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Contemporary Art and Anthropology. (2006). Edited by Arnd Schneider
and Christopher Wright. Oxford and New York: Berg.
Reviewed by Andrew Irving, Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies and Dept
of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal
Contemporary Art and Anthropology, edited by Arnd Schneider and
Christopher Wright, is an exciting and timely volume that offers
interesting and unconventional ways for looking at the relationship
between art and anthropology. The possibilities put forward in the
volume are not based in the static disciplinary categories of ‘art’
and ‘anthropology’ or epistemologies that privilege particular ways
of knowing and understanding the world over others but are based in
the types of creative dialogue and productive exchanges that emerge
when artists and anthropologists engage with one another’s work and
practices, as in the recent Tate Modern conference Fieldworks:
Dialogues Between Art and Anthropology, upon which much of the book
derives.
The book brings together artists and anthropologists (for a detailed
list of contributors see table of contents below) to consider current
representational practices within art and anthropology and explore
the possibility of how inter-disciplinary forms and collaborative
hybrids might shed new light upon the art, aesthetics and socio-
cultural life. Often the critically detached ‘view’ of social-
scientific truths speak little about being a sensory organism caught
up in a particular social or cultural world. Accordingly the volume
tries to engage our senses by way of such things as books made of out
of iron oxide and linseed oil, and by identifying points of
commonality and discrepancy within the practices of two disciplines
so as to facilitate better informed dialogues, even creative
tensions, between anthropologists and artists. As such the book is a
credit to both its authors and its contributors but also to Berg
whose own creative approach to anthropology has been responsible for
publishing some of the most interesting books in the discipline over
the last few years, many of which, like this one, have the potential
to speak to audiences beyond the narrow disciplinary confines of
anthropology. That said, given the visual and performative nature of
the book an opportunity seems to have been missed by the publishers
to create a website that would accompany the book and bring the works
discussed in the different chapters to life.
Contemporary Art and Anthropology advocates an approach that is not
wholly of art or anthropology but instead operates around the edges
and borders. As such it can be read as an attempt to ‘destabilise
from the margins’ by evoking and re-imagining social, cultural and
aesthetic practices not through systematic, social-scientific
fieldwork and research but through the capacity of art, aesthetics
and the human body to reveal things in social life that would
otherwise remain unseen. This world—particularly of interior
dialogue, reverie and imagination—is not easily found in
anthropological texts and monographs, but by locating itself in
between art and anthropology the book advocates new approaches and
creative methodologies with which to access and represent these worlds.
Schneider and Wright’s introduction seeks to place contemporary art,
aesthetics and anthropology in the realm of multisensorial experience
by way of radical experimentations and collaborations that might
offer anthropology a way of critically engaging with the whole range
of material practices and sensual experiences rather than simply
emphasising the visual. The senses and sensory engagement, however,
are obviously not the exclusive preserve of artists and by simply
being a human organism one’s nervous system is continually subjected
to different sensory and aesthetic experiences and so one important
question that is raised is how can we represent and better understand
this through art and anthropological practices. Accordingly it might
also be useful to recall the etymology of the word ‘aesthetics’
because it is this earlier understanding that we keep finding
ourselves returning to throughout the volume. Aisthitikos is the
ancient Greek word for that which is ‘perceptive by feeling’ and as
Susan Buck-Morss (1992)[1] suggests the original semantic field of
aesthetics was not art but reality –or rather a corporeality: a
discourse of the body or form of knowledge whereby taste, touch,
hearing, seeing, smell are the means by which we come to know and
understand the world.
For Schneider and Wright this is ‘the challenge of practice’ that
they hope to address by way of the chapters they collected for this
volume, and the book is at its most interesting when it questions its
own practices and presuppositions vis-à-vis established notions of
what constitutes ‘anthropological’, as well as ‘artistic’ knowledge
and practice. This capacity for uncertainty is perhaps
unintentionally reflected in the title. Is the title a comment on the
relationship between contemporary art and anthropology, by which
anthropology is defined as the ‘traditional’ party, therefore evoking
the discipline’s traditional engagement with art as an ‘object of
study’ rather than as a resource with which to comprehend, reflect
upon and better understand human behaviour and anthropological
theories?. Or does the title suggest that art and anthropology are
coeval partners whereby the prefix of contemporary does not just
refer to ‘art’ but also inquires into the into the state of
contemporary anthropology, which as we know is much fixated with
questions of method, evidence and the [im]possibility of representation.
Indeed like the title, the book can be read in many different ways:
as an alternative fieldwork research methods manual, a questioning of
traditional disciplinary presuppositions and as a radical manifesto
that advocates a different approach to art and aesthetics. It is in
its practical and methodological implications that the book excels
and distinguishes itself from other books on art and anthropology,
and to my mind the book is best read as a necessary counterpoint to
the multitude of social scientific and anthropological research
methods books on university bookshelves that reinscribe and privilege
certain ways of knowing and epistemological methods over other
(usually non-western) alternatives. Otherwise the book can still be
very usefully read as an overview index of current theoretical ideas
on material culture or as an introduction to many interesting artists
and artworks that that one otherwise may not have come across.
