Research Interests
 

We and the world are enveloped in a common reality; objectivity and subjectivity are conflated, agency is entangled and the task of research is to excavate the way we capture through language, writing, images and models part of our ultimately contingent and partial condition of being. Research traces the boundaries of our linguistic, textual, visual and modelled formulations of the world in an attempt to map the contours of the unknowable focus of our technical, intellectual and creative endevours. I am motivated by the belief that by understanding the limits of cognition we may gleam some semblance of the shape and nature of the black hole of the “real”. In 1981, I began work on a book on anthropology's repressed anti-disciplinary lineage, sometimes called philosophical anthropology, which traces the connection between Kant, Cassirer, Jung, Piaget and Lévi-Strauss. I still intend to finish this book but in the meantime much of my work appears to me to have been haunted by the epistemological and ontological issues these and other authors raise.

My work is centred on the problem, limitation and politics of the representation of metaphysical categories through images (static, moving and performative). In my formulation of the discipline of critical museology I reorientate museum-based knowledge systems away from empirical and didactic preoccuaptions to focus on them as evocations and alternative and counter-evocations of ways we have sensed, mediated and expressed meanings. Critical museology has since 1995 to 2017, provided a methodology for nearly all the exhibitions I have curated.

My research on Mexican and Portuguese Indigenous and popular art has examined the intellectual and literary roots and the changing ways these have been articulated to mobilize images within specific knowledge regimes; the working of palimpsests to ghost the past and their political manipulations and counter usages as forms of resistance. I have conducted long term research on 16-20th century Mexican and Andean dance dramas; the telescoping and spalializasion of time in the invention of popular art by the Portuguese estado novo, and on the appropriation of African visual cultures within western tropes of fetishism, curiositys and art.

I am drawn to problems of materiality; the adoption of concepts of light and heavy matter, in the words of the Mexican researcher Alfredo López Austin in his interpretation of Mexica sculpture, or luminescence and shimmer as used by pre-Hispanic Andean civilizations and later in the colonial period by the painters of the Cuzco and Potosi schools. More recently the same concepts are found in Indigenous uses of metal foils, mirrors and polychromatic plastics and paper. I have also written on collections, assemblages, rusted metals and surfaces that absorb light, fetishized objects and desire. The affect of the uncanny, the displaced, the unnatural, whether in the manipulation of puppets, dolls, deity impersonators, fashion or melodies have woven themselves in and out of many of my essays.

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In 2019, I began divising a new project focused on the aesthetics and cultural categories embedded in Luso-tropical art-worlds. This project, if developed, will examine the combinations and frictions that have contributed to creating an Afro-centric sensibility that brings together markets, exhibition networks; belief systems and artist and literary exchanges between Salvador (Brazil), Mexico, Ghana, Togo, Benin and Southern Europe.

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Klee’s monoprint, Angelus Novus, later associated by Walter Benjamin with his “angel of history”, evokes a sensibilty that runs through many of my preoccupations and works. A tapestry of Klee’s angel, brought in 1980, from Zapotec weavers in Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, three times attacked by moths, still hangs in my book room.