The Many Names of Anonymity explores two countervailing urgencies in contemporary cultural politics: the drive to recognize all individuals as artists so that they may be granted the rights and privileges of authorship; and, at the same time, the inadequacy of the modern figure of "the artist" to contain the ingenuity, imagination, and originality of anonymous workers. It does so by focusing on a long marginalized but ubiquitous genre of painting: portraits produced by Chinese artisans in the port of Guangzhou for European merchants during the long eighteenth century, at the height of the Qing dynasty. Termed the "Canton Trade" by historians, this period of trade between the Qing and Western European empires is remarkable for both the proliferation of visual and material objects generated by Chinese artisans for global circulation, and for the volume of commercial and administrative documents produced by European and American company agents about these transactions. In this relationship, makers are anonymized, while merchants' lives are preserved in vivid detail, but portraiture occasions the empirical scene of their encounter. The Many Names of Anonymity contends with this asymmetrical archive and documents the curatorial search for portraitists' names, even as it interrogates the privileges of individuality and property embedded in modern regimes of authorship. In so doing, this book charts a framework for understanding visual production and trade across overlapping imperial spaces, and demonstrates how contemporary art historical inquiry can yet decouple authorial names from authorial works, a step necessary to looking anew at anonymity, multiplicity, and the ingenuity of nameless artisans.

Image: courtesy Peabody Essex Museum

This event is generously supported by June and Simon Li, valued friends and supporters of art history.