Paper short abstract:

Before anthropology is adopted at the art school, we need to reckon with its radical potential for engaging found conceptual worlds. This ethnographic account of a Greek art school makes the case that even outmoded theoretical models such as formalism can shed new light on ethnographic contexts.

Paper long abstract:

One of the hallmarks of ethnographic practice is its ability to engage found conceptual worlds and treat their teachings as immanent tools for the solution of practical and/or theoretical problems. Within the breadth of writing on the intersections of art and anthropology, this paper makes an attempt to define the singularity of ethnography. Rather than suggesting what anthropology in the art school might look like, this is an ethnography at the art school. In Greece, in order to enter one of the country’s four Fine Arts Academies, students must sit for a five-day live drawing exam in which a thousand students crowd around six identical compositions of plaster casts of ancient statues and an assortment of plastic objects, and are asked to produce charcoal sketches or acrylic paintings. To pass this exam, most students will have attended between two to three years of preparatory classes at private, afternoon “cram schools” called frontistiria. During my fieldwork at one such frontistirio, I was taught to approach sketching in a formalist way, after nineteenth century art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. Although formalism is largely outmoded in art history and anthropology, I make the case that following our ethnographic commitments, found theories can shed light on our ethnographic object in unforeseen ways. In this case, returning to formalism opened up unlikely vistas on the institutional imbrication of private and public education. Grappling with ethnographic openness in this way is crucial to anthropology’s adoption in art curricula, so as not to become just another method.