ALLE G ORY OF THE CAVE PAINTING 257

COLONIAL COPIES AND

ETHNOGRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM:
ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTS AT THE
INTERSECTION OF ANTHROPOLOGY,
HISTORY, AND SCIENCE
Jonas Tinius

“ T he allegory goes : Just as the creation

relates to the creator, so does the work
relate to its immanent laws . […] The work is
not law, it is above the law ”

“ No work is determined to go forward , but

each work begins somewhere with a mo-
tive and grows beyond its organs into an
organism ”

“ We do not undertake analyses of works

because we want to copy them […]. We
investigate the methods by which another
has created his work , in order to set our-
selves in motion …”
1
—Paul Klee.

Introduction
Paul Klee’s framing remarks set three agendas , along
which I would like to elaborate this article: 1) artistic
creation may originate from a single originating origina-
tor, yet it mediates relational situations that go beyond
singular authorship; 2) works of art are often not start-
ing points of such situations, but connectors , conduits
of existing social, political, aesthetic dynamics ; and 3)
while artistic creation problematizes difference and
258 JONAS TINIUS
duplication, forms of analysis are often either already
a part of them, or implied by them, making them apt
sites for a reflection on social relations or political sub-
jectivity. This article seeks to contribute to a discussion
on what sets such artistic and anthropological workings
and collaborations in motion . In order to do so, I discuss
specific conjunctions between ethnographic and artis-
tic investigations that have sought cross-fertilizations ,
before elaborating the particular case of Ethnographic
Conceptualism (ec). Following this conversation with
anthropological and artistic theories of relationality and
representation, I discuss works by Khadija von Zinnen-
burg Carroll and Jonas Staal as ethnographically-inspired
inquiries into colonial (self-)replication . Their projects
give substance to my claim that by recourse to ethno-
graphic conceptualism, they can be analyzed as social
infrasculptures exposing non-identical forms of replica-
tion and repetition .
ec is a theoretical and practical movement of col-
laborations between anthropologists and (conceptual)
artists . It proposes a radical form of participatory and
experimental ethnography with conceptual art as both
a method and an object of research at its heart . ec thus
foregrounds cross-fertilizations between conceptual
experiment and ethnographic writing, similar to the
artistic-scientific-architectural juxtaposition underpin-
ning works by Jonas Staal and Khadija von Zinnenburg
Carroll. While Jonas Staal focuses on architectural
narratives , juxtaposing urban and Spiritist mythologies
in Brazil in his project Nosso Lar/Brasília , Khadija von
Zinnenburg Carroll makes productive use of the intersec-
tion of conceptual art, performance art, and scholarship
in her projects rise and Fall, Delirium of the Copy, and Ore
Black Ore . The latter work focuses on the black fungi of
COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 259
the Gwion Gwion paintings, tracing a living synthesis of
bacteria and granite, technology and mimicry, history
and contemporaneity, artistic and historical research .
Ethnographic Art /Art as Ethnography
Ever since the positivist postulation in the early 20th
century that social anthropology is an empirical science,
scholars have also argued otherwise. The so - called “ liv-
ing exhibitions ” of the Cologne museum director and
professor of ethnology, Julius Lips , serve as a prominent
case -in-point . A particularly striking example is an exhi-
bition entitled “ Human Masks ” (Masken der Menschen)
that Lips curated in the Rautenstrauch-Joest museum in
Cologne in 1931 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the
institution . Distinguishing his exhibition arrangement
from common evolutionary orderings of artifacts , Lips
arranged the masks in comparative styles and had them
worn and scenically performed by his students , exceed-
ing thus any restrictive form of “ v itrine thinking ” (Vit-
rinendenken).2 Lips’s wife described the proceedings as
follows : “[The masks] had come out of their shelves and
were awakened to new life on the shoulders of young
students .”3
What unifies the desire to innovate anthropological
display with the developments in the relatively new field
of “ a rtistic research ” is a common interest in finding
new ways of representing and describing social and
cultural phenomena ; “ the empathy and intuitive under-
standing of otherness .”4 Debates revolving around art
and anthropology, particularly in the context of museum
exhibits , are not merely significant for the study of rep-
resentation and ethnographic practice, but also address
questions concerning the methodological and epistemo-
logical fringes of sciences and history.
260 JONAS TINIUS
Scholarship on the relation between art and anthropol-
ogy, both as theory and as practice,5 has more recently
proposed that a) a broad range of artistic practices since
the 1990s (arguably also earlier) have come to resemble
anthropological research; and b) anthropological research
has begun to be concerned with contemporary art prac-
tice. With regard to the first observation, Kris Rutten has
noted that it might be useful to speak of an “‘ethnograph-
ic turn’ in contemporary art”, borrowing explicitly from
Hal Fosters’s essay “ The Artist as Ethnographer?”6 In
