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CONTAMINATED AND CONTAMINANTS |
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In the last issue of the Butlletí we published an article by the anthropologist Manuel Delgado. Here we return to the relationship between art and anthropology with a text in which the artist and anthropologist Pep Dardanyà explore some of the core aspects of the artist’s often problematic relationship with anthropology.
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PEP DARDANYÀ
‘The pure products go crazy,’ James Clifford suggests in the introduction to his book The Predicament of Culture, in which he claims that the continued contact between different cultures and the hybridization produced by these contacts are the principal causes of the formation of cultural diversity and of its productions, both material and symbolic.
That said, in today’s globalized society this hybridization is manifested in all social spheres. We appropriate discourses and strategies that in theory do not belong to us and apply them where in theory they have no place. Anthropologists set themselves up as film critics, philosophers as computer programmers, journalists as politicians and visual artists as ethnographers. This ‘promiscuity’ generates contaminated products that are hard to define and thus to control. This annoys the guardians of the essences, the keepers of classifications and taxonomies that vehemently defend their private preserves of actuation. The culture of the collage, the remix or the post-production, as we might define it, manifests itself on all sides and evidently the realm of art is no exception. The aim of those who defend and promote it is to make a stand against the institutions and their exclusivist definitions.
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| Exhibition Elevate/Or, Dave Hullfish Bailey, CASM, 2006 |
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Since the early nineties a number of visual artists have been reinterpreting, reproducing and using in their projects what we could describe as available cultural products, and this has meant the inclusion in the domain of art of forms previously excluded, ignored or simply despised. The discourses of other disciplines or theoretical fields have thus been incorporated into contemporary art. These strategies are not simply based on incorporating or reproducing images of images, or on bewailing the fact that everything has been said before, but invent or propose protocols for the utilization of existing models of representation and formal structures. It is a case of adopting, of appropriating the codes of the culture, of conducts and of the heritage and to making these function in a different context. The objective is to learn to use these structures, appropriating them with the intention of endowing them with different contents and generating a critical reflection on their immutability.
With these intentions, some visual artists have appropriated the methodologies of classical anthropology or of what is currently known as urban anthropology in order to apply these, in many cases quite arbitrarily, in their artistic projects. One of the first art historians to analyse this process, this flirtation between visual artists and ethnographers, was Hal Foster, in the essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ included in his book The Return of the Real. However, my intention here to offer a historical perspective of the causes that have given rise to these relations and the adoption of these strategies, but to note the contributions and also suggest some of the deficiencies, both of the working processes and of the resulting products.
The great majority of ethnographer artists, as we might call them, use a technique known as ethnographic mapping, which consists in deciding a space —physical or symbolic— of actuation and immersing oneself in it, sorting out the different signifiers and reordering these with an interpretive attitude. The artists put forward projects that are posited in specific sites through experimentation, research and interaction with the inhabitants and their memories in relation to the territory they inhabit. They aim to create a development of processes of self-organization by means of the social fabric and the environmental relationships, usually abandoned because of the difficulties inherent in the urbanistic and territorial fabric itself; in other words, they seek to make this method not only a new tool for the development of knowledge, but also a way of promoting the activation of the population in relationship to the territory it inhabits, with the aim of encouraging participation. In short, they present art as a medium for understanding these realities and celebrating their existence, for making visible and comprehending their values and messages, and a reflection on the relevance of architecture, urbanism and art in the use of the public space and on art’s polemical aspiration to document or stimulate that use.
These artists seek motivation in issues that until recently were only of interest to sociology or anthropology, such as migratory movements, social conflict, the phenomena of social resistance, deprivation, gender conflicts, globalization, sexual violence, ethnocentrism, racial conflict, alterity, urban tribes, prostitution, social exclusion, poverty, homelessness, urban renewal, the new religious movements, the urban peripheries, the environmental crisis, consumerism, parties, tourism, ethnic conflicts, war, sacrifice, suicide, utopia…
By virtue of the themes they address, the results of these artists’ projects are defined as social art, a definition that produces not clarity but confusion, in that the two concepts together generate a tautology: art of any kind cannot avoid being social. But it is true that the so-called social artists, with the firm grip on reality they champion, have brought about a radical change in the role of the artist in our society, prompting new reflections on authorship by making teamwork a fundamental part of the creative process and incorporating into their projects other professionals, social groups and communities otherwise excluded from cultural policies. They also propose new reflections on the authority of art as a chronicle in comparison with the communications media, with a different take on the miseries of the world today, increasingly homogenized, brutalized by the mediocrity of television and the big corporations and governed only by market forces — a world in which culture and science have lost their use value.
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In the same way that anthropologists engage in a critical analysis
of the impact of their researches on the societies they study,
the social artists, too, need to include this critical exercise in their projects..”
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| Exhibition Elevate/Or, Dave Hullfish Bailey, CASM, 2006 |
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However, just as the work of the anthropologist is defined not by the object of study or the theme but by the methodology used to analyse and develop it, visual artists cannot justify their projects solely in terms of the subject they deal with or by the fact of relating their work to a given community or marginal group, since this does not guarantee the quality of the results, either in form or in content. In the same way that anthropologists engage in a critical analysis of the impact of their researches on the societies they study or have studied —something that has led to substantial changes in the discipline— so too the social artists need to include this critical exercise in their projects, being as scrupulous as possible when it comes to involving individuals and/or communities who have no knowledge of the context in which the images or documents where they have played a part in creating will be used.
We should be cautious about defining it as a trend, but at the same time we should be rigorous and critical with those artists that jump onto the bandwagon without undertaking the necessary in-depth analysis of the implications of a change of approach of this nature. We must be clear that the aesthetic dimension gives no exemption from the indispensable ethical principles that must govern work of this kind, demanding that the approach to the territory and the community is meticulous and above reproach, taking account of the views and listening to the voices of the participants without falling into paternalism, and ensuring the necessary distance required by an awareness of the subjectivity implicit in this type of work; and all this without relinquishing the tried and trusted tools of metonymy, metaphor and, indeed, irony. Reality in all its complexity is constructed with these tools, and as Rimbaud said, ‘metaphor can change the world’. Bear in mind, however, that we need to know where and when to apply metaphor and in what dosage, and this is not a matter of inspiration, but part of a long and rigorous learning process. |
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