The Art of Research Practices Between Art and Anthropology
By E. Rikou and E.Yalouri
Introduction: The Art of Research
Research is considered to be the established way to generate new knowledge. Closely linked to the principles of the Enlightenment, research has been rooted in the powerful place that positive sciences have held in the Western world. Research, traditionally identified with science, has served as a prototype for humanities and the social “sciences,” while in the 21st century it has also been adopted by organizations and groups with purposes beyond strictly academic concerns.
Research is the dynamic process through which data is formulated and formatted, while at the same time, the bases and questions that anticipate the generation of new knowledge and future potentialities are set. As we well know, however, knowledge is power, and research not only lies at the core of any discussion of epistemological interest but also has sociopolitical and financial significance.
In an era when the terms by which research is evaluated are linked to knowledge applications and their capacity to generate financial capital, research in the social sciences and the humanities also tends to be supported much more readily if it meets this goal. It is important to problematize the principles of such an evaluation, to pursue and assert other reasons that may make research in the social sciences and the humanities “worthwhile”. It is also important to take into consideration other practices and methods that may deviate from those the calculus of commercial applicability institutionally and traditionally delineates. In short, “research” constitutes a given upon which it is time to reflect.
While research has traditionally been linked to science, it is art – stereotypically viewed as its polar opposite – that may provide the best lens to open up new perspectives on this issue. Especially since the 1990s, art research has increasingly borrowed theories and methods from the humanities and the social sciences. Conversely, the humanities and the social sciences have displayed growing interest in employing art in their own research procedures. In the field of anthropology, in particular, interest in the arts has been growing since the turn to cultural critique in the 1980s. Collaborations between artists and anthropologists have multiplied over the years as part of the tendency toward collaborative research practices with a socially-engaged character both in art and anthropology. These tend to redefine the relationship between the scientific and the artistic, and the aesthetic, the ethical and the political.[1]
In this context, we suggest that, instead of juxtaposing art to research as a feature of science, it is time to overcome such binary oppositions and turn our attention to the art of research by underlining the importance of practices, skills and techniques, which are not opposed to theory, but are ways of thinking through making in between and beyond disciplinary delimitations.
Research Between Art and Anthropology
Art research has been flourishing over the last three decades and has accordingly enjoyed significant institutional support, a phenomenon which has evoked a multitude of scholarly responses.[2] Most art school programs now offer research-based MAs and PhDs.
Art research usually refers to research activities followed by or identified with the production of an artwork and bears common elements with academic research, for example, a systematic and long-term dedication to a research project aimed at answering a number of research questions and the production of knowledge.[3] A precise definition of “art research,” however, is usually avoided, possibly for fear that this could mean restraining artistic freedom, and/or imposing evaluative criteria alien to the nature of “unprompted” and “genuine” art activities. This is why some prefer to address the question “when is research artistic?” rather than “what is art research?”[4]
The humanities, the social sciences, and anthropology, in particular, have been significant sources of inspiration for artists who are interested in connecting their work to social reality and in communicating with wider audiences at a time when the interest in politics, artistic activism, “relational aesthetics”[5] is prevalent. Artists tend to borrow theories and research techniques, such as the interview, the questionnaire, the documentary, and so on, as part of their attempt to record events and social phenomena, to criticize stereotypes, or simply to draw inspiration for the creation of an artwork. The “ethnographic turn” in art, as it was expressed during the 1990s,[6] in particular, coincides with the tendency of artists, curators and art theorists to adopt elements of anthropological theory and practice.
