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Leviathan: An Essay on the Sensorial Turn of Visual Anthropology

The present perspective of anthropology is one more multi-disciplinary, more experimental and challenging, than its text-based, single-narrative past. Visual anthropology in particular, as a subdiscipline, provides new ways to approach and produce ethnographic studies and anthropological knowledge that are much more creative and inventive, blending cultural exploration with the artistic avant-garde. Within this subdiscipline, the applications of sensory filmmaking to ethnography are creating new representations and cinematic affect, as anthropologists experiment with visuals and soundscapes to produce new narratives and portrayals. 

One such example in visual anthropology is the work of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel. Both established anthropologists, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are large contributors to Harvard’s Sensory Ethnographic Lab (SEL), a facility that promotes this kind of creative innovation in anthropology, aiming to generate new perspectives and modes of exploration. As well as working with the sensory, the pair seem often to play with observation and the lenses of objectivity and subjectivity in their co-created works, with projects such as Caniba (2017), an experimental display of convicted cannibal Issei Sagawa, and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (2022), an artistic exploration of the human body, attracting such discussions on narrative and affect. Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s most avidly discussed project does not stray from this approach and confronts its subject matter with such experimentation that it has been recognised and commended outside of its discipline, in the greater world of cinema. This project is Leviathan (2012), a cinematic ethnographic study of the commercial fishing industry on the great and treacherous Northern Atlantic Sea. 

At 87 enervating minutes, the ethnographic film expresses to its audience the gruelling and dangerous occupation of fishermen on a Massachusetts fishing boat, playing into the nauseating sensations of the cold, perilous life at sea through acrobatic camera work, long-lasting shots and comfortless diegetic sound. Its experimental delivery and content helped it bridge the gap between consumers of anthropology, and the audience and critics of art and film. This essay will discuss Leviathan as an anthropological work of sensorial approach, exploring the methods and intentions of the filmmakers in creating an ethnography of commercial fishing in such a way. Separated into how and why, this paper will use theory and literature to analyse Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor award-winning piece and its success as a sensorial and anthropological audiovisual investigation. 

How Castaing-Taylor and Paravel Take a Sensory Approach

With camera-work alone, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel create a highly sensory work that displays the dangers of this occupation. Throughout the hour and a half piece, the constantly moving, unordered erraticism of the camera in scenes is nearly motion sickness-inducing, chaotically fixating yet untethered. This is because of the filmmakers’ use of GoPro cameras for such scenes, attached to chains, propellers, fishermen’s helmets, or loosely placed among dead fish or the slippery decks (Connor, 2019), in order to capture chaotic and destabilising moments aboard. This choice of camera work differs from the pair’s previous, more static films such as Sweetgrass (2009), in a way that reflects the atmosphere and conveys their exploration in a more accurate way than tripod-mounted shots of previous works would. The ability for these small cameras and their unrestrained movement to close in on objects and textures – fish parts, rusted metal, bloody seawater – further evokes sensory experience for its spectator. As David MacDougall writes in The Corporeal Image (2006), “In exaggerating proximity, the close-up brings to the cinema a quasitactility absent in ordinary human relations,” (MacDougall, 2006, p.22), and considering this, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s free-moving cameras allow for a tangible quality that further reflects the environment of the trawler in detail, and animates ethnography in new, stimulating ways. What’s more, each shot is long-lasting, all at least two minutes long (Unger, 2017, p.6), allowing an audience to really perceive the senses and textures of the shots in all their detail. This style of filming not only creates a sensorial affect for the audience, who naturally embody the film’s “unmoored, discombobulated” feeling (Westmoreland, Luvaas, 2015, p.2), but allows the nature of this environment and profession to remain undirected. At the 33rd minute, we watch a close-up sequence of a Petrel attempting to feed from the last catch, the shot is shaky and blurred, focused from below, capturing the animal’s wings and neck as it reaches for fish carcasses; in any other method of filming, this shot would likely be unsuccessful, recording something much less than the natural process of this undisturbed animal in action. This method of filming creates a de-intentionalised cinematography of sorts, an uncontrolled, sensorial natural enactment of the chaotic life Paravel and Castaing-Taylor try to convey, the interactions of natural and man-made processes, the colossality of the North Atlantic, unperturbed by choreographed approach. In its erratic, observational manner, “the film takes the shape of the system it describes” as Eamonn Connor writes (Connor, 2019). These chaotic, violently lulling scenes are coupled with portraiture of the fishermen, slightly more motionless, intimate vignettes of the life aboard that are humanising yet unconflicting from the harshness of the ship’s exterior. Here, these shots add to the sensorial experience, making the viewer once again unaccustomed to the ever-moving torrent depicted outside. These filming methods used by Paravel and Castaing-Taylor are one of many ways they have taken a sensory approach to ethnography, creating an embodiment of the dangerous environment these workers have to face in industrial fishing, as well as the uninterrupted nature that merges with humanity here. The camera work in Leviathan is “about movements and experience—affects, including non-human affects.”, as Andrew Murphie writes (Murphie, 2014, p.13).

