***CANCELLED*** ANDREW FINEGOLD: Metonymy in Mesoamerican Art
Art History Colloquium
April 3, 2020
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
***ALL SPRING 2020 ART HISTORY COLLOQUIA HAVE BEEN CANCELLED***
In ancient Mesoamerica, images often directly responded to the forms, materials, or functions of their supports, or otherwise implicated their physical and social situatedness. In pointing to their contexts, such images can be understood as indexical according to the system of signs developed by Charles Sanders Peirce, but the close relationship between an image and its material conditions can also be classified as metonymical. Metonymy refers to expressions of contiguity or association rather than similarity; it is an additive form of expression, arising from adjacency in the same way that meaning is created grammatically through the combination of sequential terms in a phrase. In the elaboration of existing grounds with imagery deemed appropriate to them—and especially in the construction of teixiptla as embodiments of numinous forces—Mesoamerican artists regularly pursued an additive, associative practice of image making. This talk will argue that metonymy was more than a particularly favored representational trope in Mesoamerica, and that its consistent deployment can be directly linked to the ontology of images within an indigenous worldview.
Andrew Finegold is an Assistant Professor of Art History at UIC. He has published articles in the journals Art History and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, co-edited the volume Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), and his book manuscript, Vital Voids: Cavities and Holes in Mesoamerican Material Culture, is forthcoming from the University of Texas Press.
Date posted
Mar 4, 2020
Date updated
Mar 17, 2020