Totality Against a Subject: Carl Einstein's Negerplastik

Modernist Antagonisms and Material Reciprocities: Chase-Riboud’s Albino

“…As Jones further notes, in this, Chase-Riboud asserts an affinity with "African creative traditions" through the work's vertical orientation and structure, in particular drawing "parallels to West African masquerades, which join wooden mask superstructures with fabric, raffia and other materials draping the body, and are then put into performance" (Jones 2006, p. 20). A similar comparison might be made with Louise Bourgeois' personages, which invoke certain principles of African art in their direct connection to the floor as a means to assert autonomy and agency (Zeidler 2004). 5 In many ways, these seem much closer to Chase-Riboud's thinking than the minimalism and postminimalism of her contemporaries.…”

Rethinking gender from the ethnographic museum. Introduction to the special issue

“…How we come to this ‘now-meaning’ must be deliberated on in ways that honor the object in its integrity, and this process relies on scholars who have the sensitivities, knowledge, and humility to engage the object in ways that dignify it, acknowledging that these hermeneutics are being deliberated on in active dialogue with a recontextualization of the object, as well as the very theoretical lenses through which the object is being studied. Whether Sebastian Zeidler's ‘vital bond’ (Zeidler, 2004: 16) or Diagne's enjoinment to honor what the object means to us now, we implicate the object and the museum as crucial actors in how we think and retheorize gender. In the words of one of our reviewers, museums, and especially the ethnographic museum, become ‘the places to think unthinkable thoughts’, at least ‘unthinkable’ (impensable) to those who gaze upon objects emerging from a ‘lifeworld’ whose original meanings have largely been lost (Deleuze, 1968; Trouillot, 1995).…”

“… 3. The curators also were aware that when considering material culture, one of the most difficult aspects to ascertain is how these artworks become hermeneutically, or in Sebastian Zeidler's terms, ‘deeply unhermeneutic’ to ‘the reader’ (Zeidler, 2004: 16). That is, any analysis of an artwork that is informed by a singular context largely unavailable to the reader – or unavailable in ways empirical – cannot but be at some level present itself in an epistemology that equates knowledge with reason.…”