Overview

This chapbook examines the aestheticization of plants in colonial discourses and charts visualizations of art histories that use the tree as a metaphor. In doing so, Miriam Oesterreich considers how 'tropicalized' tree forms have been reappropriated to portray a more 'worlded' art history. In the mid-twentieth century, prominent visual artists including Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred Barr, and Ad Reinhardt featured trees of art as canonizing illustrations of Western art history. Using Pablo León de la Barra's poster Diagrama Tropical/Nova Cartografia Tropical (2010) as a starting point, Branching Out discusses works by contemporary artists from Latin America and the Caribbean to look at the subversive potential in reimagining plant images and metaphors.

Full Product Details

9783965580732

Table of Contents

Reviews

Branching Out offers a fresh, groundbreaking perspective on the intertwined botanical and art histories that have shaped narratives of Eurocentric intellectual evolution. Miriam Oesterreich presents a counternarrative, reinterpreting the banana tree as not only a symbol of colonial exploitation but also of artistic resistance. She challenges the tree's symbolic role in reinforcing linear, European-derived narratives of Modern art, framing the re-appropriation of the 'tropical' by artists of the Americas as a profound act of defiance within the emerging discourse of worlding art histories. - Dr. Joseph R. Hartman, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. This chapbook theorizes artistic networks from the perspective of traditionally non-centered regions. By detailing how western scholars and artists have deployed tree diagrams to present hierarchical classificatory schemes that privilege imperial centers in art and science, Oesterreich challenges the recurrent use such imagery as an apt metaphor for artistic evolution. She discusses the mechanisms through which tropicality has been positioned as an 'other' to western civilization, used to designate foreign cultures as menacing, chaotic, and consequently in need of so-called civilizing structures. As an example, the book traces changing representations of the banana plant, the ultimate symbol of the tropical in art, and its frequent association with sexuality and colonialism. Oesterreich argues that these frameworks ignore contextual power structures and instead proposes that notions of the tropical can serve as a form of resistance. She contends that by re-signifying the tropics, artists and scholars can make explicit the history of violence and exploitation that shaped and distorted colonized geographies. Instead of the tree, Oesterreich proposes the rhizome, with its ability to spread in all directions, as a metaphor that could counter the hierarchical organization of art history. This notion of art as both locally situated and entangled with larger ideas allows for the possibility of considering indigenous epistemologies and distinct temporalities, which she examines through a selection of case studies, including Tarsila do Amaral, Helio Oiticia, and Rosana Paulino. Her text presents an important new theoretical model for scholars researching artists from the Global South, allowing them to consider their connectivity to western developments without forever designating their production as behind or derivative, and thereby 'worlding' our understanding of modern art. - Michele Greet, Full Professor of Art History and affiliated faculty in Latin American Studies, Honors, and Women's Studies at George Mason University.

Author Information

Dr. Miriam Oesterreich is Professor of Design Theory/Gender Studies at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a post-doctoral researcher in the international project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation at the University of Heidelberg and remains an associated member. Previously, she was an Athene Young Investigator, post-doctoral fellow in Art History and Research Associate at the Department of Fashion & Aesthetics at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. For her second book, she is currently researching the global entanglements of Mexican Indigenism as an avant-garde art practice. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Freie Universität Berlin; her published dissertation analyses the staging of 'exotic' bodies in early pictorial advertising from 1880 to 1914. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open access journal Miradas: Journal for the Arts and Culture of the Américas and the Iberian Peninsula.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available