Reading Group at Deveron Projects
For my Reading Together session in January I chose Art after the Ethnographic Turn, the introductory text of Roger Sansi’s book: Anthropology, Art and the Gift. The text introduces us to the discourse of participatory art from an anthropological perspective, which began with Hal Fosters seminal essay The Artist as Ethnographer (1995), a critique of what he calls the quasi-anthropological paradigm in contemporary art.
I am less interested in this Anthropology-and-Art discourse, which often ends up with works in traditional galleries and museums. Instead I am keen to understand how anthropology works with artists and how this can explain the making of Deveron Projects here in Huntly over the years. Undertaking some auto-ethnographic soul searching, I have been looking at what our roles have been and how we can call this. Important remains that it is not one person who is the curator, but it is a team effort, which fulfils the multiple roles of field researcher, art curator/administrator, event organiser/community activator and all the many, many tasks that make it all happen.
Compared to Sansi’s project examples, which take place short-term all over the globe, what differs here in Huntly, is that it is the combined anthropologist-curators-administrator who were having the durational commitment to this one place and its community. This enables the artists to become co-investigators. Unlike in traditional ethnographic fieldwork, where the anthropologists commit themselves to the study of one culture, I wonder whether we have been doing the anthropology unintentionally through deep listening/looking/mapping as we went along. The longer we stayed, the more local we became. Work where you Live/Live where you work, has been a slogan that people working here coined a few years ago in a desire to get acknowledgement that when you do this work, your life and work gets so interknitted, that it is impossible to disentangle it.
It was wonderful to be back at the kitchen table to discuss all this with the mix of old and new team members and visiting artist. What are we? Curators, anthropologists, art workers, just workers? Is it elitist to call yourself the one or the other? How do we identify with such titles as individuals and as a group? To illustrate this we came up with a few drawings on tried-and tested brown card board. One of them was a tetrahedron, where the anthropologist is one axis, the curator the other, the artist the third, and the community in the centre. We are in the middle balancing it all, with so much passion and dedication, that it is impossible to say whether like this hearty vegetable soup lunch was driven primarily by work, by play or something inbetween?
