On the first Thursday of 2022, Fulbright Speakers’ Series: The World Beyond a Book will welcome one of our very own distinguished speakers, Dr. Nora Taylor, Fulbright’s Interim Provost. In this discussion, Dr. Nora Taylor will shed light on her most recent article “Hunter-Gatherer or the Other Ethnographer? The Artist in the Age of Historical Reproduction”.
What is an artist ethnographer? To the American art critic Hal Foster (1995), it is an artist who incorporates into their artistic practice elements from cultures that are not his or her own. In the nascent era of Post-Colonial Studies, he was challenging the authority of the Western artist to speak for the “other” – the Global South.
In this talk, Dr. Taylor will revisit Hal Foster’s 1995 essay through the lens of the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo’s practice of collecting historical material. While Foster problematizes Western artists’ “primitivist fantasies” in the 1990s world of “postcolonial and “multinational capitalism,” Dr. Taylor will consider Vo’ 21st-century method of acquiring objects through auction sales, negotiations with their owners, and excavating them from their sites of origin, as reversing the roles of “self” and “other.” In purchasing White House memorabilia dated to the Vietnam-American war at auctions and salvaging antique statues from Vietnamese Catholic churches as artistic practice, Danh Vo complicates Hal Foster and other critics’ assumptions about Asian artists’ identities and Western artists’ appropriations of the “other” through ethnographical displays.
Join Fulbright in this exciting discussion with Dr. Nora Taylor at:
⏰8:00 – 9:30 PM on Thursday, January 6, 2022 (Vietnam time, GMT +7)
👉 Register at: https://bit.ly/FSS_DrNoraTaylor
The link to join the webinar will be sent to your registered email 24 hours before the event.
Fulbright Speakers’ Series is a quest for knowledge and understanding with diverse incisive viewpoints of prominent authors, both in Vietnam and globally, venturing into a myriad of topics ranging from development history and current Vietnam in the context of globalization, to the importance of mental health in being a compassionate community member.
About the speaker: Dr. Nora Taylor pursued her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Art History at Cornell University, followed by Vietnamese language and history, Southeast Asian art and archaeology, Buddhism, and anthropology. From 1992 to 1994, she received a grant to research her dissertation and spent two years in Hanoi. Over the next 25 years, she taught Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Art History for the Council on International Educational Exchange in Hanoi, National University of Singapore, Arizona State University, UCLA, Nanyang Technological University, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has traveled throughout Europe and Asia for conferences and spent large chunks of time in Vietnam. Dr. Nora Taylor has released several publications discussing Vietnamese and Southeast Asian art, including Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art, Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam, Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art: An Anthology and Studies in Southeast Asian Art: Essays in Honor of Stanley J. O’Connor.
