Dr Wallis talks at National Portrait Gallery

01/10/2007

Dr Robert J. Wallis - Lunchtime Lecture at the National Portrait Gallery

Portraits in Prehistoric Europe: Against the Origins of Art
Ondaatje Wing Theatre, National Portrait Gallery
Thursday 1st November 2007, 13.15 – 14.00

Dr Robert J. Wallis, Director of the MA in Art History and Associate Professor of Visual Culture, will be giving a lunchtime lecture on prehistoric art. Portraiture is arguably crucial to understanding the history of western art, particularly from the formative period of the discipline in the eighteenth century. The portrait is historically entwined with our modern, enlightenment notions of what it is to be human, to be an individual, and the way in which we are gendered either male or female. Such categories are not human universals, however, and their application to early art and other indigenous visual culture is problematic. Concepts of bounded individuality, dualistic distinctions between male and female, and rigid divisions between human and animal are often blurred in non-western communities. Taken seriously and sensitively, animsm, shamanism, multiple gender and ‘fractal personhood’ disrupt the search for the origins of art, as well as our understandings of ‘consciousness’ and ‘modern humans’. This lecture examines depictions of humans and others in prehistoric rock art in order to critically reflect on our assumptions about what it is to be human.

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1087.aspx