Gell’s treatise is of immediate interest to art historians. He breaks out of the restricted interest in “tribal” or “primitive” art characteristic of the preponderance of work in the anthropology of art, and offers a theory of art which is anthropological in a broader sense, one which can equally effectively analyse either a West African nail fetish or Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass. For Gell all these objects which act as agents, through which we are able to grasp “mind” as an external disposition transcending the individual.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 1
In Art and Agency Gell argues that conventional art-historical approaches cater primarily to the aesthetic sensitivities of a Western art public, and assimilate the kinds of experiences in the encounter with African or Oceanic art to that of the museum-going art lover in the West – all at the expense of meaningful sociological understanding of how the artwork circulates, and produces effects, in its original setting.
Culture, Gell suggests, is not the proper frame in which to contextualise art, since culture is merely an “abstraction” in contrast to the “the dynamics of social interaction….a real process….unfolding in time”.
Instead of the focus on aesthetics and meaning, Gell chooses to “place all the emphasis on agency, causation, result, and transformation,” viewing “art as a system of action intended to change the world, rather than encode symbolic propositions about it”. All social agency, Gell argues, is realized through the medium of objects. Humans realize their intentions, and thus exercise agency, through the medium of artefacts as “secondary agents” which distribute their agency in the causal milieu.
Artworks are “indexes” which distribute agency by calling forth on the part of the viewer or the “recipient” an “abduction” or inference of their origins in an act of manufacture. The visual properties of the index, in particular their visual complexity or technical virtuosity, realize the agency of their producer through the impact they have of the viewer of “patient” inferring and experiencing the primary agent’s potency at one and the same time.
In these works of art, “beauty” and the decoding of “symbolic meaning” are not much at issue.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 2-3
…Gells claims, although expressed in distinctly different language, run remarkably parallel to the case Norman Bryson makes that “A virtue of considering the visual image as a sign is that having relocated painting within the social domain, inherently and not only as a result of instrumental placing there by some other agency, it becomes possible to think of the image as discursive work which returns into society”.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 5
The anthropology of art, Jeremy Coote suggests, should be concerned with identifying the set of formal qualities recognised and valued within a society, and the repertoire of visual skills through which they are instantiated.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 6
In the sixth chapter of Art and Agency, “The critique of the index,” Gell argues that the patterns of decorative art have an intrinsic liveliness by virtue of their interrelationships between neighbouring motifs. Four planar transformations – reflection, translation, rotation and glide-reflection – operating on constituent motifs from the basis of all patters, and generate relationships of such complexity that they are indecipherable, thus slowing perceptual scanning of the entranced viewer, trapped in an interminable exchange with the decorated object. Apotropaic patterns, like Celtic knotwork and labyrinths, exemplify this “sticky” character of decorative patterns to a particularly marked degree. They thus lend themselves to protecting thresholds, both of buildings and, as tattoos, of orifices of the body: demons fascinated by the patterns get stuck, like insects on fly paper, and are thus diverted from acts of malevolence.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 7
Paralleling Gell’s interest in the presenting image, such critics of traditional art-historical interpretation have sought to open out analysis in a number of directions. In particular, they focus on the “figurative”, the specifically visual ways in which, for example, stories are narrated through pictures, rather that shortcutting analysis by seeing the image as secondary illustration of some primary text. Like Gell’s, such approaches see meaning as a transaction in time, produced in the context of a relationship between work and recipient. Production aesthetics is increasingly supplemented by reception aesthetics, exploring “the lines of signification opening out from the work” as it is appropriated by individual viewers engaging the work in both its original context and the multiplicity of other settings in which a work might find itself through the vicissitudes of history.
W.J.T. Mitchell, asking “What do pictures really want?”, advocates an approach to pictures which goes beyond “looking at them as vehicles of meaning or instruments of power” and seeks to understand “the uncanny personhood of pictures, and the kinds of physical, social, and erotic engagement to which that gives rise.
Drawing on the phenomenology of perception, Effimova (1997) argues that it was the sensory effects of the paintings like Alexander Laktionov’s Letter to the Front that constitutes the “realism” of Soviet Socialist Realism, not the banal party dogmas encoded in the iconography. Powerful manipulation of the play of light and shadow, suggesting dazzling sunlight and parching heat, making them feel more real, by the force of the painting’s appeal to the human sensorium.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 9
Gell works from just four concepts – artist, index, prototype, recipient – related to each other as “agents” or “patients” primarily through a cognitive operation Gell calls “abduction”. His whole framework is elaborated through the systematic exploration of the possible relationships between these conceptual elements.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 10
The concept of agent implies to that of that of patient and visa versa. Artists as agent act on idexes as patients, shaping through their skill the form works of art are takes.
Gell assumes that a powerful interest in and capacity for the abduction of agency is built into the human mind. Further, such abductions are always in the nature of things materially meditated, whether through the body as a material medium of communication (smiles), or in artefact form. Indeed, it is only on this basis that other more abstract modes of linguistic and symbolic communication could be erected. Further, it is by virtue of this social intelligence, and the interpretative procedures which constitute it, that we can abduct agency from objects, and that objects in particular can thus have an agency which is to all intents and purpose equivalent to human agency.
All manufactured objects can in principle motivate the abduction of the agency of their producer. Art objects are distinctive insofar as they exercise their social effectiveness, their agency, by means of the technical processes embodied in them by their producers, and their agency is realised in the process of abduction and by the way the index shapes that process.
Similarly, the technical skill of Ingres in depicting silk is part of captivates us in his portrait of Mme Moitessier. Our admiration of the skill of the artist, transcending our capacity fully to grasp the operations, and respect for or envy of the person who commissioned the portrait thus able to command such skill, are internally constitutive of the agency of the work of art.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 12
The consultant, and the victims of such images (nail fetishes), see not just a figure pierced with nails, but a whole complex network of relationships reaching backwards in time, and potentially able to reach forwards in time, indexed by the nail fetish figure. Each time it is acted upon by a consultant who drives the nail into its flesh, the agency of both priest and hunter, the two base-men, is abducted and mobilized in the fetish’s exercise of judicial authority over its victim.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 19
Gell insists that “Artworks do not do their cognitive work in isolation; they function because they cooperate synergically with one another, and the basis of their synergic action is style”
Gell insists that “visual style is an autonomous domain” and denies that “’culture’, in some general sense, is responsible for the visual style of artefacts,” while continuing to maintain that artworks “are the outcome of social initiatives that reflect a specific, socially inculcated sensibility”.
Introduction: Art and Agency and Art History, by Jeremy Tanner and Robin Osborne. P 21
For Gell the attraction of the “generate and test” model of creative agency is that it captures the way in which “thinking” takes place outside us as well as inside us”, and that process of modification demands that we respect the artists oeuvre as a temporal object.
By the last chapter Gell is insisting that “the ensemble of an artist’s works, strung out in time, constitutes a dynamic, unstable, entity; not a mere accumulation of dateable artefacts. We con only appreciate it by participating in its unfolding life.
No comments:
Post a Comment