Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory

Jamieson, Mark; Gell, Alfred

doi:10.2307/2661201

Cited by 363 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…Therefore, as I have explored above, we cannot solely interpret Paju —the art object—without simultaneously interpreting SeMA Bunker (the museum), both as the location of Paju and as interweaving with Paju . My anthropological approach to this exhibit and museum not only connects the demilitarization process proffered by Bickford (2013) with Gell's (1998) attention to the agency of art, but also foregrounds Huyssen's (1995:15) invocation of the museum as a place of “possible resurrections.” As a symbol of Korea's anticommunist and militarized past—and, indeed, present—SeMA Bunker resurrects that authoritarian history of intense military buildup and militarization of daily life. Paju as demilitarizing art, as a critique of militarization, thus collides with this resurrection in its placement inside the bunker.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…In short, we cannot consider Paju without also contemplating the exhibition space: the former military bunker turned art space. Recalling Gell's (1998) assertion that art ought to be interpreted through intention, agency, and its transformative potential, I would amend this considering Paju and SeMA Bunker to include the dialogical nature of art and its spatialization, its placement in space. Therefore, as I have explored above, we cannot solely interpret Paju —the art object—without simultaneously interpreting SeMA Bunker (the museum), both as the location of Paju and as interweaving with Paju .…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

Gitzen

2023

Museum Anthropology

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Located mere feet from the busy Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Bunker is a former military bunker from 1970s authoritarian South Korea that now showcases changing art exhibits. Debuting in November 2019, Paju (by artist Kim Seung Rea) features a series of paintings and statues capturing life in the town of Paju in the Geyeonggi Province near the border of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. As a critique of militarization, Paju not only offers a glimpse into the life that blossoms amidst the guard towers, bulwarks, and barbed wire, it challenges the power dynamic implicit in the space of the bunker. Cold War ideologies overlap in SeMA Bunker, for while the bunker was purportedly designed to keep the former president, Park Chung‐hee, safe during potential North Korean attack, the town of Paju was to act as human and infrastructural sacrifice to keep the rest of the country secure. Therefore, to bring Paju into the bunker via the exhibit is to inverse that power relationship and thus work to demilitarize the space, the town, and ultimately the patrons.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

Gitzen

2023

Museum Anthropology

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“…For example, context and location have been shown to impact how we understand pieces of art (Griswold et al, 2013), and material construction and form additionally mediate how art objects are classified, moved and worked with (Dominguez Rubio, 2014). Negotiating between cultural objects as embodied meaning and as material objects has led some social scientists to attribute a kind of agency to objects (Gell, 1998), often through the idea of affordances (see Gibson, 1986). This idea has been utilised to examine how material objects are open to multiple but not infinite interpretations and how this interpretive capacity is informed by the materiality of the object itself (Acord & DeNora, 2008; Griswold et al, 2013; Zubrzycki, 2013).…”

Section: Theoretical Orientations Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

O'Shea

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co‐constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.

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“…Partly this is a thanks‐giving ritual, from within the ethics of care, as the researcher gives thanks to their predecessor who made the work possible; partly it is enchantment ritual, as the presence of the spirit thus summoned can be used to cast a spell on the reader through their magic presence, sometimes spontaneously and dramatically brought out of the abbreviated space of the closed bracket to a full‐blown quotation. They become ‘secondary agents’ (Gell, 1998) to the author's agency. That is, the names of others are used as a reference point for the primary agent (the author of the research) to qualify, hedge, critique or pay homage.…”

Section: Citation As Incantation and Thanksgivingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Foxes who want to be hedgehogs: Is ethical pluralism possible in psychology's replication crisis?

Sullivan

Ackroyd

2022

J Theory Soc Behav

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In this article, we draw attention to public-private dilemmas among psychologists that make sense of the debates around the replication crisis, citation practices and networking practices. We argue that the values of justice and caring map onto the public sphere and private sphere respectively and create the horns of a dilemma for academics. While bureaucratic justice is a publicly revered value of modernity in psychological research that underpins ethics, validity, reliability and equality of opportunity, 'caring' is a more subtle value of traditionalism that runs in parallel and is detected only by our psychological practices. In particular, we argue that it is detected by practices such as disputes between the replicated and their replicators in replication studies (understood as a dramatic counter reality) as to who is more 'careless' with procedure; citation (including the self-care of self-citation) as thanksgiving and incantation of powerful others in enchantment rituals, and the system of professional indebtedness that accrues in 'kinship' networks -where kinship is understood broadly as adoption into a research group and its network. The clashes between these values can lead to a sense of hypocrisy and irony in academic life, as incom-

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Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory

Cited by 363 publications

References 0 publications

A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

Foxes who want to be hedgehogs: Is ethical pluralism possible in psychology's replication crisis?

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