Dr Robert J. Wallis to present paper at CAA Conference, Chicago

08/02/2010

The Director of the MA in Art History, Dr Robert J. Wallis, will be presenting a paper at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago, in February. The CAA meeting is the largest forum for arts professionals and attracts delegates from all over the world. Wallis' paper, in the 'Theorising Things' session, addresses the 'hidden' megalithic art in the passage tombs of Ireland, and he approaches this material through the interpretative lens of animism.

Title: The coevalness of persons and things: thinking through ‘hidden art’ in Irish Neolithic passage tombs

Abstract:
‘Hidden art’ in Irish Neolithic passage tombs, positioned on the reverse of stone surfaces, so not visible to the human eye, is neglected in the scholarship in favor of the more visually stunning exposed material. I consider the implications of anomalous ‘hidden’ imagery for our understanding of the nature of ‘things’ in the Neolithic. Recent interpretative work draws axiomatic distinctions between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, the living and the dead, modern dualisms overlooking other ways of knowing, such as indigenous animism. Hidden art was arguably not meant to be viewed by living-humans, but by others living below/behind the surface, accessing the imagery from the other side. Hidden art may cite the perspectives of other-than-human-persons, marking evidence of their intentionality and personhood; it was not only hidden but perhaps ‘hiding’. Theorizing in this way repositions such ‘passive’ things as agentive and associated as much with non-human as human agency.