The Syncretic Turn

In an age where cross cultural practices and multiculturalism extend contexts, boundaries, and definitions, Fisher seeks to explain the interdisciplinary approach of syncretism as a means for understanding art. Academia's strictly defined codes and narrow perspectives in art history and art criticism must be expanded to include art with transformative and open-ended processes. "Non- academic art is a speaking not an already spoken... art criticism tends to look at or address the experience of the work but at a commodifiable level of context" (Kocur and Leung, 234). Artists must seek to create a space for free expression and being heard, a place of new awareness, to speak the unspoken, while also being self-protective. "A rather perverse turn of thought is required that reconceptualizes cultural marginality no longer as a problem of invisibility but one of excessive visibility" (Kocur and Leung, 235). To avoid the familiar, the artist uses symbols that reflect an authentic autobiographical voice and "truth," but also the enigma of self hood and realities imagined. It is an issue of the denigration of cultural purity. This is best understood in terms surpassing hybridity, two discrete identities combined to produce a third capable of resolving its parental identities, because of the implied loss and redemption in the formation of the third term (Kocur and Leung, 237). The notion of syncretism is more appropriate, where there are "no simple translations but an element of untranslatability, which is a potential space of productive renewal."

As an art student, I struggle with the duplicity of painting my own style, from my own experiences, while also making a piece that is sensational for a viewer and won't make me feel too vulnerable. I have painted as self therapy, re-hashing past experiences in painted imagery. But I was always careful to share those pieces with only selective viewers. I was pleased to discover, however, that often an outside viewer was unable to decipher the symbolism in the paintings, and that gave me a sense of security in the disclosure. My personal symbolisms and contexts are specific to my own real or imagined experiences, and have continuously evolved over my lifetime through the instability of language and dreams, as the syncretism approach suggests. I do not think art is losing integrity through appropriation, recycling, and ultimately syncretism, but rather new art forms are being created.

Jean Fisher, "The Syncretic Turn: Cross-Cultural Practices in the Age of Multiculturalism" (Kocur and Leung, 233-241)