The anthropologists also use sound in their film as a sensorial element that recreates the somewhat horrifying bodily experience of this life on the trawler. Using only diegetic noise, Leviathan’s sound design consists of crashing waves, naturally colossal in their volume, scraping metal from fishing equipment, howling winds, and occasionally the muffled chatter of the men aboard. Edited and composed by fellow SEL pioneer Ernst Karel, the team create a soundscape in this piece that, like its visuals, is all at once disorienting and palpable. Using the recorded sound from the GoPro microphones and later amplifying these with added audio, from sound libraries, that only heighten the audio, Karel distorts and alters the sound effects to create a “subjective sonic environment that is both “concrete”- deriving from the diegesis of the film – and “expressive” as it is manipulated for effect and metaphorical meaning.” (Unger, 2017, p.13). Sometimes silent, sometimes multi-textured, Leviathan’s sound is always jarring and discordant, unpleasant to the point of unnerving in it’s depiction of this job and environment, not unlike the kind of soundscape created for a horror film, with similar bodily affect induced. Though manipulated and expressed by Karel, textured metallic groans and auditory moments of engulfing water reflect the regular experiences of the job, that contrast vastly to the ones of an audience in a theatre, or home setting. Here, the film appears to display a sensory experience true to life on the boat, and it contrasts with the sensory experience of its screening location (in most cases). This sonic experience creates a depth to the ethnography, immersing the audience further into the circumstances Castaing-Taylor and Paravel try to present. Here, the team do as Steve Feld said of Colin Turnbull’s use of sound, which is “ask what it means to live and feel as a person in this place… (their) recordings signal that the concept of  ‘‘habitus’’  must include a history of listening.” (Feld, Bennels, 2004, p.462). This listening journey is drastic and extreme, cacophonous and unpleasant – edited or not. Leviathan’s soundscape also encapsulates the film: beginning before the picture becomes clear, and continuing over the rolling credits, creating a sonic environment that “exists and extends beyond what the camera can capture, and therefore, what the viewer can see” (Unger, 2017, p.13). This becomes a particularly ethnographic approach to the senses, in that it expresses a continual truth of the environment, that is not formulated only for an 87-minute showing, nor a pair of filmmakers, but for the life and experience they both depict. In this last 5 minutes and 15 seconds of audio, the audience sensorially encounters a tinny eeriness, that haunts the surrounding screening environment as a reminder of this formidable landscape as far as Castaing-Taylor, Paravel and Karel can stretch it out.

As the soundscape remains only diegetic and obscured, and the visuals are often dark and unfocused, the narrative of Leviathan remains predominantly unled. Driven only by content, temporality only shown through alternations of dark and light skies, the film’s narrative is almost a non-narrative, veering far from most traditional ethnography, and even cinema. No main characters, distinct dialogue or clear chronology mean the message and investigation of the project is conveyed only through the senses it evokes – feelings of disorientation, suffocation, fear at the colossus create a discernable display of the extremes of commercial fishing and the life lived to undertake the occupation. Castaing-Taylor says about the footage that its “opaqueness” catalyses imagination in its audience (Lim, 2012), acting almost as a device of deeper understanding in its non-narrative; the audience conceives the environment better by being stripped of explanation, by relying on the senses instead of interview or voiceover. In this way, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s use of non-narrative heightens the sensorial experience of the film, generating embodiment, and thus instigating a better understanding of Leviathan’s meaning. 

Why Castaing-Taylor and Paravel Take a Sensory Approach

As some have been discussed previously, there are several ways that Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s sensory approach benefits Leviathan as an ethnography, and benefits it also in the world of cinema, as a piece recognised for its experimentation. One key benefit that this sensory approach engenders is ‘spectatorial subjectivity’, a phrase Westmoreland and Luvaas use to describe a result of the filmmakers’ methods. The reliance of the audiovisual piece on sensory reaction in its lack of expository sound and narrative opens it up to the same subjectivity a lot of Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s co-created works produce. Through corporeal sensation, Leviathan depicts something interpretive, a knowledge of this world of industry fishing that is dependent on the viewers’ “ability to submit themselves to an experience of alterity that denaturalises human perception and means letting go of the sovereign self” as Eamonn Connor describes it (Connor, 2019). The co-creators ask something of their audience in this sensory approach; they require a near-abandonment of the human perspective for one that is greater by focusing on the non-human aspects of this enterprise, fixating on the crashing waves, on decapitated fish. So forth, the documentary looks beyond the men aboard to the environment that surrounds them, and the horrifying effect commercial fishing has on that, in its “sonic evocation of site itself rather than privileging the individuals who live and work at the site” (Unger, 2017, p.5). Although the spectacle is a bodily experience, it is also made bigger than the body in its subjectivity. Irina Leimbacher conveys this point in The World Made Flesh (2014): “Leviathan simply extrapolates ‘sensory’ from the human body to the body of the world itself—to the bodies of matter, nature, economic exploitation,” (Leimbacher, 2014, p.39). Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s methods of subjectivity and sensoriality create sympathetic consideration not only for the fishermen, but the nature that converges with them brutally in this capitalist action.  


