The Anthropologist as Curator

Description

Why do contemporary art curators define their work as ethnography? How can curation illuminate the practice of contemporary anthropology? Has the curator become a general model of the contemporary cultural worker? Does anthropology risk disappearing as a specific discipline within the general model of the curatorial? The Anthropologist as Curator collects together the research of international scholars working at the intersection of anthropology and contemporary art in order to explore these questions. The essays in the book challenge what it means to do ethnographic work, as well as the very definition of the discipline of anthropology in light of what it means to work as a curator. The contributors examine these ideas from a variety of angles, including from the perspectives of anthropologists who have set up their own exhibitions, those who have conducted fieldwork on the arts and collecting practices, including participatory practices, digital images and sound, and contributors who are currently working in a curatorial capacity at a museum. With case studies from the US, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Japan, the book represents an international perspective and is relevant to students and scholars of anthropology, contemporary art, museum studies, curatorial studies, and heritage studies Title Page Copyright Page Contents Figures Contributors Chapter 1: Introduction: anthropology and curation through the looking glass The curator as ethnographer Participatory curation The curatorial laboratory The anthropologist as curator The expanded field of the curatorial The chapters Note References Chapter 2: Curatorial designs: Act II Bloc 1: Critique / then and now Bloc 2: So, what is curation? Bloc 3: Having been modernist Bloc 4: Laboratory curation Notes References Chapter 3: The recursivity of the curatorial Introduction Anthropology, recursivity and the curatorial Berlin’s recursive curatorial fields Conclusion: the recursivity of the curatorial Acknowledgements Notes References Chapter 4: Whose stories about Africa? Reflexivity and public dialogue at the Royal Ontario Museum Authoritative museum positioning gone awry: Into the Heart of Africa Opening space and accepting failure: a journey towards decolonization Acknowledgements Notes References Chapter 5: Facing the ‘curatorial turn’: anthropological ethnography, exhibitions and collecting practices Curatorship and collecting of cultural diversity The exhibition as an ethnographic field Collecting and exhibition practices inside and outside the museum Contemporary art practice and curatorship as remediation work Conclusions References Chapter 6: Ethnographic Terminalia: co-curation and the role of the anecdote in practice Introduction Co-action Anecdotes in practice Anecdotal theory Care Conclusion References Chapter 7: Coming together differently: art, anthropology and the curatorial space Keeping things alive: resisting containment Un-learning in correspondence with artists and sites Countering research methodology Art, anthropology and the curatorial space Notes References Chapter 8: From Of, to With, to And? Anti-disciplinary exhibition making with art and anthropology ‘Knowing from the Inside’ Speculative Ground (2014): from curation to commission ‘Sticks and stones …’ (materials) Palimpsests and Remnants (2017) The ‘crit’ Self-creation and professional identities A problem of knowledge forms? Aesthetics? (Content and form) Convergences or conjunctions Notes References Chapter 9: Curating the intermural: graffiti in the museum 2008–18 Introduction Street Art at the Tate Modern, 2008 Mapping the City at Somerset House, 2015 Venturing Beyond at Somerset House, 2016 Conclusion / intermural art Notes References Chapter 10: The curator, the anthropologist: ‘presentialism’ and open-ended enquiry in process Meeting points Critiques Points of processual difference Releituras (rereadings) Conclusion Notes References Chapter 11: Between automation and agency: curatorial challenges in new terrains of digital/visual research Introduction Background Part 1 The curatorial affordance of iDocs Part 2 Critical questions Discussion and conclusion Note References Chapter 12: Anthropological sound curation: from listening to curating Curating sound? Anthropologists and artists curating sound? Sound elicitation in Xhosa townships Sound Galleries Cape sound stories Xhosa arts archives Conclusion: curating sound in the future Notes References Index