using this expression, Rutten wishes to emphasize those
kinds of artistic practices and works which exhibit sim-
ilarities to ethnographic working methods, in particular
concerning questions of cultural alterity and practices of
representation, authenticity, and neocolonial ideologies .7
At the same time, however, anthropologists began
addressing some of the anthropological implications of
contemporary arts practice. Apart from insights about
new and alternative forms of communication and com-
municability of ethnographic knowledge (cf. the “ sen-
sory turn ”),8 and a critique of the scriptocentrism of
socio - cultural anthropology,9 this renewed anthropologi-
cal interest in particular forms of art addresses the social
dynamic of production, representation, and reception .
This concern with the epistemological and ethnographic
questions is significant in particular for the reciprocal re-
lation between anthropological research and conceptual
art experiments , since both practices address a particu-
lar form of observation, representation, and reflexivity.
In the case of empirical ethnographic research in the
British tradition of “ social anthropology […] as a natu-
ral science of human society ”, we are often dealing with
forms of reflexivity that attend to falsifiable and under-
standable knowledge.10 While more recent ethnographic
COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 261
works have played with the notion of ambivalence, I
believe that ethnographic practice and writing can learn
more from conceptual art experiments about integration
and acknowledgement of ambivalence and perception,
the analysis of aesthetics and participation — in short,
about the relation between affect, percept, and concept,
to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari .11
Fiona Siegenthaler notes that while anthropological
concerns for ethnographic art have intensified since the
1990s , this has surprisingly not led to an “ ethnographic
turn in contemporary arts scholarship.”12 While she is
right in pointing out that much contemporary art has
turned towards the inquiry and reconstruction of social
networks and relations — a paradigm shift labeled and
arguably created by Nicolas Bourriaud as “ relational aes-
thetics ” — there may be reasons to think that a concern
for the exhibition as a space for such inquiries has not
entirely been abandoned, as I discuss below. 13 In her ar-
ticle “ Fight the Dragon Long, The Dragon You Become,”
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll suggests that relational
aesthetics and anthropology share a concern with hu-
man relationships : Relational aesthetics “ defines art as
information exchanged between the artist and the view-
ers .”14 As she has argued elsewhere, “ w ithin performance
art, which was traditionally focused on the performer, it
is a significant shift to instead conceive of the audience
as those who perform the work.”15 Testing the claim that
“ ethnographic conceptualism can analyze the performa-
tive responses of an art audience ” by placing center-stage
and studying the audience “ as an artist and academic ”,
she interrogates any originary and singular understand-
ing of “ the artist as author of history.”16
Sergio Jarillo de la Torre has suggested a differ-
ent way of conceiving of this relationship between
262 JONAS TINIUS
anthropology and art by discussing a series of pho-
tographs depicting museum visitors looking at art by
German artist Thomas Struth (Museum Photographs)
and the hyperrealistic participatory installation Simply
Botiful by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel.17 Responding
to their work, De la Torre suggests that “ a rt and anthro-
pology abut on a ‘metonymic juxtaposition’ that results
in ‘a movement of metaphorical comparison in which
consistent grounds for similarity and difference are elab-
orated .’”18 He asks “ what would happen if art explained
anthropology in a non-textual way and if anthropology
conceived of its data as artistic performance?” Struth ’s
and Büchel ’s propositions , each in their own ways ,
are discussed in his article as “ a rtistic ethnographies”,
by which De la Torre refers to “ those artworks or art
installations that function as de facto ethnographies in
exploring, exposing, and analyzing sociocultural patterns
of livelihood beyond or besides offering purely aesthetic
pleasure ”.19 The Museum Photographs, for example, “ a re
works of art, yet we can also see them as ethnographic
devices .”20 In addition, De la Torre takes Struth ’s reflec-
tion on viewers’ responses to artworks in museum spaces
to suggest that “ a rt is , mostly, a dynamic, ever- changing,
and collective process of intersubjective participation,
where the subjects have the capacity (if not the will) to
produce new understandings in a porous world inhab-
ited by people and things .”21 While contemporary art
has thus transcended the museum space to become “ a
discursive network of other practices and institutions,
other subjectivities and communities”, Struth ’s series of
photographs is a reminder and relational assessment of
museums no longer as “ static shrines ” but as “ a dynam-
ic forum where knowledge is a disputed construction,
induced by the participation of the public.”22
COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 263
Simply Botiful, Büchel ’s artistic intervention puts its au-
dience into a context where it can (and might be ‘invited ’
to) subvert the original creator’s intentions and authori-
