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Anthrovision Vaneasa Online Journal
Vol. 7.1 | 2019 Aesthetic Encounters The Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts, Design and Literature
Thomas Fillitz (dir.)
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/4332 DOI : 10.4000/anthrovision.4332 ISSN : 2198-6754
Éditeur VANEASA - Visual Anthropology Network of European Association of Social Anthropologists
Référence électronique Thomas Fillitz (dir.), Anthrovision, Vol. 7.1 | 2019, « Aesthetic Encounters » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 30 décembre 2019, consulté le 21 janvier 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/4332 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/anthrovision.4332
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 21 janvier 2021.
© Anthrovision 1
SOMMAIRE
Introduction: Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts Thomas Fillitz
Marketing African and Oceanic Art at the High-end of the Global Art Market: The Case of Christie’s and Sotheby’s Tamara Schild
Dak’Art Off. Between Local Art Forms and Global Art Canon Discourses. Thomas Fillitz
Returning to Form: Anthropology, Art and a Trans-Formal Methodological Approach Alex Flynn et Lucy Bell
A Journey from Virtual and Mixed Reality to Byzantine Icons via Buddhist Philosophy Possible (Decolonizing) Dialogues in Visuality across Time and Space Paolo S. H. Favero
Value, Correspondence, and Form: Recalibrating Scales for a Contemporary Anthropology of Art (Epilogue) Jonas Tinius
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Introduction: Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts
Thomas Fillitz
1 Short versions of the following articles were presented at the panel ‘Aesthetic Encounters: The Politics of Moving and (Un)settling Visual Arts, Design and Literature,’ which Paula Uimonen (Stockholm University) and I organized at the fifteenth biennial conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists in Stockholm 2018. The panel’s success, however, is also largely due to Helena Wulff, who provided invaluable ideas for its conceptualization, for which I wish to express my gratitude. We proposed to participants to think about anthropology’s interactions with visual arts, literature, film, and design within the framework of the multiple meanings these arts have now acquired with their unprecedented circulation and reception at a global scale. At the EASA panel, Paula Uimonen and Helena Wulff presented topics from the field of world literature. Sadly, neither could contribute to this issue of Anthrovision.
2 Until the late 1980s and early 1990s the field of visual arts was centred on the hegemony of occidental art history — its determination of dominant formal canons and of the category modern art. Movements of art works were either concentrated within the Western European and North American national art worlds system, or artists from other regions of the world were tempted to become incorporated within it, or this specific art world appropriated art from other regions according its own discretion. In the anthropology of art, this was the time of the most powerful The Traffic in Art and Culture by George Marcus and Fred Myers (1995), in which they claim as the objective of their ‘critical anthropology of art’: to investigate ‘the art world's manner of assimilating, incorporating, or making its own cross-cultural difference’ (Marcus and Myers 1995: 33).
3 By the new millennium this system was supplanted. European and North American art specialists became aware of the geospatial diversity of contemporary art, and occidental art history lost its hegemonic functions. Artistic practices, cultural institutions, art discourses, even market institutions, articulated locally and regionally specific types of knowledge and experiences (see Enwezor 2002; Belting 2013; Fillitz 2018). As a consequence, contemporary art is defined in how it is local, regional and
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global (Smith 2013: 188). This neither relates to a style or an art medium. Art is contemporary as it articulates the artist’s preoccupations of the contemporary world, that is its insertion within society (e.g. Smith 2011; García Canclini 2014). Multitude as geographical expansion, and multitude regarding the category of art, are two characteristics of contemporary art in a global perspective.
4 Another important category is movement, closely connected to the new dominant exhibition form, the biennial.1 Indeed, there has been a colossal global proliferation of art biennials from the mid-1990s on. These mega-art institutions are the new authorities for defining contemporary art, as Charles Green and Anthony Gardner (2016) argue (see also Altshuler 2013). As they do not hold art collections (like museums), these cultural institutions are in need of contemporary art, of artists, curators, and art specialists: for each one according to its cycle (biennial, triennial, etc.), and for all biennials on a global scale. Within the network of biennials, the movement of visual arts is multi-directional, even if most renowned curators, artists, and art specialists select their routes in relation to the most powerful cultural institutions.
5 Under constellations of the contemporary world, that is interconnected multiple worlds (cf. Augé 1994), movement is indeed co-constitutive of contemporary art — regarding social agents (artists, curators, art specialists), art’s media, techniques (artistic and curatorial), or knowledges (art histories, socio-cultural), and regarding geospatial scales (local, regional, transnational, or global).
6 Two major research topics structure the papers of the special issue ‘Politics of moving and (un)settling visual arts’: first the contrast between the regional particularism of contemporary art and the creation of a global canon of contemporary art; second, art’s insertion into society as reconceptualization of its role, against another ‘arbitrary canon’ (García Canclini 2014: 175) that is socially embedded works and processes (García Canclini 2014: 175).
7 Firstly, while contemporary art is acknowledged as a highly heterogeneous and diverse category, there is nonetheless a global art discourse which is closely related to the formation of another global art canon — installation and relational art. For John Clark (2010), the preponderance of art biennials on a global scale leads to the production of ‘the canonical works of contemporary art’ (Clark 2010: 165), and thereby influence artistic practices in local and regional art worlds. The canonization of art is the topic of Tamara Schild and Thomas Fillitz. Schild examines internationally operating art market institutions and the sales interests of leading auction houses. To these ends, their construction of an art canon follows the production of a new category of potential buyers. Fillitz reflects on the impact of art selected for the official exhibition of the Biennale of Dakar on artistic practices in the Dakar art world.
8 Schild studies the global market field of auction houses since the 1980s, and its production of a universal art canon for traditional African and Oceanic art. Schild argues that this particular present-day universal canon is historically connected to the importance of these artworks for European modernist artists of the early twentieth century. Further, the author views its elaboration due to new profiles of the auction house curators, of changing strategies in the production of the catalogues, and the active creation of so-called cross-over collectors.
9 Based on his research of the Biennale of Dakar, Fillitz reflects on the notion of ‘biennial art,’ another circumscription for the global canon of contemporary art as displayed at
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leading biennial exhibitions — installation art, and artworks which express social aspirations. Biennial art, moreover, emphasizes that this art would strongly influence local and regional artistic practices. In innumerable independent exhibitions during the Biennale, however, artists largely show paintings. Fillitz argues that economic reasons cannot help to explain this preponderance. Instead one needs to look at the history of modern and contemporary art in Senegal. Broadening the perspective, one may question the assumption of a global art field in the singular, that is a conceptualization of contemporary art which is globally validated by a few curators and such art institutions.
10 The second topic of this special issue, the reconceptualization of the role of art,, relates to García Canclini’s (2014) hypothesis of art as the place of imminence, ‘the place where we catch sight of things that are just at the point of occurring’ (García Canclini 2014: xiii). García Canclini conceives of imminence as a tool to experience other possibilities for social life (2014: 168). The two articles by Alex Flynn and Lucy Bell, and by Paolo Favero, relate to different notions of ‘embedded art,’, and thus on different practices of creating imminence. Flynn and Bell examine cartonera publishers, and describe how critical work is produced and shifts into various social relations that enable an activation of social criticism. Favero focuses on a fundamental visual question: the picture and digital processes of its making. He elaborates on the newest techniques, which encourage reflection on the fundamental conditions of the encounter with pictures, and which enable to trespass boundaries, such the ones between artist and beholder. Furthermore, the two articles operate with other closely related concepts. Flynn and Bell may be related to decoloniality, that is knowledge production on the basis of relational, multiple voices, and a combination of analysis and praxis of knowing and living (see Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Favero speaks of ‘decolonizing knowledge,’ by introducing into his description of technological innovations of image-making categories from other (spatio-temporal) visualities, and epistemologies.
11 Alex Flynn and Lucy Bell’s starting point is art’s insertion into society, one of the major criteria of the global canons of contemporary art. Flynn and Bell ask about knowledge production through collaboration. During their ethnographic fieldwork with cartonera publishers in Latin America, they had to reflect on the collaborative possibilities between researcher, these publishers, and the various fields these latter activate in their creative processes, not only for data collecting but for active participation. Cartonera publishers are small collectives that produce small, low-cost books from recuperated waste cardboard in close interaction with local neighbourhoods. For Flynn and Bell, cartoneras challenge ethnographic research insofar as they are art projects which are at the same time social activism..The authors thus aim to formulate a methodological approach that corresponds to these processes of the cartonera publishers, within which social and aesthetic forms are indivisible. Relying on the cartoneras’ activation of four forms — exhibitions, workshops, co-editions, and encontros (meeting, gathering, networking) — Flynn and Bell articulate a trans-formal approach which would allow to move analytically across different forms (aesthetic, social, political, etc.), and thereby postulate the emulation of the forms of cartonera publishers as a fundamental method of ethnographic fieldwork.
12 Paolo Favero questions the relationship between art worlds from another perspective. He focuses on the newest technologies of image-based immersive practices. These enable practitioners to question the hitherto ‘taken for granted’ divides of picture
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theories, such as the ones between viewer and viewed and between self and the world, by including beholders to actively participate in these reflexive processes. Even so, Favero demonstrates that these new technologies and practices contain traces of visual conceptualizations from other times and regions — such as Byzantine icons, or Hindu popular religious art. Pushing this insight further, Favero thus proposes the investigation of the ‘act of decolonization of knowledge’ as another visual research field, i.e. to examine newest contemporary arts and documentary practices by means of trans-regionally and trans-disciplinary categories and concepts of various types of images.
13 In his epilogue, Jonas Tinius connects the four articles on two distinct analytical trajectories: for Schild and Fillitz,‘institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation’; and for Flynn/Bell and Favero, ‘immersion, correspondence, and form.’ On this basis, Tinius pushes the reflection further, and argues for an ‘attuned anthropology of the contemporary’. This has as research topic the tensions between art and aesthetics that are created through their interplay at different levels of the local, regional, transnational, and global. In a related way, Tinius highlights the benefits of an ‘anachronistic and anatopical positionality and approach’. He then connects the overall topic of these contributions to his conceptualization of a recalibrated, anachronistic and anatopical anthropology of the contemporary, insofar as the art related processes in the different fields ‘become tools of our own analysis’.
14 This methodological issue is explicitly approached by Flynn and Bell. Indeed, the challenge to the contributors of this collection was to reflect power relations (politics of moving) and artistic preoccupations or, in other terms, the contemporaneity of art as a contrast between the given social hierarchies and pictures of desires or alternatives for life. All contributions invite a further envisioning of the active role of anthropological research and representation in the field of art, not only as a mediator. Confronting the economic power of market segments, or the cultural power of art institutions, whether more or less ‘embedded,’ artistic practices encourage us to re- think and debate conditions of life, and anthropological research on art may contribute with its critical discourses, as proposed for instance by Favero using the concept of ‘decolonizing knowledge.’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altshuler, Bruce, ed. 2013. Biennials and Beyond — Exhibitions That Made Art History. 1962–2002. London and New York: Phaidon Press.
Augé, Marc. 1994. Pour une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Aubier-Critiques.
Belting, Hans. 2013. The Plurality of Art Words and the New Museum. In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds. Pp. 246-254. Cambridge, Mass. and Karlsruhe: The MIT Press and ZKM/Center for Art and Media.
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Clark, John. 2010. Biennials as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective. In The Biennial Reader Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig Øvstebø, eds. Pp. 164-183. Bergen and Ostfildern: Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz.
Enwezor, Okwui. 2002. Großausstellungen und die Antinomien einer transnationalen globalen Form. Berliner Thyssen-Vorlesung zur Ikonologie der Gegenwart 1. München: Verlag Wilhelm Fink
Fillitz, Thomas. 2018. Concepts of “Art World” and the Particularity of the Biennale of Dakar. In An Anthropology of Contemporary Art. Practices, Markets, and Collectors. Thomas Fillitz and Paul van der Grijp, eds. Pp. 87-101. London et al.: Bloomsbury Academic.
García Canclini, Néstor. 2014. Art Beyond Itself. Anthropology for Society Without a Storyline. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Green, Charles and Anthony Gardner. 2016. Biennials, Triennials, and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art. Malden, MA. and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Marcus, George E. and Fred R. Myers. 1995. The Traffic in Art and Culture: An Introduction. In The Traffic in Art and Culture. Refiguring Art and Anthropology. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, eds. Pp. 1-51. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Mignolo, Walter D. and Catherine D. Walsh. 2018. On Deoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporary Art-World Currents. London: Lawrence King Publishing.
Smith, Terry. 2013. Contemporary Art: World Currents in Transition Beyond Globalization. In The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, eds. Pp. 186-192. Cambridge, Mass. and Karlsruhe: The MIT Press and ZKM/Center for Art and Media.
NOTES
1. I am using ‘biennial’ as term for the overall exhibition form, independently whether it is a biennial, triennial, follows a five year cycle as documenta, or other.
AUTHOR
THOMAS FILLITZ University of Vienna [email protected]
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Marketing African and Oceanic Art at the High-end of the Global Art Market: The Case of Christie’s and Sotheby’s
Tamara Schild
Introduction
1 A recent report on the evolution of the African and Oceanic art market reveals the emergence over the past ten years of a high-end market (Thibault 2018: 49). It is dominated by the auction corporations Christie’s and Sotheby’s which are trading on the value of their brands and reputations while counting on their extensive client databases and powerful marketing machines. In 2018, the sales of African and Oceanic art by the two corporations totaled €47,6 million.1 These accounted for 62.4 percent of the global turnover during this year in monetary terms despite having sold only 10.5 percent of the combined total number of lots of African and Oceanic art offered at auction (Artkhade Report 2019: 10). These figures, together with an increase of many millions from all auction sales, indicate a strong high-end market.
2 To achieve their sales goals, the African and Oceanic art departments of Christie’s and Sotheby’s have adopted the same tactics the corporations have applied to all their departments. That is, an upper market strategy which mainly consists of four strategies: (1) Selling fewer objects at higher price points. For several years now, both corporations have focused on offering carefully selected pieces fresh to the market bolstered by distinguished provenance; (2) Securing and selling the most prestigious collections;2 (3) Deploying vast marketing strategies3 in print and digital media as well as managing exclusive events that promote rarity, prestige, exclusivity and trend; (4) Enticing modern and contemporary art collectors to the African and Oceanic art arena by capitalizing on the historical link between African and Oceanic art and European modernism (cf. Thibault 2018: 50).
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3 This article will review and assess the development of Christie’s and Sotheby’s African and Oceanic art departments’ marketing strategy over the past two decades. It is a well established and frequently-told story that during the first decades of the twentieth century, the aesthetic and the sacred aspects of African sculpture became important influences on European avant-garde artists such as Derain, Vlaminck, Picasso and Matisse. Stimulated by the stylized treatment of the human figure in African art, artists saw in it a solution to break with the canon of European realism. Along with famous dealers of the time such as Joseph Brummer or Paul Guillaume, they were forerunners of an aesthetic appreciation of African and Oceanic pieces that paved the way for the arts’ reclassification in the art world.4 Between the Renaissance and first part of the nineteenth century, African and Oceanic artifacts had been collected and traded as curiosities. Later they were colonial trophies and ethnographic specimens. In the hands of avant-garde artists and their dealers, ‘they became modernist icons worthy of aesthetic contemplation’ (Biro 2015: 1). They became fine art.
4 Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, auction house specialists have used this well-known historical link between these European and African art forms to entice wealthy collectors from the lucrative modern and contemporary art markets to African and Oceanic art. Facing an aging client base, a new generation of auction house specialists put this historical link forward in the sales they organized. The departments started to schedule strategically their art of Africa and Oceania auctions and pre-sale viewings to coincide with their sales of modern and contemporary art. They were also scheduled to coincide with international art fairs in order to benefit from exposure to a global community of high-end collectors with eclectic tastes. As a result, collectors of modern and contemporary art entered the African and Oceanic art market.
5 In the first section of the article, I examine the profiles of two new players of the African and Oceanic art market — modern auction house specialists and new buyers. I further discuss the role they have each played in the promotion and reception of African and Oceanic art since the turn of the century. In the second part, I will present the results of a review of 180 sales catalogues produced by the auction houses between 19665 and 2019. I will trace and discuss how specialists have used the engagement of European avant-garde artists with African and Oceanic art as a narrative (storytelling strategy) to enhance the value of objects and their main incentives to propagate the close relationship between both art forms. The marketing strategies directed towards cross-category collectors will be analyzed in the third part through a detailed analysis of Christie’s series of thematic African and Oceanic art sales which take place every year in May in New York during 20th Century Week and which are tailored to this specific type of buyers. Finally, I will consider the implications of Christie’s and Sotheby’s upper-market strategies on the reevaluation of aesthetic canons in the field of African and Oceanic art today.
6 The assertions I make are based on a quantitative and qualitative survey of 180 African and Oceanic art auction catalogues produced by the two corporations. The procedure I followed involved sorting all catalogues notes where the mention of the link of African and Oceanic art to modern and contemporary is made by date, by auction house (Christie’s/Sotheby’s) and by location (London/Paris/New York), and studying their discursive content. The study and my conclusions were supported by extensive fieldwork observations, reviews of advertisement, sale announcements and sales
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results, and interviews with key market players (auction house specialists and collectors).
New Market Actors
A New Generation of Auction House Specialists
7 In the first decade of this century Christie’s and Sotheby’s relied on a new generation of African and Oceanic art specialists. Their profiles differed from those of previous specialists such as William Fagg (1914-1992), former keeper of the department of Anthropology at the British Museum and founder of a dedicated Tribal Art department at Christie’s. Fagg was trained in anthropology and museology and had done fieldwork in several regions of West Africa during the colonial period. Many of the new African and Oceanic art specialists have studied art history, philosophy or business. As a group they are well-versed in curating, marketing, and art criticism, and work in a different geopolitical and historical context than their predecessors. These specialists work with new technologies and online marketing as well as the changing patterns of global wealth and how it has reshaped the art industry and the art market landscape in general. They are also increasingly confronted with the problematic cultural legacy of colonialism in this collecting field and a changing view of European colonialism in Africa (cf. Sarr & Savoy 2019). To these specialists, cultural productions of Africa and Oceania have the same artistic legitimacy as any other art form. Heinrich Schweizer, for instance, who was Sotheby’s Head of African and Oceanic Art in New York from 2006 to 2015, studied art history and philosophy and holds a doctoral degree in Law. Son of a sculptor and a painter, he began collecting African art when he was ten years old. He says about his initial approach to non-European art: ‘I always looked at African and Oceanic art from a universal perspective, which was how my parents brought me up. I never ‘compartmentalized’ between different categories of art or bought into how you must use different lingo when talking about Western art versus Indian art, say, or Antiquities or African and Oceanic art’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p., italics by the author).
8 From 2001 to 2002, Schweizer was a freelance journalist covering the international market for African and Oceanic art. In 2006, Sotheby’s appointed him as Head of the African and Oceanic Art department in New York. The press release that announced his appointment is very revealing as to the strategy discussed in the present paper. Indeed, Schweizer had already outlined the strategy his department was going to follow under his tenure: ‘I’m very pleased to join Sotheby’s New York which is an established presence in the field of African & Oceanic art at a time when there are many new opportunities for growth. African & Oceanic art influenced some of the greatest 20th century artists and increasingly holds crossover appeal from collectors in the modern and contemporary areas, particularly in New York where many of our most important auctions are held’.6
9 Susan Kloman, Christie’s International Head of Department, is also a key figure in the development of the marketing strategy being discussed. She received her master’s degree in art history with a focus on modern art and art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Prior to joining Christie’s in 2008, she served eight years as head of the New York Department of African and Oceanic art at Sotheby’s and worked as an independent consultant. Her early research into the influence of non-European art on
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modern Western art continues to support her current professional activities. In introductory essays to sales catalogues and in promotional materials produced for Christie’s, she often comments on this historical and conceptual link (see below). A hallmark of her tenure has been tightly curated (thematic) African and Oceanic art sales tailored specifically to cross-category collectors which take place in New York during Christie’s 20th Century Week alongside their sales of Impressionist, modern, post-WWII, and contemporary art.
10 Heinrich Schweizer and Susan Kloman have striven to position African and Oceanic art within what they consider to be a more inclusive occidental art history, a cause supported by many of their colleagues. Together with others, they have been highly influential in cultivating and advising the group of cross-category collectors and cross- category buyers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s respectively. Indeed, auction house specialists have now taken on the role of advisors, sometimes bypassing private art dealers.
The Production of the Cross-collectors
11 Following the new marketing strategy, collectors of modern and contemporary art entered the African and Oceanic art market in large numbers around 2007, just as the art market was on the cusp of a boom. Entrepreneurs and individuals with significant financial means who focus on high-quality art with impeccable provenance from other departments of Christie’s and Sotheby’s were encouraged to join the African and Oceanic sales where masterpieces were still available at relatively low prices. 2006 had been a strong year for African and Oceanic art due to the success of the legendary Vérité sale at Enchères Rive Gauche in Paris that brought several new price records and totaled €44 million, and the opening of the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. According to Schweizer, the sale of the Saul and Marsha Stanoff collection by Sotheby’s New York in the following year marked a turning point in the art market: ‘The following spring, we presented the Saul and Marcia Stanoff Collection together with a few masterpieces deaccessioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. This auction broke all records and generated $25 million — half the sum that the Vérité sale had totaled but with only one quarter of lots. That sale of May 2007 was the true turning point in the market, marking the beginning of a new era. The quality of the works on offer was so great that it attracted the interest of art collectors outside the African and Oceanic art field, who, for the first time, entered the market on a broad front. Our cultivation and continuous expansion of this collector group led to the reassessment of the top of the market in our category’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p.).
12 However, it seems that not only the quality of the pieces but also the higher prices awakened the interest of exogenous buyers and collectors who might otherwise would never had thought of considering African and Oceanic art. The higher prices gave a sense of confidence and enticed them to come into the market (cf. Thibault 2015: 53).
13 Some seasoned collectors have looked askance at these new buyers. A long-time collector commented on the profile of the cross-collector: ‘He is a guy who today buys an African mask and tomorrow he buys a Francis Bacon … It is related to the field of paintings. He understands that an African mask goes well with a Picasso, so he buys it’ (personal communication, 26 September 2016).
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14 This statement suggest that cross-category collectors have been motivated only by fashion and financial investment.7 Seasoned collectors further criticize the supposed lack of time these new buyers apply to studying African and Oceanic art, a collecting field they believe requires a strong intellectual commitment. Some dealers also disapprove of cross-collectors’ buying habits, which are rather distinct: generally, they prefer to buy pieces whose quality will be certified and who are published, and thus prefer to purchase from auction houses. Indeed, according to Schweizer (2012), ‘newer collectors often start out at auction because they appreciate the level of expertise, compliance standards and transparency of pricing’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p.).
15 However, a brief look at the profile of two cross-category collectors, Javier Peres and Adam Lindemann, shows that it would be an over-simplification to think that they buy African and Oceanic art only for reasons of prestige and investment. A closer look produces a far more complex and subtle picture.
16 Javier Peres (born 1972, Cuba) perfectly represents a new generation of African art collectors with eclectic tastes. He is the founder of the cultural institution Peres Projects which currently operates an exhibition space located on Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin. It promotes contemporary painting, conceptual art and sculptures. Since its founding in San Francisco in 2002, Peres Projects has represented contemporary artists including Joe Bradley, Bruce LaBruce, David Ostrowski, and Donna Huanca. In 2006, Peres, who built a reputation as a ‘champion of cutting-edge artists’ (O’Hagan 2018), was included in the Art Review Power 100 ranking of the most influential people in the contemporary art world.8 Javier Peres has collected African art for nearly two decades. He says about his interest in African art: ‘I have been interested in African art since I was in my early teens. It was a combination of my interest in modernism and early 20th century artists combined with my interest in ancient civilizations. By the time I was in my mid to late teens my interest had also reached the contemporary art field and particularly Basquiat and this made the interest in classic African art even stronger’ (personal communication, 26 September 2019).
17 First attracted by the formal beauty of carvings from Côte d’Ivoire and neighbouring countries, his taste evolved under the influence of advisors such as Bruno Claessens, European Head of Christie’s African and Oceanic Art department. This has led to a more experimental and bold collection of sculptures from Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Peres 2016: 122,124).
18 In 2014 and 2016, Peres organized exhibitions in his Berlin gallery in which he juxtaposed African art from his own collection with contemporary art in a not entirely new curatorial gesture that ‘removes premodern African objects from their original context in order to present them purely as art objects, using the same modes of presentation typical in contemporary art’ (Peres in Buffestein 2016: n.p.).
19 For Adam Lindemann, who has collected art for about twenty years, African and Oceanic art was an introduction to art collecting in general. Coming from a wealthy family, he discovered this art as a student at Yale Law School through his encounter with the Belgian art dealer, Bernard de Grunne, son of the eminent African and Oceanic art collector Baudoin de Grunne (Dennison 2010: 32). Today Lindemann is a private investor and owner of the gallery Venus Over Manhattan, which opened in New York in 2012. In 2016, Lindemann organized an exhibition entitled Fétiche at his New York gallery, which assembled some thirty works of contemporary occidental art with
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ancient African and Oceanic works. In a foreword to the catalogue of the seventeenth edition of Parcours de Mondes (2018) whose honorary president he was, he said that he ‘always loved juxtaposing contemporary Western art with historic African and Oceanic works as a means to examine the literal power that art objects confer’ and that he is interested in the ‘emotionally charged tension tribal art creates in contemporary contexts’ (Parcours de Mondes 2018: n.p.). In 2017, Lindemann was the focus of attention as consignor of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Untitled (1982) which sold at Christie’s for US$57.3 million to Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. Before selling it, he bought an uli figurine from Papua New Guinea, the cover lot at Sotheby’s African and Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art sale, for US$4,7 million (Pogrebin 2016: n.p.).