Some anthropologists, on the other hand, have displayed an interest in and drawn from art. A long tradition of writing by anthropologists, critics, philosophers and aestheticians has focused on the features of art production in non-Western societies and has sought to identify the specific characteristics of each culture’s inherent aesthetic.[7] Moreover, the sociology of art has concerned itself with the institutional parameters of art production, reception and circulation and more specifically with those of Western societies or societies with state bureaucracies, such as China, Japan etc.[8] Anthropological studies of the market in ethnographic art have also dealt with the reception of non-Western art by the Western public.[9] For many years, these studies concerned themselves with the institutionalized Artworld of the West, as well as with the responses and/or reactions of non-Western peoples to the reception of their art by this alien art world.[10]
On the other hand, since the 1980s, anthropological interest in art has moved away from theories of art focusing exclusively on the aesthetic attributes of artworks[11] and away from structuralist and semiotic approaches, which tended to approach art as a cultural language of visual forms.[12] In his seminal work of 1998, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Alfred Gell, argued for an approach to art that did not seek to identify or isolate the aesthetic forms and principles inherent in each culture. By contrast with the mainstream discourses of anthropology in the late 90s, Gell paved the way for a more dynamic social approach to art that viewed it as a system of social action rather than as a system of aesthetics or signification and proposed to address the question “how can the artwork act?” rather than “what does the artwork mean?”
Other theoretical and methodological developments in anthropology have pointed to the need for finding new ways of doing anthropology in the increasingly complex globalized and digitalized contemporary world, given the dramatic changes in media and communication technologies that press for doing things differently from the classic method. George Marcus[13], for example, has suggested a specific methodological model which shifts from a single-sited to a multi-sited ethnography as a more appropriate way to respond to the circumstances of a globalized world. Marcus and Myers[14] in particular have noted that art and cultural production, in general, cannot be studied exclusively at a local level, and they have argued for a critical cultural perspective in anthropology combined with contemporary art in the task of undermining the dominant “western-centered” view of the world.
Since the 1980s self-reflexivity and a reconsideration of anthropology’s role in the power relations during the colonial era led to seeking new ways of representing and conversing with “otherness.”[15] In this context, as well as in response to the need to engage with social issues, the ethics, conventions and scope of anthropological research have been systematically debated. This and other trends have led to the experimentation with new ways and forms of making, writing, theorizing and displaying anthropology and has opened the path for an encounter with the arts.
Over the last few decades, anthropology has moved beyond dominant conceptions of representation to “evocation”,[16] “figuration”,[17] “agency”,[18] or “affect”[19]. It has also been conceptualized and practiced as an open-ended and, often, improvisatory process of knowledge that involves engagement with emotions, materials, the body, and the senses. This shift has been accompanied by an interest in new forms of “designing”,[20] “making”,[21] visualizing,[22] and producing knowledge in general.[23] Fields such as material culture studies, visual anthropology, and contemporary art have often been conscripted to offer new insights into anthropological research and new pathways to the study of emotional, sensory, and kinesthetic responses alongside interpretive ones.[24]
These developments have brought anthropology even closer to art, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that contemporary art has a lot to offer, not simply as an object of study, but also as an interlocutor and collaborator suggesting new ways and means of doing/approaching anthropological research. Experimentations in the collaboration between artists and anthropologists in Europe and the US, which have taken place in recent years, have illustrated the potentialities of such a collaboration, at a local and an international level.[25]
A conversation between art and anthropology, however, may not only promote and lead to collaborations and harmonious exchanges but may on the other hand provoke “resistances”, criticism, and contestation on both sides, thus highlighting differences between these two fields (e.g. of ethics and aesthetics), as well as the need to consider the political aspects of promoting “communication” or “collaboration”.[26] Our experience with the projects cited in this special issue has also demonstrated this fact.[27]
In addition, ethics is of particular relevance in research taking place between art and anthropology. Ethics has been of central importance throughout the history of anthropology as a discipline traditionally working with “other” societies and being implicated in colonial and imperial programs that shaped the relationship between “The West and the Rest”. Engaging with ethics, however, becomes an entirely new experience for anthropologists working with Western contemporary artists, who have their own codes of ethics and “often deliberately transgress ethical boundaries, precisely to highlight their historical and cultural contingency”.[28]
Beyond the particular difficulties concerning individual projects between art and anthropology, there are more parameters obstructing the collaboration between the two fields; these relate to dominant forms of representation in mainstream anthropological research, which has persistently been attached to logocentrism, and has long been skeptical towards “the visual”,[29] “the image”,[30] “the color,[31] and has more generally “resisted central ways of working and representing in the arts”.[32] The prioritization of discourse and text over the image still looms large in anthropology. Meanwhile, “the visual” (often identified with the arts despite the latter’s “discursive turn”) has traditionally been met with suspicion, either because of its ambiguity, which is considered incompatible with “the transparent,” “objective” analysis of the academic discourse or because it preserves a realism which conceals the “constructed” character of representation.
