor and the postindian approach to translation he proposes. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which is framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on his championing of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve Santos posits as indicative movement of the post-abyssal. The discussion concludes by proposing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a postindian, post-abyssal, decolonial era of the future, superceding the ‘botanizing’ Baudelairean flâneur representative of modernity/coloniality.
Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona eBooks, 2018
Driven by the flow of global capital the much-cited ‘global turn’ in contemporary art has expande... more Driven by the flow of global capital the much-cited ‘global turn’ in contemporary art has expanded art markets and introduced a degree of geographic decentring, allowing for new connectivities. The challenge is to harness the potentiality offered by this new proximity for the incomplete project of decolonisation and to generate a future of positive difference. Taking my cue from Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of the abyssal cartography of the modern, and his call for the creation of post-abyssal epistemologies, the discussion focuses on the exclusion of indigeneity in contemporary art explored in view of Indian floor designs from Tamil Nadu and draws on Deleuze-Guattarean post-human aesthetics to do so. A further argument revolves around questions of method and the proposition that as artists are responding to this scenario, developing creative strategies to address these challenges, art’s writerly ‘other’ is lagging behind, generating a mismatch between new aesthetic departures and the staid models of creating meaning employed in disseminating such projects. I propose that a greater creative co-implication of art and art writing constitutes a key, untapped dimension for engendering the positive potentialities the global harbours in response to present day multi-directional transcultural linkages that exceed existing narratives of art and push up against the Eurocentric dualisms of objective and subjective, fact and fiction, the verbal-textual and the visual-aesthetic.
Millicent Pilkington (1872–1960) travelled from Lancashire to India in 1893 for a year of ‘frivol... more Millicent Pilkington (1872–1960) travelled from Lancashire to India in 1893 for a year of ‘frivol’. Pilkington was the daughter of Thomas Pilkington, son of William Pilkington, one of the founders of the hugely successful Pilkington glass works at St Helens on Merseyside. The 1881 census lists Millicent’s mother Catherine C. S. Pilkington as born in Calcutta, and some of her time in India was spent with cousins in Hyderabad. Her journey to India followed fairly well-established tourist routes: London to Brindisi by train, and then by steamship to Bombay with Port Said and Aden as the major stops on the way. She documented her sojourn in India in a 50-page, leather-bound travelogue-cum-souvenir album that combines a carefully arranged mix of watercolours, sketches, photographs,1 autographs and ephemera with extensive narrative passages.
The twice daily marking of thresholds with ephemeral chalk-powdered design, executed by women, co... more The twice daily marking of thresholds with ephemeral chalk-powdered design, executed by women, constitutes a unique, cross-caste form of ‘traditional’ visual pratice. In contrast with the high level of visibility of the design in the public domain of the street, the pratice is charaterized by an astonishing degree of cultural invisiblity, as evidenced by the lack of a body of literature on the subject. Given the popular appropiation of folk and traditional arts for representing ‘Indianess’, this striking oversight of threshold design is not only suprising, but indicative, as I will argue, of the ambiguities and unresolved complexities of ‘woman’, art and culture in post-colonial India, which translate into a marked difficulty of placing the tradition within dominant constrution of Indian arts. This article hence seeks to locate the practice of threshold drawing, as encountered in Tamil Nadu, between tradition and cultural (post)modernity in the Indian discourses of art and culture. The proposed argument is that we need to turn to the loaded binaries of masculinity and femininity as operative in the gendered discourse of Indianness and culture, in order to understand the practice's low cultural visibility This investigation is part of a wider study of post-colonialism, Eurocentricity and the aesthetics of decoration.
This article seeks to outline a performative reading of the Tamil version of the pan-Indian tradi... more This article seeks to outline a performative reading of the Tamil version of the pan-Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs, an exclusively female practice seen as housework by the executing party. The argument put forward is that a reading of the practice in terms of a performative relation of ‘home’ and the ‘world’ as part of the Tamil cultural imaginary locates the ‘home’ not only in terms of a larger ‘local’ community but also within Tamil spatio-temporal perceptions constituting the ‘world’ at large. More generally, this performative perspective is situated in the context of the polycentric rearticulation in the visual field proposed by the emerging discipline of visual culture. It seeks to break from previous discussions informed by Eurocentric notions of art versus craft and understandings of the ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ as firmly located in the past and hence, in the present modern age, as characterized by a sense of loss.
Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art,... more Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art, Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics and notions of perception, as well as anthropological theory for ways to create connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Embracing a unique and experimental format, the book imagines encounters between the art works and art worlds of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female contemporary artist named Rikki T, in order to rethink normative aesthetic and cultural categories. Its method reflects the message of the book, and embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives to steer critical attention towards the complexity of artistic life beyond the gallery.
Gurney’s rethinking of mid-Victorian mass politics through the lens of mass consumption, therefor... more Gurney’s rethinking of mid-Victorian mass politics through the lens of mass consumption, therefore, also returns class to the center of this story. In particular, he invokes an older scholarly characterization of Chartism as a specifically working-class movement produced by an equally specific set of contingent historical circumstances, above all the diversification and intensification of economic exploitation in the 1830s and 1840s, the mass strikes of 1842, and the passage of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (or, New Poor Law), all of which reconfigured the laborer “not only as a worker but also as a consumer” (66). He thus rejects more recent interpretations—by Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce, and James Vernon, for example—that have viewed Chartism as a more loosely defined movement of the people, evolving out of long-standing traditions of constitutionalism and oppositional politics associated with political radicalism since at least the late eighteenth century. Indeed, for Gurney the Anti-Corn Law League was likewise an implicitly, if not explicitly, class-specific political enterprise; he asserts that “[c]onsumption practices and free trade ideology helped unify the middle classes as much as if not more than anything else” (237). If he rejects many of the claims of political historians who have decoupled Chartism from the working class, therefore, he likewise rejects those of gender historians who have identified so-called separate spheres as a primary feature of the culture of the Victorian middle classes. Thus, Gurney’s history in many ways invokes an older vision of the politics of the Hungry Forties as a history of class struggle in the Industrial Revolution, albeit one in which class now is understood as being as much about individuals’ available means of consumption as their relationship to the means of production. In doing so, he returns class to the center of nineteenth-century political history, demanding that we acknowledge the “profound trauma” working people experienced during the rise of industrial capitalism, and that we continue to reflect on the ways in which their experiences informed, and continue to inform, British political life (16). Christopher Ferguson Auburn University
Archivo Papers. Journal of Photography and Visual culture, 2023
The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view ofquestionsof indigeneity in the visual ... more The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view ofquestionsof indigeneity in the visual arts by drawing on the concept of the post-Indian created by the Anishinaabe author and theorist Gerald Vizenor and the figure of the urban earthdiver, where he re- imagines the earthdiving trickster of Native American Indian creation myths as mixed- blood contemporary worldmaker and decolonial agent of change. The propositions inherent in the work will be discussed in relation to notions of the post-abyssal and an ecology of knowledges by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the conception of"de-linking" as decolonising put forward by Walter Mignolo.
This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent c... more This discussion posits that the work of the Cree artist Kent Monkman offers a unique and potent contribution to the project of decolonisation rooted in an Indigenised context. Focusing on the parodic, art historical interventions of his artistic alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, or Miss Chief for short, it explores his art in view of ‘transmotion’, a crucial but often overlooked aspect of postindian tricksterism outlined by the Anishinaabe author Gerald Vizenor and the postindian approach to translation he proposes. His approach will be considered against the foil of the project of decolonising proposed by the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which is framed in terms of a post-abyssal ecology of knowledges, with a focus on his championing of intercultural translation and the motion of the swerve Santos posits as indicative movement of the post-abyssal. The discussion concludes by proposing the Vizenorian figure of the mixedblood, urban earthdiver as figurehead for a postindian, post-abyssal, decolonial era of the future, superceding the ‘botanizing’ Baudelairean flâneur representative of modernity/coloniality.
Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona eBooks, 2018
Driven by the flow of global capital the much-cited ‘global turn’ in contemporary art has expande... more Driven by the flow of global capital the much-cited ‘global turn’ in contemporary art has expanded art markets and introduced a degree of geographic decentring, allowing for new connectivities. The challenge is to harness the potentiality offered by this new proximity for the incomplete project of decolonisation and to generate a future of positive difference. Taking my cue from Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ notion of the abyssal cartography of the modern, and his call for the creation of post-abyssal epistemologies, the discussion focuses on the exclusion of indigeneity in contemporary art explored in view of Indian floor designs from Tamil Nadu and draws on Deleuze-Guattarean post-human aesthetics to do so. A further argument revolves around questions of method and the proposition that as artists are responding to this scenario, developing creative strategies to address these challenges, art’s writerly ‘other’ is lagging behind, generating a mismatch between new aesthetic departures and the staid models of creating meaning employed in disseminating such projects. I propose that a greater creative co-implication of art and art writing constitutes a key, untapped dimension for engendering the positive potentialities the global harbours in response to present day multi-directional transcultural linkages that exceed existing narratives of art and push up against the Eurocentric dualisms of objective and subjective, fact and fiction, the verbal-textual and the visual-aesthetic.
Millicent Pilkington (1872–1960) travelled from Lancashire to India in 1893 for a year of ‘frivol... more Millicent Pilkington (1872–1960) travelled from Lancashire to India in 1893 for a year of ‘frivol’. Pilkington was the daughter of Thomas Pilkington, son of William Pilkington, one of the founders of the hugely successful Pilkington glass works at St Helens on Merseyside. The 1881 census lists Millicent’s mother Catherine C. S. Pilkington as born in Calcutta, and some of her time in India was spent with cousins in Hyderabad. Her journey to India followed fairly well-established tourist routes: London to Brindisi by train, and then by steamship to Bombay with Port Said and Aden as the major stops on the way. She documented her sojourn in India in a 50-page, leather-bound travelogue-cum-souvenir album that combines a carefully arranged mix of watercolours, sketches, photographs,1 autographs and ephemera with extensive narrative passages.
The twice daily marking of thresholds with ephemeral chalk-powdered design, executed by women, co... more The twice daily marking of thresholds with ephemeral chalk-powdered design, executed by women, constitutes a unique, cross-caste form of ‘traditional’ visual pratice. In contrast with the high level of visibility of the design in the public domain of the street, the pratice is charaterized by an astonishing degree of cultural invisiblity, as evidenced by the lack of a body of literature on the subject. Given the popular appropiation of folk and traditional arts for representing ‘Indianess’, this striking oversight of threshold design is not only suprising, but indicative, as I will argue, of the ambiguities and unresolved complexities of ‘woman’, art and culture in post-colonial India, which translate into a marked difficulty of placing the tradition within dominant constrution of Indian arts. This article hence seeks to locate the practice of threshold drawing, as encountered in Tamil Nadu, between tradition and cultural (post)modernity in the Indian discourses of art and culture. The proposed argument is that we need to turn to the loaded binaries of masculinity and femininity as operative in the gendered discourse of Indianness and culture, in order to understand the practice's low cultural visibility This investigation is part of a wider study of post-colonialism, Eurocentricity and the aesthetics of decoration.
This article seeks to outline a performative reading of the Tamil version of the pan-Indian tradi... more This article seeks to outline a performative reading of the Tamil version of the pan-Indian tradition of drawing threshold designs, an exclusively female practice seen as housework by the executing party. The argument put forward is that a reading of the practice in terms of a performative relation of ‘home’ and the ‘world’ as part of the Tamil cultural imaginary locates the ‘home’ not only in terms of a larger ‘local’ community but also within Tamil spatio-temporal perceptions constituting the ‘world’ at large. More generally, this performative perspective is situated in the context of the polycentric rearticulation in the visual field proposed by the emerging discipline of visual culture. It seeks to break from previous discussions informed by Eurocentric notions of art versus craft and understandings of the ‘primitive’ or ‘traditional’ as firmly located in the past and hence, in the present modern age, as characterized by a sense of loss.
Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art,... more Encounters Beyond the Gallery challenges the terms of their exclusion, looking to relational art, Deleuze-Guattarean aesthetics and notions of perception, as well as anthropological theory for ways to create connections between seemingly disparate worlds. Embracing a unique and experimental format, the book imagines encounters between the art works and art worlds of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tamil women, the Shipibo-Conibo of Eastern Peru and a fictional female contemporary artist named Rikki T, in order to rethink normative aesthetic and cultural categories. Its method reflects the message of the book, and embraces a plurality of voices and perspectives to steer critical attention towards the complexity of artistic life beyond the gallery.
Gurney’s rethinking of mid-Victorian mass politics through the lens of mass consumption, therefor... more Gurney’s rethinking of mid-Victorian mass politics through the lens of mass consumption, therefore, also returns class to the center of this story. In particular, he invokes an older scholarly characterization of Chartism as a specifically working-class movement produced by an equally specific set of contingent historical circumstances, above all the diversification and intensification of economic exploitation in the 1830s and 1840s, the mass strikes of 1842, and the passage of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (or, New Poor Law), all of which reconfigured the laborer “not only as a worker but also as a consumer” (66). He thus rejects more recent interpretations—by Gareth Stedman Jones, Patrick Joyce, and James Vernon, for example—that have viewed Chartism as a more loosely defined movement of the people, evolving out of long-standing traditions of constitutionalism and oppositional politics associated with political radicalism since at least the late eighteenth century. Indeed, for Gurney the Anti-Corn Law League was likewise an implicitly, if not explicitly, class-specific political enterprise; he asserts that “[c]onsumption practices and free trade ideology helped unify the middle classes as much as if not more than anything else” (237). If he rejects many of the claims of political historians who have decoupled Chartism from the working class, therefore, he likewise rejects those of gender historians who have identified so-called separate spheres as a primary feature of the culture of the Victorian middle classes. Thus, Gurney’s history in many ways invokes an older vision of the politics of the Hungry Forties as a history of class struggle in the Industrial Revolution, albeit one in which class now is understood as being as much about individuals’ available means of consumption as their relationship to the means of production. In doing so, he returns class to the center of nineteenth-century political history, demanding that we acknowledge the “profound trauma” working people experienced during the rise of industrial capitalism, and that we continue to reflect on the ways in which their experiences informed, and continue to inform, British political life (16). Christopher Ferguson Auburn University
Archivo Papers. Journal of Photography and Visual culture, 2023
The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view ofquestionsof indigeneity in the visual ... more The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view ofquestionsof indigeneity in the visual arts by drawing on the concept of the post-Indian created by the Anishinaabe author and theorist Gerald Vizenor and the figure of the urban earthdiver, where he re- imagines the earthdiving trickster of Native American Indian creation myths as mixed- blood contemporary worldmaker and decolonial agent of change. The propositions inherent in the work will be discussed in relation to notions of the post-abyssal and an ecology of knowledges by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the conception of"de-linking" as decolonising put forward by Walter Mignolo.
Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 2016
The historian Peter Hoffenberg referred to the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883-4 as ‘In... more The historian Peter Hoffenberg referred to the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883-4 as ‘India’s own Great Exhibition’, that is ‘a South Asian version of the first international exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851’ and as ‘the largest, most comprehensive and popular Indian exhibition of its day’. It was financially successful and the colonial government in India celebrated its achievements in terms of numbers of exhibitors, articles on display, awards bestowed, and its approximately one million mainly Indian visitors, claiming this native interest in this ‘Exhibition for India’ as its primary aim while citing the furthering of trade with Australia as secondary objective. I argue these claims as a belated face-saving exercise adopted when the original but ultimately unsuccessful ambition of the Calcutta International Exhibition to be a true world fair had failed and it became apparent that the world was not only not going to descend on Calcutta in droves as had been anticipated, but that it had decided instead to ignore the exhibition altogether. The discussion explores the political and colonial contexts of this failure in relation to the larger phenomenon of international exhibitions.
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Papers by Renate Dohmen