20 These cross-collectors represent clear differences to traditional, specialized collectors, which Schweizer summarizes as follows: ‘Here we are talking about collectors with a universal perspective on art. The number of such collectors has always been much smaller than the number of collectors of just African and Oceanic objects which can be of either artistic or ethnographic merit. A lot of material that might excite a traditional specialized collector of African Art does not have the same effect on these collectors to whom African and Oceanic Art is only one of several collecting interests. The latter spend a lot of time looking at and thinking about art in general. They often have extremely refined tastes, shaped by different art fields and eras. And they know exactly what they want’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p., italic by the author).
21 Cross-category collectors show a clear focus on the objects and their aesthetics, which can, on occasion, lead to an ahistorical perspective. Lindemann, for example, has a deliberately Eurocentric perspective, and views African and Oceanic objects as valuable aesthetically regardless of their uses and meanings in the societies that produced them: ‘African and Oceanic works were created in mystical or religious contexts, though in most instances their exact functions remain unknown. Though this is tragic from a human perspective, it has freed these objects to be viewed and appreciated from a more aesthetic perspective. Early collectors historically stripped them of their native contexts, and often of their original patina, instead focusing on their aesthetic “otherness”. Today, these objects exist as much more than curios or spoils of colonialism. They cannot be reduced to rare and exotic souvenirs of cultures forever disrupted by the advance of Western civilization. They have influenced our own art history and, in my mind, remain some of the most compelling works ever created’ (Lindemann 2018: n.p.).
22 In this quote, Lindemann establishes an intellectual genealogy to the collectors of the early twentieth century. Indeed, it is interesting to note that today’s cross-category collectors have similar profiles and approaches to the amateurs of ‘l’art nègre.’ They were mainly artists, intellectuals, bourgeois and art dealers and they associated African and Oceanic art with other forms of art (cf. Amrouche 1990: 127; Biro 2018).
The Narrative Enhancement of African and Oceanic Art in Auction Catalogues
23 Sotheby’s, followed by Christie’s, cultivated the cross-collector group as seen in the changes of their sales catalogues. My survey of 180 catalogues produced between 1966 and 2019 by these auction houses revealed that the engagement of European avant- garde artists with African and Oceanic art began to be used as a storytelling strategy to enhance the value of objects only relatively recently — since the beginning of the
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twenty-first century. The precise timeline of how this narrative has since been fleshed out is beyond the scope of the discussion. Therefore, I shall limit myself to sketching the development of the narrative in broad strokes and to showing how it is related to other changes in catalogue production and especially to provenance research. I will also list the three most common ways used in auction catalogues to link African and Oceanic art to modern art. Finally, I will comment briefly on the main incentives specialists had to propagate the close relationship between these art forms.
24 Until 1990, auction house specialists seemed to get along without references to European modernism in the marketing of pieces they sold. The names of early avant- garde artists appeared in the provenance list of the otherwise very dry catalogue notes only in the case where actual ownership was verifiable, and without any accompanying narrative. It may be noted in passing that this narrative is absent from sales catalogues in 1984, the year of the ground-breaking exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (Museum of Modern Art, New York). Its curators had juxtaposed African, Oceanic and Native American Indian art with artworks of modern Western artists, hypothesizing affinities between them. This was a curatorial decision that had a great impact on the reception of African and Oceanic art in the United States and Europe.
25 During the 1990s, the African and Oceanic departments of Christie’s and Sotheby’s experienced increasing professionalization and academization. They introduced significant changes in catalogue production (Satov 1997; Geismar 2001). The sales catalogues became more academic: ‘Footnotes, literary references, exhibitions, art historical analysis and ethnographic detail are examples of textual components which [became] increasingly frequent’ (Satov 1997: 226).
26 Towards the end of the 1990s, catalogues progressively adopted a fine art aesthetic. Important pieces were published with several full-page colour photographs from different angles and close-ups to visually demonstrate rarity and quality (Geismar 2001: 35). Haidy Geismar (2001), who studied their designs at the turn of the twenty-first century, notes: ‘In these catalogues we are given a striking insight into the ways in which academic knowledge, photographic techniques, visual ‘aesthetic’ criteria, historicity, and provenance are used in the construction of market values’ Geismar 2001: 36).
27 Auction houses introduced standards of Western art history into their African and Oceanic art catalogue presentations and started to use terms borrowed from the fine art market. Massive research efforts were deployed to identify individual artists, their workshops and regional styles. Similarly, great effort was put into tracking the successive owners of the pieces sold. De facto, the increasing and finally systematic use of the narrative of Western artists’ engagement with African art, was intimately connected with provenance research. Information gained through research helped flesh out the narrative in catalogue notes. This is especially apparent in Sotheby’s catalogues and for sales taking place in New York.
28 If auction houses were to sell African and Oceanic art as fine art in an increasingly sophisticated marketplace, they would first have to change how it was perceived. They adopted several strategies for this purpose: they stopped marketing with the phrase ‘tribal art’ and instead promoted the more neutral notion ‘African and Oceanic art’ (cf. Thibault 2015: 54). By 2007 this was a consistent practice (Schweizer 2012: n.p.). The same year, Sotheby’s, later followed by Christie’s, introduced another important
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change in its catalogue design. For decades, auction houses had represented African and Oceanic sculptures on black backgrounds and under dramatic lighting. Freeing themselves from this exoticizing photographic technique, they stopped using a black background and adopted the white background commonly used for modern and contemporary art (Schweizer 2012: n.p.). Schweizer comments about the change at Sotheby’s: ‘We launched this new look for the first time in 2007 starting with the Stanoff sale. It was quite interesting to hear the reactions. The traditional collectors of African Art all said ‘hmm, this looks strange but not bad’. But when I talked to other colleagues at Sotheby's across other departments, they all said this looks really sexy. Most importantly, the fine art collectors who entered the market in 2007 responded positively’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p., italics by the author).
29 Showing how this homogenization of the catalogue design was part of a larger marketing strategy directed towards cross-category collectors, he adds: ‘It seems like such a minor thing but when you think of it: now, as you open a book or catalogue for Old Master Paintings, Greek and Roman sculpture, Contemporary Art and African Art – it all has the same look and you don't have the feeling anymore that you are walking into the “dark-forest-of-tribalism”. And if you are a collector new to this field, you want to be able to relate to it and not be repelled by a look you are not familiar with’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p., italics by the author).
30 It also became fashionable for auction houses to combine African and Oceanic art with modern and/or contemporary art. Specialists use three common ways to do so in auction catalogues: if a piece has been verifiably studied by a seminal modern artist and has influenced his or her oeuvre, comparisons have an art-historical background and represent significant provenance research. However, only a few artworks fit this category. An example is a Bamana seated female figurine from the private collection of Henri Matisse sold by Sotheby’s in May 2012. Matisse depicted it in the background of his painting Les Trois Sœurs à la Sculpture Africaine (1917; Three Sisters with an African Sculpture), which is now in the collection of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. The second reason to compare non-European and modern art is for their conceptual or aesthetic affinity: objects whose type influenced the European modernist movement but lacking verifiable proof of having belonged to an avant-garde artist. In this case, specialists often refer to a comparable piece owned by a renowned artist such as Picasso to elucidate in the catalogue note the cultural and historical context of the discovery of African and Oceanic art by modernist artists. Comparisons of this kind fall into the field of art criticism and connoisseurship. Therefore, when it comes to justifying high prices, auction houses pay scholars to discuss conceptual affinities or the significance of a non-European artwork within the context of occidental art history. In other cases, specialists undertake to comment on the conceptual and aesthetic affinities: Regarding a Fijian neck rest, for instance, Sotheby’s auction catalogue of 11. November 2005 highlights the ‘uncanny effect of animation which would have appealed deeply to the European founders of the Surrealist and Dada movements’ (Sotheby’s 2005: 26). In relation to a Mongo shield from the Democratic Republic of Congo Sotheby’s sales catalogue of 5 December, 2007 emphasizes the ‘abstract composition … that is reminiscent of the pictorial language developed by Piet Mondrian at the beginning of the 1920s’ (Sotheby’s 2007: 130, personal translation).9 However, this strategy hides the risk of purely formalistic comparisons. Indeed, this is a third type of comparison found in auction catalogues: in the last few years, the juxtaposition of works that contain mere similarities of forms has multiplied and some of the claimed
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similarities appear farfetched. This problem is reflected in the derisive and annoyed reactions of some collectors (field notes, 16 May, 2018). This occurs in instances where they believe juxtapositions of African or Oceanic art forms with modern and contemporary art have been misrepresented to pressure potential buyers.
31 What were the main incentives for specialists to propagate the close relationship between African and Oceanic and modern art from the mid-2000s? The intention was to reach new groups of buyers, to legitimize quality by demonstrating that objects passed vetting by avant-garde artists, and ultimately to increase prices. The growing number of scholarly articles and catalogue notes on the historical link of African and Oceanic art and European modernism from 2007 to the present can be interpreted as an attempt to make African and Oceanic art familiar to a new group of collectors who came to it through their interest in modern or contemporary art. For these non-specialized audiences, the narrative of modernism seems to be an easy entry point, more intuitive and engaging than the traditional ethnological approach. Auction house specialists have striven to offer pieces to cross-category collectors that relate to what they were already looking at and to market African and Oceanic art in a way that it appears to facilitate the understanding of art they were already collecting. Christie’s series of thematic African and Oceanic art sales that I subsequently discuss could be viewed as the culmination of this marketing strategy.
32 However, the need to rehabilitate the image of African and Oceanic art from its association with colonialism and illicit traffic of cultural goods in a post-colonial society, might be a second reason for specialists to favor this less controversial approach. As Geismar (2001) recalls: ‘The tribal arts market has always been problematically internationalist, from the mass exportation of ethnographica during the colonial period … [to] the theft of cultural property, and repatriation’ (Geismar 2001: 32). Whereas the discovery of African art by seminal modern artists and the European art circles appears as being based in a recognition and valorization of non- European cultural productions and cultures.
Christie’s Series of Thematic African and Oceanic Art Sales
33 In its challenge to follow the lead of its rival Sotheby’s, Christie’s reacted in 2016 with tightly curated, thematic sales tailored to cross-category collectors coming from modern and contemporary art. They take place every May in New York during the corporation’s 20th Century Week alongside the auctions of Impressionist, modern, post- WWII, and contemporary art. With Evolution of Form.10 African and Oceanic Art at the Genesis of Modernism (Christie’s New York, 12 May, 2016), Susan Kloman introduced what was then advertised by Christie’s as a ‘revolutionary’ thematic sale. Kloman (2016) considered it an ‘ode to the landmark exhibition curated by William Rubin at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1984 – ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art’ (Kloman 2016: 9). In a similar vein as the 1984 exhibition, Kloman juxtaposed African and Oceanic artworks with modern art in the sales catalogue to ‘stimulate an aesthetic dialogue and highlight visual affinities’ (Kloman 2016: 9).
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This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 34 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/4444
Website: https://www.christies.com/features/Tracing-the-influence-of-African-and-Oceanic- art-7349-3.aspx Christie’s, 10 May 2016.
This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 35 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/4444
Website: https://www.christies.com/features/African-and-Oceanic-connections-to-contemporary- art-7248-3.aspx?sc_lang=en#FID-7248 Christie’s, 18 April 2016.
36 The sale comprised a classical selection of eleven pieces ‘whose type were at the heart of the modern art’ (Kloman 2016: 9). It profiled four works from Côte d’Ivoire, one Fang reliquary figurine from Gabon and two statues from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are the types of artworks and cultural areas that are the most sought after and highly priced (cf. Artkhade report 2019: 10), following an art canon which was established in the first decades of the twentieth century. Each lot in the highly elaborated sales catalogue was accompanied by a well-researched dossier containing an ethnographic and art historical discussion of the art object as well as detailed information on its provenance, exhibition histories and literary references. Regarding the estimates, they left no doubt as to the intended audience: nine out of eleven lots had a six-figure estimate and two a seven-figure estimate. The sale was a big success: Seven out of eleven lots sold for a total of US$5,039,000. Kloman described all successful bidders as cross-over collectors, two clients making their first ever purchases in the field of African and Oceanic art (in Crichton-Miller 2016).
37 The following year, Timeless. Masterworks of African Art (Christie’s New York, 19 May, 2017) celebrated ‘the diversity of form and innovation of African artistry’.11 According to Susan Kloman (2017), the sale ‘aspire[d] to reveal [the] universal qualities [of the masterpieces] and demonstrate their rightful place on the great world stage of art throughout time and space’ (Kloman 2017: 8). She introduced the catalogue with a rather philosophical text on the meanings that African cultural creations hold for their makers, the metaphysical concepts conveyed in African art, and the human urge to create art. Rather than building the value of African art in relation to modernism, the second sale built a link to various types of classical art. The aim was to present African and Oceanic cultural productions as world art.12 The overall argument was that African art can be appreciated through an aesthetic that has both timeless and universal applications. A Dogon maternity figurine from Mali was contextualized in a timeline companion that presented the genesis of the maternal image from the Venus of Willendorf to Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch (1506) to Henry Moore’s Mother and Child with Apple (1956), whereas a Baule mask from Côte d’Ivoire was juxtaposed with the Head of an Amarna Princess (Egypt, eighteenth Dynasty, Amarna Period). The strategy was successful insofar as eight out of twelve lots sold for a total of US$3,953,500.
38 The third of Christie’s series of thematic sales, Origins. Masterworks of African and Oceanic Art (Christie’s New York, 17 May 2018), went a step further, and brought a group of
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selected artworks that markedly diverged from the art canons of the beginning of the twentieth century. The sale comprised more pieces from Cameroon and Nigeria than the two previous ones. Regarding pieces from Côte d’Ivoire or Congo, the examples were deliberately selected for their relatively atypical aesthetic: ‘The hallmark of this special selection of thirteen magical works of art is its valorization of major works of art that fall outside the canon. Anti-classical. The twentieth century discovered and established classical African art, the 21st makes us look further, at art that was not yet accessible to early 20th century taste-makers, such as Charles Ratton and Paul Guillaume … The works of art are selected for their pure creativity … The Dan mask (lot 6) is an anti-aesthetic statement. Dan people highly value beauty, and their best masks are based upon symmetry. In its asymmetry, the mask is deemed wild. It is undomesticated … With Origins, we are at the beginning of a new way to approach African and Oceanic art ... Origins is meant to defy those looking with Western eyes. Look at them from all angles. Upside down. There is no vetting by the European Avant-Garde. This is the Wild West. These are the rock stars of the art world stage. Never mind the bollocks, here’s Origins.’ (Kloman 2018: 6,7; italics added)
39 We can well consider that this selection of artworks and the way they were promoted would attract young and bold contemporary art collectors. Kloman’s vocabulary supports such a view. Even so, this intentionality to give African and Oceanic art a more fashionable and trendy appeal was less successful, as only six out of thirteen lots sold for a total of US$1,754,250.
40 In 2018, Christie’s May sale Art of Africa. Masterworks was presented as ‘a celebration of female strength, fertility, and beauty’ and offered ‘works of art that showcase the powerful influence of women in 19th century African culture’.13 The auction achieved a total of US$4,996,250. The highlight of the sale was a Kifwebe mask (Democratic Republic of the Congo) which realized US$4,215,000 setting a new world record for this type of object.
41 The format of these Christie’s New York sales is revealing, each is curated around a topic that is introduced in the catalogue by an essay of Kloman. This latter one takes the form of a manifesto which intends to shape the opinion of potential collectors. The narrative progression from modern art (2016) to classic art (2017) to anti-classic art (2018) thus reveals the objective to widen the field of potential clients.
42 Christie’s New York May sales also reveal the recent evolution of the auction market in general: As we have seen, the auction houses’ upper-market strategy in recent years has been to sell fewer, carefully selected pieces with distinguished provenance that are fresh on the market and to concentrate all research and marketing efforts on those. The auction houses’ African and Oceanic art departments have thereby intentionally produced and promoted what they have termed ‘the universal masterpiece:’ ‘I think that the art market in general in the 21st century is becoming less compartmentalized by regions or categories of artworks. There is one category that everybody wants: the universal masterpiece, the artwork that defies categorization and transcends regional styles and eras’ (Schweizer 2012: n.p.).
43 Indeed, Sidney Kasfir (1984) used the term ‘masterpiece syndrome’ to describe how collectors and publishers favour certain works of African art by stating that ‘pieces of exceptionally high quality and technical excellence are obviously preferred to mediocre works which may be far more widespread and representative of the culture’ (Kasfir 1984: 184). This is even truer today for auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s who operate at the high end of the market.
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44 A promotional video produced by Sotheby’s for the sale of a major collection of African art in New York in 201714 gives striking insight into the corporation’s process of creating and promoting universal masterpieces.
This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http:// 45 journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/4444
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ6i_ENjpfw
46 In this context, another marketing strategy developed by auction houses to increase both the perceived and the actual market value of certain unattributed African and Oceanic objects is the creation of artificial names. Specialists use two main strategies to create provisional names. The first is the identification of an artist’s hand such as ‘The Buli Master’ (name based on location) or ‘The master of the Cascade Coiffure’ (name based on recurring formal or stylistic characteristics), and the second, a more recent and more criticized practice that consists in labelling (branding) certain objects using the names of the most renowned Western collectors to which they belonged (‘The Rasmussen-de Havenon Dogon mask,’ or ‘The Coray-Kerchache Kota-Ndassa Reliquary Figure’).
Conclusion: Defining masterpieces, defying canons?
47 From the series of Christie’s May sales, which, as we said, is telling of the recent market evolution, I would like to propose, by way of conclusion and as a prospect for future research, some thoughts concerning the role of auction houses on the reevaluation of canons in the field of African and Oceanic art.
48 At the end of the 1990s, when Murray Satov interviewed Christie’s and Sotheby’s African and Oceanic art specialists about their influence on setting trends and fashions in the field, the latter rather downplayed their role in this regard. They stated that their power to determine taste or generate a fashion was limited and they viewed museums and art galleries as far more influential (Satov 1997: 235). However, the foregoing discussion of recent developments in the auction market suggests reconsidering the question. The fact that Christie’s and Sotheby’s are constantly expanding and intensifying their range of activities (mounting exhibitions, advising clients, staging art-oriented events, etc.) and therefore engage in the practices of other cultural institutions further suggests that their influence is likely to grow.
49 My review of Christie’s May auctions supports the idea that in their quest for new buyers from the modern and contemporary art worlds, auction houses are consolidating aesthetic canons of avant-garde artists and French taste-makers of the early twentieth century into the marketing of African and Oceanic art. Their high-end strategy has led them to produce masterpieces, chosen primarily to be appreciated by collectors who are particularly sensitive to a modernist aesthetic and looking for iconic pieces.15 The characteristics of these pieces are consistent with the aesthetic canons inherited from the European avant-garde, which Christie's and Sotheby's are subsequently consolidating.
50 However, as we have also seen, the constant need of the art market to innovate and attract new audiences, challenges Christie’s and Sotheby’s to broaden the scope of new
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ideas to further the appreciation of African and Oceanic art, rather than building its value exclusively on its relation to European modernism. The question, then, is whether Christie’s and Sotheby’s African and Oceanic art departments will reinvent themselves in the context of a changing view of European colonialism and expand their marketing of African and Oceanic art in ways that consider and reflect these changes?
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NOTES
1. Nevertheless, the African and Oceanic art market remains a niche market within the industry. In 2014, a record-setting year for the African and Oceanic art market, the segment accounted for only 0.68 percent of the total auction sales volume of art (Thibault 2015: 17). 2. That way, between 2017 and 2019, Christie’s managed to sell the collections of Jean-Pierre and Angela Laprugne (€2 million), Jeannine and Claude Verité (€16,7 million), Liliane and Michel Durand-Dessert (€6,1 million) and Adolphe Stoclet (€1,3 million) while Sotheby’s auctioned off the collections of Edwin and Cherie Silver (US$7,1 million), Howard & Saretta Barnet (US$8,3 million), Elisabeth Pryce (US$994 thousand), Harry A. Franklin (US$1,9 million) and Marceau Rivière (€11,48 million). 3. Marketing expenses for a various-owner sale can be estimated to be in the lower five-digit range. 4. There is an abundance of literature about the French and North American reception of African art and its development as a Western aesthetic category (Biro 2018, Monroe 2019, to mention only the most recent ones). 5. The year of the sale of Helena Rubinstein’s collection at Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet in New York. 6. See https://sothebys.gcs-web.com/static-files/f031853a-d2fb-4ada-ba2b-4774e0edf47c (accessed 24 September 2019) 7. An argument that is reinforced by David Bellingham (2017), Program Director for the Master’s Degree in Art Business at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, according to whom ‘contemporary cross- collecting reflects the increasing crossovers between the financial world and the art market, with the creation of a mixed art collection mirroring the hedge fund portfolio: when one sector is underperforming, others tend to excel’ (Bellingham 2017: n.p.). 8. See https://artreview.com/power_100/2006/ (accessed 24 September 2019) 9. ‘La composition abstraite ornant ce bouclier n’est pas sans rappeler le langage pictural développé par Piet Mondrian au début des années 1920’ (Sotheby’s, Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, Paris, 5 December, 2007, auction catalogue, lot 89, p. 130). 10. The titles of the auctions (e.g. Timeless, Origins) and the rhetoric of the video clips (see below) would deserve some critical analysis with regard to what notions of African and Oceanic art are transmitted. Since this goes beyond the scope of the article, I wish to refer readers to the works of Johannes Fabian (2014[1983]), Sidney L. Kasfir (1984), James Clifford (1988), Sally Price (2001[1989]) and Shelly Errington (1998) who have questioned this kind of rhetoric very critically. 11. See Christie’s 2017 https://www.christies.com/presscenter/pdf/8685/ REL_African%20&%20Oceanic_May2017_8685_1.pdf (accessed 23 February 2019).
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12. Auction houses use the term ‘world art’ in its old meaning where it designates all art that is not treated in occidental art history and has a universalistic underpinning. Christie’s World Art group comprises the departments African & Oceanic Art, Ancient Art & Antiquities, Indian, Himalayan & Southeast Asian Art, South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art. 13. See https://www.christies.com/about-us/press-archive/details? PressReleaseID=9369&lid=1&mob-is-app=false (accessed 24 September 2019) 14. Sotheby’s, The Collection of Edwin and Cherie Silver, New York, 13 November, 2017. At the time Sotheby’s was losing its leading position in this segment which justified a big marketing campaign. 15. With the humorous rhetorical question ‘Formal Qualities, or Does it Look Modern?’ Shelly Errington (1994: 217, 1998: 92) already emphasized that a main criterion for canonical African and Oceanic art is its closeness to European modernism: ‘The basic core of objects that define the prototype consists of objects that actually did influence, or look as if they could have influences, the likes of Picasso and Maurice de Vlaminck’ (1994: 219, 1998: 97).
ABSTRACTS
This article examines both the development and implications of a sales strategy deployed by Christie’s and Sotheby’s from the mid-2000s to increase their market share and the prices of African and Oceanic art. The strategy was designed to entice affluent modern and contemporary art collectors with eclectic tastes to African and Oceanic art and to develop cross-category collecting between the two art market segments. This was achieved by capitalizing on the historical links between these art forms and by timing the African and Oceanic art auctions and pre-sale viewings to coincide with sales of modern and contemporary art. A survey of sales catalogues produced by the two corporations between 1966 and 2019 documents how specialists have used the engagement of avant-garde artists with non-European art forms as a storytelling device to enhance the value of African and Oceanic artworks. I argue that in the African and Oceanic art departments’ quest for buyers of modern and contemporary art, auction houses are consolidating aesthetic canons established by avant-garde artists and French tastemakers of the early twentieth century with their current marketing of African and Oceanic art.
Cet article étudie le développement et les implications des stratégies de vente déployées par Christie’s and Sotheby’s à partir du milieu des années 2000 afin d’augmenter les prix et les ventes d’art africain et d’art océanien en attirant des collectionneurs d’art moderne et d’art contemporain aux goûts éclectiques. Cet objectif fut atteint en mettant en avant les liens historiques qu’entretiennent ces arts et en faisant coïncider les calendriers des ventes des départements respectifs. La recension des catalogues de ventes produits par Christie’s et Sotheby’s entre 1966 et 2019 montre comment les spécialistes ont utilisé l’intérêt des artistes d’avant-garde pour l’art africain et océanien dans une stratégie de mise en valeur narrative des objets. Je développe l’argument que par leur volonté d’attirer des acheteurs d’art moderne et contemporain, et par leurs stratégies de commercialisation actuelles, les départements d’art d’Afrique et d’Océanie de Christie’s et Sotheby’s consolident les canons artistiques établis par les artistes d’avant-garde européens et par leurs marchands au début du XXème siècle.
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Este artículo examina el desarrollo y las implicaciones de una estrategia de ventas implementada por las empresas de subastas Christie's y Sotheby's a partir de mediados de la década de 2000 para aumentar sus ventas y precios del arte africano y oceánico. La intensión fue de atraer a coleccionistas adinerados de arte moderno y contemporáneo con gustos eclécticos para reforzar lo que llaman el « cross-collecting » entre estos campos artísticos. Este objetivo se logró destacando el vínculo histórico del arte de Africa y Oceanía con las vanguardias europeas y alineando los calendarios de los respectivos departamentos. Una encuesta de catálogos de ventas producidos por Christie’s y Sotheby’s entre 1966 y 2019 documenta cómo los especialistas han utilizado el interés de los artistas de vanguardia por el arte africano y oceánico como narrativa para aumentar el valor de los objetos. Sostengo que en su búsqueda de nuevos clientes en el campo del arte moderno y contemporáneo las casas de subastas están consolidando cánones estéticos establecidos por los artistas de vanguardia y por los forjadores del gusto francés de principios del siglo XX.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Art africain, art océanien, Avant-garde européenne, marché des ventes aux enchères, stratégies marketing, catalogues de ventes aux enchères, cross-collectors, Christie’s, Sotheby’s Palabras claves: Arte de África, arte de Oceanía, vanguardia europea, mercado de subastas, estrategias de marketing, catálogos de venta, cross-collectors, Christie’s, Sotheby’s Keywords: African art, Oceanic art, European avant-garde, auction market, marketing strategies, auction catalogues, cross-collectors, Christie’s, Sotheby’s
AUTHOR
TAMARA SCHILD Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Université de recherche PSL [email protected]
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Dak’Art Off. Between Local Art Forms and Global Art Canon Discourses.
