conferences ENGAGING ANTHROPOLOGY AND ART 13th EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) Biennial Conference, Tallinn University, Estonia, 31 July-3 August 2014. ALEX FLYNN 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 anthropologies 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. Fig. 1. During the ‘Anthropologies of art laboratory’. New collaborative practices Over the last decade, taking inspiration from Richard Schechner’s theatre anthropology, Joseph Beuys and the Situationists, as well as relational art projects of the 1990s, new forms of artistic fieldwork or ethnographic art have emerged in the academic and the art sphere. Ethnographic conceptualism, documentary theatre, or ‘the ethnographic turn in contemporary arts scholarship’ (Siegenthaler 2013) refer to just some of the emerging key discourses. Alongside Till Förster and Ulf Vierke, Fiona Siegenthaler convened the panel on ‘Collective imaginations and collaborative art practice’, arguing that these new so-called ‘collaborative’, ‘dialogical’ or ‘participative’ art projects address not only new audiences beyond the institutional and established ‘art world’; they actually create alternative and multiple ‘art worlds’. Often engaged in applied agendas, such new anthropology/art collaborations manage to integrate marginalized communities in alternative, collaborative ways that challenge the authority of the ethnographer as research-expert. Questions about alternative means of collaboration, representation and narration prompted heated debates during EASA 2014. While some post-hoc discussions arguably confused techniques of presentation with technologies of representation (hello @allegra_lab #povinelli), others problematized the actual dilemma of cinematographic anthropology as more than a mere transposition of the Writing culture debate into the global digital age of mass mobile technologies. The Media Anthropology Network panel ‘Media futures’ worked in collaboration with the ‘Anthropology at the edge of the future’ laboratory proposed by Sarah Pink, Juan Salazar, Andrew Irving and Johannes Sjöberg, to argue that ‘[m]edia, especially 22 in its relationship with digital technologies, are nowadays at the core of most meaningful social transformations, creative and innovation processes’. Going one step further, the plenary (‘Intimacy, immanence and narratives’), curated by Carlo Cubero and Patrick Laviolette, directed questions away from the centrality of media towards an inquiry into the significance of narratives: how do forms of (re-)telling imply processes of knowing and of experiencing? A particularly fascinating aspect of the plenary was the manner in which its contributions – Ernst Karel’s experimental piece of sensory media on mushroom enthusiasts or Stephanie Spray’s challenging 14-minute single shot film ‘Untitled’ – linked EASA 2014’s focus on intimacy and collaboration with unsettling new artistic methodologies that evoke rather than denote, to borrow from Paul Stoller’s presentation. As such, the plenary opened new frontiers for discussion while engaging more traditional anthropological interests in aesthetics, ethics, and representation. (Contemporary art) patronage Anticipating and responding to these discussions, Lidia Rossner’s experimental ethnographic documentary Artistic office: Constructing the 7th Berlin Biennale was a highlight of the EASA 2014 film programme curated by Carlo Cubero and colleagues from Tallinn. Her documentary material generated such insights into artistic practices that her informants, the curators and creative directors of the 7th Berlin Biennale, asked to integrate her interviews and films in the Biennale. For Rossner, ‘[t]he 7th Berlin Biennale […] attempted to transform the reality of contemporary politics through socially engaged art’. A powerful peripeteia concluded her film: Polish curator and activist artist Artur Żmijewski, inspired by an invited Occupy group, confronted the directorial board of the Berlin Biennale with penetrating observations about the articulation of power and bureaucracy within their institution. It struck audience members during the Q&A that her filmic exposure of an elite art institution had elicited how politicized art can perform ideological criticism in the strict sense of the term: a reflection upon, critique of, and eventual transformation of one’s own context of production and patronage. Addressing this particularly pertinent yet troubling relationship between art patronage and political influence, Hélène Neveu Kringelbach’s paper in ‘Collaborative intimacies in music and dance’(convened by Evangelos Chrysagis and Panagiotis Karampampas) addressed choreographic collaborations between European institutions and dancers from West Africa. She problematized how French art institutions reinforced their political involvement in African art markets and institutions by colonizing the vacuum of artistic funding. While postcolonial critique is often encouraged in productions taking place under the aegis of the dance biennale Danse l’Afrique Danse!, the structural influence of the French institute remains a resilient (neocolonial) patron force. Artistic practices may be predicated on variously intimate forms and concepts of collaboration. This does not mean, however, that they are free of the hierarchies, power relations, and dependencies which characterize less collaborative practices. A fundamental concern shared by presenters across several panels, therefore, was an interrogation of ideology and power in contemporary