Third Text
Issues
Volume 37, 2023
Issue 2
Number 181, March 2023
Introduction – Make No Mystique!: Collectables’ (Dis)appearances in a Transoceanic Perspective 119–130
Manuela Ciotti
Impossible Stillness: Objects and their Edible Copies in the Global Museum 131-145
Marco Musillo
In exploring displays in European and North American museums with regards to Chinese arts, this article discusses how cultural hierarchies from Western hegemonies structure the concept of global art. Here the main focus is on the ‘Meat-Shaped-Stone', carved in Beijing during the late Qing dynasty, and on its travelling trajectory through the international stage. By considering how Western cultural institutions shape practices and languages of incorporation of the other, this article looks at the appearance and disappearance of objects, in the context of the creation of narratives of virtuous national identities, and imaginaries of political salvation through art.
Between the Social Limbo and the Art Canon: Afro-Brazilian Religious Artefacts in Rio de Janeiro 146–167
Roberto Conduru
From Luiz Alphonsus’s Rio de Janeiro Police Museum photographic series, this article discusses the complex framing of artefacts used in Brazilian religious communities linked to belief systems in some African regions, which exist between the social limbo and the Brazilian art canon. After briefly reviewing how random sets of objects violently and unsystematically seized by the police were considered criminal evidence, museum items or national heritage from the late-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century, this article analyses texts published by Raymundo Nina Rodrigues, Manuel Querino, Mário Barata and Arthur Ramos, who pioneered the artistic dimension of Afro-Brazilian religious artefacts based on European artistic principles. Concluding, this article focuses on how, under varied processes of institutionalisation, these artefacts still undergo different conceptual frameworks, being presented as criminal evidence or artworks, historical documents, or anthropological records, but are also at the centre of disputes regarding their institutional relocation, shared custody and sociocultural framing.
The Lowest Depths: Partition through Objects of Fictitious Togetherness 168–192
Atul Bhalla
In this article, I conceptualise my installation ‘Objects of fictitious togetherness–I' that centres on the interplay between memory, postmemory and the search for truth around the Freedom Struggle, the Partition of India in 1947 – and its aftermath in Punjab – and my encounter with the 1984 Delhi riots. Bringing together fiction, poetry, research and travel to now almost forgotten sites connected to Partition, as well as the experiences of my extended paternal family, who crossed borders, my practice attempts to make sense of events and the communal strife that has marked India's history and continues to do so. Against this backdrop, I chart the biographic, mnemonic and collecting processes leading up to the installation as a conceptual formulation of events that occurred at charged physical and symbolic sites. These sites are brought together through the trope of water – a central theme in my practice – and the local meanings shaping its ontology.
Crypt, Cornucopia and the Surface of Pattern: Vlisco’s Designs 193–206
Ananya Jahanara Kabir
This article argues that the development of highly patterned ‘African print’ textiles known as Dutch Wax print, which bring together designs from Indonesian batik, Indian ornamental protocols and West African chromatics with European fabric finishing techniques (often transferred from paper-making), is also the story of how Dutch mercantilism shaped commodities and taste across continents and cultures. I combine a symptomatic reading of the archives and design work at the Helmond headquarters of Vlisco, the most prestigious producer of Dutch wax, with an investigation into the relationship between mercantilism, religious wars and ornamentalism in the Low Countries. A thanatal, hallucinatory transoceanic design history emerges, attesting to Europe’s fraught relationship to African and Asian material culture. It asks us to read the textiles on which design coagulates as the very ground for the (re)ordered inscription of violence, guilt, trauma and material excess which the disorderly cornucopia of the design archive keeps generating.
Zinc Vignettes: Luminescence and Zinc in the Art of India, Britain and China c 1750 – c 1930 207–238
Natasha Eaton
This article explores the agency (often self-effacing) of zinc as the critical material and currency of British imperialism. For Primo Levi, zinc embodies a rite of passage between metals and his own sense of autobiography. Known as the Philosopher’s Snow, zinc can be conceived as soft or, as Roland Barthes would say, the embodiment of The Neutral. My discussion is concerned with the genealogies of zinc in Zawar (Rajasthan) and Guizhou Province, China. I am concerned with the politics and aesthetics of zinc in Chinese and British painting and how it became a ground for structuring the monument and how its afterlives are very much that of the filmic and phosphorescence.
The Buried Appraisals of Popular Art: Latent Archives, Actualised Repertoires and the Commodification of Locality in Goa, India 239–261
Prakruti Ramesh
This article explores some ways in which even positive publicity may entail the censorship of the persons and things being publicised. It focuses on the case of the nationally celebrated Indian artist Mario Miranda, some of whose productions reflected his attachment to his home-state, Goa. Since the 2000s, a fraction of his oeuvre has been used as a means of branding and individuating the region for a tourist clientele. I discuss the disjuncture between a limited repertoire of displayed images and a much larger archive of the artist’s work. As Miranda’s illustrations are made ever more widely available in the form of souvenirs and ‘public art’, the images themselves are bowdlerised and their political content evacuated. This repertoire of Miranda’s work, created in the likeness of the tourism industry against which he fulminated, has the retroactive effect of authoring the author and circumscribing the extent to which he is known.
‘Why do you fall in love? Why do you worship Vishnu and Shiva?’: Decolonising Collecting through the Visual-Material Cosmos of a Nation’s ‘Interior Designers’ 262–284
Manuela Ciotti
Jagdish Mittal, Vijay Kumar Aggarwal and Om Prakash (O P) Jain's biographies share a major commitment: the creation of art institutions in post-independent India. Labelled as India's ‘interior designers', these collectors have reshaped the visual-material cosmos that had been profoundly altered by colonialism both at home and abroad over the centuries. Formerly colonised and white-dominated communities' collecting practices are notably absent within the existing scholarship. Crucially, their practices are not premised on the appropriation and possession of the ‘other' through imperial conquest – at the centre of a large number of studies that analyse its long-term effects. By contrast, India's ‘interior designers’ are driven by the repossession of the self, ownership linked to the nation as well as preservation logics. This article argues that in order to decolonise the study of collecting, the epistemes governing such practices also need to be urgently foregrounded.
Phantom in the Landscape: The Golden Feral Trail 285–306
Archana Hande
The body of artworks entitled ‘The Golden Feral Trail’ emerges out of my journeys tracing the relationship between South Asia and Western Australia (WA). Linked by trade and migration flows since the early 1800s, the trail unfolds along the Gold Rush in WA and the detritus it has left behind. Drawing upon visits to cemeteries, abandoned graves, deserted mining pits, ghost towns, as well as on institutional archives, oral histories and personal photo albums in WA, I collected traces of the South Asian cameleers and traders, referred to as ‘Afghans’. A shorthand for very diverse nomadic sects found in British records, ‘Afghans’, together with local Wongutha, led British explorers in their gold exploration missions into the outback. This article argues that much has gone feral in the contemporary Australian landscape, including seeds, animals, abandoned mines and mining towns. The Golden Feral Trail – a history of nomadic economy, loss and erasure – runs beneath the Australian red soil. What is left on the surface is landscape phantoms.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group