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- Convenors:
-
Bernardo Machado
(Unicamp)
Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer (University of Konstanz)
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- Discussants:
-
Jennifer Clarke
(Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University)
Maxime Le Calvé (Humboldt University in Berlin, ExC Matters of Activity)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/007
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Assuming that aesthetic forms are permeated by political powers, this panel explores their affective and transformative potentials in transnational flows and local settings. We ask how diverse agents engage with aesthetic forms and their emergent embeddings, transits and agencies.
Long Abstract:
This panel addresses how diverse agents challenge and/ or foster common social orders by engaging aesthetic forms in various contexts. We approach forms as "shapes and configurations", "ordering principles", and "patterns of repetition and difference" (Levine, 2015: 3) that are based on attached values (cf. Sharman, 1997) and shared appreciation (cf. Strathern, 1990). Aesthetic forms are, in our view, continuous becomings in a never complete process of 'forming'. Ranging from acting techniques, dance and musique styles to visual artwork, aesthetic forms are taken by more-than-representational aspects, but as powerful agents that "intra-act" (Barad, 2005), "enfold" and "emerge" (Handelman, 2021) with their surroundings.
The discussion is interested in the ways aesthetic forms move across, depart from, and arrive in various places. These translocal, multidirectional flows are always accompanied by co-creations and co-transfers of concomitant sets of meanings, values, and practices. We assume aesthetic forms to be permeated by post-, neo- or colonial practices and structures of political and economic power. In that regard, the panel also inquires which anthropological concepts can be fruitful to discuss "art" in a critical perspective (Gell, 1998; Cesarino, 2017).
We invite contributors to explore how aesthetic forms are embraced, embodied, ignored, contested, categorized, or actively resisted and rejected. Both empirical research and theoretical contributions providing analytical keys for reflections on the subject are welcome.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Shias Muslims experience dreams and miracles in particular ways in their lives every day. For artists, art is a means of interacting with the sacred. Using an ethnographic example of a painting in Kuwait, this paper will discuss and extend Gell's agency of art.
Paper long abstract:
It is common for Shias to experience religious dreams and miracles on a regular basis. However, despite their centrality in many Shia communities, they have hardly been studied ethnographically. According to my fieldwork participants, many Shias in Kuwait view miracles as God and Ahl Al-Bayt's (family of Prophet Mohammed) way of communicating with humanity, whereas others see them as their reward for performing religious duty and worshipping. Exploring the world of oneiric experiences will help us better understand the kind of connections that are fostered between humans and the divine. The purpose of this paper is to describe how one artist in Kuwait experienced miracles through her art and how this challenged my perspective as a researcher when it came to using the senses to describe it.
Through the study of a statue and its maker, I will test Gell's theory of art and propose an extension to it as it does not recognize the complex and layered nature of art's agency. In a linear analysis of their role, miracles introduce a level of sophistication that undervalues what they actually accomplish.
Paper short abstract:
This paper approaches ritual studies through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). I examine Shi'i Azadari rituals in Leipzig, Germany over 4 years. By comparing ritual & art, I argue that they are irreducible to their form, content, and function.
Paper long abstract:
This paper approaches ritual studies through the lens of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). The central argument of OOO is that objects are in a tense relationship with their qualities. This withdrawal of objects from their accidental and essential qualities opens to the door to theoretically analyzing how rituals and artworks are in loose relationships with their form, content, and function.
Based on four years of fieldwork of Shi'i Azadari rituals in Germany, I have found that Azadari occurs not only behind closed doors in a backyard Husayniya, but it also ontologically withdraws behind its relational qualities.
I therefore challenge relationism in ritual studies and art studies. I turn to Walter Benjamin's concept of the "aura" and show Benjamin offers one non-relational approach to art and ritual. Ultimately, I argue that by rethinking artworks and rituals through non-relationality, it becomes possible to reconceive what role form, content, and function have for rituals and artworks.
