More than Meets the Eye: The circulation of images and the embodiment of value

Abstract

This article examines the popular, cheaply mass-produced prints known as ‘calendar’ or ‘bazaar’ art, going ‘beyond appearances’ to explore how their value and power is located not just in their visuality as such, but also in their capacity as circulating objects. I describe how these prints can be seen as sites of intersection between the colonially-derived institution of ‘fine art’ and what historians have called the ‘bazaar’ economy. The postcolonial visual regime in which bazaar images circulate is therefore characterised by different but co-existing frames of value and moral-commercial economies. The animated circuits of bazaar icons, I argue, have served to shore up relations of credit and exchange in the ‘informal’ social, moral-ethical and commercial networks of the bazaar, obviating the distinction between sacred and commercial forms of value. However, there are tensions between the role of images in the bazaar and the schema of aesthetic judgement within ‘fine art’. Here I focus on the way in which performative and bodily engagements, integral to a ritual and devotional relationship with images, have been denigrated within an aesthetic schema which privileges a distanced, disembodied gaze. This paves the way for a re-examination of the notion of the fetish, asking why one of the few categories that speaks to the power of the image as a circulating object rather than as a static sign does so within a moral framework of denigration and abnormality. I relate this denigration to the historical conditions of this concept's appearance, and the specific ideological work it has had to do within a European bourgeois-liberal public sphere.