Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories and Visual Cultures: Art, Design & Canon-making? Organised by Chulalongkorn University and University of Sydney, Communication Design Programme, CU, Bangkok.
19 April 2019
Abstract:
Among possible feminist approaches to de-staling the old question of what to do with the canon, we might try to imagine one that neither destructs it nor builds an inclusive version of it. Such an experiment would entail reversing figure-ground perspective. Rather than adding to and reordering the list and ranking of artworks, artists and authors, we would need to learn to sketch those invisible matters, lines, networks, and dispositions that constitute the ground and the potential for the coming into being of the work, the artist, or the canon.
This talk explores how we might proceed with a feminist approach to Southeast Asian art history writing by thinking counterintuitively about the ground, the invisible, and the ambient. Medium and matriarchs are my keywords. Drawing on examples from Southeast Asian art history, media theory, and urbanism, my talk surveys recent approaches, across wide-ranging fields, that reconceptualise the idea of medium. Rather than defining medium as a type of form, device, or platform, recent writings on medium associate it with such entities as infrastructure, ecology, or the elements, those entities which are less readily graspable as visual totality, yet which nonetheless constitute the condition of possibility for the visibility of the object and the audibility of the declaration. I’ll explore some ways in which these reworked notions of medium open up ways of thinking about women’s labour, power, or agency in art history. Then, drawing on the wayward artistic practices of female artists Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Anocha Suwichakornpong, I’ll propose a concept of the aesthetics of the matriarchal lifeline to try to evoke the radically relational ways in which their practices create living forms of entanglement with the nonhuman, the absent presence, or the unknowable.