Moreover, research between art and anthropology tends to undermine established methods, protocols and evaluation criteria of academia. Those educated in the humanities and social sciences often criticize artists for a lack of systematic research, while they underline the contradictions entailed in art practice, especially when the latter is engaged with politics and social reality. Whereas PhDs in the arts had already appeared in the 1990s,[33] artistic research has been criticized as amateurish both from an epistemological viewpoint, and as a by-product of neoliberal, antagonistic relationships in education that are associated with the Bologna Process. The introduction of such research may represent a threat for the dominant regimes of knowledge and power by questioning established borders between disciplines. Such research adds new contestants in the distribution of limited resources for research. The use of the term “research” in art opens up for artists and other representatives of the art world the path to funds, to which they had no access until recently.
Conversely, many artists contest the institutionalization of art research because they argue that there are forms of art that do not presuppose research. Some believe that the introduction of art research into education and art practices undermines the particularities of Art, which the Schools of Fine Arts have managed to maintain for so long. For them, introducing research into arts education undermines the specificity of art schools, organically related to the particularities of visual arts, which remain foreign to the assessment criteria of academia. They fear that it may subject art to evaluation criteria that come from outside which may restrict its breadth, alter its character, restrain the creativity of artists and eventually lead to a new form of academization of art.[34]
Against all these odds, important work has been accomplished in recent years on the way art has met with anthropology, as well as the paths that this encounter has opened, as a result of the developments taking place within the framework of each one of these fields. Schneider and Wright have systematically emphasized the practices of art and anthropology that are related to research. The time is now ripe for us to focus our study on the process of research itself, which often takes a secondary place compared to its end product.
This Special Issue
The present special issue focuses on research practices between art and anthropology as a means of bringing fresh insights to the topic of research in general and its role in the contemporary historical and sociopolitical context. At the same time, it seeks new perspectives on the relationship between these two fields. Thus, the first part of the issue (Encounters between Anthropology and Art) consists of contributions by anthropologists who have emphasized this type of approach to art and have extensively worked and reflected on the encounters between anthropology and art from different angles and cultural contexts. In fact, in this issue, these contributors achieve a comprehensive view of the subject: directly or indirectly, they address questions concerning the functioning of art institutions as well as the practices and scopes of individual artists, the conception and action of specific artworks, the relevance of art in particular situations, for specific social groups and for society at large and most of all for the practice and theory of anthropology.
A particular occasion for most of these scholars to meet and discuss contemporary trends on collaborative art, activism, and the humanities worldwide along with artists and other theorists and practitioners took place in Athens in October 2017, at the closing event of the research project “Learning from Documenta”. Thus, the second part of this special issue (Fieldnotes from Athens) focuses on Athens, a place where contemporary artists have been demonstrating prolific activity, especially since the economic repercussions of the Eurozone crisis began to be felt in Greece. In Athens, artistic research appeared in the 1990s due to artistic initiatives that sought to produce art with strong social and political overtones. This tendency has been reinforced by collaborations amongst local and international artists and curators during the so-called economic crisis when art activism gained popularity in Greece and beyond. Documenta 14 (“Learning from Athens”), which was partly held in Athens, is indicative of the international (and controversial) interest Greece is gaining as an emblem of the crisis in European values. Therefore, this local contemporary art scene provides an eloquent case for investigating artistic research both anthropologically and from an art historical perspective.
While the papers of the first part of this special issue highlight art as a “partner” for anthropology in different situations, the second part offers examples of the diverging scopes and, sometimes ethics, between artistic and ethnographic processes of making sense of the “real,” which problematize the “blurring of boundaries” and underline political along with methodological concerns. Far from providing a complete overview of similar tendencies in this specific sociopolitical context, this second part aspires to highlight some examples from a more “unofficial” art perspective (i.e. “work that receives little or no validation from mainstream critics, curators, or institutions” as Grant Kester has put it). [35] It draws from our own quests, queries, experiences and research endeavors between art and anthropology to create enduring structures and conditions that would allow the collaboration of young artists and anthropologists in their research practices and their contact with other fields of knowledge, creation and social intervention. Our aim has not been the institutionalization of a new academic field but a long-term process of transitions and shifts with sociopolitical potency that question stereotypes and allow for the expression of new relationships and collaborations.
