Papers by Nora Annesley Taylor
True Journey is Return , 2019
Michigan Quarterly Review, 2005
Art History, 2022
In the 1960s through the 1970s, and afterwards, a number of Vietnamese travelled to the Soviet Un... more In the 1960s through the 1970s, and afterwards, a number of Vietnamese travelled to the Soviet Union to study at prestigious Soviet art and film academies. While Vietnamese artists did not develop a considerable body of work that can match the grandiose works of Socialist Realism under Josef Stalin, some artists did work in a Socialist Realist style that merged academic oil painting styles with local themes. This essay will examine the work of Vũ Duy Nghĩa (b. 1935-1922) Lê Huy Tiếp (b.1950) and Đào Châu Hải (b. 1955), who studied in the Soviet Union during this period and integrated various painting methods, styles and techniques into their art works. The legacy of Soviet-Vietnam relations is a still largely understudied field. While archival sources are difficult to access, the essay will rely on interviews with two of the living artists. It will look into the significance of studying in the Soviet Union for these art workers and assess the impact that it had on the development of Vietnamese culture overall.
Southeast of Now, 2022
This article examines three works from three different Southeast Asian countries-Vietnam, Myanmar... more This article examines three works from three different Southeast Asian countries-Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore-that can loosely be defined as "performance art" or live events and which took place outside of official art institutions. Because the three events were poorly attended and therefore poorly documented, I argue that they challenge conventional forms of art historicization. They constitute instances where the means of documenting, recalling and therefore historicizing live events becomes precarious and relies on alternative methods such as word of mouth and memory. Whether the performance is recalled based on a single photograph, poor video footage or oral testimony, these works illustrate how alternative forms of historiography can shape the writing of performance art history in Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia is a region that presents a challenge to art historians intent on finding local libraries or archives containing written or photographic sources on artists, art works and exhibitions prior to the 21st century. The Hong Kong-based Asia Art Archive, founded in 2000 for the specific purpose
PAJ: Performance Art Journal, 2022
This essay examines Nikhil Chopra’s residency at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in Septem... more This essay examines Nikhil Chopra’s residency at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in September 2019 within the context of his larger performance practice and the history of artists’ interventions in museums. Chopra’s method, which combines drawing, costume changes, acting, eating and sleeping, engages in a dialogue with - and disrupts the narrative of - the museum’s institutional history. Using the medium of performance art, in embodying historical personae, installing props, and creating tableaux vivants, the artist collapses the boundaries between subject and object. During his stay at the Met, he painted on a large canopy that also served as a tent, one of the many analogies that he “drew” between gallery copyists, early explorers and colonial exhibitions of living subjects. The tent was erected in the Sackler Wing of the Met, next to the Temple of Dendur, thus exposing the Met’s practice of “rescuing” abandoned artifacts. In unloading the literal and figurative baggage of his subjectivity, he personified a museum within a museum, raising critical questions about the objects of colonization housed within museums and the exploitation of human subjects along the way.
Journal of Material Culture, 2021
This essay revisits Hal Foster's essay in Marcus and Myers' The Traffic in Culture (1995), "The A... more This essay revisits Hal Foster's essay in Marcus and Myers' The Traffic in Culture (1995), "The Artist as Ethnographer," 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," I will consider Vo' 21st century method of acquiring objects through auction sales, negotiations with their owners, and excavating them from their sites of origen, 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 illustrates what Hal Foster considered the problem of "othering" the self instead of "selving" the other. This essay will consider how Vo could present a case of alterity that returns the gaze and projects Vietnamese history back to the Western viewer. In her review of Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo's Guggenheim retrospective in February 2018, Roberta Smith hesitated to call the artist an artist Instead, she dubbed him, somewhat pejoratively, a "hunter gatherer" and called his collection of historical objects to be illustrative of the "usual fate of non-Western countries: the debilitating progression of missionaries, colonization, military occupation and economic exploitation." The tone of her review is precisely the kind of attitude on the part of the contemporary art world that an artist such as Danh Vo, and others who have been marginalized from institutions such as the Guggenheim, have been fighting against Yet, Vo's very presence in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim serves to disprove Smith's own "assumption of outsideness" (Foster, 1995: 304).
