Transcripts for Day 2

Transcript: Introduction to the workshop and discussion with participants

This session took place on the morning of the second day of the three day workshop.

Amanda Ravetz explains some of her motivations for running the workshop and participants respond.

Amanda Ravetz

The motivation to bring you all together was to establish better lines of communication between artists and anthropologists. One of the points that was posed yesterday by Anna [Grimshaw] was that she was struck by the communication between ethnographers and curators working in museums, and artists. She noted that those connections are not established in such recognisable ways between artists and anthropologists – they happen in collaborations between individuals – but not in recognisable patterns.

But why might this dialogue be important from the point of view of anthropology? The anthropologists here are people I've met before, apart from Mary [Bouquet] whose work I've read, and I've invited them because I think we all share something, a feeling of being quite marginal to mainstream practice in anthropology. Things that came out yesterday [in the presentations] from the anthropologists were about excess. Working with people, but feeling there is this excess which cannot be easily fitted into the canons of practice, whether these are writing ethnography or theorising. And that excess might be to do with objects or with people's imaginaries or with signs as I was saying yesterday. But I think all the anthropologists here have this frustration that these things get lost somehow.

Soumhya Venkatesan

I'm not sure I would describe myself in quite that way. But I can talk about that later.

Amanda Ravetz

There are questions around the product that come out of that. We had a discussion yesterday where Erika [Tan] was looking to see where the distinction was between the doing of ethnography and the thing that we recognise as the anthropological product. Speaking for myself and maybe some of the other anthropologists here, there's a sense that if this excess is going to be dealt with, it changes a lot of things about what the product might be. It might be possible to write about those things but it may come out as something other than text. All of us I think have worked with film or photography or with objects. But that's still a marginal thing to do within anthropology. Anthropologists want to know "where is the anthropology" in the film. Or where is the analysis, the bit that's anthropological? There is a problem about how something is expressive of larger anthropological concepts and knowledge.

So what could the product be - a film, an object, an intervention, a tour? That's an open question for us. And there is a question about who the audience are and how we think about the relationship between our audience and our subjects.

Daniel [Peltz] and I were talking yesterday about what I wouldn't want to lose from my sense of what anthropology is. It's to do with how people conceive of their way of being in the world. Some of you met James Bracewell last night, one of the people I did my fieldwork with and who is the main protagonist in my film The Bracewells. When I was working with him, by trying to position myself within his social relationships, within his family, his work place and so on, I was trying to find out how he understands his being in the world. His way of being human in the world in relation to all the things around him. That is more than a descriptive process and it begins by being positioned within those relationships.

When I was working with James' family I began to discover that the way they saw the sheep and the way they saw themselves, were intricately linked. They spoke about themselves as being bred to the hills, of being farming stock and being strong enough to withstand living on the hills like the Gritstone sheep. They talked about the problems of marrying outside farming stock and how that might weaken their ability to persist in that particular landscape.

In Family, Servants and Visitors (1985), Mary [Bouquet] has written about English concepts of personhood, the way that English people think about themselves as persons in the world, their ideas of relationships with others having a lot to do with a layer of animalness and a layer of personhood on top - as in Beatrix Potter stories where you get the animal and the human parts.

I was reading about kinship and breeding in this book as I was working with James Bracewell on the farm and trying to understand why it was important for him to breed certain sheep with others and how that made him think about the women who I was working with on the estate who he called 'half-breeds'. In certain contexts that's very derogatory, of course. But there is a whole history to why breeding is thought about in this way. It was introduced to farmers in the eighteenth century in England to make certain things happen economically. So you begin to get a sense of how James Bracewell's everyday practices make sense in terms of how he's working with the land and his attachment to the land.

Lucien Taylor

You were talking about what it was from anthropology that you wouldn't want to lose.

Anna Grimshaw

Would you say context is one of the things anthropologists remain attached to? This idea of contextualising people's practices and performances?