Several of the contributions to the first part of this special issue draw references and examples from relational aesthetics and socially engaged art. They thus acknowledge and highlight the potential of art to give anthropology new answers to old questions, such as the “mise en scène” of fieldwork, the process of interpretation or the engagement with communities.
Fieldwork (and ethnography as its product), as the central method for the production of anthropological knowledge, has ceased to be an exclusively anthropological method. It has long transcended anthropology’s borders and been appropriated by different fields of research and collectivities, among which are artists. It has been scrutinized, reconsidered or even questioned by anthropologists themselves to respond to new needs and paradigms of research.[36]
More specifically, for George Marcus, fieldwork has much to learn from art both as a technology and as an aesthetic of method, and this is where he seeks inspiration for the “refunctioned ethnography” he has been imagining. In his contribution to this special issue, he takes up the example of the Green Room of the World Trade Organization in Geneva (a place where “nations come to terms, make deals, and sometimes fail to make them and […], paraethnographically, they define the distinctive terms of their relationships, which are then played out on other more public stages”).[37] He uses the room as a metaphor for the link he wishes to make between an alternative model of ethnographic fieldwork today and performance and site-installation art from the 1990s onwards. The Green Room is thus for him “an institution of theatre,” serving as a specific intermediary space and time of reflexivity before acting, thereby considering the importance of the “off-stage” for both site-specific performance art and ethnographic encounters. For Marcus, who has been demonstrating ethnography as multi-sited since the 90s, research is “a design” of engagements across a social landscape that is both material and imaginary. Therefore, conceiving and practising fieldwork becomes quite similar to materializing an art project, particularly if this is one based on research that, in turn, duplicates ethnography.[38] Although Marcus discusses divergences between ethnographic fieldwork and materializations of art projects, he also points out that reinventing fieldwork in connection to art equals experimenting with aesthetics towards “a viable idea of multi-sitedness”.[39] The “object of study” may emerge via intense juxtapositions and can be pursued via intellectual partnerships of different sorts, whereas the ethnographic knowledge may be formed as mediation or intervention rather than representation of a kind.
Different fields of thought and practice bear their own traditions, canons, histories and audiences, and there is a degree of negotiation taking place within the “contact zones”,[40] where these fields meet each other. For example, Arnd Schneider,[41] presents the different expectations to the project for which he collaborated with contemporary artists in Argentina, and his participation in and documentation of events dedicated to a local patron saint.[42] These expectations need to be carefully triangulated between the different viewpoints coming from both art and anthropology, and both the educational and economic capital which is at play. Schneider focuses on the dialogue between artists and anthropologists in the “mise en scène” of fieldwork. He reflects on “the speaking terms” between ethnography and art and more generally on the philosophical first principles upon which translations take place when engaging with the other.[43] Schneider appreciates Lambek’s approach to hermeneutics,[44] which brings to the fore the very activity of conversation as ethical, allowing for the maintenance of diversity. In turn, he introduces the concept of “uneven hermeneutics”[45] as a way of understanding and learning from the other without colonizing its thought and its semantic territory, and as a way of acknowledging the incommensurable and that which cannot be translated further, while leaving open an “indeterminate space for translation.” The “unevenness” of Schneider’s process is demonstrated by excerpts of conversations between Schneider and two of the artists involved in the project.[46] This discussion exemplifies the contested notions of practitioners in different fields defining each other’s practices in the art-anthropology encounter. This dialogue shows what might lead different camps to a complementary understanding of practice via complex processes of translation and negotiation.
