Mémoire
| Résumé : | The present master thesis will consider the imaginative representations artists create as a means of knowing tha thelp them making sense of a cultural environment and their place in it. Acknowledging the relational nature of arts and the influences at stake in the conception of transcultural art production, the cognitive approach presented in Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998) will serve as a base to articulate the research. Gell’s theory of art will then be revised and actualized under the light of iconology, cognitive and education sciences and anthropology of memory. Artworks will then be considered as imaginative representations that help artists as multicultural individuals making sense of a cultural environment and their place in it. In other words, using art as a comprehensive medium, the research will focus on a phenomenological approach to the individual experience of cultural heritage by analyzing the processes generating images and the self-reflective discourse artists build around their multi-faceted identities and oeuvres. The phenomenological aspects of the thesis will be illustrated on the hand of the case-study French Vietnamese artists of Saigon, subject of a previous thesis project. Finally, this whole process will eventually encourage the establishment of an anthropological iconology and lay ground for new methodological frameworks in the study of cultural heritage and its transmission based on visual representations. |