ty — a complex case of planned misbehavior. Defined by
De la Torre as “ a n art installation or assemblage”, Simply
Botiful is a large metonymic juxtaposition of different
life -worlds — brothels , prayer rooms , caravans — in ware-
house spaces used by Hauser & Wirth Gallery, through
which the audience is invited to wander, crouch, climb.23
De la Torre’s argument is that “[ i]n Simply Botiful, some
of the relations suggested by Struth in his visual study of
connectedness are actually performed in the field as the
visitors amble along”, asking “ to what extent it is possible
to affirm that Struth ’s gaze makes visible what Büchel
has made livable .”24
Ethnographic Conceptualism
How do the preceding accounts illuminate and relate
to Ethnographic Conceptualism? Both Carroll ’s and De
la Torre’s accounts were contributions to a special issue
on this new movement and approach to the relation
between conceptual art and ethnographic experiments ,
spearheaded by the Russian anthropologist Nikolai Ssor-
in- Chaikov.25 For him, ec “refers to anthropology as a
method of conceptual art but also, conversely, to the use
of conceptual art as an anthropological research tool.
Ethnographic conceptualism is ethnography conducted
as conceptual art .”26 In contrast to Hal Fosters’s concept
of “the artist as ethnographer ” searching truth in alteri-
ty, Ssorin- Chaikov bases his ideas , among others , on the
conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth .27 Kosuth describes his
method as “anthropologized art”, a form of art, which,
not unlike ethnography, makes social reality perceivable
and conceivable in new ways . He suggests that the pro-
264 JONAS TINIUS
found immersion of artists in the cultures where they
produce their work produces a particular kind of reflec-
tion which not only lays bare the infrastructure of these
cultures ; this form of reflection also represents in itself
a socially-mediating activity. Anthropologized concep-
tual art of this kind thus not only describes the social
and cultural fields in which it is located — it creates or
changes them .
The starting point for these thoughts was the Mos-
cow Kremlin-Museum exhibition, Gifts to Soviet Leaders,
which Ssorin- Chaikov curated with Olga Sosnina in
2006 .28 For the curatorial duo, ethnographic concep-
tualism was a productive concept to assemble gifts to
soviet leaders from citizens connected to each other
through socialism . Juxtaposing them was simultaneously
the result of social-historical research as it was itself a
performative artifact : the exhibition offered a glimpse
into the conceptual and material grid of gift- exchange
far beyond the Soviet Union into the relations between
museum, academy, social memory, and gift-politics .29 For
Ssorin- Chaikov, the valued added by such conceptual
art experiments is that critical artworks become them-
selves forms of reflections on the process of artistic labor
or incorporate them . Accordingly, he proposes that ec
constructs the social realities it analyzes , thus radically
positing the contemporaneity of object and observer,
past and present . Thus , ec also replaces the critique of
the positivist gaze and vision on the fieldwork situation
with a conceptual critique, which includes art historical
as well as anthropological theory : “ a rt as theory rather
than theory as art .”30 In doing so, ec not only interro-
gates the complexity of “ a rtistic inquiry ” as an uncon-
scious practice, but it also asks urgent ethical questions
about the reflexivity of such processes .
COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 265
Hence, ec does not proclaim the end of traditional
ethnographic practice, but considers its performative
reconfiguration no longer as a mere description, but as a
creation of social scenarios . Ssorin- Chaikov formulates
this as follows : “ In contrast to ethnography as partici-
pant observation of what exists , ethnographic concep-
tualism explicitly constructs the reality that it studies .”31
Conceived in such a way, Ssorin- Chaikov argues that
ethnographic conceptualism could become a type of
ethnographic instrument for provoking ethnographic
situations by means of conceptual art . These situations
engender both a form of art and its ethnographic ques-
tioning.
The Delirium of the Copy : Snail Eating Theatre
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll ’s interdisciplinary work
on colonial copies is situated at the intersection of art
history, art practice, anthropology, and the history of
science . It has consistently interrogated the fundamen-
tally unsettling relation of colonial replication .32 During
the 2012 Marrakech Biennale, her three -months dura-
tional performance installation rise and Fall (with Alex
Schweder) is described as follows : “A s you move along
a fourteen-meter long structure that invites you to walk
high above the orchestra pit and stage, the floor rises
and falls beneath you, and you have to find a balance,
mutually, with your fellow viewers .”33 For Carroll, this
piece denoted not merely an experiment in relational art ;
instead, it responded to an exploration of the stories of
colonial replication. Using colonial copies as artifacts , or
protagonists , in a libretto written for the Biennale, she
traces the story of a tale -telling failure that links colonist
and colonized : Upon his return from a visit to Europe,
the Mayor of Marrakech decided to commission a
 266 JONAS TINIUS COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 267

