1: The Problem Defined: The Need for an Anthropology of Art
I have no objection to Prices’ (1989: 92 – 3) suggestions so far as increasing the recognition afforded to non – Western art and artists is concerned. Indeed what well-intentioned person could object to such a programme, except possibly the ‘connoisseurs’, who derive a reactionary satisfaction from imagining that the producers of the ‘primitive art’ they like to collect are primeval savages, barely descended from the trees. These idiots can be dismissed out of hand.
The distinction is, I admit, elusive, but it does imply that the ‘anthropology of art’ focuses on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception, rather than the evaluation of particular works of art, which, to my mind, is the function of a critic. It may be interesting to know why, for example, the Yoruba evaluate one carving as aesthetically superior to another (R.F. Thompson 1973), but that does not tell us much about why the Yoruba carve to begin with.
Aesthetic judgments are only interior mental acts; art objects, on the other hand, are produced and circulated in the external physical and social world. This production and circulation has to be sustained by certain social processes of an objective kind, which are connected to other social processes (exchange, politics, religion, kinship, etc.).
I think that the desire to see the art of other cultures aesthetically tells us more about our own ideology and its quasi-religious veneration of objects as aesthetic talismans, than it does about these other cultures.
Pages 2 – 3
Similarly, the anthropology of art cannot be the study of aesthetic principles of this or that culture, but of the mobilization of aesthetic principles (or something like them) in the course of social interaction. The aesthetic theory of art just does not resemble , in any salient respect, any existing anthropological theory about social processes. What it resembles is existing Western art theory – which of course it is, applied no longer to ‘Western’ art, but to exotic or popular art. To develop a distinctively anthropological theory of art it is insufficient to ‘borrow’ existing art theory and apply it to art.
My view is that in so far as anthropology has a specific subject-matter at all, that subject-matter is ‘social-relationships’ – relationships between participants in social systems of various kinds.
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A purely cultural, aesthetic, ‘appreciative’, approach to art objects is an anthropological dead end. Instead, the question which interests me is the possibility of formulating a ‘theory of art’ which fits naturally into the context of anthropology, given the premiss that anthropological theories are ‘recognizable’ initially, as theories about social relationships, that there could be a species of anthropological theory in which persons or ‘social agents’ are, in certain contexts, substituted by art objects.
The Art Object
Nor am I happy with the idea that the work of art is recognizable, generically, in that it participates in a ‘visual’ code for the communication of meaning. I entirely reject the idea that anything, except language itself, has ‘meaning’ in the intended sense.
Visual art objects are objects about which we may, and commonly do, speak – but they themselves either do not speak, or they utter natural language in graphemic code. We talk about objects, using signs, but art objects are not, except in special cases, signs themselves, with ‘meanings’; and if they do have meanings, then they are part of language (i.e. graphic signs), not a separate ‘visual’ language.
I view art as a system of action, intended to change the world rather than encode symbolic propositions about it. The ‘action’ – centered approach to art is inherently more anthropological than the alternative semiotic approach because it is preoccupied with the practical mediatory role of art objects in the social process, rather than with the interpretation of objects ‘as if’ they were texts.
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The art object is whatever is inserted into the ‘slot’ provided for art objects in the system of terms and relations envisaged in the theory (to be outlined later). Nothing is decidable in advance about the nature of this object, because the theory is premised on the idea that the nature of the art object is a function of the socio-relational matrix in which it is embedded. It has no ‘intrinsic’ nature, independent of the relational context.
Insomuch as we recognize a pre-theoretical category of art objects – split into two major subcategories of ‘Western’ art objects and ‘Indigenous’ or ‘Ethnographic’ art objects – I conduct the discussion in terms of ‘prototypical’ members of these categories, for conveniences sake. But in fact anything whatsoever could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point of view, including living persons, because the anthropological theory of art(which we can roughly define as the ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’) merges seamlessly with the social anthropology of persons and their bodies. Thus, from the point of view of the anthropology of art, an idol in a temple believed to be the body of the divinity, and a spirit-medium, who likewise provides the divinity with a temporal body, are treated theoretically as on a par, despite the fact that the former is an artifact and the latter is a human being.
