SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY
HISTORY OF ART & DESIGN
SCHOOL OF CULTURAL STUDIES
BA Hons History of Art, Design and Film
[Week
1-3]
Terms
and concepts to consider:
Fourth World – a collective name for all aboriginal
or native peoples whose lands fall within the national boundaries and
technobureaucratic administrations of the countries of the First, Second and
Third Worlds. As such, they are peoples without countries of their own, peoples
who are usually in the minority and without the power to direct the course of
their collective lives. (Graburn)
Art – reflects the elitist traditions of ‘high civilisations’
concerning the value of arts vs. crafts, the importance of creativity and
originality, and specialisations and distinctions. (Graburn) The creation of
works beauty, or other special significance. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’) I find this explanation, one out of
thirteen, in Collins dictionary of
the term art rather interesting in terms of the use of the concepts beauty and
significance. How would you define beauty? How would you define a special
significance? Whose concept of beauty and significance will be considered as
legitimate when judging something as a work of art or not?
Fourth World arts – different from the study of
Primitive art (see below). Has to take into account more than one symbolic and
aesthetic system, and the fact that the arts may be produced by one group for
consumption by another. (Graburn)
Primitive art – a particular Western concept,
referring to creations we wish to call art made by peoples who, in the
nineteenth century were usually called ‘primitive’, but in fact were simply
previously autonomous peoples who had been overrun by the colonial powers.
(Graburn)
With this brief explanation of primitive art I think Graburn
brings up the question regarding what art is. We take, for example, a utility
object from one society into another and suddenly a transformation is taking
form and the object becomes a piece of ‘art’ displayed in a glass case on
pedestal in a museum, and now the meaning is completely changed. So what is
art, then, and what is not?
Folk art – art produced by the ‘lower classes’
of complex societies (Graburn)
Again the question regarding what is
art and what is not, is raised. When does an art form only become a skill of a
certain technique and thereby classified as Folk Art?
Multicultural – consisting of, relating to, or
designed for the culture of several different races. (Collins ‘Concise
Dictionary’)
Art by destination – the piece of art may have been
intended by their producers to be art per se, or to have a primarily aesthetic
locus. (Graburn)
Art by metamorphosis – the piece of art is deemed art
sometime after they were originally made. (Graburn)
Anthropology – the study of human beings, their
origins, institutions, religious beliefs, social relationships, etc. (Collins
‘Concise Dictionary’)
Arts of Acculturation – art production, which differs
significantly from traditional expressions in form, content, function, and
medium, and which also differs from the various forms of art production
indigenous to ever-growing civilisation. (Graburn)
Extinction – the decline or disappearance of the
indigenous art form, surprisingly rarely described, according to Graburn, when
looking at Fourth World arts. (Graburn)
Traditional or Functional Fine Arts – the
persistence of a traditional art form can be accompanied by some changes in
technique and form, or even show incorporation of a few European-derived
symbols and images. As long as these changes do not seriously disturb the
transmission of symbolic meaning, and hence the culturally appropriate
satisfaction, these may still be called functional or contact-influenced
traditional arts. (Graburn)
Commercial Fine Arts – pieces made with eventual sale
in mind but do still adhere to culturally embedded aesthetic and formal
standards. (Graburn)
Souvenirs – ‘tourist’
arts or ‘airport’ arts that may
bear little relation to the traditional arts of the creator culture. This
happens when economic competition of poverty override aesthetic standards,
satisfying the consumer becomes more important than pleasing the artist.
(Graburn)
Reintegrated arts – fertile new forms, developed by
taking some ideas, materials, or techniques from the industrial society and
applying them in new ways to the needs of the small-scale peoples. (Graburn)
Assimilated Fine arts – the conquered minority artists
take up the established art forms of the conquerors, following and competing
with the artists of the dominant society. (Graburn)
Popular arts – the arts often take the forms of
European traditions, but in content express feelings completely different,
feelings appropriate to the new cultures that are emerging among the leaders of
the Third World. (Graburn)
Cree – a member of an Northern American Indian people living in
Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
Inuit – an Eskimo of North America or Greenland, as distinguished
from one from Asia or the Aleutian Islands. From Eskimo Inuit people, plural of inuk
a man. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
Eskimo – (1) a member of a group of peoples inhabiting N Canada,
Greenland, Alaska and E Siberia. The Eskimos are more properly referred to as
the Inuit. (2) the language of these peoples (3) of or relating to the Eskimos,
Esquimawes: relating to esquimantsic (from a native language)
eaters of raw flesh. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
I find the term Eskimo rather
interesting since it has for long been understood as meaning ‘raw meat eaters’ but
Dammas, D., in ‘Arctic’ vol 5 ‘the handbook of north American Indians’, argues
that the term Eskimo meaning’ raw-meat eaters’ only fits the Ojibwa form and
cannot be correct for presumed Montagnais source of the word Eskimo itself.
