Refiguring Modernism

Medieval Japanese Art and the Problem of Modernity

Kristopher W. Kersey

• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780271098166
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

If we want to decolonize the history of art, argues Kristopher Kersey, we must rethink our approach to the historical record. This means dispensing with Eurocentric binaries—divisions between Western and non-Western, modern and premodern —and making a commitment to artworks that challenge the perspectives we build upon them. In Facing Images, the question takes elegant and intriguing form: If the aesthetic hallmarks of "modernity" can be found in twelfth-century art, what does it really mean to be "modern"?

Kersey's answer to this question models a new historiography. Facing Images begins by tracing the turbulent discourse surrounding the emergence of Japanese art history as a modern field. In lieu of examining canonical works from the twelfth century, Kersey foregrounds the elusive and the enigmatic in artworks little known and understudied outside Japan; the manuscripts he selects defy traditional art-historical narratives by exhibiting decidedly modern techniques, including montage, self-reference, reuse, noise, dissonance, and chronological disarray. Kersey weaves these medieval case studies together with insights from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholarship, using a methodology that will prove important for historians: Facing Images produces a history of non-Western art in which diverse and anachronic works are brought responsibly and equitably into dialogue with the present, without being subsumed under Eurocentric formalisms or false universals.

A timely intervention in the history of medieval Japanese art, art historiography, and the history of global modernism, Facing Images redefines the relationship of the "premodern" non-West to "modern" art. It will be of particular interest to scholars of medieval Japanese art and of modernism.

Table of contents

• COVER Front
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Chapter 1: Antinomies Transiting Modernity in Japanese Art History
• Notes to Chapter 1
• Chapter2: Interface Between Visuality and Alterity
• Nottes to Chapter 2
• Chapter 3: Stratigraphy Facing the Eyeless Sutras
• Notes to Chapter 3
• Chapter 4: Anti-Aesthetics: Materiality and Visuality in The Significance of the Character “A” (Ajigi)
• Notes to Chapter 4
• Chapter 5: Viscera Anatomy, Prosthesis, and the Physiology of Vision
• Notes to Chapter 5
• Chapter 6: Montage The Anthology of the Thirty-Six Poets and the Modernity of Collage
• Notes to Chapter 6
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index