week 7

Music and ArtMarilou Polymeropoulou

marilou.polymeropoulou@music.ox.ac.uk

http://musicandartoxford.wordpress.com/

Department for Continuing Education

Week 7Ethnographic Art

28/2/2012

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Final Essay

• 2000-2500 words NOT including references

• Writing style (academic, journalistic, experimental, custom)

• One topic, focussing on 1-2 points (analysis)

• Introduction - Main body - Conclusion(s) - References

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

1. Research

• Find a topic

• Something you really want to write about

• Possible topics: relation of technology and art/music, analysis of a work of art, criticism on aesthetic theory.

• Periods: any from late 19th century to present

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

2. Data collection

• Pictures (online, or original photographs)

• Texts (reviews, academic articles, newspaper/magazine articles, encyclopedias, books)

• Research methods: bibliographic work, interviews?

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3. Writing up

• 1. Find the point you want to make

• Start writing main body of essay

• a) form ideas

• b) write and then formulate

artwork x description analysis criticism

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3. Writing up

• After main body write conclusions

• Then, go back and write introduction

• Finally, organise references

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4. Feedback and submission

• 10-15 minute presentation (week 10). Feedback and comments

• e-mail me

• to submit: at the Department for Continuing Education until April 6, 2012

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Practice? [optional]

• Write a 800 word essay on a topic:

• 1) Theory (for example, German aesthetics)

• 2) Art criticism (for example, write a review of an artwork)

• 3) Research (for example, write on the topic of collecting and interview people around you why do they collect - music, art, any type of collections - and write your observations)

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Previously

• Defining art and music

• Examining aesthetic theories

• Impressionism, symbolism

• Avant-garde, expressionism, futurism

• Popular Culture

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Today

• Ethnographic Art

• Anthropology of Art and Aesthetics

• Vogel’s net?

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What is ethnographic art?

Art and artifacts of indigenous peoples around the globe

Representation of a culture’s every day life. Usually centred on rituals, religious practices, history

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Polynesian Fish hooksBritish Museum

Materials:Root

hemp(?)fibre (?)bone

Found/AcquiredNew Zealand

Ethnic groupMāori

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Aboriginal Art (Australia) iconography

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Tsantsas (Shrunken heads)Amazon rain forest tribesEcuador and Peru tribes

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Vogel’s net (traps as artworks and artworks as traps)

• Alfred Gell (1996)

• Definitions of works of art: “any object that is aesthetically superior, having certain qualities of visual appealingness or beauty. These qualities must have been put there intentionally by an artist, because artists are skilled in activating a capacity present in all human beings, that is, the capacity to respond aesthetically to something.”

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

• “A work of art may not be at all ‘beautiful’ or even interesting to look at, but it will be a work of art if it is interpreted in the light of a system of ideas that is founded within an art-historical tradition”

• Contemporary definition. Interpretive vs. aesthetic theory

Interpretive theory

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Institutional theory

• “There is no quality in the art object, as material vehicle, that definitely qualifies it to be, or not be an artwork. Whether it is or not is dependent on whether or not it is taken to be one by an art world, that is, a collectivity interested in making, sharing, and debating critical judgements of this type.”

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

A Kuba woman’s wrapper, a Zande hunting net and a metal currency from Zaire in the “Art Gallery Display” (from the book “Art/Artifact” 1989).

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Vogel’s net

• Susan Vogel (anthropologist) displayed this item because “New York gallery-visitors would be spontaneously able to associate this ‘artefact’ with the type of artwork that they would have looked at in other galleries or at least seen illustrated in newspapers and magazines”

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Jackie Winsor, Bound square (1972)

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28

FIGURE 5 Giraffe

trap drawn by Wood

FIGURE 6 Rat trap, Vanuatu;sketch by Bell

FIGURE 7 Trap from Guyana; sketch byRoth

at Oxford University Libraries on February 14, 2010 http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Traps

Wednesday, 29 February 2012

• “...even without ethnographic context, without exegesis from any wise men, animal traps as these might be presented to an art public as artworks. These devices embody ideas, convey meanings, because a trap, by its nature, is a transformed representation of its maker, the hunter, and the prey animal, its victim, and of their mutual relationship, which among hunting people, is a complex, quintessentially social one. That is to say, these traps communicate the idea of a nexus of intentionalities between hunters and prey animals...”

28

FIGURE 5 Giraffe

trap drawn by Wood

FIGURE 6 Rat trap, Vanuatu;sketch by Bell

FIGURE 7 Trap from Guyana; sketch byRoth

at Oxford University Libraries on February 14, 2010 http://mcu.sagepub.comDownloaded from Wednesday, 29 February 2012

• Against aesthetics (too much historicity...)

• Communication and art nexus (see Tolstoy)

• Interpretive theory (art world, similar to Danto’s)

• Anthropology of art

Main points

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Picturing cultures

• Ethnographic films

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• Robert Flaherty (1922) Nanook of the North

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Wednesday, 29 February 2012

• Dziga Vertov (1927) ‘The man with the movie camera’. Discovering Soviet Union

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Wednesday, 29 February 2012

Crossing the Bridge: The sound of Istanbul

A film by Fatih Akin

Wednesday, 29 February 2012