Contemporary Art and Anthropology

Arnd Schneider, Christopher Wright, Arnd Schneider, Christopher Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000323627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary Art and Anthropology takes a new and exciting approach to representational practices within contemporary art and anthropology. Traditionally, the anthropology of art has tended to focus on the interpretation of tribal artifacts but has not considered the impact such art could have on its own ways of making and presenting work. The potential for the contemporary art scene to suggest innovative representational practices has been similarly ignored. This book challenges the reluctance that exists within anthropology to pursue alternative strategies of research, creation and exhibition, and argues that contemporary artists and anthropologists have much to learn from each others' practices. The contributors to this pioneering book consider the work of artists such as Susan Hiller, Francesco Clemente and Rimer Cardillo, and in exploring topics such as the possibility of shared representational values, aesthetics and modernity, and tattooing, they suggest productive new directions for practices in both fields.

1
The Challenge of Practice

Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright

The aim of this volume is to stimulate new and productive dialogues between the domains of contemporary anthropology and art, and to discern common endeavours that encompass both disciplines. We want to encourage border crossings; our concern is not with establishing contemporary art as an object of anthropological research – ‘art worlds’ as other cultures to be studied. Nor do we think it is simply a matter of artists being more rigorous in their borrowings from anthropology, although there are many misapprehensions, on both sides, that could usefully be dispelled. Our aim, in exploring certain areas of overlap, is to encourage fertile collaborations and the development of alternative shared strategies of practice on both sides of the border.

In this introductory chapter we want to examine some of the similarities and differences between artistic and anthropological methodologies and practices in representing others. In exploring the limits and possibilities of representation and perception within the two disciplines we are concerned with how artistic practices can extend anthropological practices, and vice versa.

In the second chapter, ‘Appropriations’, Arnd Schneider focuses on some of the previous encounters between art and anthropology, as well as the appropriation of methodologies and subjects between the two disciplines.

In inviting contributions to this edited volume, our aim has been to point towards areas that require further dialogue between artists and anthropologists. Specifically, we wanted anthropologists to engage with artists’ work, and artists and critics to explore the relevance of anthropology for contemporary artistic practices.

Thus a number of anthropologists write on contemporary artists: Christopher Pinney critically comments on Francesco Clemente’s work in India; Michael Richardson explores the potentials of surrealist painter Josef Šima; Susanne Küchler investigates the work of Brent Collins and John Robinson, which is inspired by mathematics; Elizabeth Edwards considers the work of Mohini Chandra; Jonathan Friedman looks at the work of Carlos Capelán in the context of recent developments in anthropological theory; and Nicholas Thomas writes on the process of representation and difference with reference to tattooing. Denise Robinson explores the work of Susan Hiller, a major international artist, who originally trained as an anthropologist. The artist and art writer César Paternosto investigates how modern abstract art and the abstract art of the pre-Columbian Americas are connected, and the editors explore in a short chapter with interviews the anthropologically informed work of Rimer Cardillo, Rainer Wittenborn, Claus Biegert, and Nikolaus Lang. We also commissioned a visual essay by photographer Dave Lewis, which takes the Anthropology Department of the University of East London as its ethnographic site.

CROSSING BORDERS

The disciplines and some of the units of comparison involved in the border crossings that occupy us in this book are often difficult to grasp securely. The reified concepts ‘anthropology’ and ‘art’ have at times an almost nebulous existence, at others they are palpable, concrete worlds in which disciplinary pressures are exercised. Many of the categories involved are unstable and we want to question some of the ‘common-sense’ assumptions about these two fields that we feel are no longer valid. Art and anthropology are both made up of a range of diverse practices that operate within the context of an equally complex range of expectations and constraints. Ideas and practices of training are one key area of differentiation between the two fields, and we will argue that these need to be creatively refigured.