Thomas Fillitz
Introduction
1 There is an undisputed thesis among art specialists that art biennials are global in their perspective, displaying artists from the whole world beyond any national or transnational loyalties. This global dimension expresses a thrive for multitude in two perspectives: (a) in a geospatial and temporal one, it brings together within one cultural space artists and their artworks from different regions of the world and a plurality of modernities; (b) instead of one clearly defined art form, art itself encompasses various categories. This assumption is based on the conceptualization of a plurality of regional art histories, characterized by antinomies of art, and clearly rejecting any overall validity of the occidental art historical narrative, i.e. of one dominant global art canon.
2 Yet, experts like Ute Meta-Bauer, Terry Smith, or Peter Osborne, express a present-day ‘biennial fatigue.’ This concerns, first, the huge number of art biennials which overlap in time, making it impossible to visit all of them. Second, and more importantly, Terry Smith (2012) sees this ‘fatigue’ as resulting from an ‘overproduction’: ‘Since 2000 the biennial has been widely seen as being in a crisis of overproduction, of having become stale in form (theme A, subthemes a,b,c,d, x number of artists, y numbers of works each, in z amount of rooms … )’ (ibid.: 92-3). Or, according to Jan Verwoert (2010), the artworks and the way of their interconnected display within the exhibition’s space ‘seem to have by now become so recognizable that (…) these works can casually be referred to in terms of a genre: “biennial art”’ (186-7, italics by the author). Generically, this art corresponds to the aforementioned two characteristics of multitude, adding characteristic (c) that art practices favour social contexts, the shift into art’s heteronomy, in Jacques Rancière’s vocabulary (2001).
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3 This latter notion refers to several transformations of the characteristics of contemporary art: (a) geo-cultural multitude is connected to core groups of artists that highly renowned globally acting curators are favouring; (b) the ‘trans-categoriality’ (Osborne 2013) of art forms shifts into other dominant forms, installation art (Groys 2008), and participatory art (Papastergiadis 2008); (c) this shift is connected to a transfer of artworks away from the field of art’s autonomy towards the one of its heteronomy — that is its embedment within socio-cultural contexts. As Boris Groys (2008) highlights for installations, artists take up images and objects from everyday life and work with them in the field of art. Regarding participatory art, Nikos Papastergiadis (2008) elaborates the various aspects of the artistic process which consists in selecting a group of people, and focusing on the quality of social relations which emerge during the artistic process.
4 Thus another encompassing global art canon seems to re-emerge — now not as narrative of occidental art history, but as a dominant narrative that is based on internationally most renowned biennial exhibitions. This discourse indeed is the product of superstar curators who have specialized on these mega-events, such as Okwui Enwezor, Hou Hanru, Charles Esche, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Catherine David.
5 The production of such a global contemporary art canon, however, is in sharp contrast to the widely acknowledged concept of the global plurality of art worlds (as art historical concept) and their antinomies (different histories), and not of the global art world.
Dak’Art, Ancient Palais de Justice
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz.
6 Based on my research on the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Dakar, Dak’Art, I intend to reflect this idea of an overall production of a new global contemporary art canon. In particular, Senegalese artists initiated exhibitions of their newest
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achievements during the Biennale time. From 2002 on all these activities have been labelled as Dak’Art Off, and this field became most successful with over 250 individual or group exhibitions these days.
An Off site
Dak’Art Off 2014 Photograph by Thomas Fillitz.
7 As artists clearly view the Off in opposition to the Biennale central venue, the Exposition internationale, this space offers valuable insights for reflecting on the influence of international trends on local artistic practices. I shall argue that an understanding of the artworks in the Off requires above all insights into the history of modern and contemporary art of the Dakar art world, whereas the Biennale’s selections are more informed by the global discourses which constitute the contexts of the curatorial teams.
8 After introducing the major differences between the Biennale and the Off, I shall deal in the second part with the dominance of painting, which appears as a longue durée, however re-defined periodically. A striking feature of Senegal’s history of modern art is that breaks and new trajectories in the arts often coincide with social, economic, and political constellations. The third part connects the question about the production of another global art canon to local artistic practices. The example of the Off allows a review of another aspect of global discourses, the criterion of contemporary art’s insertion into society. The expression of socio-cultural aspirations has been an overall objective of dakarois artists since independence in 1960. It stretches from artists as central agents in the creation of a national cultural discourse to a conceptualization of art at the service of the local population. This relates to questioning what art can
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contribute to a critical public discourse, and by means of which pictures local neighbourhoods can be reached.
Installation Art at Dak’Art and Art Forms at the Off
9 As mega-art event that is devoted to African artists and artists of its Diaspora, this Bienniale started in 1996. Senegalese artists soon became disappointed with selection practices, as they had lobbied among politicians for an international biennial format during the 1980s, and then realized that only a few of them would be included into the official premises of the Biennale. In conversations artists agreed that this format could not correspond to a local survey. They however insisted that their primary idea for the Bienniale was to create a space where their artistic achievements would be challenged through the confrontation with artworks of their peers from other places. For them, due to state pressure, this concept had been betrayed, and selection committees would decide according to their views of contemporary art.
10 This dissatisfaction with the Biennale turned to fury in 2000, when the president of the selection committee, James Elliott, then director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, and an internationally highly renowned biennial curator, announced during the press conference the end of painting and the dominance of installation art. Sylvain Sankalé, a member of the same committee, writes that after a first selection process only works of installation art had been chosen, and there had to be a re-consideration in order to bring back painting and sculpture (Sankalé 2005: 51).
11 Years later, many artists still refuse this imposition of an art form. They view it as further proof that most of these curator-experts have no knowledge of the history of modern and contemporary African art. Even so, the edition of 2000 was definitely a high point in favouring installation art. ‘It appears as unique in the practice of installations among Senegalese artists, and probably among their African homologues, insofar as it seems the privileged technique for participating in the Biennale of Dakar, as if they have to comply to the criteria and conditions of selection imposed by its committees’ (Sylla 2008). And Senegalese art historian Abdou Sylla continues to question whether this is ‘a fashion or a free choice?’ (ibid.). For the 2016 Biennale edition at the Ancien Palais de Justice, the following art forms were on display at the Exposition internationale: twenty-eight artists with installations (various mixed media), twelve using photography, ten painters, eight video artists, and four sculptors.
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View on Dak’Art 2016
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
12 These are some reasons for independent artistic activities in the Dak’Art Off space. Its main characteristics are: (a) exhibitions largely use alternative, non-prestigious art sites (restaurants, hotel lobbies, private houses, public places, etc.); (b) there is no overall curatorial activity; (c) there are no selection processes, anybody from where ever may exhibit, suffice to find a space; (d) Off activities stretch out to other regions of Senegal, St. Louis being its second centre; (e) one objective is promoting the sale of artworks.
13 Exhibitions of Dak’Art Off contrast sharply with the dominance of installation art in the Biennale’s central exhibition. Installations are present, no doubt. Yet, whether in individual or group exhibitions, the visitor encounters painting as the dominant art form . In 2012, Clarisse Djionne organized one of the most successful exhibits at Biscuiterie de Médina, an alternative site consisting of several former industrial buildings. She invited four prominent artists, Soly Cissé, Camara Gueye, Ndary Lo, and Cheikhou Ba. Three of them are renowned for their paintings, while Ndary Lo is one of Senegal’s most prolific sculptors, and contributed a sculptural installation, Windows part 1 (2012).
14 Walking around Off events, two major trajectories regarding art practices may be formulated: (a) paintings, and not installation or participatory art are dominant art forms within Dakar’s art world; and (b) the assertion of contemporary art’s insertion within social, economic, and political contexts requires some in-depth examination. Both these observations contrast with allegations of global art discourses, that biennials define contemporary art (see Green and Gardner 2016).
15 One could argue that the orientations of the Off are due to the possibilities for sales, given the presence of an international public interested in art. It is the case that most artists exhibiting in the Off make their larger income for at least a year, if not for the following two years, but this does not adequately explain the phenomenon. Many insist
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that painting is the art form through which they express their ideas and interests. They refer to the history of modern art in Senegal for understanding the value they attribute to painting, and how they relate to various societal contexts.
The Preponderance of Painting
Trajectory A — Modern Art, Senghor and State Patronage
16 On his accession to the presidency, in 1960 Léopold Sédar Senghor founded the École des Arts du Sénégal from the former Maison des Arts du Mali (1958-59) (Sylla 1998: 85), and in 1979 it was re-named into École Nationale des Beaux Arts. From its beginnings, the art academy was focused on painting, and to a much lesser extent sculpture. In its early days, it was subdivided into two departments; artist Iba N’Diaye directed one following classical European art academy training (Arts Plastiques), while Papa Ibra Tall and Pierre Lods took care of the other focusing on black artistic research (Recherches Plastiques Nègre).
17 As Senegalese art historian Abdou Sylla (1998) notes, more than eighty per cent of artists practiced painting (ibid.: 110). Sculpture was marginal at the school of fine arts. Anne Jean-Bart remarks that it was ‘the poor relative of Fine Arts in Senegal’ (1989: 145). Sculptural materials and tools were expensive, modern machines were not available on the market, studio space was limited, a sculptor’s social status was less distinguished than the one of painters, and Islam rejected sculpture (ibid.: 145; Sylla 1998: 122). One needs to add that Senghor even marginalized the Senegalese souwere painting tradition (verre églomisé painting). He strongly favoured painting as taught by Papa Ibra Tall and Pierre Lods that best corresponded to his ideology of Négritude, and to his vision of the role of artists for a national cultural narrative.
18 Iba N’Diaye soon resigned and in 1967 he decided to return to France: ‘I was aware that the craft is the first thing to learn, it is an obligation, and one cannot economize it. But I met an opposed current. They spoke of spontaneity, of négritude’ (Iba N’Diaye 1994: 53).1 Clearly, the rejection of any European oriented technical training and of occidental art history, the support of free expression and of the connection to some African culture core made the success of the department of research in black art. Papa Ibra Tall, however, left the school in 1966, when he was appointed director of the newly founded Manufacture Nationale de Tapisserie in Thiès, in the East of Dakar.
19 Thus, Pierre Lods became most influential. He had joined Dakar’s art academy in 1961 at the invitation of Senghor, and stayed until his death in 1988. His ideas of teaching painting relied on his experience with the famous Poto-Poto workshop school in Brazzaville, which he had founded in 1950 and directed until his departure for Dakar. As Amadou Sow reported to me, Lods encouraged his students to observe forms in the natural environment, to interact with African cultural expressions (texts, music, old arts), to trust their intuition, and to pay attention to bright colours and rhythm. If, in the early days’ topics were masks, imaginary spirits, rituals, etc. (Ebong 1991: 201), by the end of the 1960s younger artists had shifted towards exploring symbols. Joanna Grabski (2013) designates these artworks of this so-called École de Dakar as ‘figurative abstraction’ (ibid.: 283). This is an abstraction that several artists I had conversations with referred to styles of old African sculptures to image aesthetic values and
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worldviews. Their concern with this style, indeed, was to reflect how to picture the particular topic they were researching.
20 Senghor’s favouring of this specific form of painting was expressed in the eminent role of the state as patron of the arts, as collector, as financer of artists’ residencies abroad, as organizer of exhibitions. In 1966 he founded the Musée Dynamique on Dakar’s Corniche Ouest, which would become the centre for Senegal’s modern art by the early 1970s, and in 1977 the Cité des Artistes, studios for government sponsored artists in Colobane quarter (Sylla 1998: 81; Harney 2004: 142–3; 146), which would be destroyed under his successor Abdou Diouf in 1983.
Former Musée Dynamique
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
21 Senghor has further influenced artistic practices and art discourses in Senegal. His initiative for the 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (First World Festival of Back Arts) in 1966 is well recognised. Old African arts were heralded at the Musée Dynamique, and under the title Tendances et Confrontations (trends and challenges) modern art of African artists and artists of the Diaspora was exhibited at the Palais de Justice on Plateau, Cap Manuel — the grand prize having been awarded to Christian Lattier from Côte d’Ivoire for his rope sculptures which combine modern artistic expression with references to African cultural traditions.
22 In the early 1970s, Senghor initiates a two-way cultural dialogue with art’s modernism. First, within the emerging Dakar art world, several exhibitions of European masters are organized at the Musée Dynamique: in 1971 of Marc Chagall, in 1972 of Pablo Picasso, in 1973 of Pierre Soulages, in 1974 of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, and in 1976 of Alfred Manessier. All are friends of Senghor from his time in Paris, except the Austrian Hundertwasser (see Belting and Buddensieg 2018).
23 The other initiative is oriented towards international art worlds. On the basis of the success of the first and second Salons of Senegalese artists at the Musée Dynamique
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(1973, and 1973–74; Huchard 1989: 77), Senghor initiates the grand travelling exhibition ‘Art Sénégalais d’Aujourd’hui’ which starts at the Grand Palais in Paris (1974), and tours in Europe and the Americas until 1982 (Tamsir Niane 1989: 83).
Trajectory B – Ancien Marché Malien and Laboratoire Agit’Art
24 One of the most impressive sites of Dak’Art Off 2018 was the group exhibit The Bell of the Ants at the Ancien Marché Malien nearby Place des Tirailleurs and the railway station.
Ancien Marché Malien, Dak’Art Off 2018
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
25 The Collectif Agit’Art had adapted the demolition building, and one would walk around in deep sand, paintings and photographs are hanging on dilapidated walls and illuminated by ready-installed spotlights, and tarpaulins are used as ceilings. Young artists of revitalized Laboratoire Agit’Art (e.g. Ndoye Douts, Claire Lamarque, Pascal Nampémanla Traoré), with invited international (e.g. Maïmouna Guerresi, Jems Koko Bi, Younes Baba Ali) and Senegalese ones (e.g. Soly Cissé, Kémi Bassène, Wasis Diop) have contributed paintings, photographs, sculptures, multi-media installations, films, and graffiti. Paintings, however, are preponderant.
26 In a central space, the visitor encounters an installation of Claire Lamarque, Joe Ouakam et son Bras-O-Bab (2017), a life-size representation of most influential artist and art theorist Joe Ouakam, holding in his right hand a bundle of red ropes stretching out on the walls and towards the sculpture of a baobab in the form of a majestic hand that reaches the ceiling.
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Claire Lamarque, Joe Ouakam et son Bras-O-Bab (2017).
Dak’Art Off 2018. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
27 Again, Joe Ouakam is remembered in the large courtyard with Jems Koko Bi’s sculpture Les enfants de mille nuits (the children of one thousand nights; 2018), and with graffiti texts on the walls — not as a commemoration, but to invigorate Agit’Art’s ideas and activities for the present-day young Laboratoire generation (Ba 2018: 22)
28 On a Sunday morning, the Collectif Laboratoire Agit’Art holds a meeting. Former companions of Joe Ouakam report on their encounter with this outstanding personality in Dakar’s art world, and his conceptualization of art and society. At the end of the meeting the Collectif presents its Dismemberment Manifesto (2018). ‘Through our collaborative practices, we aim to destroy the current diktats of contemporary art. Our collective actions are forms of resistance against the dominant system but also a critique of political and cultural institutions that intent to dominate us’ (Nampémanla Traoré 2018: 1).
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Exhibition The Bell of the Ants.
CAPTION= Dak’Art Off 2018. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
29 Ancien Marché Malien ‘radiates the spirit of Joe Ouakam,’ remarks Ousseynou Wade, former Secretary General of the Biennale, in a conversation during the Sunday meeting. It is an alternative site in ruins, not a prestigious art space, and was consciously selected for its popular connotation. This is the artistic trajectory that was launched in 1973 with the foundation of Laboratoire Agit’Art by, in particular, Issa Samb/Joe Ouakam (visual artist, art theorist), Jibril Diop Mambéty (filmmaker), Youssoupha Dione (playwright, performance artist), and many others who rapidly joined in. It was a fundamental critique of the artists of the École de Dakar, who considered their artistic practices as non-political while these latter claimed their agency for a national cultural narrative around Négritude. For Agit’Art, the École de Dakar ‘allows itself to be used by the reigning political current ‘(Samb 1989: 118).
30 For Laboratoire Agit’Art, the figurative abstraction of artists in the tradition of the École de Dakar, although connected to styles of old African art, was detached from societal concerns, and inappropriate to cope with Senegal’s political and economic crises of the early 1970s. According to Ima Ebong (1991), these artists ‘were generally unable to reflect on or to adjust to social and political change’ (ibid.: 204). Hence, Laboratoire Agit’Art conceived its practices outside the system of state patronage, rejected this modernist style, and opted for art activism: ‘If art is a kind of developer, … art itself should be a place for revealing the diversity of truth’ (Samb 1989: 130). It was founded on the collaboration of artists from different art fields, and combined various visual art forms, such as performance, installation, painting, and sculpture. Furthermore, Agit’Art introduced heterogeneous materials, piles of newspapers, books, documents, objects of everyday life, etc. In order to insert art within the societal environment, its works were project oriented with an emphasis on ideas and concepts. ‘Dismemberment’ was central for the operational structure of the movement, and for avoiding institutionalization: a group of initiates coordinated the overall structure,
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while each activity, a workshop or a performance, was organized as separate entity (Harney 2004: 109–10).
La cour de Joe Ouakam in 2010
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
31 From 1973 to 1977, Agit’Art was located in Joe Ouakam’s courtyard on Plateau, from 1977-1983 it had joined the Village des Arts, and afterwards returned at Joe Ouakam’s place at 17, rue Jules Ferry. La cour de Joe Ouakam, as it was known in Dakar’s art world, was not only a centre for artistic encounters and debates, it was an artwork in permanent progress, open day and night to people, until it was razed to the ground after the artist’s death in 2017.
In Between: The Reformulation of Painting: The Village des Arts and Sét Sétal
32 Mansour Ciss Kanakassy presented an installation in the official Senegalese pavilion of Dak’Art 2018, of which he dedicated one part to the memory of the former Village des Arts (1977–83). The artist had arranged pictures of the artists villageois, of encounters and events that had taken place on the site, copies of documents and narratives (e.g. ‘L’ancien “village des arts” de Dakar’ by El Hadji Sy), and a list of all resident artists. The Village des Arts had become an emblem of the rise of contemporary art in Senegal.
33 In 1977, El Hadji Sy in search of a studio squatted spaces of the former military camp Lat-Dior, near Corniche Ouest, and founded the Village des Arts. Until 1976, some of the barracks were home to the École Nationale des Arts, later re-named École Nationale des Beaux Arts until 1982 (Kalidou Sy 1989: 36; Harney 2004: 141). Other artists rapidly followed. Like the Cité des Artistes, Senghor's initiative for government sponsored artists, the Village des Arts was cleared violently on the order of President Abdou Diouf in late 1983 (Harney 2004: 143). The Village des Arts, however, was in sharp contrast to the Cité des Artistes. The government neither sponsored the Village, nor would it
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influence or control its activities. Apart from studios, the site incorporated a theatre and a music studio, and exhibitions, encounters, conferences and workshops were organized both for artists and the interested public.
34 Since the early 1970s Senghor’s politics had been facing political opposition, against his one-party system, or his close interaction with France, and economy was in growing turbulence. While honouring Senghor for his dedication to culture and the arts, many artists, including Souleymane Keïta, liberated themselves from the state sponsored canon for painting. A vast diversity of artistic practices ensued (see Sylla 2008), pushing research on the means of painting. These developments moreover coincided with the exhibitions of European masters which Senghor had initiated at Musée Dynamique from the early 1970s .
35 El Hadji Sy was another leading personality in these endeavours. Although he was in close contact with Pierre Lods, and admired him (El Hadji Sy 1995: 88), he maintained distance from the state’s interference in the arts, and broke with the artistic framework of the École de Dakar (Harney 2004: 126), that is with the absolute prioritization of figurative abstraction, the marginalization of sculpture as well as of the traditional souwere artistic practices.
36 The Village des Arts became a symbol for a close interaction and exchange between the resident artists and their various practices, for intensified research in the arts, and a search to narrow the connections to neighbouring inhabitants. To these ends, artists started to incorporate alternative materials and to try out new techniques, be it in painting or in sculpture (Harney 2004: 142). Wood and jute are experimented instead of canvases, while found objects would provide paintings with a three dimensional volume.
37 In 1980, El Hadji Sy founded the gallery Tenq2 in his studio (Harney 2004.), as a joint location without any restrictions for artistic practices. Hence, the Village, the gallery Tenq, and the search of alternative artistic practices correlated with Laboratoire Agit’Art’s conception for intensified artistic insertion into societal environments, and for an art freed of imposed conventions. But while Agit’Art understood itself as an activist art movement, and was from its inception combining various art forms in its projects, artists in the Village des Arts did not constitute an art movement per se. They worked as individuals, although in communication with their surrounding peers, predominantly in painting and sculpture, and aimed at going beyond Senegal’s modernist conventions of style, materials, and techniques.
38 The economic crisis of 1980, particularly the imposition the first structural adjustment plan, was another impetus for furthering the artists’ récupération of everyday materials, insofar as brushes, canvases, oil and acrylic colours had either become expensive or could hardly be found on the market. Further, the artistic intention to reach local communities via the récupération of everyday materials gained another impetus in 1990 with the Sét Sétal3 movement in Dakar. This was a movement of local youth who started to clean Dakar’s quarters from the waste that was all around. Rapidly, artists joined the movement, and created murals with all kinds of topics, or small artworks in neighbourhoods out of waste materials.4 Sét Sétal thus stimulated a second artistic process of récupération, which has nothing to do with scarcity of artistic materials, or with an opposition to the dictate of artistic conventions in Senghorian times. It is above all an interest in the quality of the material for creating an artwork. But one should not consider this as a common intentional process. Viyé Diba, for instance, is interested in
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urban materials, in the research of their qualities. His topic is the urban environment, and the artist himself defines the three-dimensionality of his paintings as style kangourou. In contrast, sculptor Moustapha Dimé recuperated what the sea was throwing on the shores of Gorée Island, where he had installed himself, and was interested in traditional African cultural meanings. Even so, artists I had conversations with insist that the technique of récupération is not uniquely a process of appropriating waste or other materials (e.g. sand, textiles, ropes, metal plates, plastic). These practices require knowledge of their qualities, of how to handle them technically, how to assemble different materials in order to create meaningful works of art.
The Off and Contemporary Painting Practices
39 This short sketch of the history of modern painting in Senegal should not be read as a linear narrative of superceding art styles. From 1960 on, painting indeed has been the prevailing art form, and had developed in multiple directions by the early 1970s: in relationship to ideas, styles, materials, techniques, and in one strand, searches for inserting art into societal concerns.
40 Visits to Dak’Art Off events clearly provide insights to these various trajectories. At the (second) Village des Arts adjacent to the Léopold Sédar Senghor football stadium, which was inaugurated in 1983 under President Abdou Diouf, the Off group-exhibitions of its residents may be traced to figurative abstraction of the 1970s, but without recalling traditional African symbols.
41 Themes relate to present-day matters. In 2016, art historian Roselie van Deursen curated the small Off-exhibition Urban Africans: les artistes briseurs de tabou (Urban Africans: taboo breaker artists) at the residency of the Dutch ambassador. Kine Aw was one of the artists of the show. She graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in 2006, and has her studio at Village des Arts. The artist’s themes are women, their cultural traditions and their present-day social issues. Kine Aw works on the proportions of bodily parts, distorts them, and collapses perspectives within each picture.
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Painting by Kine Aw.
Exhibition Urban Africans: les artistes briseurs de tabou. Dak’Art Off 2016. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
42 The German Goethe Institute contributed to the 2014 Off with an exhibition of young autodidact Fally Sene Sow. He re-defines the old souwere (sous-verre) tradition, which artists of the former Village des Arts had brought back into modern painting practices in the late 1970s. In creating pictures of the Colobane market area, his overall subject, the artist works centrally with recuperated materials from the local environment. Fally Sene Sow practices sous-verre collages, applies sand, cuts out aluminium strips from soft-drink cans, images from magazines, other found materials, and combines them with painting. These filigree assemblages of materials require the artist to protect the back of the pictures with transparent plastic plates.
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Fally Sene Sow, Colobane Familiale Balba (2014) at Goethe Institute
Dak’Art Off 2014. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz.
43 At the northern end of Bay of Mermoz, with the commanding monument Renaissance Africaine on the horizon, Barkinado Bocoum has rented a friend’s villa for his Off 2018 exhibition. A characteristic of his technique immediately leaps out: the artist subdivides the plane of his pictures into demarcated fields nested within one another, and elaborates each field meticulously. Between these fields, the artist deconstructs the representation of faces, of human bodies, and objects. When speaking of his paintings, Barkinado Bocoum views each of them as an image of interconnected changes of perspectives. It is, however, not research on perspective in painting — indeed the artist questions the various facets of human beings in social interactions and emotional expressions, what is made visible, what remains hidden, or what is yet not revealed to others. Likewise, for Barkinado, any social phenomenon consists of an amalgam of differently situated gazes, and not in one exclusive viewpoint. In his 2018 exhibit, the artist consequently expands his focus on the relationship between the personality of individuals, consumption, and the impact of adverts, as in the cycle A force de copier l’autrui on déteint son « voyez-moi » # 3 (2018; By dint of copying the other one bleaches one’s ‘see me’ #3).
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Barkinado Bocoum, A force de copier l’autrui on déteint son « voyez-moi » # 3, 2018
Dak’Art Off 2018.
Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
44 The multiple sides of human beings are also the driving idea of Cheikhou Ba’s artistic creations. He graduated first in Dakar in 2002, later in Geneva in 2011, lived for several years in Geneva and Neuchâtel, and resettled in Dakar in 2016. For the Off 2016 at Hôtel Villa Racine on Plateau, the artist presented a project at the invitation of the Spanish curator Jesús Ahedo of Kalao Panafrican Creations, Bilbao: Hommage à Rafael Padilla CHOCOLAT de son nom d’artiste 1er clown noir de la scène française 1868–1917.5
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Cheikhou Ba, Exhibition view
Dak’Art Off 2016. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
45 With these artworks, Cheikhou Ba honours an artist who had long passed into oblivion. To capture different aspects of Padilla’s career, and in keeping with his style around these years, the artist works the canvasses with stains of bright colours, his brush strokes move in all directions, faces and bodies are fuzzy, and he includes here and there graffiti-like word tags.
