Some Sculpture-Anthropology Relations: Reading the Agency of Franz Boas and Lev Sternberg

J. c. howard SoMe SculPture-anthroPoloGy relationS: readinG the aGency of franZ BoaS and lev SternBerG abstract. this article deliberates arguments for sculpture being considered ‘the most anthropological of the arts’. after introducing british contentions for the anthropological aspect of sculpture (barlow, Gell, ades and bunn), it then applies, not without a hint of irony, the concept to sculpture specifically made for anthropological and ethnographic museums, using examples instigated by franz boas and lev sternberg (for the united states national Museum in the 1890s and the Kunstkamera in the 1910s). hence mannequins and copies of Kwakiutl and pre-hispanic andean ritual figures (living and carved) are, respectively, explored. correlations with associated acquisitions are made, e.g. nivkh and Kadiwéu wood carvings, these involving their contemporary analysis by Voldemārs Matvejs and alberto Vojtěch frič. Particular attention is paid to sternberg’s commission of concrete copies of the san agustín megaliths from Karl theodor stoepel. the subsequent placement of these in the Kunstkamera courtyard is probed in terms of potential altered meanings, identity and agency. thereafter the enquiry moves to examination of the ‘sculpted anthropologist’, again using boas and sternberg as case studies. ultimately, through the combination of these two distinct and direct anthropological sides of sculpture, a restricted case is made for the plastic art’s anthropological identity. KeyWords: sculpture, anthropology, boas, sternberg, Kunstkamera УДК 069:39 doi 10.31250/2618-8619-2020-4(10)-140-156 JereMy c. hoWard – Phd, senior lecturer, school of art history, university of st andrews (st andrews, scotland, uK) e-mail: [email protected] Howard J. C. Some Sculpture-Anthropology Relations: Reading the agency of Franz Boas and Lev Sternberg introduction: follies of the sculPture-anthroPoloGy relationshiP in 2019 i was asked to present a response to british artist Phyllida barlow’s ‘provocation’ that ‘sculpture is the most anthropological of the arts’1. initially i thought that barlow, author of folly (2017), had done a good job in being provocative because her statement was nonsensical2. i still think it is, but at the same time i believe i have also managed to find some ways of making sense out of the nonsense. hence here i concentrate on showing why i think sculpture is ‘the most anthropological of the arts’, while also refuting it. the provocation is highly problematic, especially if we were to consider, as the anthropologist alfred Gell would have been prone to try, all the axes of indexes and meshes of intentionalities that are the workings of sculpture, if not all art3. Gell’s formulations themselves serve as axiomatic for this paper, construing as they do an ‘artwork’ as a visible, physical index of a series of cognitive operations, and as such making sculpture, for example, an agent that mobilises what can be deemed aesthetic principles in the cause of developing social interactions. although Gell frequently investigated three-dimensional artworks, he did not categorically differentiate between art fields, and instead argued for the ‘personhood of art objects’, seeing all those objects as ‘social agents… in the system of terms and relations envisaged in the [anthropological] theory’ (Gell 1998: 7). thereby, and irrespective of any other definitions of them as art, they are subject to anthropology’s ‘biographical’ approach, i.e. a depth of focus on their ‘act’ within the context of their ‘life’ (Gell 1998: 10). as material entities, the stylistic and formal conventions, individual works display comprise familial relations with other works. hence they are axes of coherence with a Janus-like double identity that fuses internal mental process and external transaction in objectified personhood. this personhood is one that is fractal and collective, i.e. it is a phenomenon of distributed mind and efficacious agency, a ‘doing’ characterised by an element of protention that anticipates future works and another of retention that derives from earlier ones. this accords with consideration of anthropology’s aim as being the making sense of human behaviour in the context of social relations and its being particularly ‘good at providing close-grained analyses of apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances, etc.’ (Gell 1998: 10). all this said, and irrespective of any institutional, aesthetic or semiological status afforded them, three-dimensional art objects, that one may decide to term ‘sculpture’, often form a material culture basis for anthropological enquiry. in many ways then what we are dealing in this essay is something to which i shall ascribe the term isculpture or a similar neologism. if ‘sculpture’ is the most anthropological of the arts, would it not follow that anthropology is the most sculptural of the social sciences or humanities? More so than art history, or aesthetics or philosophy? being anthropological means being engaged in scientific accounting for human nature. sculpture can also do this, if not perhaps in the way intended by the ‘provocation’, as i attempt to show here. sculpture’s being rather anthropological is questionable not least because it could be taken as meaning that it is a Western- and industrialised- society derived and arts-based intellectual enquiry. it, if sculpture is an it, can be this but only on occasion, and sculptural practice around the globe and across time shows that such an aspect is relatively minor. furthermore, and connected to such an erroneous premise, having an anthropological aspect might therefore imply that sculpture is a Western engagement with the practices of ‘less complex societies’ (a term i also find problematic since its gloss implies the suffix ‘than us’), i.e. that sculpture is still a product of an industrialised West but that it interprets ‘primitive’, ‘folk’ or ‘non-Western’ ways for the benefit of a privileged Western elite (i do not rule out that this might have value, because surely that elite can grow wiser and less narrow in its comprehension of the world by 1 The invitation came from the henry Moore institute, leeds, uK, as part of its contribution to a festival entitled ‘yorkshire sculpture international’. My intervention took place on 10 July at the institute. barlow is a direct descendent of charles darwin. 2 folly was barlow’s large, multi-material bauble- and column- dominated installation for the british Pavilion at the Venice biennale, 2017. seven models for the columns, made of plywood, polyurethane foam, hessian, concrete and cement, and with the appearance of a thicket of roughly capped and pedestaled upright human excrement, were exhibited at the henry Moore institute in 2019. these then are barlow’s version of that which i term isculpture, as explored in this essay. 3 See, in particular, not least for this terminology, Gell (1998). 141 кунсткаМера KunstKaMera № 4 (10) 2020 exposure to such interpretations). one problem with this is that it smacks of social evolutionism, i.e. Western culture is a pinnacle of civilisation and development, and that it is so because of a unilineal evolution of societies from most primitive to most civilised. dawn ades has claimed that when henry Moore spoke (in 1961) of the benefits of ‘the new friendship between art and anthropology’, he quite possibly did so with anthropology being ‘a euphemism for primitive’ (ades 2015: n.p.). this is, in part at least, based on his being inspired by non-Western art following his initial visit to the ethnographic Gallery of the british Museum in 1921. so the provocation could suggest that sculpture is the most ‘primitive’ of the arts. or the most primitivist. if so, this implies a somewhat shallow, narrow understanding of anthropology as well as a bland glossing of primitive/ist. in any case, it suggests an ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the axial index still Western modern art. if this is so then Moore’s aim, as stated in a 1926 notebook, to ‘keep ever prominent the world tradition’ was not motivated by a desire for such ‘tradition’ to be nurtured by its makers or their closest descendants, or even helped in this by wealthy outsider benefactors, but rather for it to be somehow promoted through interpretation by remote, connoisseurial artists from ‘advanced’ societies (ades 2015: n.p.). this certainly can have value, despite its limitations and potential for association with colonial practice. alternatively, the provocation could also suggest that sculpture is anthropological because it is a practice with considerable agency (more than other arts) in societies deemed less complex. and in those societies its material form and making act as indices for concepts of personhood and community, life and death. this leads me to the idea that what might lie behind the provocation’s apparent claims is a more general notion that something called sculpture has greater agency within and upon human behaviour and society than two-dimensional art. it is an old argument of course. flat means one surface, means visual, means the making is less embodied, means unlikely to be tactile, means unlikely to be outside in a community space, means limited agency or efficacy. that much white-cube installation or conceptual ‘sculpture’ could stand aloof in distinct but related ways should not be overlooked. Plus, that the implied privileging of sculpture over other arts denies the anthropological aspects of, say, performance and the crafts with all their living, aesthetic, materialities, is hugely problematic. it also denies that boundaries between the ‘categories’ of arts only exist in certain instances, i.e. that much practice has no such distinctions. such sculptural privileging has long since been debunked, not least by the work of sculptor, craftswoman and anthropologist stephanie bunn, whose sinuous, woven, organic Winged arch (2006) was a willow, reed, walnut and living plant fence and gateway designed to protect and draw attention to the vulnerable, sandy shoreline at Gibraltar Point, toronto island, canada4.

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