Southeast Asia. Modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art: An anthology. Edited by Nora A. Taylor and Boreth Ly. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 280. Plates, Notes
| Autor: | David Teh |
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| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 44:355-357 |
| ISSN: | 1474-0680 0022-4634 |
| DOI: | 10.1017/s0022463413000167 |
| Popis: | Modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art: An anthology Edited by NORA A. TAYLOR and BORETH LY Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2012. Pp. 280. Plates, Notes. doi:10.1017/S0022463413000167 This overdue anthology is an uneven survey of an uneven field, reflecting the disjointed state of visual art production and discourse across an always tenuous geography. In her introduction, Nora Taylor wisely hoses down expectations of any comprehensive regional survey--indeed, the book's wide historical scope ('modern and contemporary') is matched by its medley of analytical modes and vocabularies. Essays range from forensic speculations on the techniques of a nineteenth-century Siamese muralist, to a psychoanalytic study of films about Khmer Rouge atrocities and commentaries on the latest 'relational' practices in international contemporary art. The breadth testifies not just to a patchy and interdisciplinary field, but also to the region's hitherto underestimated--and now burgeoning--variety of aesthetic modernities. Though an incomplete stock-take of recent scholarship, the anthology's concerns revolve around certain key problems. The incoherence of the region as a site of art practice and study is pivotal, as what Taylor calls the 'fight against generalizations' (p. 4) is complicated by the struggle for visibility of a region doubly marginalised--on the one hand by Euro- and US-centric histories of art, on the other by area studies often indifferent to the visual. But while the volume justly claims to be the first on modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art not connected to some exhibition or symposium, it nonetheless falls short of gathering disciplinary critical mass. The art historians here are outnumbered by others, and yet play a crucial role in linking diverse subject matter. John Clark's opening study of 'transitions to modernity' emphasises the artist's graduation from craftsman to a super-artisanal status. While empirical accounts of such social elevation remain scant in most places, it behooves scholars to consider carefully what 'art' might have meant in this or that place, before considering what modern art has come to mean. Clark's emphasis on professional self-consciousness--as constitutive of an aesthetic modernity mediated by colonial then national institutions and systems of distinction--offers a potentially useful framework for lassoing an unruly field. This would be especially valuable where artists have put old techniques to contemporary purpose, as in the finely wrought rattan sculptures of Sopheap Pich that are so suggestive for co-editor Boreth Ly, or the contemporary Javanese batik examined here by Astri Wright. Another tension animating the volume is that of distance: all authors are conscious of the parallax that attends looking, and writing, from afar, yet those that shine are the ones who waste the least time worrying about it. It is still the case that the most service to a regional art history is done by researchers operating within national frames. Among them here, Patrick Flores (The Philippines) and Lee Weng Choy (Singapore)--surely the region's two most reliable resident scribes--deserve mention. Without making pronouncements about Southeast Asia, their research furnishes regional scholarship with models for thinking through common shapes and problems, offering cogent critiques of national consciousness and policy, without losing sight of regional and global economic histories. Kenneth George's study of Islamic aesthetics in Malaysian modern art, meanwhile, is leavened by fruitful comparison with Indonesia. … |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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