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Networked Objects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2013

Mary Roberts*
Affiliation:
Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia; e-mail: mary.roberts@sydney.edu.au

Extract

Over the last decade an approach to 19th-century visual culture that focuses on cross-cultural contact and exchange has begun to supplement an earlier model of Orientalist critique focused primarily on the iconographic analysis of European Orientalist tropes and stereotypes. In this essay I engage with these discussions by analyzing what I will call networked objects. Tracking the mobility of art works and artifacts across cultural boundaries and their differing signification in varying sites of reception impels a nuanced understanding of how visual culture has been implicated in these networks of power. Influenced by anthropological debates, my approach focuses on the circulation of images and objects across cultures and within the region, exploring their function at divergent sites. Social networks of artists and patrons facilitated the transplantation of ideas and images, but the meanings of networked objects morphed independently of authorship according to their displacement to new geographic locations. Networked objects were also entangled within patterns of misinterpretation, blockage, and rupture as visual forms were created, reshaped, or productively misinterpreted in the environments into which they were transplanted, thus provoking challenges from the peripheries and divergent forms of indigenous agency.

Type
Roundtable
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Linda Nochlin's 1983 essay, the first transposition of Edward Said's critique of Orientalism into art history, exemplifies the important first wave of this critique. See Nochlin, Linda, “The Imaginary Orient,” Art in America 71, no. 5 (1983): 118–31Google Scholar, 187–91. The more recent shift in the field was heralded by Çelik, Zeynep in “Colonialism, Orientalism and the Canon,” Art Bulletin 78 (1996): 202205Google Scholar. See also Beaulieu, Jill and Roberts, Mary, eds., Orientalism's Interlocutors. Painting, Architecture and Photography (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 My approach has been particularly influenced by the work of anthropologist Nancy Munn. See Roberts, Mary, “Divided Objects of Empires: Ottoman Imperial Portraiture and Transcultural Aesthetics,” in Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930, ed. Codell, Julie F. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 159–75Google Scholar.

3 See Treter, Mieczysław, “Rysunki Sułtana Abdul-Azisa,” Lamus 4 (1908–09): 555–63Google Scholar; and Pawlikowski, M., The Studio 57 (1913): 162–63Google Scholar. Earlier, other sketches by the sultan gifted by Chlebowski to Annie Brassey were published in her diary. See Brassey, Annie, Sunshine and Storm in the East. Or Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1880), 113Google Scholar.

4 M. Sami, “Selatinde İncizab-ı Tersim. 19 Şubat 1329 [1913],” 14, 1 Mart 1330 [1914], reprinted in Osmanlı Ressamlar Cemiyeti Gazetesi, 1911–1914, ed. Yaprak Zihnioğlu (Istanbul: Kitap Yayınevi, 2007), 185–86.