Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/07/19, SPi
CONDITIONS OF VISIBILITY
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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.
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Conditions of Visibility
Edited by
RICHARD NEER
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
