pourinfos.org [apostils] : The artist and his "models". Part I |Jean-Claude Moineau|

[xavier cahen]

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The artist and his “models”
By Jean-Claude Moineau

html version
http://pourinfos.org/encours/item.php?id=3019

Facing the crisis that not only political art or critical art, (two 
totally different concepts), but contemporary art itself are 
experiencing, (knowing that “the state” of crisis has always been the 
“normal” state of art, that art has always been in a permanent state of 
crisis, a crisis that has recently increased, even accelerated), some 
people intend to go back to the old polemic (relevant to the various 
avant-gardes) between documentary-art, or rather, documentary form that 
inspired Kassel’s last Documenta. What art couldn’t do, documentary, or 
rather, documentary art, could. As if the so-called “objectivity” or the 
so-called “transparency” of the document were not suspect, as much as 
the good old notion of aesthetic experience, here and now, 
non-mediatized, that most detractors of the document form such as 
Nicolas Bourriaud in the catalogue of the last Biennale de Lyon [1], 
cling to.

That context created at the time of Documents, Georges Bataille’s 
review, the extra artistic reference to science, and especially to 
anthropology, the search for extra artistic models through art, 
especially for the anthropological model, or rather the “anthropological 
paradigm”, even though the notion of paradigm has something too 
exclusive to be used without care (which, according to S. Kuhn 
[2]himself, would be abusive). The two following articles also aim in 
that direction.

The first article, Artist as anthroplogist [3], was written in 1974 by 
the neo avant-garde conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth,. The piece is 
really not clear, like most artists writings, especially conceptual 
artists. It intends to establish a break (in a quasi-Althusser sense) 
between an “anthropologized art” and the “forms” preceding it what he 
calls “naive”, relating to artistic activity including the forms of 
earlier conceptual art. According to Kosuth, earlier art was based on 
what he called a “scientific paradigm”, and was related to scientism, 
when, on the contrary, anthropologized art would break from this paradigm.

Kosuth believes that the anthropologist is a man of science, and 
therefore positioned himself outside of the culture he’s studying; he 
calls this attitude “un-committed”. But the artist as an anthropologist 
operates inside his own socio-cultural context and finds himself totally 
submerged (Kosuth doesn’t see the de-contextualizing character which is 
that of the museum within which, as an neo avant-garde artist, he 
continues to mingle), the artist as an anthropologist is an artist that 
Kosuth would consider “committed” (with the intentional character this 
implies), but will not use political discourses or bring any aesthetics 
in the political action as the “protest artist” will.

Kosuth believes that while the anthropologist tries to understand other 
cultures, the artist, on the contrary, “interiorizes” his own 
socio-cultural activity. Therefore, the artist as an anthropologist is 
able to accomplish what the anthropologist has always failed to do. For 
Kosuth, this paradoxically implies the superiority of the artist as an 
anthropologist over the anthropologist, his “model”.

The second article is written by the American critic, Hal Foster. The 
author is both the theoretician of what he calls the neo avant-garde 
second generation (Daniel Buren, Michael Asher…) who tries to carry on 
the criticism of artistic institution from the inside, and the road 
companion of what he calls, at the time, radical Post Modernism - 
represented by Pictures Artists around Douglas Crimp and Rosalind Krauss 
- by opposition to the trans-avant-garde and other artists representing 
what Raymonde Moulin called art for the 80’s Market. The article is 
called The artist as an ethnographer or does the “end of history” mean 
the return to anthropology?[4]. One will notice that the title of the 
article refers to the Post-Modernist crisis of history - ancient 
continuity history as well as dis-continuity, “structuralism” history, 
or even still history - to the temptation of what was then a 
post-history. History is opposed, not like in Michel Foucault’s, 
whatever his dues to “new-history” are, but to archeology - even though 
an archeological paradigm appeared in recent art (or rather, a candidate 
to the title of paradigm), but to anthropology, in reproducing entirely 
the opposition prevailing in the 60’s between history and structure, as 
Foster intends in his demonstrations to show an anthropology that would 
no longer be only Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology. In his 
text, Foster does not praise anthropology or even less so, the artist as 
an anthropologist or as an ethnographer, but intends to have a truly 
critical view, both on anthropology (with the internal debates inside 
the anthropology field, that he calls an auto-criticism practice from 
anthropology, in a somehow modernist fashion; auto-criticism that, 
according to him, could have contributed to make it appealing to the 
artists’ eyes that have adopted the artist as anthropologist paradigm), 
and on the artist as an anthropologist. I will not only use Foster’s 
article as my own - as inescapable as could it be - but I will attempt 
to make a critical reading of it.

