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2014, Anthropology Today 30 (6): 22-23.
This report from the recent EASA 2014 conference in Tallinn on ‘Collaboration, intimacy and revolution’ takes a look at one particular of its manifold threads: anthropology and art. Key questions such as how many anthro- pologies of art there actually are, sparked heated debate in panels and on Twitter alike (re-read some of the happenings via #EASA2014ART). In this brief report, I review three substantial strands that appeared to unite debates across the nine panels, two films, and one plenary directly addressing art and anthropology: 1. new collaborative practices, 2. contemporary art patronage, and 3. common conceptual paradigms.
British Academy Blog, 2015
In 2014, the Louvre and the Tate Modern between them received over 12 million visitors. In November of the same year, Christie’s contemporary art sale raised an astonishing $852.9m. Not only has the widely forecast ‘end of art’ (Belting 1987, Danto 1986, 1995) failed to materialise, but art has increasingly spilled beyond the refined spaces of the Tuileries, the Southbank, and the auction houses for the super-rich. Whether it’s Banksy’s murals being torn off walls by ‘ignorant’ council officials in Clacton-on-Sea, the Occupy movement’s ‘bat signal’ being projected onto the Verizon building in New York, or the launch of Paul McCarthy’s ambiguously sexual Parisian ‘Tree’ sculpture, new forms and engagements with art generate fierce debate in all spheres of social, economic, and political life. Are these controversies still about ideas of beauty? Or has art succumbed to spectacle and money? And what, if any, is the relation of contemporary art to the political?
2015
Building on such established anthropological approaches to art as those of Alfred Gell or Pierre Bourdieu, this workshop seeks to map out contemporary anthropological approaches to art. Furthermore, by asking what distinct views on artistic practices are offered by such new theoretical perspectives as ethnographic conceptualism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013) or relational aesthetics (Sansi 2014), we hope to propose new pathways of anthropological inquiry. A key proposition behind this workshop is the idea that contemporary art theory and practice are increasingly in dialogue with theories of sociality – how we relate to other people to create meaning – and therefore connected to core anthropological interests. The objective of this workshop is therefore not just to apply existing anthropological theory to potentially new ethnographic situations characterized by the production of art, but to develop anthropological theory through an engagement with the conceptual approaches that underpin the contemporary production of art today. The premise we wish to interrogate with this workshop is thus that there is something distinct about contemporary artistic practices. If this is so, what would a contemporary anthropology of art – or rather – contemporary anthropologies of art look like? As the inaugural research event of the Anthropologies of Art [A/A] network, we wish to propose this digital platform as a space to map, link, and interrogate answers to these two questions. Some possible lines of thought addressed by papers may be: • How can we productively theorize the porous boundaries between artistic practice and every life activities? • Has the body been overlooked as a site of artistic production? For example, can we consider the performance of gender as an aesthetics of becoming? • What contribution can anthropology make to understandings of models of postfordist creative labour? • What are the (dis)connections between artivism, protest, and public art? • Can we consider the relationship between aesthetics and politics without a consideration of the state? • How can we provide a better analysis of the porous boundaries of the art world and the market? • What are the potentials of contemporary art for anthropological research? For example, how does the mode of artistic installation challenge and provoke alternative strategies of research?
The Anthropology and the Arts Network (ANTART) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), convened by Roger Sansi (Barcelona) and myself, is holding its first interim event on 21-22 September 2019 in Berlin. The Trouble with Art: Philistinism, Iconoclasm, and Scepticism explores the foundations of the iconoclastic ethos of anthropology, and reassesses the role of art within the discipline. Our aim is to examine how the anthropology of art can be re-founded, from a paradoxical sub-field, to a contribution to the core theoretical problems of anthropology, also in terms of its public political role as a critical science and discipline of contemporary (European) societies. We are convening at my host institution, the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) in the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie - HU Berlin Berlin of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which kindly supports the event via the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation alongside EASA. The meeting is open to the public, but we ask you to register with the convenors if you intend to attend.
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, 2015
This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between contemporary art and anthropology from multiple perspectives. In recent volumes specifically investigat- ing the relationship of contemporary art and anthropology, the focus is primarily on the capacities of both art and anthropology to represent social worlds,and there is surprisingly little discussion of the border zones and aesthetic frames that define contemporary art as a specific material genre and institutionalized practice.
The Art of Anthropology / The Anthropology of Art brings together thirteen essays, some of which were presented at the March 2011 annual meeting of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) in Richmond, Virginia. Collectively, the essays in this volume explore not only art through the lens of anthropology but also anthropology through the lens of art. Given that art is a social phenomenon, the contributors to this volume interpret the complex relationships between art and anthropology as a means of fashioning novelty, continuity, and expression in everyday life. They further explore this connection by reifying customs and traditions through texts, textures, and events, thereby shaping the very artistic skills acquired by experience, study, and observation into something culturally meaningful. In The Art of Anthropology / The Anthropology of Art, contributors revisit older debates within the discipline about the relationship between anthropology’s messages and the rhetoric that conveys those messages in new ways. They ask how and why anthropology is persuasive and how artful forms of anthropology in the media and the classroom shape and shift public understandings of the human world. The papers in this volume are organized in four groups: Textual Art, Art Valuation, Critical Art, and Art and Anthropology in Our Classroom and Colleges.
World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches, 2008
Journal of Media Practice, 2002
Forthcoming: European Yearbook of Constitutional Law (EYCL)), 2024
Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique , 2024
Gottinger Miszellen Beitrage Zur Agyptologischen Diskussion, 2010
Marine Ecology, 2017
Journal of Endocrinological Investigation, 1991
Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter, 2006
Actualidades Investigativas en Educación, 2022
New Findings in #R##N#Applied Geology, 2015