EXCERPTS FROM RECENT WRITINGS

Thinking with Things / Page 3

I sometimes wonder if aliens went through my apartment what things they would classify as art and what would be non-art. How would they distinguish the garments that hang on the wall from the garments that hang in the closet? When I bought those textiles in the Chichicastenango market from women wearing them, did I transform them into works of art? I bought them as works of art, making sure that they were old and authentic and not tourist art. Maybe the aliens would like my Tupperware, as Kwakiutl potlatchers are happy to get it. Or perhaps the icebox. Contemporary artists have been playing the art/non-art game since Duchamp exhibited a urinal entitled Fountain in 1917. It is art if someone makes a convincing case for it. That includes piles of earth, fat, wrapped islands, and sacrificial blood. That is, if the West does it and it is a happening. If an African sacrifices a chicken on an altar, it is not art. But is not the West’s conception of art a form of religion too, consisting of various interlinked cults – from the museums and their ritual and relics, to contemporary artists seeking to be priests and shamans? If it is not in how the chicken is sacrificed, and not in the context – where exactly is the art? McEvilley would be Kantian and argue that art is only possible when there is no longer religion present. What then of the Sistine Chapel?

Is Bouguereau art? Or are his canvases art but “bad” art, in which case how can “art” be honorific? In their time they were considered excellent. Do we take a people’s definition of what is good in their art, or do we make our own selection? And does our selection change as our taste changes? How come we think everything native cultures did at or before Western contact was beautiful and everything they now make is shoddy, tasteless, and worthless?

Originally published in Thinking with Things (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 7-10.

1) Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts,” in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 163-227.
2) Esther Pasztory, “Three Aztec Masks of the God Xipe,” in Falsifications and Misreconstructions in Pre-Columbian Art, ed. E. H. Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 77-106.
3) William M. Conway, The Literary Remains of Albrecht Dürer (London: Cambridge University Press, 1889), 101-102.
4) Esther Pasztory, “Still Invisible: The Problem of the Aesthetics of Abstraction for Pre-Columbian Art and Its Implications for Other Cultures,” in Res 19/20 (1990-1991): 105-136.
5) Barbara Braun, Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1993), 30.
6) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
7) “…art is and remains to us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past.” George Wilhelm Hegel, Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstader and Richard Kuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 392.
8) There is an extensive bibliography on museums in their social context. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995); Pierre Bourdieu, The Love of Art: European Museums and Their Public (1966; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals (London: Routledge, 1995).
9) Adrienne Kaeppler, Cook Voyage Artifacts in Leningrad, Berne, and Florence Museums (Honolulu: Bishop Museum, 1978), 168-169.
10) Just from the Tlingit group Emmons collected four thousand pieces for the American Museum of Natural History between 1888 and 1893. Aldona Jonaitis, From the Land of the Totem Poles: The Northwest Coast Indian Art Collection at the American Museum of Natural History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 87.
11) Alisa La Gamma, personal communication, 1999.
12) Esther Pasztory, “Andean Aesthetics,” in The Spirit of Ancient Peru, ed. Kathleen Berrin (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 60-69.
13) Thomas McEvilley, “Art/Artifact: What Makes Something Art?” in Art/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, introduction by Susan Vogel (New York: Center for African Art, 1988), 200-203. 14) Lewis Binford, “Archaeology as Anthropology,” in American Antiquity 28, no. 2 (1962): 217-222.
15) It is worth looking at a Japanese catalog of non-Western things, such as Andean textiles, in which both layout and selection indicate that the Japanese see Andean textiles through a Japanese aesthetic and bring out very different aspects of the “Andean” than a similar Western publication.
16) Constantijn Petridis, “In Pursuit of Beauty: Cults, Charms and Figure Sculpture among the Luluwa” (lecture, University Seminars, Columbia University, April 15, 1998). Constantijn Petridis, “Of Mothers and Sorcerers: A Luluwa Maternity Figure,” Museum Studies 23, no. 2 (1997): 182-195.
17) For example, the objects of the Yoruba in Nigeria or of Teotihuacán in Mexico are considered less “artistic” than more naturalistic and polished traditions.
18) Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148-172.
19) Aldona Jonaitis, Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1990). These are not illustrated in the catalog as works of art but can be found in an ethnographic photo (fig. 5.19).
20) I attended Tupperware parties in Hungary after the collapse of Communism, when there was a sudden enthusiasm of the form, function, beauty of Tupperware that rivaled discussions of art I heard back home.
21) McEvilley, “Art/Artifact,” 202.

 

ESTHER PASZTORY
Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor
in Pre-Columbian Art History
and Archaeology

Department of Art History
and Archaeology
814 Schermerhorn Hall

Columbia University
in the City of New York

ep9@columbia.edu
(212) 854-5681