Rather the Montagnais ‘assime’ has an origin from a form meaning ‘snowshoe
netter’, which existed before Montagnais contact with the Eskimos. The term
then, presumably after trade between the Spanish whalers and the Montagnais,
via Spanish made its way into the English and French language.
Tradition –
(1) the handling down from generation to generation of customs, beliefs, etc.
(2) the body of customs, thought, etc., belonging to a particular country,
people, family, or institution over a long period (3) a specific custom or practice
of long standing (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
Nature – (1)
fundamental qualities; identity or essential character (2)
the whole system of the existence, forces
and events of all physical life that are not controlled by man (3) plant and
animal life, as distinct from man (4) a wild primitive state untouched by man
(5) natural unspoilt countryside (6) disposition or temperament (7) desires or
instincts governing behaviour (8) the normal biological needs of the body (9)
sort; character (10) against nature.
unnatural or immoral (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
I wanted to include the term nature in
my list since I do think one have to be rather careful with the use of it,
since the term have quite a few different meanings. One of the problems, I
think, is the first main link to the explanation as something fundamental,
since this fundamental view must derive from a Western point of view. The
western world have created a concept of nature, that Fourth World people, via
integration, have been more or less forced to adopt.
Revival – refers to the
attempted re-creation of an art form that has fallen into disuse; it may
involve slight modification of the form and probably does not re-create the
context of the original manufacture. (Graburn)
Faking – refers to the
manufacture of something valuable by whatever means and passing it on as
authentic. (Graburn)
Reproduction –
refers to approximately the same phenomenon, the re-creation of something old
or valuable by whatever means, so that the final object resembles the original,
even if it is made of entirely different materials, but not claiming that it is
original. (Graburn)
Archaism – a
tendency to make things that look old, or resemble to some degree an ancient
tradition, without actually reproducing some particular object: archaism is
attractive both commercially, to tourists, and non-commercially, to governments
who are trying to create a national ‘ethnicity’ out of some glorious past.
(Graburn)
Notes and
reflections, on Nelson H.H. Graburn’s introduction ‘Arts of the Fourth World’,
from ‘Ethnical and Tourist Arts – cultural expressions from the fourth World’.
‘Primitive’
art and ‘Folk’ art are no longer adequate categories for any contemporary
description, but only tend to be patronising slurs upon the arts and artist.
Rather look at categories such as ‘art by destination’[1]
and ‘art by metamorphosis’[2].
(Graburn p.3)
Outside
our showcases, there is no primitive art, particularly not in the nonliterate
societies where museum and gallery objects have been created. (Maquet, 1976)
(Graburn p.4)
Again this quote refers to the very important notion of the
transformation of an object, from maybe utility object to a ‘highly’ valued art
object in a glass case, displayed in the Western World and viewed by a Western
audience, as something labelled ‘Primitive art’. A term which furthermore is
invented by the Western society to categorise certain types of objects/art
pieces.
Cultural Changes: More important than the availability
of new materials and techniques is the advent of new ideas and tastes. Contacts
with foreign peoples, education, literacy, travel, and modern media so broaden
the ideas and experiences of Fourth World peoples that they may want to change,
break away from, or enlarge upon their previously limited traditions. It is
these ideas that not only build up new arts, but that are eventually
destructive of old traditions. Missionaries and governments have destroyed many
art traditions around the world, but neglect and competing ideas have destroyed
just as many. (Graburn p.12)
European and
Western society in general, while promoting and rewarding change in its own
arts and sciences, bemoans the same in others. (Graburn p. 13)
‘Lack of tradition’ is often the explanation of change
rather than a cultural process
The market itself is the most powerful
source of formal and aesthetic innovation, often leading to changes in size,
simplification, standardisation, naturalism, grotesquery, novelty, and
archaism. (Graburn p. 15)
It is rather interesting that objects
within a certain culture are made to live up to the expectations of another
culture’s myths and beliefs, for example as Graburn argues on page 16, the
travelling public of the Western world seems to believe that souvenirs should
match the skin colour of their producers.
