Clémentine Deliss. Clémentine Deliss

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       Artists and Anthropologists

      I had visited the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt ten years earlier in the autumn of 1999 as the newly appointed guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. On one occasion, the dean of the art school, Kasper König, took me to meet the director of Frankfurt’s department of culture. They both knew of my background in cultural anthropology and wanted me to take on the vacant directorship of the ethnographic museum. At this first meeting, I declined. It felt anathema to the excitement of teaching art students. A couple of months later, the director invited me back to his office. Again, I refused. The main reason for not accepting the offer was informed by my studies of anthropology in the mid-eighties. At that time, the subject of analysis was not the foreign culture and its artifacts so much as the figure of the ethnographer. Anthropology, the “maculate,”¹⁴ soiled science, could be deconstructed by decoding the tropes employed to “write culture.”¹⁵ Neighboring literary criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, this radical strain of semantic anthropology was barely engaged in defusing the charged condition of its founding institution, the colonial museum and with it, the hundreds of thousands of confiscated artifacts. Studying anthropology and art practice in Vienna in the early eighties, I read everything I could that was brought out by German publishers such as Syndikat, Suhrkamp, or the Qumran Verlag. I discovered texts by ethno-psychoanalysts Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Mario Erdheim, essays by transgressive thinkers like Hubert Fichte, the work of Michael Oppitz and Fritz Kramer, alongside the more mystically oriented research of Hans Peter Duerr. This theoretical material played a role in the German-speaking art world of the time. As art students we read anthropology because there was little else. There were no formalized courses in curatorial studies and no transcultural academies; nothing but a relatively conservative art history, which bore little relation to the heteroclite practices of Actionism, Concept Art, and performance.

      Key to this interdisciplinary crossover was a text written in the seventies by American artist Joseph Kosuth titled “The Artist as Anthropologist.”¹⁶ In a sequence of numbered paragraphs, Kosuth cites economist Michael Polanyi, philosopher Martin Jay, sociologist Max Weber, and anthropologists Stanley Diamond, Bob Scholte, and Edward Sapir, and draws a map of contextual adjacency with which he aims to destabilize the narratives of Western modernism and scientism as the defining references in contemporary art. He argues for an “anthropologized art,” “an art manifested in praxis,” an “engaged” activity founded on “cultural fluency” whose criticality succeeds because it “depicts while it alters society.”¹⁷ Kosuth’s article—with its typically male figureheads—was more than merely a reading list for emerging artists. His intellectual stance corresponded with the aftermath of the first Independence period in sixties Africa, emancipatory movements in the US, the global student demonstrations of 1968, and the fallout of the Vietnam War. The relationship between contemporary art and cultural anthropology was built upon the articulation of linguistic and contextual propositions that might activate a recursive adjustment to ways of understanding and representing art itself.¹⁸

      As a doctoral student in anthropology I was required to do fieldwork, so in 1986 I moved to Paris to investigate the storage rooms, archives, and ephemera of the Musée de l’Homme. I wanted to establish a link between those concentrates of Concept Art and Actionism that I had witnessed in Vienna as a young art student and the edginess and subversion that I detected within certain strains of twentieth-century anthropology. I named this connection eroticism, less with reference to gender studies or sexuality, but as a philosophical drive that motored both the ideational extremes of artistic research and various experiments in ethnographic inquiry. One afternoon at the Musée de l’Homme, I came across the incomplete collection of the dissident Surrealist periodical Documents (1929–31) edited by Georges Bataille and Carl Einstein. Here I recognized the prelusive moment, the uncertain and unresolved phase in creative practice, and its ability to activate entry points beyond explanatory or contextual forms of information. I decided to juxtapose the written and visual assemblages in Documents with the collecting activities of the team of French anthropologists who crossed Africa between 1931 and 1933 on the notorious Mission Dakar–Djibouti, amassing more than 3,500 objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris.

      The thesis was a handmade affair produced on discs the size of a bathroom tile and interspersed with black-and-white photocopies of archival material. I asked an artist friend to take photographs of me while I worked in the museum’s library, standing on steps to reach books, or holding a Dogon mask on my face against the backdrop of metal filing cabinets.¹⁹ Alongside these self-portraits, we took photographs of Michel Leiris in his office or in conversation at the museum’s Le Totem bar. All this led to a doctorate that stuck out from the purely text-based, literary dissertations of the time. By then I had realized that academic anthropology was not my future. It was the summer of 1988, and I was keen to return to art and become a curator. The new discipline of cultural studies was flourishing in Birmingham under the leadership of Stuart Hall, and the Black Arts movement was active in London. Rasheed Araeen was preparing the seminal exhibition The Other Story and Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa were producing films on the Black experience in Britain. In contrast, the Museum of Mankind in London’s Burlington Gardens felt both disconnected from movements in contemporary art or cultural studies, and out of sync with curatorial practice.

      The artists who made an impact on me as a student often worked in relation to a form of meta-ethnology. I focused on Lothar Baumgarten and his friend the anthropologist Michael Oppitz, who in turn was close to Marcel Broodthaers, Benjamin Buchloh, and Candida Höfer. СКАЧАТЬ