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SoSe 24: Modern Art and Anthropology

Eric de Bruyn

Kommentar

A series of recent exhibitions – the last São Paulo Biennial, the travelling exhibition Indigenous Histories, O Quilombismo at HKW – have demonstrated a growing investment of artists, curators and critics in notions of “indigeneity”, “worlding”, and non-Western cosmologies as well as specific artistic strategies (e.g. community-based), forms (e.g. figuration), techniques and materials (e.g. textile). The present, therefore, provides an opportune moment to revisit a long-standing debate concerning the relationship of art history (and artistic practice) to the fields of ethnography and anthropology. Although art history and anthropology are often considered as mutually exclusive areas of study – the one devoted to Western, “modern culture”, the other to non-Western (and often, so-called “pre-modern cultures”) – both fields have passed through substantial changes since the nineteenth-century while often engaging in a process of mutual critique. Whereas the current “anthropological turn” of art forms our departure point, we shall examine various crucial moments of conflict and exchange between the two disciplines since their origin in the later 19th century. We shall examine constitutive concepts (e.g. the “origin of art”, myth and ritual, ornamentation and abstraction, animism and mimicry, exoticism and primitivism, creolité and tropicalism, fetishism, technology and magic, games and play, cosmology and indigeneity.) We will read classical texts of anthropologists (e.g. Frobenius, Mauss, Caillois, Descola, Lévi-Strauss, Clastres, Clifford, Viveiros de Castro, Povinelli) as well as theorists and art historians (e.g. Worringer, Carl Einstein, Bataille, Kubler, Glissant, Deliss) as well as discuss various exhibitions, media (paintings, film and crafts) and artists, ranging from the historical avant-garde (e.g. Lam, Deren) to the contemporary e.g. Lamelas, Downey, Nascimento, Deball, Karrabing Collective, Calel, Sasmita). Schließen