46 At Hôtel Sokhamon, facing the Îles de la Madeleine, Viyé Diba presents a highly interesting re-conceptualization of painting in Galerie Kemboury’s exhibition Lignes partagées (shared lines) during the Off 2016. At a first glance, the visitor sees strange forms. They however rapidly unravel as paper collages of roughly designed, cut out, and assembled bodily forms. These artworks are the outcomes of the artist’s thoughts and feelings following the news of the terrorist massacres in Paris on November 13 2015. For this oeuvre, the artist partly relies on the two-dimensional painting format, with grey coloured paper as support, frame and glass. Viyé Diba, however goes further, and constructs three-dimensional constellations of pictures that are hanging in the space. Mounted on frames of wildly tied cables, violently worked fine white nets are used as support. Hence, the frame, the support, and the assemblage, all forcefully edited, as well as the hanging become integral to the experience of these spatial pictures. The perception of the beholder is further challenged as s/he moves around and in-between them, thus changing with each position the gaze on these pictures.
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Viyé Diba. Exhibition Lignes partagées (2016), detail
Dak’Art Off 2016. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
The Off, a Contemporary Art Canon, and Art’s Social Aspirations
47 In Contemporary Curating (2012), Terry Smith reports of a roundtable on exhibition curating in Africa chaired by Chika Okeke Agulu, in which participants argued that biennials are art-events in which curators visualize pressing contemporary issues by means of the art forms they conceive as most relevant (ibid.: 153). Simon Njami, an internationally prestigious curator of contemporary African art, and artistic director of Dak’Art 2016 and 2018, also asserts in conversation that a biennial’s objective is not a kind of monographic display of artistic achievements from a local art world. Nevertheless, the notion of ‘biennial art,’ and the production of another (global) contemporary art canon stand as critiques of dominant global art discourses, and stimulate to examine the relationship between local contemporary artistic practices and major art biennials’ favouring of dominant art forms: (a) installation and participatory art, and (b) a socially engaging art.
48 In this context, the informal field of Dak’Art Off imposes itself for investigation. Although installation and performance art have increased also in this field since the Biennale’s edition of 2000, painting remains the dominant art form, and not only for market sales reasons as the short historical sketch shows. Since the beginning of modern art in Senegal, painting has been the art form par excellence, first strongly favoured by Senghor’s cultural politics, and in art education. This art form, however, was periodically re-conceptualized, be it regarding styles, the materials used, the tools and the techniques. A major line of these reconfigurations requires to be considered out of local discourses and exchanges. The international exhibitions at Musée
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Dynamique, which Senghor enabled between 1971 and 1976, constitute a first impact for artist-painters to extend beyond the limits of the early École de Dakar style — away from the exclusive figurative abstraction, towards a symbol and colour centred, non- figurative abstraction. Besides residencies of artists in Europe and North America, the Biennale of Dakar further influences painting practices, in particular with a move towards the mixing of styles as exemplified in the artworks of the younger generation of artists (e.g. Barkinado Bocoum, Cheikhou Ba).
49 In global art discourses, the important aspect of contemporary art, however, is its insertion in societal issues (e.g. Rancière 2001, Smith 2011, García Canclini 2014), and the preferential display of such art forms in mega-art events by leading internationally acting curators (e.g. Enwezor, Hanru, Christov-Bakargiev). This shift articulates the contrast to occidental art history’s modernism, for which art’s changes were characterized by the artists’ reflections within art’s autonomous practices (styles, art forms, materials, techniques). Contemporary art as an ‘art of the world’ (Smith 2011: 8; italics by the author) emphasizes the societal connections, and correlates such art practices with installation art and more so with participatory art — the former incorporating everyday objects into art’s field, the latter centring on the re-production of social relations, and rejecting art as material good. At the Biennale of Dakar, this move can be observed with the preferential selection of installation art which deals with ICT and other objects of present-day urban life (cf. Sylla 2008).
50 In Senegal, however, the autonomy of modern art does not correspond to occidental art history’s meaning. To a large extent, it always had some connection to societal fields. From the 1960s on, art students were trained to first conceive a topic in relation to their environment which then would be researched by means of the tools of art (painting, etc.). The topics indeed would change in time, as well as the conceptualization of art’s insertion into society. Further, during his presidency, Senghor attributed artists the role of important agents for the production of the national cultural discourse (Grabski 2013: 288-9). Their concern was the idea of an African cultural core, and they reflected this in their picture-making with traditional African cultural symbols. As much as these pictures corresponded to the objectives of the independent state, and to Senghor’s ideology of Négritude, they nevertheless had but little to do with people’s concerns in urban environments. These artworks became symbols of the state’s cultural politics, while critics emphasized the abandonment of art’s critical potential.
51 A trajectory towards art’s autonomy in European modernism’s sense starts by the late 1960 and early 1970s, with a diversification of art forms, and the detachment from the early École de Dakar, from its stylistic and thematic constraints, and from the role of the artists as agents of the national cultural narrative. In this strand, the creation of pictures is highly individual and stylistically diversified. Even so, main common denominators are the primacy of the artistic research on the grounds of art’s tools for expression, and a move towards non-figurative abstraction.
52 At the same period, another trajectory opens up with those peers, who are searching for ways to narrow the relationship between art and society by elaborating and strengthening art’s critical potential. Laboratoire Agit’Art takes the lead, elaborates the combination of various art forms, and takes counter-positions to political power. One needs to acknowledge that the artistic practices of Agit’Art correspond to present-day global art discourses about art’s insertion into society.
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53 From the mid-1970s on, painting’s concerns about its relationship to society may be connected to both trajectories, to the liberation of artistic practices from the constraints of a national cultural discourse, and to the activities of Agit’Art. Hence two artistic strategies became preponderant for this art form: firstly, the focus on urban social themes, and second the inclusion of everyday materials from local environments (récupérations): in the early 1980s with the enforcement of the first structural adjustment plan which implied scarcity of the materials for painting. In 1990, the Sét Sétal social movement constituted another impetus, and artists actively developed the incorporation of objects and materials of everyday life. This entailed a re-formulation of painting, from its two dimensionality into a three dimensionality, and the development of new techniques with the application or assemblage of different materials. Further, while artworks were exhibited in spaces of art, artists also intervened in local neighbourhoods.
54 Painting at the service of contemporary social aspirations continues to be an objective of Senegalese artists in the present: the situation of women, facets of one’s personality in modernity, plural perspectives on social, economic or political facts, the importance of social relations as against individualization, obstacles to transnational mobility, migration flows, etc. Artistic practices draw on the freedom of stylistic expression, and thereby connect to local developments of the late 1970s, or to a mixing of styles with intensified international exchanges. Nevertheless, these artworks require art related visual skills from its audience. Although artists take inspirations from local issues, their pictures are often highly sophisticated elaborations, as a major objective is their research in the possibilities of the picture’s expression. Thus, while their topics deal with people’s aspirations, local neighbourhoods can hardly cope with these pictures, as they are not trained in these forms of artistic practices.
55 Senegal’s history of modern and contemporary painting thus unravels some central aspects for art’s objective to insert itself into society. Topics of societal aspirations are not sufficient, the question is how an image reflected by the artist encounters as picture the public. This relates to the combination of styles, techniques, and materials, to the spaces where these artworks are incorporated in — art spaces, or alternative popular ones —, and which target groups the artists envision. This brings us back to the Collectif Agit’Art at Ancien Marché Malien during Dak’Art Off 2018. With this exhibition, the Collectif questions the possibilities of art forms as critical medium for social aspirations and as mediator for social interactions.
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At Ancien Marché Malien
Dak’Art Off 2018. Photograph by Thomas Fillitz
56 Asking what art’s insertion into society can mean, its exhibition focuses on how an artwork can reach the people who are concerned. The project clearly positions itself in opposition to elitist exhibition practices: by settling in a public environment (the former Marché Malien), in a building in ruins, it aims at narrowing the accessibility of artworks for a general public. Through the display of various art forms, and in particular of different kinds of paintings, it also encourages to reflect artistic issues how an artwork can reach people beyond an art instructed audience.
Conclusion
57 Curators and other art experts agree that biennials are not local surveys of artistic achievements, but global in scale. Due to the tremendous proliferation of this exhibition format in the 1990s and early 2000s, they view an emerging homogenization, a ‘biennial art’: similar global topics, similar structures of the exhibits, selections around a core group of preferential artists, and of a few dominant art forms. Some art theorists therefore assume that this leads towards another global art canon, no longer defined by occidental art history, but by the curators’ preferential tastes of an art that is embedded in society. While in the past biennials were seen as terrains of free experimentation, this assumption implies that these mega-events and their concomitant global art discourses determine artistic practices in local art worlds — which is the central question of this article.
58 While Dakar’s Biennale of Contemporary African Art started with the objective to display the newest achievements of artists of Africa and its diaspora, the impact of global art discourses on selection procedures and invitations of artists can be observed rapidly, particularly visualized through the growing importance of installation art
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using new technologies. Dakar art world professionals struggle with this trajectory of the Biennale’s exhibits. On the one hand, they welcome such an internationalization infused by curatorial decisions, but they also wonder, on the other, about the representation of local artistic practices. In other words, they feel uneasy as to whether the Biennale is already overly inscribed within hegemonic global art discourses.
59 This tension marks the success of Dak’Art Off. What is conceived as the popular part of the Biennale may be expressed with the following key ideas: no overall curatorial narrative, diversity of artistic practices, freedom of exhibiting, and alternative, non-art dedicated sites. Hence, the visitor who strolls around the Off encounters multiple forms of painting. Some may be connected to different periods of the history of modern art in Senegal, others are expressions of a deeper exchange with the art of the official Biennale spaces. Social aspirations are a common denominator of all these artworks, however artists elaborate a huge diversity of themes, at various degrees of intensity, and in their individual practices.
60 In an overall perspective, Dak’Art Off’s exhibitions offer an image of demarcation from global art discourses and their aesthetic judgements about the most relevant art forms and pressing issues. Indeed, Dakar’s artists and art world professionals see it in opposition to the official Biennale. Nonetheless, the relationship between both spaces rather appears as a complementary one — as exchanges between international art world strategies, a geospatial plurality of art practices, and local artistic intentions. This thrillingly relationship reorients our investigation to the entanglements of specific biennial exhibitions with local histories of art practices and discourses, and in the context of Dakar the Off stands for its antinomy to another hegemonic global contemporary art canon. Groys, Boris. 2008. The Topology of Contemporary Art. In Antinomies in Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Pp. 71-80. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books and articles
Ba, Abdou. 2018. No title. In Le Manifeste du Démembrement/The Dismemberment Manifesto. Laboratoire Agit’Art, ed., editorial direction Abdou Ba with Delphine Calmettes. Pp. 17-22. Dakar: Bathie Sow.
Belting, Hans and Andrea Buddensieg. 2018. Ein Afrikaner in Paris. Léopold Sédar Senghor und die Zukunft der Moderne. Munich: C. H. Beck.
Ebong, Ima. 1991. Negritude: Between Mask and Flag — Senegalese Cultural Ideology and the “École de Dakar”. In Africa Explores. 20th Century African Art. Susan Vogel, ed., assisted by Ima Ebong. Pp. 198-209. New York and Munich: The Center for African Art and Prestel.
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García Canclini, Néstor. 2014. Art Beyond Itself. Anthropology for Society without a Storyline, trans. David Frye. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Grabski, Joanna. 2013. The École des Arts and Exhibitionary Platforms in Postindependence Senegal. In A Companion to Modern African Art. Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà, eds. Pp. 276-293. Malden, MA. and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Green, Charles and Anthony Gardner. 2016. Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art. Malden, MA. and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Harney, Elizabeth. 2004. In Senghor’s Shadow. Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal. 1960 – 1995. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Huchard, Ousmane Sow. 1989. The Salons of Senegalese Artists. In Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal/Anthologie des Arts Plastiques Contemporains au Sénégal/ Anthopology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal. Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. Pp. 77-78. Frankfort/Main: Museum für Völkerkunde.
Jean-Bart, Anne. 1989. Sculpture. In Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal/Anthologie des Arts Plastiques Contemporains au Sénégal/ Anthopology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal. Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. Pp. 145-146. Frankfort/Main: Museum für Völkerkunde.
Nampémanla Traoré, Pascal. 2018. No title. In Le Manifeste du Démembrement/The Dismemberment Manifesto. Laboratoire Agit’Art, ed., editorial direction Abdou Ba with Delphine Calmettes. Pp. 1-2. Dakar: Bathie Sow.
N’Diaye, Iba. 1994. Iba N’Diaye s’entretient avec Franz Kaiser. In Peindre est se souvenir. Iba N’Diaye. Pp. 52-54. Dakar: NEAS – Sépia.
Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere or not at All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London and New York: Verso.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2008. Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking Contemporary Art. In Antinomies in Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Pp. 363-381. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2001. Le partage du sensible. Paris: La Fabrique-éditions.
Samb, Issa. 1989. The Social and Economic Situation of the Artists of the “Ecole de Dakar”. In Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal/Anthologie des Arts Plastiques Contemporains au Sénégal/ Anthopology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal. Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. Pp. 117-120. Frankfort/Main: Museum für Völkerkunde.
Sankalé, Sylvain. 2005. Some Magical Sparks in many Trivialities?. Afrik’Arts 2: 50-51.
Smith, Terry. 2011. Contemporary Art-World Currents. London: Lawrence King Publishing.
Smith, Terry. 2012. Thinking Contemporary Curating. ICI Perspectives in Curating No. 1. New York. Independent Curators International.
Sy, El Hadji. 1995. Objects of Performance. A Story from Senegal. In Seven Stories. About Modern Art in Africa. Clementine Deliss, ed. Pp. 76-101. London, Paris–New York: Whitechapel, Flammarion.
Sy, Kalidou. 1989. The School of Fine Arts of Senegal. In Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal/ Anthologie des Arts Plastiques Contemporains au Sénégal/ Anthopology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal. Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. Pp. 35-40. Frankfort/Main: Museum für Völkerkunde.
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Sylla, Abdou. 1998. Arts Plastiques et Etat au Sénégal: Trente Cinq Ans de Mécénat au Sénégal. Dakar: IFAN-Ch. A. Diop.
Tamsir Niane, Djibril. 1989. The Exhibitions of Senegalese Contemporary Art Abroad. In Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal/Anthologie des Arts Plastiques Contemporains au Sénégal/ Anthopology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal. Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. Pp. 83-84. Frankfort/Main: Museum für Völkerkunde.
Verwoert, Jan. 2010. The Curious Case of Biennial Art. In The Biennial Reader’. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, Solveig Øvstebø, eds. Pp. 184-197. Bergen and Ostfildern: Bergen Kunsthall and Hatje Cantz.
Websites
Sylla, Abdou. 2008. Les Arts Plastiques Sénégalais Contemporains. Ethiopiques 80. Available online: http://ethiopiques.refer.sn/spip.php?page=imprimer-article&id_article=1599 (accessed 29 August, 2016).
NOTES
1. ‘Je savais que le metier était la première chose à apprendre, que c’était une obligation dont on ne pouvait pas faire l’économie. Mais j’ai rencontré un courant opposé. On parlait de la spontanéité, de la négritude.’ (My translation). 2. Wolof: joint, connection; see Samb 1989: 118. 3. Wolof: Cleaning up, being clean. 4. Ndary Lo’s sculptural installation Windows part 1 (2012) at Biscuiterie de Médina during Dak’Art Off 2012, may be considered in line with this tradition. 5. ‘Hommage to Rafael Padilla CHOCOLAT from his artist name 1st black clown on the French stage’, an exhibition enabled by the Embassy of Spain in Senegal.
ABSTRACTS
Critical considerations of the impact of biennials on artistic practices worldwide emphasize that they create new hegemonies: biennials produce another canon of contemporary art at a global scale. The main characteristic is art’s insertion into society, with the primacy of installation and participatory art forms. This article examines these assumptions in considering the art shown in the field of Dak’Art Off, an initiative of Dakar’s artists in opposition to the Biennale’s main venue, the Exposition internationale. Whereas installation art is preponderant in this latter space, exhibitions in the Off show largely paintings. To understand this discrepancy, one needs to view the history of modern art after Senegal’s independence. Furthermore, contemporary art’s characteristic of its insertion into society requires a differentiated analysis for this art world, as this aspect has been an objective throughout the history of modern and contemporary art in Senegal, though with changing meanings, artistic practices, and targeted public.
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Des études critiques sur les biennales considèrent qu’elles créent aujourd’hui de nouvelles hégémonies dans le domaine des pratiques artistiques: elles produisent un autre canon d’art contemporain à l’échelle globale, qui induit l’insertion de l’art dans la société, et la primauté de l’installation et de l’art participatif. Cet article examine ces suppositions à partir de l’art exposé dans le champ de Dak’Art Off, initiative des artistes Dakarois, développée en opposition aux manifestations officielles de la Biennale, l’Exposition internationale. Pendant que les installations sont prépondérantes dans ce dernier espace, les expositions du Off montrent plus largement des peintures. Pour comprendre cette divergence, il faut surtout considérer l’histoire de l’art moderne depuis l’indépendance du Sénégal. De plus, le critère des aspirations sociales de l’art contemporain requiert une analyse différentiée dans cet univers de l’art, vu que cet aspect fut un objectif principal tout au long de l’histoire de l’art moderne et contemporain au Sénégal — bien que son sens changeât, ainsi que les pratiques artistiques et le public ciblé.
Las consideraciones críticas acerca del impacto de las bienales en las prácticas artísticas alrededor del mundo subrayan que éstas crean nuevas hegemonías: las bienales producen otro canon de arte contemporáneo a escala global. Su característica principal es la inserción del arte en la sociedad, dando primacía a la instalación y a las formas de arte participativo. Este artículo examina estos supuestos tomando en consideración el arte mostrado en el ámbito de Dak’Art Off, una iniciativa de artistas de Dakar que nace en oposición al evento principal de la Bienal, la Exposition internationale. Mientras que en este último espacio las instalaciones son preponderantes, las exhibiciones en Off muestran principalmente pinturas. Para entender esta discrepancia es necesario ver la historia del arte moderno después de la independencia de Senegal. Además, las aspiraciones de inserción social del arte contemporáneo requiere un análisis diferenciado para este “mundo del arte”, ya que este aspecto ha sido un objetivo a lo largo de la historia del arte moderno y contemporáneo en Senegal, aunque con significados, prácticas y públicos cambiantes.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Biennales, Dak’Art, art de biennale, monde de l’art de Dakar, aspirations sociales de l’art. Palabras claves: Bienales, Dak’Art, arte de bienal, mundo del’arte di Dakar, aspiraciones sociales del’arte. Keywords: Biennials, Dak’Art, biennial art, Dakar art world, art’s social aspirations
AUTHOR
THOMAS FILLITZ Dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna [email protected]
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Returning to Form: Anthropology, Art and a Trans-Formal Methodological Approach
Alex Flynn and Lucy Bell
1 This article focuses on cartonera publishers, small community-based collectives whose members make low-cost books from recovered materials in an explicit attempt to make both the consumption and production of literature accessible to wider society. Cartonera first emerged in Buenos Aires in the wake of the 2001 economic crisis, during which unemployment rates soared, leaving marginalised residents of the city to seek alternative means of supporting themselves and their families. Many took to the streets to become cartoneros (‘waste pickers’), sorting through the city’s daily waste stream, picking out metal, glass, paper, and cardboard to sell for recycling.
2 In 2003, the founding members of the first cartonera collective, Washington Cucurto, Javier Barilaro and Fernanda Laguna, were determined to find alternative ways of publishing books. Their criteria were simple: first, the crisis had made establishing a conventional publishing operation financially impossible, so any production method had to be extremely low cost; and second, they were committed to selling as many books as possible at an affordable price, thus challenging the notion of books as an upper middle-class commodity.1 This commitment was not just a social gesture, of course, but a plastic artistic proposition that in itself recalls different literary traditions of popular printing, from cheap books to DIY–zines (Piepmeier 2009). In this, their key artistic influence was the Belleza y Felicidad collective, a printing press and gallery founded by Laguna and her friend Cecilia Pavón that, since the late 1990s, had been publishing simple texts in the form of stapled photocopies (Palmeiro 2011).
3 With these guiding principles, their press, Ediciones Eloísa, began production in Laguna’s studio. What was unclear at the time, though, was how the counter-cultural, marginal and experimental texts that Ediciones Eloísa was publishing could find a broader connection to the social processes that were being practiced in the workspace. Laguna’s studio in Almagro, like much of Buenos Aires, was on the route of many cartoneros, and these figures would often interact with readings and events that were constantly taking
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place. At this point, Cucurto suggested that in terms of readily available cheap materials, cardboard was the obvious resource to work with and the cartonero, the figure who best represented the crisis. Driven by personal connections and collaborations, the collective began buying cardboard from the cartoneros at five times its market value and production commenced of hand-painted, cardboard-bound books in collaboration with the waste-pickers (Epplin 2009). In this manner, bringing the social forms present in their location into dialogue with their aesthetic intentions, Ediciones Eloísa irrevocably became Eloísa Cartonera.
4 Since 2003, this model has spread rapidly across Latin America and beyond. There are over 250 cartonera collectives today from Buenos Aires to New York, from Paris to Maputo, from Seoul to Seville, each with a unique way of publishing books. What all cartonera practitioners share, however, is a strong sense of collective belonging through the notion of cartonera, which refers to the publishers themselves and to the cardboard- bound books that they publish, as well as referring back to the waste-pickers who first inspired Eloísa Cartonera. The adjective cartonera, in turn, encompasses a number of common aesthetic and social practices: cartonera books are all made by hand and bound with recovered cardboard, which is intervened through different artistic techniques, from painting and drawing to collage and serigraphy; cartonera editions have limited print runs (generally between 50 and 120), and are often numbered to highlight their uniqueness as art objects; and cartonera publishers work with minority groups or marginalized communities to create new social relations and communities through their social and aesthetic practices.
5 Cartonera’s artistic proposition is thus deeply rooted in the social forms that these organisations have come to assume, creating a convergence of democratic politics and participatory aesthetics, literary forms and social formations. In this article, we put forward a methodological pathway for work between the social sciences and the humanities that is premised on this relation between social and aesthetic form. We focus on the ways these forms intersect and the implications this has for expanding an ethnographic methodology to capture the agency of different socio-aesthetic forms of production. We begin by describing in more detail Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher based in São Paulo that will be the ethnographic focus of this article. The interconnectedness of Dulcinéia’s location, production and practice is key to foreground, as is the impossibility, for the collective’s members, of separating any one element from another. We then present three theoretical propositions by Jacques Rancière (2004, 2009), Néstor García Canclini (2014) and Caroline Levine (2015), which open up crucial theoretical and methodological pathways, enabling us to re-examine art, literature and aesthetics not in isolation from, but rather in relation to, social and political processes. From our distinct positionalities in social anthropology and literary/cultural studies we discuss the methodological journey upon which we embarked in response to the challenge posed to us by cartonera publishing: how can ethnographic practice intersect with aesthetics in a mode which goes beyond the illustrative? How might we reconsider the kinds of outputs that ethnographic methods generally produce? We conclude by proposing what we term a ‘trans-formal’ approach embedded within emulation, offering an ethnographic example of how we put this into practice. Such a framework, we suggest, offers the possibility of researching and experimenting with contemporary cultural practices — located at the interstices of art, society and politics — in a way that departs not only from a different understanding of the relationship between ethnography and aesthetics, but also opens up new
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possibilities for research that is multi-disciplinary, transnational, horizontal and participatory.
Dulcinéia Catadora: Glicério
6 Based in the Glicério recycling cooperative in São Paulo, the Dulcinéia collective is composed of Lúcia Rosa, an artist, and three waste-pickers from the cooperative itself: Andréia Emboava, Maria Dias da Costa and Eminéia dos Santos. Founded in 2007, Dulcinéia’s poetry, prose and artists’ books emerge from workshops run in the cooperative, from collaborations with artists, as well as through projects with community groups. However, while Dulcinéia has undertaken many projects within wider communities, it is rooted very specifically to the Glicério cooperative and Lúcia told us many times how it would be impossible to imagine Dulcinéia Catadora in a different space: ‘The phenomenon was born with the catadores (waste-pickers in Brazilian Portuguese), and I never wanted to compromise on this, because I think this is the soul of Dulcinéia.’
7 This rootedness is striking given the practical difficulties in working from this location. Above the recycling coop traffic thunders down a four lane highway overpass, a constant flow on the Radial Leste, one of the principal arteries of the city. Every day refuse is brought here from all over the city, wheeled on hand pulled carts by members of the cooperative, the catadores, to be sifted, cleaned, sorted, crushed, packaged, and then sold on up the chain.
The Glicério recycling cooperative as seen from Dulcinéia Catadora’s workshop
Photo by Alex Flynn
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8 Built onto the perimeter wall are a row of structures used by the recycling cooperative as a meeting room, a bathroom, and finally the Dulcinéia workshop itself. Inside this cramped space is a waist-height trestle table and a large graffiti-style mural, the result of a previous collaboration. Shelves box in the space, on which the collective stores its stencils, tools, paper, stamps and all the other paraphernalia accumulated in creating a catalogue of 140 titles over a twelve years period. There is so little space in fact, that it is noticeable how the collective cleans up after each and every activity, placing every single item back into its unique place: the bradawls (agulhões), paper clips, box cutters (estiletes), metal rulers, paints, pots, brushes, etc. This is necessary not just to keep things organised, but also because Dulcinéia regularly uses this space for workshops, inviting members of the public, artists, university students and professors and other cartonera practitioners to co-create books here. In April 2018, for example, we found ourselves crammed into the space when Dulcinéia invited the Argentine publisher Biblioteca Popular Ambulante to work with them in order to create a co-edition destined for an exhibition in the North East of Brazil.