Although anthropology, from the perspective of art, is often perceived negatively as a ‘science’ – and it is precisely the confines of a scientific discipline that artists are critical of – both are disciplines in the sense of having canons of practice (however loosely defined), accepted histories (although these are frequently disputed and rewritten), and their own academies and institutions. We recognize that art and anthropology have both been active in criticizing and extending their own boundaries, but they still involve broadly defined ways of working, regular spaces of exhibition, and sets of expectations. In some cases differences between the two have more to do with exhibition sites and strategies – with finished products, rather than intentions or practices. Certainly, these dramatically influence the kinds of dialogues and audiences that are possible. However, despite the fact that one can identify polarizing or centripetal influences at work in each discipline, neither is a static, stable, or unified entity whose borders can be definitively traced. Both contemporary anthropology and art contain centrifugal movements and a diverse range of culturally, regionally, and historically located and inflected practices.

We are concerned with questioning assumptions about ‘anthropology’ and ‘art’ – these are labels that can often work to obscure any affinities – in order to highlight some of the correspondences we think exist between the two endeavours. In focusing on the practices of anthropologists and artists, this book may help to point out the disparity between actual ways of working and received notions of contemporary anthropology and art. We are not solely interested in formal similarities between the work of artists and anthropologists, but also want to discern ‘deeper affinities’. Neither are we suggesting that all anthropologists should necessarily embrace the methodologies of artists, there are aspects of anthropology where such a move is clearly not relevant.¹ But we do believe that some aspects of anthropological theory and practice, and not just ‘visual anthropology’ or the ‘anthropology of art’, would benefit from a consideration of art practices and these in turn could learn much from further dialogues with anthropology. Both disciplines share certain questions, areas of investigation and, increasingly, methodologies, and there is growing recognition and acceptance of these areas of overlap.

The borders between anthropology and art have never been completely or rigidly demarcated and, despite much indifference, at specific historical conjunctures (some of which we will review in the second chapter), each has in some sense required the other as a necessary foil to work against. Although this has sometimes been a productive friction, both disciplines at times also feel threatened by the other, or are envious of the other’s practices, as suggested by Hal Foster in his influential article ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’.² Whilst this book is concerned to promote dialogue, there have been occasions when suggesting border crossings of any kind has provoked hostility on both sides, reflecting an anxiety of interdisciplinarity, which is perhaps also a product of the often blurred nature of the borders. In advocating the development of new practices we do not want to gloss over differences between contemporary anthropology and art, as these can in themselves be productive points of departure for work.

Connections between the two disciplines have become more relevant, and problematic, with the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’ of contemporary art.³ This has involved, among other things, the adoption of a broad definition of ethnography, and the production of an increasing number of works that directly tackle some of the concerns of anthropology. From the perspective of contemporary anthropology, the development of DVD and other digital technologies has raised the possibility of an enhanced visual practice within anthropology. This would seem to usher in a new period of creative potential for contemporary anthropology, but, if this is to be a reflexive practice transcending any art/science dichotomy and involve more than the production of illustrated multimedia ‘texts’, there needs to be a new approach to images and creativity in anthropology.

Similarities between contemporary anthropology and art are not weighted equally, and the same is true for the appropriations that have occurred across the borders between them. Artists have incorporated the methodologies of anthropologists in idiosyncratic ways, making inventories, carrying out ‘fieldwork’, using interviews, and engaging with anthropology’s theorizations of cultural difference.⁴ Art writing, too, has taken on some of the theoretical concerns of anthropology. But there has been relatively less traffic in the opposite direction. Post-structuralist philosophy, literary theory, ethnopoetics, and experimental writing all heavily influenced the important ‘writing culture’ debate in anthropology in the 1980s in which the written nature of anthropology was subjected to a self-ref lexive critique.⁵ Still, as Arnd Schneider pointed out in his article ‘The Art Diviners’ developments in contemporary art were hardly noticed by these critiques.⁶