Art sociology
I have just provisionally defined the ‘anthropology of art’ as the theoretical study of ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’ and I have suggested that in order for the anthropology of art to be specifically anthropological, it has to proceed on the basis that, in relevant theoretical respects, art objects are equivalent of persons, or more precisely, social agents.
Page 7in the contemporary world, much ‘ethnographic’ art is usually produced for the metropolitan market; in which case there is no possible way of dealing with it except in this specific framework. However, it also remains true that in the past, and still today, art was and is produced for much more limited circulation, independently of any reception which may be accorded to this art across cultural and institutional boundaries. These local contexts, in which art is produced not as a function of the existence of specific ‘art’ institutions, but as a by-product of the mediation of social life and the existence of institutions of a more general-purpose kind, justify the assertion of at least relative autonomy for an anthropology of art not circumscribed by the presence of institutions of any specific, art-related, kind.
It seems then, that the anthropology of art can be at least provisionally separated from the study of art institutions or the ‘art-world’. Which implies the need to return to, and reconsider, the proposition advanced above. To suggest that art objects, to figure in an ‘anthropological’ theory of art, have to be considered ‘persons’, seems a bizarre notion. But only if one fails to bear in mind that the entire historical tendency of anthropology has been towards a radical defamiliarization and relativization of the notion of ‘persons’. Since the outset of the discipline, anthropology had been signally preoccupied with a series of problems to do with ostensibly peculiar relations between persons and ‘things’ which somehow ‘appear as’ , or do duty as, persons.
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The power of art stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded of the enchantment of technology. The enchantment of technology is the power that technical processes have of casting a spell over us so that we see the real world in an enchanted form. Art, as a separate kind of technical activity, only carries further, through a kind of involution, the enchantment which is imminent in all kinds of technical activity.
Gell 1992:44
Parts of indexes convey agency just as wholes do. In other words, the parts of the index exert causal influence over one another and testify to the agency of the index as a whole, in that it is in the disposition of the parts of the index that the artists agency is primarily made apparent. We are accustomed to speak of decorated surfaces as ‘animated’. This idiom reflects the fact that the motifs in decorative art seem to be engaged in a mazy dance in which our eyes become readily lost. / ……the inherent agency in decorative forms, forms which do not simply refer to (represent) agency in the external world , but which produce agency in the physical body of the index itself, so that it becomes a ‘living thing’ without recourse to the imitation of any living thing. Gell. Art and Agency. P 76
Guernica is stylistically decipherable and psychologically salient because part-to-part relationships within the painting cohere with the whole, and Guernica is an instance of ‘Picasso’s style’ (rather than Guernicas style) because this painting is coherently related to other Picasso paintings, which are related to others still-so that ultimately all Picassos are intelligibly related to each. Art and Agency P162
Captivation – Viewer becoming artist up to a point
‘Thus, part of my experience as a recipient of Vermeer’s Lacemaker is the contemplation of the possibility that I, not Vermeer, could have produced this painting…………… Art and Agency P 69
A man whose name is known in distant communities as one who controls the pathways along which renowned valuables are transferred, can influence the calculations of Kula operators in faraway places. He is, so to speak, more than a merely incarnate man. He is an expanded and disseminated being, present here, there and everywhere because his name is attached to circulating objects, and still more because the movements of these objects are influenced, at long range, by his intentional agency, his calculativeness, and (magically assisted) persuation (Munn 1986). Art and Agency P 230 - Relations to Grafitti?