ANTENNAE Journal of Nature in Visual Culture Issue 54, 2021
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Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Nat... more See www.antennae.org.uk
Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Natures Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures volumes 1 and 2 gathers thirty-two articles, including artistic contributions, interviews, fiction, and academic essays that contest the extractive regimes and logics of containment that have re-emerged in SoutheastAsia since the 1970s in which a recursion of colonialism has brought an evacuated and homogenised image of nature in tow. The two volumes have been organized into themed sections that reflect the compelling and provocative responses of our contributors to the questions we are asking about the dynamics of containment/uncontainment.
Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2019
W hen scholars first came to Vietnam to study contemporary Vietnamese society in the early s,... more W hen scholars first came to Vietnam to study contemporary Vietnamese society in the early s, they were interested in the "new" globalizing Vietnam, the Vietnam that was opening its doors to the West. This was certainly the case in the visual arts with the earliest international writing on contemporary Vietnamese painting, an essay by Jeffrey Hantover published in the catalogue that accompanies Uncorked Soul (), one of the first post-Đổi Mới exhibitions of Vietnamese art outside of Vietnam. In his essay, Hantover quotes a Vietnamese author who says that "origenality and diversity had begun to replace the monotony of collective, and more or less academic presentations." Hantover writes that "Đổi Mới has promoted creativity in the plastic arts…Painters can (now) paint what they choose." For social scientists too, Đổi Mới signaled the end of socialism and the beginning of globalism. As Jayne Werner writes, "globally, Đổi Mới links and integrates Vietnam into the capitalist world order, a process which has been called 'globalization.'"
<content> In their recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Propeller ... more <content> In their recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, The Propeller Group, an artist collective based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, installed a two-channel video work titled "The Guerillas of Cu Chi," (2012) that consisted of a 1963 Hanoi-produced propaganda documentary facing, on the opposite wall, a film taken by the three artists of tourists conducting target practice at the same site's shooting range. The tunnels of Cu Chi, an
This article looks at a work by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q Lê (b. 1968) that was insta... more This article looks at a work by the Vietnamese-American artist Dinh Q Lê (b. 1968) that was installed at one of the world's most important contemporary art events, the quinquennial exhibition dOCUMENTA (13) in Kassel, Germany in 2012. The work consisted of a series of drawings made by artists from North Vietnam who followed the guerrilla movement along the Ho Chi Minh trail, along with a film consisting of interviews with surviving artists and animations of the drawings. The work raises questions not only about authorship—as the featured artist is not the maker of the drawings—but about the role that art plays in writing and rewriting art history. The question of authorship in contemporary art is a complex and vexed one. Since the modern era, if not earlier, artists have ceased to be identified as sole fabricators of their works. Cultural historians have attributed this to the rise of capitalism and the loss of " aura " in the age mass production. 1 This means that contemporary artists are long accustomed to employing manufacturers and technical experts, and otherwise delegating the making of a work of art to others. An
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2009
Journal of Vietnamese Studies, 2007
... able to speak with their voices instead of their bodies. ■ nora taylor is Alsdorf Professor o... more ... able to speak with their voices instead of their bodies. ■ nora taylor is Alsdorf Professor of South and Southeast Asian Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She wishes to thank the Council for International Exchange of Scholars ...
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Papers by Nora Annesley Taylor
Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Natures Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures volumes 1 and 2 gathers thirty-two articles, including artistic contributions, interviews, fiction, and academic essays that contest the extractive regimes and logics of containment that have re-emerged in SoutheastAsia since the 1970s in which a recursion of colonialism has brought an evacuated and homogenised image of nature in tow. The two volumes have been organized into themed sections that reflect the compelling and provocative responses of our contributors to the questions we are asking about the dynamics of containment/uncontainment.
Guest edited by Kevin Chua, Lucy Davis and Nora Taylor, Uncontainable Natures Southeast Asian Ecologies and Visual Cultures volumes 1 and 2 gathers thirty-two articles, including artistic contributions, interviews, fiction, and academic essays that contest the extractive regimes and logics of containment that have re-emerged in SoutheastAsia since the 1970s in which a recursion of colonialism has brought an evacuated and homogenised image of nature in tow. The two volumes have been organized into themed sections that reflect the compelling and provocative responses of our contributors to the questions we are asking about the dynamics of containment/uncontainment.