Contesting Art

Art, Politics and Identity in the Modern World

Jeremy MacClancy, Jeremy MacClancy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000323856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art moderne

Art is a major political weapon of our times. Today, peoples around the world use art to boost their own identity and to attack the ways others represent them. At a time of increasing intercultural exchange, art has become a primary means through which groups reinforce their challenged sense of culture.This pioneering book breaks with the tradition of the anthropology of art as the depoliticized study of aesthetics in exotic settings. Transcending artificial distinctions between the West and the Rest, it examines the increasingly significant relations among art, identity and politics in the modern world.Among the themes investigated by the contributors: - how African painters undermine racist stereotypes yet remain dominated by the Western art market - the role of anthropology museums in the perpetuation of the Western market in 'tribal art' - the internal and external political disputes underlying the 'repatriation' of cultural property.

1

Anthropology, Art and Contest

Jeremy MacClancy

On 28 August 1963 a group of Yirrkala Aborigines from northeast Arnhem Land presented a petition to theAustralian Parliament. In it they called for the government to reconsider their decision to allow a mining company to exploit their homelands. By those times their formal plea was not in itself unusual. What was unusual was that the petition was framed as a bark painting, showing the clan designs of all the areas endangered by the company’s plans. Against a background of cross-hatching and triangular blocks of colour, a series of birds, lizards, fish, turtles, snakes and other animals surrounded the typewritten words of the paper. The traditional style of the frame complemented the modern text of the petition, thickening its context, adding further dimensions to its significance. The frame highlighted the fact that this was no conventional Western entreaty, that their argument was based on extra-European grounds. It demonstrated, in a visually striking manner, that the Yirrkala’s claim to the land arose out of their spiritual relationship with it. They chose to present their plea in this manner because, in the words of one of them, ‘It showed, in ways in which raising a multi-coloured piece of calico could never do, the ancient rights and responsibilities we have towards our country. It showed we were not people who could be “painted out” of the picture or left at the edge of history’ (Yunupingu 1993: 65). In order not to be misrepresented by others at this critical juncture, the Yirrkala represented themselves. In order not to be painted out, they had to paint themselves in, according to their own designs.

Though the novel form of the petition gained it the attention of news journalists and captured public imagination, it still failed in its immediate objective. The mining leases were not revoked. But it was more successful in the longer term, as it led to the establishment of a Parliamentary Enquiry which played an important part in the process of achieving land rights for the Yirrkala and their neighbours. The petition itself, which became for its creators a symbol of their struggle for land rights, was prominently positioned in the new Parliament House in Canberra (Morphy 1991: 18). Through the skilful deployment of art, the Yirrkala had won recognition of their culturally distinctive claims to their homelands.

This particular event exemplifies an increasingly common, increasingly significant occurrence — the use of art objects for contestatory purposes in the multicultural milieux we all now participate in. Maoris petition British museums for the return of the tattooed skulls of their ancestors. Native American artists make their claims through pictures. Colonized Melanesians challenge Western conceptions of them by recreating their artifacts and revitalizing the rites in which they were customarily used.

The political and economic reasons for this increasing prominence of art are not hard to discern. Many peoples, bent on self-determination and unhappy with the way they are represented by others, wish to represent themselves to others and art is one of the most powerful media by which to do so. Also, many peoples, aware of the inflated prices paid for ‘important tribal pieces’ on the Western art market, have come to revalue both the objects removed from their homelands and the objects they produce, while the rise of tourism has vastly expanded the market for their artifacts. Further, if the degree of structural difference between societies is being steadily eroded by the seemingly uncheckable advance of global capitalism, then art becomes, partially by default, a key means of proclaiming continuing cultural difference. None of these factors is primary, rather it is their interplay which has led to the recent emergence of art as a major contemporary site of cross-cultural contest.