In terms of traditional cinematic theory, Leviathan can be seen to reflect a level of realism that extends its meaning and purpose as an anthropological film. In their sensory approach, the SEL filmmakers open their film up to an audience in a manner of embodiment, and the previously mentioned subjectivity the films camerawork creates, make the piece less configured and somewhat more depicting of the site’s reality, especially in the omniscience of it’s cameras everywhere in and around the boat. In Heretical Empiricism (1972), Pasolini suggested that the mode of realist documentary obscures its own falsehood successfully through its sensorial qualities; “This means that the camera is not felt, and that what counts is the real action” (Pasolini, Lawton, Barnett, 2005, p.216). Castaing-Taylor and Paravel maintain this concealment in their experimental methods, drawing their audience into feeling and experiencing the environment (‘real action’) rather than just watching it. In its motion sickness, its submergence, its hair-raising metallic clashing, Leviathan sutures its audience to the screen and its content: the site of this trawler in the North Atlantic. In Bazinian theory, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s piece is less of a representation of reality than a piece of reality itself, in its unorthodox and widespread capture of life from non-fixed camerawork and non-narrative. This Bazinian reality is invigorated more by the sensory approach, conveying the experience it reproduces beyond the screen, and although the film’s soundscape is manipulated, it conveys more of a reality and experience than a narrated, commentative sound design would, and thus remains more true. Leviathan has the observational and realist intention of polyperspectivity and corporeality that is “neither attuned to nor motivated by any logic of narrative comprehension.”(Landesman, 2015, p.15), and this plays into its purpose as a study with ethnographic and anthropological foundation, a discipline and study that is observational in principle.

In Leviathan, the use of a sensory approach also attains a dedication to ethnography and, to an arguable extent, ethical documentary. Since its beginning, ethnography has had a vexed relationship with its subjects and an undeniable root in colonial exploration. This problematic foundation means that in order to be ethical, ethnographic and anthropological studies require conscious and outspoken contrast from the typical orientalised angle. In the documentarians’ unorthodox techniques, Leviathan attempts to scorn this colonial orientalisation, while dedicating itself to an ethnographic approach. A key tool the film uses to do so is its embodiment. In the aforementioned use of GoPro cameras, attached to the fisherman and to the trawler’s equipment, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor distance their visuals from a disembodied, authoritative gaze, and instead place the audience into the perspective of the interlocutors. Eamonn Connor likens this sensorial camerawork to Donna Haraway and Karen Barad’s concept of diffraction, a research methodology that challenges the hierarchical relationship between researcher and researched along with other methodological binaries (Fox, 2023) of which the filmmakers’ methods can be seen to disrupt in a way that does not disavow or disrespect the way anthropology has done in the past. “The film takes the shape of the system it describes; its discursive practices are materially enacted,” Connor writes of Leviathan’s sensorial approach, “The cameras move in accordance with the flows and currents of the marine ecology in which they are submerged and attest to the idea that knowing and being are entangled material practices” (Connor, 2019). This description of the film’s carefully curated methodology and process attests to Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s commitment to the work as ethnographic, as research, and not just documentarian. In Faye Ginsberg’s significant work Decolonising Documentary On Screen and Off (2018), she also recognises Leviathan’s dedication to ethnographic practice in its sensory approach, writing about its recording methods that “Such affordances have been used to enhance the ethnographic sensibility of “being there” in its most physical and most haptic sense as was made dramatically evident” (Ginsberg, 2018, p.41). Despite this agreeance, she also criticises the extent of the film’s ethics and accountability. In the article, Ginsberg writes of the necessity for “relational documentary”, a term that describes the kind of non-fiction media that considers, with regard, its subject and the ethics of telling their stories (Ginsberg, 2018). Regarding this, she writes of Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and the SEL in general, “What all this work neglects to stress, however, is any sense of accountability for the ethical/political relationships that ethnographic and other documentary filmmakers co-construct with the subjects whose lives are central to their films” (p.42) This question of accountability is a valid one, as the filmmakers appear, aforesaid, to focus beyond the human element of life on the trawler, evoking the site itself more than the fishermen that work and live there. Considering Ginsberg’s argument, one cannot entirely say that this ethnography is decolonial, but in their GoPro aesthetics, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor create a relationship of shared authorship with their subjects that argues the point that Connor makes, creating collaboration in every key element of the film’s production, condemning a classical exertion of otherness. The ethical approach of the film is a contested argument, but an argument nonetheless. Regardless, Leviathan’s sensory methods can be seen to contradict traditional, problematic, unethical approaches to an ethnographic subject and so remain a valid reason for this experimental application.


To conclude this analysis of method and reason, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s documentary Leviathan is a practice-based anthropological piece, that is sensorial in its experimental approach. Through multiperspective camerawork in the form of untethered and attachable GoPros, temporally-suspended structure and complex, non-narrational sound design, the film creates a bodily experience in its spectators. The corporeality of Leviathan is formulated in order to express the danger and hardship of its subject: commercial fishing. In the darkness, colossality and eeriness expressed by its visuals and sound, the ethnography depicts how gruelling work aboard this Massachusetts-based fishing trawler is. It also conveys the harsh effects this world has on the surrounding nature and ecologies, going further than fixating on humanity aboard, to embody aspects of the non-human throughout. The piece becomes an ethnographic horror film of sorts in its sensorial conveyance, condemning the damage and harshness of the industry, consumerism and, more generally, the fallout of the Anthropocene. As members of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s dedication to ethnography is furthered by the sensory approach they take, allowing the film to express its message while remaining observational and also interpretable. In its effect on audiences, its tangible and experiential spectatorship, Leviathan becomes an argument for a better visual anthropology, one that is exciting and experiential, one that conveys ethnography as art. This audiovisual work has also become successful outside of an audience of anthropologists, gaining critical acclaim as an experimental piece of cinema. With this in mind, the film becomes even more of a rationale for the use of sensory approach in practice-based anthropology, and in documentary cinema in general.

