11Story

22 January 2010

Vernacular parallels

Posing Questions: Being & image in Europe & Asia

Contents - Introduction  - The sections      * Agent      * Role      * Person       * Mind  - The panels      * Optical character recognition?      * Vernacular parallels      * Modernist Politics       * Show & Tell                                                        - Acknowledgements

 

 

Vernacular parallels

 

Since its Renaissance origins, the assumptions of mimetic idealism have come to dominate European portraiture and other practices influenced by it. The admirable character trait which such a portrait is supposed to reveal is normally one the subject would like to have.   Elsewhere, however, including large parts of Asia and vernacular Europe itself, ‘people pictures’ are often based on quite different assumptions.   People everywhere use portraits for company, commemoration, comfort, inspiration, delight, or as reminders of status or duty. For many, portraits are agents extending social networks to wider circles of the living, of ancestors or of gods.   Such practices are shared by millions across Asia and Europe but attract far less attention than élite or mainstream exchanges of orientalist and mimetic idealist artworks and of the sensibilities (social conventions) needed to decode them.

 

 

 

 

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