Mediated transportation: social relations agencyed by non-Western material indices and works of art

Abstract

In attention to the differences observed between the regimes of production and fruition of works of art and non-Western material indexes, this text establishes intercultural nexuses concerning social relations mediated by things. To this end, it compares the aesthetic regime with critical considerations about the autonomization of the work of art in modernity, and the correlated expurgation of its functional dimension. The self-centered character of art is thus confronted with the agentive function inherent to the material universe cultivated by original societies. From this exercise, a zone of interpretative contagion is derived, within which a representative work of contemporary artistic production transits.