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- Convenors:
-
Jennifer Clarke
(Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
Anna Laine
Maxime Le Calvé (Humboldt University in Berlin, ExC Matters of Activity)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 21 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Anthropologists rarely engage in explicit definitions of art, yet those definitions are entailed in their own practices as well as those observed in fieldwork. We invite papers that address the dynamics and the polemics of situated definitions of art in specific field contexts and practices.
Long Abstract:
Anthropologists' diverse and ambiguous relationships with art have long spurred debates around aesthetics, ethics, epistemologies and methodologies. While discussions about experimental methods are rich and ongoing (e.g. Scheider and Wright 2006, 2010), in the emergent field of transdisciplinary 'art-anthropology' anthropologists rarely engage in explicit definitions of 'art' - definitions that are entailed in their own practices as well as in those that they observe on fieldwork. We invite papers that address and problematise the dynamics and the polemics of situated definitions of "art", developing in particular field contexts and through specific practices, comparatively and in diverse forms.
If doing anthropology 'and' art is different from anthropologies 'of' art, or anthropology 'with' art (cf. Clarke 2019), how does the question of authorship change according to those various positions? Should 'artlike' forms of anthropological work (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2015) be evaluated by the same standards as professional art? How are relationships between form and content tackled? More broadly, how do power relations within the respective fields affect art-anthropology collaborations?
The panel further aims to open up discussion around how definitions of art, shaped through materials, objects, performances and social collaborations, can relate to diverse understandings of art as 'knowledge forming', one way of defining what art is and does. It is a definition we see emerging in the contemporary landscapes of our discipline, which may temporarily pacify the polemics between potential transdisciplinary practitioners while preserving the fundamental dynamics at work.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 21 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork within the frame of relational art projects, the paper confronts the artistic self concept of "art as translation work" with the theoretical dimension of the term translation in the SSH, especially in anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Following the artist and theorist Peter Weibel art can be conceived as "translation work". With the term translation, he considers significant artistic approaches since the modern avant-garde which indicate the end of the artistic original. As main argument serves the observation, that the concept of the original is inevitable linked to the capitalist concept of property which is no longer fundamental to recent process and actor oriented works. Furthermore, art in the sense of translation work can never be an original, because it always borrows from the existing material, works with it, internalizes it and carries it onward beyond geopolitical and national borders.
Based on the research project "Aesthetic alliances. Translation moments in relational art", the paper offers a critical review of the concept of art as translation work from an anthropological point of view. It is based on a theoretical exploration of the term translation in the SSH and confronts their academic approach with the increasing practical and metaphoric usage of the term translation in the art field. More and more artists and curators conceive their work in the frame of participatory approaches as conversation, mediation or just translation work between the different involved actors. Taking three recent examples of relational art in the frame of urban regeneration in which the author participated in a double agency as citizen and anthropologist, the paper offers an insight into the hierarchies and conflicts in such projects which question the harmonious self concept of art as translation work in a multiple way.
Paper short abstract:
This paper will problematise the theorisation and definition of art by examining 'research-creation'. Going beyond research by artists as commonly understood, it is the complex intersection of art practice, theoretical concepts, and research, a route into the question of art as 'knowledge forming'.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will problematise the theorisation and definition of art by examining 'research-creation'. Going beyond research by artists, as it is commonly understood, I will explore how it is the "complex intersection of art practice, theoretical concepts, and research" as a route into the question of art as 'knowledge forming'.
Given the increasing corporisation of universities, including art schools, experimental pedagogy and research must be defended. The developing notion of 'research-creation' is a means of insisting on, troubling, and valuing knowledge produced through mattering practice and ways of thinking-with in multiple, frictional, productive, modes. Following the feminist artist Natalie Loveless, and what she calls her own 'polydisciplinamory', I will argue that research -creation is not a method, it cannot be 'appropriated'. Research-creation does not describe, explain or represent (it is not ethnographic, as Ingold also argues for anthropology). Creating concepts and problematising them in the same move, it is a thinking-in-movement, "thinking saturated with affect" (Springgay and Truman 2016). It doesn't offer a theory or definition of art because it IS art AND is IS theory: theorypractice. The point of it is the unravelling of ideas about what knowledge is, how it is made and who makes it. This is in alignment with feminist and queer-thinking that asks us to pay attention to who participates, whose labour counts, and which modes of address are given scholarly credence.
I will also present some of my recent 'theorypractice' work, in a para-digital mode - between analogue and digital forms, in conversation, visual artwork, and performance.
Paper short abstract:
This paper seeks answers to the following question: how do the legal and criminological redefinitions of an artistic gesture, realized for political purposes, alter or contribute to the contemporary anthropological understanding of what is 'art'?
Paper long abstract:
As an empirical example, I will use my ethnographic work with the corpus of legal and criminological documents, generated around the political performances realized by Piotr Pavlenskiy (b.1984, Russia). Pavlenskiy is a radical Russian artist, who faced several criminal accusations and prison sentences in Russia and France between 2013 and 2019. How do we incorporate the auto-ethnographic knowledge, produced by the artist to the disciplinary field of anthropology? How do the legal and criminological redefinitions of an artistic gesture, realized for political purposes, alter or contribute to the contemporary anthropological understanding of what is 'art'? Speaking as an anthropologist, constantly influenced and challenged by my encounters with artists and performers, I will try to reflect on the following question: how do we produce anthropological knowledge about artistic practices/with artists, when our main sources - our research objects - are, at the same time, research subjects on their own? In other words, how do we produce ethnographic knowledge about and with those who are themselves "ethnographers", involved with their own research experiments, strong argumentation and theorization going far beyond their artistic field?