9 Both in the workshop and in the recycling coop itself, it is striking how the aesthetic of what Dulcinéia publishes is inspired by the space in which they are based. All around the Glicério coop are hand spray-painted stencils, the industrial, machined stencils of the cardboard itself, and the colourful labels that identify equipment as belonging to the Glicério recycling cooperative. These motifs echo throughout Dulcinéia’s books and when Lúcia, Andréia, Maria and Eminéia are cutting cardboard for book covers, they take care to select certain pieces to make sure that the industrial stencils are visible on the book covers they create. This way, Lúcia explained, ‘you know that the cardboard is reused and not somehow fake,’ that is, a representation, a mock-up of a very particular aesthetic that comes directly from the street.
A wall adjacent to the Glicério recycling cooperative and the cover of a book produced by Dulcinéia Catadora
Photos by Alex Flynn
10 Dulcinéia’s environment is interweaved through every stage of the production of their books, from the selection of the materials they use to bind their books to the designs and aesthetic forms that integrate the composition of the covers. These social forms of the space, including the very model of labour and recompense that the recycling cooperative operates, are integrated into Dulcinéia’s practice, directly informing the
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aesthetic forms with which Dulcinéia work. What is interesting about Dulcinéia however, and indeed cartonera more widely, is how this indivisibility operates in both senses, a specific ‘double-fold’, that works across these forms and in both directions. Dulcinéia’s aesthetic forms, informed by a specific context, extend beyond the Glicério coop and into other spaces, many times creating and shaping social forms. One such community in which the collective has worked is the occupied Hotel Cambridge project on which we have written elsewhere (Flynn 2018a, 2018b; Bell 2017b) and here we would like to describe in more detail just how the aesthetic informs the social, with an example of Dulcinéia Catadora’s work in the Morro da Providência community in Rio de Janeiro.
Dulcinéia Catadora: Além (beyond)
11 On 1 March 2013 a new museum was being inaugurated in the centre of Rio de Janeiro’s old town. The Museu de Arte do Rio, popularly known as MAR, is one of the centre pieces of a gigantic project of urban regeneration, an ongoing project that seeks to transform the city’s dilapidated port zone into a shiny new commercial, cultural and residential space. In front of a striking architectural design that unites a nineteenth century palace, an old police facility and the former central bus station, the queue to enter was huge. At the welcome ceremony, João Roberto Marinho, of the Marinho foundation with assets of at $30 billion, and the private stakeholder in the museum, smiled and made a play on the name MAR: ‘I invite everyone to come play and dive into this sea’. But of course, not everyone was welcome: all the tensions inherent in the construction of a project that had been accused of gentrification right from the start were on display: security was tight, and visitors were aware of the proximity of the nearby favelas, including Rio’s oldest, the Morro da Providência.
12 For the opening night, there were four exhibitions. One in particular, O Abrigo e O Terreno (Shelter and Land), directly addressed questions of inequality focusing on the ‘forces that come together and conflict in the urban, social and cultural transformations of the public and private space’.2 The show included many of the most significant artists in Brazil: Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Cláudia Andujar, and in amongst this prestigious list, Dulcinéia Catadora. The collective had been invited by curators Paulo Herkenhoff and Clarissa Diniz to develop an artistic collaboration with the neighbouring Morro da Providência, creating a link between the museum and the surrounding marginalised communities As such, the project was entirely in line with the theme of the exhibition. Nevertheless, some, including Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, were of the opinion that Dulcinéia’s inclusion was incongruous and politically, potentially disastrous. Paes even argued to have Dulcinéia removed from the exhibition but the curators stood firm.
13 To prepare for the exhibition, Dulcinéia conducted a yearlong series of workshops in the Morro da Providência, producing four texts, collectively written with residents, on the housing problems they faced and the risk of violence in their homes. On the eve of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Dulcinéia’s intervention brought about heightened attention to conditions in the favela, making plain how the house clearances for this mega-event and the imminent 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games were affecting the residents, materially, socially and psychologically. The four texts became integral to the opening night exhibition, with over 1,100 copies, painstakingly stitched, stapled, folded, glued and painted in the workshops, on display, and for distribution to visitors. In this way,
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cartonera practice created a temporary point of connection between the favela and Rio’s most prestigious new cultural space, between the words and worlds of the Morro’s residents, and the cultural and political elite of Brazil. Seeing, as James Elkins observes, is metamorphosis, not mechanism (1996: 12), and once these opening night visitors cast their eyes on the striking installation of hundreds of hand-painted cartonera books, in the symbolically resonant form of a wall, something small was put in motion: the feel of the rough texture of cardboard recovered from the street, the bold gouache colours that resignified an everyday disposable material, the neat stitching through irregular perforations that left no doubt that the books were handmade, unique, and came from somewhere very distant to a space like MAR.
Detail from the exhibition O abrigo e o terreno, Dulcinéia Catadora's installation to the right-hand side
Photo by Lúcia Rosa
14 Outside the museum, there were several queues. One was for the grandees and their entourage. Another was for the general public. At the third, the queue for artists participating in the exhibition, there was a source of confusion. Andréia, one of Dulcinéia’s members, had travelled from the Glicério recycling cooperative in São Paulo to attend. Later she told us: ‘They see us as drug addicts, as street-sleepers. They see us, but they pretend not to see us, we are invisible to them.’. There was confusion with security and she was removed: barred from her own work, her own project, her own artistic labour. Just in time, Lúcia arrived, and they joined forces. Together, determined to enter, they embodied cartonera: a practice based on intervening, perforating, challenging and reconfiguring the deeply entrenched social stigmas that characterise the contexts in which they work. At the artists’ entrance they demanded to be admitted and finally they were allowed to enter.
15 The exhibition, a form that is common to cartonera practice, became a type of battleground in which Dulcinéia’s aesthetic intentionality managed to subvert sedimented social forms of exclusion. First, the initial refusal to allow Andréia to enter the exhibition reveals how being a member of Dulcinéia Catadora undermined museum security’s decision to bar a catador, a waste-picker, from entering the space. Second, in the exhibition itself, MAR’s opening night public was confronted with an unexpected and, for some people, unwelcome, reminder of the Morro da Providência’s proximity, and the accompanying poetic and artistic agency of the people who lived within it.
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Threatened with eviction by the very scheme of urban ‘revitalization’ of which MAR was a key component, Dulcinéia’s intervention opened a possibility for the Morro’s residents to create their own architectural intervention in the space, a towering wall of cartonera books that was continually constituted and reconstituted as the museum’s public took a copy home, while the museum’s staff replenished the installation from the 1,100 editions created in community workshops. The very content of the text De Lá pra Cá, de Cá pra Lá (From there to here, from here to there) spoke powerfully of residents’ desires to know and transit the spaces of the city, and how they connected this concept of circulation with group dialogues on rights and citizenship.
Four Forms: Exhibitions, Workshops, Co-editions, Encontros
16 The double-fold of the indivisibility of social and aesthetic forms convinced us that we had to work closely with this expanded idea of form. We began to analyse in what forms cartonera took shape and how we might think about working within these parameters. From ethnography with Dulcinéia Catadora but also from the data of our wider project, which spans Mexico and Brazil, working with cartonera publishers in Guadalajara and Cuernavaca, and Minas Gerais respectively, our ethnography points toward four consistent forms through which cartonera publishers operate: exhibitions, workshops, co-editions and encontros (gatherings).
17 The exhibition at MAR was just one of many in which cartonera practitioners participated or have initiated. Dulcinéia itself came about as a result of the 2006 São Paulo Biennale ‘Como viver junto’ (How to live together) and has participated in exhibitions at MAC Niteroi as well as the SESC Pompéia Cultural Centre among others. Catapoesia, a cartonera publisher based in rural Minas Gerais, has created eight exhibitions in spaces such as libraries, community museums and even a local bar. La Cartonera, based in Cuernavaca, Mexico, organised an elaborate retrospective exhibition in the Galería La Barranca, within the Chapultepec park in March 2018, celebrating their ten-year anniversary as a collective, and have participated in exhibitions in Chile and France.
18 Cartonera exhibitions tend to be embedded in processuality and it is important to foreground that Dulcinéia’s installation at MAR was made possible by a year-long series of face-to-face sessions with residents of the Morro da Providência: it is impossible to overlook how workshops are a key organizational form for cartonera publishers. The affordances of workshops are multiple, employed as they are as modes of production and dissemination, as means of fulfilling pedagogical principles, of widening access to literature, and of working with communities and individuals. La Cartonera, for example, hold a weekly workshop session in which covers are co-created and new aesthetic forms are experimented with, while almost all of Catapoesia’s output is produced collectively in community workshop contexts. La Rueda, based in Guadalajara, has produced dozens of titles since 2009, and many of their books are made by hand in workshop contexts.
19 This kind of co-production is typical of the collective spirit that unites this otherwise loose publishing network and there is a marked emphasis on collaboration. One of the foundational texts that first sparked collaboration across diverse collectives was the
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2008 co-edition of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro’s Respiración del laberinto, a collection that was conceived at a cartonera encontro in Wisconsin. More recently Dulcinéia have published co-editions of O Gato Peludo in Spanish and English with the Peruvian collective Sarita Cartonera and Underwood portátil, by Mário Bellatin, with La Cartonera and Vento Norte Cartonero. The occasion for these kinds of collaborative opportunities is usually at an encontro, in all the extended Portuguese senses of the word (meeting, gathering, convergence, conference). An encontro is a method of networking, while also disseminating and celebrating work, regularly used by cartoneras. Most prominent is the yearly encontro cartonero in Chile, but there are many others, like the noches cartoneras, ‘cartonera nights’ (more recently renamed francachela cartonera, ‘cartonera revelry’) that accompany Guadalajara’s annual International Book Fair (FIL).
Theoretical Points of Inspiration: Context
20 These social forms, embedded within but also constituted by the aesthetic forms of cartonera publishing, emerged as we became better acquainted with our project partners. We became convinced that our project’s methodological framework should be developed in response to our experiences of cartonera publishing’s very particular double-fold, working with a two-way process that moves across aesthetic and social forms. Of particular interest was how cartonera practices can intervene to create spaces for transformation, and how in many cases this process is premised upon a disruption or dissonance, challenging consensual orders and posing alternatives. Jacques Rancière’s (2009) work on the politics of aesthetics is therefore interesting for us for a number of reasons. First, Rancière argues that aesthetics and politics cannot be separated, that aesthetics is the means through which the political is constituted and operates; second, politics, for Rancière, is not a party political system or a more traditional reading of power and hierarchy, but rather ‘the configuration of a specific space, the framing of a particular sphere of experience, of objects posited as common and as pertaining to a common decision, of subjects recognized as capable of designating these objects and putting forward arguments about them’ (Rancière 2009: 24). As Brian Larkin in his reading of Rancière has suggested, ‘politics takes place when those who occupy fixed positions outside a certain order decide to intervene within that order. It is the apportioning that determines who can participate in a system’ (Larkin 2018: 187); as Rancière states: ‘this distribution and redistribution of places and identities, this reapportioning of spaces and times, of the visible and invisible, and of noise and speech is what I call the distribution of the sensible’ (2009: 24-25). Artistic practices, in Rancière’s account, are thus not privileged means of understanding ‘reality’, but ‘“ways of doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility’ (Rancière 2004: 8). All art, in that sense, is political — and, conversely, ‘there is […] an “aesthetics” at the core of politics’ – because both are built on sensory perception, on ‘what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ (Rancière 2004: 8). Both are capable of producing equality and inequality, inclusion and exclusion.
21 Alongside its literary output, we understand cartonera as a type of artistic practice and indeed Javier Barilaro, one of Eloísa Cartonera’s founder, told us that he specifically conceived of Eloísa in this way: ‘Eloísa for me was always an art project with the choice
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of medium being editorial, the publishing of books. I thought a lot about Joseph Beuys' concept of social sculpture in relation to Eloísa Cartonera’.
22 However, Eloísa’s output clearly proposes certain challenges to art historical readings: its works have a defined price; they are co-authored in many senses; they are displayed many times in spaces beyond the typical environs of contemporary art circuits; and as a publisher, the gesture towards social intervention occurs over a period of decades. Thinking through this interstitial location and developing a previous line of thought on art practice at a series of intersecting axes (Flynn 2018a) we have worked with Néstor García Canclini’s (2014) concept of post-autonomous art, a theory that owes much to Rancière’s thought. García Canclini argues for a type of contemporary artistic practice that sits within a particular arrangement of porous frontiers that characterizes contemporary artistic production: With this word I refer to the process of last decades in which displacements from artistic practices based on objects to practices based on contexts have increased, up to managing inserting the works in mass media, urban spaces, digital networks and forms of social participation, where the aesthetic difference seems to disappear. (García Canclini 2014: 17).
23 For García Canclini, what was once theorised as a hermetic ‘system,’ or an art world with definable boundaries and conventions, can no longer be contained within these terms. Art is no longer a singular field with a limited range of actors, such as the idealized artist, the gallerist, or the curator, nor is it practised within a series of definable locations, such as the ‘white cube’ gallery, the museum, or the private space of the collectors. Post-autonomy, the condition that characterises work that exists in interstitial spaces, is an evitable consequence to a contemporary history of art that García Canclini characterises as ‘a paradoxical combination of behaviours to strengthen the independence of the art field [while] stubbornly trying to destroy the borders that demarcate it’ García Canclini 2014: 15). Processuality here is important: post-autonomy is premised on a movement away from artistic practices based on objects to practices based on contexts. Such work is intensely processual, as can be seen from Dulcinéia’s intervention in the Morro da Providência for example, and for García Canclini, processuality is ultimately how he imagines Rancière’s conviction in art’s potential to constitute new collective worlds to be realised.
24 Given the intersections between Rancière’s and García Canclini’s theories, it is unsurprising that both call for the development of new methodological approaches capable of overcoming the limitations of traditional methodologies from both the social sciences and also literary and art historical disciplines, even if their suggestions are somewhat speculative (Papastergiadis 2014). Tijen (2015) highlights how García Canclini’s work on art from an anthropological perspective is refreshing in that it chooses to focus specifically on form as opposed to the more common paths of price and market that continue to fascinate anthropologists and sociologists alike. And García Canclini himself points toward how the answers to these questions may be located in working more closely with artists themselves: ‘What roles do artists such as Antoni Muntadas, León Ferrari, and Carlos Amorales play when they reconsider these same ties of interdependence in their works and stagings?’ (García Canclini 2014: xvi). This last point is important to us, as we have become convinced that while methods need to be developed in dialogue with theoretical advances and debates, they also need to be thought through collaboratively alongside the people with whom we work, bearing in mind their specific, situated and reflexive artistic practices.
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Theoretical Points of Inspiration: Moving Forward
25 Caroline Levine’s pioneering formalist propositions helped us to approach our work on methodology with greater purpose and clarity. In Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), Levine argues: An attention to both aesthetic and social forms returns us to the very heterogeneity at the heart of form’s conceptual history. […] All of the historical uses of the term, despite their richness and variety, do share a common definition: “form” always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping. Here, then, is where my own argument begins: with a definition of form that is much broader than its ordinary usage in literary studies. Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference. (Levine 2015: 3; italics by the author)
26 Levine’s reinvigoration of formalism, based on a refusal to distinguish between literary and social form, allows us to construct an analysis of cartonera that acknowledges the double-fold that this practice enacts between different configurations of form. This repurposed approach furnishes a means of moving between textual analysis and ethnography, recognizing the potentiality of the broader etymology of the word ‘form’ (or ‘forma’) in Spanish and Portuguese, where it denotes not only shape, form or figure but also way or mode. Within this mode of reading, forms of action — ways of doing things, of changing things, of shaping experience — necessarily intersect with aesthetic forms — ways of shaping objects, words and experiences. Turning to cartonera texts as ‘theorization[s] of the social’ (Levine 2015: 134) enable us to research not on, but in processual dialogue with cartonera publishers as creative, reflexive, social actors; to overcome the obstacles within and between academic disciplines that lead us to focus on different issues in relative isolation (Chaddha and Wilson 2011); and thus engage with social practice, aesthetic form and collective imaginaries.
27 In order to develop methods that were true to this notion of artistic practices as ‘theorizations of the social,’ however, we needed to move away from a tendency, present in Levine’s work, to privilege the literary critic as a reader with VIP access to understanding forms — the ways they work, the possibilities they afford and their transformative potential. In order to do so, it was necessary to engage seriously with the post-critical turn that in recent years demands that researchers question a mode of reading and a dominant paradigm in the field of literary and cultural studies — critique — that has tended to ‘render the thoughts and actions of ordinary social actors as insufficiently self-aware or critical’ (Anker and Felski 2017: 14). As Anker and Felski point out, the possibility of separating between ordinary social actors and privileged critics has been fuelled by prevailing antagonistic and combative trends in the humanities, particularly since poststructuralism, which in spite of its radically democratic underpinnings has in fact fostered a ‘spirit of marginality’ and thus ‘kept serious thought sequestered in the ivory tower’ (ibid.: 19).
28 Levine (2015) arguably falls into the same trap when she locates formalism in academic — and specifically literary critical — approaches to form: ‘One has to agree to read for shapes and patterns, of course, and this is itself a conventional approach. But as Frances Ferguson argues, once we recognize the organizing principles of different literary forms – such as syntax, free indirect speech, and the sonnet – they are themselves no longer matters of interpretative activity or debate.’ (Levine 2015: 13)
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29 Levine thus anchors formalism in acts of reading rather than artistic acts or practices themselves, rooted in conventional literary critical approaches, missing out on the particularity of how these ‘shapes and patterns’ are locally and specifically contextualised and contingent. These in turn become normalizing perhaps recalling the work of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (2005), or even structuralist approaches, the universalizing notion that human societies and communities worldwide were organized by shared structures which has, as Levine (2015) acknowledges, undergone fierce criticism for ‘assuming that these patterns were natural and therefore inexorable’ (Levine 2015: 5).
30 Her approach leaves room for questions, which themselves pave the way for further methodological experimentation: how can generalizing formalist methodologies be reconciled with ethnographies located in concrete, ever-unfolding experience? What happens when aesthetics, which has often served as a tool for theoretical development, is considered as a research method in itself? To what extent can academics become involved in more creative, collaborative, participative, immersive activities, like co- curating exhibitions and media experiments (Lash 2007: 75), while retaining their credibility as rigorous researchers?
A Trans-formal Methodological Framework
31 The ‘trans-formal’ methodological framework which we have developed in response to our experiences of cartonera publishing is premised on the double-fold process that moves across aesthetic and social forms. The term ‘trans-formal’ is used to define a methodology able to operate across different aesthetic, literary, discursive, social, political, and material forms, across human and other-than-human forms, and across different kinds of form (shapes and actions, spatial configurations and temporal practices). On the one hand, this means approaching the social forms at play in cartonera practices through methods deriving from the aesthetic forms of cartonera practices — a departure from Levine but following the logic of her radical formalist proposition. On the other hand, it means reading the texts — post-critically — as interventions in, and creative reflections on, these social forms; in other words, we see the texts as generators of their own critical thought and theory.
32 The central pillar of our methodological framework is the notion of emulation. Emulation most commonly refers to efforts to match or surpass, typically by imitation: artists, artisans and architects for example may seek to emulate natural forms in their work, for example by invoking the Golden Ratio, a universal constant that has long been known and used. But emulation also has a more contemporary meaning. The second entry for emulation in the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘reproduc[ing] the function or action of (a different computer, software system, etc.)’3 which is the basis for Techopedia’s expanded definition and contextualisation: Emulation is the process of imitating a hardware/software program/platform on another program or platform. This makes it possible to run programs on systems not designed for them. Emulators, as the name implies, emulate the functions of one system on another. Thus, the second system behaves like the original system, attempting to exactly reproduce the external behaviors of the first system.4
33 Although we do not subscribe to the notion of hermetically separate, entirely different systems, the notion of a research team enacting an emulation through a commitment
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to processuality was interesting for us and we explored the possibilities of working in this manner. Through our fieldwork, literary analysis and conversations with project partners, we identified four forms through which cartonera practitioners operate but also make possible: exhibitions, workshops, co-editions and encontros. We then decided to emulate these forms in our own fieldwork, with three central justifications: first, that cartonera was a highly reflexive process and these were their already existing forms of investigation and research; second, that such an approach would directly contribute to the cartonera community, creating better conditions of horizontality throughout the project lifespan and beyond; third, and crucially, that in assuming these forms that traversed the social and the aesthetic, we would not only be researching, but also producing knowledge that originated in a space closer to cartonera’s positionality with regards to the distribution of the sensible.
34 In practice, this involved designing participatory, creative methods, which — crucially — were not laid out from the start, but rather emerged from months of work on the texts and dialogue with our partners in Mexico and Brazil. What emerged was a constellation of practice-based methods, co-productions with our cartonera project partners, which emulated the very exhibitions, workshops, co-editions and encontros that we had first come upon and in which we had enjoyed participating. What was particularly significant for us however, was conceptualizing method not only as assemblage, but also as an open-ended set of processes, and this has been crucial to developing these more horizontal, interdisciplinary approaches.
Exhibitions
35 As we have discussed, cartonera publishers commonly exhibit their work, and we decided to create an exhibition of cartonera work in São Paulo in close discussion with our cartonera project partners. The exhibition, which took place in the Casa do Povo cultural space from 1 November 2018 to 9 February 2019, was the largest exhibition of cartonera work to date, featuring over 350 books from thirty-five different cartonera collectives. Amongst works from Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Germany and France, our four project partners’ books were specifically foregrounded, along with works from the publishers Yiyi Jambo and Eloísa Cartonera. The exhibition also included four short films, documenting different methods of constructing cartonera books and a longer documentary by the filmmaker Isadora Brant. The production process for this film expanded our ethnography in unexpected ways: we travelled to Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro as well as across São Paulo to gather materials and as a consequence interviewed actors which otherwise we might not have come across. The exhibition was co-curated by Alex Flynn and Beatriz Lemos and the curatorial process occurring between an anthropologist and a full-time curator provoked many interesting points of similarity, as well as points of disjuncture. As discussed elsewhere (Flynn 2019), curating an exhibition offered an interesting parallel to traditional ethnography.
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The staircase module, itself an emulation of the Casa do Povo's entrance staircase with area for seating built into the display.
Photo by Alex Flynn
36 First, the presential, processual nature of work that invites one actor to accompany the other in their day-to-day practice lead to the development of affective and embodied relations. Second, the realisation of a field of work in which there are multiple actors, each with unique spheres of practice, to whom we had diverse responsibilities, required us to mediate diverse positionalities. And third, there was a strong emphasis on synthesizing a conceptual narrative from within (although not necessarily about) these positionalities and multiple actors, the construction of a body of work, and the inherent reflection that this suggests. We began with a goal to better understand how cardboard publishers sought to transition a literary work into a visual sphere and the processual nature of constructing a complex exhibition allowed us to gain a privileged insight into how the post-autonomous literature of Ludmer’s (2007) conception — a literature that traverses borders being at once outside and inside — enters into dialogue with aesthetics, exhibition design, and importantly for our work, politicized public space. One of the key driving principles of the exhibition design was that all the books on display should be accessible, that is, not protected by -glass from the visitors’ hands and touch. As a project team we wanted visitors to be able to engage phenomenologically with the books and the exhibition catalogue echoed this idea. Printing two booklets, one in Spanish, the other in Portuguese, recognising cartonera’s pan-Latin-American intentionality, we created a workstation with cardboard from the Glicério recycling cooperative, paints, paintbrushes, boxcutters etc — in short, a typical cartonera workshop — so that visitors to the exhibition, in taking home the catalogue could create their own cartonera book, supervised by the public programme team. Over the duration of the exhibition, over 300 catalogues were created in this manner allowing us to work alongside people encountering cartonera for the first time, both literally and affectively.
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Workshops
37 A key part of the exhibition design was to think of the books as points of potential interaction, thus making possible a space of relations and exchanges. While this design counted on a certain didactic content, such as the tutorial videos and the documentary film explaining where cartonera had come from, it was our intention that the space should essentially function to welcome visitors to come in and sit down, pick up a book, and come to their own understanding of the cartonera phenomenon. We also thought of the books as enacting a type of proto-cartonera library, as we were creating a concentration of cartonera literature never before seen in a public space. It seemed to us that just as a university library would be a starting point for many research processes, a cartonera library could function in the same way, although importantly, with different basic rules of access, copyright and interaction. As such the workshops articulated by the exhibition’s public programme team, directed by Graziela Kunsch, were an integral part of what we hoped the exhibition could achieve, and in doing so, perhaps expand on what an ethnographic process might not encompass.
38 The public programme organised various activities, three of which we will highlight here. First, Dulcinéia Catadora led three workshops in the exhibition space exploring immigrant women’s perspectives of São Paulo. The participating group, compromising representatives of three different feminist and LBT (Lesbian Bisexual Transgender) collectives, worked together to create a series of texts that spoke to their experience of living in São Paulo. Over the three sessions, the participants created a cartonera book of these short texts, which through a complex series of folds, became an A2 placard of protest to be used in a march following the third session. Second, in the process of working throughout the exhibition, two members of the public programme team created their own cartonera publisher, Sin Fronteira Cartonera, echoing how Dulcinéia Catadora came into being during Eloísa’s workshops at the 2006 São Paulo Biennale.
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The workshop Iy mũn ku mãk pax investigated the silencing of indigenous languages and histories.
Photo by Alex Flynn
39 Over a series of sessions, they produced six books, including Dialogos, reflexiones y desafios en Colombia: Hacia un feminismo popular (Dialogues, reflections and challenges in Colombia: Towards a popular feminism), a text organised by the Colombian feminist collective Red de Mujeres de La Sabana. And finally, to close the exhibition, we organised the event Iy mũn ku mãk pax, an event designed to bring into focus languages spoken in Brazil beyond those of the colonizers, Portuguese and Spanish. This event took place over two days and, inspired by the bi-lingual texts of Yiyi Jambo in the exhibition that create a deft interplay between Portunhol Selvagem, Portuguese and Guarani, the event sought to work with themes of how colonial structures have systemically silenced indigenous languages and literature. Juanito Cusicanki and Beatriz Morales of Aymara and Quechua ethnicity respectively, were invited to present their indigenous alphabets, based on their oral knowledge. In the second workshop, representatives of Guarani, Pankararu and Baniwa peoples spoke about their experiences of state kidnapping and the following imposition of Portuguese on their communities. Contextualised by these moving accounts, the title of the event came to hold a particular significance: from the shamanic chant maxakali / tikmũ'ũn, Iy mũn ku mãk pax meaningss ‘my beautiful voice’.