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Art

The Contemporary Symbiosis of Anthropology and Art

Contemporary art and its practices have evolved, expanding in awareness of the world and its audience. Modern art breaches the borders of other sympathetic disciplines as artists adopt new methods of researching and creating. One such discipline is anthropology; as art has connected with its own social and cultural contexts and impacts, artists have adopted anthropological methods and more empirical processes. 

As a holistic social field of study, anthropology observes the interconnection of a focus with all that surrounds it – nothing exists within a vacuum. In terms of methodology too, this consideration of intersectionality means contemporary anthropology takes an observational approach towards research, which considers the interlocutors and the very process of investigation. This is the approach that contemporary artists have begun to adopt, especially in the case of participation, a key anthropological method, that has existed in contemporary art too since the 1990s as an element of ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud, 1996) – a genre that explores human relations and social contexts in art, one that titularly recognises the interrelational manner of anthropology.

Anthropology, too, has been affected by its entwinement with art. Becoming more interdisciplinary and multimodal, subfields such as visual anthropology are clear evidence of contemporary art’s entanglement. Artistic processes such as painting, drawing and sculpture can be considered artistic research methods with their use in inciting enquiry and can challenge the research modes of traditional anthropology, shaping a new contemporary that borrows from the visual and sensory styles of artists.

The growing entanglement of the two disciplines is evident in contemporary spaces, as this essay will explore by looking at the examples of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Pad Thai) (1992) and Ruangrupa’s project for Documenta 15 to explore anthropology’s use in art. To explore how artistic research methods have decentred anthropology, Kyra Sacks’ Drawn in The Field (2020) and Susan Ossman’s essay on her use of painting in visual anthropology (Making Art Ethnography (2010)) will serve as examples of the alliance between anthropology and art. Animated by these cases, this text will delve into the methodologies of both disciplines and their multifaceted functions, portraying the ways that contemporary art and contemporary anthropology exist in alignment and assist one another towards a more fluid and expanded scope of reflection, one ever-necessary in denigrating hegemonic power relations between the viewer and the viewed, the creator and the audience, the self and the other. 

Anthropological Methods As Contemporary Art Practice

Rirkrit Tiravinija is a contemporary Thai artist whose work often revolves around installations and audience participation. Focusing on the experiential rather than painting or sculpture, Tirivanija’s work is “fundamentally about bringing people together.” (Tomkins, 2005). One such example of this is the artist’s renowned 1990 work Untitled (Pad Thai), one of a series of installations that involved turning the gallery – in this case, New York’s Paula Allen Gallery – into a kitchen that cooked and served food, inviting the gallery-goers to eat and share the space communally. As is evident from the title, this example featured several Thai men and women, including Rirkrit himself, cooking and serving pad thai, integrating Thai ingredients and customs into his work and the exhibition. Despite its seeming simplicity, this artwork is grounded in several social, cultural and political intentions. As a Thai artist, Tiravinija uses the piece to remark on the Western colonial tendency of museums to isolate objects from their social and cultural contexts, and thus he recontextualises these orientalised objects by using them in an attempt to decolonise the gallery space; “In contrast, enjoying a meal is a way to really engage with and understand the other” as the artist spoke of the piece (Newell-Hanson, 2022). Often deemed the ‘Poster Boy of Relational Aesthetics’ (Perreault, 2011), Tiravanija’s Pad Thai is also a means of social interaction in the gallery space, a call for participation between the artist, the artwork, the audience and the space in which it resides. For the artist, the very serving, offering and eating of the food is the art; as Renate Dohmen writes, “It is the convivial consumption of the pad thai…that constitutes the artwork” (Dohmen, 2011, p. 35). This intention endeavours to reframe the sociality of art and art spaces, to “cross physical and imaginary boundaries” (Tiravanija, 2023), the way that relational aesthetics aspires to in its focus on the exchanges between artist and audience and the social relations that exist in art. 

Both Pad Thai’s relational aestheticism and decolonial critique are evidence of anthropology’s place among art. While decoloniality is more of an anthropological idea than a method, the contested objects Tiravanija conveys in the piece resemble the critique of orientalism and colonialism that contemporary anthropology has actively and methodologically adopted in an attempt to reshape its own problematic and displacing past. By activating the decontextualised and immobilised objects of the Western museum, Tiravanija “Looks beyond the colonizer’s perspectives”, “recognize(s) and confront(s) the discipline’s colonial legacies” and reflects upon colonial restraints just as A. Lynne Bolles writes that decolonial anthropology does (Bolles, 2023, p. 519-522). Furthermore, the artist uses anthropological methods of participation and collaboration in his adoption of the “artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space” that Nicolas Bourriaud refers to as relational aesthetics in his seminal 1996 book that defined the genre (Bourriaud, 1996, p. 113). Participation is a key anthropological method that ties in with the observant nature of the empirical discipline, and in assuming the same participatory method in this art piece, Tiravinija invites his audience to exist as part of the work, a collaborator instead of just its viewer. Furthermore, with its invitation and service, the distribution of food to the audience resembles gift exchange, a component of relational aesthetics that also comes from anthropology. Here, the anthropological notion of the gift in relational and participatory art such as Pad Thai shows how the two fields are “inextricably related” (Sansi, 2017, p. 87). The artist’s cooking and serving of food in the exhibition space engages with the ‘deep anthropological practice of listening with our ears and with our hands,’ (Rizmi, McGranahan, 2016) in the participatory and observant style that Tiravinija adopts, and it becomes evident that anthropology has had an influence on art with this work as an example.

