Line: Art, Circulation, and Transfers
This research line concerns themes addressing discussions on artists' circulation and transfers; visual, stylistic, architectural, and iconographic models; as well as techniques, knowledge, theories, and precepts. It focuses on various forms of local and global mobility over different historical periods, including the circulation and transfer of concepts, ideas, theories, and issues related to historic and artistic heritage.
Such line stimulates researchers to identify collections and approach public and private collections, artistic objects, built heritage, and any visual materials that indicate artistic and cultural exchanges between different contexts, localities, and temporalities. Researchers are also expected to share theoretical reflections about causes and impact of artistic exchanges or transfers materialized by their research object. These reflections may concern the fields of critical reception, artistic geography, conservation and heritage themes, cultural policies, and social and historical conditioning that lead to art works transferring, appropriation, or assimilation by diverse cultural environments.
This line also comprehends the study of transcultural and transtemporal traditions and artistic practices, as well as the study of institutions that enable the survival or dissemination of cultural models; their reception and adequacy in different locations such as museums and libraries; the creation and development of Arts formal education institutions; and other practices of visual arts knowledge transmission, including exhibitions and art criticism. Forms and spaces of political and religious representations of relevance, as well as archives and the theoretical production related to them, may also be addressed within this line. Besides presenting extensive knowledge about their research object, both regarding its material scope and conceptual and historical aspects, researchers are also expected to be able to identify, understand, explain, and debate in a reasoned manner their research object constituting elements. In doing so, they will help understanding the context in which these objects arise and the dialogues they articulate with agents, cultural scopes, and time periods, renewing traditional approaches and inserting less disseminated works and agents into the historic-artistic debate.
References:
ANJOS, Moacir dos. Local/Global: arte em trânsito. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2005.
AUGÉ, Marc. O antropólogo e o mundo global. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2014.
BURKE, Peter. Testemunha ocular. História e Imagem. Bauru: Edusc, 2004
CASTELNUOVO, Enrico. Retrato e Sociedade na Arte Italiana. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006.
CHOAY, Françoise. Alegoria do Patrimônio. São Paulo: Editora da Unesp, 2006.
GOMBRICH, E.H. Arte e Ilusão - Um estudo da psicologia da representação pictórica. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995.
WARBURG, Aby. A Renovação da Antigüidade Pagã. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2013.
Line: Institutions, discourses, and otherness
This research line analyzes modern and contemporary images, objects, and artistic practices based on the concepts of institutionality, discourse, and otherness. Institutionalization processes of cultural goods and practices unveil explicit or implicit hierarchies among styles, eras, techniques, authors, social positions, and worldviews, enabling fruitful reflections on the relationship between art/cultural productions and their circulation and reception. The discourses and narratives constructed around works of art and cultural expressions also determine how they will be valorized and interpreted. Thus, beholding art and cultural productions and producers while traversed and formed by constructed narratives and considering institutions that welcome (or not) them, we try to understand these phenomena based on a philosophical, social, and historical context. When we deem that cultural forms and expressions are part of identity construction processes and that social differences and inequalities are reflected in and may subvert these identities, it is clear that both notions of identity and otherness are important analytical keys in the study of symbolic and material production.
Running counter to exclusively formal analyses based on the work of art supposed autonomy, this research line proposes approaches aimed at contextualizing both works and their creators within history, society, culture, ethnicity, institution, and the discourse. In a broader and interdisciplinary conception of Art History, unconventional objects and sidelined subjects are also valued. Institutions, discourses, and otherness focuses on the public and political dimension of Arts and expressive forms in general, their imagery and industries, be it visual and performing arts, architecture, photography, graffiti, cinema, or new media, as well as in exhibitions and other forms of visibility and legitimation of Arts and symbolic goods. This line welcomes studies of images, objects, artistic processes, and cities based on their production contexts, constituting agencies and hierarchies, and appropriations and reception modes, always emphasizing the interfaces between artistic creation and extra-aesthetic vectors and the richness of interdisciplinary reflections. It contemplates different historical, geographical, and theoretical references, seeking to cover hegemonic and non-hegemonic memories, knowledge, and devices.
References:
BLEICHMAR, Daniela. Visible empire: botanical expeditions and visual culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012.
