Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Myanmarian
19th-century, 20th-century
Urbana, IL: Spurlock Museum (2025)
60%
Shan Buddhist Manual on Astrology and Indigenous Medicine. late 19th-early 20th century. Mulberry paper, cotton, and ink
Fundamentally this doodled-on leaf from a not-super-old manuscript is a trifle, but having been museumized it compels artistic looking, and in small ways it rewards artistic looking. It's interesting to see the cup-shaped faces from Buddhist sculpture cropping up here in (what I assume to be) some monk's idle scratching. It's interesting to see a single page so evenly divided into deep-black text and indistinct-gray image — this gives the whole sheet a sort of proleptically layered quality, as if there are two distinct pictorial planes that are getting prepped to be laid one atop the other. The disorder of the half-dozen sketched scenes contradicts the orderliness of the text, and I like that transition period (from conscious to unconscious thought?) at page-center where there are just a few scratched symbols that seem to be drifting down into the drawn portion. Is it misguided to judge as art an object that was so passively composed? Maybe. But we do a version of this whenever we aesthetically like something was not just made just for aesthetic liking.