Week II Blog Post

Doris Salcedo A Flor de Piel (2013)
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons Elevata (2002)

The thirteen objects I chose as syllabus foci for a global art historical approach to considering the spiritual, performative and conceptual understanding of the foundations we walk on. I engage this in the most capacious sense, greatly influenced by Sarah Lewis’ concept of “groundwork” and my own intrigue with African and African Diaspora studies and its material cultures. The objects exist across a range of geographical and temporal periods to allow students to consider the paradox of globality, that is the heightened sense of connection met with growing realization of incongruency brought on by uneven development. 

The objects illustrate the importance of ground or even groundlessness especially the conceptual objects such as Doris Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel. Salcedo sutured thousands of rose petals to create a fragile shroud usually displayed on gallery floors. The materiality of the object emphasizes the sheer fragility of life while the act of suturing them recovers them and gives them life anew. The mnkisi power figures and fetishes represent the charge of the ground. The very material existences of the Earth found and feed the works creation while spiritual understandings allow for the Earth to become transformed. 

Cuban-born artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ works speak to the familial and spiritual foundation in which her work is rooted. Her installation Sugar/Bittersweet alludes to her birthplace of Matanza, a sugar plantation in Havana. Sugar grounds the economic, political and social interests of the Caribbean and specifically in Cuba. Campos-Pons’ Eleveta and Kara Walker’s African/American present two figures that seem to be groundless, suspended in the air without any yielding to our common understanding of gravity. Foundation, ground and reason coalesce in the constellation of syllabi objects. The global condition requires a reassessment of the currents of art history and art historical narratives. Of course, this is not without trouble. In searching through the Harvard repositories, the objects require that we continually negotiate the definitions of art, but also how we reify hierarchies of art through collecting practices. I am most interested in the ways that syllabi—the readings, objects, and discussions—can help students wade through the historical baggage of art history.


Object Checklist

Anonymous maker

Power Figure (Nkisi)

Figurine

Peabody Museum

 

Anonymous maker

Bundle of Power Elements

Medicine Bundle 

Nubian/Egypt/Congo

 

Anonymous maker

Fetish on cord

Charm

Ghana

 

Anonymous maker

Fetish on cord, boar’s tusk

Ornament

Ghana

 

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

Elevata 

2002

Composition of 16 Polacolor #6 24-by-20 Polaroid prints

P2004.11

 

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

Sugar/Bittersweet Installation

Cooper Gallery

 

Nick Cave

Soundsuit (Found rugs)

2011

 

Paul Gaugin

Noa Noa/ Ordorant 

Woodcut Print

1893-94

 

Paul Gaugin

Nave Nave Fenua/ Terre délicieuse (Delicious Earth)

Print

1893-94

 

Gordon Parks

Untitled (Grave Site), Shady Grove, Alabama

Archival digital pigment print

1956 

2018.3

 

Doris Salcedo

A Flor de Piel

2013

2014.133

 

Ming Smith

Universal Consciousness with Alice Coltrane

1999/ 2016 print

 

Kara Walker

African/American

Linocut

1998

M24376

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