ANTHROPOLOGY OF ART

A recurrent motif of 1980s theorising about art theoretical discourse was the idea that art history had in some sense come to an end. Common to a wide range of authors, from Donald Preziosi, to Victor Burgin or Hans Belting was a sense that the discipline, as traditionally conceived, was in a state of crisis. The motivations for such judgements were various. One important cause for this sense of the disintegration of the discipline was the impact of conceptual and methodological concerns of neighbouring subjects such as psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory and anthropology. As the boundaries separating the different fields of the humanities began to dissolve, so the identity of art history became destabilised, producing a period of intensive reflection on its origins and history. 2 In addition, the sense of crisis paralleled the wider pronouncements of the time concerning the death of art. 3 At a time when the legacy of, amongst others, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers or Art & Language entailed that 'art' often seemed indistinguishable from museological critique, sociological observation or philosophical analysis, it seemed impossible for art history to continue unperturbed in the face of the disappearance of its traditional object.

Anthropologists assume art is a human universal, but have had to struggle with the cross-cultural identification of art, either by finding common forms and practices, e.g. painting, sculpture, dance, and so on, or by exploring the aesthetic locus in each cultural system. All humans enjoy aesthetic appreciation, but their visual, aural, tactile, olfactory and sensory preferences vary from place to place and over time. Anthropologists have examined the meaning of arts, in their psychological or psychoanalytic aspects and emotional power, or as semiotic media of communication like language and signaling systems, or by examining their sociopolitical agency in guiding human relationships. Arts like other local practices have experienced cross-cultural exchange, colonization and globalization. They have evolved both as symbols of specific ethnic identities, and as commercial and tourist arts. Crossing boundaries subjects arts to different audiences who make different interpretations, and meanings may be manipulated for power or commerce by mediators such as traders, anthropologists, and critics. As trade and travel erase barriers, artists of formerly separate peoples encounter metropolitan practices such as art school education, art galleries and museums, and the thriving and competitive mainstream art world. Many creatively enter that world while endeavouring to maintain ethnic distinctiveness, so that for instance, British, Inuit, Japanese, Spanish and Maori arts are circulated and exhibited by the same or similar institutions. The contemporary world of dissolving boundaries, often called postmodernity, has allowed many practices formerly segregated as crafts, often made by women, to enter these same circuits and institutions; metropolitan artists have appropriated features of non-Western arts as their own, as non-Western artists take up metropolitan practices. There is a convergence as artists now engage in ethnographic research, and anthropologists emphasize the poetic (rather than the analytical) power of their works. Art historians emphasize the personal and contextual in art production while anthropologists extend their gaze at the metropolitan and global art world.

2015

Building on such established anthropological approaches to art as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on artistic practices are offered by such new theoretical perspectives as ethnographic conceptualism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013) or relational aesthetics (Sansi 2014), we hope to propose new pathways of anthropological inquiry. A key proposition behind this workshop is the idea that contemporary art theory and practice are increasingly in dialogue with theories of sociality – how we relate to other people to create meaning – and therefore connected to core anthropological interests. The objective of this workshop is therefore not just to apply existing anthropological theory to potentially new ethnographic situations characterized by the production of art, but to develop anthropological theory through an engagement with the conceptual approaches that underpin the contemporary production of art today. The premise we wish to interrogate with this workshop is thus that there is something distinct about contemporary artistic practices. If this is so, what would a contemporary anthropology of art – or rather – contemporary anthropologies of art look like? As the inaugural research event of the Anthropologies of Art [A/A] network, we wish to propose this digital platform as a space to map, link, and interrogate answers to these two questions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be: • How can we productively theorize the porous boundaries between artistic practice and every life activities? • Has the body been overlooked as a site of artistic production? For example, can we consider the performance of gender as an aesthetics of becoming? • What contribution can anthropology make to understandings of models of postfordist creative labour? • What are the (dis)connections between artivism, protest, and public art? • Can we consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics without a consideration of the state? • How can we provide a better analysis of the porous boundaries of the art world and the market? • What are the potentials of contemporary art for anthropological research? For example, how does the mode of artistic installation challenge and provoke alternative strategies of research?

2010

European Association of Social Anthropologists, 2019

2019 Symposium of the Anthropology and the Arts EASA Network (ANTART) Art has always occupied an ambivalent position in anthropology; it has been subject to both fascination and scepticism. Alfred Gell went as far as positing that anthropology is essentially anti-art, advocating instead a ‘methodological philistinism’ and ‘resolute indifference’ in our study of modern and contemporary art. Aesthetics has often been questioned as a Western, Bourgeois construct. The anthropology of art historically departed from this paradoxical, iconoclastic rejection of art practice and in particular, art theory. In this workshop, we want to explore the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassess the role of art within the discipline. What is the trouble with art in anthropology? Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the theoretical problems of anthropology, and a critical discipline of contemporary societies. The symposium is open to both senior and early-career scholars who are planning or conducting projects in the anthropology of art.

Alex Coles, ed., Site Specificity: the Ethnographic Turn (London: Black Dog), 2000

A recurrent motif of 1980s theorising about art theoretical discourse was the idea that art history had in some sense come to an end. Common to a wide range of authors, from Donald Preziosi, to Victor Burgin or Hans Belting was a sense that the discipline, as traditionally conceived, was in a state of crisis. The motivations for such judgements were various. One important cause for this sense of the disintegration of the discipline was the impact of conceptual and methodological concerns of neighbouring subjects such as psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory and anthropology. As the boundaries separating the different fields of the humanities began to dissolve, so the identity of art history became destabilised, producing a period of intensive reflection on its origins and history. 2 In addition, the sense of crisis paralleled the wider pronouncements of the time concerning the death of art. 3 At a time when the legacy of, amongst others, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers or Art & Language entailed that 'art' often seemed indistinguishable from museological critique, sociological observation or philosophical analysis, it seemed impossible for art history to continue unperturbed in the face of the disappearance of its traditional object.

Masters Thesis in Social Anthropology, Stellenbosch University, 2008

2017

Anthropology’s engagement with art has a complex and uneven history. While material culture, ‘decorative art’, and art styles were of major significance for founding figures such as Alfred Haddon and Franz Boas, art became marginal as the discipline turned towards social analysis in the 1920s. This book addresses a major moment of renewal in the anthropology of art in the 1960s and 1970s. British anthropologist Anthony Forge (1929-1991), trained in Cambridge, undertook fieldwork among the Abelam of Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and 1960s, and wrote influentially, especially about issues of style and meaning in art. His powerful, question-raising arguments addressed basic issues, asking why so much art was produced in some regions, and why was it so socially important? Fifty years later, art has renewed global significance, and anthropologists are again considering both its local expressions among Indigenous peoples and its new global circulation. In this context, Forge’s arguments have renewed relevance: they help scholars and students understand the genealogies of current debates, and remind us of fundamental questions that remain unanswered. This volume brings together Forge’s most important writings on the anthropology of art, published over a thirty year period, together with six assessments of his legacy, including extended reappraisals of Sepik ethnography, by distinguished anthropologists from Australia, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Anthony Forge was born in London in 1929. A student at Downing College, Cambridge, he studied anthropology with Edmund Leach, and went on to undertake research with Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics. Over 1958-63 he undertook several periods of fieldwork among the Abelam of the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, made major collections for the Museum der Kulturen, Basel, and went on to write a series of essays which were enormously influential for the anthropology of art and for studies of Melanesia. He was appointed Foundation Professor of Anthropology at the Australian National University in 1974 and taught there until his death in 1991.

Contemporary Art and Anthropology. Oxford: …, 2006