The title of the article is, of course, modeled over Walter Benjamin’s 
L’Artiste comme producteur [5]. In this text, Benjamin sustains that the 
artist who “shows solidarity with the proletariat” - according to the 
terms used then - wouldn’t only spread “a politically-right content” – 
when possible - but must be “artistically right”. “Before asking myself: 
what is the position of a work of art in relation with the means 
production at that time, I would like to ask: what is its place within 
these same means? This question directly aims at the function of the 
“oeuvre” within the literary production means (or broadly artistic 
means) of the works of art. In other words, it directly aims at the 
literary (or artistic) technique of a work of art”.

No Economism in this, since, according to Benjamin, art is not only 
super-structural unlike orthodox Marxism, but includes what Benjamin 
calls literary or artistic production links (even though Benjamin avoids 
technical determinism, whatever dialectical links are being maintained 
by “the technical production forces” - non specifically artistic - and 
“the artistic production means”).

What Hal Foster interprets in a totally contestable manner from the 
Productivist conception as it was defended by USSR right after the 
revolution launched by the Constructivists, who became later the 
Productivists, is a conception based on the idea that the avant-garde 
artist (both in an artistic and in a political sense, that are 
inseparable anyway) cannot limit himself “to back up the proletariat”, 
but must become himself a proletarian, must assimilate into a producer 
in the strong sense of the word and must resolve the artist/producer 
contradiction. Productivism generally brought back this conception to 
the engineer/artist conception; the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann and his then 
companion, Hannah Höch would make a point in reproaching the 
Productivist conception to carry on praising “expertise” - here again, 
in all senses of the word – and would oppose to it the conception of the 
artist as an assembler who only puts pieces recuperated in the 
industrial production together, without trying to reconcile them in 
anyway, therefore without being concerned with how they are joined 
together (that conception was generalized later on by Ernst Bloch [6], 
without the proletarian reference).

At the same time, Foster allows himself to rediscover – totally out of 
context, in my opinion – some remains of “Productivism paradigm” in the 
sculptural action as re-understood – enlarged – in the 60’s by a Richard 
Serra, and of the notion of “textual production” championed by Tel Quel 
during the same period.

Foster starts then to relate criticisms held against the productivism 
paradigm happening at the same time, mainly, he says, from Jean 
Baudrillard, even if Beaudrillard’s criticism was not aimed at 
Productivism, but rather at Fonctionalism, which is totally different. 
According to Foster, these criticisms would have lead the way from a 
Productivist paradigm to a “Situationist paradigm”, still badly defined 
even when Baudrillard’s criticisms do not spare the Situationists 
themselves.

In any case, according to Foster, would we be witnessing the coming of a 
third paradigm since the second half of the 80’s, the artist as 
anthropologist, or as ethnographer, since we’re dealing here with a 
field investigator rather than a office anthropologist (even though 
Foster seems to hesitate with an other paradigm which would be the 
artist as a cartographer, or rather as a geographer). An ethnographer 
paradigm, which oddly enough, would be launched at a time when a crisis 
would start, not only between ethnography criticized by structural 
anthropology and structural anthropology itself, just as relates Foster, 
but anthropology as such, mainly due to - no matter what the 
anthropologists are saying about it - the fall of the colonial era and 
the ambiguities of the post-colonial era, if it’s true that there ever 
was a post-colonial era. At the same time, the anthropology in-crisis 
could claim itself, unlike the anthropologist as an artist paradigm, as 
Clifford Geertz [7] and James Clifford [8] did, who are dealing - 
without falling into obvious aesthetics - with anthropologists writings 
as literary or artistic texts, of the fictional texture of anthropology, 
Clifford going as far as talking about “ethnographic Surrealism” 
(Foster, being ironical about that, also starts to talk about the 
anthropologist as a collage artist, multi-cultural collage artist, that 
is). Deconstruction - if not abolition - of the opposition between art 
(and literature) and anthropology. At the same time, as Foster relates, 
that anthropology - in this case, cultural anthropology – can present 
its subject of study, culture, as the result of some collective artists 
creativity, could assimilate nations to artists. Geertz [9] has been 
able to handle cultures themselves as texts similar to written texts, to 
“textualize” non written cultures themselves, with a (questionable) goal 
to de-contextualize them from their discursive enunciation situation (as 
well as from the agents’ intentions) to finally consider anthropology as 
a meta-text, a hermeneutic, when, according to Geertz, the meaning of 
studied facts is generally not concealed, native people are not cultural 
idiots, but are spontaneous anthropologists (without any derogatory 
intention), they are the first interpreters of their own culture, so 
that anthropology appears - far from the “simple description”, the 
“return to the real things”, far from Harold Garfinkel’s [10] 
ethno-methodology - as a second class interpretation, “an interpretation 
of an interpretation” which aims to remain next to the populations under 
study. This allows Geertz to build a disparity in the anthropologist and 
in the “informant” status, a hierarchy between first class and 
second-class interpretations. The anthropologist’s information is not 
meant to be read by the concerned populations, but only by “the 
anthropologists world”. The hermeneutic exchange between the 
anthropologist and the “anthropologized” resembles the exchange between 
settlers and colonized peoples, a deeply unequal exchange. This leads 
Clifford [11] to question the authority of the ethnographer, “his 
authority and his author-ity” to demand, following Roland Barthes [12] 
path, the author’s death, at least the individual author if not the 
collective author, and the reader’s accession to talk, here again, the 
collective reader, plural, rather than the anthropologist as the author, 
and ask for the “anthropologist account” as a literary piece. At the 
same time that appears a new paradigm - not as much for the 
anthropologist as for anthropology - the paradigm of negotiation (based 
on the negotiated portrait in photography), of dialogue, of 
conversation, of inter-subjectivity, of sharing (and not only “exotic 
sharing”), between anthropologist and “anthropologi-zed”, of even an 
effective reciprocity, every one ethnography-ing and starting to 
interpret “the other”.

