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- Convenors:
-
Elizabeth Hallam
(University of Oxford)
Clare Harris (University of Oxford)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Clare Harris
(University of Oxford)
- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
We invite presentations from artists and anthropologists to explore issues of response and responsibility through art practices and art works grounded in particular material contexts. Investigations in any area of practice are welcome, including drawing, mixed media, photography, video and sound.
Long Abstract:
If art entails and demands more than an 'aesthetic response' (Gell, 1998), how might current anthropological work on and with art and artists generate fresh insights with regard to responsibility? This panel invites presentations, from both artists and anthropologists, to explore issues of response and responsibility through art practices and art works that are grounded in particular material situations and contexts.
Artists have adopted, and advocated, various positions on responsibility and its reverse: surrealist activity in the 1920s rejected it to embrace forms of freedom; a century later artists' work foregrounds, or urges, responsible and ethical action, as in bio art, eco art and critical/collaborative installations and projects (see Helmreich and Jones, 2018).
This panel explores how responsibilities are produced, assigned, and questioned by art - for its makers, its curators/exhibitors, its viewers/receivers, its owners, and its destroyers. We ask how art practices and works provoke consideration of responsibility in relation to urgent social, economic, political, and ecological issues, as in the case of art concerned with climate change, colonialism, inequality, urban decay, or waste, for example. How does the making of art open up different perspectives, motivate action, and facilitate interventions in difficult or problematic situations? Can anthropologists engage with art and artists to more fully understand and sensitively refigure their responsibilities in anthropological work, including teaching, research, method design, theorising, and communication beyond the discipline.
Presentations from anthropologists and artists working with/on any area of practice are welcome, including drawing, mixed media, photography, video, and sound.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 March, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
A provisional introduction to the panel, ‘Art, response, and responsibility’, drawing on some strategies or methods in art practices, and their reverberations, since the 1960s: intervention, installation, destruction.
Paper long abstract:
A provisional introduction to the panel, ‘Art, response, and responsibility’, drawing on some strategies or methods in art practices, and their reverberations, since the 1960s: intervention, installation, destruction.
Paper short abstract:
Art in the last century has been premised upon the withdrawal of agency. Irresponsibility, failure and idiocy are central to art practice, and I would argue, also to anthropological practice. In this paper, I will argue for irresponsibility as a form of politics in art and also in Anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
One of the key questions in art in the last century has been the disavowal of agency. Art practices of sharing, delegating, or withdrawing authorship are at the foundation of modern and contemporary art practice. Chance and encounter, besides intention and expression, are central to artistic experimentation. The work process is emphasised over the final result, and failure is embraced. In this sense, artistic practice seems to run against notions of responsibility as the assumption of agency. But that does not imply a renounce to politics. On the opposite, these practices are political precisely because they question the ontological division of labour, so to speak, upon which notions of responsibility are premised, namely the bourgeois subject. The bourgeois subject is founded upon the responsibility of the good citizen, and its opposite would be the idiot, who does not assume its political duties. I would argue that idiotic practices of irresponsibility and failure are radically political precisely because they question this model.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers notions of ‘ownership’ and ‘responsibility’ - in kinship, politics and ritual - through looking at Guna ritual artefacts. Showing how relations are immanent in and modelled through objects it is argued that meaning is created through timely material and social processes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an ethnographic response to objects that provide a model for social relations of ‘ownership’ and ‘responsibility’. Through looking at Guna ritual artefacts I show that relations characterized by notions of ownership and responsibility are immanent within these objects central to ritual life and everyday practices of dealing with non-human alterity. By the same token, relations of ownership and responsibility are found in other aspects of Guna life, from kinship to politics. Looking at the manifold relations concretized within Guna artefacts and refracted through them allows a modelling of social life that escapes signification - the inscription of meaning on objects and relations – and foregrounds generativity – the creation of meaning through material and social practices. The style of objects, with Gell, is a relational matrix containing the possibility of transformation based on the virtually unlimited combination of limited elements. With this case study, I intend to further show that relations modelled in the object constitute the very essence of style as a dynamic system containing the preconditions of its transformations in time.
Paper short abstract:
I wish to present, from the standpoint of a practicing artist with a history of working with museum collections, a sequence of new videos in which aesthetic responses, and associated moral responsibilities, occur when exhibited objects embody a history of harm, or are themselves harmed.
Paper long abstract:
When Alison Wilding’s sculpture Blue-Black collapsed in front of me at the 1984 British Art Show I felt responsible for what had happened. My approach across the gallery floor dislodged the delicately balanced structure, destroying at a stroke the artwork’s adaptation to the environment of the spectator. Like any unpromising pile of materials in a studio, the sudden horizontal disposition of ‘parts’ made it much harder to understand how, of all the sculptures these bits and pieces might have become, Wilding’s arrangement remained the aesthetic optimum.
My accidental act of unmaking, occurring as I planned my first interventionist exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, conjured, as if from nowhere, the dead matter out of which the living presence of the art work had been constructed. Unlike Mary Richardson’s attack on the Rokeby Venus in Gell’s Art and Agency, doing harm to Blue-Black prompted in me a lasting awareness of the fragility of artefactual agency. Whereas Richardson confirmed art’s power, Wilding’s sculpture punctured the aesthetic force that keeps art acting upon us.
My thoughts often return to this moment and I have recently extended the idea to inanimate materials that were once alive themselves. My new ASMR-style videos, utilising Holly Dugan’s 2019 article, offer a practice-based response to an unsettling juxtaposition of animals drawn on a calf skin manuscript now in the British Library. By transforming this biological artefact into contemporary media, I hope its 17th century approach to ‘harmed life’ achieves aesthetic validity once again.