This volume is both a protention and a retention: a nodal point in a series of conversations between Alfred Gell and a collection of scholars who have in various ways drawn inspiration from, critiqued and expanded his seminal ‘anthropological theory of art’, Art and Agency (1998). Its origins lie in the ‘Art and Agency: Ten Years On’ symposium, which we convened in Cambridge on 15 November 2008 to mark the tenth anniversary of the book’s posthumous publication. We are grateful to the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) for sponsoring and organizing the symposium, to the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for hosting the post-symposium reception, to all the speakers whose papers are now collected in this volume, and to the guest chairs and discussants who held the panels together so nicely on the day: Marilyn Strathern, Martin Holbraad, Graeme Were and Stephen Hugh-Jones. Fittingly, the speakers and their papers were given a pretty serious (but good-natured) grilling by an audience that remained engaged, incisive and very generous throughout.
In preparing the present volume, we have added a few contributions to the symposium’s original line-up. Chief among these is ‘The Network of Standard Stoppages’, a hitherto unpublished essay written around 1985 by Gell himself, which his wife Simeran found amidst his files and boxes. With some luck, we managed to assemble all the relevant pages (though not, sadly, all the accompanying diagrams) to form the full document, which is published here for the first time. An engaging piece centred on the work of Marcel Duchamp, it may be read as a precursor to some of Gell’s most innovative arguments on time, change and creativity towards the end of Art and Agency. Alternatively, it could simply be taken as a recently rediscovered component of Gell’s oeuvre; an insight into an extraordinarily fertile mind that was engaging in serious cross-disciplinary study well before the concept became fashionable. ‘NSS’, as we now call it, is followed by a short commentary by Simon Dell, who provides an art-historical perspective on its content. Finally, the book closes with an epilogue by Nicholas Thomas – one of Gell’s closest collaborators, who was among those responsible for preparing Art and Agency for publication after his death.
From the time we began work on this project, we enjoyed the blessing and unwavering support of Simeran and Rohan Gell. We are particularly indebted to Simeran for letting us into her (and her late husband’s) life, giving us full access to Gell’s vast collection of papers, fieldnotes, lecture notes, and most intriguingly, drawings and diagrams which he made in both his childhood and later years, which reveal the intense visuality of his thought. (Some of these ended up in Art and Agency; two have been reproduced here.) For all this and more, we are immensely grateful.
Liana Chua and Mark Elliott