Lost and Found at Sea, or a Shipwreck’s Art History

To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi­tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths

Horizons pacifiques de l’art américain

Au début de ce siècle, l’historien David Armitage déclarait : « Désormais, nous sommes tous des atlantistes ». Cette assertion, qui sonne comme une bravade, contient une grande part de vérité. À leur sommet, les Atlantic studies s’efforçaient (et s’efforcent toujours) d’ouvrir des perspectives méthodologiques et historiques sur les réseaux – réels, imaginaires, ou un peu des deux – reliant les populations et les marchandises des Amériques et de l’Afrique à celles de l’Europe occidentale. Elle..

Geographische Kenntnisse und ihre konkreten Ausformungen

Der Tagungsband untersucht anhand der drei für das Internationale Kolleg Morphomata programmatischen Schwerpunkte »Genese«, »Dynamik« und »Medialität« die Frage, wie sich epistemische Konzepte von geographischem Wissen in verschiedenen Kulturen und Epochen, in unterschiedlichen Medien und Materialitäten konkretisieren. Das Spektrum der Beiträge reicht von der jungsteinzeitlichen Wandmalerei (Çatal Höyük, Türkei) über Homers berühmten Schiffskatalog und antike Straßenverzeichnisse bis zu Allegorien der vier Erdteile in der Kunst der Neuzeit – schließt aber auch den neuentdeckten »Grazer Paravent« mit der Darstellung Ôsakas vom Anfang des 17. Jahrhunderts ein

American art’s Western horizons

Writing at the turn of the current century, the historian David Armitage proclaimed, “We are all Atlanticists now.”1 His claim evinces bravado, but carries a good deal of truth. When at its best, Atlantic Studies sought (and still seeks) to open methodological and historical perspectives onto the networks – be they physical, imagined, or some combination thereof – that connected people and goods of the Americas and Africa with those of Western Europe. There has been a pronounced hemispheric slant to this project, such that histories of the North have been more commonly written and fully developed than those of the South. Yet Atlantic Studies has been successful in pressing Americanists to grapple with the Atlantic as both lived space and metaphor, not merely as continental boundary.2 Today, Atlantic Studies still exerts more sway among those who study the United States and Great Britain than, say, Brazil or Ghana, but its intellectual project is now familiar. When it comes to the west, and more specifically, the Pacific, however, there is no parallel..