I consider the various arts – painting, sculpture, music, poetry, fiction, etc. – as components of a vast and often unrecognised technical system, essential to the reproduction of human societies, which I will be calling the technology of enchantment. Gell 1992: 43
But in fact anything whatsoever could, conceivably, be an art object from the anthropological point of view, including living persons, because the anthropological theory of art (which we can roughly define as the ‘social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency’) merges seamlessly with the social anthropology of persons and their bodies. Thus, from the point of view of anthropology of art, an idol in a temple believed to be the body of the divinity, and a spirit-medium, who likewise provides the divinity with a temporary body, are treated as theoretically on a par, despite the fact that former is an artefact and the latter is a human being.
Gell. P 7 – Art and Agency
…..there could be a species of anthropological theory in which persons or ‘social agents’ are, in certain contexts, substituted for by art objects.
Gell. P 5 – Art and Agency
……the anthropological theory of art is the theory of art which ‘considers art objects as persons’ is, I hope, immediately and legibly Maussian. Given that prestations or ‘gifts’ are treated in Muassian exchanger theory as (extensions of) persons, then there is obviously scope for seeing art objects as ‘persons’ in the same way.
Gell P 9 Art and Agency
Very much part of the theory I am proposing is the idea that we approach art objects (and members of a larger class of indexes of agency) as if they had ‘physiognomies’ like people. When we see a picture of a smiling person, we attribute an attitude of friendliness to ‘the person in the picture’ and (if there is one) the sitter, or ‘subject’ of the picture. We respond to the picture in this way because the appearance of smiling triggers a (hedged) inference that (unless they are pretending) this person is friendly, just as a real persons smile would trigger the same inference. We have, in short, access to ‘another mind’ in this way, a real mind or a depicted mind, but in either case the mind of a well disposed person.
Gell P 15 Art and Agency
Animals and material objects can have minds akin to a human one, if not identical. Animals and material objects can have minds and intentions attributed to them, but these are always, in some residual sense, human minds, because we have access ‘from the inside’ only to human minds, indeed to only one of these, our own. Human minds are inevitably ‘social’ minds, to the extent that we only know our own minds in a social context of some kind.
…..but I am more concerned with the kind of second-class agency which artefacts acquire once they become enmeshed in a texture of social relationships. However, within this relational texture, artefacts can quite well be treated as agents in a variety of ways.
The immediate ‘other’ in a social relationship does not have to be another ‘human being’.
Gell Art and Agency P17
They are certainly social beings – ‘members of the family’, for a time at any rate. (Michelangleo’s David / a girls doll).
Art and Agency P18
Soldiers weapons are parts of him which make him what he is. Pol Pot’s men were capable of being the kind of (very malign) agents that they were only because of the artefacts they had at their disposal, which, so to speak, turned them from mere men into devils with extraordinary powers. Their type of agency would be unthinkable except in conjunction with the spatio-temporally expanded capacity for violence which the possession of mines makes possible. Pol Pot’s soldiers possessed (like all of us) ‘distributed personhood’. As agents, they were not just where their bodies were, but in many different places (and times) simultaneously. Those mines were components of their identities as human persons….
Art and Agency P21
The public, or ‘recipients’ of a work of art (index) are, according to the anthropological theory of art, in a social relationship with the index, either as ‘patients’ (in that the index casually affects them in some way) or as ‘agents’ in that, but for them, this index would not have come into existence (they have caused it).
Art and Agency P24
Columbus reported that ‘ Certain trees were believed to send for sorcerers, to whom to whom they gave orders how to shape their trunks into idols, and these “cemu” being then installed into temple huts, received their prayers and inspired their priests and oracles’. Even this terse statement is enough to establish the possibility that, in certain instances, it is an agency in the material of the index, which is held to control the artist…’…….’The act of carving, famously in the instance of Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’, is often seen as a matter of ‘liberating’ forms which inhere in the uncut stone or wood.
Art and Agency P 29 / 30
The particular attention paid to the eyes of these idols arises, not from the need to represent the body realistically, but from the need to represent the body in such a way as to imply that the body is only a body, and that a much more important entity, the mind, is immured within it.
