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Journal of Material Culture
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DOI: 10.1177/135918359600100102
1996 1: 15Journal of Material Culture
Alfred Gell
Vogel's Net : Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps
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Articles
VOGEL’S NET
Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps
⧫ ALFRED GELL
Department of Anthropology, The London School ofEconomics
Abstract
This essay explores the basis of the distinction commonly made between
works of art or art objects, and ’mere’ artefacts, which are useful but not aesthetically
interesting or beautiful. It is argued that if the art object is identifiable
as such in the light of the fact that it has an interpretation, as Danto
claims, then many artefacts could be exhibited as art objects. The essay shows
that animal traps could very well be exhibited as art, because they tend to
embody complex ideas and intentions to do with the relationship between
men and animals, and because they provide a model of the hunter himself
and his idea of the world of the prey animal. It is concluded that an aesthetic
definition of the art object is consequently unsatisfactory.
Key Words ⧫ artefacts ⧫ artworks ⧫ concept art ⧫ symbolism ⧫ traps
A good deal of discussion in the philosophy of art, visual art particularly,
at the present time, has to do with the problem of defining the idea of an
’artwork’. When is a fabricated object a ’work of art’ and when is it something
less dignified, a mere ’artefact’? There are (at least) three possible
answers to this question. It may be said that a work of art can be defined
as any object that is aesthetically superior, having certain qualities of
visual appealingness or beauty. These qualities must have been put there
intentionally by an artist, because artists are skilled in activating a
capacity present in all human beings, i.e. the capacity to respond aesthetically
to something. This theory is not one I propose to discuss here,
although it is still widely held, especially by the general public, who tend
Journal of Material Culture
0 1996 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol. l(l) 1996: 15-38.
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to think that visual attractiveness, or beauty, is something they can recognize
automatically.
The second theory holds that artworks are not, as the ’aesthetic’
theory holds, distinguished by any external quality. A work of art may
not be at all ’beautiful’ or even interesting to look at, but it will be a work
of art if it is interpreted in the light of a system of ideas that is founded
within an art-historical tradition. