Making spirits, making art, Nat carving and contemporary painting in pre-transition Myanmar (Burma)

Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Material religion Vol. 14; no. 3; pp. 285 - 313
Main Authors: Hasinoff, Erin L., Kendall, Laurel
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: London Routledge 03.07.2018
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects:
Aesthetics
Anthropology
anthropology of art
Artists
Contemporary art
Democratization
Imagery
Mass media effects
Mass media images
Materiality
Myanmar (Burma)
nat worship
object agency
Production
Sacredness
Secularism
sensational forms
spirit mediumship
Spirits
Technology
Visual arts
Workshops
Worldview
Myanmar (Burma)
ISSN:1743-2200, 1751-8342
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Embodiment, materiality, and technology intersect in the production of sacred images where tools, media, and intangible studio protocols inform the production of efficacious things. In Myanmar nat spirits appear in the bodies of costumed spirit mediums and in the intimately tended statues that adorn their altars. Prior to the recent democratic transition, nats appeared as the subjects of paintings, sometimes offering sociopolitical commentaries. This article explores the resonances between technologies of nat making in workshops that produce images for mediums and the techniques deployed by contemporary artists who have made nats the subjects of their paintings. In the Burmese religious world view, nats are lesser entities than the Buddha; their troubled histories of injustice account for their continuing agency as spirits in the human world. Appropriately, nat images are cruder than Buddha images; carvers are less likely to use precious wood or to observe Buddhist precepts and aesthetic guidelines while carving. A similar sense of the unrefined, unsettled nat is conveyed through the daring representational techniques and liberties of artists. We argue that connections between media, technique, and object agency can have resonance when sacred subjects are deployed in secular art.
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ISSN:1743-2200
1751-8342
DOI:10.1080/17432200.2018.1485428