For the
art-collecting public, the underlying analogy is that since creative works of
value are made by named individuals in our culture, the best of someone else’s
culture must also be made by unique named individuals. (Graburn p. 22)
The idea of celebrating the individual
per se and the beliefs that a work of art somehow should be credited less if
the author is unknown, is very peculiar. However, I think that this notion is
something dying out slowly, since contemporary works of art often is
challenging the idea of interaction between the work itself and the viewer to
the extent that the viewer becomes as much the author of the work, as the
person behind it.
This emphasis on
individualism in the arts of the Fourth World have resulted in an established
genre similar with the Western genre characterised as ‘art’ and populated by
named ‘artists’. As a result Eskimo lithographic prints became art whereas
dolls and clothing remain anonymous to their buyers and are usually spoken of disparagingly
as crafts. (Graburn p.23)
This cult of
individualism, as opposed to co-operative equalitarian effort, fits a belief
system that differentiates art from life and leaders from ordinary people.
(Graburn p.23)
Threatened identities
often lead to a revival of archaic traditions. This bolsters a sense of unique
identity and links the people to a past perhaps more glorious that the present.
(Graburn p.25)
It is interesting to see how powerful
tool this is especially when looking at the idea of monuments and how they can
control people, for example in Hausmann’s Paris.
What were once
relatively independent societies have become Fourth World minorities, overrun
by and up against the more powerful peoples who have taken charge of the world.
The need for external distinctions, as well as the maintenance of internal
order, has become more complicated. (Graburn p. 26)
How do you operate in a society under
these conditions? The TV have found its way into most Fourth World minorities
in the same way as Fourth World arts have found its way into most of the homes
in the Western world, so an exchange and contact is taking place, which is
accepted. But at the same time a suppression of cultural history is taking
place. Maybe one shouldn’t see this as a suppression, though, but rather think
affirmative and look for new possibilities of cultural history. Fourth World
minorities should maybe try to relive their history and their memories rather
than feeling suppressed by the Western world.
But the world moves
on: people do not always retain fixed images of themselves or their value to
the outside, and new symbols and materials may have greater prestige than the
older ones – especially if they are brought by powerful and prestigious
outsiders. (Graburn p.27)
If
the peoples of the Western world – whether out of genuine appreciation, guilt
over past sins, fascination with the exotic, or simply boredom with their own
lives – have chosen to view the arts of the Fourth World as significant and
worthwhile statements from fellow human beings, then that in itself is a most
important result of culture contact. (Graburn p.32)
[Week 4]
In
an article by Charles Darwent about Max Beckmann he argues that Beckmann was
a man whose pictures were doomed from the start to be seen as artefacts rather
than as art. So what is art then, and
what is not?
In
Alfred Gells article about Vogel’s net he argues that there are at least three
possible answers to this question.
1. Any
object that is aesthetically superior, having certain qualities of visual
appealingness, or beauty, put there
intentionally by an artist.
2. A
work of art that may not be at all ‘beautiful’ or even interesting to look at,
but it will be a work of art if it is interpreted in the light of a system of
ideas that is founded within an art-historical tradition, this theory is
something Gell calls the interpretive
theory.
3. The
institutional theory, saying
basically the same things as the interpretive theory but a work of art may be
in origin unconnected with the mainstream of art history, but if the art world
co-opts the work, and circulates it as art, then it is art, because it is the living representatives of this art world,
i.e. artists, critics, dealers, and collectors, who have the power to decide
these matters, not ‘history.
Many
objects are not seen as art pieces just because they have not been put in a
theoretical context.
The art-culture system: A machine for
making authenticity
Source: Clifford, J. 1988
James
Clifford furthermore argues in ‘On collecting Art and Culture’, when
considering Richard Handler’s ideas concerning the assumptions and paradoxes
involved in ‘having a culture’, selecting and cherishing an authentic
collective ‘property’, that this analysis
suggests that the identity whether cultural or personal, presupposes acts of
collection, gathering up possessions in arbitrary systems of value and meaning.
