Halle O'Neal: "Word Embodied: Entangled Icons in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Art"

Date
Thursday May 30th 2019, 5:30 - 7:00PM
Event Sponsor
The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford
Location
Humanities Center, Levinthal Hall
Halle O'Neal: "Word Embodied: Entangled Icons in Medieval Japanese Buddhist Art"

Abstract:

My project on the Japanese jeweled pagoda mandalas reveals the entangled realms of relics, reliquaries, and Buddhist scripture engendered through intricate interactions of word and image. The twelfth- and thirteenth-century mandalas use precisely choreographed characters from sutras rather than architectural line to compose the central icon of a pagoda. Surrounding this textual image, narrative vignettes pictorialize the content of the scriptures. This talk delves into the materiality of the objects and the dynamic viewing encouraged by such rich surfaces by using a digital animation to map how the textual characters construct the pagoda. Doing so uncovers alternative functions for written word that has jettisoned its exegetical purpose as well as the performative engagement that the paintings require of the viewer. These movements dictated by the surface encourage viewers to experientially constitute the resolution and dissolution of the various instantiations of Buddha body into one. Such a performance enables the concepts of sutra, relic, dharma, body, and pagoda to exist in a fluid and constantly interchanging visual relationship. This examination of the mandalas, therefore, recovers crucial underlying dynamics of Japanese Buddhist art, including invisibility, performative viewing, and the spectacular visualizations of embodiment.

Bio: Halle O’Neal (University of Edinburgh)

Halle O’Neal is a specialist in Japanese Buddhist visual and material culture in the University of Edinburgh’s History of Art department, where she is a reader and director of research. She has published on the subject of word/image interactions, performative viewing, and relics and reliquaries in Word Embodied,  a monograph with Harvard University Press, and articles in The Art Bulletin, Artibus Asiae, and Journal of Oriental Studies. From 2017–2019, she is working on a new book project on medieval reuse and recycling in Buddhist palimpsests with the support of a grant from the British Academy.

 

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