WORKSHOP REPORT
ENCOUNTERING CONCEPTS IN ART AND ANTHROPOLOGY
Universitat de Barcelona, June 11 and 12th.
A. Introduction and general framework of the workshop.
The Anthropology of Art interest group within VANEASA was first launched in the
EASA conference in Paris, 2012. We have had our first meeting in this last EASA
conference in Tallinn, 2014. We organised this meeting as a Lab (L200
Anthropologies of Art). The rationale was to generate a group discussion on the
objectives of the interest group. A central theme that emerged through our meeting
were the uncertain processes of collaboration between art and anthropology. In the
last years, many members of the interest group have participated in several different
processes of cross-fertilisation, and experimental practice between both fields. While
these experiences have often been very productive, there is also a sense of frustration
on the uncertain grounds of these processes, the misunderstandings on which
sometimes they are based and the precariousness of their outcomes. Some
anthropologists feel that their opening towards art has not been fully acknowledged
by artists. At this point, it is necessary to put together these experiences and discuss
which are the reasons for these misunderstandings? Which concepts are we putting in
play in these processes? Are we using the same concepts in different ways?
With this idea in mind, we generated a list of key recurrent concepts that are
interesting precisely because of their ambiguity: “method/work”, “research”,
“creativity”, “participation/exclusion”, “institutions” and “archives”. We organized
the workshop “Encountering concepts in Art and Anthropology” to address these
concepts. The objective was not to produce definitions, but to engage with the
questions and problems they have generated- encountering the concepts, as it were.
Each concept has been addressed first by one or two members of the group, who will
then open the room to discussion. In the following paragraphs I will make a short
summary of the discussions of each panel on each concept or pairing of concepts.
B. Panels and discussion.
1) Participation/Exclusion
Leaders: Weronika Plinska and Anton Nikolotov.
The first section of the workshop was dedicated to the discussion of the
complementary concepts of participation and exclusion. The leaders of the panel
started by acknowledging that these concepts have been used and discussed in other
fields than art before, for example in development and social welfare studies (House,
Mosse 2006), where participation was already highlighted as a solution to social
exclusion, and as a tool of empowerment. The extension of this discourse of
participation to the larger economic discourse of management, development and neo-
liberal governmentality was also pointed out.
In the case of art and anthropology, the “imperative to collaborate” (Marcus, Howes
2012) has taken different shapes and forms, from activist projects that aim to engage
with situations of social exclusion, through projects to reach out local populations
and “activate” them, to more specific and focused processes of collaboration between
different social agents and experts in particular projects or laboratories. This last case
is what has been identified by Marcus as a “para-site”, or a site of research that
exceeds the traditional definition of the field site, where anthropologists and artists
work collaboratively with other agents and experts, forming a particular site, not just
working on or about them, but with them. The leaders of the workshop explained
these concepts in regards to their own research, like in the cases of the Warsaw
Rainbow by Julita Wójcik and the art-activist collective Ultra Red. The following
discussion revolved around questions of ethics, and the politics of participation/
representation. One issue that was particularly pointed out was the difficulty to assess
the “quality” or “success” of participation from the artistic point of view, and if such
questions actually made sense at all in this context. Another question that was raised
was the possibility of thinking some of these projects in terms of self-organisation
and autonomy rather than participation.
2) Work/Method
Leader: Roger Sansi
Most of the literature on the relationship between art and anthropology has engaged
with the use of ethnographic methods, and how both disciplines could learn and
exchange ideas about the uses of methods – visual and artistic methods in the case of
anthropology, and ethnographic methods in the case of art. In this workshop however
we extended the discussion beyond the ¨method¨ of research towards its outcomes:
what is achieved in anthropological and artistic research? What are the outcomes and
forms of objectification of this research? Contemporary art practice often
experiments with transitive processes that do not result in definitive outcomes, as
opposed to anthropological research, which is objectified in clear research outputs-
articles and monographs. In recent years some authors have argued for the
experimentation with processual forms of production in Anthropology, that do not
result in formal academic outputs. But in more general terms, this experimentation
questions the very definition of what constitutes academic work: to withdraw from
academic production is to question the academy as a mode of production. In these
terms, it was pointed out how in art practice, the discussion on what constitutes
artistic work has been much wider and critical than in Anthropology, and how it has
been linked to wider discussions in political economy about precarious labor. An
interesting discussion emerged on the differences in the mode of production in
different regional traditions in Anthropology: how soviet anthropology was always
designed as a collective work of gathering an cultural archive, as opposed to Anglo-
American Anthropology, that has always been more individualistic, based on the
model of the single ethnographer going to the field and producing a monograph. In
these terms, Anglo-American Anthropology can also be more easily assimilated to
the romantic ideal of the individual artist. Within western schools of anthropology,
the French distinction between “ethnologue¨ and “anthropologue” was also remarked,
as a hierarchical system of production in which the collective of “ethnologists”
produces the archive that the single “anthropologue” will transform then in theory,
through systematic comparison. The discussion of all these variations made us aware
of the need for further discussion on the conditions of knowledge production in
Anthropology, beyond the good intentions of proposing more experimental methods.
