1. Department for
Continuing Education
Music and Art
Marilou Polymeropoulou
marilou.polymeropoulou@music.ox.ac.uk
28/2/2012
Week 7
Ethnographic Art
http://musicandartoxford.wordpress.com/
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
2. 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
3. 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
4. 2. Data collection
• Pictures (online, or original photographs)
• Texts (reviews, academic articles,
newspaper/magazine articles,
encyclopedias, books)
• Research methods: bibliographic work,
interviews?
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
5. 3. Writing up
• 1. Find the point you want to make
• Start writing main body of essay
• a) form ideas
artwork x description analysis criticism
• b) write and then formulate
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
6. 3. Writing up
• After main body write conclusions
• Then, go back and write introduction
• Finally, organise references
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
7. 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
8. 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
9. Previously
• Defining art and music
• Examining aesthetic theories
• Impressionism, symbolism
• Avant-garde, expressionism, futurism
• Popular Culture
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
10. Today
• Ethnographic Art
• Anthropology of Art and Aesthetics
• Vogel’s net?
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
11. 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
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
12. Polynesian Fish hooks
British Museum
Materials:
Root
hemp(?)
fibre (?)
bone
Found/Acquired
New Zealand
Ethnic group
Māori
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
17. Tsantsas (Shrunken heads)
Amazon rain forest tribes
Ecuador and Peru tribes
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
18. 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
19. Interpretive theory
• “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
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
20. 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
21. 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
22. 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
24. Traps
FIGURE 5 Giraffe
trap drawn by Wood
FIGURE 6 Rat trap, Vanuatu; FIGURE 7 Trap from Guyana; sketch by
sketch by Bell Roth
28
Downloaded from http://mcu.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 14, 2010
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
25. • “...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 FIGURE 5 Giraffe
trap drawn by Wood
between hunters and prey animals...”
FIGURE 6 Rat trap, Vanuatu; FIGURE 7 Trap from Guyana; sketch by
sketch by Bell Roth
28
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 Downloaded from http://mcu.sagepub.com at Oxford University Libraries on February 14, 2010
26. Main points
• Against aesthetics (too much historicity...)
• Communication and art nexus (see Tolstoy)
• Interpretive theory (art world, similar to
Danto’s)
• Anthropology of art
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
