Full Description
In Probing Arts and Emergent Forms of Life Michael M. J. Fischer calls for a new anthropology of the arts that attends to the materialities and technologies of the world as it exists today. Fischer examines the work of key Southeast and East Asian artists within the crucibles of unequal access, geopolitics, reverberating past traumas, and emergent socialities. He outlines the work of artist-theorists---including Entang Wiharso, Sally Smart, Charles Lim, Zai Kuning, and Kiran Kumar---who speculate about changing the world in ways that are attuned to its cultivation, repair, and rethinking in the Anthropocene. Their artistic vocabulary not only undoes Western art models and categories; it probes the unfolding future, addresses past trauma, and creates contested, vibrant, and flourishing spaces. Throughout Indonesia, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam---and from Kumar's experimental dance to Kuning's rattan and beeswax ghost ships to Lim's videography of Singapore from the sea---Fischer argues that these artists' theoretical discourses should be privileged over those of the curators, historians, critics, and other gatekeepers who protect and claim art worlds for themselves.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Challenging Art as Cultural Systems 12
2. Synthetic Realism: Postcinema in the Anthropocene 31
3. Feminage, Warang, and the Nervous System (Hauntology and Curation) 71
4. Nomadic Video in Turbulent Sea States: How Art Becomes Critique 100
5. Water Notes on Rattan Strings 132
6. Raw Moves and Layered Communication across the Archipelago Seas 165
Epilogue. Probing Art and Emerging Forms of Life 197
Appendix. The Year 2020 and the Camouflage Painting Series: Conversations with Entang Wiharso 215
Notes 221
References 253
Index 281
