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Notes on Fieldworks: Dialogues between art and anthropology
(Friday 26 - Sunday 28 September 2003)
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art and anth
anth and art
can't tell them together
can't tell them apart
- a ditty from Lucy Lippard
George Marcus of writing culture and elite fame
began the conference at 11.30 Friday morning with
an erudite expression of the politics of knowledge.
From the very beginning, he said, ethnography was
folklorique and filmic. After that I was lost in a
jargon jamboree of the sublimest kind setting the
debate nicely for an academic pitting of the wits,
Art vs Anthropology: mental summersaults and
buttons were pushed as hackles raised in defence
of anxious territories.
The central question was, 'is a dialogue between
anthropology and art useful, or indeed desirable'.
As some quick-witted artists retorted, however,
the very premise of the question sets up a
hierarchy with the philanthropic anthropologist
condescending the artist in yet another colonial
escapade to make Art her handmaiden - this was on
Sunday as the temperatures of closeted intellect
gathered force in the bright red Starr Auditorium
of the Tate Modern. And that was the bizarre thing
as it really did feel like an anthropology
conference, with the anthropologists flirting with
art and yet it was held in one of the foremost art
galleries in Britain, and yet did any of us have a
chance to look at any art outside the lecture
theatre?
So it's late September. The nights are beginning
to draw in, with us exiting the lecture hall at
the very time that Thomas Hardy suggests is that
peculiar time of day when time is put on hold and
anything appears possible. The conference is
littered with anecdotes, personal paraphernalia
and teasing statements sure to set a titter, such
as, 'anthropologists turn the gold of ethnography
into the lead of academic life' (Hugh Brody,
Friday Morning). Hugh, an anthropologist and
filmmaker collaborated with artist Anthony Gormley
on an installation on a 50acre salt lake in
Western Australia (only Hugh was present at the
conference, Anthony we saw on film). We saw 20mins
of his film of the project where in-brief Anthony
persuades the inhabitants of a certain small town
to be scanned in the buff and then creates
sculptures of each of them. These are computer
generated by looking at the scanned person,
cutting away two thirds of their body so you are
left with an image reminiscent of Giacommetti's
tall, thin people that police places like the
Pompidou Centre in Paris. These dimensions are
then sent up to a production line where they are
cast and then returned by truck to the salt-lake.
What came out of the discussion with Brody was the
mammoth negotiations that took place around the
project, Anthony flying over salt-lakes for three
days before he found the perfect spot, discussing
for weeks and months with the local whites and
Aborigines, finding out about the place politics
of the town of little more than 50 inhabitants.
Through intervening in the space as a foreign
artist and working with the locals both Gormley
and Brody were able to discover much about this
place. When talking about his work Gormley says,
'the insider is opposite of sense from self, from
appearance.' …
The power of the institution was a theme threaded
throughout the three days. Anthony Gormley is a
well-established artist with money and
institutional backing. Not necessarily in reaction
to this, but with regard to her own work Amrit
Srinivasan, from the Institute of Technology,
Delhi, upbraided the ludicrous differences in
price an art work from the West fetches as opposed
to one from India, in her talk on 'Beyond
Appearances - Visual Practices in India'. Chris
Pinney (UCL), who was chairing her particular
piece suggested that in order for Indian 'works of
art' to be defined as 'works of art' and therefore
increase in market value India needs first to
develop a healthy, acclaimed, critical art history
discipline. It was interesting to reflect on this
in a conference room at the heart of the Tate
Modern, decorated by expensive wires and machines
that simultaneously transmitted images of the
speaker on to the World Wide Web. And just in case
the audience had forgotten who was speaking their
image would be projected onto the back wall with
their name popping up and projected also, lending
authority to their words and their image, (and to
the price of the audience's tickets).
Authority and representation were issues that
Mohindra Chandra engages with as an artist and
academic. A past Westminster visiting lecturer who
now, 'creates installation-based artwork and texts
that draw upon multiplicity of cross-cultural
dialogues with history, anthropology and
geography' looked at the fertile ground of
personal memory for informing diasporic cultural
identity. She works from a feminist informed
doctrine validating the vernacular away from ideas
of gossip and hearsay into a critical space of the
historical document. A piece of hers that I was
particularly taken by was a display of the backs
of photographs. She had been studying her family
history, collecting photographs from her own
diaspora (an Indian-Fijian whose family was now in
Canada, England and Australia). Instead of
presenting the viewer with the photographs, she
presented them with their backs, with inscriptions
reading 'to my Granddaughter' or so and so passed
away July 1968. She'd even, made them into an
album, an album of absence as the viewer is denied
what we desire, the image. Instead we are given a
piecework history, a patchwork and assemblage, and
given space to draw our own conclusions of the
effects of a diasporic identity and how that
relates to our own identity.
Mohindra spoke eloquently situating herself within
Art, and feeling uncomfortable with describing her
research as fieldwork per say. The
discussion afterwards developed into a
confrontation between reified concepts of Art and
Anthropology, or visual authority and textual
authority. Christopher Pinney encouraged us to
leave these faux castles and suggested rather it
was a discussion between criticism and compliance:
the former exemplified by Jean Rouch and the
latter by the romantic image of the artist as
anthropologist (or indeed the anthropologist as
artist).
Again and again we would return to neat catch
phrases to try and define or express the overall
contention between anthropology and art, (the
beauty of the catch phrase being that there is a
truth and a lie behind each one). From a
pessimistic perspective it seems that we are at a
loss before we begin, as I don't believe anyone
has as yet come up with a convincing definition
for either Art or Anthropology. According to my
stalwart Collins Dictionary, anthropology is 'the
study of man, his origins, physical
characteristics, institutions, religious beliefs,
social relationships etc.' It is the etc that is a
killer in this definition, as it really says 'anything
goes.' Art has a huge definition equally
encompassing leading us from the 'creation of
works of beauty or other special significance' to
'the exercise of human skill' and on to 'imaginative
skills applied to representations of the natural
world or figments of the imagination.'