Art and Agency P 136
We can only distinguish between idolatrous and non-idolatrous use of religious images because idolatry is in an important sense not ‘symbolic’ at all, whereas the use of images as aids to piety, rather than physical vehicles to divinity, is symbolic. The Egyptian ceremonies just adduced belong firmly in the category of idolatrous practices, and are thus real, practical, services performed for divine social others in image-form, not symbolic acts.
Art and Agency P 135
Guthrie, in a recent study of the foundations of religious belief, has argued that ‘anthropomorphism’ – the tendency to impute human attributes such as will, agency, and responsiveness to supposedly ‘inanimate’ entities – is an abiding feature of human cognition (Guthrie 1993)
Art and Agency P 121
How can an entity possess ‘intentional psychology’, without being biologically alive? In the case, a worshipper who addresses prayers to a stone must believe, somehow, that the stone in question, though not a living thing, sees and hears as does the worshipper, thinks and reacts as he does, and moreover, has the power to plan and execute actions.
Art and Agency P 122
The question as to the manner in which representational indexes – idols – can be apprehended as social others, as repositories of agency and sensibility, seems to raise the question of ‘apparently irrational’ beliefs and practices. It is surely irrational, or at least strange, to offer food to, dress and bath, a mere piece of sculpture, rather than a living breathing human being.
Art and Agency P 123
First of all, although idols may not produce much visible behaviour, they may none the less be very ‘active’ invisibly, that is, most of their actions take place ‘off stage’ as it were. They can be making crops grow, confounding traitors and plotters, or keeping the sun alight…..And these actions have visible consequences ‘elsewhere’, though not in any change in the bodily demeanour of the idol per se.
Secondly, an idol who does not respond actively is none the less ‘active’ as a patient with respect to the agency of others (Kids – Doll)
P 129 Art and Agency
The Distributed Person
Mimesis and Sorcery
The basic thesis of this work, to recapitulate, is that works of art, images, icons, and the like have to be treated, in the context of an anthropological theory, as person-like; that is, sources of, and targets for, social agency. In this context, image-worship has a central place, since nowhere are images more obviously treated as human persons than in the context of worship and ceremonies.
..art lovers, it seems to me, actually do worship images in most of the relevant senses, and explain away their de facto idolatry by rationalizing it as aesthetic awe. Thus, to write about art at all is, in fact, to write about either religion, or the substitute for religion which those who have abandoned the outward forms of received religions content themselves with.
Page 96 – 97
One such ‘black stone’ worshipped in Arabia as Cybele, was conveyed with great ceremony to Rome, where it was installed into a cavity within the idol of Magna Mater Idea, the goddess of members of the Imperial elite who favored an ‘internationalist’ religious outlook.
Page 98
Idols…are not depictions, not portraits, but (artefactual) bodies.
Conclusion: The Extended Mind
Each piece, each motif, each line or groove, speaks to every other one. It is as if they bore kinship to one another, and could be positioned within a common genealogy, just as their makers could be. Above all, each fragment of Marquesan art resonates with every other, because each has passed, uniquely, through a Marquesan mind.
Page 221
The major upshot of that discussion (sections 7.9-11), I hope, was that the contrast between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is always only relative rather than absolute difference. The contrast between ‘mind’ (the internal person) and the external person, though real, is only relative. If we seek to delve inside the person all we seem to find are other persons – the homunculi of Dennett – and if, as sociologists rather than as cognitive psychologists, we try to give an account of the external aspects of persons, we find that any one social individual is the sum of their relations (distributed over biographical time and space) with other persons (M. Strathern 1988; Gell ‘Strathernograms’ 1998). Our inner personhood seems to consist of replications of what we are externally, as suggested in the parable of Peer Gynt and his famous onion. So, bearing this in mind, it may not be so aberrant to suggest that what persons are externally (and collectively) is a kind of enlarged replication of what they are internally. Especially if, as I shall be doing, we we consider ‘persons’ not as bounded biological organisms, but use this label to apply to all the objects and/or events in the milieu from which agency or personhood can be abducted….