BROWNLE; PICCOLI; UHLYARIK (orgs.). Paisagem nas Américas: pinturas da Terra do Fogo ao Ártico. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: São Paulo, Brasil: [Chicago]: New Haven; London: Art Gallery of Ontario ; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; Terra Foundation for American Art; In association with Yale University Press, 2016.
GELL, Alfred. Arte e Agência. São Paulo: Ubu, 2018.
GEERTZ, Clifford. Arte como sistema cultural. In: O Saber Local: novos ensaios em Antropologia Interpretativa. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1997.
GOLDSTEIN, Ilana S. Da representação das sobras à “Reantropofagia”. MODOS: Revista de História da Arte. Campinas, SP, v. 3, n. 3, 2019.
MCROBBIE, Angela.The Aftermath of feminism - gender, culture and social change. London: SAGE, 2011.
PRICE, Sally. Arte primitiva em centros civilizados. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2000.
KRAUSS, Roselind. O Fotográfico. São Paulo: Gustavo Gilli, 2012.
FRIZOT, Michel. Nouvelle Histoire de la photographie. Paris: Bordes Éditeur, 1994.
Line: Art, Philosophy, and Politics
This line of research investigates theoretical and methodological perspectives inherent to art historiography focused on the articulations between symbolic and political practices of several imagery/artistic objects of modern and contemporary scenarios. It approaches the construction of critical, speculative, and genealogical discourses on visualities from various themes within anthropology and philosophy, such as memory, identity, gestures and corporeities, image temporalities, life and community forms, diversity, decoloniality, and non-European epistemologies.
Grounded on a pluriculturalism that multiplies questions on forms life, this research line dwell on agents of a renewed cartography to understand Art in its unimpeded aimlessness by voices and gestures that constitute the contemporary expressive diversity. By doing that, it favors the transit through disciplinary fields often taken for granted – art history, philosophy, anthropology, ethnology, psychology, cultural studies – and embraces authors committed to deploy art history in an epistemo-critical manner to stimulate its methodological renewal. Such line also proposes inextricably political and artistic issues, thus favoring a dialectical problematization of images critical and social function – visualities, in a whole.
Its unequivocally revisionist perspective presupposes the inextricability of expressive supports, including visual events in cinema, photography, visual arts, and in diverse illustrations from the heterogeneous sensitive, which shapes the contemporary scenario.
In short, Art, Philosophy, and Politics invites a dense critical constellation projecting itself on a diverse artistic production to challenge the common ground of art, politics, and notions that have occupied critical discourse, aesthetic theories, and speculative, social, and political thinking, revising historiographical models proposed throughout the twentieth century. From this we have the proposed nature of some post-Benjaminian thought: the loss of the aura, art-life integration, modern art ethical dimension, contemporary art aesthetic efficacy, the distribution of the sensible, among others. In that sense, this research line assumes a critical perspective before the new formal sensibilities and the changes in artists and intellectuals' production conditions and, consequently, in their social role.
References:
RANCIÈRE. Jacques. A partilha do sensível. Estética e política. Transl. by Mônica Costa Netto. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2005.
DIDI-HUBERMAN, Georges. Diante da imagem. Questão colocada aos fins de uma história da arte. Transl. by Paulo Neves. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2013.
____________________. Sobrevivência dos vaga-lumes. Transl. by Vera Casa Nova & Márcia Arbex. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2011
BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. Radicante: por uma estética da globalização. Transl. by Dorothée de Bruchard. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2011.
SODRÉ, Muniz. Pensar Nagô. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017.
OVERHOFF FERREIRA, Carolin. Introdução Brasileira à Teoria, História e Crítica das Artes. São Paulo: Edições 70, 2019.
Line: Art and classical tradition
This line groups research articulating Art and Classical Tradition focused on the following subthemes: a) Studies of Greek and Roman arts from the Classical Archaeology perspective, addressing context, form, and function, and thus dealing with questions about workshops, artists, and principals; these arts purpose and use; the physical environments where they are displayed; how they operate within their time and place and the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic contexts that ascribe their meanings; b) Studies on art and culture in the Modern Age focused on historiography, sources, and objects, considering iconographic themes, relations between artists and principals, production and collectionism, and art and artistic literature.