Ruangrupa’s work for Documenta 15, too, is an example of anthropology’s influence on art practices, as the group adopted similar anthropological and ethnographic methods for Lumbung (2020). For the quinquennial art exhibition Documenta, held in Kassel, Germany, the Jakartan art collective curated the fifteenth instalment with community and collaboration in mind. Documenta 15 was centred around the concept of Lumbung, a rice barn that stores communally-produced rice as a shared future resource, focusing on the biennale as a centre of resources in this same way. As a collective rooted in collaboration and holistic social and personal art practices, Lumbung’s focus on an “alternative economy of collectivity”, “equitable distribution” and “shared resource building” (Documenta Fifteen, 2022) aligned with the group’s core values and provided the projects curatorial and thematic approach. The concept of Lumbung was also its practice; using collaboration, community and conversation to evolve and change through artist interactions, building works that do not exist independently but as a collective. This curatorial approach and practice elicited a fluid and changing collection throughout its 100-day instalment; “the venues are constantly changing: they are places in which to meet, discuss, and learn. Exhibition buildings become living rooms, and together the artists decide how to use each venue.”(Documenta Fifteen, 2022). Lumbung forms an interdisciplinary, cooperative practice that transcends traditional art in the way Ruangrupa always champions, anchored in communal values of friendship, generosity and regeneration.

Much as Tiravinija’s cooking and consumption of Pad Thai constituted the artwork, Ruangrupa’s curatorial method became the art itself, blending with the collectivity of the works and artists themselves to become an amalgam of art and practice. Ruangrupa’s project rethinks relationships, forms of exchange and participation, making sharing its practice. This case is evidence of anthropology’s further entanglement with art in its reconsiderations and reflections on practice and methodology. One way in which Documenta 15 channels anthropological methods is in its devotion to ‘deep hanging out’: coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz, this method consists of one immersing themselves in a group or community on an informal level, observing from among them. As curators, Ruangrupa involves itself deeply with its artists, making art of the communal conversations and exchanges, as they continue past production, into the gallery spaces and exhibition. The group channels anthropology also in Lumbung’s focus on participation, just as Tiravanija does, cultivating a community in the name of art and observing how it grows and changes with collaboration, exploring the sociality of art. Ruangrupa seeks to create partnership and collaboration in every step of Documenta 15, banishing hierarchical power relations and promoting a polyphonic, collective space the way that Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban writes of collaboration in contemporary anthropology (Fluehr-Lobban, 2008, p.175). This project for Documenta 15 encapsulates more than just art, and leans towards anthropology in its focus on exploring sociality, cultural cultivation and community; by making sharing its key practice Lumbung transcends art practice and becomes a greater cultural platform and community that continues past the 2022 exhibit.

Both Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Pad Thai and Ruangrupa’s Documenta 15 curation show the ways that anthropology has influenced and integrated with contemporary art practices. As art has become more interdisciplinary, multimodal and more affected by social and cultural contexts, it has adopted anthropological methods and concepts to explore sociality and community. These two examples almost become ethnographies and anthropological works themselves in their adoption of practices and ideas, exploring the gallery spaces as more than just showrooms and exploring relationships between curator, artist and audience as more than just hierarchical interactions.

Artistic Research Methods in Anthropology 

Susan Ossman followed the interdisciplinary turn of anthropology in the 1990s, studying and practicing visual anthropology. In the essay anthology Between Art and Anthropology (2010), Ossman wrote about art as ethnography and painting as an ethnographic practice, an idea her own work has explored, but still one that, she writes, remains “pointedly ignored” as a contribution to developing anthropological knowledge (Ossman, 2010, p.127). Using examples of her own paintings the visual anthropologist looked at the art form’s potential as an abstract and interpretive reflection of a place, culture or community. One such example is her piece Hills of Chaouen (1990), a triptych that portrays the region of Chaouen in Morocco, by reflecting the place’s landscape and weavers. This idea that Ossman explores is also supported by anthropologist Zoe Bray, who argues in her article for Visual Anthropology Review (2015), that painting shares with ethnography the same “empathetic and sensitive process of long-term observation and contextual interaction” (Bray, 2015, p. 119) that allows anthropologists to create ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973). Ossman continues, writing that Hills of Chaouen’s reception highlighted a different value of paintings to anthropology; the work took a new form when perceived, acting as a screen that projected reactions and positionalities, such as her Morrocan friend’s interpretation of the painting as a statement about the Iraq war. In this example, the subjectivity of a painting allows for what it reflects to evolve, for its reception to change and for it to stimulate discussions of positionality and politics. This art form can provoke engagement with the field, opening spaces for conversation and dispute. Ossman’s writing supports this, as she likens a painting to a field note:

“It can focus attention on certain objects, regularities or connections. Once it is hung in public, it can stimulate exchanges about aesthetics, or politics. It can become a projection or a double of the ethnographer.” (Ossman, 2010, p.134)

Here, painting becomes a representation of both the interlocutor and the ethnographer, as well as a methodology in and of itself.

Ossman’s exploration of painting as a potential ethnographic practice shows the research technique to be valuable to contemporary, interdisciplinary anthropology. The fluid and observational nature of painting resembles the same quality of ethnography, but more vital is the way that this methodology affords the field and interlocutors a point of discussion just as Ossman’s Hills of Chaouen did. The subjectivity of paintings can facilitate evolving reflection, they can be rethought just as traditional anthropological texts have been and can be received differently in different spaces just as similarly. Ossman’s use of the artistic research method makes perfect sense in this consideration and works as a rationale for more frequent use as visual anthropology remains merely emergent even a decade after this publication.