Daniel Peltz

One of the things I was thinking about when I asked you that question last night was that artists are very comfortable talking about their process and what's personal about it to them but the personal element of their process is something I rarely hear from anthropologists. And that would be really helpful to me in understanding how to think about this dialogue. When I listen to your story, it still seems to me that one of the differences of approach is epistemological. There is still a commitment in anthropology, despite debates around subjectivity, to the possibility of knowing something. It's like an anti-solipsism. You're talking about other people –and there's a lot of acceptance in the anthropological community that any context described is in relation to you. But that's the part that artists are maybe really good at. What you wouldn't be willing to let go of is that there is also something – there is also this Other that exists, that you could know something about?

Amanda Ravetz

Yes.

Rosalind Nashashibi

So it's like adding to a canon of knowledge. Is there a responsibility to that?

Chris Wright

There's this funny thing though, that anthropologists don't really do that. You can think about biology is a cumulative thing, we now know more about biology than we did in 1890. I don't think there is the same sense in anthropology that we know 'more' about people than we did in 1890. We are still asking very similar questions. It's not cumulative in that sense.

Rosalind Nashashibi

It's also reductive.

Mary Bouquet

But it is cumulative in a way.

Daniel Peltz

That's what we were talking about this morning. Scholarship is this beautiful art practice because it is this extreme long-duration, collaborative activity done by people over multiple generations. It can be viewed as a large-scale time-based art project.

Mary Bouquet

Absolutely. When you look at those old ethnographies from the very beginning what could you say of them except that they are beautiful pieces of art. They are descriptions of people in the terms that those people could produce them. They are very Other. I can't get hold of the difference [between art and these ethnographies]. They are extraordinary things. If you ask young people to read them, they have difficulty fathoming their way through it, because its so 'other'. We create this otherness and I think it's that sense in anthropology that has created ructions, or at least caused ructions twenty five years ago.

Amanda Ravetz

You mentioned 'other'. The imaginative possibility that there is some other way to know the world that will change my assumptions about how I exist in the world, about my family relationships, my prejudices… that is the passionate bit of the anthropological engagement: the sense of being able to be shifted by someone else's consciousness.

Soumhya Venkatesan

It comes back to that thing you were talking about yesterday, domestication. In trying to understand why James would talk about the women as half-breeds, you are destabilising an idea of how people see each other and the idea that some land-based people for example are bigoted. But in a certain sense you are also domesticating why he might be doing this. And that's the twin project that anthropologists are engaged in fairly consistently, from the older ethnographies that you are describing, even up to now. That's the knowledge practice anthropology is engaged with in some sense.

Lucien Taylor

I don't agree with you, Daniel, if you say there is this basic epistemological difference between anthropology, and it's attachment to the other, and set that off against artists who don't have that presumption or that desire, then I don't recognise that. I feel able, wrongly perhaps, to generalise about anthropology. I have a sense of what anthropologists do, their different tendencies and inclinations, both today and over time, but I don't feel that about artists. The art world always strikes me as much more internally variegated and heterogeneous with lots of different tendencies and people at loggerheads and one of the features of contemporary art that I see, including in Rosalind Nashashibi's work actually, is a real resurgence of an attachment to the real. Of course one can go on ad infinitum about what the real means and how that is inflected in different practitioner's work. Certainly when I work as an artist I don't have the same attachment to context necessarily as when I'm doing something that I consider to be anthropological, be it in words or in moving images. And there are other differences too. But I don't necessarily renounce some investment in the other or in some inter-subjective relationship with my subjects if they're human or if they are animal for that matter. But I may have misunderstood you?

Daniel Peltz

I'm not saying that isn't widespread in art, but just that its not one of the presumptions made, that commitment to context. I think artists are allowed to retreat into a space – or we don't have to call it retreat - just to locate their work in a space of not being able to know anything about anything, may be not even about this notion of self and they are allowed to locate their practice there; whereas anthropologists aren't. Part of what I was saying then, is what's missing to me, is this element of the personal. What's personal about your practice as an anthropologist? And then that there is still this bleaching process that happens in the knowledge production mode where the personal gets stripped out.