Another contributor, Thomas Fillitz, has worked extensively on art biennials and more generally on discourses surrounding the concept of global art, and is concerned with the encounter between the anthropologist and the protagonists of the art world, artists, curators and exhibits, specifically when the latter intervene in a culturally different context than the one defined by Western art history. Although Fillitz acknowledges the importance of cross-disciplinary activities in the field of the arts, he remains convinced of the differences of practices among artists, curators and anthropologists. Fillitz presents two examples of his long-term ethnographic research in West Africa: a dialogue with Ivoirian artist Mathilde Moro and the curatorial activities of the Biennale of Dakar. He argues that when an anthropologist meets an artist[47] the question is not one of “interpretation” of an artwork but of the discursive creation of a common field of reflection that make visible different facets of the “real.” The same is true for curatorial practices,[48] which, although diverse in their perspectives, may operate as catalysts of imagining alternatives of social life. Thus, a common space of reflection on culture emerges, produced between the anthropologist during the research process,[49] the artists and the curators s/he works with.
Research is registered in a tradition that has been historically defined by an academic community which evaluates it each time. Of course, there have been voices raised against any methodological rules in scientific knowledge production [50], but the research process is a matter which concerns not only an academic community but also the community at large.
Roger Sansi Roca’s reflection on research between art and anthropology takes the notion of “amateur” as a point of entry thereby discussing questions of deskilling, expertise and collaboration. The practice of the art collective La Fundicio, active recently in Barcelona, serves as Sansi Roca’s main example in order to consider processes of mediation between the “expanded field” of art,[51] social sciences and social life. Sansi Roca brings into the debate arguments from anthropology in addition to those from art history of the avant-garde, as well as Ranciere’s famous book The Ignorant Schoolmaster[52] along with Bourriaud’s Formes de Vie[53] in order to argue for anti-hierarchical practices linking life and work that might be designated as “amateurism.” The complex question of the political perspective of projects such as La Fundicio is finally raised: do artists as “amateurs”, researchers and educators naively promote new forms of social management in the periphery? Or are they protected from such uses of their work by adopting the standpoint of autonomy of art? Sansi Roca concludes in favor of contemporary artists’ political potential to work collaboratively based not on difference of expertise but on common political ground.
Politics as activism in relation to research in art and anthropology, considered as forms of cultural production, also preoccupy Christopher Wright. Documenta 14 “Learning from Athens” and more specifically certain “social sculptures” such as Rick Lowe’s Victoria Square project serves as the starting point for Wright’s reflection on tools and methods these three aforementioned fields of activity employ to investigate “reality.” The main example that serves his argument, however, is the digital video work de la vie des enfants au XXIe siècle created by two Senegalese former “street children,” Papisthione and Grand Malien, with the help (and the editing) of the French artist, activist and stage producer Jean Michel Bruyère between 1999 and 2000. Wright offers an account of his own reactions as a spectator of the film, since watching it, in his own words “certainly delineates my own ethics –their limits and their positionality in stark relief”.[54] He considers this film as unclassifiable, in the sense that it is neither a documentary nor an artwork and, as such, disrupts the boundaries between art, anthropology and activism. For Wright, the lack of distinction between the three fields is revealing, particularly in terms of research, an activity which characterizes disciplines such as anthropology and art projects that intervene into the uncertain realm of the so-called “reality” that aims to change people’s lives.
Like Wright, Eleana Yalouri deals with “unclassifiable” works, this time located in between anthropology, art and archaeology. She discusses these works, which she herself has been involved in, as points of reference for a wider discussion of “the advantages and disadvantages of being undisciplined.”[55] She problematizes binary oppositions between the real and the unreal, the literal and the metaphorical, which are commonly associated with anthropology and art respectively and have stereotypically situated them on the two opposing sides of the academic fence, [56] as a way to rethink established certainties of science and to highlight a possible economy of knowledge that recognizes the potentiality of uncertainty and ambiguity.
In turn, Elpida Rikou summarizes her “fieldnotes” on the projects she has initiated and been involved in during the last ten years as an example of transdisciplinary, collaborative, socially-engaged art research that took place in Athens, Greece, parallel to similar trends developing internationally.[57] She describes the projects TWIXTLab, Voices, Value and others that are characterized by critical reflection on the context of their emergence, that is, the specific sociopolitical conditions and the biographies of the actors involved, as well as the mingling of different generations, diverse professional status and differentiated ways of producing and thinking about culture.