still , 2014 .
Carroll , Snail Eating Theatre , video
Fig . 1 . Khadija von Zinnenburg
French Tunisian architect to design a European opera for
Marrakech . The reproduction in concrete, Théâtre Royal
Marrakech , became the central site for her examination
of the palpable but repressed instability and insecurity
of Morocco in the wake of the Arab Spring,34 the pres-
sure of failed colonial models of imposed statehood and
architectural replicas as conceptual ethnographic sites .
Carroll ’s rise and Fall in Marrakech thus interrogates
the colonial metaphorical assemblages of replication and
failure .
Snail Eating Theatre
looks at the infectiousness of
European high culture that continues , for
example also in Schlingensief ’s Opera Dorf Afrika ,
to produce mutant replicas of itself in the colonies . Jonas Staal : Nosso Lar /Brasília
The copy is a symptom of an authority that high Furthering a concern with the idea of colonial repli-
culture imposes . The colonial copy is born from cation, architectural copies , and failure, Jonas Staal ’s
a fear that there is no local equivalent to piece Nosso Lar/Brasília invites a striking comparison .
that European form .35 Establishing a mimetic relation between two cities , one
ethereal and one built, Staal projects an architectural
Eating Theatre , video still , 2014 .
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll , Snail

animation of a bird ’s- eye view of these imagined and

real spaces , overlapping them as his film progresses . A
voice - over further explores the possibility of the imbrica-
tion of two cities, asking unsettling questions about the
intersecting of two different yet reciprocally mirroring
architectural projects : “ T his is a story of two cities . But
one could also say it is the story of a single question .”
of Théâtre Royal Marrakech , 2014 .
Charles Boccara , architect ’s elevation

