Thesis Eleven-2010-De La Fuente-3-9, artykuły, papers
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//-->Thesis ElevenThe Artwork Made Me Do It: Introduction to the New Sociology of ArtEduardo De La FuenteThesis Eleven2010 103: 3DOI: 10.1177/0725513610381377The online version of this article can be found at:Published by:Additional services and information forThesis Elevencan be found at:Email Alerts:Subscriptions:Reprints:Permissions:Citations:>>Version of Record- Dec 10, 2010What is This?Downloaded fromthe.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012The Artwork Made MeDo It: Introduction to theNew Sociology of ArtEduardo De La FuenteMonash University, Melbourne, AustraliaThesis Eleven103(1) 3–9ªThe Author(s) 2010Reprints and permissions:sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navDOI: 10.1177/0725513610381377the.sagepub.comAbstractThe sociology of art has experienced a significant revival during the last three decades.However, in the first instance, this renewed interest was dominated by the ‘productionof culture’ perspective and was heavily focused on contextual factors such as the socialorganization of artistic markets and careers, and displays of ‘cultural capital’ throughconsumption of the arts. In this article, I outline a new mode of approaching artsociologically that begins with Alfred Gell’s (1998)Art and Agency,but comes to fullfruition in what I am calling the ‘new sociology of art’. A major theoretical statement thatcaptures many of the aspirations of the new approach is Jeffrey Alexander’s essay: ‘IconicConsciousness: The Material Feeling of Meaning’. It is suggested that the new sociologyof art has much in common with material culture studies, and that a more robust conceptof the artwork’s agency is needed now that art has well and truly taken on a social andcultural life well beyond those institutions traditionally understood as the ‘art world’.Keywordsaesthetic agency, Alexander, artwork and art worlds, Gell, iconicity, new sociology of artThe anthropologist Alfred Gell’s (1998) posthumously publishedArt and Agencydiscusses a fascinating case study in the social life of an artwork. The book tellsthe story of ‘Slasher Mary’, as she came to be known to the public. In 1914, thesuffragette Mary Richardson, in protest at the death in prison of fellow activistMrs Emmeline Pankhurst, attacked the Velazquez painting theRokeby Venus.Photo-´graphs taken at the time show the painting having suffered a series of deep, mostlydiagonal wounds. Gell ponders how and why Mary Richardson came to despise theCorresponding author:Eduardo De La Fuente, Monash University, Melbourne, AustraliaEmail: eduardo.delafuente@arts.monash.edu.auDownloaded fromthe.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 20124Thesis Eleven 103(1)image so much that she took to it with a kitchen knife wielded with such violence. Hebegins by citing the account given by Mary Richardson herself to explain her actions.Mary Richardson gave this account of her action in 1914: ‘I have tried to destroy the pictureof the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government fordestroying Mrs Pankhurst, the most beautiful character in modern history’. . .From thisand from a later interview, it is quite clear that Richardson equated the woman in the picture(Venus) with Emmeline Pankhurst, and the ‘sufferings’ of the picture with Mrs Pankhurst’ssufferings in prison. . .the frenzied gestures of Richardson defacing the image so that itsdeath corresponds to that of Pankhurst create the space in which the life of images andpersons meet and merge together. (Gell, 1998: 64)The art historian David Freedberg (1989) covers the same incident in his bookThe Powerof Images.The book offers a history of the image and its impact on viewers. Freedbergdescribes Mary Richardson’s act of violence towards the Velazquez painting as a supreme´act of ‘iconoclasm’. Defacing paintings in museums is, for Freedberg (1989: 425), a‘frightening’ act that opens to the gaze of the viewer ‘the power and fear that we may sensebut cannot quite grasp’. Art-destruction is art-making in reverse. Freedberg (1989: 425)puts it this way: ‘When the iconoclast reacts with violence to the image and vehementlyand dramatically attempts to break its hold on him or her, then we begin to sense its poten-tial’. Iconoclasm is therefore dependent on idolatry for its cultural significance.But in treating the artwork as one might a real person – say an opponent in a bloodycivil war – Mary Richardson produced a type of action that can’t be reduced to discourseor rhetoric. She acted ‘as if’ the painting itself had the potential for agency. Much thesame thing happens when we curse or strike an inanimate object that has caused