Dialogues and exchanges between art and anthropology have a longhistory, from French ethnology’s relationship with surrealism in the1930s (Clifford 1988) to the avant-garde inspired experiments of the writing-culture debate in the 1980s (Marcus and Fischer 1986) and,most recently, the “ethnographic turn” within contemporary art in theearly 1990s (see Foster 1996; Coles 2000). However, given the proliferation of misunderstandings and the subsequent growing distance be-tween the two over the last few years, Schneider and Wright argue that this relationship is in need of renewal. Indeed, despite the borrowingsbetween anthropology and contemporary art in recent years—mostly aone-way street of artists broadly using ethnographic methods in theirprocesses or occasionally wrestling with theoretical concerns fromanthropology—these are clearly different disciplines, with their ownrules and methods, their own practices, and their own histories, insti-tutions, and academies. Yet in spite of these obvious differences, whichSchneider and Wright argue can nonetheless be “productive points of departure” (2006: 3), there are deeper affinities between the two, spe-cifically the shared and common object of culture or, in short, the rep-resentation of others: “Artists and anthropologists are practitioners who appropriate from, and represent, others” (2006: 26). ~ Kiven Strohm, When Anthropology Meets Contemporary Art
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 00:25:17 +0000
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