How to deal with histories that are both too different

to be the same, and too much the same to be entirely
different? 36 Between 1944 and 1956 , the plans for two
cities , Nosso Lar (Our Home) and Brasília, exhibited
the clash of Spiritist and modernist thought enacted
in urban architectural projects . Nosso Lar ’s city plans ,
created in 1944 , were based upon the psychographical
268 JONAS TINIUS COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 269

transcriptions of Francisco de Paula Cândido “ Chico ” extent, one that allows for an articulation
Xavier, who would soon become Bazil ’s most famous of what could be considered a shared
medium . Brasília’s plans , on the other hand, inspired by project of engineering society.
fifteen freehand drawings sketched in 1957 by architect

Brasília , Map Study 2014 .

fig . 2 . Jonas Staal , Nosso Lar/
Lúcio Costa, illustrate a crucifix with a curved crossbar
(resembling an airplane). These plans were realized under
the center-left liberal politician Juscelino Kubitschek .
Although the metaphysicism of the former and the ad-
ministrative technocracy of the latter seem in contrast,
Staal suggests that they are in fact connected on a more
profound plateau :
Both cities are instruments of
(re -)colonization processes: Xavier
recolonizes the field of religion by implanting
his Spiritist movement in the occupied domain
of Roman Catholicism; Kubitschek recolonizes
the country of Brazil, by implanting his
Modernist colony in the domain still
unoccupied by the Portuguese . 37
By imbricating both cities to create an impossible rec-
reation of failed colonial copies , Staal ’s work can be put
into a productive dialogue with Carroll ’s concern for the
self-replicating conservation of the Gwion Gwion . While
they might also be said to dispense with the viewer,
there is also an inevitable moment in Staal and Carroll
where art history is imagined and thus presenced by the
act of regarding, by the “ performing viewer.”38 Yet he
also creates an oneiric neologism that takes ec’s proposi-
tion of exposing societal infrastructures further :
Although the metaphysical project of
Spiritism and the administrative, planned
enterprise of Modernist architecture seem to
be naturally in opposition to one another, I will
argue that they show similarities to a remarkable
270 JONAS TINIUS
Artworks as Social Infrasculptures
The idea of a social sculpture, or soziale Plastik, is a
term often attributed to the work of Joseph Beuys . For
Joseph Beuys, who coined this term and paradigm, a
soziale Plastik contains as vital aspect of the artwork,
not its qualities as “ exhibited object”, but those kinds of
(human and non-human) behavior internal to it, which
immediately address relationality and sociality, social
restructuring and formation .39 Linking my previous ac-
count on ethnographic conceptualism as a way to render
visible the infrastructure of a given situation, I would
like to propose that we can productive rethink Carroll ’s
and Staal ’s work as social infrasculptures that reveal the
political nature of the idea of colonial replication and
relationality.40 The Gwion Gwion serve as a background
myth and allegory for such a social infrasculpture: they
radically urge us to rethink our concepts of art, author-
ship, and authenticity by extending their own frames of
(artistic) reference, question the autonomy of authorship,
threaten genealogical as well as archaeological models
for linear (art) historical argumentation .
Harald Szeemann, curator of the fifth Documenta
exhibition, opened the doors to the public on 30 June 1972 .
“Questioning Reality — Image Worlds Today ” had been
chosen as the exhibition’s theme, with a range of concep-
tual art, happenings, and performances critically inquir-
ing the relation of art to society. Joseph Beuys had been
invited to Documenta V and established an Office for Direct
Democracy that opened a space for discussion and creat-
ed an early kind of “museo-lab ” or “lab-museum.”41 On a
table in the central space, Beuys placed a red rose that was
changed daily. Commenting on this choice, he said:
For me the rose is a very
simple and clear example and image for
COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 271
this evolutionary process to the revolutionary
goal, as the rose is a revolution with regard
to its genesis . The flower ’s coming into existence
does not happen abruptly, but in the organic pro-
cess of growth . […] The flower is a revolution with
regard to the leaves and the stem, although it
has grown in organic transformation . The
rose only becomes possible through
this organic evolution.42
Via the Office, Beuys also issued his famous statement
“ every human being is an artist.” For Beuys, this
idea was directly linked to his project “ to change the
West German constitution so as to take power away
from representative political parties and government
bureaucrats and transfer it to the people.”43 Beuys’s con-
viction was that “[c]ollective systems of self-management
guiding the production and distribution of goods would
end oppressive economic relations while, in the cultural
sphere, ‘free science, free education and free information’
would be enshrined .”44 It was at Documenta V that Beuys
also “ proposed that future ‘political intentions’ become
artistic: ‘they must originate from human creativity,
from the individual freedom of man’”:45
Politics as social sculpture would
trigger revolutionary changes in economic,
governmental and social institutions … when
people stopped participating in the existing
order of things and turned their
energies elsewhere .46
Concluding Remarks : Non -Identical Replication
From the point of view of the anthropological observer,
it is a productive exercise to reflect upon the enabling
epistemological and methodological function of the
272 JONAS TINIUS COLONIAL COPIES AND ETHNO GRAPHIC CONCEPTUALISM 273

