Prof. Alicia Jiménez gave a paper at this year's Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at the University of Syracuse, NY (May 3-5, 2019). Alicia's presentation, in a session organized by Profs. Christopher Watts (University of Waterloo) and Carl Knappett (University of Toronto) on "Entangling Ancient Art", addressed questions of replication and invisibility of female bodies, using ancient Roman honorific statues as a case study.
http://tag2019.maxwell.syr.edu
Session 008: Entangling ancient art: new perspectives from Americanist to Classical archaeology
Session Chairs: Chris Watts and Carl Knappett
In this session, our aim is to explore recent approaches to ancient art across different fields of archaeology, from Americanist to Classical. In particular, we have in mind an assessment of some of the different questions that arise depending on the scale of enquiry. For example, the phenomenological move foregrounding the work that artworks do, as active agents in the practices of individual lives, has been effective in challenging the conception of the artwork as a subject of aesthetic contemplation. And yet, this shift of perspective also leads to a narrowing of view whereby only the local effects of an artwork can be recognized. When artworks share iconographic features with other objects scattered far and wide, however, there is another scale at which the artwork is operating that the phenomenological lens struggles to capture (see Stewart 2007). Iconographical scholarship may have been successful at this level, while also risking essentialist categorizations of entire art ‘cultures’. How are archaeologists and historians of ancient art to mediate between these two extremes of scale? What is the middle ground that might allow scholarship to both pay attention to the intimate interactions between individual bodies and artworks on the one hand, and to do justice to the dynamics of wider ontologies on the other? Here we suggest a two-pronged approach that draws on and develops current approaches across our discipline. First, ideas of entanglement and assemblage can and have been very usefully put to work as a means of documenting and exploring the myriad connections both among people and things, and between things. Second, the notion of a community of practice, when applied to art production and consumption, also has utility in helping us operate at a ‘meso-scale’ between the micro and macro scales outlined above. We wish to bring together scholars working across domains of archaeology that are usually quite separate (e.g. Americanist and Classical) to create a new dialogue on the range of problems encountered in tackling ancient art and the kinds of solutions that may now prove effective in this renewed archaeological interest in ancient art. Approaches may include consideration of particular material processes (e.g. containing) and their semiotic potentialities; the degree to which locally-sited art logics may or may not be mobile; the utility of ideas on the image as taken from work in visual culture/Bildwissenschaft; and the impact of the aesthetic turn, and degree of ongoing resistance to aesthetic perspectives.
8:20 Introductory Remarks
Christopher Watts (University of Waterloo) and Carl Knappett (University of Toronto)
8:40 The Anti-predation Reformation: Images and Onto-ethics in the Ancient Andes Darryl Wilkinson, University of Cambridge
9:00 Networks of artistic production in Egypt during the 3rd Millennium BCE Deborah Vischak, Princeton University
9:20 Replication and invisibility: ancient Roman female statues as a case study
Alicia Jiménez, Assistant Professor, Department of Classical Studies, Duke University
9:40 Art/Archaeology: Beyond Meaning in the Past Doug Bailey, San Francisco State University
10:00 Break
10:20 Drinking together: Entangled Pots and People from the Ancient Americas to Classical Greece
Mary Weismantel, Northwestern University 10:40 Color, keramos, and Cosmos
Jennifer M.S. Stager, Johns Hopkins University
11:00 The Curious Case of Coronado’s Shields: Towards a Pueblo Iconology on the Eve of Spanish Colonialism
Severin Fowles, Columbia University
11:20 Art in the Community: The Role of Antefix Production in Archaic Campania and Southern
Lazio
Anna Soifer, Brown University