Such systems, always powerful and rule governed, change historically. One
cannot escape them. At best one can transgress or make their self-evident orders
seem strange.
All
kinds of gathering or collections embody hierarchies based on exclusion and so
forth. And this idea, as Clifford continues to argue, that
identity is a kind of wealth (of objects, knowledge, memories, experience) is
surely not universal. In Melanesia, for example, one accumulates not to hold
objects as private goods but to give them away, to redistribute. In the West,
however, collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive
self, culture, and authenticity.
I
think this notion of collecting is rather fascinating with the massive impact
it has on people and furthermore how this idea of collecting has shaped our
museums today.
Arthur C. Danto argues in the article
Art/Artefact, that in their original contexts, most of what we class as
primitive art was not intended to be responded to aesthetically, even if
aesthetic excellence was acknowledged as an index that the deep and important
powers had been captured.
Danto is furthermore arguing, when
considering the Zande net which Susan Vogel showed at an exhibition called
ART/ARTIFACT at the Centre for African Art in New York 1988, that ‘nothing the eyes can tell you will tell
you whether it is art or artifact’.
I
think this is important to remember since one very easily tend to try and
classify an object as art or artifact only by looking at it, without
remembering that this matter is so much more complex than that.
‘Can
we really capture art – ‘by which’ as with religion men escape from
circumstances to ecstasy?’ (Clive Bell)
Raymond Firth, in Art
and Anthropology, sees art as part of the result of attributing meaningful
pattern to experience or imagined experience. It is primarily a matter of
perception of order in relations, accompanied by a feeling of rightness in that
order, not necessarily pleasurable or beautiful, but satisfying some inner recognition of values. This patterning
attribution can vary from quiet recognition to direct creative manipulation,
but it is never purely a passive condition.
[Week
5]
Africa unlike North and South America,
as blabla argues in Part VI/Africa, consists mainly of newly independent Third
World nations and in these some tribal traditions are perpetuated or even
elaborated to become national arts, creating new national ethnicities.
African
art has since colonialism changed rapidly of various reasons where the most
obvious is the contact with the white man. So a natural search started for some
kind of nationality to be found in the art. I have to mention as well the
notion of ‘Tourist art’ (see Graburn week 1-3) a rather problematic term
involving a list of problems in terms of ‘authenticity’ etc., which I have
already dealt with in the beginning of the journal. This demand for souvenirs
came along with the destruction, and collection, of many traditional African
arts.
Since the fifteenth century, as William
Bascon argues in Changing African Art, when the Portuguese first explored the
Western coast of Africa, African artists have adapted European materials to
their own purposes. Africans have also been quick to reflect the changing scene
by depicting guns, gin bottles, bicycles etc.
So
one can not simply say that the contact with Western civilisation have degraded
‘genuine’ African art but rather that African art have found a new way of
expression. Or put in Bascon’s terms when he continues to argue that:
What is relevant is the continued
repetition of dictum that great African art belongs to the remote past. Recent
African art has no merit because it has been contaminated through European
contact.
From
a collector’s point of view this is rather important, to keep a work
‘authentic’ and thereby be able to keep the prices up. So instead of supporting
a Third nations development to establish some kind of national identity, after
years of interruption, I believe, there has been and still are many Western
powerful voices who have tried to decide what is and what is not ‘real’ African
art, only to support their own interest.
the
Eurocentric ‘art supermachinery’ (Nicodemus, E and
Romare, E. Africa, Art Criticism and the
Big Commentary, p.55)
Where art production is integrated into
highly advanced information society, the work and its textual mediation more or
less becomes part of one and the same productive process. In parts of the world
where information circulation is poor, on the other hand, visual production is
left to function by other, more precarious conditions. (Nicodemus, E and
Romare, E. Africa, Art Criticism and the
Big Commentary, p.53)
As a basically intellectual system, modern
art has been framed by its symbiosis with writings on art. The different levels
of textualisation account for a crucial part of the diverging conditions and
the unequal status to be found in the contemporary art world as the circulation
of written information on art represents both a knitting element and a power.
(Nicodemus, E and Romare, E. Africa, Art
Criticism and the Big Commentary, p.53)
So
what this then might mean to the African history of art, is maybe a prick, as
Nicodemus and Romane then continues to argue, in the African self-esteem
produced by the fact that it was mainly European pens that reinterpreted
precolonial African visual production. A sophisticated kind of domination.
