Asserting the Vernacular: Contested Musealities and Contemporary Art in Lima, Peru

This essay examines three museums of contemporary art in Lima, Peru: MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art), MALI (Lima Art Museum), and MASM (San Marcos Art Museum). As framed through curatorial studies and cultural politics, we argue that the curatorial practices of these institutions are embedded with tensions linked to the negotiation of regional, national, and international identities, coloniality, and alternate modernities between Western paradigms of contemporary art and contemporary vernacular art in Peru. Peruvian national institutions have not engaged in the collection of contemporary art, leaving these practices to private entities such as the MAC, MALI, and MASM. However, these three institutions have not, until recently, actively collected contemporary vernacular Peruvian art and its by-products, thus inscribing this work as “non-Western” through curatorial practices and creating competing conceptions of the contemporary. The curatorial practices of the MAC, MALI, and MASM reflect the complex and contested musealities and conceptions of the contemporary that co-exist in Lima. This essay will address this environment and the emergence of alternative forms of museality, curatorial practices, and indigenous artist’s strategies that continually construct and disrupt different modernities and create spaces for questioning constructs of contemporary art and Peruvian cultural identities.

Translatio Poetriae

The Occitan treatises on the art of poetry are among the earliest vernacular arts of poetry. However, they adapt the pedagogy of the classroom implicit in Latin treatises like the Poetria nova to the court milieu beginning in the thirteenth century. This paper illustrates this development by comparing the new vernacular art with the Latin art found in Geoffrey’s treatise and commentaries on it as well as in other treatises written and commented on in the twelfth-thirteenth centuries and beyond. The Occitan treatises were written for laymen; although ignorant of Latin, they wished to write in the style of the early troubadours but with adaptations to the new subject matters of fin’amors. Key documents include the different versions of Guilhem Molinier’s Leys d’Amors written for the Toulouse consistory as well as some Catalan courts. An important feature of this emerging vernacular art is the imitation and emulation of recognised masterpieces of the art, including the ‘ancient troubadours’ and some Latin pieces, as the vernacular art evolved under supervision of the Inquisition. These changes are evident in the works of model poets such as N’At de Mons and Ramon de Cornet on whom I focus in this paper. Latin pedagogy is evident in the Occitan treatises these authors exemplify, but with adaptations to the new vernacular. The troubadour influence went north to some French courts and beyond. The role of intermediaries that link different vernaculars will be briefly noted in conclusion, a rayonnement not unlike that identified in Woods’ study on the diffusion in Europe of the Poetria nova and commentary on it.

Prefacio I

This special issue constitutes an excellent and representative testimony of the variety of contributions presented during YOCOCU 2016. The reader will find that the 41 papers in this special issue cover a wide range of materials (stone, gypsum, lime, mortar, ceramics, metal, paper, videos, textiles, paintings, plastics, pigments …), from different types of art and heritage: architectural and archaeological; contemporary and digital art; industrial heritage, vernacular, art caves and ethnographic heritage; museum collections, landscapes and intangible cultural heritage (CH).

Akimbo Culture

This chapter examines the physical and participatory implications of blackface dance, and the dance cultures more generally, depicted by William Sidney Mount. It also uses the evidence drawn from Mount's visual depictions to locate prototypical blackface dance vocabularies and rhythmic practices in vernacular art works of the earlier nineteenth century. The chapter first considers the resources for recovering the kinesics of minstrelsy, along with visible evidence of Afro-Caribbean influence on bodily kinesics, before turning to juba and the aesthetics of African movement. It then analyzes Mount's choreological evidence to illustrate the consistency with which he records and manipulates the cultural associations of body vocabulary, as well as his integration of the creole synthesis in his works. It argues that it was rhythm and dance that accounts for minstrelsy's remarkably immediate yet enduring popularity and influence. It shows that, in addition to the symbolic transgression of bourgeois grace implicit in Jim Crow's akimbo representation, the images' anatomical distortions also capture movement, not stasis. The chapter concludes by looking at the so-called “bending knee-bone” in blackface performance.

The Flying Dutchman, English Spectacle and the Remediation of Grand Opera

Richard Wagner wrote in 1852 that in settling on the theme of the phantom ship he had entered ‘upon a new path, that of Revolution against our modern Public Art’, that is,grand opéra. Wagner’s revolution has often been described in light of the poetics of return and homecoming that contributed a new sense of identity to (German) opera. The present article is written against the grain of this conviction, and highlights the cosmopolitan career of the phantom ship and of the vernacular art forms – the nautical theatre and the phantasmagoria – that maintained the seafaring image at the forefront of the liberal imagination, first in Britain, and then in Paris, where Wagner arguably seized on it. Specifically, it explores the significance of ‘apparitional images’ to mid-nineteenth-century opera and Wagner’s turn to a regime of modern spectacle, inspired by the art of phantasmagoria, inDer fliegende Holländer.