Co-editions
40 Workshops, as described above, many times generate cartonera books, either in terms of their format (the binding process), their artwork (the painted covers), or their content (the text themselves). Unsurprisingly, given the collective spirit that unites this otherwise loose publishing network, collaborative publications are a hallmark of cartonera literature. We decided that to take cartonera seriously as a form of knowledge
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production, as a research project, we should also publish in cartonera form. This was again a process of emulation premised on the double-fold notion of form: first, publishing in cartonera form meant engaging in the social form of co-creation, which meant revealing all the accumulated knowledge built into an academic research process to our project partners, including executive summaries, budgets, research questions and stated outputs; second, engaging with the aesthetic of cartonera, understanding how many pages could be bound by different types of stitching, working with our texts beyond the two dimensional interface of a word processing programme, and understanding that what we wrote would reach a radically different audience from an academic output located behind a paywall, altered what we wrote and how, giving us a deep insight into the writing and editing processes of cartonera production.
41 The project worked with two principal co-editions. First, we co-published a text entitled Cartoneras in translation, with our four principal project partners, Catapoesia, Dulcinéia Catadora, La Cartonera and La Rueda. This text included contributions from each publisher, and an afterword, co-authored by the research team. Each text was translated from Spanish or Portuguese to English, and the colophon, afterward and contents page appears in three languages. Not only contributing to this text, but also accompanying its production revealed the highly specific nature of cartonera publication, and how a production method in Mexico could be entirely out of sync with the equivalent process in Brazil. The second text we have co-edited is an extension of a Dulcinéia model, entitled Vocabulario Vivido, an alternative dictionary built on subjective lived experiences rather than more typical normative definitions. While Lúcia Rosa used this model to explore the experiences of moradores (dwellers) living in the Hotel Cambrige Occupation in São Paulo, we have employed it as a means of engaging with key words from cartonera discourse from the standpoint of their diverse experiences rather than from a reductive and potentially colonial perspective.
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A text, an object of protest — Somos mulheres imigrantes
Photos by Alex Flynn
42 This Vocabulario cartonero (2019) is the result of a series of conversations with our project partners, and while it provides insight into the elements that connect and distinguish the collectives, obtaining this type of data was not our principal motivation. Rather, we suggest that Vocabulario Vivido is a form that has emerged organically constituting a reflexive means of research from within cartonera practice itself. In working with the notion of co-edition, we therefore seek to not just adopt and emulate a mode of publishing, but also highlight how in engaging with the forms of project partners, many times the best modes of research are already located within their everyday practice, or, as Lúcia Rosa dryly commented ‘parece que o feitiço virou contra o feiticeiro’ (it seems the spell has returned to act against he who cast it).
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Cartoneras em tradução: to the left, Catapoesia's edition, to the right, Dulcinéia Catadora’s.
Photo by Alex Flynn
Encontros
43 Cartoneras em tradução was launched in the week following the opening of the exhibition at the Casa do Povo. It was timed to coincide with the first event to be held in the exhibition space, an encontro cartonero, a two-day event to which we invited cartonera practitioners from various cities across Mexico and Brazil as well as Buenos Aires, New York and London. As we discussed above, encontros are a method of networking, disseminating, and celebrating, regularly used by cartoneras across Latin America. This encontro was designed to fulfil a similar purpose and it echoed a smaller event we had organised in March 2018 in Cuernavaca. Both encontros sought to bring cartonera practitioners into face-to-face dialogue, a significant difficulty within cartonera networks due to the cost of travel in Latin America in relation to the minimum wage.5 The encontro was therefore an opportunity to fund practitioners and fortify existing networks, creating an opportunity for people to catch up, exchange and sell books, and make connections and discuss new projects. We organised a series of roundtable discussions in collaboration with our four project partners to stimulate conversation on cartonera.
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Cartonera encontro, São Paulo, November 2018.
Photo by Alex Flynn
44 Together we discussed the importance of actions and interventions in wider society, how and why cartonera had managed to spread across the world, where people felt cartonera had come from and where it was going, and the tension between the cartonera book and the status of art object it might assume in an exhibition. As well as fuelling a number of productive discussions around the topics of cartonera aesthetics and politics, both the encontro in Cuernavaca and that of São Paulo generated a number of collaborations and co-editions: a collection of manifestos that resulted the discussions in Cuernavaca; and in São Paulo, a collection of political texts, entitled BR, responding directly to the 2018 victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil’s presidential elections. In organising these events, our intention was not to read any such texts produced critically, but as modes of critique in themselves, which both underline and problematize the form of the encontro as a mode of social and aesthetic action.
45 This forum was also an important opportunity for the wider cartonera community to question us as a research team and seek clarification on our motives for becoming involved with cartonera. At the beginning of the research project Pensaré cartonera, a publisher based in San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico, had been forthright in their critique of our research, posting publicly in the largest cartonera forum of their experiences with our academia: We decided to share our reflection so that it can serve, on the one hand, as a mirror and reflection on the relations between Academia and Cartoneras, which seem to be increasing. We must also be aware that in many cases — perhaps in this case — these relations have consequences on concrete bodies, on broader social relations, and foster the hierarchical system of oppressions already in play. (Facebook 2018)
46 The encontro in São Paulo provided a valuable opportunity to invite a representative from Pensaré, amongst other cartonera publishers, to discuss these specific questions in
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a broader, public forum. This direct communication helped us as a project to reflect on the hierarchical relations that indeed, structure such interactions, and the structural limitations that acted upon our attempts at horizontality, as European, white researchers, with contracts at powerful British institutions of higher education. Perhaps more than anything else, the form of the encontro allowed us to better appreciate the complex inequalities and hierarchical knowledge production relations that are at play in the interface between cartonera publishing and a wider world.
Conclusion
47 As we outline above, social and aesthetic forms do not operate exclusively of one another, instead they are involved in a complex double fold, each arranging and ordering the other. The social forms of cartonera, including diverse models of labour and methods of production, are integrated into each publisher’s practice, directly informing the aesthetic forms with which they work. Equally, each cartonera publisher’s aesthetic forms, informed by a specific context, extend beyond their sites of production and into many other spaces, reordering and reconfiguring the broader social forms that characterise the communities in which they are based.
48 To design a methodology that recognises such interdependent oscillation, we started with an expanded notion of form and sought to identify the key forms through which cartonera operated. Anthropology has long worked comfortably with social forms, but this project makes plain that aesthetic forms are co-constitutive of the dominion in which anthropology has established itself, the social: thus, to ignore aesthetics’ power to reorder is to overlook a key vector of sociality. This realization prompted us to engage with a process of emulation: in discussion with our project partners, we took on board the forms of cartonera and deployed them to structure our own research enquiry in order to work directly with cartonera’s existing methods for research, make a direct contribution to the cartonera community, and crucially, not only research, but also produce, knowledge from a hybrid positionality that fundamentally redistributes places and identities within the order of researcher and researched. In this manner, we engaged with both the production and consumption of cartonera texts and objects, contextualising their potential effects and affective potential through the socio- material forms of cartonera practices in which they were embedded.
49 While working in this manner demonstrated our commitment to moving away from twentieth century model of ethnographic research, we accept that like Derrida’s democracy (1994, 1997), horizontality is something we strive towards but must necessarily fail at, and therefore strive towards all the more. As researchers, we have been made constantly — and sometimes painfully — aware of the difficulties, if not impossibility, of achieving horizontality between our work as researchers working on funded projects supported by higher-education institutions and funding bodies in the Global North, and the work of social actors operating in complex contexts in the Global South, either lacking or refusing (on political grounds) institutional or state support. What our approach has given us however, is a practical pathway to carry out research that departs from Rancière’s (2004, 2009) conviction in the centrality of aesthetics to politics. And perhaps beyond the concrete benefits of emulation and understanding another’s enquiry in an affective, embodied sense, it is in working to distribute and
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redistribute places and identities through the unique configurative properties of an expanded notion of form, that our approach can offer a broader contribution.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books and articles
Anker, Elizabeth S. and Rita Felski. 2017. Critique and Postcritique. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Bell, Lucy. 2017b. Recycling Materials, Recycling Lives: Cardboard Publishers in Latin America. In Literature and Sustainability: Concept, Text and Culture. A. Johns-Putra, J. Parham and L. Squire, eds. Pp. 84-106. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Benedict, Ruth. [1934] 2005. Patterns of Culture. Boston: Mariner Books.
Bilbija, Ksenija and Paloma Celis-Carbajal, eds. 2009. Akademia Cartonera. Madison: Parallel Press.
Chaddha, Anmol, and William. J. Wilson. 2011. “Way Down in the Hole”: Systemic Urban Inequality and The Wire. Critical Inquiry 38(1): 164-188.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994 Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins. London and New York: Verso.
Elkins, James 1996. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Epplin, Craig. 2009. Theory of the Workshop: César Aira and Eloísa Cartonera. In Akademia Cartonera. Ksenija Bilbija and Paloma Celis-Carbajal, eds. Pp. 53-72 Madison: Parallel Press.
Flynn, Alex. 2018a. Contemporary art in the Global South: Occupation // participation // knowledge. In An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors. Thomas Fillitz and Paul van der Grijp, eds. Pp. 179-195. London et al.: Bloomsbury Academics.
Flynn, Alex. 2018b. Reconfigurando a cidade: arte e ocupação no Hotel Cambridge em São Paulo. Revista Plural 25(2): 20-45.
Flynn, Alex. 2019. On Anthropology, On Curation. In The Anthropologist as Curator. Roger Sansi, ed. Pp. 173-194. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
García Canclini, Néstor. 2014. Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society without a Story Line, trans. David Frye. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Larkin, Brian 2018. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure. In The Promise of Infrastructure. Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, eds. Pp 175-202 Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Lash, Scott. 2007. Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation? Theory, Culture and Society 24(3): 55-78.
Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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Ludmer, Josefina. 2007. Literaturas postautónomas. Ciberletras 17. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ ciberletras/v17/ludmer.htm (accessed February 14, 2018).
Palmeiro, Cecilia. 2011. Desbunde y felicidad: de la cartonera a Perlongher. Buenos Aires: Título.
Papastergiadis, Nikos. 2014. A Breathing Space for Aesthetics and Politics: An Introduction to Jacques Rancière. Theory, Culture and Society 31(7-8): 5-26.
Piepmeier, Alison. 2009. Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism. New York: New York University Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum.
Rancière, Jacques. 2009. Aesthetics and its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Rosa, Lúcia. 2017. Vocabulario vivido. São Paulo: Dulcinéia Catadora.
Tunali, Tijen. 2015. Book Review. Néstor García Canclini. Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society Without a Story Line. Aesthetic Investigations 1(2): 336-338.
NOTES
1. This connotation stems from the fact that across Latin America books are extremely expensive, for example, the Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities by Mary Romero and Eric Margolis (2005), costs more via the largest online Brazilian bookseller than a full month’s minimum wage in São Paulo. 2. O ABRIGO E O TERRENO: arte e sociedade no Brasil I. Available online: https:// www.museudeartedorio.org.br/pt-br/exposicoes/o-abrigo-e-o-terreno (accessed 18 January, 2019). 3. Definition available online: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/emulate (accessed 6 October 2019). 4. Definition available online: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4787/emulation. (accessed 18 February 2019). 5. For example, the flights from Guadalajara to São Paulo for the encontro cost the equivalent of 284 days of a Mexican minimum wage; the equivalent period of minimum wage in the UK would be worth £17,487.
ABSTRACTS
This article puts forward a methodological pathway for work between anthropology and art that is premised on the relation between social and aesthetic form. It draws on the authors’ work with cartonera publishers in Latin America, small community-based collectives whose members make low-cost books from recycled cardboard in an explicit attempt to make both the consumption and production of literature accessible to wider society. We begin by describing Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher based in São Paulo that is the ethnographic focus of this article.
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We then present three theoretical propositions, which enable us to analyse not in isolation from, but rather in relation to, social and political processes, asking how ethnographic practice can intersect with aesthetics in a mode which goes beyond the illustrative. We conclude by proposing what we term a ‘trans-formal’ methodological approach based on a method of ‘emulation’, opening up new possibilities for research that is multi-disciplinary, transnational, horizontal and participatory.
Cet article propose une approche méthodologique centrée autour des sciences sociales et humaines afin d’’étudier les relations entre formes sociales et esthétiques. Cette contribution est fondée sur le travail des éditeurs cartonera en Amérique Latine : il s’agit de petits collectifs dont les membres produisent des livres bons marchés à partir de papiers cartons, afin de rendre la production et la consultation de littérature accessible à un public plus large. Dans une première partie nous procédons à une description ethnographique de Dulcinéia Catadora, un éditeur de cartonera basé à São Paulo. En questionnant comment la pratique ethnographique peut s’entrecouper avec l’esthétique au-delà de l’illustratif, nous présentons par la suite trois propositions théoriques grâce auxquelles nous analysons cartonera dans ses interactions sociales et politiques. Nous proposons ainsi une approche ‘trans-formale’ qui est fondée sur l’émulation, et permet de nouvelles recherches pour une recherche pluridisciplinaire, transnationale, horizontale et participative.
Este artículo presenta una propuesta metodológica para el trabajo entre la antropología y las artes que se basa en la relación entre la forma social y la forma estética. Parte del trabajo de los autores con los editores cartonera en América Latina. Éstos son pequeños colectivos comunitarios cuyos miembros fabrican libros de bajo coste a partir de cartón reciclado en un intento explícito de hacer que el consumo y la producción de literatura sean accesibles para la sociedad en general. Comenzamos describiendo a Dulcinéia Catadora, una editora de cartonera de São Paulo que es el foco etnográfico de este artículo. Luego presentamos tres proposiciones teóricas que nos permiten analizar los procesos sociales y políticos no de manera aislada, sino más bien en relación, preguntando cómo la práctica etnográfica puede cruzarse con la estética en un modo que va más allá de lo ilustrativo. Concluimos proponiendo lo que llamamos un enfoque metodológico "trans-formal", basado en un método de "emulación", que abre nuevas posibilidades para una investigación multidisciplinaria, transnacional, horizontal y participativa.
INDEX
Keywords: aesthetics, politics, form, methodology, trans-formal, cartonera, Latin America Palabras claves: estética, política, metodología, trans-formal, cartonera, América Latina Mots-clés: esthétique, politique, forme, méthodologie, trans-formalisme, cartonera, Amérique latine
AUTHORS
ALEX FLYNN University College London, Dept. of Anthropology [email protected]
LUCY BELL University of Surrey, School of Literature and Languages
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A Journey from Virtual and Mixed Reality to Byzantine Icons via Buddhist Philosophy Possible (Decolonizing) Dialogues in Visuality across Time and Space
Paolo S. H. Favero
1 From Asia to America, Europe to the Middle East we are today witnessing to the shaping up of a world progressively more and more devoted to separation. Borders, walls and fences are being rebuilt, identities reconstructed in terms of principles of exclusion enacted at the expenses of those who are forced to migrate. Societies and cultures are increasingly being envisioned as ‘walled’ (Khosravi 2018) and calls for the rights of those who ‘were there first’ are dominating the debates of many rich countries. In this movement, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are pulled apart and unity is becoming a chimera, slowly appearing as a ghost from a distant past. We have no doubt entered post-globalization, an era of separation between countries, individuals and between ourselves and what surrounds us. In parallel to these dramatic changes we are however witnessing to a counter-tendency, located mainly in the world of emerging technologies, of digital visual image-making practices. The popularity of virtual, mixed1 and augmented reality (from here onwards VR, MR and AR) of 360 degree and other forms of life-logging and plenoptic image-practices seem to pull in the opposite direction. They speak of a desire (simultaneously new and ancient) for unity, for trespassing of the divide between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘self’ and the world. Such desire runs as a continuum in the history of art across time and place, and images today are more than ever an expression of this. Claiming their right to become an active part in our lives, images have abandoned the dominating duty to exclusively portray and represent, entering instead a terrain dominated by notions of ‘presencing’ and empathy, of contemplation and transformation. In line with what Wassily Kandinsky (1989) wrote long ago with reference to the duty of art, ‘present images’ (Favero 2018, see below) seem to be less interested in mirroring the world than in functioning as a prophecy, of providing us with a beacon for a different way of visualising and approaching the world in which we live. This article aims to address this shift and the
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conceptual continuity that underpins it. Focussing on the world of VR and MR art and documentary practices, I aim to offer insights into the possible exchanges (conscious and not) that make up their present existence, functioning and meaning. Through an approach aiming at ‘decolonizing’ knowledge I will in this text juxtapose these hyper- modern, ‘avant-gardish’ late-capitalist, image-making practices with an ancient, pre- modern visuality, that of the painted (Byzantine) icon. The debate on the decolonisation of film canons and visual culture is today indeed a leading topic in the social sciences and humanities. I believe that it is important to push this approach beyond the mere analysis and observation of ‘other’, ‘non-Western’ ways of entering the visual field (which often occurs within the space of Western hegemonic visuality). Instead, turning this position upside down, we should aim at incorporating into our analysis of Western, late-capitalist visual practices those epistemological assumptions that underpin other’ visualities. My attempt is to explore the extent to which the insights gathered from the analysis of the visuality of Byzantium (but also Hindu) icons can help us enact a grounded rethinking of the assumptions that guide hegemonic (Western) approaches to the world of images and especially of emerging digital visual worlds. The reflections on Buddhist epistemology that I will insert in this paper take this challenge further attempting at showing the extent to which the introduction of a different epistemology can provide us with a new language for analysing and describing this emerging terrain. Underpinning my analysis is also a claim of continuity in ambition in the field of immersive images. VR and MR express, albeit by means of different techniques, a similar desire for immersion of that which characterizes other (more ancient) visual regimes. As a consequence, the images that circulate in contemporary digitised habitats, rather than taking us into a futuristic unknown territory can also help us to re-centralise, by means of the digital, ways of engaging with visual representations that can be found elsewhere and ‘elsewhen.’
2 This article will begin with a brief portrait of the contemporary worlds of digital visualities. I will then proceed to offer two examples from what I consider to be revealing VR/MR experiences. From there I will proceed to analyse the visuality that characterises religious icons and, finally, reflect upon the dialogues across these different visualities. My hope is that these passages may help us looking at contemporary, digitally produced, emerging arts and documentary visual practices with new eyes.2
Background
3 A quick look into the broader contemporary (digital) world of image-making, image- viewing and images-sharing practices shows how images today emerge as being much more than matters of representation and narration. From Facebook to Instagram, from 3D printing to VR, MR, and AR images seem to do much more than ‘illustrating,’ ‘reflecting,’ or ‘capturing’ the world out there. They rather concur in its very crafting. The images travelling in contemporary digital habitats create relations and materialities. They are increasingly multisensory and participated hence stitching together users with each other and with the world that surrounds them. A banal example could be the images that circulate on Facebook. Loaded with metadata indicating when and where and with whom they were taken, and augmented also by a large amount of written and visual dialogues, such images materialise communities and
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life-trajectories. If we once upon a time addressed the act of making pictures (or more specifically of taking photographs) as an act of killing,as Barthes (1993) would have it, or of preserving the past for posterity - for example Bazin’s (1960) idea of photographs as being obsessed by a ‘mummy complex’- images seem today to cling onto the present moment. As Mizuko Ito (2005) anticipated long ago in her path-breaking essay on MMSs, images are calling for ‘visual co-presence.’ They are increasingly made to share the present of the image-maker with that of a viewer located elsewhere. Images are ‘present’ in today’s digital habitats, I have recently suggested (Favero 2018); they simultaneously foreground ‘presence’ and the present moment.
4 With the arrival of digital technologies images have therefore become more than ever paradoxical objects. They are invested by a duty of doing many (and at times contradictory) things at once: of representing and presenting, of presencing, crafting and connecting. This ambition, I would like to suggest, is, however, far from unique to our epoch. In many cultural contexts (of the past as well of the present, here as well as in faraway places) images have had this function. In Antiquity, as well in many religious contexts, images often functioned as portals, two-way gates allowing an exchange between human beings and the world surrounding them. In relation to Byzantine- inspired imagery, for instance, Russian monk, art historian and theologian Pavel Florensky (1977) wrote, in the early nineteenth century, that an image is ‘not only a window through which the visages depicted in them appear, but also a gate from which these enter the sensible world’ (Florensky 1977: 69). And in the context of Aboriginal Australia, Elizabeth Edwards (2005) has shown how photographs function as relational objects. Central to the act of articulating histories that have been suppressed, photographs constitute an element in a much broader performance. They are held, caressed, stroked, sung: they become sound, the sounds of voices, of songs, of memories verbalised as stories; an oral history materialising the relationships between specific individuals who engage each other through such images. They are ‘things that matter’ (Edwards 2005: 28) not just visual depictions. Similarly, in the context of Hindu devotional practices too, representations of the Gods are considered to be direct emanations of God. As implied in the notion of darshan, the act of looking is, in this context, an act of being looked at, an on-going inter-penetration leading to a full immersion in the image. As Diana Eck (1998) expresses it: ‘because the image is a form of the supreme lord, it is precisely the image that facilitates and enhances the close relationship of the worshipper and God and makes possible the deepest outpouring of emotions in worship’ (Eck 1998: 46). They are guided by the logic of what Christopher Pinney has called ‘corpothetics’ (2001), i.e. an ‘embodied, corporeal aesthetics’ which stands in opposition ‘to “disinterested” representation, which over-cerebralizes and textualizes the image’ (Pinney 2001:8). They hence foreground efficacy and presence rather than realist representation and associate the act of seeing to that of touching. As Lawrence Babb (1981) suggests, seeing is in this context an ‘outward-reaching process’ (Babb 1981: 393) that directly engages the object seen. Seeing is a material exchange between the viewer and the viewed, one involving not just the eyes but the whole body. One becomes ‘what one sees’ (Babb 1981: 297) in an act that could probably be inserted within the logic of ‘contagion’ and hence of (‘sympathetic’) magic (Frazer 2009).
5 I want to claim however that these parallel visualities have been sidelined, especially in the West, by hegemonic narratives of realist representation and by linguistic reductions. Starting from the latter, Barbara Maria Stafford (1996) in her writings
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about surfaces attacks the ‘totemization of language as a godlike agency’ (Stafford 1996: 5) that characterizes Western culture. She suggests that Saussure’s schema ‘emptied the mind of its body’ reducing images to ‘encrypted messages requiring decipherment’ (Stafford 1996: 6).3 Regarding the latter, realist representation relies on the conventions that were established by Renaissance geometrical perspective. Grounded in the West’s growing obsession with rationality, lines and mathematics, and mirroring Descartes hierarchization of the relation between the senses and the intellect, geometrical perspective came to constitute, to use Martin Jay’s (1988) terms, a ‘scopic regime,’ i.e. a dominant theory of vision. Conventionally metaphorized with the help of a window allowing to measure a particular view, perspective created a strict separation between the observer and the observed, the self and the world. ‘Pushing’ the viewers out of the image, it made reciprocity impossible allowing them instead to control the image (rather than to situate themselves within it). While not representing the complete spectrum of images produced by Western artists (below I will go further in depth with this by means of a number of examples) I still claim that geometrical perspective constitutes a kind of hegemony, to use a Gramscian (1971) term, that has progressively marginalized other kinds of approaches to the world of images. It is true then, in line with what Georges Didi-Huberman (2003) said, ‘we ask too little of images’ Didi-Huberman 2003: 33). In order to explore this further let me now offer a couple of examples gathered form the world of contemporary art and documentary.
VR and MR Art and Documentary
6 VR, MR and 360-degree images are today emerging with a broad appeal. They are employed in commercial, artistic and therapeutic settings increasingly exploring that space in between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’ (Milgram et al. 1994).
7 Let me offer two examples. Draw Me Close is an MR ‘experience’ (this is the term used in the official presentation of the performance) authored by award-winning playwright and filmmaker Jordan Tannahill.4
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Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zokAxgRNYs
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Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrpUvRSb2E0
10 Using a combination of hand trackers and VR goggles this play is a one-on-one performance. One at a time the viewers are exposed, in a small room, to an intimate encounter, in VR, with the mother of the director who passed away of cancer when he was a young boy. The performance stages his distant memories through an actress wearing sensors. She stages live the movements and gestures that the viewers receive in the shape of black-and-white drawings in the VR goggles. I have never had a chance to experience the performance directly but have engaged with the testimonies of viewers. And indeed, I could not but notice the short-circuit that this experience
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generates in them. Entering a VR space filled with animated drawings viewers are suddenly asked to abandon the realm of ‘real life’ experience and enter that of simulated storytelling. This movement becomes at first tangible when the viewers are asked to draw on a canvas. Watching their own drawings become colourful traces within a simulated environment they start closing in the gap between the virtual and the actual. The real short-circuit happens, however, at a later moment, when the mother (the actress) eventually asks them whether she can hug them. A disrupting moment, this instance brings even further the virtual in direct contact with the actual, physically mediated experience, of the viewers’ own bodies.
