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Subject:

Book Review. Andrew Irving on Contemporary Art and Anthropology

From:

Rebecca Marsland <[log in to unmask]>

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Rebecca Marsland <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Sat, 15 Jul 2006 07:50:19 +0100

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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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