Paper short abstract:
Here I will argue from the perspective of an artist what I believe anthropology could do for art, but doesn't.
Paper long abstract:
Here I will argue from the perspective of an artist what I believe anthropology could do for art, but doesn't. I argue firstly that art historians get art history wrong - and by getting it wrong create a problematic legacy for artists - because they cherry-pick specific artists to use as exemplars of genius, their exceptionalism is used to write a progressivist history where one genius begets the next and so on. Anthropologists, by contrast, usually investigate communities, in their entirety; ethnographies do not cherry-pick exemplars on which to extrapolate whole theories of progress, but instead attempt to research relations between people, our ideas, taboos and social structures (etc). Understanding art from this perspective would be valuable for artists, if anthropolgists actually wrote these types of ethnographies. But they don't. Instead they either write as if art is the same as craft. This idea belies a history of art qua art, in which art emerges in the sense that we mean it today, as a practice and way of seeing, emerging with Modernity and only in the eighteenth century. Other anthropologists follow the occlusions established within the history of art and focus only on the type of art and artists shown in biennials and national galleries. I will argue that these can not be understood as communities of artists, but moments of becoming, emergences within global capitalism, to employ phrases from Process Philosophy, not communities per se.
Paper short abstract:
This paper aims to discuss the artistic and ethnographic material developed by the Family Stronger Project (www.familiastronger.com) carried out by the anthropologist and artist Vitor Grunvald and Paulo Mendel, an artist and director engaged in audiovisual possibilities in multiple medium.
Paper long abstract:
Since 2016, Vitor Grunvald, trained artist and anthropologist, and Paulo Mendel, artist and video director, have been developing multimodal material out of a fieldwork conducted with Family Stronger, a LGBTQIA+ collective of Sao Paulo (Brazil)'s periphery.
Besides traditional ethnographic written texts, the outcomes of this documentary of transmedia storytelling have multiple forms that cut across the disciplinary fields of art and anthropology. So far, we developed a webdoc (www.familiastronger.com) composed by videoportraits, photographs, digital diagrams and a blog fed by members of the family. Also a short documentary called Sunday which have itself two forms of presentation: as a mono-channel film (screened in the RAI Film Festival 2019 - https://raifilm.org.uk/programme-2019/sunday/) and as a videoinstallation (selected by the curators and presented at
21st Sesc_Videobrasil Biennial - www.bienalsescvideobrasil.org.br/artista/paulo-mendel-vitor-grunvald, one of the most important art events in Brazil).
In this presentation, I aim to discuss the vicissitudes of conducting an anthropological informed work that is both ethnographic and artistic, emphasizing collaborative practices and the challenges of reception that this kind of material presents facing some traditional definitions of art and anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation makes the case for a becoming of anthropology 'and' art that engages beyond visual investigations of either discipline.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I argue that to consider visual investigations as both anthropological and artistic firstly requires an understanding that thus far a hierarchical system of categorization of affectivities has been put in place for us to distinguish art and make sense of it. To this point, I refer to Highmore's work, stating that art has been the mechanism that has thus far provided exemplifications of what, namely "creaturely, experiential life (2010, 122)", is difficult to render via speech and writing. According to the author, it is the impossibility of translating aesthetics into anything other than art that develops into "aesthetic discourse that results in the misdirection of aesthetics, directing it to become simply synonymous with art theory (Highmore 2010, 122)." Referencing texts from affect studies, I want to make the case for the anthropologist to claim the territorialities and temporalities away from "''aesthetics' [working] as an umbrella term for heuristic inquiry into affect and its interlacing of sense perception and bodily dispensation (Highmore 2010, 123-4)". Secondly, I maintain that the way both the anthropologist/artist and the public approach visual representations of work that is both anthropological and artistic determine its affective qualities and thus its experiential meanings.
Moreover, referencing examples from work I have co-conducted in Tirana, I maintain that it is possible, if not necessary, to step away from labelling our practice of anthropology and art as 'applied practice' for it tends to categorize this becoming and its related theoretical and analytical spaces as cultural practices.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces definitions of art through processes of making, with attention to intersections between artistic and anthropological research and to relationships between art, document and body.
Paper long abstract:
Artistic research has been formalised as an academic discipline and knowledge field during the last decades. It gives voice to artists speaking from within the making of art, hitherto marginalised by outside definitions provided by art historians and art critics. These marginalised voices are of particular interest for anthropological approaches to art, following the discipline's critical examination of representation, authorship and power relations, including structures of 'othering'. Artistic research, with its contextual variations, offers a potential to enhance the understanding of art and creative processes, and to what extent these processes can be linked to anthropological ways of working.
This paper discusses a project where the other (artist) is self-identified as me (anthropologist), continuously evolving through transdisciplinary engagements. As not uncommon in artistic research, it articulates emergent processes of making things, performances, relationships and knowledge through Tim Ingold's writings (2011, 2013; Laine 2013; 2018). The project uses collaborative photography, curation and exhibition response to convey a critical understanding of casteism in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora. While encountering contradictive relationships between art, document and body, the project visualises knowledge of contemporary casteism as part of the transnational expansions of right-wing nationalism and provides alternatives to silencing notions of caste as a pre-modern practice partly modelled through anthropological understandings of structure and transaction.