Rosalind Nashashibi

I agree with what you're saying, it's what I've been thinking and talking about. What the anthropologist is allowed and responsible to, compared to the artist. So what the artist feels he or she needs to be responsible to, which does exist, is different from what the anthropologist feels. But at the same time, reading the amount of anthropological texts that I have, which is very small, or seeing ethnographic films, there is the personal. But I don't know if it's more in the way we describe things, or if it's only in certain works that it comes through, but it does come through. But it feels more like perhaps the anthropologists here have expressed a frustration, wanting to rid themselves of what they see as boundaries on what they are allowed to do, or what they ought to do.

Amanda Ravetz

Or what they know how to do.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Or feel equipped to do, yes. So what interests me about coming here, to go back to one of your original questions, is I think, and I know this is a simplified version, because we've found out already all the boundaries here are blurred, but I think anthropologists use different tools from artists and its about trying to figure out what they are and what happens if you try to apply them to artworks, or artists apply their tools to anthropological work.

Amanda Ravetz

I think that takes us on to this shift that we were talking about yesterday, away from an anthropology of art. I see that as being to do with the fact that anthropology used to situate itself in what it saw as an unreflexive world and its job was to be reflexive. So the anthropology of art comes out of that sense that people are going round in the world making objects, art, whatever, and that we as anthropologists come along and reveal something about the context that makes things appear as they do. But as we saw in Daniel's work yesterday that isn't the world we live in, people do reflect upon themselves and their practices and relationships with each other. Artists are reflexive practitioners. Because of that some people want to shift from an anthropology of art to anthropology and art. There's a level ground and that's where one of the overlaps is happening.

But Rosalind, you said would it not be interesting for an anthropologist to study contemporary art; and Lucien said an anthropologist would only do that in a boring way; but that might not be the sense that you would have?

Rosalind Nashashibi

I probably had a much more romantic idea. But I was thinking of artworks as divorced from artists. It probably wouldn't make sense for an anthropologist. But I was thinking of abstracting an artwork into a place where it was detached, it was seen as an item that had an effect between people. It wouldn't necessarily be boring either, the whole art world context.

Anna Grimshaw

Lucien, you've done that in a way in your film In and Out of Africa. I don't know whether you would want to comment? You've tried to use the medium of film to explore how objects move through different spaces and become art or commodities. Did it make a big difference to do that through the medium of film rather than to try and write about it?

Lucien Taylor

Yes, though it was along time ago. It did and certainly it would have looked different had we written it rather than making it as a video. Formally it wasn't that unconventional and there was a lot of talk in that video and a lot of testimony that we played with and juxtaposed at times, to render something absurd or contextualise or de-contextualise material in ways we thought were interesting that were not just concerned with denotative content. But it was very different from what you're imagining which I think is quite interesting, which is to do an ethnography of contemporary art exclusively through the objects in some way. Objects have agency and objects refract social relationships in different ways that are only partially visible or audible if you like, and that strikes me as less familiar and more exciting in a way.

Amanda Ravetz

I think that's interesting because I was going to ask Rosalind 'if there was to be an anthropology of art how would you want to be studied by an anthropologist?' And wouldn't that take us back to anthropology and art. Wouldn't it become a collaboration, since you immediately have an idea of how that could be done and Lucien then picks up on that...

Rosalind Nashashibi

Between myself and Francesco Manacorda in the magazine Metropolis M where in a way Manacorda is anthropologising my practice, it happens all the time in relation to your work when you are interviewed. I think what strikes me as interesting about the anthropology project would be putting yourself in a false situation as an a anthropologist where you divorced certain things away from the work. What is missing sometimes is what the work does and that would be interesting. But how would I want that to happen?