11 I experienced a similar short-circuiting when viewing 6X9, a VR experience produced by the British newspaper, The Guardian, and directed by Francesca Pennetta.5
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Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcsxUbVyZA&t=13s
13 A simulated experience of solitary confinement 6X9 inserts the viewers, upon entrance in the VR space, into a tiny, greyish room. When I entered this experience, I found myself sitting on a bed in one of the corners of the room. The room was only semi-lit but I could detect a few objects in the space. Opposite to me there was a door with a tiny window secured by metal bars. I do not remember all the details so clearly. However, I can recall that, at a certain point, I noticed the book and the magazine laying on a shelf next to me and that I heard voices coming in from the outside. As time passed by, being in the room became progressively disturbing. At one point, the room shook; the lights went off and on again. The voices I heard from outside the door became louder and more pervasive. The warning of a possible moment of panic started to rise in me: suffering from claustrophobia I was getting warm and started to sweat. By mistake I managed to interrupt that moment by touching the table in front of me in the room that was hosting the VR experience. ‘Visible’ only to my hands this table brought me into a kind of split: my hands and my eyes anchored me respectively in two different, perhaps parallel worlds. My mind and body complex was suddenly torn. Where was I or rather who and what was I? Where was my body now that the sweat really seemed to belong to the virtual space and my hands to the actual one? Was I the person wearing VR or the convict in the cell? Or maybe both? Should I trust my eyes or my hands?
14 Both these experiences seem to direct our attention to the space in between self and other, or better between self and not-self. Through the multiple short-circuits I described above we are interrogated about these boundaries and also led to reflect further also on our perception of the relation between body and mind, and on our awareness of the relativity of the self. Let me open a brief parenthesis here. I believe that in order to grasp such insights we ought to abandon the terrain of Western dualistic epistemologies. We may in fact get a better understanding by adopting the insights on perception that characterize for instance, Buddhist philosophy.6 It is not within the scope of this contribution to enter fully into this debate but let me only point out that the principle of non-duality or of double negation -which is one of the pillars of Buddhist thought (Shaw 1978)_ can help us addressing this in-between space, this being neither ‘self’ nor ‘not-self’. Avoiding reductions to binary oppositions
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Buddhist philosophy suggests that between such opposite poles we may also contemplate the possibility of being simultaneously both ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ and also ‘neither self’ nor ‘non-self’. Such resistance to binary reductions is key to the Buddhist (agnostic) way of addressing the world. Looking upon as an impermanent, fleeting object in constant becoming Buddhism engages with the world though a constant act of ‘confrontation’ (Batchelor 1997: 18) rather than through a search for solid, stable answers. Buddhism can hence be seen as a method rather than a coherent system of knowledge (von Glanesapp 1967, Tucci 1992, Batchelor 1997). Grounded in contingency and ambiguity, it builds on the recognition of transcendence and of the impossibility to fully know. As Batchelor suggests Buddhism ‘offers no answers, only the possibility of new beginnings’ (1997: 103). The logic of double negation inserts itself into this terrain, one where human perceptions of the world can neither be fully true nor false. Within this (circular) space ‘I’ can be simultaneously ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ and also ‘neither self’ nor ‘non-self’. ‘I’ can be simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘not-here’. I suggest that the application of these (consciously unstable) epistemological principles can help us grasp what happens in VR and MR, and help us address the various shifts in identification that make up the perception of many viewers. In such environments viewers are simultaneously neither ‘self’ nor ‘not-self,’ neither presence nor absence, neither ‘body’ nor ‘not-body’. They engage in a processual (performative) ‘confrontation’ that eventually leads them to discover the fragmented nature of the self, the multisensory nature of human perceptions and the continuum that makes up the body-mind complex. An attempt at decolonizing our knowledge, enacted through the insertion of elements borrowed from other epistemologies, can provide new insights into this possibly ‘uncanny’ territory, where we discover experiences, to use Sigmund Freud’s ([1919] 1925) definition of this term, that are ‘strangely familiar’ and hence both known and not-known.
15 The act of entering such image spaces entails also the abandonment to a curved, ephemeral, dynamic and shifting frame that is significantly different form the square frame that characterizes flat 2D images. Rather than an act of pure seeing, of grasping, and perhaps also of controlling a totality (as a perspectival image would allow us to do), such image-environments entail an act of acceptance of this totality, of becoming one with it, of abandoning any desire to dominate and also to understand. Such a stance brings back to our attention not only the Buddhist principles discussed above, but also Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) intuition that ‘man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself’ (Merleau-Ponty’s 1962: xi). As Merleau-Ponty suggests in his description, such settings can lead viewers to realise that: ‘I am neither here nor there, neither Paul nor Peter; I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere’ (Merleau-Ponty’s 1962: xi).
16 VR/MR experiences do evidently pose a number of challenges to conventional ways of approaching the world of images. In the first place these images are interactive; they are personal (hence marking a step away from ‘mass’ media) and multisensory (directing appealing to both vision, sound, movement and tactility). As I have suggested elsewhere (Favero 2018), such acknowledgement entails a rethinking also of a number of terms, on which the conventional terminology used for analysing images builds upon. For instance, how should we address the frame in a context where this has morphed away from that protective square that as in Albrecht Dürer’s famous
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illustration of a perspectival frame (in The Painter’s Manual, 1525), separated the viewer form the world, to become instead an embracing environment within which the viewers can move? How to speak of ‘frames’ when viewers are not external to (and hence no longer in control of) the visual field? And how can we approach the various ways in which images come to us in the absence of the beamer, that politically dense apparatus that, with its fixed point of emanation of light, reproduces the principles that informed Renaissance perspective? The result of a long evolution that started with the camera obscura, the magic lantern, the silhouette, and the cathode ray tube, projection is, in fact, far from neutral. I need not go further in depth with these questions, confident that the challenges that such digital visual practices pose to our conventional assumptions are quite evident.
Parallel Visualities
17 I want now to proceed further and address the extent to which the immersive desire expressed by such new images is far from unique to them and hence far from novel. Rather it is an insistent longing and appearing throughout the history of visual art and of image-making techniques and technologies. Let me first come out with a disclaimer. Despite addressing the continuity in attempts at immersing viewers in the image and hence at blurring the separation between spaces that we could address as being virtual and actual, my analysis makes no claim, as I anticipated in the introduction, at tracing a historical continuity of techniques. I believe, however, that such (parallel) visualities function both as concrete inspirational forces for contemporary VR artists and documentarians. They also express a desire, or ambition, or yearning that human beings, across places and times, have had in relation to the world of images, i.e. that of closing the gap, through the image, between themselves and the world. Let me offer a few examples of the different modalities through which this immersion has been obtained in the past.
18 In the Villa dei Misteri (House of Mysteries) in Pompei (Italy), second century BC, the surfaces of the walls are filled with a rich variety of scenes blending mythology and everyday life. Painted figures dialogue with each other across the walls: they look and point at each other. A sense of involvement strikes the visitors as they find themselves literally surrounded by these exchanges and by the events that are portrayed on the walls (the Dionysian initiation ritual that constitutes a core element of this set of paintings is probably the strongest of these exchanges). The gazes that the painted characters exchange from one side of the room to the other are here the core tools through which a sense of immersion is generated in the viewers. In an on-going fading of ‘the borders between visual and actual space’ (Grau 1999: 365) viewers become part of the painting and the world that it portrays, while the image starts appearing as ‘a portal through which in one direction the gods pass into the real world and in the other real people enter into the image’ (Grau 1999: 366).
19 The Ara Paci Augustae in Rome (an altar dated around thirteen BC dedicated to Pax, the Roman goddess of Peace,) offers us another kind of immersive visuality. The internal space of the altar is shaped through a merging of bas-relief, depicting scenes from mythology and elements of nature (mainly leaves) that are inserted in and on the walls. While Pompei (and Herculaneum ) are unique examples of the Roman use of painting on internal walls, the bas-relief and sculptures of Ara Pacis are more typical techniques
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that ancient Roman artists and architects used for exploiting the space represented by the walls. Giulio Carlo Argan (2008) has suggested that the Romans did not experience the wall ‘as a solid surface, but as a spatiality or imaginary depth’ (Argan 2008: 147). Presenting a ‘hypothetical space, a plane of projection’ (Argan 2008: 147) the wall was for them not a boundary, but a joint, a juncture, a portal between physical natural space and pictorial space. The use of stucco would later on insert such spatial experiences also in the context of painting. It allowed for the creation of thick, modulated surfaces allowing views to explore a multiplicity of angles from which to observe the image, and of allowing actual life (in the shape of light and shadows) to mix with the visual impressions generated by the objects represented in the image.
20 The Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches designed under the influence of Byzantium, offer insights into yet another immersive technique, this time based upon a blend of materiality and composition. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna (fifth century AD), to give but one example, embraces the viewers with visual details that are placed all over the walls. The use of mosaic in particular, with its variety of different materials capable of absorbing and defracting light, have a deceiving and displacing effect on the viewers. Similar to Roman stuccos, it deceives viewers’ perceptions of the dimensions of the space in which they find themselves, hence leading to a transcendence of physical space altogether (see Argan 2008). As Greek Orthodox churches still make evident today, worshippers are also surrounded by a broader set of sensory experiences; by the glittering lights generated by candles mirrored on the metal and the glass tiles composing the image, by the smell of incense, and the sound of the bells. This exposure to a full sensorial experience brings viewers, through their senses, in touch with the divine.
21 I could go on giving more examples from Antiquity but let us instead observe how a quest for immersivity is also characteristic of modern practices. Stereoscopic images were created at the very dawn of photographic history. Along with panoramic formats these expressed a concrete attempt of moving as far as possible away from the limitations imposed by the square, narrow frame provided by the first cameras. These were used to awaken physical reactions towards a landscape or of arousal towards erotic or even pornographic imagery (Gilardi 2002).
22 Cinema too responded to the same craving for immersion (and for a dynamic environment in which to move) with 3D movies. Supposedly born in response to the possibilities offered by sound for surrounding the viewer (see Elsaesser 2013), 3D cinema speaks, according to Akira Mizuta Lippit (1999), of a desire to overcome the limitations to perception imposed by screens and frames. In Thomas Elsaesser’s (2013) words, this is an attempt to ‘self-abolish’ the ‘apparatic scaffolding and peculiar geometry of representation’ (Elsaesser 2013: 229). 3D cinema (as well as following formats such as IMAX) can, therefore, be seen as direct precursors of VR, introducing ‘the malleability, scalability, fluidity, or curvature of digital images into audiovisual space’ (Elsaesser 2013: 235). The list of examples could go on with the experiences of Cubism, Dadaism, and Futurism, which were all characterized by an attempt at converging on the same canvas multiple angles or moments of observation. It could also move further into the world of the video installations of Ken Jacobs and Bill Viola or of the 3D laser-mapping installations of Danny Rose or of Miguel Chevalier. All these works, I suggest, despite the diversity of techniques deployed, are united by the desire of overcoming the separation between the observer and the observed, the ‘I’ and the
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world typical of flat images. We can however grasp a more detailed insight into this yearning by taking yet another leap backwards and exploring the principles that underpin Byzantine art inspired icons.
The Transformative Visuality of Icons (and of Vr/Mr?)
Icon painted by Sr. Silvia Favero. Photograph by Paolo S.H. Favero.
23 Emerging in the ninth century as ‘the privileged image’ (Pencheva 2010) icons have as one of their key characteristics the resistance to comply to one single type of mathematical reduction (as in the case of geometrical perspective). They are constituted by a combination of techniques of composition as well as of material production, that contribute in offering the viewers multiple (and sense-driven) points of entry. Supported by a specific spiritual vision such pictures are dynamic, allowing viewers to observe them literally as well as metaphorically from a variety of perspectives.
24 The first thing to notice when we enter the visuality of icons is that these are neither fully bi- nor fully tri-dimensional images (Lindsay Opie 2014). Icons are conventionally characterized by what is commonly referred to as ‘reverse perspective’ (Pencheva 2010; Argan 2008; Florensky 1967; Marci 2014).7 Rather than being unaware of the principles of geometrical viewing, Byzantium painters and mystics seem to have developed a different (perhaps ‘parallel’) spatialization of the relationship between the image and the viewer. In terms of design techniques, these images are divided into two main layers. The front layer, the one where the face of the divinity is portrayed, is conventionally positioned on a flat surface, frontally facing the viewer. The rest of the image (starting from the head and the hair, to the aura and the background) is instead
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characterized by a rounded shape which is designed according to the above-mentioned principle of reverse perspective which has its own vanishing point behind the viewer (Sendler 1985).8 Through this composition of foreground and background, viewers are simultaneously frontal to the face of the divinity while also being while being wrapped into it. As art historian Bissera Pencheva (2010) has suggested, the ‘picture space’ of an icon ‘opens up in front of the image rather than behind it’ (Pencheva 2010: 6).9
25 There is however more to the icon, which adds to its magnificent complexity. The result of the use of not only colours but also metals, icons shine, often causing the viewers to mirror themselves in them. Their golden background offers in fact no representational context. The divinity does seldom appear surrounded by objects or landscapes. Instead, it invites viewers to mirror themselves and their own context of viewing in the picture. In this sense icons are truly reflexive images. The thin golden foil that makes up their background is meant to bring the viewer in direct touch with the divine figure portrayed: ’instead of the light reflected from the outside world we find uniform gold, thanks to which the image itself becomes an independent source of light’ (Lindsay Opie 2014: 146). Symbolizing ‘pure divine light’ (Sendler 1998) the golden foil is to be understood within the spiritual view that sustains icons. It is also informed by a visuality defined by the theory of ‘extramission’ whereby ‘the eye was active, sending off rays that touched the surfaces of objects’ (Pencheva 2010: 5). It is, hence, neither illustration nor decoration, but a tool for communicating directly with the realm of the divine (of the invisible) and for entering it. There is no subjectivity involved by the painter here. He or she is just a conduit towards ‘a true participation at the world of divine archetypes’ (Lindsay Opie 2014: 146). A form of ‘sustained dream’ (Florensky 1977: 34), icons, like spiritual art in general, grant according to Pavel Florensky access to a ‘world upside-down’ (Florensky 1977: 31). They lift up the soul from earthly matters bringing it in touch with another dimension (the ‘celestial’ one). Florensky suggests that this world (with its ‘curvatures’, that is its spiritual essence) manifests itself only through the interaction with the viewer, behaving, to use his metaphor, like ‘a magnetic field on top of a surface that gets visible only by pouring metal dust’ (Florensky 1977: 52). Unlike Western perspectival painting icons are ‘the cliff of celestial figures … Icons materially sign these penetrating and immemorial gazes, these super-sensual ideas, making inaccessible visions almost public’ Florensky 1977: 64). The strength of icons, Egon Sendler suggests, lies in their capacity to be ‘images of the invisible’ (1985). Other types of icons do also explore the use of materiality even further. In the past in particular they have been produced in relief or constructed with the help of materials whose texture would provide the viewer with a sense of direct tactile engagement. Pencheva (2010) states that the icon is a matter of ‘tactile visuality’ (Pencheva 2010: 6, 7), that is sensorially experienced.
26 My main point however is that icons, despite their figurative centre (an image of Christ, of the Virgin Lady, etc.) have as their primary mission not that of representing but rather of taking the worshippers elsewhere, to transform them through vision. Through artefacts such as icons, art provides human beings with a connection between the visible and the invisible world. Just like Hindu devotional images, such icons are therefore not a mere representation of something out there but an entry into another experiential dimension. Objects of ‘visual ascesis’ (Lindsay Opie 2014) they speak of presence, contemplation and transformation rather than narration. In a movement that goes in the opposite direction from the Renaissance perspective, these techniques position viewers in the co-presence of possible parallel worlds (the parallel with
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Buddhist nonduality is here evident). I could go even further into my exploration of the visuality of Byzantium icons, but I guess that what I have written so far may suffice to open up room for my parallel with the world of VR and MR. In the context of VR the body is in fact central, interpellated by a series of act that simultaneously connect and disconnect the viewer to the image and its content. The body is foregrounded not as a mere ‘appendage to the self’ (Dolezal 2009: 209) but rather as the core tool through which any form of engagement with the world is made possible. They seem to materialize Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) above-mentioned intuition that humans can only be and know themselves ‘in the world’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xi). Such images also foreground a degree of interactivity, asking viewers to actively engage with and move within the depicted space. With their multiple short-circuits of mind and body they provoke instances of dissociation, hence transforming the viewers, re-inserting them in their actuality often (and at least temporally) in a new position.10 It is of little surprise that VR experiences are today explored in medical settings for the treatment of post- traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, panic attacks etc.
Conclusions
27 The possible dialogues between the worlds of VR/MR and that of icons may indeed not be explicit. Yet, they surely speak of the manifold ways in which humans have attempted at using images in order to enter the world in which they live and to transforms themselves. We could also imagine that the visuality that characterizes the world of icons may also have directly inspired contemporary artists. It is after all part of the cultural heritage of our world. But regardless of the interpretation we want to give to this dialogue, the parallels between these different regimes of visuality are many, as they both address matters of interactivity and multisensoriality. Both also move away from a pure representational duty towards a contemplation and a transformative act of presencing. Taking us away from narration and realist representation they move towards that sense of oneness between the human and the world that makes up the fundament not only of Saint Augustine’s intuitions but also of many other knowledge systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism, and various forms of animism (see von Glanesapp 1967; Tucci 1992; Knott 1999). The suspension of the distinction between the observer and the observed and between the self and the world combined with a sense of detached observation and acceptance of the world surrounding us is, in fact, a core coordinate in the practice of meditation (see Easwaran 1978).
28 Such visualities seem, hence, to move against the hegemonic trends of Western visual culture that I described earlier. Disrupting the geometrical-political conventions that characterise conventional understandings of camera-produced images, they threaten the assumptions that we have inherited from the Renaissance perspective and that have been consolidated by photography and film. A step into the elsewhen and the elsewhere can hence help us grasping such contemporary digital visual practices in a new terrain hopefully able to contribute in decolonizing our overall understanding of visual culture.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books and articles
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Khosravi, Shahram. 2018. Walling, Unsettling, Stealing. Keynote at EASA conference 2018. https://www.easaonline.org/conferences/easa2018/ (accessed 28 February, 2019).
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Tannahill, Jordan (dir.) 2019. Draw Me Close. Production: National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and National Film Board of Canada.
NOTES
1. ‘Mixed reality’ is an overarching term conventionally used for addressing visualizations where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. We could place this term at any given point within the continuum that goes from the ‘real’ to the ‘virtual.’ 2. This article is dedicated to my aunt, Suor Silvia Favero, amazing artist, loving and enlightening presence who introduced me to the world of religious icons. 3. I am indebted to the writings of Christopher Pinney for the discovery of Stafford’s work. 4. Draw me Close is in a co-production between the National Theatre’s Immersive Storytelling Studio and the National Film Board of Canada, in collaboration with All Seeing Eye. The trailer can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zokAxgRNYs and a further analysis at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrpUvRSb2E0
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5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcsxUbVyZA&t=13s 6. The term Buddhist philosophy (as well as Buddhism) does not really adapt to describing the corpus of knowledge that makes up the teachings that are conventionally attributed to the figure of the Buddha. Nevertheless, I will use it here for lack of better options warning however the reader about the epistemological traps embedded in conventional choices of terminology. 7. Thank you Tito Marci for introducing me to the world of reverse perspective. 8. There is indeed a debate among art historians and icon painters as to whether the vanishing point is located behind the viewers or at the height of their eyes. 9. If we were to look even further into the visuality of the icon we could state that, in its overlap of foreground and background, it also offers a visuality explainable only within the logic of Buddhist double negation: neither inside nor outside. 10. I have been able to observe this together with my colleague Eva Theunissen with whom I conducted ethnographic observations and interviews with VR viewers.
ABSTRACTS
In the context of contemporary digital art and documentary making, practitioners are discovering the possibilities given by emerging image-based immersive practices, techniques and tools (360-degree video and photography; virtual, augmented, and mixed reality) to wrap viewers in the image and to blur the distance between viewer and viewed, ‘self’ and ‘other’. Challenging the distinction between presence and absence and between body and mind, these practices also seem to attack another set of divides, i.e. between past and present, here and there. An intrinsic part of late-modern, industrial, capitalist societies new experiences in immersive visual documentary and art (MR and VR especially) contain traces of continuity with the visualities that characterise other (non-modern) places and times. They share some of the core principles that characterise the visuality of, for instance, Byzantine icons, as well those of Hindu popular religious art. Based on the concrete analysis of a selected number of examples gathered form the world of contemporary MR and VR performance art this article suggests that art is always the result of a dialogue across the elsewhere and the ‘elsewhen’. Underpinning this article is also the idea that an act of decolonisation of knowledge, enacted by means of the use of categories imported from other epistemologies (such as Byzantine and Hindu image theory as well as Buddhist philosophy) can help us look at contemporary emerging arts and documentary practices with new eyes.
Les praticiens de l’art numérique contemporain et des documentaristes découvrent les possibilités immersives fondées sur les images, techniques et outils (per exemple 360-degrés vidéo et photographie ; réalité virtuelle, augmentée et mixte) servant à inclure l’observateur dans l’image, et de brouiller ainsi la distance entre observateur et observé, entre soi et monde. Étant donné que ces pratiques défient la distinction entre présence et absence, elles semblent aussi s’attaquer à d’autres dualités, comme celle entre passé et présent, ici et là-bas. Ces nouvelles expériences en arts visuels immersifs apparaissent comme intrinsèques des sociétés capitalistes industrielles de la modernité tardive. Pourtant, ces arts portent tout autant des traces de continuité avec des visualités qui caractérisent d’autres lieux (non-modernes) et époques. Ils partagent, par exemple, des principes de base de la visualité avec les icônes Byzantines, ou avec l’art religieux populaire Hindou. Fondé sur l’analyse d’exemples concrets du
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domaine de l’art de la performance contemporain e MR et VR, cet article propose que l’art serait toujours le résultat d’un dialogue avec un autre lieu et un autre temps. Une autre idée est sous- jacente : promulgué e par l’utilisation de catégories importées d’autres épistémologies (telle que la théorie de l’image Byzantine et Hindoue, ou de la philosophie Bouddhiste), un tel acte de décolonisation de connaissances permettrait un nouveau regard sur les arts contemporains émergeants et les pratiques documentaires.
Este artículo presenta una propuesta metodológica para el trabajo entre la antropología y las artes que se basa en la relación entre la forma social y la forma estética. Parte del trabajo de los autores con los editores cartonera en América Latina. Éstos son pequeños colectivos comunitarios cuyos miembros fabrican libros de bajo coste a partir de cartón reciclado en un intento explícito de hacer que el consumo y la producción de literatura sean accesibles para la sociedad en general. Comenzamos describiendo a Dulcinéia Catadora, una editora de cartonera de São Paulo que es el foco etnográfico de este artículo. Luego presentamos tres proposiciones teóricas que nos permiten analizar los procesos sociales y políticos no de manera aislada, sino más bien en relación, preguntando cómo la práctica etnográfica puede cruzarse con la estética en un modo que va más allá de lo ilustrativo. Concluimos proponiendo lo que llamamos un enfoque metodológico "trans-formal", basado en un método de "emulación", que abre nuevas posibilidades para una investigación multidisciplinaria, transnacional, horizontal y participativa.
INDEX
Palabras claves: estética, política, metodología, trans-formal, cartonera, América Latina Keywords: virtual reality, mixed reality, visuality, decolonization of knowledge, visual culture, digital culture Mots-clés: réalité virtuelle, réalité mixte, visualité, décolonisation de la connaissance, culture visuelle, culture numérique.
AUTHOR
PAOLO S. H. FAVERO University of Antwerp, Visual and Digital Cultures Research Center (ViDi) [email protected]
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Value, Correspondence, and Form: Recalibrating Scales for a Contemporary Anthropology of Art (Epilogue)
Jonas Tinius
Emerging Anthropologies of Art
1 In the introduction to their influential volume The Traffic in Culture (1995), George Marcus and Fred Myers note that ‘art has come to occupy a space long associated with anthropology, becoming one of the main sites for tracking, representing, and performing the effects of difference in contemporary life’ (Marcus and Myers 1995: 1). Published more than twenty years ago, this statement still rings true, but with some qualifications. Marcus and Myers’ concern for a recast perspective on ‘Western art worlds’ (Marcus and Myers 1995) has laid the foundations for a set of different perspectives in the anthropology of art and visual cultures that — at once — seem to have gone a long way while making steps backwards since then. In this afterword, I try to witness some of these short, and a few longer passages that have been made since then, reviewing both a broader literature related to the theme of this special issue and convergent strands of inquiry and trajectories evoked and addressed by the papers in this publication.
2 It has been widely attested that the global circulation, export, and imposition of particular ethnocentric (often a short-hand for Euro-American) concepts of art, aesthetic judgment, and forms of artistic exhibiting have simultaneously created a homogenous global phenomenon — a ‘metropolitan conversation’ (Schneider 2017: 1) — while at the same time incorporating cyclically a changing set of geographically- specific and often essentialist cultural, regional, or even continental styles and art fields (see Schild, this issue). Museums, art fields, and curatorial agents articulate national narratives and digest troubling cosmopolitan challenges against them (see e.g.
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Levitt 2015; Tinius and Macdonald 2020; Tinius and Zinnenburg 2020). This simultaneous export and incorporation, expansion and centralization extends to forms of artistic communication and distribution, for example through particular exhibition formats (Dimitrakaki 2012), but also means and materialities and rejections thereof (see Bishop 2012 and Fillitz, this issue). The naïve celebration of an exchange of perspectives between artistic form in international, or even ‘nomadic’ biennales, such as Manifesta, has not least become subject to their own critique (Kompatsiaris 2017). Equally, the proliferation of an entire cross-pollinating and -sustaining art-philosophy-theory nexus on precariousness, creativity, and the variously exoticized or pathologized agency of the expat artist jet-set or the equally ambivalent ubiquity of the project- based, self-fashioning, and independent curator of contemporary (art) worlds has ceased to surprise or provoke (witness e.g. Balzer 2015; Avanessian 2017). Contemporary artists and artistic styles have been entangled in the same mobile and global ‘scapes’ that Arjun Appadurai conjured previously as ‘constitutive feature[s] of modern subjectivity’ (2001: 3); and they have turned these into means of theoretical production. The cogency of reflexive contemporary art, in that sense, can therefore no longer be regarded merely in what it ‘offers’ to anthropology, but in its unfazed incorporation of anthropological concerns for the diverse relational and scalar entanglements of the global and local. In some instances, as in the exhibition- experiment Gifts to Soviet Leaders that nourished Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov’s research manifesto for an ethnographic conceptualism (2013), this has in turn become a source for methodological and theoretical propositions.