Among many recent examples, Kyra Sacks’ Drawn in The Field (2020) shows a turn in fieldwork research toward sketching and drawing in anthropology. As a visual artist and social anthropologist, Sacks walks the line between the two disciplines in a lot of her work, as is shown in Drawn In The Field; a reflection on her use of drawing as an anthropologist and a display of her fieldwork sketches for an ethnography of the refugee crisis in Lesvos, Greece. In her own words, combining ethnographic fieldwork with sketching “managed to contain an embodied experience that could later be unpacked” (Sacks, 2020). Evident in her writing and the pages of her monochrome drawings and notes, Sacks’ use of sketching rather than only writing creates a less rigid and prosaic rendition of events observed, one more emotive and engaging, that better reflected the crisis she was witnessing and investigating. Sacks also conveys the tangled chaos of what she was observing; too difficult to unravel with only words that she felt “only decreased the totality of the experience instead of doing it justice” (Sacks, 2020). Drawing provided a better account that encompassed more. Renowned anthropologist Michael Taussig shares this view in his seminal text I Swear I Saw This (2011), a descriptive rationale for the use of drawing in anthropology. Taussig writes that sketches “provide a welcome pause to the writing machine whereby another philosophy of representation and meditation takes over” (Taussig, 2011, p.25), benefitting the anthropologist and their fieldwork by way of reflection and escape from the unvaried manner that fieldwork notes can adopt. Agreeing that reliance on writing can “fall short” (Sacks, 2020), Sacks suggests that drawing in the field can also be used for connection more than just recording. The anthropologist’s use of art provided an exchange for interlocutors, becoming a multifaceted research method as she offered drawings and portraits in return for people’s stories. As well as this use of art, the anthropologist’s presentation of her Lesvos ethnography conveyed the same openness as she talks of in her notes “Allow(ing) the reader to unpack it further and mak(ing) the urgency of the situation tangible” (Sacks, 2020).

Kyra Sacks’ use of sketching and drawing in her ethnography of Lesvos provides an example of artistic research methods used in anthropology and argues their place and value in a more multimodal version of the discipline that benefits from the openness, fluidity and embodiment that drawing can provide to fieldwork notes. 

While there is some similarity between Susan Ossman’s and Kyra Sacks’ use of art forms in anthropology, Ossman’s rationale for painting in ethnography refers more to its use in opening spaces for discussion, while Sacks’ sketches facilitate a less rigid and more embodied expression of fieldwork to be used in ethnography. In both cases, the argument for an anthropology that embraces multimodality and artistic methods is convincing, and while some anthropologists and ethnographers have embraced such techniques, there is still room for the discipline to grow. Using the methods and practices of art, such as sketching and painting, challenges anthropology to become more fluid, integrative and multidisciplinary.

                                                            

                     

The instances of anthropology’s influence on contemporary art and art’s influence on anthropology provided in this essay are a few of many examples that show the two disciplines’ entanglement in recent decades. Tiravanija’s and Ruangrupa’s works provide evidence of art’s ontological turn towards anthropological knowledge and acknowledgement of social and cultural contexts; Lumbung blurs the lines between curation and art as well as the lines between the collective and the individual; Tiravanija’s Pad Thai addresses the colonialism of the gallery space and works to dismantle it through collaboration, participation and gift exchange. In their multimodal approaches, they both adopt ethnographic methods and almost become ethnographies as the interactions and observations they instigate constitute the artworks themselves. Both of these artists and pieces are compelling examples of interdisciplinary and multimodal contemporary art that work to expand the social and cultural dimensions of art. Although they were created over 30 years apart, the artworks equally take steps toward a reconstructed art discipline, evidently influenced by contemporary anthropology, and both equally promote its further involvement.

Susan Ossman’s and Kyra Sacks’ use of art processes in their anthropological work establishes the necessity of its consideration in contemporary anthropology; a version of the discipline that is more fluid and multimodal, one that embraces the protean nature of culture and humanity, and thus recognises the confinement of textual field notes and presentations. In their own ways, Ossman and Sacks portray the multifaceted capabilities of artistic research methods; the former addresses the value of painting in reflecting upon the field and in provoking discussion, referring to a displayed painting almost as a screen that can be projected onto. The latter anthropologist writes about the importance of drawing and sketching in fieldwork to capture the field more entirely, channelling emotion and embodiment more than written notes do. In both examples, the value of imagery to anthropology is clear and suggestive of a more encompassing methodology that should be used. While the two advocates refer to themselves as both artists and anthropologists, their convictions are inclusive of all anthropologists and promote the approach as something that should be used throughout the discipline. As contemporary anthropology continues to shape, Ossman and Sacks are examples of art’s important consideration in challenging the static and traditional elements that remain embedded.

                                                                                                                     The growing interlacement of anthropology and art over the last few decades is a necessary reassessment of inflexible approaches that artists and anthropologists alike can remain within. As the two disciplines grow in their contemporary phases, they require an awareness of their contexts, impacts and traditionality, factors that examples like the ones referred to in this essay work to reframe and reconsider. In the current climate, it is crucial to challenge the hierarchical and colonial relations of all disciplines, and in breaking boundaries and self-reflecting, artists and anthropologists can work towards undoing such power relations and structures that are prominent in the cultural and social contexts within which they exist.