Amanda Ravetz

I think I was posing that as a rhetorical question, as a way of looking at this shift that has happened from an anthropology that saw itself as a way of revealing context, to a world where we are all in the business of making context explicit, so that that relationship doesn't hold up so well anymore.

Rosalind Nashashibi

I think it's the fact that it doesn't hold anymore that makes it interesting. It's like using an almost antiquated technique…potentially, when Lucien did his film in Africa, that would have helped him to use the material in a more objective way than if it was with artists in north America. But what if you put yourself in a false position of not knowing and proceeded from there? I suppose anthropologists do that anyway?

Lucien Taylor

We all do that don't we? Some people might start with a platonic idea and seek to realise that, but many artists and many anthropologists are in the business of discovery rather than of justification, so as they're working they don't know where they are going. We have ideas and its theory laden, but those ideas are constantly being revised. For example, I'm really far on in the production of a film piece – Big Timber. I don't even necessarily know what it's about. I certainly can't articulate in propositional language what it's about.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Yes, that's important. Absolutely.

Daniel Peltz

But these issues of responsibility are interesting. It's interesting to think about what you are describing as the break down of contextualising authority - something like a trained clairvoyance. When that breaks down, what also breaks down is the relationship to responsibility. So, how do you all as anthropologists see your responsibility and does it shift if there's that breakdown? If you're no longer in the business of controlling context….

Mary Bouquet

I think in the anthropology of an exhibition-maker, if you are engaging with an institution and that means designers, photographers, a whole population of people, that engagement defines to a large extent what comes out, which is also a process of discovery and interaction. And literally you can see that developing in a space using objects to create an idea which becomes material. I've done one piece of work in Oslo on the central staircase of the Oslo University Ethnographic Museum - because it was the only space that was left - using the collections to articulate with the populations, both anthropologists and museum staff, the history of these collections before they were digitised, computerised and accessible. So it was something people didn't know about. And they used an outsider, classically an anthropologist, to go in there and look at them in a different way. That involved very classic techniques of ethnography, talking to everybody, tuning in I would say, more than revealing, and through a very odd constructive process involving a large group of people and all kinds of objects and images and all kinds of different places, constructing this thing. So in a way this was ethnography but it didn't end up only as text. Text was involved in it, that's for sure. It was also a sort of collective kind of …

Daniel Peltz

I think it's really interesting; but I also find one of the things I get really frustrated with is this sense - and both artists and anthropologists know - but we carry on insisting - that we've reached the limits of language and its something I see so little anthropology grappling with. What's wrong with language? Is language really so impotent and so incapable of containing this excess? I do critiques at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in many different fields and you get it for example from the ceramicists. It's almost like the ceramicist's argument. This shift between body knowledge and clay and material. Yes, its very beautiful and sexy and I'm with you, right there! You know, I learn a lot from material and I insist my students learn from material, but I also feel there's a way it circumvents this whole discussion around what the word can do and whether we've really explored that.

Mary Bouquet

Yes, you are right. But you can't deny the fact that you can't find the words and sometimes instead of the words you find a big pile of things actually growing somewhere and people fiddling with it and it escapes words in that way. Which is not to say you couldn't find the words or someone else couldn't, as Mauss certainly could and spin it into all kinds of things. But perhaps if we just talk about the process of production: of course afterwards you can find very neat ways of talking about it, but as you are actually doing it, I'm bothered if I could put it into those terms.

Amanda Ravetz

I think there's a whole history of why that should be in anthropology and how anthropologists have been constrained to language if not by language. To use all kinds of ways of doing ethnography, of being with people, of making relationships, and then expecting that we only use language to express that. So there is a reaction against that in anthropology.

Chris Wright

Isn't there a misperception that we're more constrained as anthropologists and that there is a relative autonomy amongst artists? That as an anthropologist you would have to be responsible for this? It sounds as though as soon as I am speaking as an anthropologist I should be checking the anthropologist's code. 'Am I responding to section 6 of the code?'

Rosalind Nashashibi

No, I think that's an extreme version. I was just saying that we all feel we have a responsibility in some way to the material, but I just think those responsibilities are located in different places.