Things are changing
with new generations of well-educated Africans coming into the political and
cultural field. (Nicodemus, E and Romare, E. Africa, Art Criticism and the Big Commentary, p.53)
[Week
6]
Before
going to the British Museum I wanted to stake out what my aims really were,
seeing one easily get caught up and engaged in issues that might not be
relevant for this particular project. I found three different sections that
would be interesting to look at; the Mexican gallery, the North American
gallery and the African gallery. The main thing I wanted to do was to compare
different approaches used by the three different curators and to find out how
this would effect myself as a visitor. The other thing I wanted to do was to
carefully look at the Inuit snowshoes in the North American collection and to
find out whether any information would be possible to get, Jonathan King was
the name I was given on before hand.
The
African gallery and the North American gallery were, I must say, fairly similar
in terms of display technique used for exhibiting the items, even if the
African gallery very much emphasised that objects in terms of style should be
side by side rather than objects from different areas and seeing Africa after
all is a continent and not a country this stroke me as being unfair. However
when walking in to the Mexican gallery I was a bit shocked. The Mexican gallery
was in a way build up as a theme park. The roof was black and sloping reminding
you of a cave or some kind of pyramid, the floor was beige like sand and one
side of the walls blood red with stone carvings fitted into the wall. It was as
if all the possible Western expectation of Mexico came through and if the items
displayed suddenly became something very exotic. I was amazed over the obvious
power of the curator.
In the JP Morgan Chase Gallery of North America I found a
pair of Eskimo snowshoes, very different from the pair I am researching from
the City Gallery in Sheffield. The snowshoes in the British Museum were
completely round and had no woollen decorations on the sides. However in the
display text it said that the Eskimo snowshoes sometimes may be decorated with
woven designs, relating to animals, for instance of ptarmigan feet. I find this
rather interesting seeing that would almost be as unpractical as the woollen
round red balls on the sides of City Gallery’s snowshoes, the only big
mysteries remaining is the shape.
[Week
8]
Snowshoe:
the Eskimo, according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, sixth
edition 2001, use one shape for the snowshoe that is triangular, about 46 cm in
length and another that is nearly circular but the designs differ considerably.
The Cree, farther south, use a long narrow hunting shoe about 2m in length; in
open country and for speed this type is the most suitable. The toe slightly
turned up to prevent catching if there is a crust on the snow.
This
is quite interesting since the snowshoe I have looked at is neither triangular,
circular or long and narrow. The toe is slightly turned up which presumably
means that it was used to be able to slide and not just walk, probably not for
hunting though since the length would not allow any major speed, for this
purpose one would have to use something more similar with a ski. Somewhere
along the road the Cree then must have got in contact with the Eskimos and exchanged
knowledge in terms of how to produce snowshoes and influenced the production of
a fairly narrow shoe with the toe slightly turned up rather than a triangular
or circular fairly clumsy shoe. However the decoration on the snowshoe tell us
that this pair of snowshoes, even though the different shape from a normal
Eskimo snowshoe, not could have been used for hunting. It just would not have
been practical.
According to some instruction on how to
make Alaskan Eskimo Snowshoes (web site www.inquiry.net/images/ich054.gif
06/03/2003, see image), Eskimos use walrus hide for webbing. They also point
out that there are different snowshoes depending on gender.
I
have this far in my research not found any images of snowshoes with decorations
on the sides.
Eskimo:
the belief that the term Eskimo means
‘raw meat eaters’ have led to the use of the word Inuit, meaning ‘the people’,
rather than Eskimo, but recently linguistics have found (source the handbook of North American Indians
vol. 5 Arctic, 1984) that this
meaning only fits the Ojibwa forms and is not correct for the Montagnais source
of the word, assimew, which in Ojibwa
would be ashkime, meaning ‘she nets a
snowshoe’.
Notes
on George Swinton’s essay Touch and the real: contemporary Inuit aesthetics –
theory, usage and relevance from Art in Society
Trade-art has been part of Eskimo life
since the very first white contacts and particularly since the beginning of the
nineteenth century.