Nevertheless, one also has to take into consideration that the arrival 
of the paradigm of the artist as an anthropologist is to be connected 
with the coming -that we can deplore, alongside with Adorno, without 
being trapped in a heavy reactive modernism - of art in the broader 
field of culture - as Krauss is talking about the “broader field” of 
sculpture when referring to Serra and others - that anthropology is 
traditionally meant to “control”, although its monopoly is nowadays 
being threatened by the competition of cultural studies.

Yet, at the same time, what seems to give the art base on anthropology, 
a more ethical than political character, when political reflux is 
allowing an ethics come-back, that is not at all the same thing, (let’s 
not mistake ethics and morality), and even though, as mentioned by 
Gilles Lipovetsky [13], it would only be “light” soft ethics, without 
any deep commitment. Deconstruction, as the old sublime category already 
was, of the aesthetic-ethics distinction.

We do not have here the consensual neo-humanistic, egalitarian, “Family 
of Man” style of ethics, but rather the ethics of the Other, of the 
Other with a capital O, ethics of the difference and anthropology 
defining itself now by opposition to sociology, not as the investigation 
of man, but as the quest of the Other. Not so much the social Other, but 
the cultural Other. A passage from a subject defined in terms of 
economical relationships - perhaps political relationships already - of 
political exploitation (producer and worker) to a subject defined in 
terms of cultural identity, representing an “oppressed”, “subjugated” 
sub-culture. This goes together with the growing interest in the problem 
of identities in the age of globalization (what Foster rightly links to 
a definite recent come-back of the subject- and even to a substantial 
subject-following the Structuralism and post-Structuralism period with 
the death of the subject and the death of the man, primarily, the death 
of the author – including also the liberal subject, non substantial, 
even if the on-going rise of the identities does not reject 
globalization as much, since it does not belong there. Yet, this would 
be a pre-defined subject rather than a subject in progress).

And with the idea – as it was the case for the paradigm of the artist as 
a producer - that the artist generally only has a limited access to this 
otherness.

Because of the anthropology crisis itself, which for its part, 
necessitates a re-conversion, otherness non only of the old “primitive” 
(although this otherness was reduced by its re-conduction to a previous 
state of “the evolution” of the Same) -otherness that modernist 
primitivism had already sought in the past -, otherness of the faraway 
(with a part of exotism), that otherness of the close-by, with, 
according to Foster, the risk of being self indulgent like Michel Leiris 
in his search of the Other within himself, in the interiorization of the 
Other, in the “auto-ethnography” (just like psychoanalysis had rejected 
the practice of auto-analysis), to project in the other one’s own ideal 
– or should we say in one’s ideal of the self?-, and to negate the Other 
as such. Where ethnography used to be in competition with psychoanalysis 
(the Lacanian Other). Foster sustains that anthropology has now replaced 
psychoanalysis as the science of the otherness. Anthropology of the 
close-by can be multi-facetted, from the anthropology practiced by the 
artist as the anthropologist of his daily routine, of his family, of his 
friends, to the anthropology practiced by the outlaws, the homeless, and 
other nomads, migrants or illegal aliens, rejected by the “system”… 
those who are now taking the status of the proletariat in the past.

This is still true when the ethics of the Other seems to always copy 
this Other, absolutely Other as close as could it be, on the absolutely 
Other without any expectation of the divine, the transcendence, the 
Other being always caught in a “double bind” between subordination to 
the Same which denies him (consensual ethics) and absolutisation (ethics 
of the Other).