Chris Wright

I'm not sure they're even located in different places. I think what happens is, that if I've got a grant to do a different piece of work, it might be a film, but as an anthropologist I don't have to sign a disclaimer to say I promise to make a documentary and I promise…

Rosalind Nashashibi

But it sounds from what….

Erika Tan

It sounded like that yesterday.

Rosalind Nashashibi

In a university context.

Chris Wright

If I want to show it in certain contexts, I know I'm going to get certain responses to it, so if I'm going to show it at an ethnographic film festival I might think, well, if I do this kind of film people are going to say this, but that's the same for an artist. If you're a figurative realist painter and you put something in for a particular kind of show, they're going to go 'hang on, we don't take this kind of art at this show'. And you know that. There is a misperception that everyone is more constrained because they are in a discipline. And artists aren't in a discipline in the same way.

Rosalind Nashashibi

I don't think I made that distinction. I think I would say that artists are constrained as well.

Amanda Ravetz

We are grappling with the 'are we the same, are we different?' question that always comes up and has to be confronted in some way, but you can get stuck in that too. What I want to know from the artists is what it is they want from being here - and perhaps from the anthropologists too. Maybe we could find a way of making a statement about that. Or perhaps we haven't heard enough from the artists yet? I want to move on soon to how we are going to pursue these conversations. Yes, through language, possibly through writing, but also through doing something together in groups. First of all, I'd like to know how everybody is feeling up to this point, what is missing and what are the frustrations right now around the table?

Mary Bouquet

I'm not frustrated at all.

Lucien Taylor

With respect to language, going back to Daniel's point, and I totally agree with what you are saying, and I find myself often very glibly dismissing language in a way that irritates me, but I think there are two things. One is that for anthropologists its very easy to say 'be experimental' but if you're dismissing language you are dismissing poetry, novels, all forms of art that expresses itself in language. Artists can have just as much investment in language as anthropologists and academics. I think it's simply the presumption that a certain kind of expository prose can say everything. It's not necessarily an articulated conscious presumption, but it frequently appears a presumption and it's the danger of that default hegemony of language, of discourse, working within anthropology just by attachment to logos, to word-based forms of signification, that feels like a limit, especially when seeking to represent or to express somatic bodily lived experience and subjectivity. And of course novelists and poets deal with that precisely through words so it's important not to make these bland, glib dismissals of language. But the critical resistance to the hegemony of language is also something that a lot of us feel.

Rosalind Nashashibi

But film has been part of the canon of anthropologists for a long time too.

Lucien Taylor

That's the other thing. For all we visual anthropologists bemoan our marginality, anthropology of all academic disciplines much more than any other social science or the humanities even, which might be presumed to be more open to art practice as a form of discourse, or to film are not nearly as open to it. And the humanities often make the mistake for example of hiring an ethnomusicologist and then the Dean will say 'we've made a great contribution to the arts', but they've actually made a contribution to the humanities, so there's a slippage there.

Daniel Peltz

One thing I feel anthropologists have a lot to offer and this group in particular in what was coming out of yesterday's discussion, is a shared understanding in terms of the complexities of the real. I was really interested in Lucien's point about the real and that makes it a particularly urgent moment in art if there is a resurgence of interest in the real and engagement with the real. Anthropologists can bring their knowledge of how to investigate the complexities of the real as a long duration time-based project. I feel that artists do have a time-based practice and there is this idea of a body of work that's like an anthropological project; you cannot really know what it is, you figure it out as you go along and one day you make a connection you see "oh, actually its been going this way since the beginning." What I feel anthropologists have a long history and knowledge of is how to have a structure to make possible long duration explorations. I can make my project in Cameroon and people say that's a really interesting mode and what are you going to do with it next? And what that would mean is 'what material are you going to work with next', whereas if I were to say 'actually, this is going to become my practice, and I'm going to work with this group of people for the rest of my artistic career or for the next ten years', that would be a very difficult thing to do within the context of contemporary art. It would be unviable in terms of the gallery system. But that's not even the world I'm working in. Even within the world of fine art institutions and educational institutions it would be unviable.

