Practicing Art and Anthropology

A Transdisciplinary Journey

Anna Laine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350143678
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181074
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Practicing Art and Anthropology presents an in-depth exploration of transdisciplinary work in the expanding space between art and anthropology. Having trained and worked as an artist as well as an anthropologist, Anna Laine's decades-long engagement in art practice, artistic research and anthropology provide her with a unique perspective on connections between the two fields, both in theory and in practice. Intertwining artistic and anthropological ways of working, Laine asks what it means to engage a transdisciplinary stance when academia requires a specific disciplinary belonging. In order to expand the methods of producing academic knowledge by going beyond conventional approaches to research, she draws on examples from her own work with Tamils in India and the UK to present an original take on how we can cross the boundaries between art and anthropology to reach multiple dimensions of understanding. Offering exceptional breadth and detail, Practicing Art and Anthropology provides a unique approach to the discussion. An important read for students and scholars in art and anthropology as well as artists and anyone interacting in the space in-between.

1
Working with art and anthropology: An introduction

Collaborations between artists and anthropologists have increased during the first two decades of the twenty-first century and continue to evoke considerable debate. Proponents and antagonists in the respective fields discuss a wide range of issues concerning methodology, theorization, representation and presentation. Arguments are constituted around viable epistemological forms and knowledge productions (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2009, 2013), sensual and material engagements in social relations (Ingold 2013; Svasek 2012; Wright 2013), ontological perspectives on images and objects (Gell 1998; Pinney and Thomas 2001; Latour 2005), theoretical and conceptual developments (Belting 2014; Sansi 2015; Ssorin-Chaikov 2013), and power imbalances between globally dispersed actors (Enwezor et al. 2012; Marcus and Myers 1995; Schneider 2006a, 2006b, 2012). Varying conventions regarding aesthetics and ethics have prompted the most edgy disputes, and they have postulated incompatibility and institutional purity as well as productive tensions with potentials for increased exchange.

This book is a contribution to the ongoing debate. It presents a particular kind of experience based on exploratory engagements within and across art, anthropology and art as research. This way of working has developed during practice-based learning within photography and fine art, followed by academic training in anthropology and subsequent experiments with joining the two, partly by way of the newly established field artistic research (expanded on p. 11f). Skills in how images, objects, sounds and installations affect us and transform what we know have guided my inquiries, and pointed at theoretical frameworks concerned with conceptualizations of the material, relational and sensory as well as implications of actual situations of making.

From the perspective of anthropology as a discipline, the anthropologist’s own experiences and feelings are recognized as influencing the knowledge produced during fieldwork and are given a prominent role in many ethnographic texts. Following hermeneutic and deconstructionist approaches, the proclaimed authority of objectively explaining other cultures was challenged by the ‘writing culture’ critique and replaced by an acknowledgement of the researcher’s subjective position (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). The idea of possessing scientific neutrality and rationalism transformed into self-reflexive investigations that scrutinized how cultural background and personal experience impacted on the research process. However, this approach has been criticized as a risk where the capacity for analytical reflection and generalized explanations of social realities and the consequential ability to engender substantial and valid knowledge might be lost (Aull Davies 1999; D’Andrade 1995).

The reluctance towards the inclusion of personal experiences and intense emotions has partly been articulated in an anxious attitude toward images and their aesthetic capacities, conceptualized as an ‘iconophobia’ that subordinates visual representations in favour of the ethnographic text and binds their multiple meanings by captions (Taylor 1996). As already pointed out by scholars who embrace the incorporation of artistic practices in anthropology, the iconophobic stance remains as a hindrance towards visual experimentations and a dismissal of images’ and objects’ capacities to constitute knowledge and it hereby continues to affect the debates on possible collaborations between artists and anthropologists (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016; MacDougall 1997, 1998; Schneider and Wright 2006, 2010; Wright 1998).¹

