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Accepted Paper:
When making art means breaking law? Anthropological redefinitions of the 'art' at the margins of legality
Nataliya Tchermalykh
(University of Geneva)
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?