Paper short abstract:
Through a comparison of ethnographic methods and the methods used by the photographer Martin Parr, this paper considers the aesthetic forms and political implications of artistic and anthropological practice. Parr’s work and my ethnographic research can be seen to produce “relational aesthetics”.
Paper long abstract:
Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) has coined the term “relational aesthetics” to consider how the practice of artists may generate not only artefacts but new social arrangements, that, in turn, can be politically transformative. Therefore, social configurations can also be seen to present different “aesthetic forms” and “shapes”. In this paper I will use Bourriaud’s concept to consider the work of both artists and anthropologists. I will do so by drawing a comparison between my ethnographic work at the British seaside and that of the photographer Martin Parr – who has become globally well-known for his photos of seaside towns. While conducting long-term ethnographic research in Margate, a seaside town in South East England, I have been able to engage with research interlocutors who have participated in Martin Parr’s photographs. Although neither I or Parr, at the time, necessarily intended to directly interfere in the social arrangements of the communities we were working with, I consider how the “methods” we applied generate more than artefacts – either photographs, in his case, or anthropological publications, in mine. By addressing interlocutors’ interpretations of such events, I discuss how the very encounter between artists or anthropologists with local interlocutors produce “relational aesthetics” that engender particular power structures. Although the connection between anthropological practice and the reproduction of power is now widely discussed, here I draw attention to aspects of anthropological practice (e.g. the “shape” of fieldwork) that are often considered the “backstage” of what we do, therefore avoiding critical scrutiny.
Paper short abstract:
Pointing to the simultaneous standardisation and diversification of aesthetic forms in the global contemporary art world, this paper explores how the transnational circulation of artworks by Indian Dalit artists both challenges and affirms social and aesthetic hierarchies, locally and globally.
Paper long abstract:
Within the past 6 to 8 years, a growing number of contemporary Indian artists hailing from the marginalised castes known as Dalits have exhibited their works in international art biennials, museums and fairs alongside artworks by some of the world's most coveted artists. Incorporating aesthetic forms hitherto foreign to the sleek, polished contemporary art world, these works may be seen to challenge local caste hierarchies as well as global/postcolonial hierarchies by subverting established aesthetic norms and forms. However, the curatorial embrace of 'Dalit art' (Achar 2019) internationally may come with the price of aesthetic cooptation and coalescence. Using examples from recent exhibitions in art fairs and biennials, this paper explores the aesthetic and political agency of 'Dalit art' in a global field, which is largely governed by financial and political interests. Do the artworks under scrutiny retain their aesthetic fervour and distinctiveness once they are transplanted into new settings and contexts? And if so, what is their transformative potential then?
Paper short abstract:
This paper takes some notes from a reality TV show named “Dançando na Broadway”. Broadcast by a Brazilian channel in 2012, it exhibited six young Brazilian actors and actresses living in New York competing to find out who would be the most prepared artist to join Broadway’s stage.
Paper long abstract:
Theatre is generally taken to be a local phenomenon, limited to a specific region, yet shows, artists, and scripts have transited intensely around the globe ever since at least the seventeenth century. In this paper, I take some notes from a reality TV show named “Dançando na Broadway”. Broadcast by a Brazilian channel in 2012, it exhibited six young Brazilian actors and actresses living in New York competing to find out who would be the most prepared artist to join Broadway’s stage. Every day, they learned a song and choreography of a musical and performed for a jury of professionals from American musical theater. At the end of each episode, they would choose a winner. Whoever had the highest number of victories would be the season champion. This paper will examine the uses of the notion of “truth” in this reality TV show. The research has a double objective: identify the social references mobilized to produce what could be “true” and “false” on the scene; and analyze which bodies were able to materialize the “truth” of a song/character. Criteria of gender, race, and sexuality relate to aesthetic conventions to guarantee “verisimilitude” to the theatre scene and to the reality of the tv show, particularly when considering standards from different countries such as Brazil and the US.