The Unidentified Concept: Art
How do anthropologists work on art?
In our daily lives, we do not think much about what art is. However, many disciplines like anthropology, literature, history, and philosophy have been trying to answer the “what is art?” question for a long time. The question seems like a basic definitive question; actually, it is quite a wide concept to discuss.
In the Anthropology of Art and Music class, in the Fall of 2021, we spent the whole semester discussing what art is. To make it easy to discuss it, the Professor, described art as “an output of imaginative activities that help us understand, interpret, and enjoy life.”
During this class, I thought about how an art object affects my perception of life and how I interact with the art object?
Looking at art
Some people look at the objects presented to them by institutions and consider them ‘art,’ they might try to interpret the objects they see, then maybe take a selfie to impress their followers before they move on.
While many individuals consider objects ‘superficial,’ others try to understand the meaning behind the art and can have emotionally charged reactions.
Before I took this class, my vision of art was different. I think I was looking at objects more ‘superficially’ than I am now. Now, when I see an art object, I try to understand it from a cultural, aesthetic, and unbiased perspective.
During a visit to an art exhibition with one of my family members, who is an artist, I found myself enjoying a piece of art solely due to its appearance. I thought about how I enjoyed the colors, shapes, and structure.
When speaking to my artist family member, I noticed that she had a much broader perspective about the same art piece; she started by explaining who the artist was and what they symbolized, then she told me about the artist’s previous work, with historical context, finally explaining the key visual elements that I only glossed over as colors and shapes on the canvas. Her process of liking or disliking an art object was much deeper than how I thought about art.
“Art is notoriously hard to talk about.” Clifford Geertz
The experience of art
As I mentioned in the example above, and you can see from their own experiences, we experience the world in various ways, and our evaluations of the situation can differ from person to person.
To better understand this process, it is important to mention aesthetics, “a branch of philosophy that deals with beauty and taste and the creation and appreciation of beauty.”
When we look at the etymology of the word aesthetic, “pertaining to taste or discernment” and “of sense perception, sensitive, perceptive” descriptions. So, artwork has to do something with our senses.
While we were talking about how we experience art objects, Professor Shannon mentioned Immanuel Kant’s thoughts about senses. He stated that we don’t sense the world in the same way. Jacques Maquet also mentions different ways of looking at art and explains how these looking ways affect the aesthetic experience.
After class, I researched how we experience art objects and found thoughts that Kant’s aesthetic experience teaches. Associate Professor Orman gives a memorable example of it.
Orman states aesthetic experience also means a certain difference from all other practical interests and explains with this example:
“It is a religious experience for a religious person to go to a mosque or church and pray. However, when a tourist goes to the same place of worship and focuses only on architectural harmony and visuality, perceiving the place of worship only for the sake of perceiving it without any religious interest indicates an aesthetic experience.”
These examples and explanations, which show the role of our way of perceiving or evaluating an object, still do not fully define what art is.
Art and non-art
Ferdinand de Saussure states the parametric meaning is founded on binary oppositions. The meanings can be only understood in relation to other meanings. As Theodore Adorno says, “art is defined by what it has become, that is, by what has been defined as ‘not art.’”
While philosophers evaluated art by putting it against the truth, anthropologists examine art by placing it against craft.
Alain Badiou explains the link between art and philosophy with three schemas, didactic, romantic, and classic schema; with these schemas, Badiou explains what art is.
The didactic schema was created based on Plato’s ideas. According to the didactic schema, “art is incapable of truth,” it is representative of and is an imitation of the world. Plato states that artworks are dependent on physical objects, saying that art is only a representation of the truth.
Badiou suggests that “the norm of art must be education; the norm of education is philosophy.” Thus, combining art, education, and philosophy together. In contrast, the romantic schema suggests art alone is capable of truth, and art is education itself.
The classic schema, which is the Aristotelian thought, suggests that art has a mimetic essence, as the Platonic approach teaches. However, Badiou also presents an opposite claim to the didactic schema’s problem of incapability. Arguing that art’s incapability of truth is not as serious of a problem as Plato dictates. Rather, explaining that “Art has a therapeutic function, and not at all a cognitive or revelatory one.”
Badiou explains this argument by saying that art must be liked to form an effective bond with the viewer; thus, the truth of the art is relative to how the viewer perceives and theorizes it.
