An Anthropology of Contemporary Art

Practices, Markets, and Collectors

Thomas Fillitz, Paul van der Grijp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181128
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

Drawing on the exciting developments that have occurred in the anthropology of art over the last twenty years, this study uses ethnographic methods to explore shifts in the art market and global contemporary art. Recognizing that the huge diversity of global phenomena requires research on the ground, An Anthropology of Contemporary Art examines the local art markets, biennials, networks of collectors, curators, artists, patrons, auction houses, and museums that constitute the global art world.Divided into four parts – Picture and Medium; World Art Studies and Global Art; Art Markets, Maecenas and Collectors; Participatory Art and Collaboration – chapters go beyond the standard emphasis on Europe and North America to present first-hand fieldwork from a wide range of areas, including Brazil, Turkey, and Asia and the Pacific.With contributions from distinguished anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Roger Sansi Roca, this book provides a fresh approach to key topics in the discipline. A model for demonstrating how contemporary art can be studied ethnographically, this is a vital read for students in anthropology of art, visual anthropology, visual culture, and related fields.

PART ONE
Image and Medium

1.1
The Making of Images

Philippe Descola

It is about a year ago that I started being seriously interested in the theme I have chosen for this lecture.¹ I therefore take the opportunity to test in front of you what is still just an assembly of loose reflections on cultural forms of image-making. At this early stage of my research I need, first, to specify the methods and the domain of what could be an anthropology of figuration, essentially in the scope of fields covered by the anthropology of art, art history, and the philosophy of aesthetics. Here, figuration is understood as the universal operation by means of which any material object is ostensibly invested with “agency,” which is socially defined following an activity of shaping, of ordering, of ornamentation, or of placing in a situation. This activity aims at conveying the object the potential for the iconic evocation of a real or imaginary prototype which is indexically denoted (via the delegation of intentionality) in as far as it plays on a direct resemblance of a mimetic type or on any other type of indirect or immediate motivation. Adopting the intentional perspective developed by several authors² in this respect—the idea that the best way to approach works of art is to treat them rather as agents having an effect on the world instead of considering them according to the meaning attached to them, or the criteria of beauty to which they should respond—the present approach needs to be distinguished from the former in as much as it does not consider art to be related solely to the object. The domain it characterizes may not be specified in a transhistorical and transcultural way, let alone on the sole basis of perceptive or symbolic properties that supposedly should be intrinsic to it. By privileging the process of figuration I wish to accentuate the fact that among the multitude of nonhuman objects which may be ascribed an autonomous social efficiency—such as a sacrificial victim, a coin, a fetish, or a copy of the constitution—I am interested uniquely in those which hold as well an iconic character. This allows one at least to avoid the embarrassment into which one may fall when aiming at defining with precision the attributes, even purely relationally, of the art object. I would like to clarify in this context that iconicity in Peirce’s sense is not simple resemblance, even less so realistic representation, but the fact that a sign exhibits the same quality, or configuration of qualities, as the denoted object. This relationship allows the beholder of the icon to recognize the prototype to which it refers.

To be anthropologically interested in figuration does not mean to do anthropology of art. Indeed, this subdiscipline essentially strives at reproducing the social and cultural contexts of the production and use of non-occidental artifacts. Occidentals have invested the latter with an aesthetic virtue in order to make, for instance, their meaning accessible to the public who frequent ethnographic museums, according to similar criteria as the ones accepted for the aesthetic appreciation of those objects that are traditionally on display in art museums—categorization, periodization, function, style, quality of elaboration, rarity, symbolism, and so on. As useful as the multiplication of studies dealing with concepts of beauty in non-European civilizations or of the conditions of their making may be, or with the function and the reception of this category of artifacts to which occidentals acknowledge an aesthetic value, this endeavor may not be defined in the strict sense as anthropological. Apart from a few rare exceptions—in particular the one of the regretted Alfred Gell—it is not founded on any general anthropological theory, and its objective is not to produce one. One is confronted with a different stage of the anthropological work, which is analogous to the one occupied by art history, and which should better be called an ethnology of art: the former is studying occidental art objects, the latter is dealing with artifacts from non-occidental contemporary cultures which seem to share an air of familiarity with these other objects.

