AAA  AGM and Conference 1997
The ICOM Conference will bring  many anthropologists and art historians to Australia.  This  presents us with a unique opportunity to prepare a symposium on a topic of crucial importance to both disciplines.

My interest is specifically directed to the study of contemporary art and is not necessarily concerned with comparative studies or with issues about contemporaneous art across wide cultural boundaries.  I am interested to explore methodologies in art history starting with specific materials and their cultural meaning in their context.  The behaviours associated with these materials in the production of meaning would be the next step.  I suspect that such a study would be applicable across cultural boundaries provided that the specific cultural context for the meaning of materials was a defining part of the process.

The process of reform in Art History since 1968 has been valuable in relating the field to other cultural theories, however, it has sometimes led to traditional studies of objects and the creative process being displaced by critical analysis of the art market and institutions or the psychoanalysis of the artist.  As a result of this process graduates of Art History are not always strong on empirical method and the analysis of objects.   Museums world wide have found recruitment of graduates into curatorship increasingly difficult, particularly at a senior level.  Graduates with a close knowledge of art works of a particular period and the ability to identify, date, evaluate and enjoy the particular qualities of objects are surprisingly rare.  Unfortunately Australian art museums have very active programmes but are seriously understaffed consequently they have not been very effective in training new curators or providing the mentoring that would ameliorate this problem.  At one level this simply implies the need for more old fashioned connisseurship but it is not this that interests me so much as the possibility that there are fresh approaches to looking closely at the material aspect of production in association with the specific consequences of certain actions on that material, in this way we can link the appreciation of qualities of objects to cultural contexts rather than seperating them out.

It is important to acknowledge the value of past reforms which shifted the emphasis from individual authorship to a social context.  I am not advocating returning to an evolutionary view of Art history and the formal taxonomy of artefacts, nor a return to the elevation of the author however, a contemporary study of interactions between the body of the artist and the viewer with materials and their specific cultural meaning does provide an avenue for understanding objects, their process of manufacture and their application.  In such a study the response of identified viewers would be as important as the intention of the artist.  Most of us make some use of such information already but I feel that it still has considerable potential for organisation and development.

Anthropology may be able to provide some methods to balance the psychoanalytical and philosophical emphasis of recent decades.  There are kinaesthetic and aesthetic dimensions to objects and their use which are fundamental to understanding the culture which produced them.  When someone makes a mark or a form they also make a gesture and they choose a material.  Both the gesture and the material have cultural significance.  The site of production and the site of reception are also culturally significant.  An emphasis on the study of these elements taken in the conjunction with the social and psychoanalytical  could be very fruitful. 

An very brief example might be the slashed paintings of Lucio Fontana.  The history of modern painting provides a context for the increasing insistance upon the surface of the canvas and of the trace of the artist�s behaviour registered on that surface.  These monochromes carry the trace of a violent act upon the surface of representation rending the veil between the thing and its representation.  It is not surprising that the viewer often associates this surface with skin and the subsequent slashes as bodily orifaces although the artist resists such readings.  The Catholic society of South America and of Italy where Fontana worked have an obvious history of catholicism that surely informs the viewers understanding whatever the artist may claim.  This not only introduces the meaning of the wound but also the veil that carries the image.

I am not thinking of anthropological analysis of the art world such as that undertaken by Ken Myer.  We are all too familiar with institutional and commodity critiques that have pervaded art criticism for some decades.  It is formalising some means for exploring the meaning of any given art object in a given cultural context beyond the art world and the market place which interests me.   All too often anthropology takes modernisms claim to autonomy literally and in that light commodity critique may be all that is left, however, we all know that art can still produce significant insights into all aspects of human experience.  Art is fundamentally linked into an ethical social structure taking its form from it and informing it.

Cultural diversity has become a key to contemporary exhibitions and theoretical discourse since the mid 1980s also raises questions about art historical methodology when cultural assumptions and usages are often resistant to direct exchange.  There has been a tendency to eliminate the difficulty of translation and to ignore the different historical relationships that cultures have with modernism..  This is understandable from an ideological point of view but has a supressing effect on critical analysis of objects.  I am hoping that it would be possible to make use of a methodology such as the one I am looking for and that it would prove to be equally applicable to Western art as it would to other cultures dealing with modernism precisely because it would first have to establish the specific cultural field in which materials and behaviours functioned.  This assumption would apply as much to European art as it would to African or Asian art.

It is proposed that a number of critical theorists in the field whose interests correspond with these issues be invited to prepare papers for this symposium which would form the basis for a publication which would recommend the means  to effect a shift in emphasis back to the study of objects, their meaning and their use.

In the first instance we seek expressions of interest from the fields of Art History, Anthropology and the museum profession.  The Art Gallery of New South Wales is prepared to host the symposium and assist with the development of the project but to succeed it will require wide intellectual support from our colleagues and some financial support from funding agencies or a sponsor.  Officers of The Ministry of Culture in Paris, AFAA and The British Council have already expressed verbal support subject to a final agenda.  I would very much like to receive some indication from the field if there is any interest in pursuing the matter here.