Bibliography

Bolles, A.L. (2023). Decolonizing Anthropology. American Ethnologist, 50(3), pp. 519–522. (online) Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13199. [Accessed April 7 2024]

Bourriaud, N. (1996). Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel, France. p. 113

Bray, Z. (2015) Anthropology with a Paintbrush: Naturalist-Realist Painting as “Thick Description”, Visual anthropology review, 31(2), pp. 119–133.

Documenta 15. (n.d). Documenta 15 Website. (online) Available at: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/ [Accessed April 7 2024]

Documenta 15. (2022). [Exhibition]. Fridericianum Museum, Kassel.

Dohmen, R. (2011). Towards a Cosmopolitan Criticality? Relational Aesthetics, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Transnational Encounters with Pad Thai. University Of Louisiana. (online) Available at: https://openartsjournal.org/issue-1/2013s05rd/ [Accessed April 7 2024]

Fluehr-Lobban, C. (2008). Collaborative Anthropology as Twenty-first-Century Ethical Anthropology. Collaborative Anthropologies, vol. 1, p. 175-182. Project MUSE.

Geertz, C. Darnton, R. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures. 3rd edn. New York: Basic Books.

Newell-Hanson, A. (2022) Rirkrit Tiravanija Cooking Pad Thai WIth His Students. The New York Times Style Magazine. April 21. (online) Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/21/t-magazine/rirkrit-tiravanija.html [Accessed April 9 2024)

McGranahan, C. Rizvi, U. (2016). Decolonising Anthropology. Savage Minds. April 19. (online) Available at: https://savageminds.org/2016/04/19/decolonizing-anthropology/ . [Accessed April 7 2024]

MoMa PS1. Tiravanija, R. (2023). Rirkrit Tiravanija’s untitled 1990 (pad thai). MoMA PS1 Calendar. (online) Available at: https://www.momaps1.org/events/318-rirkrit-Tiravanija-s-untitled-1990-pad-thai  [Accessed April 7 2024]

Ossman, S. (2010). Making Art Ethnography: Painting, War and Ethnographic Practice. Between art and anthropology: contemporary ethnographic practice. (1st ed.). Routledge. pp. 127-134. 

Ossman, S. (1990). Hills of Chaouen. [Oil on canvas]. Collection of Rabia Bekkar, Paris

Perreault, J. (2011). Rirkrit Tiravanija: fear eats the soul, Artopia: John Perreault’s Art Diary, 4 April. (Online) Available at: http://www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2011/04/rirkrit_ tiravanija_fear_eats_t_1.html [Accessed April 9 2024]

Sacks, K. (2020) Drawn in the field. entanglements, 3(1):7-30. (online) Available at: https://entanglementsjournal.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/drawn-in-the-field.pdf [Accessed April 7 2024]

Sansi, R. (2015). Participation and the Gift. Art, Anthropology and the Gift. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 87-111.

Tiravanija, R. (1990). Untitled (Pad Thai). [installation]. Paula Allen Gallery, New York


Tomkins, C. (2005), Shall We Dance? The New Yorker. October 17. (online) Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/17/051017fa_fact_tomkins [Accessed April 9 2024]

Categories
Art

Art For Society 1978: A Reflection

In 1978, Margaret Richards proposed the idea of an art exhibition with works of a social or political purpose. The third of it’s kind at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and only the second survey of contemporary socially committed art since the war, the exhibition aimed to challenge the almost dogmatic opinion that art did not mix well with politics or commitment to social change.

The exhibitions measure of success was stated:

‘If the exhibition is successful it will cause at least three things to come about: that reaction to the exhibition will be so strong as to cause other exhibitions to focus more precisely on aspects of social practice in the arts; that a much stronger body of contemporary and historical research will become available which will recognise that artists have seen their responsibility to society as an integral part of their art, and finally that museums and galleries, arts funding bodies and others not only recognise the contribution being made by artists in this way, but will support them and their work.’

Martin Rewcastle and Nicholas Serota

Over 40 years later, the subject of politics is commonly presented in post-modernist art and often forms the basis of artistic discussion. Societal issues such as gender, the environment, fascism and racial issues are just some of the topics captured by art in the 21st century. Because of this change to the focus of art in recent decades, looking at this exhibition documenting the combination of society and art historically, allows us to see how both society and art have developed since. This is a review of the galleries predictions from the perspective of the UK art world 40 years later.

Exhibitions Which have Focused on Society Since 1978

2 years after the exhibition, began a decade significantly and unpredictably marked by sociopolitical occurrences – Thatcher’s Britain, the Berlin Wall, the miners strike, HIV, gay liberation and the Falklands War to name a few. With these occurrences came cultural impact, which also meant an artistic resurgence that focused more on political topics.

The Tate Liverpool’s 2014 exhibition ‘Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980’s Britain’ is a prime example of this resurgence, as it is a curation of 1980’s society-focused art, conforming to a theory of cultural change: ‘Vocabulary of Society and Culture’ by Raymond Williams. Other 1980’s exhibitions that reflected these political topics, or ‘aspects of social practice’ as suggested by Serota and Rewcastle include ‘Issue: Social Strategies By Women Artists’ of 1980 and the touring American ‘Tim Rollins + K.O.S’ which was exhibited in the UK for 4 months.