Addressing the field of figuration is above all the occasion of testing an anthropological theory I have developed in a recent book (Descola 2005). It asserts that the diverse ways of organizing the experience of the world, individual and collective, may be brought back to a reduced number of modes of identification. These latter correspond to the different ways of distributing qualities to existing entities, or “existents,” that is endowing them, or not, with certain aptitudes which render them capable of a particular type of action. Founded on the diverse possibilities of imputing to an indeterminate aliud analogous physicality and interiority, or dissimilarities to the ones any human makes experience of, this identification may be expressed in four ontological formulas: Either the majority of beings are renowned for having a similar interiority while distinguishing themselves through their body—this is the case of animism (Amazonia, the North of Northern America, Siberia, and some regions of Southeast Asia and Melanesia); or humans are unique in possessing the privilege of interiority while relating to the continuum of nonhumans through their material characteristics—this is naturalism (Europe from the Classic Age on); or some humans and nonhumans share, within a denominated class, the same physical and moral properties issued from a prototype, and outright distinguish themselves from other classes of the same type—this is totemism (primarily the Aborigines of Australia); or all elements of the world are differentiated among each other on the ontological level, the reason for finding stable correspondences between them—this is the analogism (China, Renaissance Europe, West Africa, Andes, Mesoamerica). I think I succeeded in showing on the one hand that each of these modes of identification envisages a type of collective more particularly adequate to rally in a common destination of the types of being it distinguishes; that is to say, each ontology generates a sociology that is proper to it. On the other hand, the ontological intentions, which are operated by each of these modes, have an impact on the definition and the attributes of the subject. Therefore, each ontology secretes both an epistemology and a theory of action which are adapted to the problems it has to solve. So it seems logical to now examine the effects that are induced by these four formulas on the genesis of images. If figuration is a universal disposition, the products of this activity—that is to say the type of entity it creates, the type of agency that invests these products, and the means by which they are made visible—in principle should vary, in as far as each of these modes of identification stipulates different properties for the figurative objects, and so calls for a particular mode of figuration. Fundamentally, the task is to highlight that a specific iconology corresponds to each ontology.

The modes of figuration, however, have not to be conceived as styles in the sense of art history but rather as “morphologized” ontologies. They do not so much allow us to foresee the general form of an image which is invested by a socially defined agency, but instead to anticipate the type of agency associated with a type of form. An anthropology of figuration, as I understand it, differs in these regards from the theory of the art nexus developed by Alfred Gell (1998). He proposes a simple mechanism for classifying on the basis of a generative combination of the different possible relations between the four terms of the artistic activity—index, prototype, artist, and recipient. These relations are deployed around intentional objects, which are not defined by formal characteristics, but by the type of agency delegation that these objects mediate. Indeed, his theory provides a means to escape the Eurocentric iconological criteria of occidental aesthetics, and this is already an immense merit. It nevertheless does not contribute to the elaboration of a comparative grammar of figurative schemes. Yet, as the intentional dimension of the objects is for Gell totally a function of the relations within which they are inserted, the theory of the art nexus does not inform us about the formal characteristics which are propitious for the expression in an object of this or that type of delegation of intentionality. Nor does the theory inform us about the reasons, other than the functional ones, which would explain some stylistic convergences where the influence of diffusion seems excluded. Moreover, as soon as Gell focuses on a local iconological coherence, as in his analysis of the Marquesian corpus, he no longer involves the mechanisms of incorporation and of delegation of agency, except marginally, for justifying the correspondence between stylistic codes and social structure on the basis of the very generic principle that objects of art are social agents insofar as they are products of social initiatives.

Before addressing the characteristics of the modes of figuration proper to each of the four modes of identification, one needs, however, to consider several difficulties which are connected to such an enterprise. The first problem to confront is the one of the pertinent level at which a difference or a resemblance in the figurative schemes becomes significant. A simple formal similitude between this or that technique of figuration that is employed by far-distant civilizations in time or space is not sufficient in itself for inferring their ontological identity. One may demonstrate this with two examples. The first one is the split representation (Franz Boas), or représentation dédoublée (Claude Lévi-Strauss), which may better be denominated as figuration éclatée (broken-up figuration). It consists in representing, on the lateral and sometimes superior prolongation of a human or animal figure, the flank or the dorsal face of the prototype. The second one is the figuration radiologue (radiologic figuration)—the occasional or permanent unveiling via diverse procedures of the internal structure of an organic body. The “broken-up figuration” is attested in North America as well as in ancient China and Melanesia. Given these localizations, it might not be the product of a diffusion, nor is it an index of the membership of these three areas to the same ontological archipelago. As Boas had already witnessed for the art of the northwestern coast of Canada, it merely testifies an identical means of solving the problem of extension on a two-dimensional surface of the representation of three-dimensional objects, the figure being unrolled and flattened. The same is the case for the “radiologic figuration:” The winged masks of the Northwestern coast, the medieval opening virgins, the Florentine anatomic mannequins, or some Aboriginal paintings of northern Australia which are containing the skeleton of an animal, all are analogous solutions to the challenge of representing the content of a corporeal envelope, and may not be considered as indices that these diverse objects would refer to common ontological properties. Quite the opposite is the case, as the properties these techniques have as mission of figuring are much more characteristic of the figurative schemes. In the case of the “radiologic figuration,” for instance, the winged masks of animals of the northwestern coast or of the Yup’ik Eskimos mostly reveal a human face, that is an interiority of human type lodged in an animal body, a dispositive typical of an animist ontology;³ whereas the paintings of Arnhem Land are figuring totemic animals, their organs and body having been pre-cut up with dotted lines, representing the portions of meat to be allocated according to kin. They therefore unveil the internal structure of a social morphology that coincides with the anatomic structure of a totemic prototype (see Taylor 1996). In other words, one and the same figurative technique is applied in two distinct ontological regimes, in order to produce the presence of completely different properties.