The topic of art as contest in intercultural settings has been touched upon by some anthropologists (e.g. Thomas 1991) but, strangely, has not yet received the sustained attention it merits. A key aim of this book is to correct this omission. To that end, the contributors provide detailed and comparative analyses, based on extensive fieldwork, of a variety of cross-cultural contexts where peoples fight with art, where they negotiate and dispute the meanings it can bear. The contributors investigate how people use art objects, for example, to resist colonialism, to subvert racism, to demolish demeaning stereotypes, to better their own position or that of their own group, to defend a challenged notion of their people’s identity, to reinvent that identity. Like a recent analyst of the roles art can be made to play, they think that ‘art is not ancillary to or reflects the social scene but a major and integral part of the transaction which engenders political behaviour’ (Edelman 1995: 2). The contributors examine, in short, how art is intertwined with empowerment, and artifact with advocacy.

All of the studies collected in this book have their clear limits. None of the contributors is trying to reduce the power of the pictures or objects discussed to the parameters of anthropological analysis. While the various contributors are able to tease out subtly the diverse contexts within which pictures are sited and interpreted, they do not pretend that the results of their intellectual approaches exhaust the range of potential meanings these objects may bear or the spectrum of responses they might evoke. But they do claim, contra those who assume the transcendence of their aesthetics, that all aesthetics are socially grounded and, as such, are appropriate subjects for social analysis.

Until relatively recently few anthropologists gave time to the study of art. Those who did were predominantly concerned with the uses of objects in traditional, supposedly unchanging societies. The few functionalists among them tended to focus on how local uses of the objects helped to sustain the present structure of a society, cataloguing carefully the various social functions indigenous items were meant to fulfill (e.g. Anderson 1979: 25–51; Glaze 1981). The structuralists who studied art regarded objects as forms of communication which attempt to resolve symbolically the existential contradictions of local life. Perceiving indigenous items as bearers of complex cultural messages, they acted as decipherers trying to break the local code (e.g. Lévi-Strauss 1979; Rosman and Rubel 1990). However, despite the best intentions of their practitioners and the revelatory results of their analyses, both functionalist and structuralist approaches often served to highlight the interpretative power of the anthropologist at the expense of native exegesis or any acknowledgement of historical agency. Also, they tended to exaggerate local consensus about the meanings and roles of the objects and to over-emphasize the boundedness of particular cultures, as though they were wholes unto themselves.

The contributors to this book, striving to avoid their predecessors’ pitfalls, do not regard societies as isolated, homeostatic systems coasting in a timeless ‘ethnographic present’. Instead, they provide fully historicized examples of societies undergoing change, of permeable cultures in contact with one another, all of them members, to a greater or lesser degree, of the same world system. These days, it would be difficult to sustain any other sort of view. !Kung San now have their paintings sold in London and Paris. Muslim middle-men of the Ivory Coast peruse the latest copy of African Arts to see how the market is moving. The land-diving islanders of Pentecost, Vanuatu, seek royalties from bungee jumping entrepreneurs around the world for breaching their ‘cultural copyright’.

This is not simply to shift from a naive view of cultures as separate unto themselves to an equally simplistic view of cultures as coherent but dynamic groupings of people which bump into contact with one another, like intersecting circles in a Venn diagram. It is rather to see culture as a continuing construction, which both organizes and emerges from people’s behaviour. The boundaries which divide off the people of one culture from those of another are not necessarily those rules, habits or dispositions which differentiate them structurally but those which its members choose to distinguish themselves from others. The culture of a people thus becomes open to a variety of definitions as different members interpret it in their own way for their ends, and the boundaries they choose need not coincide. Today, this process becomes ever more evident as the plurality of global communications continues to expand and as peoples increasingly enter the capitalist world-system. In this contemporary context, the potentially central role of art can be suddenly and starkly realized, with peoples reifying or creating their sense of culture through the use of particular objects. Here, art objectifies power.

