Author: Alfred Gell Publisher: Clarendon Press ISBN: 0191037451 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view, and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions—European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian. Art and Agency was completed just before Alfred Gell's death at the age of 51 in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigour, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.
Author: Alfred Gell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0198280130 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
In Art and Agency, Alfred Gell formulates an anthropological theory of visual art that focuses on the social context of art production, circulation, and reception. As a theory of the nexus of social relations involving works of art, this work suggests that in certain contexts, art-objects substitute for persons and thus mediate social agency. Diversely illustrated and based on European, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian sources, Art and Agency was completed just before Gell's death at the age of fifty-one in January 1997. It embodies the intellectual bravura, lively wit, vigor, and erudition for which he was admired, and will stand as an enduring testament to one of the most gifted anthropologists of his generation.
Author: C. Thi Nguyen Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0190052082 Category : Games & Activities Languages : en Pages : 253
Book Description
"Games are a unique art form. The game designer doesn't just create a world; they create who you will be in that world. They tell you what abilities to use and what goals to take on. In other words, they specify a form of agency. Games work in the medium of agency. And to play them, we take on alternate agencies and submerge ourselves in them. What can we learn about our own rationality and agency, from thinking about games? We learn that we have a considerable degree of fluidity with our agency. First, we have the capacity for a peculiar sort of motivational inversion. For some of us, winning is not the point. We take on an interest in winning temporarily, so that we can play the game. Thus, we are capable of taking on temporary and disposable ends. We can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies, letting them dominate our consciousness, and then dropping them the moment the game is over. Games are, then, a way of recording forms of agency, of encoding them in artifacts. Our games are a library of agencies. And exploring that library can help us develop our own agency and autonomy. But this technology can also be used for art. Games can sculpt our practical activity, for the sake of the beauty of our own actions. Games are part of a crucial, but overlooked category of art - the process arts. These are the arts which evoke an activity, and then ask you to appreciate your own activity. And games are a special place where we can foster beautiful experiences of our own activity. Because our struggles, in games, can be designed to fit our capacities. Games can present a harmonious world, where our abilities fit the task, and where we pursue obvious goals and act under clear values. Games are a kind of existential balm against the difficult and exhausting value clarity of the world. But this presents a special danger. Games can be a fantasy of value clarity. And when that fantasy leaks out into the world, we can be tempted to oversimplify our enduring values. Then, the pleasures of games can seduce us away from our autonomy, and reduce our agency."--
Author: Howard Morphy Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 1405155329 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 576
Book Description
This anthology provides a single-volume overview of the essential theoretical debates in the anthropology of art. Drawing together significant work in the field from the second half of the twentieth century, it enables readers to appreciate the art of different cultures at different times. Advances a cross-cultural concept of art that moves beyond traditional distinctions between Western and non-Western art. Provides the basis for the appreciation of art of different cultures and times. Enhances readers’ appreciation of the aesthetics of art and of the important role it plays in human society.
Author: Robin Osborne Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 0470777273 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
Art's Agency and Art History re-articulates the relationship of the anthropology of art to key methodological and theoretical approaches in art history, sociology, and linguistics. Explores important concepts and perspectives in the anthropology of art Includes nine groundbreaking case studies by an internationally renowned group of art historians and art theorists Covers a wide range of periods, including Bronze-Age China, Classical Greece, Rome, and Mayan, as well as the modern Western world Features an introductory essay by leading experts, which helps clarify issues in the field Includes numerous illustrations
Author: Liana Chua Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 0857457438 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
One of the most influential anthropological works of the last two decades, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency is a provocative and ambitious work that both challenged and reshaped anthropological understandings of art, agency, creativity and the social. It has become a touchstone in contemporary artifact-based scholarship. This volume brings together leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars into an interdisciplinary dialogue with Art and Agency, generating a timely re-engagement with the themes, issues and arguments at the heart of Gell’s work, which remains salient, and controversial, in the social sciences and humanities. Extending his theory into new territory – from music to literary technology and ontology to technological change – the contributors do not simply take stock, but also provoke, critically reassessing this important work while using it to challenge conceptual and disciplinary boundaries.
Author: Cristina Albu Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315437112 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
This book examines the interconnections between art, phenomenology, and cognitive studies. Contributors question the binary oppositions generally drawn between visuality and agency, sensing and thinking, phenomenal art and politics, phenomenology and structuralism, and subjective involvement and social belonging. Instead, they foreground the many ways that artists ask us to consider how we sense, think, and act in relation to a work of art.
Author: Caroline van Eck Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110380358 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 413
Book Description
Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.
Author: Sidney Littlefield Kasfir Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253007585 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 402
Book Description
“Compelling case studies demonstrate how African workshops have long mediated collective expression and individual imagination.” —Allen F. Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles The role of the workshop in the creation of African art is the subject of this revelatory book. In the group setting of the workshop, innovation and imitation collide, artists share ideas and techniques, and creative expression flourishes. African Art and Agency in the Workshop examines the variety of workshops, from those which are politically driven or tourist oriented, to those based on historical patronage or allied to current artistic trends. Fifteen lively essays explore the impact of the workshop on the production of artists such as Zimbabwean stone sculptors, master potters from Cameroon, wood carvers from Nigeria, and others from across the continent. Contributions by Nicolas Argenti, Jessica Gershultz, Norma Wolff, Christine Scherer, Silvia Forni, Elizabeth Morton, Alexander Bortolot, Brenda Schmahmann, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Karen E. Milbourne and Namubiru Rose Kirumira “A closer examination of the workshop provides important insights into art histories and cultural politics. We may think we know what we mean when we use the term ‘workshop,’ but in fact the organization of groups of artists takes on vastly different forms and encourages the production of diverse styles of art within larger social structures and power dynamics.” —Victoria Rovine, University of Florida “Taken as a whole, the case studies provide a wide window into the very diverse structural and functional characteristics of workshops. They also clearly describe how African workshops have served both contemporary political and cultural needs and have responded to patronage, whether it be traditional or stimulated by tourism.” —African Studies Review
Author: Carlos Fausto Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 1496221532 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 356
Book Description
In Art Effects Carlos Fausto explores the interplay between indigenous material culture and ontology in ritual contexts, interpreting the agency of artifacts and indigenous presences and addressing major themes in anthropological theory and art history to study ritual images in the widest sense. Fausto delves into analyses of the body, aerophones, ritual masks, and anthropomorphic effigies while making a broad comparison between Amerindian visual regimes and the Christian imagistic tradition. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork in Amazonia, Fausto offers a rich tapestry of inductive theorizing in understanding anthropology's most complex subjects of analysis, such as praxis and materiality, ontology and belief, the power of images and mimesis, anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, and animism and posthumanism. Art Effects also brims with suggestive, hemispheric comparisons of South American and North American indigenous masks. In this tantalizing interdisciplinary work with echoes of Franz Boas, Pierre Clastres, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, among others, Fausto asks: how do objects and ritual images acquire their efficacy and affect human beings?