In order to interrogate the relationship between the ‘artist’ and culture, we must first situate the theory and practice of contemporary art within a modern epistemology. For these purposes, Hal Foster’s essay entitled “The Artist as Ethnographer”1 will serve us here as a foundational text, for the essay demonstrates a genealogy leading up to what Foster refers to as “ the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and theory.”
Foster takes his title from Walter Benjamin’s The Artist as Producer (1934), an address made at the Institute for the Study of Facism in Paris. Referring to Plato’s desire to banish the poets from the ideal state, Benjamin returns to “the question of the poet’s right to exist.”2 Benjamin called upon the artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production -- to change the techniques of traditional media and transform the apparatus of bourgeois culture:
Foster takes his title from Walter Benjamin’s The Artist as Producer (1934), an address made at the Institute for the Study of Facism in Paris. Referring to Plato’s desire to banish the poets from the ideal state, Benjamin returns to “the question of the poet’s right to exist.”2 Benjamin called upon the artist to intervene, like the revolutionary worker, in the means of artistic production -- to change the techniques of traditional media and transform the apparatus of bourgeois culture:
A correct ‘tendency’ was not enough; that was to assume a place ‘beside the proletariat.’ And ‘what kind of place is that?’ Benjamin asked in lines that still scathe. ‘That of a benefactor, of an ideological patron -- an impossible place.’
Benjamin’s injunction sets up the relation between artistic authority and cultural politics, a question later framed in the context of theory vs. activism. Foster believes that a new paradigm structurally similar to the old author as producer model has emerged in contemporary art on the left: the artist as ethnographer. Now, instead of understanding the oppositional relation as situated between the bourgeois-capitalist institution of art and the working class, it is the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the committed artist most often struggles, “This represents a subtle shift from a subject defined in terms of economic relation to one defined in terms of cultural identity.” In this new framing, the danger of ‘ideological patronage’ for the artist as ethnographer becomes an even greater and complex concern.
Foster discusses how Johannes Fabian, in Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983) articulates anthropology as being founded on a “mythical mapping of time onto space based on two presumptions,” -- the first being that time is immanent/coextensive with the world, and second that sociocultural and natural relations can be understood as temporal relations. Thus, “...‘over there’ became ‘back then,’ and the most remote (as measured from some Greenwich Mean of European Civilization) became the most primitive.” This naturalized discourse provided the conditions for such conceptions as the realist assumption (the siting of political truth in a projected other or outside, understood not as ideology, but in truth and reality), and the primitivist fantasy (the association of the primitive/prehistoric/pre-Oedipal, the other, and the unconscious; or the assumed connection between the development of the individual and the development of the species/civilization).
There are three assumptions from the old ‘artist as producer’ model that persist - FIRST is the assumption that the site of political transformation is the site of artistic transformation. SECOND is the assumption that this site is always elsewhere, in the field of the other, and that “this elsewhere, this outside, is the Archimedean point from which the dominant culture will be transformed or at least subverted.” THIRD is the assumption that if the artist is not perceived as socially and/or culturally other, he or she has but limited access to this transformative alterity, and that if he or she is perceived as other, he or she has automatic access to it.
The present ethnographic turn in contemporary art practice/theory is characterized by the understanding that anthropology stands as the science of alterity -- the discipline that takes culture as its object. It is also considered to arbitrate the interdisciplinary, and in this sense it is believed to be contextual. But, it is the self-critique of anthropology that renders it so attractive, for it “promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer at the center even as it preserves a romanticism of the other at the margins.” Foster demonstrates how these ‘anthropologisms’3 are engaged by various fields of twentieth-century art. This is the case for surrealism, which often figures the other in terms of the unconscious, art brut or ‘outsider art’ which represents the other as a redemptive anti-civilizational resource, abstract expressionism in which the other stands for the primal exemplar of all artists, the allusion to prehistoric art in earthworks, conceptual and institution-critical art which treats the art world as anthropological site, etc. It is not surprising then that anthropology, along with psychoanalysis, is considered “the lingua franca of artistic practice and critical discourse alike.”
Foster then charts the ethnographic turn in contemporary art over the last forty-five years. This trajectory may be understood through a sequence of investigations: first of the material/objective constituents of the art work, then of its spatial conditions of perception, and then of the corporeal bases of this perception (minimalist work, conceptual art, performance, body art, then finally site specific work in the early ‘70s):
Soon the institution of art could no longer be described only in spatial terms (studio, gallery, museum, and so on); it was also a discursive network of different practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities. Nor could the observer of art be delimited only in phenomenological terms; he or she was also a social subject defined in language and marked by difference (economic, ethnic, sexual, and so on).
