Título del proyecto: Circuitos de producción, distribución y consumo en la historia del arte japonés: Una revaluación historiográfica

Participación: Individual.

Estado: En fase inicial.

Institución base: El Colegio de México.

Otras: Fundación Japón (con financiamiento de un año para realizar estancia de investigación en Japón) e International Research Center for Japanese Studies – Nichibunken (como institución receptora en Japón por el período de junio de 2014 a junio de 2015).

Resumen: Por cuenta de que este proyecto se presentó a concurso en el programas de becas de investigación en estudios japoneses de Fundación Japón, el resumen que incluyo aquí está en inglés.

The project aims to study the role different circuits of production, distribution and consumption of material and visual culture had taken within the general history of Japanese art. If we examine carefully an important number of the academic output within the field of Japanese art history (in Japanese as well as English), we will notice that, usually, its study is organized in chronological terms, defining historical periods, selecting certain kind of production, and highlighting some objects and images as “representatives” of that moment. Of course, this is not particularly a specific problem of our field of study, but of the entire discipline of Art History, which has been challenged and discussed mostly during the last couple of decades. Nonetheless, there is barely such kind of discussions with regard to Asian Art History, and, in our case, Japanese Art History, and there is still a need for a thorough historiographical reexamination of some of the core problems which affect our discipline as well as the ways we interact with our research subjects.
Are really those objects and images “representatives” of a certain period? In which grounds this “representativeness” is based? It is not possible to consider the existence of different “cultural circuits” far beyond the hegemonic and legitimated grounds we are used to look at? It is possible for us to define different circuits for production, distribution and consumption of “art” which function diachronically through different historical periods, and which also interact synchronically with other circuits? How could we propose a new way of structuring the history of Japanese art, departing from this idea, and avoiding a linear historical perspective?
Thus, our research project will target these questions, examining first the ways the history of Japanese art history has been narrated, and then to try to build a new approach for considering the history of Japanese art based on the idea of “cultural circuits”, their specific developments, their parallel lives, and their interactions with the different milieus they were based on.
Of course, I am totally aware of the ambitiousness of this enterprise. That is why I am conceiving this project as a long term research, divided into various phases, of which the present application it’s the first one. In this sense, for this phase of the project I am mainly interested in identifying, within the historiography of Japanese art history, some of those core problems mentioned above, as well as to construct a theoretical structure based on circuits of production, distribution and consumption of art.
Besides the debate about the present state of study of our field, and also the proposal for a different way of consider it – based on the idea of “cultural circuits” –, there is another important goal at the agenda of this project. Up to the moment, there is not a single book published in Spanish conceived as a general history of Japanese art (nor as an original publication neither as translations). In this sense, it is of the interest of this project to produce a thorough introduction to Japanese art history in Spanish for the general public, based in the above mentioned framework, and enhancing this way the information and perspectives about this field to students, researchers and all the people interested in this subject.

Resultados: Este es un proyecto a largo plazo y en varias fases. Para la fase actual (la primera) se publicará un ensayo que presente al proyecto y sus principales líneas argumentativas. También se propone la publicación del libro «Historia mínima del arte en Japón», como parte de la serie que edita El Colegio de México.