What Do Rubbings Preserve? A Foray into the Aesthetics of a Technique
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
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| Description | The focus of my attention is the case of the Mayanist archaeologist Merle Greene Robertson who appropriated (and adjusted) in the 1960s the Chinese rubbing techniques to record Maya stelae and other reliefs as a way of preserving their designs, but also as a means of reproducing their artistic content – she would exhibit the rubbings back in the States. A complex cultural transfer is happening here: the appropriation of an ancient East Asian method by a 20th-century American archaeologist in order to reproduce 8th-century Mayan bas-reliefs. I want to argue that the nature of the rubbing method makes it attractive for a particular pictorial imagination, one that tends to locate value in the acknowledged or explicit planarity of pictures. But does the fact that a rubbing can be made of a relief suggest that this kind of pictorial imagination also informed its production? |
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