3) Creativity
Leader: Rodrigo Ferreira Nunes
In the section on creativity, the leader Rodrigo Ferreira addressed this concept in
reference to Ingold, Hallam and Wilf´s recent discussions. As opposed to notions of
individual creativity, anthropological approaches often underscore the collective
dimensions of creativity, as improvisational events involving human and non human
agents in the context of preexisting genres, traditions, and skills. The practical,
material and embodied nature of creativity is also stressed by these authors, as
opposed to a more cognitive perspective that approaches creativity as a mental act.
This notion of creativity and improvisation is intimately related to the more general
concept of culture in anthropology since Boas, as an embodied set of dispositions
than enables improvisation from a given register. Rodrigo explained the concept in
reference to his own fieldwork on music making in Shetland islands. The discussion
introduced critical notions of “creativity” as a buzzword in contemporary capitalism,
as a form of transforming what is seen as raw human energy in productive potential,
and as an extension of “art” and “culture” into a wide sphere of production ( as in the
“creative industries”). The Schumpeterian notion of ¨creative destruction¨ was also
invoked in this sense. This move was discussed within the larger trajectory of the
transformations in cultural production in relation of property rights. The emergence
of copyright in the eighteenth century is strictly linked to the emergence of the figure
of the author as creator. Paradoxically, the emergence of new electronic media in the
last decades has had the opposite effect, by enabling the emergence of a more
collective notion of creativity (as in ¨creative commons¨).
It was also pointed out that “creativity” seems to have lost its centrality in the last
years in favor of the notion of “innovation”, more closely linked to science and
technology.
4) Institutions
Leaders: Lidia Rossner and Jonas Tinius
The section ‘Institutions’, explored several different ways in which institutions have
been conceptualised by artists and by anthropologists. Focus of the session was to
mobilise some of the ways in which institutions function, or are constituted by artists,
and to ask how these conceptual, ethnographic, emic notions of institutions can be
productively theorised for further anthropological inquiry. Based on fieldwork
conducted by the section leaders among public theatre in the German Ruhr valley and
a state-funded project lab to rethink the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, respectively, the
section proposed four different instances of the institution as concept between art and
anthropology: a) as prism and mediator between different social spheres, b) as
tradition with a coherent albeit potentially conflictive set of ethical and aesthetic
values, c) as risk minimisers that allow for unprofitable projects, and for long-term
planning, d) as sites for institutional critique that can provide internal ways of
rethinking the nature of the institution.
5) Research
Leader: Thomas Filitiz
Approaching the topic of research in the anthropology of art the leader of this section
proposed to consider the framework within which we are investigating. As broad
concept, the leader used the notion ‘dialogue’ as outlined by Schneider in his series
of articles on the new hermeneutics between art and anthropology, a conversational
situation of collaboration between artists and anthropologists being fully conscious of
differences (Schneider 2013, 2015). This new agenda, according to Schneider, is
positioned within participatory art. The leader of this section argued that this
emphasis on participatory art is neglecting or marginalising art practices around the
world that are not based on participation. In these terms, the question of a “global art”
framework, that includes other local art worlds beyond the still Western-centric
international contemporary art world.
One of the central questions raised in the discussion that followed was the role of
curators and patrons in the production of contemporary art discourses. In particular,
the latter are aiming at getting more influences on exhibitions (e.g. U.S.A. and
Switzerland). That relates to their influence in producing the art-ness of the object.
On the other hand, there was also a common interest in engaging with current
discussions on ontology, the (artistic) multitude and perspectivism to approach the
multiplicity of contemporary art worlds.
6) Archive.
Leaders: Giulia Battaglia, Fionna Siegenthaler.
The leaders of this section made three general points in relation to the concept of
archive: First, the archive as something shared/collective that can be both, material
and non-material. Second, the archive as an existing or potential place, as a subject
and as an object of collaboration (for instance, between artists and scholars, scholars
and community members, etc.). And third, the archive is process-based rather than a
still repository; i.e. it is subject to practices, transliterations and transformations. The
following discussion revolved around a set of questions. Is the collective/shared
quality of the archive unique? How can it be further explored, and to what extent
does it distinguish itself from other collaborative and shared practices, places and
subjects? What does archive then mean for future ethnography as a discipline of
societies and cultures? What forms of collaborative work does the archive offer, and
what could it contribute to the exploration of the relationship of art and anthropology
for all, scholars, artists and other actors? What can we gain from a process-based
notion of the archive? What implications does this have on the role of the archive in
art and anthropology, and for the practices related to it, in particular.
C. Conclusions and Outputs.
In the wrapping-up discussion of the workshop, we agreed that the outcome of the
workshop didn´t need to be a standard publication, an edited volume or special issue,
but that in the spirit of the project we had to maintain an ongoing, opened
conversation on the concepts we discussed. In these terms we plan to build an online
blog where the discussions on the concepts will be open to contributions of people
who didn´t participate in the workshop. We also plan on organizing a workshop in
the next EASA biennial meeting in Milan 2016, open to other EASA members so that
we can enlarge and reinforce the discussion within the Anthropology of art interest
group
11 Jun 2015
- 12 Jun 2015