Anthropology might be considered a ‘fieldwork science/documentary
art’. However, after reading this volume we can also make a case for
anthropology being a ‘fieldwork art/documentary art’ thereby
recalling the approach of Victor Turner whose own attempts to combine
ritual, performance and ethnography can be thought of as a
presentiment of the concerns raised throughout the volume. For Turner
anthropology too often failed to provide an open, living quality to
its texts precisely because “our analysis presupposes a
corpse” (Turner 1982:89)[2] and he advocated the use of drama and
performance to bring the discipline to life; and George Marcus, in a
piece written with theatre practioner Fernando Calzadilla, notes that
Turner was less interested in matters of method and epistemology than
questions about mind and emotion that could be explored through the
aesthetics of performance. Marcus recounts how he himself had just
about given up hope that the aesthetic implications of Writing
Culture would be addressed and properly developed by anthropologists
themselves, who seemed to only concentrate on the issues of textual
and ethnographic authority. However, Marcus’ co-author Calzadilla
attempts to enact anthropology’s theoretical, aesthetic and sensory
concerns in the field, with fellow artist, Abdel Hernandez, by using
pipes, plastic sheets, asphalt, onion sacs and carrier bags to create
a structure within a Caracas marketplace, in collaboration with
people who worked at the market, with which to question and represent
multiple issues from everyday market life and artefacts to violence
and the Venezuelan oil industry.
Many of the book’s authors consider the possibility that the world,
as revealed through art, can be used to supplement (and at times is
better equipped to understand) the worlds we find represented in
models and theories. Michael Richardson, for example, recasts Michael
Serres notion that literature often sees a way through whereas
philosophy sees an obstacle, and suggests that art often goes
‘deeper’ into the nature of human relations than anthropology but
that the artist still needs the anthropologist to show how deep they
are going. Accordingly Richardson uses the work of Czech painter
Josef Šima to suggest that reality is not simply constituted by its
material components and therefore needs art to explore the immaterial
dimensions of being. Susan Küchler also looks beyond the boundaries
of social science to explore the borders of visual perception and
cognition via the ideas and methods that exist in between mathematics
and art, and which are currently being explored so fruitfully in
terms of sculptural and architectural forms. Küchler considers the
possibility of exploring art through the lens of science and
mathematics rather than simply in aesthetic terms and the intriguing
implications this might have for visual research in anthropology.
Nicholas Thomas considers another kind of intersection whereby
different artists are brought together to reveal the complex flows of
culture, displacement and living history that are inscribed on the
surfaces of the skin in tattoos. These flows are embodied in artistic
encounters, for example between the skin and the camera, whereby
Polynesian tattoos become an object of photographic interest and in
doing a second skin is formed that enters into the representative
milieu, sometimes exotically and sometimes ironically, as in Greg
Semu’s self portraits of himself as an ironically displaced subject
of a nineteenth century ethnological photograph. A similar ‘self-
portrait’ of displacement is provided by Mohini Chandra’s series of
installations, photographs and video works Travels in a New World and
Album Pacifica, as discussed by Elizabeth Edwards. Chandra’s starting
point is that of multiple displacements in the form of her families
uprooting from India to Fiji by the British and then their subsequent
diasporic movements. Edwards understands these works, and the
journeys they represent, not simply as idiosyncratic and fragmentary
articulations of issues of homeland, identity and belonging but in
terms of a method and ethnography appropriate to understanding the
contemporary world.
The denial of coevalness within the artworld is explicitly addressed
in Chris Pinney’s interesting and illuminating chapter Moon and
Mother: Francesco Clemente’s Orient, where he considers how
Occidental misconstructions of India not only fail to engage with
contemporary Indian realities but also exclude the political and
economic ‘frame’ that surrounds an artwork. Thus the Orient does not
simply inhabit a different time frame (an ancient, romantic,
Disneyfied histo-alterity) to the western observer but Indian
alterity is also a static one whereby social, political and
revolutionary change within the culture rarely enters into occidental
representations and appropriations, thus calling for a ‘re-
orientation’ of the subject.
Time is also the matter of Jonathan Freidman’s chapter on the work of
contemporary artist Carlos Capelán whose paintings and installations
makes reference to anthropology’s own modes of appropriation and
representation, that Friedman, somewhat tendentiously, extends out to
discuss the anthropological appropriation of other people’s
experiential worlds which he claims is something that no ‘real
artist’ would not do. The theme of [in]appropriation is the subject
of Schneider’s chapter in which he argues that the incorporation of
cultural differences into material artefacts, such as in the
encounter between Picasso and the ‘magic’ of African sculpture, is
perhaps the most central defining characteristic of Twentieth Century
art as well as anthropology which not only appropriates artefacts for
museums but in a form of academic alchemy turns myths, rituals,
social-life, persons and their kin relations into ethnographic,
literary artefacts for wider academic consumption. Thus raising the
question as to what kinds of appropriation are appropriate for C21st
artists and anthropologists.