Swinton continues by arguing that what
seems to attract the attention and interest of Inuit artists most is a
threefold attitude to art objects which arises out of the sananguaq concept:
i.
the making process itself
ii.
the concern for materials
iii.
the concern for reality – real or imagined
Quality depends on how well or
successfully the artist has worked his material.
Form for the Eskimos is not merely
well-sculpted form but largely sensuous – tactual –sensation.
True art for the Eskimo is in giving
life to a stone, the bone, the ivory, the sheets of paper, the string, the
cloth, the clay; to change them through one’s touch into reality – small
replicas of life or death – made by one’s hands and senses.
In contemporary Inuit art, touch-form
is its most significant and general aesthetic criterion.
Notes
and reflections on, Saradell Ard Frederick’s essay ‘Roots in the past’
Today’s Eskimo is the product of many
influences – the deeply rooted traditions of his own culture, the new
techniques and aesthetic standards of Western civilisation, and the pressures
of the twentieth century to develop a highly personal form of self-expression.
The Eskimos have become famous for
their ingenious use of materials and practical adaptations to the environment,
since they live in one of the most difficult climates in the world, with
limited raw materials available.
The
use of snowshoes in various forms is definitely a proof of practical adaptation
to the environment and a must to be able to get from A to B on foot in very
deep soft snow.
By 1914 every village of more than one
hundred inhabitants had a school and a white schoolteacher. World War II
brought increased contact, military service, and a change from a fishing and
hunting economy to a cash economy. Explorers, missionaries, sailors, teachers,
gold miners, and ubiquitous tourists have all influenced Eskimos and their art.
So
presumably the snowshoes I have been looking at were made up especially for the
school teacher in a non-traditional way.
Twentieth-century researchers have
found Eskimo children consistently superior in culture-free drawing tests. It
is theorised that centuries of selective breeding have intensified an ability
to observe and reproduce minute details. Survival itself was often dependent
upon this keen eye, and it was the survivor who lived to breed children.
Tom G. Svensson
points out, in Ethnic art in the Northern
Fourth World: The Netsilik before his introduction, aesthetic expression
among indigenous peoples is gaining more and more scholarly attention. At the
same time there is a shift in focus from art as pure aesthetics to examining
art both as a means of livelihood and as a way of life, something which is
probably due to the fact that art historians and anthropologists lately have
tended to draw nearer one another both in terms of theoretical concerns and in
methodology.
[Week
9]
What
is our role? What are we doing on this course with the material we are looking
for when researching the chosen object from City Gallery? And what are City
Gallery going to do with the material? How will they treat it?
As Simpson , M.G., argues in the
introduction to Making Representations,
and as I have noticed as well after
speaking to Gill at the City Gallery, museums are now undergoing a radical
change in the way that they function and in their relationships with the
cultures represented in the collections; a change which reflects shifts in the
relationship between dominant western cultures and those of indigenous,
minority, and suppressed cultures everywhere.
Simpson also argues that the museum,
‘the cabinet of curiosities’, is the storeroom of a nation’s treasures,
providing a mirror in which are reflected the views and attitudes of dominant
cultures, and the material evidence of the colonial achievements of the
European cultures in which museums are rooted. The colonial origins of the
museum remain an enduring influence upon these institutions and upon public
perceptions of them.
So
it is about our identity as much as the cultures displayed.
Colonialism has played a significant
role both in shaping the collections in museums and in shaping the audiences
that might potentially use them. (Simpson, M.G.)
We
have to be very careful with our mindset when going to museums. It is rather
easy to fall into traps and not be critical enough, seeing colonialism have for
hundreds of years shaped western history. Museums furthermore have to carefully
take into account the demands by the groups that are represented. There is
often a lack of representation of cultural diversity in local history
collections.
We
cannot know with any certainty the meaning of a work of art produced in another
culture, even if we have had considerable experience of that culture. (Anthony
Forge 1973 from Art in Society)
Scholarly interest in the role of the
artist within society has led to a plea for the development of a sociology
of art. AESTHETIC ANTHROPOLOGY!
(Greenhalgh, M & Megaw, V. from introduction to Art in Society)
As
a student on this module, Transculturation, I hope I am looking at myself
rather than on other cultures. Trying to find out what my understanding of
other cultures are, specifically the Inuits in Northern America, and to try and
understand what education the audience at City Gallery bring with them as
viewers and as well what the curators, think.
