anthropology beyond itself.pdf

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2009

have been redefined as territories of Afro-Brazilian culture, semi-public spaces becoming places of mediation through which the axé (power, vital force) is transformed into a 'cultural value'. He insists that objects of cultural value must be known, seen, and reproduced, but in Candomblé you are not allowed to see or depict these objects. The question, therefore, is how to transform secret values into cultural values so that they become public. Sansi defines this process as the outcome of extended interaction between intellectuals and Candomblé leaders during the course of a century. Anthropologists, writers, and painters, some of whom became practitioners (and vice versa), combined the changing attitudes of both those in power and practitioners, including a definite hierarchy in which Candomblé Ketu is the accepted model, emphasizing its 'pure African' cults, while all other manifestations are neglected or even rejected. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 focus on modern art and Afro-Brazilian culture. During the Vargas regime's search for nationalism, 'progress' and an 'authentic' Brazilian culture emerged. The popular became exotic and was given a political role. During the dictatorship, artistic elites were recognized and acknowledged as representing Afro-Brazilian art, corresponding to the accepted Candomblé houses. All others were considered as mere 'popular' artists who created works for tourists. Sansi stresses the contradiction between the innovations of contemporary modern art and the standard, hierarchic, 'traditional' concept of Afro-Brazilian art. The Orixás of Tororó exemplifies the complexity of these changes. This is a public monument, the purpose of which was to glorify African-Brazilian culture but at the same time symbolize the secret world of the orixás and the axé. Pentecostals' recent attacks see the monument and Candomblé as fetishism, the devil's work, and attempt to shake the perception of Candomblé as symbolizing national identity. The concluding chapter, 'Re-appropriations of Afro-Brazilian culture', claims that while Candomblé has now attained official recognition, religious people who once were its practitioners dispute its credibility when they turn to Protestantism. Sansi concludes that the Afro-Brazilian cultural renaissance is characterized by the 'objectification of new, unprecedented cultural values attached to objects' (p. 188). Values have changed and will continue to change, opening a route to new conflicts and transformations of values. Book reviews 175

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 2000

2016

This thesis provides a dialectical conception of relational aesthetics, the state of art given definition by Nicolas Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics (2002), by focusing on the ‘value form of participation’ and the ways in which this gets subsumed into capitalist circuits, to fit its purpose within ‘culture’. One of the original contributions of this research project within the field of political art, or art that aims to be political, is its in-depth critique of relational art’s political economy from the perspective of an engaged practice. The thesis also provides insights into the role of the curator as the interlocutor of this exchange. As part of this analysis I examine the changes in the formal character of this relation of domination, by analysing the ways in which the classic opposition between autonomous art and the culture industry has mutated today. The thesis supplements its Marxist analysis with Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse to examine the particularities o...

“Inside, outside and against institutions: Latin American aesthetic practices in the era of mass consumption and contemporary techno-capitalism (1950- 2020)”, 2023

*** Deadline: October 30 *** This dossier intends to set up a dialogue between aesthetic approaches that analyze different aspects of artistic production about institutionalism, under the specific prism given by the expansion of artistic consumerism and the progressive commodification of visual productions. The considered period extends from the second half of the 20th century –a world that, marked by capitalist production and mass consumption, exhibits the wearing out of the cultural field’s autonomy– to the first decades of the 21st century –a scenario that, in the heat of the development of new technologies of communication, has shaped a globalized “techno-capitalism” (García Ferrer, 2017), marked by a lack of artistic differentiation and a diffuse aestheticization. To address these issues, we consider two perspectives that intertwine in a dialectic and complementary manner: the institutional devices that encourage the artistic mainstream and the creative strategies that intend to corrode that system. Thus, we center our attention in the Latin American aesthetic field, understood not as an identity or an original property tied to the well-known binarism between center and periphery, but as a zone of loans and negotiations between cultural formations standing out by its political and positional character that disrupt the rigid territorial demarcation, thus overturning the categorization conducted by the question about the Latin American in art (Ticio Escobar, 2004). From institutionalism’s point of view, we are interested in critically observing the role of museums, exhibitions, and the art market as devices that shape artistic production, establish criteria of material and symbolic validation, and promote aesthetic and political ideas. As Nelly Richard suggests, we are referring to art as a tradition (the ideal of the aesthetic canon), a field (the specificity of the practices identified as works of art), or a system (the institutional mediations in the circuit of production, distribution, and exhibition) that validates “the authority of its own beliefs, values, and regulations, based on a selective layout of its borders” (Richard, 2014, 9). Regarding production, we propose to analyze the practices that critically intervene inside institutions, generating friction and hybridization of the aesthetic categories that, relationally, lead to transformations in social reality. On the other hand, we are interested in pieces developed at the margin of institutional spaces and in actions that intervene in the urban scene as a medium of work and subversion of the statu quo. In this sense, following Martha Rosler (2017), we intend to question the idea of institutional critique, exploring the issues concerned with canonical discourses, and to observe the positioning and urgencies traced by activism and other forms of interventionism, through new artistic regimes, new materialities, and new notions on art and on what it means to be an artist. In this way, we focus our attention on the subversive potential of the arts regarding other systems of symbolic and material validation, especially when dealing with resistance to the commodification of the work of art and the obliteration of critical voices under the pressure of the multiple conflicts of cultural authority (postcolonialism, subordination, feminism, and sexual and gender minorities).

