Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship

Abstract

While an ethnographic turn has indeed taken place in contemporary art practice, this is not necessarily the case with scholarly research in contemporary art. This is especially surprising considering the conditions under which research on contemporary art production takes place.The particular processuality of the artworks does not allow for an exclusive use of established methods in art history, but requires additional approaches. This paper calls for an ethnographic turn in art scholarship that complements established approaches with methods and research questions derived from social anthropology and sociology, such as participation, observation, and qualitative studies in social and aesthetic production, reception and perception.Artists working in the ethnographic modality normally seek social interaction, but scholarly analysis hardly considers the actual exchange taking place during the art project and both its social and aesthetic implications. In order to keep up with new artistic practices, art scholars need to adopt empirical approaches that go beyond the exhibition space and other sites of art mediation and take instead the factual social and aesthetic processes and impacts in the 'field' into consideration. These processes occur both during the project period and in its aftermath in both the artist's life as well as the life of the people or groups involved. Drawing attention to these social interactions and interpretations is necessary not only in the analysis of projects by 'northern' artists in 'southern' contexts, but in any art practice that involves and aims at social exchange.

Bodies of Archives / Archival Bodies: An Introduction

“…3. See Schneider and Wright (2006, Banks and Ruby (2011), Sansi (2015), Laine (2018), and Siegenthaler (2013), to mention only a few. 4.…”

Literature and Participatory Culture Online: Literary Crowdsourcing and Its Discontents

“…In the past few decades, collaboration, participation and the production of relations (Bourriaud 2002) or dialogical encounters (Kester 2004) have been major trends in aesthetics, and different forms of socially engaged or community-and process-based art have dominated much of the art world (Siegenthaler 2013). Artists increasingly emphasise social practices, networks and processes as constituting the actual artwork, instead of the art object, and events that facilitate social interaction are seen as the actual art practice (Siegenthaler 2013, 738).…”

“…With a closer look, though, the question of value becomes more complex. Following the wider process orientation in art (Bourriaud 2002;Kester 2006;Siegenthaler 2013), not all commentators perceive the literary text as an important element. In various responses to literary crowdsourcing, the commentators downplay the significance of the resulting text, ignoring questions of aesthetic value, and instead stress the importance of the process and the practice.…”

Black mirrors and zombies: the antinomy of distance in participatory spectatorship of smart phones

“…Apparatus theory tended to demonise subjectivity (the subject position), but Jacques Rancière (2009) has suggested that regarding aesthetic experience in this manner is reductive and simplistic. Therefore, when I take issue with the purported participation engendered by smart phones I am within the context of contemporary art (Bourriaud 2002), in the context of the socalled ethnographic turn in contemporary art-making (Siegenthaler 2013), as well as in its own right as an emerging field of study (Delwiche & Jacobs Henderson 2013:1-33). Participation lends itself to being an umbrella-term for many different iterations of spectatorship, but it seems too often used to herald "new" practices, and to highlight the differences between such practices and what came before.…”