curator-artist-researcher relation in these two concep- are depicting and altering, depicting them as persistent,
tual works I discussed . In the light of my introductory replicating and multiple difference .
remarks on Klee, we can see how Staal ’s and Carroll ’s
works explore the underlying concept of non-identical
repetition and social infrasculptures . Seen in the light of
self-reflexive, self- colonizing non-identical repetition, the
engagement with the Gwion Gwion challenges arche-
ological shorthands such as the idea of the cognitive
explosion or any idea of originary moment of creation .47
What ’s more, signifier and signified, historical residue
and originary artifact, become one, thus necessitating
an interdisciplinary genealogical imagination . Much like
the rhizome, the colonial copy, or the neocolonial city,
each painting becomes “ a palimpsest of itself”, counter-
balancing the political relegation of the indigenous into
prehistory.48
Understanding difference as a principle subordinate
to a model /replica-scheme precludes an understand-
ing of difference and internal self- differentiation as a
process of becoming- different, becoming- organism .49
Staal ’s and Carroll ’s work both address the question of
self- colonisation,50 making the Gwion Gwion readable as
allegoric way pointers to wider issues of artistic creation
as multiple, repeated replication, artworks as mediators
for social, political, and aesthetic dynamics , and artistic
creation as a problematizing difference and duplication.
Ethnographic conceptualism, as an example of interdis-
ciplinary conceptual collaborations between anthropol-
ogy and art, sheds light on how conceptual artworks
such as Nosso Lar/Brasília and rise and Fall foreground
cross-fertilizations between conceptual experiment and
ethnographic writing. We can thus read Staal ’s and
Carroll ’s artworks as forms of ethnographic provoca-
tions , as infrasculptures that expose the processes they
274 JONAS
1 Respectively, Paul Klee, Paul Klee, ed. Klaus
H. Carl ( New York: Parkstone International,
2012), 163. See also: Paul Klee, “ Schöpfer-
ische Konfessionen,” in Kasimir Edschmid.
Ed. Tribüne der Kunst und der Zeit: Eine
Schriftensammlung. XIII ( Berlin. Erich Reiß
Verlag, 1920), 28– 40; Paul Klee, Beiträge zur
bildnerischen Formlehre: Faksimilierte Ausgabe
des Originalmanuskripts von Paul Klees
erstem Vortragszyklus am staatlichen Bauhaus
Weimar 1921/ 22, ed. Jürgen Glaesemer,
Paul- Klee- Stiftung. ( Basel/ Stuttgart: Kun-
stmuseum Bern, 1921/ 1922), 149; Paul Klee,
Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, trans.
Ralph Mannheim ( London: Lund Humphries,
1961), from “ The Concept of Analysis,” 99.
2 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, “ Vitri-
nendenken: Vectors between Subject and Ob-
ject,” in The Challenge of the Object, Congress
of the International Committee of the History
of Art, t. 1– 3, eds. G. Ulrich Großmann and
Petra Krutisch ( Nuremberg: Germanisches
National Museum, 2013) .
3 Eva Lips, Zwischen Lehrstuhl und Indianer-
zelt: Aus dem Leben und Werk von Julius Lips
( Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1986), 33ff.
4 Anna Brus, “ Laboratorien kultureller Aus-
drucksformen: Das Eigene und das Fremde im
Vergleich,” presentation during a workshop on
Theater- Medien- Objekte. Kulturgeschichte( n)
der Kulturwissenschaft( en), Theaterwissen-