Yalouri and Rikou present yet another one transdisciplinary, collaborative research project entitled “Learning from documenta”, for which they provide a brief account of the complexities of doing collective research on an international exhibition of the caliber of documenta in the context of Athens during the crisis. During the two years that they worked as a team on documenta 14, they had the opportunity to fully realize the entanglement of epistemological, political and personal quests in the research between art and anthropology.
It is important to note that, in this and all other projects presented in this special issue, research is conceived as an open process, according to developments in art but also in anthropological theory since the 1980s. These developments have illustrated the role various historical and sociopolitical parameters as well as the researcher’s own subjectivity play in defining the outcome of research and its end product – the text of ethnography itself.[58] For the production of ethnography, a series of negotiations take place between the principles, the canons, the traditions of the academic disciplines set by the academic communities on the one hand and the expectations, the aims and desires of individual researchers and other collectivities involved in the production of knowledge on the other.
Despite these developments in anthropology and in the social sciences more generally, the end product of research still tends to be prioritized over its process. This fact is related to a Western history of ideas, closely related to the emergence of “disciplines” and the way “Science” has been defined as the means of giving objective answers and solutions to problems.[59] It is also related to the way the academic community and university education have been structured and defined in the context of Western European policies and the increasing relationship of education (and research) with the market.
In contemporary art, on the other hand, the concept of process is more widely– and systematically – promoted. In a great part of contemporary art production the concept of “project,” as opposed to the concept of the completed visual artwork plays an increasingly significant role.Being stereotypically presented as a form of “free expression” which resists scientific strictures, art has not been historically identified with knowledge, and it, therefore, does not consider itself obliged to follow scientific rules. The significance of “the process” in art, has been reinforced institutionally and in tandem with the dominance of the figure of the artist as a researcher. It is worth noting here that the emphasis placed on the process by artists does not necessarily refute the primacy the end art product retains, as it is this creation which is usually exhibited and evaluated by the art world.
Against the stereotype of science being exemplary in the practice of research, Timothy Ingold who has systematically worked on and with the concept of “making” in between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, closes this special issue with his contribution, where he suggests that anthropology could do well by following art’s example. That is, not to seek to hold the world to account, or to extract its secrets through force, but to go along with it, entering into its relations and processes. Thus, research for him is a processual and open-ended “re-search,” namely “a second research,”[60] which does not aim at discovering once and for all the secrets of a world already formed and objectively decipherable, but at joining with the ways of a world of relations and processes which is constantly changing. Research for him is not “a technical operation” as he says, but a way of living curiously (from the Latin curare), with care and attention. This way of life is intimately linked not just to what we do, but also to what we undergo and experience.
Considering all the above, the collaboration of art and anthropology can offer a chance to reflect on the notion of the research process, not only on a theoretical level but on a practical one as well, without necessarily diminishing the importance of the end product and the need for its evaluation.
When attempting to transgress borders between different fields of thought and practice, some questions arise related to the more general issue of trans-disciplinarity. Even though art is not considered “a discipline,” it does bear its own disciplines, derived from specific traditions, principles and canons of the Artworld. One should, therefore, ask: what is the aim of a trans-disciplinary project between art and anthropology? Is it the creation of a new academic field defined by its own borders and disciplines? Is it oriented towards the search of a utopia linked to a time before the fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines took place? Does it aspire to the collapse of existing disciplinary boundaries and the facilitation of communication between different fields of thought? Such questions are not solely of epistemological relevance. What is also at stake is the opening of paths and possibilities for a renewed dynamic, collective and socially engaged approach to important social and political matters when art and anthropology meet each.
