Art, Anthropology and the Gift

197 Pages·2015·1 MB·English

by  Roger Sansi

ART,
ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE GIFT

ART,
ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE GIFT
Roger Sansi
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2015
© Roger Sansi, 2015
Roger Sansi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as Author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-0-85785-781-1
PB: 978-0-85785-535-0
ePDF: 978-1-47251-707-4
ePub: 978-1-47251-706-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Printed and bound in India
9780857857111_txt_print.indd 4 13/08/2014 08:39
CONTENTS
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction: After the Ethnographic Turn 1
2 Art as Anthropology 20
3 Traps and Devices 46
4 Aesthetics and Politics 67
5 Participation and the Gift 87
6 Work and Life 113
7 Fields and Labs 137
8 Ethnography and Utopia 155
Notes 165
Bibliography 169
Index 181
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1 All the Plants in the Neighborhood, Zander Januta
(CCCB 2013). 4
Figure 2 Disruption, workshop with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Can Xalant
(Can Xalant 2009). 10
Figure 3 Photograph of pots of Morton salt, showing repetition of “girl
with a pot of salt” (Roger Sansi 2000). 23
Figure 4 An example of détournement, found on a street corner (Roger
Sansi 2013). 34
Figure 5 Mòdul d’Atenció Personalitzada (Pep Dardanyà, 2005). 60
Figure 6 Memetro, David Proto (Roger Sansi 2013). 62
Figure 7 250cm line tattooed on six paid people, Santiago Sierra 1999
(Roger Sansi 2013). 89
Figure 8 Roll of paper from the train route of Cristina Ibañez-Tarter,
made in 2007 (Roger Sansi 2012). 129
Figure 9 We Can Xalant, Pau Faus (Pau Faus 2009). 132
Figure 10 Enthusiasm (Claudio Zulian 2012). 156
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my colleagues at Goldsmiths, in particular Mao Mollona, Chris Wright, and
David Graeber. To my students at Goldsmiths and Barcelona. To my friends in
Barcelona, in particular Rosa Pera, Deli Bruset, Pep Dardanyà, Manuel Delgado,
Pau Faus, Oriol Fontdevila, Aviv Kruglanski, and Alex Mitrani. But most of all to
my son Leo, who was born while I was writing this book.

1 INTRODUCTION: AFTER THE
ETHNOGRAPHIC TURN
More than a decade ago, a friend invited me to a gallery opening in Barcelona,
Spain. This wasn’t exactly a conventional “opening”: it didn’t consist of a display of
artworks. It was a proper, total opening: the storage of the gallery, which is normally
closed, was opened for visitors to see and exchange the stored artworks. The gallerist
was offering to give away all the art in the storage in exchange for anything: t-shirts,
toys, purses … This was not exactly barter, but rather a massive act of gift-giving,
since there was no apparent equivalence in value between the artworks and the
things given in return. The objective of the gallerist was to question public policy
on the arts, and this event gave him the opportunity to appear in the media to
make his point. I remember I used the term potlatch: it seemed to me that the very
act of giving everything away was a form of acquiring a public notoriety (a “face,” a
“name”), which the gallerist could then use to make his voice heard in public. My
artist friends who participated in this event immediately recognized the idea of the
potlatch: many of them had read Mauss’s The Gift, and were explicitly influenced
by his ideas.
In the years after this event, I started to follow the work of these artists. Many of
them worked on site-specific projects that involved something similar to fieldwork,
an investigation of a specific place and its social issues, from immigration to urban
gentrification, intellectual property rights, labor conditions … For example, in the
project Insideout: Jardí del Cambalache “Garden of Barter” (2001),1 artist Federico
Guzmán and curator Rosa Pera built a whole network of reciprocity in the patio of
the Fundació Tàpies, a contemporary art museum in a historical building at the very
center of Barcelona. The project was the result of an ethnographic research on the
colonos (“colonists”)—people who occupy abandoned plots of land on the periphery
of the city and turn them into gardens. Most of these colonos are old rural immigrants
who came to Barcelona to work in factories. Many of these gardens were threatened
by real estate development. One of the colonos was invited to transform the patio
of Fundació Tàpies into a garden. The vegetables he cultivated were then offered
to the public in exchange for some object—whatever they wanted. The project