Paper short abstract:

As recently stated by Grayson Perry, it is now almost 100 years since Marcel Duchamp effectively rendered the question ‘Is is art?’ entirely redundant; the only question that needs to be asked of art today is ‘Is it good?’. The same may be said of bringing artistic perspectives and practical methods into archaeology.

Paper long abstract:

Recent discussion in this area has been agnostic at best and, at worst, has bordered on the romantic, with the contributions of artists accepted uncritically and as, patronisingly, a useful way to convey the results of archaeology to a wider audience. Artists appear in archaeological thought as quasi-magical conveyors of 'truths' archaeologically invisible, we peer-review our colleagues yet present artistic responses to sites and landscapes as if they were primary evidence.

All of this serves to obscure the true worth of artists and archaeologists working together in ways that recall the interdependence of surrealist art and anthropology in the 1920s, sadly lost in the grey mists of post-war science. Appreciating that artists are more than just illustrators or camera operators and that archaeologists do more than rigorously apply an unchanging method to whatever unfortunate object falls into their path, perhaps we can investigate how, in practice, we can prompt each other to new lines of questioning, new subjects and, in the spirit of this session, new outputs and forms of dissemination in a relationship that works both ways.

Based on three years embedded, as a contemporary archaeologist, in the public art programme of a new shopping centre development in Bristol, this paper seeks to outline a useful practical relationship between artists and archaeologists that stands up to academic critique while also reinvigorating the exciting boundary blurring and disciplinary radicalism of 100 years ago, asking of the bringing together of art and archaeology not 'Is is worthwhile?' but 'Is it good?'