Moreover, Badiou explains the relationship between art and truth through the categories of immanence and singularity. Besides art being immanence due to producing truth, it is singular because these truths are presented only in art. He also explains the irreplaceability of artwork because it is finite, truth is infinite.
In her book, Visual Culture, Alexis Boylan discusses the singularity of art by giving the King Uthal example. In 2015, ISIS destroyed sculptures and other objects in the Mosul Museum. One of the sculptures there was the original King Uthal sculpture. After its destruction, artist, activist, writer, and educator Morehshin Allahyari created an exact 3D printed version of the artifact, naming it ‘King Uthal.’
Allahyari showcased the replica sculpture in her exhibit called Maternal Speculation: ISIS from 2015. Allayari also published the files online. This way, everyone was able to download and recreate the King Uthal sculpture. Boylan states this recreation process ruined the original sculpture’s singularity and criticizes Allahyari’s work as a kind of violence to the originality of King Uthal’s sculpture.
Politics of art, art of politics
Another view describing the art comes from Jacques Ranciere. Ranciere examines politics and art as separate domains and explains the relationship between art and politics, which are included in each other’s fields, discussing the paradox of the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics.
Ranciere opposes the clear separation of fields, which is an Aristotelian thought, and the hierarchical order formed because of this separation. As Ranciere explains, his aesthetic regime has the “effect of blurring the boundaries, breaking the border between art and life.” Thus, anything can be the subject of art.
Craft and art
Anthropology defines art by separating it from craft, defining art by talking about the objects’ artistic or ethnographic implications.
Geertz sees art as a cultural system. He states art is meaningful to its own culture. He explains that cultural objects have cultural significance within the local matter. He criticizes the Western point of view of art, especially referring to non-Western art as “primitive art,” he states, “they do not talk about it the way the observer talks about it [art].”
According to Geertz, art is evaluated with craft terms such as tones and color harmony. This evaluation affected the West, and he thinks the Western point of view has led to blindness. Then he emphasizes the aesthetic power embedded in “formal relations among sounds, images, volumes, themes, or gestures.”
Like Geertz, Boas explains that although objects across cultures can be similar, the objects have minor changes as they adapt to different cultures, such as their shape or details.
Boas defines art as a type of expression, explaining its main features are creativity and form. He emphasizes that the techniques used in creating the perfect art form directly affect the viewer’s aesthetic judgment. He also highlights the specific character of arts; this character is created by the principle of symbolic selection and the methods of composition.
Moreover, Boas talks about the difference between artisans and artists. He thinks while artists create an object, artisans imitate an existing object. Boas claims everyday objects are made by artisans, imitators, not originators.
When thinking of this, I began to think about an everyday object and how it was initially created. Was there no creativity involved in that process? Can’t the objects that a craftsman makes be original? Or does the context of the work affect how we perceive the object?
The transformation of art anthropology
Kisin and Myer, in their article, explain the transformation of art anthropology starting from the mid-1980, explaining that instead of dividing art into ‘primitive art’ and ‘modern art’ categories, anthropologists started to divide art based on their cultural differences. They mention various debates in their article. One of the debates discusses instead of showing non-Western art in art museums, displaying it in the natural history museums.
Another significant one is the “Primitivism” of the 1984 MoMA exhibition. They state, “Prior to that time, the focus on “tribal art” had emphasized timeless traditions as if they were allochronic, failing to recognize individual artists (which, after all, are the sine qua non of creativity as valued in modernist art theory). Since then, anthropologists have produced eloquent work on the history of non-Western traditions as alternative art histories to the hegemonic Western narrative.”
After all of this, today, when I saw a chair displayed in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I perceived this chair as an art object and thought about its artistic values, looking at its engravings and the artistic thought that went into making it. However, if the same chair were placed in the American Natural History Museum, my reaction would be to look at its historical and cultural aspects rather than its artistic ones.
So, what is art?
There is no clear answer to “what is art?” Philosophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists all have a slightly different ways they explain and perceive art. Without a clear answer, what we do have is the ability to see how others perceive art. It is not “What is Art?” that can be answered; rather, “What is art, to you, as a member of a society?”
To some, art is creativity or singularity, while to others, art is imitation, an expression form, or a part of the culture. This list can go on. While some categorize art through culture, others have categorized it through a Western lens. To some, art is what is displayed at art museums like MoMa; to others, art is everywhere.
THE VIDEO ABOUT THE TOPIC
I also published a video about the concept of art on my youtube channel. Check it out!
