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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:
In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement resulted in the toppling of monuments all over the world. This paper examines how the toppling of a monument in Senegal enabled discussions about responsibility for colonial legacies in West Africa.
Paper long abstract:
On the morning of 5 September 2017, the statue of Louis Leon Faidherbe that had formed the focal point of Saint-Louis since 1886, had fallen. The effigy lay down, next to its pedestal, its face buried in the sand of the public garden that it had decorated for 130 years. In the accounts given in the newspaper, the statue had been toppled by a thunderstorm. This explanation seemed implausible to quite a few inhabitants of Saint-Louis who had mixed feelings about the toppling of the effigy of the man considered by many the ‘founder’ of modern Senegal. In subsequent discussions in national media, the question of the toppling of Faidherbe’s statue in the former capital of French West Africa became entangled with a wider discussion about the achievements of the French General and the human costs at which he had achieved them. At stake was the legacy of colonialism, its merits and its traumas. In 2020, informed by the death of George Floyd and the world-wide activism generated by the Black Lives Matter movement, the toppling of the monument acquired yet another momentum in a wider reckoning with race. This paper situates the toppling of the statue of Faidherbe in wider discussions about the legacies of colonialism and racism. Raising the question of the monument’s toppling, it addresses the paradox how obscurity around the responsibility for the toppling of a colonial monument enabled a discussion about the legacies of colonialism by attributing responsibility to the founder of the colony.
Paper short abstract:
Exhibitions are usually understood and used in anthropology as representation techniques, here I propose and describe the use of displays as devices for ethnographic inquiry, for political concern and for learning epistemic generosity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines an untapped potential for exhibitions to act as key experimental devices and fields of knowledge-in-the-making. It describes the preparations of and reactions from the show ‘Objects of Attention’, in which ten artists were invited to re-design an ordinary object into a political question, and two designers had to learn how to translate our ideas into materials. A series of field arrangements were constructed, materially heterogeneous and with a variety of forms, establishing particular kinds of relationships and of knowledge.
As a result, my fieldwork was intoxicated by the ways of doing of very different participants, impelling me to un-learn part of my disciplinary grammar, and my counterparts to practice epistemic generosity. Moreover, I was often compelled to act as an artist and as a designer myself (not just as a curator), entering a field in which I felt unqualified, and facing the limits of my knowledge and skills.
During the process, not only I faced the limits of my own ability to participate in the making of the exhibition, but in some cases, participants placed me at the periphery of what was going on despite my role as curator-ethnographer. Our experimental collaboration was indeed not free of tension and disagreement, facing diverse and competing relational obligations and responsibilities.
Accordingly, it also discusses the skills of collaboration in contemporary art, design and gallery curation, and how they make tangible different (working) definitions of knowledge, objecthood and amateurism, which themselves generate moments of surprise, material intensity and also tension.
Paper short abstract:
This talk comes from the perspective of being a research fellow inside the Reshaping the Collectible project at the Tate Gallery. The project asks how a selection of key works works are challenging, and shaping, practices of collections care in the Art museum.
Paper long abstract:
This talk is generated from the perspective of being a research fellow inside the Reshaping the Collectible project at the Tate Gallery for four months in 2019-2020. Through intense focus on specific artworks, either in, or coming into, the Tate’s collections, Reshaping the Collectible asks how these works are challenging, and shaping, practices of collections care in the Art museum. Given this backdrop, here I aim to unpack some of the key words that underpin the Reshaping the Collectible Project drawing from both anthropological and decolonial thinking to situate them within an expanded and cross-cultural field. I focus on the ongoing acquisition of a work by the Aboriginal Australian artist, Richard Bell into the Tate's collections. Embassy, is a satellite of the Aboriginal Embassy, an ongoing political action that asserts Aboriginal Australian sovereignty in the face of settler-colonial domination resulting in centuries of erasure of Aboriginal rights. As Aboriginal sovereign space, both the original embassy and the artwork ask those who enter them to resituate themselves, to understand that the ground they are on is not an undifferentiated “public” space, but rather re-zoned as an Indigenous space and place, governed by alternative rules and protocols, looking from there out and back at the nation-state and its citizens. Here, I ask, what do questions of participation, political activism, and social networks look like from the perspective of an artwork that rezones the terms of relation between spectator and spectacle, visitor and guest?
Paper short abstract:
Art, as many other disciplines, has changed a lot in its practices from the past. But we still continue addressing it as it was a century ago. So, how could we replace the actual meaning of art in our social context in order for it to share responsibility with other disciplines on equal terms?
Paper long abstract:
Art as we consider it has changed a lot from the way we knew it as a representation of reality, like the role photography has produced in painting. Now some of its concerns have more to do with sociology, politics, film, etc. How come the field of art has changed so much and we continue naming it the same?
Because there is not a problem with the name but what it means in the collective consciousness. And here there is a paradox. Although art has changed a lot, the understanding of art for the majority of people is still as a subjective way of representation. Which in this era has the value of almost nothing compared with the subjects that concern people today.
Today there are movements which demand the application of artists’s way of thinking for other disciplines like education (Acaso, 2017). But here I’m going to discuss how I think art no longer has the role as a singular field and should be associated with other disciplines. That is equal to saying that different disciplines should be more intertwined to have more coherence between the evolution of society and the way it thinks its practice.
Because in the end when we talk about responsibility we have to talk about co-responsibility — having the same impact in society: economically, culturally and technologically. And today the proportion of how technology and art are affecting the world is analogous to the weight of the sun compared to that of an orange.