Amanda Ravetz

Why?

Daniel Peltz

Maybe another artist can respond to why.

Jos van der Pol

Its also the case in our practice that there is a question of how we come to a final product. We have to work with a deadline. We have to make decisions because the show is going up. You have to force yourself in that context.

Rosalind Nashashibi

Even if you kept coming up with works about this certain thing and kept going back to it, certain artists do that but I think its true that there is not usually a feeling of developing within one area. Its usually bringing your tools to different instances of areas. Otherwise in a way you do shift discipline. So as an artist I think – and I'm just tying to figure this out so it could go astray – but you bring the same tools to different situations in your work and I think with anthropology, in its a more utopian aspect, there is an idea you can stick with things for longer and progress in a lifespan almost of the subject let's say. In art the progression is much more contained in the ego or the persona of the artist. That's the development that's at stake, rather than an outside development.

Soumhya Venkatesan

I keep going back to the place where I've done research partly because I don't think I've understood enough of what's going on in this place, so in some sense its not just grappling with the limitations of language or how one represents what one thinks one's understood, but partly that one hasn't understood. You said you were here because you were frustrated with anthropology. I don't think I'm frustrated with anthropology because I don't really think I know enough to know what mode of representation I should be using, or tools. That's one reason why one keeps going back. I've started another project now, but I know I'll go back to the village in India where I've been doing fieldwork after three or four years.

Rosalind Nashashibi

But there is a different feeling. That rigour is to do with understanding, that's what you want to be rigorous about in your practice, but I think there is a difference in what we as artists feel (if I can speak for artists) we need to be rigorous about.

Jos van der Pol

Sometimes we call ourselves 'generalists'.

Liesbeth Bik

Amateurs.

Bryony Bond

I've often found working with artists through Alchemy [at The Museum of Manchester], we bring someone in and they say they'd need to spend twenty years to be able to work or comment on any situation and I always think its much more successful when artists say that they don't feel they need a PhD before being able to talk to someone. In the museum we have lots of people who are really great at depth, who have spent years looking at the gonads of spiders in Siberia, but to get a perspective on that its great to have people who have depth in a different way, who actually bring breadth.

Soumhya Venkatesan

Which is where Amanda's understanding of working that fieldwork material through with an artist comes in and is exactly what Bryony is describing although perhaps it doesn't have to be with an artist.

Amanda Ravetz

Yes and when Rosalind and Lucien and I were having an exchange about what anthropology could bring to contemporary art and you made the suggestions you did, I thought, that's why I want to work with an artist, because they bring suggestions I couldn't think of myself.

Jos van der Pol

And maybe the other way around. When Bik van der Pol do a project and we are quite limited in time for research and you have to go to the other extreme; and sometimes it's a shame these projects can't go deeper and sometimes I think these projects should be put on the table for somebody else.

Paul Rooney

I think that's what's quite frustrating about this context. Everybody only has a certain amount of time to give a sense of what they do as an anthropologist. Whereas for me I'm really interested not only in what you study and the particular areas, but the methods. And what the differences might be between the different anthropologists. I'm not interested in using anthropology methods in my work, but as the subject of my work. Amanda, you were asking what as artists we might want and that's a kind of frustration I have.

Anna Grimshaw

Would it help if, as Lucien suggested, we looked at more work that all of us have produced? Because in that way questions can become more concrete. Lucien could show some of his work and the artists could ask why did you do that in that way and that could make some of these questions more concrete?

Paul Rooney

There is a limited amount of time.

Anna Grimshaw

Of course.

Amanda Ravetz

I think then that I should tell you what I did have in mind and you should tell me what you think we should do.

Day 2 whole group discusson
Day 2 whole group discusson
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion
Day 2 whole group discussion