The simultaneous acknowledgement of the subjective position of the researcher and his or her textual production, and the reductive notion of images as objective evidence and illustrations emerged as a conundrum during my initial encounter with anthropology. What if material and sensual practices of art making had been available to Renato Rosaldo in his account of Ilongot headhunting practices, a classic example of how personal experience has been used as a vehicle for increased understanding (1989)? Ilongot men cut off heads of fellow humans during reoccurring attacks and they explained the killings to Rosaldo as acts of rage born of grief and loss. Their tossing away of the decapitated heads aimed to analogically toss away and eliminate this rage. The force of the pain behind the practice became accessible to Rosaldo only after the accidental death of his wife in the field. His own mourning and consequent reflection affected the fieldwork process and the concluding analysis, and aware of the risk of academic dismissal in using personal experience as an explanatory variable, he decided to include his own bereavement in the written account. However, while Rosaldo grasped Ilongot headhunting in a visceral emotional manner, his experience and understanding has only been made accessible to others through academic texts. Could an installation of images and sound have evoked the rage of grief experienced by Rosaldo, and hereby made it possible for the beholder to come closer to the emotional intensity that made him grasp why this force was essential to understanding Ilongot headhunting? What other routes or methods might there have been towards understanding the unspeakable grief of headhunters? In what ways could a close collaboration with the Ilongots on artistic forms improve the manner in which their practice was conveyed? Is there a distinct line to be drawn in terms of which kind of attention, method and presentation that should be termed artistic and anthropological? These questions, largely based on my own experiences with art, have directed my inquiries into how visual and material practices might be combined with the linguistic and textual in the process of developing anthropological knowledge. My position does not regard images and texts as opposites, but rather follows Jean-François Lyotard’s separation between ‘figure’ and ‘discourse’ where the first concept incorporates textual forms like poetry in its reference to sensory experience of plastic art, and the second designates meaning as firmly anchored through philosophical closure (2010). Three academic texts evolved as central motivations for my continued exploration. The first was Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology by Elizabeth Edwards (1997), who argued for a need to incorporate the expressiveness and subjectivity of photography in anthropological practice. With reference to contemporary photographic critique that has challenged the idea of photographs as visual facts, she focused on an interrelatedness rather than opposition between realist and expressionist perspectives. This was part of what I had learned through practice, and Edwards made me see new possibilities within anthropology. My interest in Hindu imagery lead me towards the second text, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, by Diana Eck (1985), and her account of Hindu vision as tactile and its revered objects as agents opened up connections between images and language and enhanced my motivation for fieldwork in India. The last text was Contemporary Art and Anthropology by Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright (2006), which brought considerable excitement through its recognition of contemporary art practice as a relevant subject for anthropology. The authors highlight existing overlaps between artists and anthropologists and suggest increased collaboration as productive for both fields. Their emphasis on the potentials of shared practices finally provided a qualified link between my artistic and anthropological ways of working, and their progressive approach spoke to my training in photography and art that promoted experimentation as soon as the basics were apprehended. Although the practice-based knowledge remained unrecognized by academic superiors due to my incapacity to translate it into verbal form, the direction forward was set. The motivating texts provided guidance into a reimagining of how the dynamic social and material world around me could be explored across disciplinary boundaries and pre-set knowledge fields, and conventional ways of working began to be reshaped. With this book, I aim to shed new light on possible collaboration and transgressions that are relevant to both artists and anthropologists, whether they work inside, outside or in collaboration with academia. I suggest that it is central to establish and enhance the level of trust between practitioners of the respective fields in order to develop future experimentations and possibilities of emergent knowledge.

The subsequent chapters give an account and analysis of a journey, where personal experiences and ethnographic descriptions intersect with theoretical explorations that advance along the way. They centre on collaborative and participatory projects conducted within and in relation to ethnographic fieldwork with Tamils; in South India, and in the UK among the diaspora who migrated from Sri Lanka. Each project accounted for in the book concerns processes of making and learning though different materials and social situations, and presentations of resulting works in both artistic and anthropologically informed contexts. The continuation of this introduction outlines epistemological positions and their implication for integrations of the well-established fields of art and anthropology; recent collaborations and debates between the two fields; and discussion within artistic research, authorized as an academic discipline at the beginning of the current century and yet in the process of defining its precise objectives. The institutionalization of borders is further investigated in relation to transdisciplinarity as a possible frame for future experimentations and expansions of academic practices. This section is followed by the structure of the book, and a note on its black and white photography. The book is compiled through a certain paradox, as the described projects emerged through a need to work beyond the verbal and textual. However, they have successively transformed into combinations of texts and various other media which hereby provide ethnographically grounded examples intended to nuance and expand current debates and practices at the intersection of art and anthropology. As readers, you are invited to encounters of institutional conservatism and progressive scholars, distance and participation, representation and evocation, success and failure, which collectively hold potentials of guidance along your own route of investigation.