The international handbook of sociology, 2000

During a long period, sociology of art has been divided mainly between two major directions. Both show art as a social reality but they do so from quite different points of view: one is frontally critical and aims at revealing the social determination of art behind any pretended autonomy (be it the autonomy of the works, following the objectivist aesthetics, or the autonomy of the taste for them, following an aesthetics of subjectivity); the other is more pragmatic and, without pretending to make statements about the works or aesthetic experience, procedes through a minutious reconstitution of the "collective action" necessary to produce and consume art. Against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetical commentary of art works, sociology has thus filled back an "art world" which formerly included only very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, organizations and markets, codes and rites of social consumption have been pushed to the front of the scene.

Critique d'art , 2019

Unpublished thesis (University of Leeds), 2012

The thesis and accompanying portfolio of practical work presents a parallel inquiry into socially transformative art practice and the evaluative framework proper to it. It explores how art contributes to a better world and the form such practice takes in an increasingly expanded, ‘precarious’ and interdisciplinary sphere. The varied nature of the work under question leads to the adoption of a structure that distinguishes practices by their operation in different spaces or ecologies: the individual, social and structural. A further distinction is made between those practices that self-identify as art (and the institutional, market-led and capitalist framework this can entail), and those that either actively disavow or go unrecognised as art due to their distance from the signifying apparatuses of the discipline. This ‘informal’ art practice is referred to as ‘self-organised cultural activity’ and opens up on to discussions of the relative merits of DIY practices including music, self-publishing, political activism and so on. The thesis demonstrates how these often distanced and apparently contradictory practices find resonance and whose accumulative effect contributes to the conditions for a paradigmatic shift that would constitute ‘postcapitalism’. The connecting thread between these sites and practices is their potential for effecting change at the level of the individual via a subjectivising aesthetic rupture. Contextualised by poststructuralist, postanarchist and Autonomist Marxist political philosophy and debates in contemporary art criticism and theory, the thesis and dossier of practice contribute to a richer understanding of - and expanded language with which to discuss – the relation between art and politics. It draws links between normally unconnected practices, identifying the often overlooked or underplayed aesthetic experience within socially engaged art and the political resonances of aesthetic experience, attending to gaps in thought and practice around art and social change.

What does it mean to speak of artistic autonomy at a time when art is fully commercialized and aesthetics has become the guiding principle of economic production and policymaking? This book takes a fresh look at this question by summoning three heroes of the aesthetic revolution to confront the challenges artistic practice faces today. Turning Kant into a campaigner for the Anthropocene, Schiller into a creative entrepreneur and Schelling into a political activist, it lays the groundwork for a critique that identifies the contemporary itself as contemporary art’s greatest challenge. Only by taking up a struggle against the contemporary, it argues, can art reinvent its autonomy and regain its relevance to society.

Decolonial introduction to the theory, history and criticism of the arts

This book provides, from a critical perspective, a first contact with the key debates and authors who, over the last 2,500 years, have tried to define, study and evaluate the arts in the west, as well as tell their stories so as to highlight Europe’s outstanding achievements and supposed civiliza-tional mission. It shows and deconstructs how the western theories and stories on different media – theatre, sculpture, literature, painting, photography, performance art, contemporary art, etc. – repeat and vary certain fixed ideas in diverse disciplines – from philosophy to media studies – so as to deal with and often repress arts’ power. By drawing on texts from recent picture and image theory, as well as on present-day Amerindian authors, anthropologists and philosophers, this in-troductory panoramic survey argues for the need to question the power structure inherent in Euro-centric art discourses and to decolonise art studies, using Brazil’s arts, its theory and history as a case study to do so.

Decolonial introduction to the theory, history and criticism of the arts, 2019

This book provides, from a critical perspective, a first contact with the key debates and authors who, over the last 2,500 years, have tried to define, study and evaluate the arts in the west, as well as tell their stories so as to highlight Europe’s outstanding achievements and supposed civilizational mission. It shows and deconstructs how the western theories and stories on different media – theatre, sculpture, literature, painting, photography, performance art, contemporary art, etc. – repeat and vary certain fixed ideas in diverse disciplines – from philosophy to media studies – so as to deal with and often repress arts’ power. By drawing on texts from recent picture and image theory, as well as on present-day Amerindian authors, anthropologists and philosophers, this introductory panoramic survey argues for the need to question the power structure inherent in Eurocentric art discourses and to decolonise art studies, using Brazil’s arts, its theory and history as a case study to do so.