Studies in Remoteness critically engages with aesthetic tastes and social imaginaries that have emerged through forms of exile, migration, and ‘worldly exploration’, exploring how these have conditioned regimes of artistic and scholarly attention. The project approaches histories of distanced relations as intersectional and thus informed not only by the contours of geography, temporality, and cultural difference, but by how these intermingle with power, class, privilege, and politics. While rooted in modernist studies, subaltern studies, and critical colonial studies, the project further contributes to the art historical fields of reception studies, attention studies, and research in infrastructural aesthetics – all of which variously investigate what it means to expose subterranean, concealed, and/or unperceived lifeways, situations, and social processes to the witness of mass global publics. The project connects these nascent art historical subfields to Indigenous studies and the emerging field of rural studies.

As well, Studies in Remoteness identifies its topic as a powerful (if under-acknowledged) force driving aesthetic theory and modern taste. In the introduction to Theodor Adorno’s seminal work on the topic (1970), Robert Hullot-Kentor argues that, for the German philosopher, “society is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society” (1997 [1970], xvii). In an influential recent work of aesthetic theory, Sianne Ngai describes how the depiction of inaccessible peoples and places produces an aesthetic category she labels the ‘interesting’, which, “marks a tension between the unknown and the already known and is generally bound up with a desire to know and document reality” (2012, 5). By inquiring how taste (aesthetics) has systematically informed historical discourses on the knowable (epistemology), the project Studies in Remoteness addresses a history of complex aesthetic parasociality in a globalized world and analyses epistemology and aesthetics as entangled conceptual relations in the history of ideas.

In 1982, the Canadian art historian Francis Sparshott gave the presidential address of the American Society for Aesthetics on his concept of “remote art”, which was rooted in his great admiration for and collection of sculptural works of Indigenous Inuit carvers. Sparshott described how his experience of their work was conditioned by, “the complete strangeness of the culture from which the work stems, and its virtual inaccessibility” (1982, 134). Sparshott’s description of the remoteness of Inuit art, in this case, was shaped by gulfs of experience, geography, and privilege distancing ‘settler’ and ‘native’ in twentieth-century Canada. As Ngai argues, such settler desire to ‘know’ Indigenous art (which she places within her aesthetic category of ‘the interesting’), produces an “affective interface between colonized and colonizer” (2012, 282). Thus, Studies in Remoteness will critically examine how aesthetics of the unknown, like Sparshott’s ‘remote art’, emerge in dynamic, and often confrontational relations with political and economic histories of colonial occupation and extraction.

Continue to III. The Circumpolar North