Research School of Humanities & the Arts

An essay on New Zealand photographer Fiona Pardington's photographs from the early to mid 1990s. From the book Kriselle Baker and Aaron Lister (eds.), Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation, Victoria University Press in Association with City Gallery Wellington and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, pp 82-85.

Written to accompany an exhibition of art from 7 South American countries that considered the poetics and politics of contemporary art from this region. Published in Beatriz Bustos Oyanedel and Zara Stanhope, eds., Space to Dream: Recent Art from South America, Auckland Art Gallery Toi oTāmaki, 2016, pp 27–44.

This article is a dialogue with the theoretical arguments of Alfred Gell's book Art and Agency. While strongly supporting an action-oriented perspective on art it is argued that Gell's argument deflects attention away from human agency by attributing agency to the objects themselves. It is argued that the very properties of art that Gell excludes from his definition of art objects and largely from his analyses -aesthetics and semantics -are integral to understanding art as a way of acting in the world and to understanding the impact that art works have on people.

Western art history has developed with two complementary sides: a history of art objects in their own right and art as a source of information about people's lives and worlds — artworks as sources of historical information. 1 The former history is linked to the value creation processes that elevate certain objects to the category of fine art, evaluate them according to qualitative criteria and provide the basis for connoisseurship. The latter can leave the object, and the art in the object, far behind, focussing on its evidential value or even morphing into social theory. Until recently these differences in approaches to art objects have been associated with an opposition between two kinds of institutions — art galleries (or art museums in the USA) on the one hand and museums (of ethnography or social history) on the other. The distinction between the art gallery and the museum can be simplistically summarised as a difference of emphasis between appreciating and 'knowing about' the work of art. But it has also been associated with the very definition of things as fine art or non fine art. To simplify things significantly, art galleries have been associated with connoisseurship and have developed as privileged venues for viewing fine art and the appreciation of objects on the basis of their form. Museums have provided less privileged and more crowded viewing places for material culture including ethnography, and have tended to emphasise an interpretative perspective that places the object in its social and cultural context. The value creation processes involved in the creation of fine art have affected art historians, anthropologists and archaeologists in different ways. They have all had to engage with the process of classification that has divided their data into different sets collected by different institutions on the basis of whether it is or is not held to be fine art. Fine art in this sense is a western category of relatively recent origins that until recently was largely centred on the history of western art. 2 Other works were included within the category of fine art on the basis of their relationship with western art history. Art historians as a profession, because of their focus on western fine art, had a closer association with art galleries than social history or ethnography museums, but were none the less often constrained by its definitions and connoisseurial requirements. Anthropologists and archaeologists of art found that the majority of the works they were interested in were excluded from the art