Similar
views are shared by blabla and blabla in ‘Reading National Geographic’ when
arguing that ‘National Geographic’ photograph reflects
as much on who is behind the lens, from photographers to magazine editors and
graphic designers to the readers who look – with sometimes different eyes –
through the Geographic’s institutional
lens. The photograph can be seen as a cultural artifact because its makers and
readers look at the world with an eye that is not universal or natural but
tutored.
This
is the process of culturation and if we are not careful we will just end up
being tutored.
Ethnography
– the branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific
description of individual human societies. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
Anthropology
– the study of human beings, their origins, institutions,
religious beliefs, social relationship, etc. (Collins ‘Concise Dictionary’)
Notes from web site www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/VSOC/Handbook/Whatisethnography (03/04/2003):
The rationale of ethnography can be
stated as follows: Its objective is to display the social organisation of
activities as they are revealed through involvement in the natural setting of
the activity.
The study of social life should begin
with coming to terms with meaning and the experience of social actors within
their natural circumstances. This experience must be the subject of a process
of interpretation not hypothesis testing.
Ethnography is not a theoretically
neutral activity within sociology, but does involve commitments to particular
stances toward the nature of society, social life and how these may be
investigated.
The ethnographic method is known by
various names, the most common alternative being ‘participant observation’.
The objective of the fieldworker is to
participate and observe the way of life, the activities, of the particular
setting of concern (exotic tribes, neighbourhood, prisons or whatever the
research might concern).
The aim of ethnography is to assemble
an account of the way in which those being studied manage and organise their
lives as natural social actors rather than as some homunculi of sociological
theory, by trying to obtain an ‘insider’s’ view of the setting.
The art of ethnography is knowing what
you are getting during the fieldwork, knowing what you have got and, finally,
knowing what to make to it.
Notes from web site http://emuseum.mnsu.edu/cultural/anthropology/theories.html
(02/04/2003):
Anthropology Theories:
Unilineal
Evolution 1800’s –
believed in Unilineal Evolution.
Diffusionism
– believed that cultural traits diffused outward from a
variety of cultural centres in circles to other regions and people.
American
Historicism – each society has its own unique
historical development and must be understood as a product of its own.
Functionalism
– stressed the study of systems and was an etic form of
anthropology.
Psychological
Anthropology – interested in how culture affects
personality.
Neoevolutionism
– characterised by attempting to find a mechanism for
cultural change.
French
Structuralism – Lévi-Strauss tried to use
structuralism to find the origin of systems in cultures.
Cultural
Materialism – study technology, environment, and
economic factors. They believe that these material constrains are the primary
cause of cultural variation.
Interpretive
Anthropology – work towards interpreting the culture
they are studying and then reporting their interpretation to their own culture.
[Week 11]
Diaspora peoples have
been marginalised by this visualisation of national cultures in museums, while
consistently using visual means to represent their notions of loss, belonging,
dispersal, and identity…
…That essence was, of
course, race. Powers does not mean to suggest that all art history must be
rejected as racist but that, when we are involved in cross-cultural work, the
traditional tools of the discipline must be handled with the greatest of care.
Writing the history of diaspora visual cultures will, then, pose important
methodological questions for both diaspora studies and the visual discipline. (
Mirzoeff, N 2000)
notes and reflections on Alana Jelinek’s text Working within and against Tate Modernism
‘Century City’
exhibition – aesthetic definitions of the Modern and questions around its
supposed universality have been brought to the surface. However, a new gallery
demands a new understanding of how art is read. ‘Century City’ reflects the
significance of genuine cross-cultural exchange, as distinct from multicultural
exoticism. Cultural and national interaction is marked out as a key component
of the creative life of the city. Absence of contemporary context leaves the
majority of cities stuck in their historical time-frame which seem to suggest
that this period and no other in the last century produced interesting or
internationally relevant work.
This reminds one of a Modernist model, where a chronology
raise notions of progress.
The culture of this
institution is not one of perfectionism. There is a clear understanding that
mistakes will happen. Around issues of historicity and traditional exclusions,
there is a genuine attempt (not always rigorous) at engaging with the debates and
a self-consciousness around Tate Modern’s position as an institution in a
post-modern postcolonial world. More must be done. This is also a position
taken at the highest levels.