Page 221
The idea of personhood being spread around in time and space is a component of innumerable cultural institutions and practices. Ancestral shrines, tombs, memorials, ossuaries, sacred sites, etc. all have to do with the extension of personhood beyond the confines of biological life via indexes distributed in the milieu.
Page 223
The mechanism for the accumulation of dispersed life into the physical index of the Malangan carving is via the mechanism of fire. The process of making the image is conceptualized as a building up of a fire from ashes, to glowing embers, to the final blaze (1992: 104). The raw wood is charged with efficacy by a technique of heating and burning…As the forms emerge (the carver, a hired specialist, is guided by dreams sent by ancestors), the carving grows (conceptually) hotter and hotter. The culminating process in painting, at which time the carving is ready to redistribute its accumulated charge or ‘heat’ at the climactic ceremony during which it will be publicly displayed and remembered by those privileged to do so, and during which it will, itself, ‘die’ and become col and rotten.
Page 226
New Islanders have elaborated the art of transacting ‘memories’ as a conscious, public, strategy; the accumulation of memories is institutionalized rather than being the product of happenstance…Their accumulated, interlocking memories consist of internal skins, mediated via the Malangan, which can be taken apart and reconfigured at will.
Page 227
Thus memory becomes a socially engineered medium for the transmission of the power to change the world or shape the course of events, rather than a mere passive registration of the past. Once the index has been witnessed in its ‘charged’ state, it is a mere corpse, drained of its power, because whatever memory images others may form of it (by witnessing it in its inert condition in a museum or a shop) they will not be those memories, the ones uniquely stipulated as potent and efficacious.
The Malangan are indisputably material objects, but the socially relevant Malangan are internalized images which New Islanders carry about inside their heads.
Page 228
Any given work of art, in gross terms, considered in the context of its makers’ oeuvre, is likely to be both a ‘preparation’ for later works, and a ‘recapitulation’ of previous works.
Page 234
…we can easily conceive that ‘remembering’ something which happened in the past is very like ‘copying’ a picture that one has painted in the past, or that ‘making a preliminary sketch for a picture’ is very like mentally anticipating some future happening or course of action.
In other words, the arrangements of individual works in an artist’s oeuvre, each of which is partly a recapitulation of previous works and partly an anticipation of works as yet uncommenced, seems to generate some kind of relationships between indexes (which are objects in the external world) as exist between mental states in the cognitive process we recognize as consciousness. In other words, the temporal structure of index-to-index relations in the artists’ oeuvre externalizes or objectifies the same type of relations as exist between the artists internal states of mind as a being endowed with consciousness. The artists’ oeuvre is artistic consciousness (personhood in the cognitive, temporal sense) writ large and rendered public and accessible.
But where does ‘cognition’ take place? – in the artists’ head, or on his canvas? Mostly, of course, the cognitive processes of any mind, especially a whole biographical career, are inaccessible private experiences which leave only the most indecipherable traces. And we could hardly aggregate an artists’ oeuvre as an unified ‘temporal object’ unless each of the individual works had, at one stage, originated as an intention in the artists’ mind to produce such and such an index (i.e. a state of mind giving rise to artistic agency). But the generate-and-test model of creative agency, which we briefly examined earlier on, reveals most clearly that ‘thinking’ takes place outside us as well as inside us. The poet writes down his lines, and then scratches them out, altering and improving his verses in ways that crucially depend on the existence of physical traces of his previous (mental) activity. And this is still truer of the graphic artist, who continually uses his own past production as a spur to his future production, altering and modifying freely as he goes along. And in more general terms, the artist lives surrounded by his own works, completed or half-completed, which litter the studio and provide him with an ever-present record of his activity over many years. (Peter Blake living within his collections and works – Philip Guston in his studio surrounded by works etc..)
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