Elpida Rikou has studied sociology (Panteion University, Athens), anthropology (D.E.A., Université Paris V-Sorbonne), social psychology (D.E.A. and Ph.D, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris) and visual arts (Athens School of Fine Arts). She has taught at different universities (Universities of Crete, Thessaly, Athens and Panteion University) since 1998. She has also taught Anthropology and Contemporary Art in the Department of Theory and History of Art of the Athens School of Fine Arts from 2007 to 2017 and from 2011 to 2013 in the Postgraduate Program (Master in Fine Arts) of the Department of Visual Arts of the same School. She is the editor of “Anthropology and Contemporary Art” (a collection of texts of British and American anthropologists and art theorists published in Greek by Alexandria in 2013) for which she has written the introduction and of the translation in Greek of Marc Augé’s book “Pour une anthropologie des mondes contemporains” (published by Alexandria in 1999), for which she has also written the introduction. She has co-edited with E.Yalouri and A.Lampropoulos a volume with the work of artists and theorists on value (Αξία) and with P.Panopoulos a volume with the work of artists and anthropologists on voice (Φωνές/Fones) as well as the translation in Greek of Alfred Gell’s book Art and Agency. She has published articles in scientific periodicals, edited collections, art catalogues and newspapers. She is the coordinator of several art projects with an interdisciplinary character (i.e. TWIXTLab, the international research project Learning from documenta with E.Yalouri, Value/4th Athens Biennal , project “Fonés”, etc.) in which she is also a participant as an anthropologist and visual artist.
Eleana Yalouri is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. She has a BA in Archaeology (University of Crete, Greece) an MPhil in Museum studies (University of Cambridge), a PhD in Social Anthropology (University College London), and conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Princeton, USA. She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster, London and a lecturer at the Dept of Anthropology of University College London. Her research interests include theories of Material Culture, cultural heritage and the politics of remembering and forgetting; anthropology and contemporary art; anthropology and archaeology. Her book The Acropolis. Global Fame, Local Claim (2001) discusses the modern life of the Athenian Acropolis, and the ways in which modern Greeks deal with the national and international features of their ancient classical heritage. Her edited volume Υλικός Πολιτισμός. Η Ανθρωπολογία στη Χώρα των Πραγμάτων (Material Culture. Anthropology in Thingland) (2012) offers a systematic review of theories and ethnographies on key fields of material culture. Her current research projects involve collaborations with visual artists and art historians exploring the borders between contemporary art and fields of inquiry dealing with the material culture of the past or present, such as archaeology and anthropology.
Endnotes
[1] See Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[2] Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices (Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts; Gothenberg: University of Gothenburg/Art Monitor, 2005); Sandra Delacourt, Katia Schneller, and Vanessa Theodoropoulou, eds., Le Chercheur et Ses Doubles (Paris: B42: Ecole supérieure d’art et de design Grenoble-Valence, 2016); Dieter Lesage, “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On Measuring Artistic Research Output,” Art and Research: A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods 2, no. 2 (2009).
[3] Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vadén, ibid.
[4] Julian Klein, “What Is Artistic Research?,” Gegenworte, no. 23 (2010).
[5] Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998).
[6] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996).
[7] Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover Books, 1927); Jeremy Coote, “Marvels of Everyday Vision: The Anthropology of Aesthetics and the Cattle-Keeping Nilotes,” in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 245–74; Jeremy Coote, “Aesthetics Is a Cross-Cultural Category: For the Motion,” in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 266–75; Howard Morphy, “The Anthropology of Art,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1994), 648–85; Howard Morphy, “Aesthetics Is a Cross-Cultural Category: For the Motion,” in Key Debates in Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 249–93; Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).
[8] Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7-8; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Pierre Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” International Social Science Journal 20, no. 4 (1968): 589–612; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. R Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Nathalie Heinich, La Sociologie de l’art (Paris: La découverte, 2004).
[9] Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2009).
[10] See relevant critique by Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[11] Alfred Gell, ibid.; Howard Morphy, “The Anthropology of Art,” in Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Tim Ingold (London: Routledge, 1994), 655.
[12] Alfred Gell, ibid., 163-164.
[13] George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1995): 95–117.
[14] George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, eds., The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkley, L.A., London: University of California Press, 1995).
[15] James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
[16] Stephen A. Tyler, The Unspeakable: Discourse, Dialogue, and Rhetoric in the Postmodern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 199—213.
[17] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 55—57; cf. David MacDougall, “The Visual in Anthropology,” in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 288.
[18] Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[19] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley Robert, Seem Mark, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 1 (2009): 1–18; Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
[20] E.g. Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, and Rachel Charlotte Smith, eds., Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[21] Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013).
[22] Peter Ian Crawford and David Turton, eds., Film as Ethnography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920 (New Haven, London: Yale University Press with Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1992).
[23] Cf. David MacDougall, “The Visual in Anthropology,” in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 288.