Perhaps one way to avoid this dilemma is to appropriate oneself. Thus
an essay by art critic Denise Robinson, on the work of contemporary
artist Susan Hiller, considers how we move from one condition of
knowledge to another, for example by way of altered states and
phantasms. Hiller herself makes this journey by transforming herself
from a practising anthropologist to a practising artist in response
to what she deemed was anthropology’s intellectual, economic and
political colonalisation of other peoples. A further reflective gaze
is provided by a series of specially commissioned photographs, taking
the Anthropology Department at the University of East London as its
ethnographic site, by photographer Dave Lewis; and a dialogue between
Schneider, Wright and various protagonists of ‘fieldwork’ and
‘tracking evidence’ movements in the contemporary art of the last 20
years, including Rainer Wittenborn, Claus Biegert, Nikolaus Lang,
and Rimer Cardillo.
Argentinean sculptor and painter Cesar Paternosto’s case mixing a
limited range of earthy and sandy-grey pigments mixed with marble
powder to obtain subtle textural differences that are suggested to
the eye as much as the hands. These textures did not emerge through
the imagination but via the lingering effects of being ‘in the field’
travelling around the Andean landscape and witnessing Incan
monoliths, temples and sculptural forms.
Not that the book succeeds on all counts. Artists
themselves have long known that failure is essential to the creative
process but perhaps anthropologists also need to embrace failure as
being fundamental to the processes of both fieldwork and writing.
This is highlighted by the reiteration of the conventional ‘truth’ of
the impossibility of representing and translating fieldwork
experience, images and objects by way of language, but perhaps this
would better explored as a creative tension that generates new and
multiple forms of thinking and writing rather than being an obstacle
to a single ‘truth’. Similarly, while commenting on the relationship
between contemporary art and anthropology the book fails to properly
address how one might define its central subject of the
contemporaneous vis-à-vis art, material culture and aesthetic
affects. For anthropologists are rightly wary of the inherent
temporalisation of cultural difference whereby non-western practices,
be they artistic or otherwise, are seen as some throwback to earlier,
more primitive forms of humanity. By this measure all art that is
currently being made and produced in different parts of the world
needs to be understood as ‘contemporary art’, and if not then by what
criteria and on whose authority are the multiple and various forms of
art currently being produced declared ‘traditional’? And should
anthropology be buying into this language and form of representation,
for whenever processes of categorisation, temporalisations of
difference and restrictions of the interpretative multiplicity of art
occur we have to look at the power operating behind the scenes, which
in this case is the western art-world/industry whose terms (as Pinney
shows) anthropologists cannot accept uncritically. To do so goes
somewhat against the spirit of the volume which otherwise admirably
succeeds in destabilising conventional categories and borders of
differentiation. These criticisms aside the book offers a rich and
varied attempt to follow in Turner’s footsteps and use rather than
merely study art, in order to explore, evoke, provoke and better
understand the fluidity, complexity and depth of social life, and as
such it offers essential new perspectives for the study and practice
of art, aesthetics and anthropology, and much more besides. However
it is to an artist, Jean Genet, as quoted by Denise Robinson, that we
leave the last words: ‘Art should exalt only those truths which are
not demonstrable, and which are even false, those which we cannot
carry to their ultimate conclusions without absurdity, without
negating both them and yourself. They will never have the good or bad
fortune to be applied’.
Contemporary Art and Anthropology. (2006). Edited by Arnd Schneider
and Christopher Wright. Oxford and New York: Berg.
About the editors:
Arnd Schneider is Reader in Anthropology at the University of East
London, England and Senior Research Fellow at the University of
Hamburg, Germany.
Christopher Wright is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College,
University of London.
Contents and Contributors:
Contents
Introduction: The Challenge of Practice (Arnd Schneider and
Christopher Wright)
1. Appropriations (Arnd Schneider)
2. Moon and Mother: Francesco Clemente's Orient (Christopher Pinney,
University College London)
3. Where Green Grass Comes to Meet Blue Sky: a trajectory of Josef
Šima (Michael Richardson, Waseda University, Tokyo)
4. Encounters with the Work of Susan Hiller (Denise Robinson,
independent scholar, London)
5. Reflections on Art and Agency: knot-sculpture between mathematics
and art (Susanne Küchler, University of London)
6. Artists in the Field: On the Threshold between Art and
Anthropology (George E. Marcus, Rice University and Fernando
Calzadilla, New York University)
7. Photographic Essay (Dave Lewis, photographer, London)
8. Dialogues with Dave Lewis, Rainer Wittenborn, Claus Biegert,
Nikolaus Lang, and Rimer Cardillo.
9. Travels in a New World: work around a diasporic theme by Mohini
Chandra (Elizabeth Edwards, University of the Arts, London College of
Communication)
10. The Ancient American Roots of Abstraction (César Paternosto,
Painter, Sculptor and Author, Segovia, Spain)
11. Carlos Capelán: our modernity not theirs (Jonathan Friedman,
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and University
of Lund, Sweden)
12. The Case of Tattooing (Nicholas Thomas, Goldsmiths College)
[1] BUCK-MORSS, SUSAN. 1992 Aesthetics and anaesthetics. In October.
Fall 1992 1-41
[2] TURNER, VICTOR. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: the seriousness of
human play. New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications.
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