art practice. Which aesthetic ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 30 NO 6, DECEMBER 2014 regimes decide artistic, market, or other kinds of ‘values’ in an art world? Who influences institutions responsible for canonizing and influencing artistic practices? What practices of exclusion are implicit in often seemingly participatory and emancipatory art histories? Such questions and others were raised with regard to Brazilian museum rejuvenation schemes, German Nazi art dealings, and independent performing arts and filmmakers in Hungary and Chile in the panel I convened with Alex Flynn on ‘Relational patrons’. Common conceptual paradigms Two sessions differed notably from the others insofar as they tried to synthesize anthropological approaches to art theoretically. Thomas Fillitz and Ursula Helg, who convened the panel ‘Anthropology of art’, suggested that even the most common concepts anthropologists use to describe artistic practice – ‘the art world’, ‘global art’, ‘curators’, ‘mediators’, ‘galleries’, ‘creativity’, ‘patronage’ – remain problematically context-unspecific. While also many non-European artists utilize such concepts, they often do so to evoke vastly different meanings. Thus, Thomas Fillitz rightly pointed out in his paper ‘Engaging with global art discourses’, we need to ‘reconfigure our concepts about art through local, processbased ethnographic understandings’. This would not only yield a thicker description of specific arts practices, but also enable unique anthropological contributions to discourses in neighbouring disciplines, such as art history, architecture, or design. In the interest of uniting these efforts under the aegis of one interest group within the Visual Anthropology section of EASA (VANEASA), the ‘Anthropologies of art’ laboratory convened by Roger Sansi drafted plans for a follow-up workshop in Barcelona in May 2015. A new international researchbased network entitled Anthropologies of Art (A/A), which I co-convene with Alex Flynn, complements this envisaged consolidation of a coherent set of anthropological approaches to (contemporary) art. l Jonas Tinius University of Cambridge jlt46@cam.ac.uk Siegenthaler, F. 2013. Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 27(6): 737-752. narrative Boredom is a polysemic category, defined – for instance – as a human phenomenon that can generate a range of effects at both the individual and social levels. Boredom is reflected in Charles Baudelaire’s taedium vitae or in the ordinariness of certain characters depicted by Melville and Dostoyevsky. What may be viewed as ‘modern boredom’ (Goodstein 2005; Jervis et al. 2003; Musharbash 2007) has been the object of analysis and philosophical reflection. In an existentialist vein, Patricia Peterle (2013) has maintained that boredom is likely to be the point of contact between humans and animals. In line with Lars Svendsen’s idea that in ‘the in-humanity of boredom we gain a perspective on our own humanity’ (2008: 41), Peterle argues that the boredom caused by acting automatically, mechanically and unmindfully gives us access to a ‘chink’ through which to observe the world. ‘Humanitarian boredom’ produces its own perspective on the world, providing a ‘point of entry’ to the observation of humanitarianism in practice. In the current paper, while problematizing both a general understanding of boredom and a romantic idea of humanitarianism, I focus on boredom as experienced by humanitarian workers. More specifically, I explore the mutual relationship between boredom and crisis in the humanitarian realm. White City When on a cold day in Kabul during the autumn of 2006 I heard a young man working for a French NGO (non-governmental organization) shout ‘Oh no, White City again!’, I initially thought that the dusty streets of the Afghan capital had finally been coated in snow. However, it was not snow that was at issue. In military jargon, White City is a security status used by UN (United Nations) personnel but also adopted by a number of NGOs to restrict staff mobility for security reasons.1 PUBLIC DOMAIN BOREDOM AND CRISIS IN THE HUMANITARIAN REALM Fig. 1. l’Ennui. Gaston de La Touche, 1893. The young man who was complaining about the imposition of White City status had just obtained a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science and only the day before had received confirmation of a big project he was due to run in the role of programme manager: a $12 million shelter programme in the province of Ghazni, in the central-eastern area of the country. For the remainder of that day – or until the situation changed (though no one knew exactly what the security risk was) – it would not be possible to go into the office, eat out at a restaurant, meet friends at other guesthouses, attend parties, etc. ‘I don’t like working at ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 30 NO 6, DECEMBER 2014 the guesthouse’ the young humanitarian worker said, ‘I like the office – and they cook much better there too’, he added with a smile stamped across his face. Everybody at the guesthouse settled in for another boring day: ‘Here we go again’ said Lidia, a logistics manager working for the same NGO, ‘I’m not sure that it’s really dangerous to leave the guesthouse. Anyway, what does it matter, we can’t go outside. In the end, expats are always a potential target. Luckily my mother sent me a food hamper last week. We can all tuck into it today’. At that time there was one North American and seven European expats staying at the 23