No one could go from the stimulating arguments of this book with a sense that anything in or around the anthropology of art is settled. The field is certainly fertile, but also confused by disagreement that starts from the most basic questions of definition. Is ‘art’ a class of things or a cultural domain available for study, or is it merely a problematic rubric that offers a route into the investigation of something different? Can or should the anthropology of art be different to the study of material culture? Is the anthropology that might be brought to bear upon this – whatever this is – a classically conceived science of social relationships in small-scale societies, or a project of another kind?
In one sense issues of this sort are not new. Despite an extensive literature from A.C. Haddon (1895) and Franz Boas (1927) onward, there has never been a well-established ‘anthropology of art’ at a higher level of generality and comparative range than the excellent ethnographies of art produced for various African, Oceanic and Aboriginal cases. While, in the 1960s, anthropologists such as Raymond Firth transposed kinship studies almost effortlessly from tribal ethnography to East London, ‘art studies’ never had a repertoire of concepts and methods that could be disembedded from the tribal ethnographic context and applied elsewhere. What however did become, over the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, increasingly sophisticated, were ethnographies of art’s expressiveness, of aesthetic meanings and workings in particular cultures.
Yet – as anyone who has read Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency in part or whole, or the substance of this book, will be well aware – it was precisely this body of work that Gell confronted, with a sustained assault on the founding premises that art was (in whatever particular sense) language-like, that aesthetics could be central to its analysis. The alternative model – in which (crudely) objects mediate agency, entrapping recipients in the intentionalities of producers – is well summarized and elaborated upon earlier in this book. Surely the state of play would be straightforward enough, if the ‘art nexus’ were therefore simply a rival theory which might be accepted or rejected?
There are all sorts of reasons why this is not the case, and some are effectively stated by Liana Chua and Mark Elliott in their introduction. First there is the point that Art and Agency is a genuinely difficult book. The polemic of the opening chapters is radical but coherent and relatively straightforward. The arguments about style and temporality that it leads into are demanding in themselves and bear an unclear relationship to the opening sections. There is on my own reading no major inconsistency or contradiction, but the latter chapters move in different directions and are almost more like abstracts for studies in another genre. If ‘art as agency’ looks like a theory that can be weighed against others, the range of arguments around the ‘art nexus’ do not.
Chua and Elliott are right, too, to draw attention to the ‘old-fashioned’ character of Gell’s anthropology. Indeed one of the consistently striking features of Gell’s thought and creativity was his tacking back and forth between a remarkable range of stimuli – in language, psychology and philosophy among other fields – and what often looked like more classical anthropological concerns and comparative projects. His work was thus marked by a bewildering combination of highly innovative argument, and what could be seen as conservatism – manifest in Art and Agency, particularly, by an insistence upon a specifically anthropological domain and mode of analysis that excluded the historical and the postcolonial. Georgina Born is right to argue that this effort to segregate social anthropological analysis, with its ‘biographic’ scope, from historical time is ultimately unproductive – even if one can see why Gell was concerned to set aside the debates about the cross-cultural formation of indigenous art traditions, in order to press forward with his own, more general and theoretical critique.
I take it that this book is motivated in part by a sense that, more than ten years on, Art and Agency has been ‘packaged’ in a way that diminishes the rich provocations of the project, but makes a model available for citation and ‘application’ to particular case studies. Despite the scientistic strand in Gell’s own text, this understanding would be mechanical; it would fail to capitalize on what are in fact the diverse richnesses of the book, that are effectively brought forward by various contributions here. In particular, the suggestive arguments about temporality, protention and retention that were brilliantly exemplified in Gell’s readings of Duchamp and of Maori houses go beyond what could easily become reductive accounts of technologies of enchantment.
A general point might be drawn from Chris Gosden’s argument that Gell’s theory applies best to the earlier phases of the Celtic art corpus – what he sees as quality- rather than quantity-oriented periods. This is that ‘art’ is simply too capacious a category to be theorized effectively or plausibly. An argument about art’s character, about what art does, may be powerful and absolutely apt for certain genres, but tendentious, even banal for other forms, for other contexts. There is a sense in which the debate between Gell and critics such as Howard Morphy (2009) and Ross Bowden (2004) was always at cross-purposes. The examples central to Gell’s critique – Trobriand canoe splashboards, Asmat shields, Maori kowhaiwhai painting – were all works of a particular kind, marked by considerable optical complexity, and intended to be displayed in contexts of competitive performance, indeed in some cases of confrontation between rival groups. Their motifs possessed names and associations, it could be argued, but they were clearly not narrative artworks, or artworks illustrating myth, of the kind that Morphy understandably sought to base quite different arguments upon. Conversely, meaning-oriented analysis would always impoverish works such as Papuan shields or Maori canoes, if the practical deployment of such forms did not enter into analysis. If theorizing is inevitably parochial – in that ostensibly general models emerge from specific sites, traditions and engagements – there is a way of thinking differently and turning a local or regional base to advantage.