Anthropologists of art frequently worry about how to define ‘art’, if they are to use it as a comparative concept. They often point out that no similar term exists in the particular societies they are studying. The problem here is how to compare something across cultures without the particular definition chosen predetermining the answers arrived at. The difficulty arises because Western ideas of art and aesthetics are themselves such historically particular products of European culture (Eagleton 1990; Staniszewski 1995). One possibility (Morphy 1993) is to employ the term in a broad sense in the hope that the resulting trawl of other cultures may net such a varied range of objects that the original definition will be reflexively revised. That hope may be praiseworthy but remains difficult to translate into action while non-white artists continue to be relatively powerless players within the Western-dominated world art market (Lippard 1990: 2–17; Fisher 1995). It is significant, however, that, to my knowledge, no anthropologist who has participated in this debate has acknowledged that the term ‘art’ or synonyms for it used in other cultures may well become themselves a cause for internal contest between interested parties. In these contexts, the question ‘But is it art?’ is not as a hoary chestnut to be ignored but a politically-motivated interrogatory to be studied. As MacClancy demonstrates in his chapter about the continuing debate between Basque nationalists, journalists and artists over the nature and aims of ‘el arte vasco’ (‘Basque art’), ‘art’ and its synonyms are not unproblematic terms but can themselves become sites of dispute as different parties struggle to impose their own definition.

A subsidiary aim of this collection is to contribute towards ending the idea that the anthropology of art is exclusively concerned with the study of non-Western societies and their art. This particular focus, a consequence of the history of the discipline, has for long smacked of the arbitrary and in the contemporary world appears not merely quaintly idiosyncratic but blinkered to present realities and verging on the neo-colonialist. At a time when established notions of culture appear to be dissolving before our eyes and the concept of creolization threatens to become the intellectual norm, it seems gravely out of place for anthropologists of art to continue to concentrate on the traditional production of images among ‘the X’ at the expense of investigating, say, the discourses sustaining the Western art market.

The examples employed in this book are all of pictorial or sculptural art. This is purely for reasons of space and focus. Most, if not all, of the points made here about the use of pictures or objects could apply equally well to the production of films, poetry or music (Washabaugh 1996), the performance of beauty pageants (Cohen, Wilk and Stoeltje 1996), the crafting of chocolates (Terrio 1996) or the sale of fashionable garb (Kondo 1992). But I had to be selective. I was editing only one book, not a series of volumes. However, when the staging of Miss World in India leads to terrorist threats and the deployment of 20,000 police (Bedi 1996) or when, in South Africa, the wearing of highly decorative anti-apartheid T-shirts is made a punishable offence (Williamson 1989), the general politicization of aesthetics in cross-cultural contexts cannot be put in doubt.

While the problems discussed in this book are worldwide in scope, the range of particular ethnographic areas examined by the contributors is more restricted. There is an (unintended) focus on the art of the American Northwest Pacific coast and of coastal West Africa. This is no comment whatsoever on the anthropological value of the art produced elsewhere, simply a consequence of who could attend the seminar series and who could provide potential chapters. It is to my regret that there are no sections, for instance, on the art of Melanesia, East Africa, or Southeast Asia.

The contributors discuss a mesh of interrelated points. For the sake of expository convenience, I group them into several themes: anti-colonialism, anti-racism; painting propaganda, picturing power; individuals, groups, categories; art as property; concepts and objects; the marketing of art.

Anti-colonialism, Anti-racism

What aesthetic strategies are available to those whose culture is bludgeoned by expatriate dominators? What artistic tactics can be employed by those uprooted and then exploited in their new homeland? How may they contest the model of themselves created by the colonizers? How, in other words, may they use art to fight the conditions of life and terms of thought set by the foreigners?

One way was to reject colonialism totally, and to persist in the production of indigenous forms which missionaries condemned as ‘idols to devils’. The danger of adopting this tactic was its regressive and rigid character, threatening to ossify locals’ sense of their own culture. As Svašek points out (this volume), some colonial art schoolteachers, wishing to ‘save primitive culture’, reinforced this tactic by obliging ...