Ethical and aesthetical in collaborative and participative art practices: Lexicon Tânja Ostojić

  • Jasmina Čubrilo Department of History of Art, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v13i2.12
Keywords:
participative and collaborative art practices, artist as an ethnographer, community/provisional social group, ethical criteria, аеsthetic criteria

Abstract

In this paper theoretical concepts and paradigms through which and within which the challenges, ambiguities, contradictions of the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary participative and collaborative artistic practices, are recognized and explained, will be analyzed on the example of the artist Tanja Ostojić's project named Leksikon Tânja Ostojić, started in 2011. Participatory or collaborative artworks are almost always realized through various nonartistic practices, likely on the boundary of political or social engagement, and often in the absence of standard artistic practices, media, materials, expressions, even without any visual character. These artworks are being generated and constructed by different situations in response to specific contexts. Their already conventional structure, beside artists, implies the involvement of the public sphere and its subjects, the establishment of a close relationship with the existing or newly established social group in a certain period. The method on which these modern participatory art practices rely on is certainly cooperation. The third key element of participative and collaborative practices is a social problem that becomes 'material' for work. Therefore, in this paper functions and meanings of artists and the community in colabrative and participative artistic practices will be considered, on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary art history, as well as on the basis of current debates within contemporary art studies.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. London, New York: Continuum.
Benjamin, Valter. 1974. „Pisac kao proizvođač“. U Eseji, 95-113. Beograd: Nolit.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1998. Esthétique relationnelle. Dijon: Les Presses du réel.
Bishop, Claire. 2014. Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. OCTOBER 110: 51-79.
Bishop, Claire. 2006. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents. Artforum: 178-183.
Charnley, Kim. 2011. Dissensus and the politics of collaborative practice. Art and the Public Sphere 1 (1): 37-53.
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clifford, James. 2000. „An Ethnographer in the Field, interview by Alex Coles“. In Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, ed. Alex Coles, 56-59. London: Black Dog Publishing Limited.
Downey, Anthony. 2009. An Ethics of Engagement Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of Ethnogapher. Third Text 23 (5): 593-603.
Foster, Hal. 1995. “The Artist as Ethnographer?” In The Traffic in Culture, Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus, Fred R. Myers, 302-309. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press.
Gablik, Suzi. 1992. Connective Aesthetics: Art after Individualism. American Art 6 (2): 2–7.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Culture. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers.
Green, Renée. 2010. “L’artiste comme ethnographe?” In Une anthologie de la revue Texte zur Kunst de 1990 à 1998, éd. Catherine Chevalie & Andreas Fohr, 504-517. Dijon: Les Presses du réel.
Groys, Boris. 2002. “Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation”. In Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, ed. Okwui Enwezor, 108-114. Kassel: Documenta und Museum Fridricianum.
Hjort, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. 2014. The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation. Visual Studies 29 (2): 128-135.
Kester, Grant. 1995. Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art. Afterimage 22: 5-11.
Kester, Grant. 2005. “Conversational Pieces: The Role of Dialogue in Socially-Engaged Art” . In Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur & Simon Leung, 76-88. Malden, MA, Oxford, UK, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.
Kosuth, Joseph. 2008. „The Artist as Anthropologists“. In The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Stephen Johnstone, 182-184. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kwon, Miwon. 2000. „Experience vs. Interpretation: Traces of Ethnography in the Works of Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee“. In Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, ed. by Alex Coles, 74-91. London: Black Dog Publishing Limited.
Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another, Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press.
Laclau, Ernesto & Chantal Mouffe. 1992. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Political. New York & London: Routledge.
Lind, Maria and Hito Steyerl. 2009. „Introduction“ to The Green Room. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, 10-26. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Martin, Stewart. 2007. Critique of Relational Aesthetics. Third Text 21 (4): 369-386.
Milenković, Miloš. 2007. Istorija postmoderne antropologije, teorija etnografije. Beograd: Srpski genealoški centar, Etnološka biblioteka; Odeljenje za etnologiju i kulturnu antropologiju Filozofskog fakulteta u Beogradu. Dostupno na:
http://www.anthroserbia.org/Content/PDF/Publications/3_MilosMilenkovic_PoslePostmo
dernizma.pdf. (pristupljeno 1. februara 2018)
Möntiman, Nina. 2002. Kunst ald sozialer Raum: Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler, Rikrit Tiravanija, Renée Green. Köln: Walther Konig Verlag.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1992. Citizenship and Political Identity. October 61: 28-32.
Osborne, Peter. 2012. Theorem 4: Autonomy, Can It be True of Art and Politics at the Same Time?, open! Platform for Art, Culture and the Public Domain 1-6, https://www.onlineopen.org/download.php?id=364 (pristupljeno 12. marta 2017.)
Rampley, Matthew. 2000. „Anthropology at the origins of Art History“. In Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, ed. Alex Coles, 138-163. London: Black Dog Publishing Limited.
Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. London, New York: Continuum. Rancière, Jacques. 2013. Dissensus, On Politics and Aesthetics. London, New Delhi, New York, Sidney: Bloomsbury.
Ransijer, Žak. 2012. Sudbina slika. Podela čulnog. Beograd: Centar za medije i komunikacije.
Sheikh, Simon. 2008. „Talk Value: Cultural Industry and the Knowledge Economy“. In On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art, ed. Marija Hlavajova, Jill Winder and Binna Choi, 182-197. Utrecht: BAK.
Siegenthaler, Fiona. 2016. Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 27 (6): 737-752.
Steyerl, Hito. 2009. „A Language of Practice“. In The Green Room. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, 224-231. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Verwoert, Jan. 2009. „Research and display. Transformations of the Documentary Practice in Recent Art“. In The Green Room. Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art #1, ed. Maria Lind and Hito Steyerl, 188-211. Berlin: Sternberg Press Green Room.
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. „The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference“. In Feminism/Postmodrenism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson, 300-323. New York: Routledge.
Published
2018-08-01
How to Cite
Čubrilo, J. (2018). Ethical and aesthetical in collaborative and participative art practices: Lexicon Tânja Ostojić. Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, 13(2), 507–528. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.21301/eap.v13i2.12
Issue
Vol 13 No 2 (2018): Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology: Anthropology of Music I
Section
Other Humanities and Social Sciences
License

All articles in Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License which allows authors and users to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the article under the same conditions as in the licence.

The CC BY SA license permits non-commercial and commercial re-use of an open access article, as long as the author is properly attributed.

Copyright on any research article published by Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology is retained by the author(s).

Authors grant to the Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology the right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media. Copyright and source must be acknowledged and a link must be made to the article's DOI.