Art and anthropology

The capacity of the renewed collaboration between art and anthropology has been realized through the Ethnographic Terminalia, established as an experimental artistic environment in parallel with the annual conference of the American Anthropological Association since 2009, and the Anthropology and the Arts Network founded as part of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in 2017. Schneider and Wright have edited three volumes vital in this development by their strong advocacy for explorations and experiments that cross both methodological and theoretical lines of inquiry (2006, 2010, 2013). They begin in resonance with the ethnographic turn in contemporary art where artists began to explore fieldwork as method and criticize practices of collection and display in ethnographic museums; evolves around how engagements with art practice connects the already established visual² and sensual³ fields in anthropology, including phenomenologically informed attention to experiential knowledge⁴; and ends with a call for intensified exchange motivated by the increase of artistic interventions in social and postcolonial contexts where anthropological assessments of global power relations can enhance ethically conditioned participation.⁵ Schneider and Wright’s works are structured around potentials of convergences between art and anthropology rather than the dualistic perspective of differences and similarities. The authors criticize existing tendencies to reify practitioners from both fields, and argue that the respective disciplines incorporate a vast variety of intentions and methodologies. But they emphasize that this strategy does not aim to obscure existing disparities and consequently they account for scepticism within mainstream anthropology as well as in art criticism. One of the main separations the authors identify is the finished product in the respective fields. While ways of working and themes of investigation may overlap, anthropology requires a representational conclusive text but artists can present tentative objects and performances as an outcome of a study. Experimentation with these tensions are embraced as a productive method to expand anthropological ways of working and hereby generate new knowledge (Schneider and Wright 2010: 11).

Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz have proposed collaborative exchanges between art and anthropology as a way of sharpening anthropological sensibilities and enhancing its visual knowledge production (2005, and Ravetz 2007a, 2007b). In a critical reflection of the debates incited by the recent realignment, the authors challenge the polarization between resistance and wholehearted embrace and call for a more nuanced understanding (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015). They argue that productive collaborations need to recognize differences, and point at radically distinctive positions concerning knowledge forms within the respective fields. Artistic work is described as improvisational, imaginative, and aimed at disrupting established knowledge, in contrast to a logical anthropology engaged in conventional cumulative processes. Anthropologists produce knowledge according to a model that builds on previous corollaries and is finalized with a concluding argument, but, following the philosopher John Dewey, knowledge generated by artists emerge through transformative processes shaped by interactions between the presented artwork and its audience (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015: 430).

Aesthetics and ethics reoccur as tense themes in the debate. Grimshaw and Ravetz identify contradictory positions between artists and anthropologists and define them as critical forms of resistance towards continued collaboration (2015: 427). It is argued that artistic works made by anthropologists often are dismissed by artists for their lack of attention to form and affect, and that socially engaged works made by artists are dismissed by anthropologists on behalf of their neglect to consider power relations at play. Ravetz has a background in art practice and has experienced this contradiction from several perspectives. The risk of misrecognition was elucidated by the art critic Hal Foster at the early stages of the ethnographic turn (1995), which had been enabled by James Clifford’s expanded definition of ethnography and following invitation to various fields of practice and knowledge production (1988). In the seminal article The Artist as Ethnographer?, Foster presents a sceptical perspective based on mutual envy, and he cautions for artists engaged in site-specific works and community art who appropriate the term ethnography without actually implementing the method, and for self-idealiz ed anthropologists who pretend to be avant-garde artists open to chance (1995). Foster suggests that artists objectify the other for their own fame and engage in self-f ashioning in favour of a community’s well-being. This alert of unjustifiable appropriations of ethnographic methods is continuously reiterated in anthropological discussions on ethical positions among artists and their implications for future collaborations (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016: 8; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015: 426; Sansi 2015: 7; Schneider 2016: 208; Schneider and Wright 2006: 19). But at the same time as contemporary anthropologists receive rigorous training in ethics and must articulate their treatment of ethical codes before funding can be received, Pentagon has been able to employ career driven scholars who have provided local knowledge for the US pursuits of refining their counterinsurgency programmes (Forte 2011; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006).

