It seemed to me that artists work on site-specific projects that involved something similar to fieldwork at present. I realized an investigation of a specific place and its social issues.
‘ The Social Turn’
I have started to see that the interest of artists who defined their work as ‘social practice’ in the social sciences. In contrast, they were less interested in art as a form of self-expression than in working in public sites. In other words, they were almost like anthropologists.
Some artists were not actually interested in ‘art’, but in the things one can do with art. I found that their frame of reference was not just art history, but also connected social and cultural theory, and anthropology. From the mid-1990s, many authors have discussed the ‘affinity’ between art and anthropology. This reminds me of Hal Foster’s article ‘The artist as ethnographer’ (1995). Furthermore, Mitchell described that new field of visual studies as fundamentally grounded on anthropology (1996). Afterwards discussing the use of ethnographic methods in art.
It seems that through the years, the vicissitudes of the ‘social turn’ have been many. One of them is the ambivalent relation between contemporary art and anthropology. Although the use of ethnography is a very useful, art practitioners seem to like anthropology not just because of its methods, but also since they are interested in anthropological theories of exchange, personhood, and the body. Thus artists engage a form of social and political engagement.
Ethnography
I noticed anthropologists found new ways of seeing and new ways of working with visual materials. In addition, Foster conned the expression ‘the ethnographic turn’. I realized that anthropologists in the eighties was to seek for new, more creative, experimental forms of writing ethnography. Thus, the ethnographic turn in art was the mirror image of the literary turn in anthropology.
