Dr Robert J. Wallis signs 'Art and Shamanism' book contract with AltaMira

09/01/2012

Dr Robert J. Wallis, Professor of Visual Culture and Director of the MA in Art History and Visual Culture, has signed a contract with AltaMira Press (Rowman & Littlefield Publshing Group) for his book entitled 'Art and Shamanism, from Cave Painting to the Quite Cube'.

Dr Wallis has researched and published extensively on this topic and related themes for over a decade, with a particular focus on rock art. His new book will consider more broadly how art and shamanism have been conceived and negotiated over time, with a range of case studies 'from cave painting to the white cube' of the contemporary gallery.

The book will demonstrate how art and shamanism are often thought to span the history of humanity and persist across cultures, represented as timeless, universal features of human experience, with an apparently immutable relationship linking them. Shamanism is often held to represent the origin of religion and shamans are frequently characterized as the first artists, leaving their infamous mark in the Cave Art of Palaeolithic Europe – widely believed to represent the origins of art. Despite a disconnection of several millennia, modern artists too, from Wassily Kandinsky and Vincent van Gogh, to Joseph Beuys and Damien Hurst, have been labeled as inspired visionaries who access the trance-like states of shamans, and these artists of the ‘white cube’ or gallery setting, are cited as the inheritors of an enduring tradition of shamanic art. But, Wallis' book will argue, ‘art’ and ‘shamanism’ are not fixed, unchanging and uncomplicated, but constructed, historically situated and contentious. In contrast to previous scholarship, which straightforwardly affords a relationship between shamans and artists, and assumes distinctive continuity across cultures, the book will argue against widespread generalizing misconceptions of shamanism and art, offering a new approach, situated within the current scholarship on thing theory, materiality and agency across the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, art history and the study of religion, specifically the theorizing of a ‘new animism’ in anthropology. 'Art and Shamanism' will deliver a critically engaged, innovative and coherent approach to shamanism and art.

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1274.aspx