| Popis |
The propensity to build visual cultures has been manifest in all human groups since the earliest times, but the mechanisms that help sustain these cultures are still poorly understood. To address this neglect, the developing field of world art studies – cognate with visual studies though in many respects in fierce tension with it (Davis, 2014; Rampley, 2017) – has increasingly been engaging with advances in natural and cognitive sciences. Central to understanding how these various fields coordinate with each other is the project of “worlding” visual cultures, which will also be the focus of my paper. Introduced by Whitney Davis as a methodological solution to the problem of addressing the diversity of visual and material culture from a non-particularist perspective (i.e., focused on the temporal, geographical and cultural location of individual practices), worlding aims at putting worldwide visual practices in the world, that is, studying them with the tools that are employed in explaining the natural world, including human world or human nature (Davis, 2009; Davis, 2017). Modes of inquiry would include, for instance, cognitive psychology, evolutionary sciences, cognitive anthropology, cognitive archaeology and many more, as there is no single privileged theoretical framework or unified call to order. I argue that embracing the project of worlding has major epistemological consequences for understanding visual cultures, allowing us to ask more general questions, less common in visual studies and mainstream art history. For example, what exactly needs undergo this worlding process, how are visual cultures to be individuated, carved up or modelled; what is it, if anything, that provides their internal coherence and consistency? And what can we learn with respect to our engagement with visual and material cultures radically remote from our own? As one possible avenue of worlding, I propose an approach from cognitive psychology to these questions, focusing on the ways in which expectations and cognitive schemas shape our response to the products of visual culture (Lopes & Ransom, 2023; Mortu, 2023). More specifically, I will be looking at rock art from the remote spaces of Aboriginal Australia (Ucko, 1977), which poses a real challenge for the project of worlding, especially with respect to processes of valuation across cultural and temporal boundaries.
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