3 It is evident, thus, that the rapid digital capacities for the distribution of images, money, and data and the inflation of cheap global travel produce ambivalent effects on the possible encounters between global and local art canons. The former has, of course, already been attested as constitutive of the infrastructural undergirding of globalization (see Kearney 1995). Aesthetic ideas, fashionable styles of artistic production, as well as the curatorial discourses that facilitate them, already travel from, say, Paris to Venice to Lubumbashi and Hong Kong within a month. In spite of this, there are a great number of profoundly coherent trajectories within the proclaimed horizontal and hybrid connectivity of these flows, which have not rescinded their autonomous thought and practice.
4 So what concerns does this raise for a contemporary anthropology of art and aesthetics that is attentive to the politics of moving and the apparent unsettlement of its categories and fields of study? The editor of this special issue has identified as a theme ‘anthropology’s interactions with visual arts, literature, film, and design within the framework of the multiple meanings these arts have taken nowadays with their unprecedented circulations and receptions at a global scale’ (Fillitz, introduction, this issue).
5 For Fillitz, anthropological scholarship on this circulation and reception since the early 1990s accounted for these phenomena no longer by reference to ‘the former universalistic pretension of European modernism’s canons in the various arts,’ but with a growing consciousness about ‘geospatial [and, one might add, geopolitical] diversity’ (Fillitz, introduction, this issue). He is keenly aware that such transformations did not come about, or produce, an early internet age utopia of frictionless network translation, but crafted old power relations onto this new infrastructure. As Marilyn Strathern (1996) already noted in her critique of ANT and its neutralised network
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metaphor, ‘the power of such analytical networks is also their problem: theoretically, they are without limit’ (Strathern 1996: 523). The same observation — and the same critique — applies to the study of relations between international art circuits and locally focused projects and institutions.
6 If this is the case, an anthropology of contemporary art and aesthetics, which is itself attuned to a contemporary perspective, that is, one willing to step aside and question its own intrication in the production of the local and global, is in an important position to perform a double move. It acknowledges simultaneously two dimensions. First, that in terms of digital connectivity, technological transformation, logistical intensification, and precarization of professional worlds, we have to catch up with a set of early twenty-first century ‘givens’ that no longer surprise. Secondly, it begs us to attune to a situation in which this very alteration has both integrated and neutralised, yet not consumed and rendered disjunctive the idiosyncrasies and specifics — the heterogeneity of homogeneity — within fields that may appear to be simply relational, multi-sited, and endlessly circulating (see García Canclini 2014a).
7 An attuned anthropology of the contemporary, which focuses on the tensions of art and aesthetics across scales of glocality, might then benefit from an anachronistic and anatopical positionality and approach. This phrasing borrows from Michel Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia (1986) and Giorgio Agamben’s figure on the contemporary (2009) as someone at once immersed and at the same time removed from the immensity and density of the present; to be reflexively calibrated to contemporary worlds, then, is to be contemporary and anachronistic, disjointed and at a queer angle to a contemporary condition and position. This position recognizes unevenness as part of the condition of supposed horizontality (see Schneider 2015). The anthropology of markets, collectors, curators, and further agents in this emergent glocal field (see e.g. Fillitz and van der Grijp 2018), where new spheres of valuation and aesthetics emerge, creating new canons as well as resistances, is itself firmly implied in this condition. We are thus in a trans-anthropological phase in which anthropology no longer documents, but constitutes these fields itself (see Oswald and Tinius 2020). This affords a greater reflexivity about the collaborative modalities and theoretical value generated through our scholarship as anthropologists; it also asks for a recalibrated ethnographic awareness of the co-articulation of art and anthropology at all scales of their encounter. The theories we generate and the methods we mobilize are not detached from the ‘tools for the production of difference’ (Fillitz, introduction to this issue) enacted by the hierarchies of art production at a global level. To return to Marcus and Myers’ (1995) introduction which I cited at the outset, we need to look at both art and anthropology, not just one or the other, for ‘tracking, representing, and performing the effects of difference in contemporary life’ (Marcus and Myers 1995: 1). A recalibrated anachronistic and anatopical anthropology of the contemporary historicizes and contextualizes these tools through which contemporary global art spheres circumscribe the present condition, and renders these a subject of analysis. As such, the ongoing and cumulative historicization and de-localization of artistic production from within the fields themselves become tools of our own analysis.
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Convergent Strands of Inquiry and Trajectories
8 The articles in this special issue speak from particular places and fields of ethnographic inquiry. Each contribution shows a marked concern for the ways in which the local and the global articulate and constitute each other, not necessarily in the affirmative or the empathic, but also in rejection and reification. But for me there are two sets of distinct analytical trajectories that I want to highlight below. They concern, broadly, the nexus ‘institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation’ (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild) and ‘immersion, correspondence, and form’ (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell and Paolo Favero).
Institutions, Histories, and Spheres of Valuation
9 Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild provide two accounts of an anatopical and anachronistic anthropology of the contemporary as I propose it above; they are firmly situated in several years-long ethnographic fieldwork — in Paris and Dakar, respectively — but focus on the ways in which the art markets and art institutions of each field demarcate and formulate borders of local, global, African, European, noire, ethnographic, etc. They underline the role of institutions and spheres of valuation, in particular art auction houses and biennales, and the particular geopolitical and geospatial imaginations as well as the historical, and especially art historical, framings that each enact. Their accounts speak of the generation of locations and attention to the multitudes — and the insufficiency of this term — to grasp the aesthetic and economic dimension of form and materiality in artistic production, curation, and collection. This first section addresses also curatorial influence, institutional framing, and the changing ethico-aesthetic realms that certain forms, modes, and categories of art undergo (see also Tinius 2018). Fillitz and Schild also speak of the often-overlooked diachronic trajectories in our research sites, and the contrasting reasons for the emergence of certain styles and unexpected forms — such as painting in the off scene of the Dak’Art Biennale — over time. They furthermore underline the role of institutions, including that of the art market, and parallel narratives for the emergence of comparisons and juxtapositions of artists, artworks, and styles. Schild raises the intriguing issue of the circulation and valuation of categories such as ‘ethnographic’ or ‘anthropological’ entirely beyond the professional academic confines of the discipline in universities and museums, addressing the role of individual collectors and their dubious curiosity for ‘African’ art incorporated into Euro-American collections that so starkly contrasts the footnotes on private collectors in Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s restitution report (2018). In what ways do institutions and spheres of valuation create barriers and impasses, not just connections and flows, that variously block, constrain, and control capital and power, form and medium?
10 Thomas Fillitz draws on long-term fieldwork with the Senegalese Dak’Art Biennale for his article. His principal observation concerns the discrepancy between the official Biennale in Dakar and the sprawling and recognised so-called Off, a notion familiar from other event contexts, such as the Avignon festival of performing arts and theatre in France. Fillitz notes that, counter to the assumption that large-scale exhibition events such as this one, the most well-known biennale of contemporary art in Africa, the global arts discourse and its aesthetics has only a limited influence on what happens beyond the official part of the exhibition. In fact, the exhibitions of the
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Dak’Art Off ‘offer an image of demarcation from global art discourses and their aesthetic judgements about the most relevant art forms and pressing issues’, as he demonstrates. In contradistinction to the official shows, where installation art dominates, the majority of the Off features paintings. Fillitz then delves into a discussion of the history of Senegalese post-independence modern art, arguing that an explanation of the choices of media and aesthetics in the Off require a greater understanding of this history than the official biennale, whose discourses and choices are predominantly influenced by the respective curatorial teams. (This is not to say that there cannot also be a history and genealogy of the official exhibition, but these offer different trajectories.) Apart from the difference in media, Fillitz also underlines that the kinds of spaces chosen in the Off offer a set of different affordances and principles of production, including the marked absence of curators and links to socio- economic and political realities that the official biennale barely touches or grasps. The provocative thrust of his argument, however, does not primarily concern the tensions between the Off and the ‘In’, but the fact that the official biennale discourse does not in fact dictate or influence what is understood as contemporary art in this context, even though it might be the most obvious platform to do, or to be assumed to do so.
11 Most notable in his review of the Dak’Art Off genealogy is the influence of Léopold Sédar Senghor about whom, not coincidentally and to blur the distinctions here even further, the last two Dak’Art Biennale editions’ curator Simon Njami wrote a biography, C’était Senghor (2006). Founding figure of the 1960 École des Arts du Sénégal, later renamed into École Nationale des Beaux Arts, Senghor facilitated a school that focused on painting and some sculpture. However, as the Senegalese art historian Abdou Sylla (1998: 110) notes, the vast majority of the artists there — eighty percent, to be exact — practiced painting. Further, Sylla underlines the social service of the arts and artists coming out of and related to the school, all of which are related to the ‘local developments of the late 1970s’ (1998), and thus to a history that is to a large degree disconnected from recent contemporary arts biennale discourse. Moreover, even though Senghor’s cultural policies and politics of Négritude ‘attributed artists the role of important agents for the production of the national cultural discourse’ (Fillitz, this issue), artists also sought to liberate themselves from the hegemony of a statist framework.
12 In his ethnographic forays into various Off sites, Fillitz furthermore evokes another trajectory, which is key to understanding the predominance of certain art forms and styles in the Off, namely that of the Laboratoire Agit’Art. Founded in 1973, the collective reacted to the styles and traditions of the École de Dakar and what they perceived as the school’s apolitical stance, instead rejecting state patronage and mobilizing in favour of an artistic activism. The development of the Dak’Art Off, further facilitated by a number of other factors, including a commercial orientation, a focus on urban regeneration, and an absence of overall curatorial figures, leads Fillitz to conclude that while the two fields operate in different trajectories and aesthetic frameworks, they operate in a complementary relationship that helps understand the articulation of styles along a complex scale from the local courtyard to the European- African diaspora superstar curators and the canonisations of contemporary art that comes, for better or worse, and whether they wish it or not, with their practice.
13 The article evokes the much-rehearsed discussion of the effects of the geospatial metaphors of the global and the local, offering a counter-narrative to the assumption
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that the homogenous global circuit has overdetermined the visual and exhibitionary culture of the Dak’Art Off. It also prompts a related ethnographic reflection worthy of further deliberation, namely one regarding the demarcation of the field: where and how does the study of a biennale, or of biennale cultures in the plural begin and end? As so often, it appears that it is neither sufficient to drift along the edges and into the supposed periphery to realize that the generative potential lies there; rather, it takes of the observer a particular step aside in space and in time, to fully understand the co- constitutive demarcations and means of producing internal differentiation within fields such as this.
14 Tamara Schild presents a distinctively different field that intersects uncomfortably with the emic dynamics evoked by the previous analysis. She focuses on the marketing of Ancient African and Oceanic Art at high-end auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s, which account for seventy percent of the total auction market sales volume in these categories. In 2017, their sales volume totaled €58 million, which, however significant for this segment, amounts to a small percentage in these firms’ overall revenues. Schild’s focus is not on mere economic facts, though, but focuses on the strategies of auction houses to establish links between modern and contemporary Euro-American art and so-called African and Oceanic art for purposes of marketing. Indeed, she argues that one of the main functions of an increased interest in this historical link — catalogues mentioning Western artists and their relation to African and Oceanic arts have apparently multiplied since the beginning of the twenty-first century — is the encompassing of the latter category in the ‘modes of presentation typical for modern and contemporary art’ (Schild, this special issue). Among a number of different factors, the increase in prices facilitated by marketing and auction house spectacles draws attention to this category of works, rather than their intrinsic materialities or other features of qualitative depth.
15 Crucial in her analysis is the role of curating and collecting. Not just the selection and presentation of non-European works and their connections to existing market segments conducted by auction houses matters, but also individual ‘cross-category collectors’ (Schild, this special issue) play a key role. As recounted by Javier Peres, founder of Peres Projects and representative of a ‘new generation of African art collectors’ (Schild, this special issue), his attendance of the ethnographic museum in Berlin led him to appreciate and ‘train’ his eye for non-European, in particular African, art objects. Besides personal interest and marketing through gallery representations, Schild reviews that other factors such as high-end catalogues and their juxtaposition of ‘academic knowledge, photographic techniques, visual “aesthetic” criteria, historicity, and provenance are used in the construction of market values’ (Geismar 2001: 36). Her article juxtaposes starkly the two competing Dakar fields of valuation by introducing the agency of market curators and auction houses with their spheres of valuation that extend beyond the discursive into the materialities and individualised narratives that generate cross-continental aesthetics.
16 Yet, there is evidently at play in the processes she describes a profit-oriented encompassment and reification of particular types of art objects; it is indeed not far- fetched to ponder to what extent art institutions such as auction houses are not just creating value (both pecuniary and symbolic), but actually co-create entire value spheres and, more significantly, spheres and parameters for the valuation of art. Reposing the question of the trans-anthropological in this context, the role of
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anthropologists and creative refusal on behalf of more critically-minded cross-over scholars and curators merit more attention. How do they effect these spheres and values? What generative effect do art historians have in the re-constellation of art historical proximities that help feature and market art objects previously associated with ethnographic museum collections, rather than glossy catalogues and high-end ‘coffee-table’ books meant primarily for display. And to what extent are these valuations to be regarded historically and in relation to the dubious and unearthed stories about the unjust acquisition of colonial artefacts? It remains an intriguing tension, here merely noted in passing, how differently provenance research serves a function in the critically-minded scholarship on colonial histories, raising problems and deliberately troubling the circulation and marketing of certain objects, while provenance in another context serves to establish and consolidate value.
Immersion, Correspondence, and Form
17 In the second section of my discussion, I focus on the nexus ‘immersion- correspondence-form’. I derive these notions from a review of Alex Flynn and Lucy Bell’s as well as Paolo Favero’s contributions to this special issue. Their accounts, divergent again in fieldwork setting and subject, share a concern for the generative effects of immersion, both as experience and as method. In the case of Flynn and Bell, immersion casts itself as a problem of social relations and the echo of fieldwork experiences in research method and design. For Favero, immersion is also at once a subject of study and a constitutive ethnographic experience, for example of virtual reality projections and religious icons, whose agency he analyses. Both contributions focus furthermore on forms of reflexivity and recursivity between fields of literary and visual artistic productions on the one hand, and anthropological method and ethnographic theory on the other. They offer us thus a form of counter-narrative to the framing context of global aesthetic flows I somewhat broadly sketched in my introduction, arguing for both extremely close and micro-analyses of social relations in specific sites (be they analogue or digital) and for the generation of new approaches to cultural, literary, and visual artistic production. Their recalibration, then, takes place (in the literal sense of the phrase) and enacts itself through an insistence on the value of the speaking and viewing position and its relational and reflexive qualities and potentials (see also Flynn and Tinius 2015).
18 This second section additionally addresses the affordances of the particular materialties and immaterialities as well as the ways in which our research design, experience, and theoretical generation can correspond with these. What kinds of influence does the materiality and form of the artistic processes we study have on the way we can relate to these? In what sense do virtual images reveal themselves, how does their agency get mediated to us differently than, say, hand-made books?
19 In their contribution entitled ‘Returning to Form,’ Alex Flynn and Lucy Bell draw on fieldwork with cartonera publishers, poets, and activists. Cartonera appeared in the midst of the 2001 economic crisis in Buenos Aires and provided means to outcast residents of the city to produce goods and survive economically. Known as cartoneros, meaning ‘cardboarders’ or ‘waste pickers,’ these practitioners combined a collection and recycling of waste with the production and consumption of literature. The production of cheap books bound in cardboard and the very materiality of the books,
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Flynn and Bell argue, was ‘deeply embedded in the complex social fabric of the city, incorporating its uneven social strata, from informal street workers to an emerging class of wealthy consumers’ (Flynn and Bell, this special issue). In such a way, this hybrid art form echoes already in itself the complexity of urban and economic life. Flynn and Bell seek to find a kind of correspondence between the location, production, and practice of Dulcinéia Catadora, a cartonera publisher based in São Paulo and the anthropological methods of fieldwork and dissemination. They propose, in sum, a corresponding methodology of anthropological research ‘that is premised on the relation between social and aesthetic form’ (Flynn and Bell, this special issue), focusing on the four forms of operation by which cartonera publishers mediate their practices and materials: exhibitions, workshops, co-editions, and encontros (‘gatherings’).
20 Because cartonera publishing, both in form and content, are inextricably linked to the material conditions of their production, Flynn and Bell urge an engagement with these contexts in the same terms. What is more, the publishers and collectors involved in producing these books are, we learn, themselves highly aware of the kinds of economic activities and the politics of recycling they produce — as well as the politics and epistemological value-added through their methods of production (for a comparable context see also Alexander and Sanchez 2018).
21 Dulcinéia Catadora, the São Paulo cartonera publisher serving as a case study in their contribution, is a markedly material environment. Materials are collected, stored, and bound, reshuffled and handled, offering a translation of material value from one sphere (the street, dirt, rubbish) into quite another (the bookshelf, poetry, literature), though my own sighting of poetry would not necessarily, as the authors also point out, suggest that the subjects of the books are divorced from the harshness of poverty and the street. This offers another question about the possible correspondence not just between form of the books and the design of research, but also the content of both. Flynn and Bell, however, are more interested in the social relations crafted on the materialities and forms of the cartonera publishers, which they compare in a wider ethnographic project with similar practices in Mexico and elsewhere in Brazil.
22 Beyond their ethnographic descriptions and methodological proposals, the authors intervene in a debate about the relation of ‘aesthetics and politics’ citing and discussing Jacques Rancière (2004), Néstor García Canclini (2014b), and Caroline Levine (2015). Refreshingly, they are not rehashing the same trodden arguments about these authors, especially about the division of the sensible, but rather seek from them operationalizable moves into a correspondence between social aesthetics and political theorisation of cultural production. In this endeavour, it is Levine (2015) who proposes the most intriguing notion by speaking of practices of reading and literature as potentially radical because of their ‘rearrangement’ of different configurations of form. This, a crucial element to Flynn and Bell’s proposal for a trans-formal approach to ethnography, works across the formal arrangements and correspondences of cultural, artistic, anthropological, social, economic, and political composition.
23 It is, however, this very trans-formal approach that lends itself to the same critique of a supposedly, possible clean, and endlessly-extensive mediation that I reviewed with regard to ANT in my introduction. How can one transverse these terrains despite their unevenness, both within the field, and across it into the realm of an anthropological methodology and institutionalised Western set-up? In spite of these tensions, their case study complements my discussion of the performativity of value spheres and spheres of
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valuation: the cartonera publishers are engaged in the ambivalent generation of political value by reference to a lack thereof in terms of recognition and money. In this sense, the fundamental political question seems to me to be: How do we theorise and analyse the mediation of their forms and values of publishing within the context of academic writing about and with them?
24 Paolo Favero’s article links to yet another medium constitutive of and composed by global flows of data: digital art and image-production. He sharply contrasts the technological capacities and aesthetic aspirations of ‘emerging image-based immersive practices, techniques and tools’ (Favero, this issue) with the collapsing dualisms of modernisms, including those of presence and absence, but also past and present, here and there. By way of an unexpected comparison with the visuality of Byzantine icons, Favero argues, we can detect shared principles of visual immersive art as ‘the result of a dialogue across the elsewhere and the “elsewhen”’ (Favero, this issue). Icons and immersive digital image-making practices, despite their innumerable differences, inform one another. In particular, he suggests, ‘the world of icons’ allows us to recognize that the premise of virtual images as transporting mediums into a different sphere, they actually ‘re-centralize’ our relations to the self and surrounding. In that sense, digital technologies of image-making are ‘paradoxical’ since they are at once re- creating a sense of presence while crafting an artificial otherwise, an ambition that, Favero claims, is hardly singular to the contemporary West.
25 Indeed, visual culture (including earlier technologies with broad circulation, such as photographs) has long been co-constitutive of the production of selves and relations to the then and there. As the author puts it, ‘[photographs] are held, caressed, stroked, sung: they become sound, the sounds of voices, of songs, of memories verbalised as stories’ (Favero, this issue). Not least since Roland Barthes’ critique of the analogon metaphor (1977), photographs, like other forms of visual representation, are exposed for what they are not: transparent windows into the world. Favero takes this into another direction, arguing for a greater attunement of the ways in which images throw us back on ourselves, as it were. After one particularly disjunctive VR experience, during which he (the user) accidentally reached out in front of him to touch a table that was not programmed in the VR experience, he noted the evocative and central question here: ‘Should I trust my eyes or my hands?’ (Favero, this issue). This throws us, like Barthes’ analysis, right into the politics of the digital and the reliance on other media: How are we to theorize the presence of art and aesthetics within the affordances and infrastructures of the media in which we are embedded as ethnographers?
26 Favero’s main point regarding iconic figurative centres (such as an image of Christ) concerns their transformative intention; having as their ‘primary vision not that of representing but rather of taking the worshipper elsewhere, to transform them though vision’ (Favero, this issue). As such, the question becomes one of conceptualizing a visual frame beyond the viewer’s agency. More interestingly, perhaps, it is a methodological question besides a linguistic one, as the author suggests. Borrowing the notion of an ‘imaginal’ world from Henry Corbin (1971), Favero argues that it might serve as an ‘intermediary’, bringing together observer and observed, object and subject.
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Conclusion
27 The articles in this special issue cover a broad range of ethnographic sites, ranging from the Off in the contemporary African art biennale of Dakar to auction houses of non-European art in Paris, cartonera publishing in Buenos Aires and digital image- production techniques across locales. Yet they all share a concern for a series of overlapping problems, including those two key sets of issues I have discussed under the headings of institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild) and immersion, correspondence, and form (Alex Flynn/ Lucy Bell and Paolo Favero). Across these articles, questions about the role of institutions in articulating scales of global and local are addressed through issues of valuation and demarcation. These contributions speak about the commensurability and interrelation of starkly contrasted spheres of aesthetic valuation and artistic production — many of which include a strong element of trans-anthropological reflexivity.
28 Notably, the authors share a concern for translations of methodologies that draws on art historical, economic, activist, and visual fields, cognizant of the mobility of forms and methods of research across fields of artistic and scholarly production, but also sites of research and exchange. The papers address furthermore the performativity of institutions as well as methods, analysing closely the different professional roles and characters that emerge and co-constitute each other in these fields. Two major questions, however, remain about the constitutive agency of these figures: How do they — how do we as anthropologists — choreograph such ‘aesthetic encounters’ ourselves, considering ethnography as a kind of mise-en-scène? And in what ways might these creative reconfigurations of ethnographic designs offer alternative notions and practices into digital and analogue creations and circulations of aesthetic experiences and social forms? This last point concerns a term coined by Sherry B. Ortner in Not Hollywood (2013), namely ‘interface ethnography’. Evoking the question of the intersection between public infrastructures of circulation (auction house publicity, biennale catalogues, or cartoneras) and anthropological scholarship, it remains to be seen, how future research organizes and makes sense of the fact that the fields we study are themselves providing theatrical settings for anthropology, rather than passively welcoming our attention. I propose to consider the sites of global articulation presented in this exciting collection themselves as reflexive trans-anthropological experiments, which leave an anachronistic anthropology of contemporary art much to do yet.
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ABSTRACTS
Reflecting on two sets of analytical trajectories of the articles in this special issue — ‘institutions, histories, and spheres of valuation’ (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild) and ‘immersion, correspondence, and form’ (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell and Paolo Favero) —, I argue for an attuned anthropology of the contemporary. This latter focuses on the tensions of art and aesthetics across scales of glocality, and might benefit from what I would like to call an anachronistic and anatopical positionality and approach. I thus consider us in a trans-anthropological phase, in which anthropology no longer documents, but constitutes these fields itself. This affords a greater reflexivity about the collaborative modalities and theoretical value generated through our scholarship as anthropologists; it also asks for a recalibrated ethnographic awareness of the co-articulation of art and anthropology at all scales of their encounter.
À partir des deux approches analytiques des articles ici présentés— «institutions, histoires, et sphères de production de valeurs» (Thomas Fillitz and Tamara Schild), ainsi qu’ «immersion, correspondance, et forme» (Alex Flynn/Lucy Bell et Paolo Favero) —, j’argumente dans cet épilogue pour une anthropologie de la contemporanéité réceptive. Celle-ci se formerait sur la base des tensions entre art et esthétique à travers différentes échelles de glocalité, et
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bénéficierait d’une approche anachronique et «anatopical». Je conçois donc une période post- anthropologique, dans laquelle l’anthropologie ne s’achève plus dans la documentation, mais constitue elle-même ces champs. Ceci requiert une réflexivité avancée à propos des modalités collaboratives et de la valeur théorique qui sont produites au cours de la recherche anthropologique ; ceci demande aussi une conscience ethnographique qui est re-calibrée sur les articulations entre art et anthropologie à tous les niveaux de leur rencontre.
Partiendo de dos aproximaciones analíticas presentes en los artículos de este número especial: 'instituciones, historias y esferas de valoración' (Thomas Fillitz y Tamara Schild) y 'inmersión, correspondencia y forma' (Alex Flynn / Lucy Bell y Paolo Favero ), propongo una antropología “receptiva” o “sintonizada” (attuned) de lo contemporáneo. Ésta se centra en las tensiones entre arte y estética a través de escalas de glocalidad, y podría beneficiarse de lo que me gustaría llamar un enfoque y una posicionalidad anacrónica y ana-tópica. Por lo tanto, considero que nos encontramos en una fase post-antropológica, en la que la antropología ya no documenta sino que constituye estos mismos campos. Esto permite una mayor reflexividad sobre las modalidades colaborativas y sobre el valor teórico generado mediante nuestra labor académica como antropólogos. También exige una conciencia etnográfica que recalibre la co-articulación entre arte y a antropología a todos los niveles.
INDEX
Mots-clés: institutions, esthétique, arts visuels, art contemporain, anachronisme, échelle, valeur, globalisme Keywords: institutions, aesthetics, visual art, contemporary art, anachronism, scale, value, globalism Palabras claves: instituciones, estética, arte visual, arte contemporáneo, anacronismo, escala, valor, globalismo
AUTHOR
JONAS TINIUS Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Department of European Ethnology, Humboldt zu Universität Berlin [email protected]
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