When considering Tate and how the institution have succeeded
in addressing the Eurocentrism of traditional art histories, one of the few
non-European (descent) artists that come into my mind is Anish Kapoor and his
massive red piece (of which I have unfortunately forgotten the name) installed
in the turbine hall downstairs at Tate Modern.
Notes and refections on Niru Ratnam’s text ‘I am that other that you want me to be’: the
work of Anish Kapoor in 1980s Britain.
Anish Kapoor is an
Indian-born British based sculpture who became noticed by the public in
1981. ‘Increasingly what is important
is not looking at and reading myths as an observer, but living them.
’Kapoor’s use of his
Indian cultural heritage was not a simple extrapolation from a well of imagery
or motifs. Instead, his works were an attempt to make manifest those myths and
legends which make up Hindu culture.
So we find an interesting relationship between looking and
living. Britain knows India from a certain framework and in a way Anish Kapoor
tries to rework this relationship and gives a enough space for the viewer to
fill in.
‘I think [the works] are receptacles. I suppose the best way
to say that is that Kpoor needs to leave out enough Kapoor so that you the
viewer can be there in the work. If I fill it up with me, then there’s no place
for you. It’s very important that I’m not there too much.’ (Kapoor 1990) Making
emptiness would be a process of vacating Otherness.
Here it would seem important to note the role of the viewer.
The viewer is as much responsible for the narrative around a piece, as the
maker.
The founding text of
post-colonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism,
is based on the observation that the West has a certain way of regarding
the East. This discursive body of knowledge is a mixture of anthropological
observations, myth and imagination that together form a discourse based on
stereotypes.
Notes on Susan Pui San Lok’s text Erika Tan – Pidgin:
Interrupted Transmission
The work Interrupted Transmission is playing on the aspects
of language and translation.
The play on
‘pidgin’/’pigeon’ highlights a slippage that registers as a visual and written
pun but not in the spoken; a gap in translation that refutes the transparency
and stability of language as a straightforward means or mere tool of
communication.
Language as a
carrier, a bearer, a conduit, a messenger of meanings picked up and dropped
intact.
The unconscious drive
for the ‘Other’/’other’, the desire in language, is brought into relief by the
Barthesian quotation cited and recited in the work.
Taking as given the loss of a phantom
‘original’, dwelling in the irreparable break, to speak and be (mis)heard is
perhaps to share in the complicity and companionship of not-knowing,
not-quite-hearing; pleasure in the silence, pleasure in the sullying, the
subversion, pleasure in mistranslation.
I find this piece very interesting and I like the idea of
mistranslation, misspelling and misunderstanding. It is rather fascinating how
our language operates and I think misspelling and mistranslating is an
important way of using it, in an affirmative way.
[Week
12]
Culture – Geography
Notes
and reflections from World Culture Report
2000 from UNESCO
If we believe that culture is ‘a mass
of interplaying stimuli’ (UNESCO, World
Culture Report 1998), then how will our institutions and technologies
preserve, celebrate, reflect and perhaps even stimulate culture’s variety and
dynamic change?
‘There is…a danger…which is to treat
culture as an object, a ‘thing’ which exists separately from the social space
in which various social actors interrelate.’ (Stavenhagen 1998)
Archives, libraries and museums –
institutions of memory
Be
aware of the fact that institutions are not always right. History and memory
are always going to change. History is constantly rewritten.
Knowledge is made up of networks of
shared cultural metaphors stored in the memories and thoughts of interconnected
individuals.
How can a piece of culture be preserved
and even nurtured and changed in a digital environment?
However
there are problems arising when spreading culture over the www, and making
culture accessible for everybody. First of all, facts are mostly shown via
photos, not much text seeing this would make the viewer leave the web site, and
photos as we know are fairly dangerous since they’ve got the power of representing
something as ‘real’ and ‘truthful’. Secondly, is this not just another way of
enforcing Western views onto different cultures? Forcing people to use the
computer to access their cultural heritage.
The globalised culture that is
currently emerging is not a global culture in any utopian sense…It is neither
inclusive, balanced, nor, in the best sense, synthesising. Rather, globalised
culture is the installatin, world-wide, of one particular culture born out of
one particular privileged historical experience. It is, in short, simply the
global extension of Western culture.
(John Tomlinson Globalised Culture: The Triumph of the West? Cited in Culture and Global Change 1999)
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