Weintz Art Lecture Series: Wendy Shaw
Stanford Department of Art & Art History's J. Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz Art Lecture Series presents Prof. Dr. Wendy Shaw.
"Looking, Listening, and Transcending the Self: From Lacan to Rumi and the Agency of Art History"
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s mid-twentieth century paradigm of the gaze articulates a mode of looking towards the Other as a mirror that displaces subjective identification to enable its consolidation. Widely accepted as reflecting human experience, this engagement resembles the art historical encounter with alterity that produces a cohesive image of culture through a panoply of cultural fragments, understood as artworks. Not only ascribing internal cohesion to a given culture, such art historical narratives also enhance the cultural capital of the subject through mastery of the dissected and reconstructed Other.
Yet the Lacanian model of the gaze emerges from two stories framed by the particularly French contexts of phenomenology, existentialism, and colonialism. Far from universal, the paradigmatic efficacy of such stories is culturally contingent. This paper explores what art history might learn from a different set of of parables describing encounters with alterity as articulated in the teachings of the thirteenth-century Muslim sage Jelal al-Din Rumi. In doing so, it undermines the epistemic colonialism of art history by inhabiting multiple narrative strategies, aesthetic articulations, and egalitarian ethics of subjectivity.
Professor Wendy M. K. Shaw (Ph.D. UCLA, 1999) publishes on the impact of coloniality and Eurocentrism on art-related institutions, heritage and preservation, modern art and pre-modern discourses of perception, and religious thought under secular modernism. Her work focuses on the Ottoman Empire, modern Turkey and regions of Islamic hegemony. She is author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire (University of California Press, 2003), Osmanlı Müzeleri (İletişim Yayınları, 2006), Ottoman Painting: Reflections of Western Art from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic (IB Tauris, 2011), What is “Islamic” Art: Between Religion and Perception(Cambridge University Press, 2019, Honorable Mention for the 2020 Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association and the 2021 Iran Book Award), and Loving Writing: Techniques for the University and Beyond (Routledge, 2021). Learning from her recent research which underscores the need to learn from rather than about culture and to expand intellectual discourse outside the academic sphere, she is currently making art engaging with premodern intellectual and aesthetic legacies.
This event will take place online via Zoom, please register in advance.
This lecture series is made possible by a generous grant from Fred Weintz and Rosemary Weintz.
Image: The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland.
—
This event will take place online via Zoom. Please register in advance (your name and email address are required). After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing a link to join the Zoom meeting.
Connect with the Department of Art & Art History! Subscribe to our mailing list and follow @stanfordaah on Facebook and Instagram.