Approaches Readings

Who wrote ‘What Can Art History Learn from Anthropology?’ and what does it argue?

Alfred Gell, 1998.

• Anthropological Theory of Visual art can be practiced as the art of colonial and post-colonial margins being approached via any, or all, of the existing theories of art, as far as they are useful. 

• Art History would benefit from the elements of Anthropology that centre social relationships in the understanding of behaviour. In his view, an anthropological theory of art accounts for the production and circulation of art objects as a function of this relational context. 

• He sees anthropology as a social science, not a humanity- focusing on social rather than exclusively cultural.

• The anthropology of art focuses on the social context of art production, circulation and reception, rather than the evaluation of particular works of art, which is the function of a critic.

Who wrote ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture’, and what do they argue?

Clifford Geertz, 1973

• Culture was not, he argued, simply a function of people’s material lives, and could not be reduced to a set of “laws” that linked economic, political, and social conditions to behaviours, beliefs, and practices. Rather, culture was that realm in which people interpreted and made meaning out of their lives. This meant that cultural analysis involved “sorting out the structures of signification . . . and determining their social ground and import.

• Geertz was essentially arguing that culture most fundamentally could not be viewed as a set of behaviours, practices, and beliefs, but rather was an ongoing construction of meaning as people continually reflected upon the significance of their lives. In this sense, culture was similar to language. It was a way of sharing meaning communicated through signs and symbols.

• This shifted the goal from realizing a “complete” understanding of culture to one of studying the ongoing social contexts in which cultural meanings are being produced and how the production of culture matters in those contexts

Who wrote ‘Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America’ and what did they argue?

Aby Warburg

• Lecture first delivered in 1923 after his journey to the American West.

• Here, Warburg describes his interpretations of indigenous people living in villages (pueblos), from a firmly Euro-Centric lens.

• At several points, Warburg uses language that both others the people he studied, and makes them appear primitive.

• 'in the midst of a country that had made technological culture into an admirable precision weapon in the hands of the intellectual man, an enclave of primitive pagan humanity was able to maintain itself'

• Material is 'contaminated'- laid over twice- Spanish Catholic influence 16th cent, North American education

• He only really cares about the ‘uncontaminated’ artefacts and culture- ignoring the complexities of the contemporary cultural influences, and real people. Sees them through a timeless, ethnographic lens.

Who wrote ‘Words about Words about Icons’ and what does it argue?

Susanne Blier, 1988

• In this essay, Blier takes on Panofsky by discussing how some West African art makes us rethink some of his methods and assumptions.

• Dogon kanaga mask- seen- depending on one’s position of eldership- to represent variously a bird and a highly complex symbol of creation and regeneration.

• African art images do not always have a basis in life, and do not always convey emotions in the same way. In art, as in life, signifier and signified are not universally correlated. Real danger of misreading even the most elementary feature of a work

• Architectural decoration of the Batammaliba- often can either represent friendly spirits or dangerous ones with the same iconography, just dependant on where the location of the figure

Who wrote ‘Jan Van Eyck's 'Arnolfini Portrait’ and what does it argue?

Erwin Panofsky

• Essay analysing the Arnolfini Portrait through an iconographic lens-

• He first identifies the couple in the image through a marriage document. Full length double portrait not uncommon in iconography of a marriage picture in the period

• questions whether the enthusiasm bestowed on the interior anticipates the art for art’s sake attitude, or is rooted in the medieval tendency of investing visible objects with an allegorical or symbolical meaning

• Single candle burning on the chandelier - not practical- marriage symbol

• Significant attributes not emphasized but disguised impresses the beholder with some kind of mystery- applied in a much higher degree to the medieval spectator who was wont to conceive the visible world as a symbol

• in works of Van Eyck, medieval symbolism and modern realism so perfectly reconciled that the former has become inherent in the latter.

Who wrote ‘Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance Art’ and what do they argue?

Erwin Panofsky

• In this essay, Panofsky sets out the distinction between subject matter and form

• 1- Primary/Natural subject matter (identifying pure forms as representations of natural objects and mutual relations as events)

• 2- Secondary/ Conventional subject matter- (Connecting artistic motifs with themes and concepts)

• 3-Intrinsic Meaning/Content- 'apprehended by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion- qualified by one personality and condensed into one work

• Iconography invaluable for the establishment of dates, provenance and authenticity- furnishes necessary basis for all further interpretation, but does NOT try and work out this interpretation for itself.

Who wrote ‘The Rhetoric of the Image’ and what did it argue?

Roland Barthes

• Important problem facing the semiology of images: Can analogical representation (the copy) produce true systems of signs and not merely agglutinations of symbols?

• He discusses the linguistic nature of the image -ONE HAND- image is rudimentary system in comparison with language, OTHER- signification cannot exhaust the image's ineffable richness.

• Commercials are a very convenient medium in which to explore the way ideologies are reflected in visual images. Commercials have to be able to speak in a conventional language, use conventional terminology and transmit its message very fast, and therefore they provide access to conventional ideologies of their time.    

• Barthes works along the lines of two theoretical distinctions: connotation and denotation, and the internal relations of the sign between the signifier and the signified.

  • The signified, according to Barthes, has two level of meaning: the denotational and the connotational.  The denotation is the dictionary meaning of the sign/word and it detonates something in the real world. The connotation is the interpretative association that comes with the sign and is something which is culturally and context dependant.

  • In "Rhetoric of the Image" Barthes gives the example of a pasta brand imported from Italy to France. The commercial is in Italian despite the fact that it is aimed at the French customer. Barthes holds that the fact that the viewer cannot understand the things spoken does not stand in the way of associating Italian with quality pasta.