This raises a wider issue. In an epoch marked by the greater governance of research – through national oversight of methods training, for example – the propensity to reify theory is exacerbated. A more organic understanding of description, interpretation and theorizing as interwoven dimensions of an effort to understand cultural forms in the world may be hard to sustain. Gell’s work embraces both a classical, social-scientific abstraction of theory and an argument provoked by engagement with the work, most extensively with Duchamp’s oeuvre. Duchamp, like any more stimulating anthropological interlocutor, is not an ‘informant’, his works are not objects of analysis; he is rather a co-interpreter. If the anthropology of art can be conceived in these terms – as a work of co-interpretation stimulated by artists, art forms and the things people do with them – it may sustain the momentum of risk and experimentation that was so conspicuous in Alfred Gell’s writing on art.
Despite the range of anthropological, archaeological and art historical responses to Gell’s project, the question of the implications of Art and Agency for museums and their futures has not been much considered. Some exhibitions, such as the 2009 exhibition ‘Dazzling the Enemy’ at the British Museum, which showcased New Guinea shields, have been cognizant of arguments for specific technologies of enchantment. Gell’s core thesis has in other words entered into museum captions, into the ways in which particular artefacts have been contextualized. But this is not the same as any larger consideration of the potentially more explosive implications of the theory for museum practice. Of course, the suggestion that exhibitions mediate curatorial – and in a larger sense, institutional and ideological – intentions would not be new. Indeed well-known critiques of museums, inspired by Foucault’s arguments concerning discipline and governmentality in effect argued that the spectacular character of displays entrapped audiences, inculcating in them broadly evolutionary and more specifically nationalistic ideologies (Bennett 1995). Or, more positively, that displays of great Australian Aboriginal paintings, among other historic and contemporary native art traditions, succeeded in mediating a wider affirmation of the peoples represented (Thomas 1999).
Gell’s arguments would bring a distinct language to these debates but not fundamentally change our understanding of their politics. For those who work as curators in museums, and from my own perspective as the director of an anthropological museum, the challenge is completely different. It is to find ways of responding to the sense in which objects do exercise agency, not only in displays but in stores and workrooms where they mediate past and present intentions, where they provoke revelations, where they precipitate ambience. As practical, material and sensory but non-discursive processes, these are hard to describe or define, but they are vital and fertile dimensions of museum life that have never been quite specified or addressed in either the critical or technical museum studies literature (cf. Thomas 2010; Elliott and Thomas 2011).
The challenge for curators may be now to find ways of staging the potentiality of artefacts that do not collapse into the too-literal mode of contextualization that dominated much museum practice in the 1970s and 1980s. The art/artefact debate has long been circular and unhelpful, construing context and aesthetics as competing and mutually exclusive alternatives, leaving ‘context’ unexamined, and doing more to sustain than undermine anthropology’s long-standing propensity to treat the object as an illustration of other things, such as meanings and social relations. Gell’s arguments were certainly provocative, perhaps overstated in a variety of ways. Yet they had the virtue of insisting upon the animation and activity of material things. Despite the profound sense in which museums exist in order to keep, care for, and ‘do things with things’, these facts – of objects’ animation and activity – have for too long remained elusive for museum theory and practice. There is now, perhaps, an opportunity, not merely to tell audiences the sort of story that Gell told in Art and Agency – that objects may act. Nor is it even to create yet more inventive displays that enable them to act, but to make the facts of their acting, the diversity of their characters, and the magic of their theatre visible – and questionable.
Bennett, T. 1995. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge.
Boas, F. 1927. Primitive Art. Oslo: Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning.
Bowden, R. 2004. ‘A Critique of Alfred Gell on Art and Agency’, Oceania 74(4): 309–24.
Elliott, M. and N. Thomas. 2011. Gifts and Discoveries: The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. London: Scala Publishers.
Haddon, A.C. 1895. Evolution in Art: As Illustrated by the Life-Histories of Designs. London: W. Scott.
Morphy, H. 2009. ‘Art as a Mode of Action: Some Problems with Gell’s Art and Agency’, Journal of Material Culture 14(1): 5–27.
Thomas, N. 1999. Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture. London: Thames and Hudson.
———. 2010. ‘The Museum as Method’, Museum Anthropology 33: 6–10.