us somedispleasure or inconvenience. To account for this dimension of the object requires goingbeyond contextual factors.What does this have to do with the sociology of art? Desperate to avoid the twinproblems of ‘essentialism’ and ‘formalism’, sociological accounts of art have oftentended to focus on factors other than the artwork itself. For example, the three most citedworks in the field of the sociology of art since about 1980 have been Howard Becker’s(1982)Art Worldsand Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, 1993)DistinctionandThe Field ofCultural Production.In all cases, the preference was for a sociological account of thelogics of ‘art worlds’ or ‘fields’, on the production side, and class and other identitycategories on the consumption or audience side. While what was referred to as the ‘newart history’ during the 1980s operated with a more explicitly poststructuralist vocabularythan the sociology of art of either Becker or Bourdieu, the work of such art historians alsotended to focus on the discursive regimes and technologies of the self (in the Fou-cauldean sense) that had shaped the history of art.Gell’s (1998: 14)Art and Agencywas therefore amongst the first texts in either thesocial sciences or art theory to challenge the notion that art is ‘like language’. The bookalso distances itself from the premise that an artwork communicates through ‘symbolicmeanings on the basis of language-like components’ (Gell, 1998: 14). In this respect, asTanner and Osborne (2007: 6) note, rather than attempting to offer a deconstruction ofthe ‘analytics of beauty. . .in the sense of Kant’s third Critique’, Gell could be said to beDownloaded fromthe.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012De La Fuente5offering a ‘transcendental aesthetic’ closer to Kant’s first Critique, which explores ‘howthe human sensory capacity construes and gives form to stimuli’ (Morphy cited inTanner and Osborne, 2007: 6–7). The framework in question is transcendental to theextent it focuses on the ‘universal perceptual-cognitive bases for visual response, by vir-tue of which. . .[artworks] have the ‘‘causal’’ character [Gell’s] theory asserts’ (Tannerand Osborne, 2007: 7).Art and Agencyclaims that artworks have causal propertiesthrough their capacity to ‘abduct’ the agency of the viewer (Gell, 1998: 14). For Gell,art is therefore more like a Peircean ‘index’ than a ‘symbol’ proper. It is an ‘entity fromwhich the observer can make acausal inferenceof some kind, or an inference about theintentions or capabilities of another person’ (Gell, 1998: 13).Gell’s move away from seeing the art-object as a projection screen for discursive andother socio-historical forces has been mirrored in art theory by W. J. Mitchell (and theaforementioned David Freedberg). Mitchell’sWhat Do Pictures Want?treats artworks‘as if they had an intelligence and purposiveness of their own’ (2005: 31). He suggeststhat no ‘modern, rational, secular person’ will readily admit that pictures ‘be treated likepersons’ (p. 31). But, most of us are ‘willing to make exceptions’ when it comes to treat-ing certain objects as having personhood. And, while ‘Everyone knows that a photographof their mother is not alive. . .they will still be reluctant to deface or destroy it’ (p. 31).Mitchell quips that if we could question pictures, they would most likely express the fol-lowing desires:[P]ictures would want to be worth a lot of money; they would want to be admired andpraised as beautiful; they would want to be adored by many lovers. But above all they want akind of mastery over the beholder. . .[what] paintings desire, in short, is to change placeswith the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder. . .in what might be called ‘theMedusa effect’. (Mitchell, 2005: 35–6)In the case of art-objects, what we have, therefore, is a type of causality or displacedagency where the function of the artwork is to ‘fascinate, compel, and entrap as well asdelight the spectator’ (Gell, 1998: 23). For the purpose of his argument, Gell (1998: 16)defines agency as persons and things ‘who/which are seen as initiating causal conse-quences’ (Gell, 1998: 16). Agency can therefore inhere ‘in graven images, not to mentionmotor cars’ as ‘in practice, people. . .attribute intentions and awareness to objects likecars and images of gods’ (Gell, 1988: 17). The ‘other’ in a social relationship does not haveto be a human being. Gell cites the example of a little girl who says she loves her doll andher doll is her best friend, and the doll is treated as a family member. He quips: ‘But what is[Michelangelo’s]Davidif it is not a big doll for grown-ups?’ (Gell, 1998: 18).Gell (1998: 21) admits that conceiving our relationships with dolls, motor vehiclesand art-objects in this manner has a touch of ‘animism’ about it. But he wants to stressthat his theory of art as agency is not a form of ‘material-culture mysticism’. We cannottell in advance which objects will exercise agency. Yet Gell leaves the reader wondering:can we do entirely without the concept of ‘meaning’ in a theory claiming to explain theaffective and causal properties of the artwork? I will return to this question briefly.The sociology of art has followed the lead set by Gell and Mitchell, withoutnecessarily acknowledging or directly engaging with these anthropological or artDownloaded fromthe.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 20126Thesis Eleven 103(1)historical/visual theory sources. As I have argued in other recent essays on the state of thefield (De La Fuente, 2007, 2010), one of the characteristics of the ‘new sociology of art’is a desire to take the aesthetic and affective properties of art-objects seriously withoutnecessarily resorting to an essentialist understanding of art. Emblematic is a recent col-lection edited by, amongst others, the founder of the ‘art world’ perspective. Becker,Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006: 1) suggest in the ‘Introduction’ to the collec-tionArt from Start to Finishthat there ‘has always been a blind spot in the sociology ofart: any discussion of specific artworks’. This should be qualified with the observationthat the target of their critique is recent sociological discussions of art rather than, say,the ‘classic’ works of Adorno, Lukacs, Goldmann and Williams, which did assuredlydeal with specific texts or, in Adorno’s case, specific musical works. In this, and otherrespects, some of the recent debates in the sociology of art have been shaped (perhapsoverly?) by American trends and internal critiques of these developments. Thus,Art fromStart to Finishis to some extent a modification and extension of Becker’s original thesisinArt Worldsto the extent that the artwork is conceived as the ‘product of collectivework. . .[that] produces the result that is eventually taken to be the artwork itself’(Becker et al., 2006: 3). In the language of Becker’s (1986) interactionist sociology, theeditors of this collection propose that the artwork itself, like art more generally, is theresult of ‘people doing things together’ (Becker et al., 2006: 3).If we had to summarize the central message ofArt from Start to Finishit would be thatthe ‘artwork is one of the actors involved in the drama of its own making’ (Becker et al.,2006: 6). In the words of Becker, Faulkner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, artworks ‘havelives and careers. . .they go from here to there to somewhere else and. . .these move-ments in time and space affect what they are and what they can be made into’ (p. 6). Indeed,one of the key lines of empirical investigation inArt from Start to Finishis when the label‘finished’ is applied to an artwork. This is a complex issue, whether we are dealing with ajazz improvisation or a sculpture by Rodin. But, as with Gell’s anti-symbolic theory of art,the question remains: does process itself explain why artworks have successful or eventfulcareers? Again, we must ask: can we do entirely without a theory of meaning?In a sense, the artwork is much more than an ‘index’ able to ‘abduct’ the viewerbecause of shifting intentionalities within what Gell (1998: 12–27) terms an ‘art nexus’;and it is also much more than an ‘actant’ – a Latourean term explicitly invoked byBecker, Faulkner and Hirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006: 6) – moving about from an artist’sstudio to a gallery or market situation before residing in the home or collection of its pur-chaser. We see this from the fact that many artworks are valued and esteemed out of allproportion to their material or objective qualities.This is where Jeffrey Alexander’s account of ‘iconic consciousness’ promises to addanother layer to the theory of the artwork’s agency. In keeping with his project of a‘strong program’ in cultural sociology (Alexander, 2003), Alexander has recentlyattempted to synthesize a sociological account of materiality with one centred onmeaning, through the concept of ‘iconicity’. In his essay ‘Iconic Experience in Art andLife: Surface/Depth Beginning with Giacometti’sStanding Woman’,he outlines a theoryof the role of the icon in aesthetic experience and social life more generally (Alexander,2008). Contra the tendency to assume that meaning is best understood through foraysinto the nature of literary texts, Alexander explores what a plastic art like sculptureDownloaded fromthe.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012
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