These recognitions were not strictly internal to art. Also crucial were different social movements (civil rights, various feminisms, queer politics, multiculturalism) as well as diverse theoretical developments (the convergence of feminism, psychoanalysis, and film; the recovery of Gramsci; the application of Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault; the development of postcolonial discourse with Said, Spivak, Bhabha, and so on), “Thus did art pass into the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey.” These developments constituted shifts in the very siting of art, from the surface of the medium to the space of the museum, from institutional frames to discursive networks, to the point where many artists and critics treat conditions like desire or disease, AIDS or homelessness, as sites for art.
Interestingly, the ethnographic turn has come to be indicative of the commissioned ethnographic mappings which effectively function as a museum-event in which the institution imports critique, “whether as a show of tolerance or for the purpose of inoculation (against a critique undertaken by the institution, within the institution).” Art institutions may also use site-specific work for economic development, social outreach, or art tourism.
New anthropology understands culture as text, which is supposed to challenge ‘ethnographic authority’ through ‘discursive paradigms of dialogue and polyphony’. Yet because this understanding of ‘culture as text’ reduces social relations to decoding operations, the ethnographic reader is rendered more authoritative, not less -- for it represents a recoding of practice as discourse. Marshall Sahlins, in Culture and Practical Reason (1976), argues that two epistemologies have long divided anthropology, the first being symbolic logic which understands the social in terms of exchange systems and the second being practical reason which understands the social in terms of material culture. Thus, Foster argues that in this same way, contemporary art and criticism situates itself accordingly:
With a turn to this split discourse of anthropology, artists and critics can resolve these contradictory models magically: they can take up the guises of cultural semiologist and contextual fieldworker, they can continue and condemn critical theory, they can relativize and recenter the subject, all at the same time. In our current state of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and cultural-political impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice.
This becomes a nuanced and difficult territory to navigate, one in which work often strays from a decentering of the artist as cultural authority to a remaking of the other in “neo-primitivist guise.” Foster asks, “Who in the academy or the art world has not witnessed these testimonies of the new empathetic intellectual or these flâneries of the new nomadic artist?” An interesting example of this was Clegg & Guttmann's “Project Unité, commissioned in 1993 for the Unité d’Habitation in Firminy, France:
Here the neo-conceptual team Clegg & Guttmann asked the Unité residents to contribute cassettes for a discotheque, which were edited, compiled, and displayed according to apartment and floor in a model of the building as a whole. Lured by collaboration, the inhabitants loaned these cultural proxies, only to have them turned into anthropological exhibits. And the artists did not question the ethnographic authority, indeed the sociological condescension involved in this facilitated self-representation.
Clegg & Guttmann have referred to their interventions as ‘community portraits’, and in the case of Project Unité, this took a literal turn when they photographed those involved for the covers of the cassettes they had donated. Almost naturally the project shifted from collaboration to self-fashioning and little collaboration with the community was effected.
Foster gives some examples of artists that expose and reframe the institutional codings of art and artifacts, but these deconstructive ethnographic approaches risk elitism and inaccessibility, “a place for initiates only where a contemptuous criticality is rehearsed.” This deconstructive positioning, which is at once inside and outside the institution, allows the artist to “retain the social status of art and entertain the moral purity of critique, the one a complement or compensation for the other.” This represents a paradox that is implicit to reflexivity, for while it is needed to protect against an over-identification with the other, it can also lead to “hermeticism, narcissism or even a refusal of engagement altogether.” Instead Foster advocates, “parallactic work that attempts to frame the framer as he or she frames the other” and in this way negotiate the contradictory status of otherness as both real and fantasmatic. Foster questions reflexivity in contemporary art, “And what does critical distance guarantee? Has this notion become somewhat mythical, acritical, a form of magical protection, a purity ritual of its own? Is such distance still desirable, let alone possible?” Keeping in mind that our intention is to interrogate the relationship between art and culture, it is this space of disciplinary memory and critical distance that we should examine most carefully -- especially since it gestures to the very work we intend to engage with here.
1. [This essay first appeared in George Marcus and Fred Myers’ book The Traffic in Culture: Reconfiguring Art and Anthropology under the title ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’. A year later, a much revised version of the essay was published in Hal Foster’s own book entitled The Return of the Real - no longer bearing the question mark.]↩
2. [Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." New Left Review 1.62 (1970) Web.]↩
3. [Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon, 1971. 345. Print.]↩
No comments:
Post a Comment