Through the following 3 decades politically-centred exhibitions became more popular and common. The 1997 YBA-created, Saatchi-owned exhibition ‘Sensations’ was proof of the possible success of controversial art, as the Royal Academy recorded 3,000 visitors daily during the duration of it’s residency. This public excitement encouraged more and more exhibits of controversial art – whether the disputes were over sociopolitical messages or simply the profound appearance of such works.

Nowadays there are a plethora of exhibitions solely focusing on activist art and socio-focal themes. In fact, when asked about post-modern art, 60% said they, above all, considered the purpose to be a socio-political message. To relate to the predictions of Art For Society, whether caused by the gallery or just in junction with it, more and more UK exhibitions have focused on social and political practice since 1978 with success and popularity.

The Recognition of Artists Who’s Practice is Informed by Social Issues

Increasingly, UK artists have used their talents to portray their social and political beliefs and moral stance, and have received celebration and recognition for their integrity and creativity. Below is a list of UK socio-focal artists that have been acknowledged since the Art for Society exhibition in 1978.

Helen Chadwick was a British sculptor, active from the 1970s to her untimely death in 1996. The subject of Chadwick’s work was mostly corporeal, profoundly and unconventionally commenting on patriarchy and the values of feminism. In 1987, she became one of the first women to be nominated for a Turner Prize, rightful validation of her recognition as a forerunner for a new neo-conceptualism – more shocking and unorthodox and statement-making art than works before that were later to be associated with the Young British Artists movement, a movement coaxed by Chadwick and like-minded creatives of the UK.

Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA is a British Nigerian multimedia artist, known for his commentary on colonialism, post-colonialism and cultural identity. Shonibare typically remarks the economic and political relationship between Africa and Europe and such works are internationally known. Yinka was a Turner Prize nominee in 2004 and has since been awarded MBE and CBE decoration proving the national recognition of his talent and works. In 2013, Shonibare was elected a Royal Academician, which also shows his sociopolitical work is recognised, accepted and a part of an Artistic Institute.

Tracey Emin CBE, RA has been deemed the ‘bad girl of British art’ due to her unconventional behaviour and controversial works. A pioneer of the YBA movement, Emin’s sculptures, installations, paintings and videos are thought-provoking and often sensuous, typically reflecting her opinions and ideals, some of which were bred of her personal experiences with rape, abortion, sexism and substance abuse. Tracey Emin has achieved CBE decoration and Royal Academician status, showing institutional acknowledgement of her work. She also represented Great Britain in the 52nd Venice Biennale – a well known international art festival.

Banksy is an anonymous graffiti artist and political activist, internationally known for his cynically comedic works that comment on capitalism, politics and humanity in the canvas of the public streets. Banksy’s documentary, ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’ was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA. Due to the unannounced nature of his pieces, when found they receive international televised attention.

Support For Artists And Their Work Through Public Institutions

Rewcastle and Serota’s proclamation stated that museums, art funding bodies and other public institutions wouldn’t just recognise sociopolitical artists but would also support them, if the Art For Society exhibition was successful. The following are examples of institutes that provided such support.

The Turner Prize is a British art prize established in 1984 (6 years after the exhibition) that is aimed to encourage a wider interest in contemporary art. Several winners in the past have submitted sociopolitical centred art, such as Grayson Perry, Gillian Wearing CBE and Jeremy Deller. The support the award provides for the artist is public recognition and financial gain, as the award is £25,000 and the ceremony attracts publicity and televised attention. The chairman of the Turner Prize jury until 2007 was Nicholas Serota himself, who wrote the preface of Art For Society and created the measures of success this article is about. Seeing as Serota was the chairman from the establishing year of the award, the Turner Prize could be seen as a direct association influenced by the exhibition, as it is a body of recognition and support for artists, including those that employ social and political messages.

Royal Academy – Among the UK’s public institutes of art, the Royal Academy of Arts is an example that recognises and supports sociopolitical artists. Currently their list of Royal Academicians include the previously mentioned Yinka Shonibare, Gillian Wearing, Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin, all of which influence the vision and future of RA. The RA have had a history with controversial art: it was, of course, the venue of the Sensations exhibition of 1997 – quite a gamble for an establishment so favoured and well known.

Goldsmiths, University of London – For over half a century, Goldsmiths University has had a reputation in the fields of humanities and the creative arts, but in 1988, an art movement was formed from a new generation of Goldsmiths students, nurtured by the institute – the Young British Artists. As previously mentioned, this era of British art was born out of controversy, sociopolitical and comedic messages, and atypical material use. The school played an essential role in the movements development – Michael Craig Martin and Ian Jeffrey* were just two of the tutors that were integral to the YBA’s first exhibition ‘Freeze’. Since that period, Goldsmiths has continued to pride itself on it’s notable alumni and still provides support and encouragement for controversial creative art.

*Ian Jeffrey wrote an essay for the Art For Society exhibition, on photography and disclosure, showing his recognition of sociopolitical art and photography – this could have been an influence on the YBA.

To summarise this long and winding article, in 1978, the Educational Officer and the Director of Whitechapel Art Gallery created a declaration of aims for an exhibition of social and political purpose. Whether it was a contribution or an attribution, the decades following the show were filled with an increasing amount of acceptability of sociopolitical focused art and support for their creators. In the current climate, sociopolitical messages are almost expected of post-modern art, as the subjects of politics and art have become more interlaced in cultural conversation.

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