Indeed the practice of ethnography seemed to be
being redefined and contested at this conference
as imaginative skills applied to
representations of the natural world. And it
is here that Michael Taussig enters the stage.
Taussig needed no introduction to anybody present
at the conference. His fame preceded him as a
reverent hush fell on the packed auditorium; eyes
glued as he gathered his papers, dropped them,
picked them up, assorted them and adjusted his
glasses. His head with its sprouting thick grey
hair seemed confirmation enough that what he was
about to say, or rather perform, was worth the
pregnant pause of expectation. He told us a story
in the form of a sonata: three parts, heat, water
and magic. In a catch phrase he was trying to
right the injustice of the definition that said 'ethnography
is the telling of other people's stories badly,'
where you have informants and not storytellers,
ethnographers and not authors. He asked us to
think of thought as a movement to nothingness,
something that disappears down the plug-hole.
I was seduced as much as any other by what he was
saying and by how he was saying it, and rather
than reduce what he said into a contrite,
meaningless form here (the talks will be posted on
the Tate's website in a few weeks), it is his
presentation that I will say a little about.
Sitting in a crowded room, taken in and away by
the moment and his charisma, we were watching a
performance. Taussig was presenting himself as a
cultural object, a piece of art. With measured
words he was an illustration of the ethnographic
project, a demonstration of the ethnographic
imaginary and its full force, contending with the
institutional issues, and using the material and
power plays at hand in the conference itself to
dramatic effect. Using his charisma and his
reputation he had us spell-bound from the start
and using this magic, plus the magic contained
within the conference he impressed upon us ideas
from Heidegger how is it with nothing?,
whilst letting the 'long ago and the now fall into
place with the faraway and the here.' The romance
of fieldwork, as far as I was concerned, had been
validated by his presence, his performance and his
erudite, meaningful expressions.
I left soon after Taussig's performance to protest
the occupation of Iraq along with 20,000 others,
on that cool Saturday afternoon, and returned to
the Tate in time for the second afternoon session.
Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion were on the
platform showing us some of their work that
resulted from 10 years living in a remote fishing
community in Aberdeenshire, a romantic landscape
of hills and a wild sea juxtaposed to a
hyper-modern oil and fishing industry where many
of their 'subjects' worked. Both being Scottish
they were outsiders only to a certain extent, but
enough, Matthew said, to allow them certain
eccentricities and to have their eccentricities
tollerated. They impressed upon us how they viewed
anthropology and art. Anthropology (and its filmic
counterpart documentary) desired to fill in as
much information as possible, all of the gaps and
lines between the dots. Art, on the other hand,
leaves more room for the viewer to draw their own
conclusions. In their film Another Place
composed of video portraits of the inhabitants of
St Combs I thought one device worked particularly
well. As a viewer your introduction to a certain
character was first seeing them on a TV screen,
framed by space and the physical projection cloth.
Then the image you would see would be just their
portrait. For me, this movement in and out did not
let you forget that you were a viewer, a voyeur as
the narrative was blatantly boxed. The last piece
they showed us was Water Falls Down - a
beautiful portrait of a baptism service in the
surf of the North Sea. First you see snow falling
off a laden tree and then the receiving waves, and
then this awe-some spectacle of a man in a
shell-suit held by two other men by the elbows as
they drop him under. It is not until the end of
the shot that you see the congregation standing on
the shore. This spoke to me much about my own
preconceptions of baptisms, faith in Britain,
rituals and shear incredulity. It also, however,
kept me at a respectful distance: if I wanted to
find out more I would have to go myself.
There is a reverent hush that is almost religious
in hue in museums and art galleries. True, as
audience we are encouraged to 'participate'
nowadays, but still there is that quiet and
stillness, in respect of an authority that we know
not of. There was probably a bit of this in my
reaction to Dalziel and Scullion's work, as well
as to Michael Taussig: there is something in a
performance that demands attention. Anthropology
was criticised by Dominic Willsdon (Tate Modern
curator of the event) of being seduced by this
magic of art, letting down the critical guard and
seeing art as its 'utopian horizon.' He continued
saying much of art was trash and rubbish, with
little regard to the ethics that the
anthropologists' hold dear. Of course he was being
provocative, but there is a point that in a
certain core of anthropologists reacting against
positivism they may swing too much the other way,
and may be horrified when they eventually land.
Amanda Ravetz, (an artist and anthropologist
trained at Manchester University in visual
anthropologist) rejoined by saying that
anthropology can develop a fictional form
without being irresponsible, and that there is
a space for both. This is up for negotiation and
talking to other older hands at the conference
many were excited by the possibilities that 'in
their time' had been not-up-for-discussion.
The conference threaded sense and reactions in and
out of artists' and anthropologists' works, posing
healthy questions such as is art useful in
anthropological enquiry and rendered more obvious
art and anthropological institutions as motivators
and legitimators of such forms of enquiry. It
seemed obvious to me from my visual anthropology
background recently relocated into an art school
that of course artistic/subjective modes of
enquiry can be very beneficial to an
anthropological gaze. And neither is this anything
particularly new, as Anna Grimshaw documents the
alliances between anthropology and surrealist art
at the beginning of last century (in her book The
Ethnographer's Eye). And with the new
institutionalised 'practice based PhD's" this
news should become more legitimate and apparent.
Therefore the answer to 'is a dialogue between
anthropology and art useful and desirable' is a 'yes,
of course,' the dialogue has already begun, not
only between each other, but in our practice as
well.
reviewed by Zemirah Moffat
Sept 30th 2003
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