The Tireless Engine

Author : Kristopher W. Kersey
Publisher : Penn State Press
ISBN 13 : 0271098155
Total Pages : 619 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (71 download)

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Download or read book Facing Images written by Kristopher W. Kersey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2024-07-29 with total page 619 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If we want to decolonize the history of art, argues Kristopher Kersey, we must rethink our approach to the historical record. This means dispensing with Eurocentric binaries—divisions between Western and non-Western, modern and premodern—and making a commitment to artworks that challenge the perspectives we build upon them. In Facing Images, the question takes elegant and intriguing form: If the aesthetic hallmarks of “modernity” can be found in twelfth-century art, what does it really mean to be “modern”? Kersey’s answer to this question models a new historiography. Facing Images begins by tracing the turbulent discourse surrounding the emergence of Japanese art history as a modern field. In lieu of examining canonical works from the twelfth century, Kersey foregrounds the elusive and the enigmatic in artworks little known and understudied outside Japan; the manuscripts he selects defy traditional art-historical narratives by exhibiting decidedly modern techniques, including montage, self-reference, reuse, noise, dissonance, and chronological disarray. Kersey weaves these medieval case studies together with insights from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, using a methodology that will prove important for historians: Facing Images produces a history of non-Western art in which diverse and anachronic works are brought responsibly and equitably into dialogue with the present, without being subsumed under Eurocentric formalisms or false universals. A timely intervention in the history of medieval Japanese art, art historiography, and the history of global modernism, Facing Images redefines the relationship of the “premodern” non-West to “modern” art. It will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval Japanese art and of modernism.