Interpretative Frameworks
Follow the Footprint: An Ancient Mesoamerican Motif
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session D. Bryan Schaeffer
The purpose of this paper is to examine the footprint as utilized in several codices and other documents of Postclassic Mesoamerica in order to illuminate its loaded capacity to signify various categories within the overarching rubric of travel and movement. As its indexical quality usually produces only perfunctory notice, the footprint motif has profound conceptual implications that have been glossed over. The footprint’s use by Nahua, Mixtec, and other indigenous scribes, as it is relentlessly and rigorously repeated in different linguistic and ethnic groups’ artistic production, is typically noted by scholars in one or two sentences and nothing more. My contention in this paper is that the footprint provides us with a clarity of Mesoamerican conceptions of how movement is not just physically indexed, but also historically, ideologically, politically, and spatially charged. As I examine certain visual uses of the human footprint, I will explicate its engaging employment through various interpretive frameworks that demonstrate it is not necessarily a “natural” representation but one that guides the viewer from the image to the culture to the history of that culture and into an indigenous Mesoamerican production of knowledge through visual media.
Intersection of Drawing and Imagination in Poetry of Rumi: Rumi in the Garden
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Behzad Nakhjavan
It’s difficult to imagine architecture without representational sketches and drawings that lead to its completion during the construction of buildings. These drawings are multi-faceted in their origins. They are means of communicating ideas regarding a constructional detail of artifacts within the horizontal or vertical landscape, but also they can be works of art in itself and means of representing thought and imaginary reality as has been demonstrated throughout history of art and architecture by people like Piranesi. One can dwell in Piranesi’s imaginary drawings as one equally can find refuge and sustenance in interiority and depth of Rumi’s Poetry. The collection of drawings presented here are based on Rumi’s poems, an attempt to reveal the concentrated vision of Rumi’s meditative spaces in his mystical odes (ghazals) and quattrains (rubai) by exploring the single motif of Sufi landscape where the subjects evoke an atmosphere of solitude and aloneness.. Empty foregrounds in these illustrations allow viewer to enter the drawing while shadows help breakdown the sense of scale and perspective creating an intensely meditative space to dwell. Rumi was not interested in poetry. It was for him a way of being. The spontaneous words chanted during the Sufi dances, the short poems, as well as mystical odes were often without logical cohesion. Like these illustrations, they have a unity that comes from deep devotion and quest for religious experience.
Windscapes : Seeing Myth through Photography
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lillyana Toushek
Placed in a ‘world of increased communication, travel and migration’, the artist becomes ‘homo viator’, one crossing through signs and formats to relate to the contemporary traits of mobility in society. A traveling artist in an unfamiliar environment, instead of collecting postcard views, has a more specific focus, seeking to represent an engagement in the decentralization of the self. As a photographer, one can explore the disturbance of the habitual placement of personality by being enveloped by the unfamiliar as a means of expression. This can be linked to the experience of the place itself and the mythologies that are connected to its history. This paper will show, through discussion of images, a search through encounters of winds and seas in different places, to find social and personal affinities with the environments represented. Using abstract landscape photography, a visual translation of what can be described as the ‘quality of being ‘honey-eyed’ becomes the discovery of being embroiled in an external experience. This is a view opposed to the touristic brushing against the surface, questioning the ways the world is to be experienced through the liminal spaces of the travel encounter, seeking where the body is lingering between the unfamiliar and the habitual, getting deeply involved in the space itself. The narrative derives from readings and commentaries on art, as well as on travel and perception, searching for solid links between travel and visual representation of mythology through contemporary art and theory.
