Social Science Frameworks for Looking at Art since 1960
The supposed revolution within both art making and its reception which was marked in the 1960s internationally can be thought of as a move away from the understanding of the artwork as autonomous; away from the idea that the artwork could ever be divorced from the social world in which it circulated and from which it was produced. The social sciences across the same period made use of new possibilities in communications technologies and data analysis to respond to urgent questions within a rapidly changing society. Over the last twenty years or more art historians have increasingly turned to social science frameworks contemporary with the production of artworks in order to understand the relationship between the art object and the social world it occupies. Drawing on fields such as sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, political science, we seek papers that engage creatively, provocatively and otherwise imaginatively with social science frameworks and discourses.
In this session we invite papers that reflect on the way in which art history engages with the social sciences. We would like to ask how productive empirical and data driven research can be for looking at artwork which might critically question the very taxonomies on which that research is based?
Session Convenors:
Jo Applin, The Courtauld Institute of Art
James Boaden, University of York
Speakers:
Lucy Reynolds, University of Westminster
Beyond Serendipity: Mapping cybernetic reciprocities in the expanded cinema of late ‘60s London
As articulated by its curator Jasia Reichardt, the computational emphasis of the forward-looking exhibition ‘Cybernetic Serendipity’ at the ICA in 1969, brought together proto-digital films, poetry, graphics and music alongside cybernetic devices and environments. Contemporary to kinetic art and systems painting, Cybernetic Serendipity crystallised a burgeoning international movement coalescing around the creative potential of computer driven systems and related media technologies: from printing machines and light installations to video art. However, Cybernetic Serendipity’s paradigmatic status in current understandings of cybernetic influence on the arts in the 1960s and 1970s, risks overshadowing the impact of cybernetic thought on other London based artistic practices and contexts contemporary to the exhibition.
My paper makes the case that cybernetic serendipities might equally be traced in the film actions and participatory performance events developed in the transient spaces of the New Arts Lab and the London Filmmakers Co-operative (LFMC). Rather than the visual arts model of mid-century modernism to which LFMC film practices are historically associated, I argue that the experimental convergences of light, apparatus and audience in works such as Malcolm le Grice’s multi-screen films, or Annabel Nicolson’s participatory film actions, are indebted to the ‘principles of information, feedback and systems,’ that Edward Shanken identifies in cybernetic theory. I discuss how that the playful contingency, feedback loops and audience participation of their expanded cinema have their roots in cybernetics’ social scientific discourses of communication and information theory, and which they were encountering through the arts culture of late ‘60s London. My paper maps the development of these little-known cybernetic reciprocities, finding in their experiential convergences of performer, film apparatus and audience alternate conceptions of cybernetic potential, reaching beyond the computational towards a new corporeality and collectivity.
Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge
Artwork as Feminist Worker Enquiry: Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1970-75 and the Feminist Critique of Capitalist Life
This paper concerns Women and Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1970–75, by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly. Conceived amid the Women’s Liberation Movement, Women and Work was an explicit reorientation of art practice from the gallery into the world. The work comprised five years of research in and around the Metal Box Company factory in Bermondsey South London, during the implementation of the Equal Pay Act. The artists’ multi-modal research included interviews with workers, management and union representatives, collation of data on working conditions and responsibilities in the home and recordings that verged on industrial espionage. They worked spontaneously, rather than via a planned programme: utilising each artists’ established skills, following the feminist impetus to work autonomously, and searching out interdependencies with other women.
Women and Work did not utilise social documentary, instead taking the form of a ‘document’ showing the gendered systems of oppression exploited by managers and legislators. While commentators have seen Women and Work as austere, non-participatory, or as only a precedent for each artist’s subsequent work, this paper refocuses on the popularity of the installation, first shown at South London Art Gallery in 1975. Giving attention to the artists’ visual and textual argumentation across space and their attention to moments of comradery and silliness between the workers, I argue for this work as a feminist worker’s enquiry that sought not only to critique conditions in the Metal Box Factory, but also the determinations of Capitalist life.
Anna Lovatt, Southern Methodist University
Picturing Kinship: Relatedness in Contemporary Art
In 1984, anthropologist David Schneider took aim at one of the central concepts of his discipline, contending that there is “no such thing as kinship.” For Schneider, kinship was a Western concept rooted in biological essentialism, an analytic apparatus European and American anthropologists had imposed on other cultures. The ties of blood and marriage long regarded by anthropologists as fundamental to all human societies were, in fact, culturally specific. Understandings of relatedness and group membership varied across cultures to such an extent that Schneider declared kinship a useless concept for anthropology.
Yet rather than putting an end to the study of kinship, Schneider’s critique opened it up to new interdisciplinary perspectives. Drawing on feminist theory, gender studies, and developments in biotechnology, anthropologists including Janet Carsten and Marilyn Strathern transformed the study of kinship in the 1990s and 2000s, showing concepts of relatedness to be neither biologically determined nor entirely culturally constructed, but a complex negotiation of genetic, legal, social, emotional and symbolic bonds.
In recent years, kinship has entered the discourse on contemporary art, with exhibitions including Kinship at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and Archie Moore’s kith and kin at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Yet the wall texts and catalogue essays that accompanied these exhibitions were necessarily brief, limiting their engagement with scholarly debates on the nature of kinship. This paper offers a more robust analysis of critical kinship studies, assessing the opportunities and challenges it offers Art History.