schaftlichen Sammlung ( Universität zu Köln,
September 12– 13, 2013), unpublished manu-
script.
5 For further discussions of this relation, see
Jonas Tinius, “ Engaging Art and Anthropolo-
gy,” Anthropology Today 30. 6 ( 2014), 22– 3 and
id., “ Was für ein Theater! Überlegungen zum
Spielraum zwischen ethnographischer Praxis
und performativer Kunst,” Berliner Blätter 1
( forthcoming, 2015) ; id., “ UrSprünge: Das Feld
zwischen Anthropologie und Theater.” Brink:
Magazin zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft 2
( 2012), 6– 9.
6 Hal Foster, “ The Artist as Ethnographer?,”
in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and
Anthropology, eds. George E. Marcus and Fred
R. Myers. ( Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1995), 203– 309; Kris Rutten, An van
Dienderen & Ronald Soetaert, “ Revisiting the
Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art,”
Critical Arts: South- North Cultural and Media
Studies 27. 5 ( 2013), 459– 473.
7 See G. Marcus and F. Myers ( eds.), The Traffic
in Culture. Refiguring Art and Anthropology.
( Berkeley, LA and London: University of
California Press, 1995), 1.
8 Sarah Pink, Doing Sensory Ethnography
( London: Sage, 2009) .
9 Arnd Schneider and Chris Wright, Contempo-
TINIUS
rary Art and Anthropology ( Oxford and New
York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 4.
10 In his preface to Meyer Fortes’ s African
Political Systems ( 1940: xi), Radcliffe- Brown
suggests that “[ t] he task of social anthropol-
ogy, as a natural science of human society,
is the systematic investigation of the nature
of social institutions.” See Radcliffe- Brown,
Alfred, ‘ Preface’, in: Fortes, M. & E. E. Ev-
ans- Pritchard. Eds. African Political Systems
( London: Oxford University Press, 1940) .
11 A good example of an ethnography that
attempts such a more creative description
of ambivalence, perception, and “ reality ”
is Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting,
Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian
Yukaghirs. ( Berkeley/ London: University of
California Press, 2007) ; Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? transl.
by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson
( London/ New York: Verso, 1994) .
12 Fiona Siegenthaler, “ Towards an Ethnograph-
ic Turn in Contemporary Art Scholarship,”
Critical Arts: South- North Cultural and Media
Studies 27. 6 ( 2013), 737; Rutten et al, “ Revis-
iting the Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary
Art,” refer to this reciprocal relation when
they speak of “ representation as delegation ”
( those who are delegated to speak and act in
the name of another) and “ representation as
description ” ( the presentation and description
of the other) .
13 Nicolas Bourriaud, L’ esthétique relationelle
( Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 1998) .
14 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carrol, “ Fight the
Dragon Long, the Dragon You Become: Per-
forming Viewers in the Graffiti Monument,”
Laboratorium, Special Issue on Ethnographic
Conceptualism, ed. Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov,
5. 2 ( 2013), 101– 27.
15 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Carola Der-
tnig, and Alexander Schweder, Wer performt
Kunst? Die performenden BetrachterInnen
( Vienna: Akademie der Bildenden Kunst,
2010) .
16 Carroll, “ Fight the Dragon Long,” 105.