In particular, a field investigation, on what Marc Augé [14] calls the 
non-sites, (wastelands, fallow lands… which, more than surrounding our 
cities (with all the threat intended), distinctions center/suburbs 
established to reproduce colonialism and post-colonialism, being less 
and less pertinent appear and pierce the urban space. Art meant to 
rehabilitate more than to denounce these non-sites, rehabilitation not 
in the usual urbanism sense, but tending to transform these non-sites 
into a true anthropologist place according Augé’s definition (that he 
borrowed from Certeau [15] ).

Nevertheless, this represents a risk to (eco) museum-ize them, to show 
them off, to turn them into new reservations or new attraction fairs, 
even into new human zoos, and to make a show, mythical-ize or hero-ize 
the outcasts themselves, to make a show of the other’s distress just 
like the so-called humanitarian photography does.

This is the reason why Anthony Hernandez, a Los Angeles photographer, 
photographed for Landscapes for the Homeless the “homes”[16] of LA 
“homeless people”, choosing, thus avoiding any voyeurism, by not ever 
showing homeless people themselves, but only showing the traces they 
left behind. Camp traces, basic and temporary set-ups, with the goal of 
not forging a better utopia world (utopia is now taking refuge in the 
micro-utopia found in the trendy openings at the Palais de Tokyo in 
Paris ), but with the idea of resisting as much as possible and going as 
far as to elaborate, in other countries, a sort of infra-architecture, 
similar to the traces left behind on the land by nomads and similarly to 
the favelas (they were the inspiration for Japanese artist Tadashi 
Kawamata’s Field Works - “field works” being the term used in 
anthropology to designate work in the field - and his own “favelas” that 
he built himself particularly in Houston at the bottom of high tech 
modern sky scrapers designed for wealthy individuals as a type of 
architectonic montage. Transient traces themselves of transient 
developments that photographic traces are trying to perpetuate in 
documenting them. Those who left the traces are never seen and have 
disappeared “for those remaining”. That is the reason why Régis Durand 
[17] said that, in fact, Hernandez didn’t pretend to be an 
anthropologist since he never directly dealt with the concerned 
populations, unlike traditional anthropologist field investigations 
which looked for subjects, or rather, some of them, “the informers”, 
like in the Chicago School, see the anthropologist as an active-observer 
who mingle with the populations he is studying. In fact, Hernandez’s 
photos always tend to magnify the non-sites that they are reproducing in 
putting them back, as the title of the series indicates, in the great 
tradition – genre – of the American West landscape photography, which is 
filled with spiritualism.

During the winter of 97-98, Jacqueline Salmon in Chambres précaires [18] 
searched for rooms in the shelters provided by good will organizations 
for the homeless people during the wintertime. Rooms that, unlike what 
Virginia Woolf [19] claimed as “a room of her own”, have to be entirely 
vacated at dawn, by body and personal effects, in order to get people to 
“work” at looking for jobs, or at least, for food. The spaces shown by 
Jacqueline Salmon are emptied of their transient occupants, unlike the 
fallow lands photographed by Hernandez that are free of all marks of 
appropriation, with the added inconvenience that the outcast finds 
himself excluded twice; he’s excluded both from the non-sites that 
precarious rooms are themselves (even if Marc Augé’s notion of non-site 
can be too open, too vague, since it includes waste grounds, 3 stars 
hotel rooms and precarious rooms, supermarkets, as well as highways and 
their surroundings) and he is excluded from the image, he is off-site. 
He is not so much put at a distance, “distanciation”, than kept in 
exclusion.
“Rooms without a soul” but paradoxally, the photos bring back the 
presence of the passing occupants, those who went by and disappeared in 
the urban material, as a transcendance. There is a sacralization of the 
homeless, in the excessively religious side of Jacqueline Salmon’s usual 
architecture photos (that are, in fact, the content of Chambres 
précaires, as in Hernandez’s pictures are landscape photos). There is no 
longer an aesthetic representation, but an aesthetic presentation, where 
the homeless replace divinity. Sublimation of the excluded where a 
religious character, that too often the characterizes humanitarian 
photography, Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, (which appears to be 
humanitarian photography before the term was coined in the United States 
by the FSA during the Depression but, since it was de-territory-ized 
could also, later be used as a symbol for other causes, for instance for 
the Spanish Civil War), Georges Mérillon’s Piéta de Kosovo, and Hocine’s 
Algerian Madona (sic), despite some differences.


Translation : Kristine Barut Dreuilhe

Original version:
L'artiste et ses "modèles"
http://pourinfos.org/encours/item.php?id=3020


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a free pedagogic or associative usage.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/fr/


part II on next post or
html version
http://pourinfos.org/encours/item.php?id=3019

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