Gill Park, University of Leeds
Resistant voices, counter-visualities and migratory aesthetics
In May 2024 I embarked upon a new project which seeks to investigate possibilities for transdisciplinary exchange between myself, an art historian, and sociologist Dr Sylvia Gyan (University of Ghana). The project focuses on the rights, representations and lived experiences of ‘kayayei, a term used to describe adolescent girls who migrate from the Northern regions of Ghana to work as ‘head porters’ in the markets and e-waste recycling centres in Accra. Propelled by this project, my paper will ask how the convergence of art history and social science methods can illuminate gendered experiences of migration. I will draw particularly on Mieke Bal’s conception of migratory aesthetics as a mode of transdisciplinary analysis that considers aesthetics as being not bound to traditional art historical categories but as being constantly shifted by and shifting the world in which we live. In investigating migratory aesthetics, my focus will be on the specific relay between the ‘narrative turn’ in social science and the ‘social turn’ in contemporary visual art. Across these two disciplines, attention has been given to centring human experiences as productive of knowledge. I argue that this has particular pertinence to artworks seeking to capture the experiences of migrant women who are subject to misrepresentation and opacity. Focusing on the deployment of narrative methods in contemporary artist video work, I will ask: How can the words of migrant women tell an alternative story to that captured by the dominant visual record? How are artists drawing on narrative methods more typically applied in social science work to expand our knowledge of the migratory experience? How is a migratory aesthetics in turn producing new social knowledge about gendered experiences of migration under globalisation?
Rose Taylor, The British Museum
Contested Spaces: using anthropological methodology to research contemporary arts production in the Native American artworld of Los Angeles.
Drawing on anthropological methodology, this paper discusses the contemporary Native American artworld in Los Angeles. Using social science frameworks to investigate this artworld uncovers the relationship between art, artist and their social world, revealing artistic motives and historical influences, social and art-form hierarchies, and tensions relating to artist representation, art production and arenas of display. The research presented in this paper draws from direct engagement with Indigenous artists and artworld stakeholders, focusing primarily on works on paper and photography, though the broad range of artforms produced and displayed within this artworld have been investigated. Bridging anthropological and art historical frameworks, the paper will demonstrate how the contemporary Native American artworld in Los Angeles is tied to legacies of colonialism and politics of rights and representation. The research also highlights how the production and display of contemporary Native American art speaks to issues of sovereignty, generates resistance and activism outside the museum sphere into non-art and civic spaces, and contributes to urban Indigenous identities and placemaking. Ultimately, I argue that within the timeframe of the research, art practices are the connective tissue that binds the culturally diverse and geographically dispersed Native American community together in Los Angeles in lieu of dedicated art spaces or Native neighbourhoods.
Marcus Jack, University of Edinburgh
Spoiled Artists: Rethinking the compromise of discreditable artists for queer counter-histories
Erving Goffman’s sociological study Stigma (1963) offered a landmark behavioural analysis of stigma as it differs principally for those with discreditable and discredited identities: those who can or cannot choose to conceal personal attributes which carry heightened risk in prejudiced societies. Not limited to minority sexualities, criminality, class and/or health status,discreditable stigmas and the self-monitoring thereof produce predictable outcomes in educational (Pachankis and Hatzenbuehler, 2013; Mittleman, 2022) and professional (Tilcsik, Anteby, and Knight, 2015) decision-making and attainment. Lesbian and gay workers, for instance, are likely to pursue roles that require high degrees of task independence and social perceptiveness—criteria matched precisely by the artist and art historian alike.
In returning this sociological understanding to the lived contexts of artistic production in the late twentieth century—before and after the decriminalisation of homosexuality—queerness can be refigured in closer relation to the legislative and social vulnerabilities impressed upon it. For queer or otherwise at-risk artists, the necessity of personal security anticipates certain forms of aesthetic, political and professional contingency which have previously been derided as acts of artistic compromise. Through the interrelated examples of Scottish artist-filmmakers Norman McLaren, Enrico Cocozza, and Bill Douglas, and with respect to the socio-religious conservatism of their Central Belt origins, this paper explores concealable stigma as a productive framework to revisit and recalibrate cultural history. In doing, it advocates for infrastructural analyses which face complex forms of discrimination and their psychological affect as immutable context.
Larne Abse Gogarty, Slade School of Fine Art, UCL
“Anti-luxurious expressionism”: Scavenging and salvage in the work of Yuji Agematsu and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt.
This paper addresses methods of salvage and scavenging in the work of Yuji Agematsu and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, under the sign of what Ernst Bloch described as “the potentiality of an anti-luxurious expressionism”. By using materials which exist in abundance, often because they are trash, or cheap, and treating them as if they are precious, both artists enable us to consider the pathologisation of hoarding under capitalism as an “incorrect” response to commodity culture. To explore this, I will engage the concepts of the fetish and bricolage, addressing how these terms are used across aesthetics, art history and anthropology to talk about objects which seem to arrest or enchant everyday objects and materials, often through processes which are viewed as forms of misapprehension, misuse, or excess accumulation. Through this, I hope to understand how these artworks enable reflection upon subsistence and abundance, or needs and desires within Marxist approaches to the commodity form. How does this create a temporality to these works which sometimes appears as prophetic, or at the least, proleptic? And how does this assist in imagining how a non-capitalist society might inherit, negotiate or abolish the categories of need, desire, subsistence and abundance?