The chapter from James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture that stuck out to me most was that on ethnographic surrealism and its concentration on its growth in Paris from the 1920s and 1930s. The notion most emphasized is that surrealism is used to create interesting and unexpected juxtapositions. Surrealist ethnographers saw culture as a contested reality—something I still believe to be true to this day—that needed to be analyzed and rearranged.
Clifford includes an excerpt from Griaule where he states that “ethnography…is interested in the beautiful and the ugly[1].” This article today I think holds true in art and my approach to photography. I guess I am a surrealist at heart, but I essentially try to take what seems common and make it peculiar and the bizarre banal. William Makepeace Thackeray once said, “the two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.” This is true of any work that one is doing, especially anthropology. Geertz states that we should study common sense because it is “natural” to the person in that culture, but never the thing analyzed. This is making the familiar new. When we study other cultures in anthropology we are looking to understand it and therefore make the new thing familiar to us. Clifford essentially does this when telling us about Western culture and how we learn as children to collect things and put them on display, like a “treasured bowl filled with the bright shavings of a crayon[2].” I would have never noticed this because it is part of the “familiar” of our Western culture.
Clifford’s chapter on collecting art and culture made me wonder how one decides what is scientific, cultural artifacts, what is an aesthetic work of art, and what is seen as a collectible. Are they all valued equally? If not, why is the one valued more? We kind of consume these three different types like a commodity, part of a museum attraction or exhibit in a gallery. It wasn’t seen as “beautiful” in the European sense of the word until recently, which then pushes to the forefront why we were interested in these nonwestern works. Even those that were considered “art” where in some ways consumed because of its exotic characteristics and therefore appeal in Western culture. It wasn’t primarily for its appreciation of art for art’s sake. The art world is really about it’s mass appeal and value and these were valued because it was seen as curious, exotic, and bizarre. The value, not the monetary kind, behind the art to the culture it came from, in this case the West Africans, gets ignored and lost. The meaning is insignificant to the West and their art is seen as another good that we can consume.
No comments:
Post a Comment