[24] Cf. MacDougall, ibid.
[25] See e.g., Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Contemporary Art and Anthropology (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006); Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright, eds., Between Art and Anthropology: Contemporary Ethnographic Practice (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2010); Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, eds., Anthropology and Art Practice (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013); Wendy Gunn, Fieldnotes and Sketchbooks: Challenging the Boundaries between Descriptions and Processes of Describing (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009); Marcus, George E., “Affinities. Fieldwork in anthropology today and the ethnographic in artwork”. In, Between Art and Anthropology. Contemporary Ethnographic Practice, edited by Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright, 83-94. Oxford, New York: Berg, 2010.
[26] Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, “The ethnographic turn – and after: a critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropology” Social Anthropology, no 23(4) (2015): 418-434; Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004): 51–79;
[27] Elpida Rikou, this issue; Eleana Yalouri, “‘The Metaphysics of the Greek Crisis’: Visual Art and Anthropology at the Crossroads,” Visual Anthropology Review 32, no. 1 (May 2016): 38–46; Eleana Yalouri, this issue; Eleana Yalouri and Elpida Rikou, this issue.
[28] Arnd Schneider, “Anthropology and Art,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, ed. Richard Fardon et al. (London: Sage, 2012), 65. See also Marcus, this issue.
[29] Christopher Pinney, “The Lexical Spaces of Eye-Spy,” in Film as Ethnography, ed. Peter Crawford and David Turton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 26–49.
[30] Lucien Taylor, “Iconophobia: How Anthropology Lost It at the Movies.,” Transition, no. 69 (1996): 64–88.
[31] David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion books, 2000).
[32] Arnd Schneider, “Anthropology and Art,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, ed. Richard Fardon et al. (London: Sage, 2012), 65-66.
[33] James Elkins, Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2009).
[34] See Sandra Delacourt, Katia Schneller, and Vanessa Theodoropoulou, eds., Le Chercheur et Ses Doubles (Paris: B42: Ecole supérieure d’art et de design Grenoble-Valence, 2016.
[35] Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), XIX.
[36] George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1995): 95–117; Tim Ingold, “That’s Enough about Ethnography!,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (June 2014): 383–95; Alice Elliot, Roger Norum, and Noel B. Salazar, Methodologies of Mobility: Ethnography and Experiment (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017).
[37] George Marcus, this issue.
[38] The example is Cummings and Lewandowska’s artistic intervention produced for the Tate Modern in 2001.
[39] George Marcus, this issue.
[40] Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession, 1991: 33–40; James Clifford, “Museums as Contact Zones,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, by James Clifford (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1997)
[41] Arnd Schneider, “Anthropology and Art,” in The Sage Handbook of Social Anthropology, ed. Richard Fardon et al. (London: Sage, 2012); Arnd Schneider, this issue.
[42] A participation in and documentation of events dedicated to a local patron saint.
[43] That open up an “indeterminate space for translation” (Arnd Schneider, this issue) when encountering and engaging with “the Other”.
[44] Michael Lambek, “The Hermeneutics of Ethical Encounters: Between Traditions and Practice,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no. 2 (2015):3.
[45] Also with reference to the “dialogical aesthetics” advocated by Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
[46] Mati Obregon and Richard Ortiz, in collaboration with the aforementioned project in 2005.
[47] Even when the artist’s practice has no visible connection to the everyday life, like Moro’s.
[48] In the case of the Dak’Art Biennal of contemporary African art, for instance.
[49] Which Fillitz does not differentiate from writing.
[50] Paul K. Feyerabend, Three Dialogues on Knowledge (London, New York: New Left Books, 1975).
[51] Irit Rogoff, “The Expanded Field,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating, ed. Jean-Paul Martinon (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 41–48.
[52] Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1991).
[53] Nicolas Bourriaud, Formes de Vie: L’art Moderne et l’invention de Soi (Paris: Denoël, 1999).
[54] Christopher Wright, this issue.
[55] Eleana Yalouri, this issue.
[56] cf. Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), xi.
[57] Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
[58] James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
[59] Tim Ingold, “Dreaming of Dragons: On the Imagination of Real Life,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 4 (December 2013): 734–52.
[60] Tim Ingold, this issue.
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