The anthropological resistance to aesthetics has been informed by the Kantian notion of an individual experience in an autonomous field where the subject is detached from the perceived object, and the subsequent establishment of a Western modernist discourse with white male universal claims of aesthetic judgements. The term has been dismissed by anthropologists through its lack of engagement with the social (Gell 1998: 3) and by its intertwinement with a particular historical and cultural context (Overing 1996: 260). Aesthetics has been re-conceptualized within anthropology as well as art in relation to contemporary practice, however, the two disciplines have not always been aware of the historical developments in the other (Marcus and Myers 1995: 6). In the former field, Chris Pinney introduced the term ‘corpothetics’ to account for the sensorial and relational engagements with imagery in popular Hinduism (2001: 8, 2003, 2004), where he draws on Susan Buck-Morss’s reclaim of the Greek term aisthitikos (1992), and David MacDougall has defined culturally constructed orders of sensory experience and response in daily interactions as ‘social aesthetics’ (2006).

Social interventions among contemporary artists directed towards the realization of interpersonal relations through participatory and collaborative practices with the public has affected art criticism, particularly through Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept ‘relational aesthetics’ (2002) and Grant Kester’s ‘conversational aesthetics’ (2004). Kester has, in spite of Foster’s caution of the dominance of the artist’s self-interest, shown how collaborations with communities and neighbourhoods evolve into political practices and art making which enhance social situations in marginalized areas (2004, 2011). In response to the altruistic aspects of participatory and collaborative art, Claire Bishop argues for a more antagonistic approach that reclaims the critical and qualitative potential of an autonomous artist separated from aims of doing social good where aesthetic judgement is automatically replaced by ethical concerns and sociological discourse (2004, 2012). Her caution further concerns the risk of producing artists that take on an instrumentalized role of correcting social ills and maintaining infrastructures neglected by an irresponsible political governance, particularly as such governance participates in funding community art projects and evaluates them in relation to their social effect (Jackson 2011; Kester 2011: 198). Bishop’s polarizing view affected a split between artists who either aligned with her notion of the artist as autonomous and engaged with aesthetics and those who aspired towards intersubjective encounters which could improve social relations and rights and therefore paid larger attention to ethics. However, the philosopher Jacques Rancière argues that aesthetics not only is a part of everyday life but also at the core of politics (2004, 2011), and Bishop contends that he has opened up new ways of discussing and analysing participatory art (2012: 18). These variations elucidate the heterogeneity within art practices and offer a counter position to the tendency in mainstream anthropology of reifying art into a singularity based on the modernist tradition of presenting objects to be interpreted from a distance. The increased permeability between social work, activism and other forms of cultural practices in contemporary art points towards the potential for art practice in social research.

The affirmative approach towards collaboration between artists and anthropologists is further advanced by Roger Sansi (2015), and he focuses on conceptual issues rather than the practices of sharing physical materials and perceptual sensibilities emphasized by Schneider and Wrigh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Working with art and anthropology: An introduction
• 2 Visual and visceral encounters with kolam in South India
• 3 Art making as third space across India and Sweden
• 4 Photo-poetic essay
• 5 Engagements in the ethnographic museum and contemporary art galleries
• 6 Artistic methods in urban South India
• 7 'Making kolams in London': A collaborative and participatory art event
• 8 Sharing practices with British Tamil artists
• 9 New platforms and future possibilities
• Notes
• References
• Index