The second problem encountered is partially attributed to borrowing in the recurrence of forms and motives from far-distant locations of the planet. It is considered a good method for being solely interested in cases of formal resemblance of civilizations which are sufficiently distant from each other in space—for diffusion being not particularly probable, and after having verified the historical indices which seem to exclude it. This supposes that one disposes of reliable information about the images which are to be analyzed. A figurative scheme is indeed an ensemble of means in the service of an end which consists of making visible in a recognizable form this or that trait which characterizes a particular ontology by individualizing it in an image. Hence, an image will behave vis-à-vis the other existents in a mode sui generis through the agency it seems to prove—to return to the two precedent examples, the human type of interiority lent to animals in an animist regime or the coincidence between social morphology and corporeal morphology in a totemic regime. For elucidating this aspect one needs to possess ethnographic or historical evidences about the iconic and indexical dimensions of the images, that is to say about the nature of the referent to which they refer as well as about the kind of agency imputed to them. Such a precaution is required if one intends to avoid the two characteristic weaknesses of the anthropological analysis of images, the anachronistic retrospective and the invocation of psychic archetypes. The first weakness is well illustrated by the speculative interpretations of paleolithic cave art on the basis of hazardous analogies with contemporary shamanism, an operation which tends to dissipate ignorance (of what the cave painters searched for) through confusion (regarding the actual nature of shamanism, a practice which nobody agrees on in defining). Regarding the second weakness, it is the recourse to explaining images by invoking a renowned universal disposition of human nature in their origin, as Belting does (2004) for example, when he sees the desire to keep the memory of the dead in the production of images. This suffices to deny the consideration of many societies (in New Guinea or Amazonia), where the departed are feared and devoted to the quickest oblivion.

If an anthropology of figuration needs to forbid itself the consideration of images of which one does not dispose of information, it has by definition as well to exclude the domain of the nonfigurative. Truly, the border between the figurative and the nonfigurative is often not easy to trace. It rather consists of a continuum with three terms that are organized along a gradient reaching from a maximal resemblance (mimetic iconicity, corresponding to “realism” in aesthetics) to a total absence of resemblance (an-iconicity, corresponding to abstract art and to a certain category of decorative art), passing via several forms of nonmimetic iconic figuration. Indeed, the so-called decorative arts may be iconic if the compositional motives refer to a prototype they are figuring in a stylized manner, and if this denotation is present to the spectator. In order to have iconicity, in fact, the motivation has to be activated by figuration that is recognizable in at least one quality of the prototype. This genre of stylized decoration often has a function which one may qualify as iconogène; that is to say it stimulates the visual imagination and this way unleashes the production of mental images which may be perfectly figurative without ever being actualized by material support. This is, for instance, the case of the facial paintings of the Jivaro (Taylor 2003). In other cases, on the contrary, the decorative motives are perfectly an-iconic, in as far as their eventual original motivation became inactive. The agency so becomes purely internal to the composition and is a result that the motives and combination of motives seem to interact spontaneously with each other, thus producing the impression of being animated by the simple fact of their structural and positional characteristics. This is why nonfigurative decorations function as very efficacious mind-traps. They are mechanisms Which capture and fix the attention, and are capable of evoking an attachment to the objects which they are embellishing, while rendering these objects, as well as the activities to which they are connected, more salient on the psychic and emotional level. One may as well think that this effect of focusing attention allows one to detach oneself from the mundane preoccupations and to fix one’s thoughts on the nonrepresentable—the other positive side of the iconoclastic of certain Book religions. Or, on the contrary, it may be employed to apotropaic ends, as it is the case with the complex labyrinth motives which are adorning the houses in Tamil Nadu, India, and are destined to fascinate the demons in order to withhold them on the threshold (Gell 1998: 84–86). In decorative nonfigurative art the layout therefore creates agency: freed of any immediate symbolism, the motives lose their individual salience to let subsist just the movement evoked by their combination and their repetition. The same is true...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Texts
• Introduction
• PART ONE Image and Medium
• PART TWO World Art Studies and Global Art
• PART THREE Art Markets, Maecenas, and Collectors
• PART FOUR Participatory Art and Collaboration
• Notes
• References
• Index