Experimentation and creativity are differently conceived, and differently valued, on either side of the border. For example, in terms of anthropological film making ‘anthropological content is often defined as precisely that which takes precedence over, and is the polar opposite of aesthetics’, as suggested by Chris Wright in his article ‘The Third Subject’.⁷ The fact is that there remains an ambiguous and at times hostile relation between these two terms within anthropology. In the current situation in Europe and North America, where academic posts in anthropology are relatively scarce in comparison with the numbers of professionals trained, experimentation and creativity walk a fine line between being an asset and a burden. The role of experiment is still largely relegated to a historical pantheon of established ‘maverick’ anthropologists (such as Michel Leiris, Gregory Bateson, and Jean Rouch), rather than an actively encouraged and valued facet of anthropological training. Some anthropologists, such as Anna Grimshaw,⁸ have argued that the discipline’s own avant garde was effectively stifled in the early decades of the twentieth century, as the new discipline struggled for academic acceptance and a foothold in the universities. Indeed, this period saw certain common agendas and strategies shared by art, anthropology, and art history dissolved through the creation of more rigidly bounded university disciplines. This process of separation has long outlived any usefulness.

EXPLORATIONS

In the following we will consider new possibilities for dialogues between art and anthropology. We will set what we see as an agenda for future collaborations based on examples of radical experiments from contemporary art and anthropology. Our main argument is that anthropology’s iconophopia and self-imposed restriction of visual expression to text-based models needs to be overcome by a critical engagement with a range of material and sensual practices in the contemporary arts.

Anselm Kiefer’s book work Cauterization of the District of Buchen⁹ (1974) uses a viscous amalgam of iron oxide and linseed oil to engage our senses of touch and smell in addition to our visual faculties. The book invokes the tactility of vision, something that the reproduction of two of its pages here can only gesture towards. The blackness of this ‘burnt’ flux gradually overcomes the book – the physicality of the image resisting any attempts to contain it or subsume experience into ‘language’. Kiefer imagines military stores of petrol slowly leaking out, igniting and cauterizing the land (perhaps as one would cauterize a wound?), and the work continues his exploration of the processes of burning, silting, and sinking in relation to German history and Geist (spirit).¹⁰ The direct sensual experience involved is not one we normally associate with books, although in this case, paradoxically, its status as an artwork actually prevents us from touching it (there is something perverse about the thought of it being carefully handled in white gloves by gallery staff). Kiefer has made a diverse range of book works, from printed facsimiles of orginal books containing watercolours, photographs, and collages like Transition from Cool to Warm (1988), to the sculpture High Priestess (1985–9),¹¹ a monumental metal bookshelf filled with huge books made of lead.¹² These works suggest productive irritations and resonances for thinking through some of the current relations between anthropology and art.

Figure 1.1. Anselm Kiefer, The Burning of the Rural District of Buchen, 1974, bound original photographs with ferrous oxide and linseed oil on fibrous wallpaper (21⅜ × 17¹¹/16 × 1⅛ inches; 62 × 45 × 3 cm), 210 pages, private collection. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery.

Kiefer’s books involve affect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Challenge of Practice
• 2 Appropriations
• 3 Moon and Mother: Francesco Clemente’s Orient
• 4 Where Green Grass Comes to Meet Blue Sky: A Trajectory of Josef Šíma
• 5 Encounters with the Work of Susan Hiller
• 6 Reflections on Art and Agency: Knot-sculpture between Mathematics and Art
• 7 Artists in the Field: Between Art and Anthropology
• 8 Photographic Essay
• 9 Dialogues With Dave Lewis, Rainer Wittenborn, Claus Biegert, Nikolaus Lang and Rimer Cardillo
• 10 Travels in a New World: Work around a Diasporic Theme by Mohini Chandra
• 11 No Borders: The Ancient American Roots of Abstraction
• 12 Carlos Capelán: Our Modernity not Theirs
• 13 The Case of Tattooing
• Notes
• Index