17 Sergio de la Torre, “ Art and Anthropology
beyond Beautiful Representations: The Ma-
terial Hyperreality of Artistic Ethnography,”
Laboratorium, Special Issue on Ethnographic
Conceptualism, ed. Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov,
5. 2 ( 2013), 128– 47.
18 Clifford 1988: 146, cited in De la Torre, “ Art
and Anthropology beyond Beautiful Rep-
resentations,” 129.
19 De la Torre, “ Art and Anthropology beyond
Beautiful Representations,” 130.
20 Ibid., 133.
NOTES 275
21 Ibid., 135.
41 Cf. Anita Herle, “ Exhibitions as Research:
22 Ibid., 136; Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Displaying the Technologies that Make Bodies
The Avant- garde at the End of the Century Visible,” in Museum Worlds: Advances in
( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 305. Research, vol. 1, eds. Dudley and K. Message
( London: Berghahn, 2013), 113– 35.
23 De la Torre, “ Art and Anthropology beyond
Beautiful Representations,” 139. 42 Beuys cited in Antliff, Joseph Beuys, 70.
24 Ibid., 142. 43 Ibid., 71.
25 Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov, “ Ethnographic Con- 44 Ibid.
ceptualism: An Introduction,” Laboratorium,
Special Issue on Ethnographic Conceptualism, 45 Ibid.
ed. Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov, 5. 2 ( 2013), 5– 18.
46 Ibid.
26 Ibid., 6.
47 Cf. Marc Abramiuk, The Foundations of
27 Joseph Kosuth, “ The Artist as Anthropolo- Cognitive Archaeology ( Cambridge, MA: MIT
gist,” in id. Art after Philosophy and After: Press, 2012) ; Hannes Krämer, Die Praxis von
Collected Writings, 1966– 1990. ( Cambridge, Kreativität: Eine Ethnografie kreativer Arbeit
MA, 1991) ( Bielefeld: transcript, 2014) .
28 Nikolai Ssorin- Chaikov ( ed.), Dary Vozhdiam/ 48 Mihnea Mircan, Allegory of the Cave Painting,
Gifts to Soviet leaders, exh. cat. ( Moscow, curatorial statement ( Antwerp, 2014) .
2006) .
49 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
29 Ssorin- Chaikov,“ Ethnographic Conceptual- trans. ( London: Continuum 2001), 41.
ism,” 7.
50 Alexander Kiossev, “ The Self- Colonizing
30 Ibid., 11. Metaphor,” in Atlas of Transformation, ed.
Zbyněk Baladrán and Vít Havránek ( online
31 Ibid., 8. publication, 2011), <http: // monumenttotrans-
formation. org/ atlas- of- transformation/
32 Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Art in the html/ s/ self- colonization/ the- self- colo-
Time of Colony ( Surrey: Ashgate, 2014) . nizing- metaphor- alexander- kiossev. html>,
accessed November 22, 2014.
33 <http: // www. kdja. org/ web/ riseandfall/
index. html>, accessed January 8, 2015; Carson
Chan and Nadim Samman ( eds.), Higher
Atlas/ Au- déla de l’Atlas, Biennale Catalogue
( Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012)
34 Marlise Simons, “ Biennale amid the Souks
and the Arab Spring,” The New York Times
( March 1, 2012), <http: // rendezvous. blogs. ny-
times. com/ 2012/ 03/ 01/ biennale- amid- the-
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35 Delirium of the Copy, artist’ s statement ( 2014) .
36 Jonas Staal, Nosso Lar, Brasília: Spirit-
ism — Modernism — Architecture. ( Capacete/
Heiningen: JAPSAM Books, 2013)
37 Ibid., 94.
38 Carroll, “ Fight the Dragon Long,” 103.
39 Barbara Lange, Joseph Beuys: Richtkräfte einer
neuen Gesellschaft. Der Mythos vom Künstler
als Gesellschaftsreformer ( Berlin: Reimer,
1999) .
40 Allam Antliff, Joseph Beuys ( New York: Phai-
don, 2014), 70– 2.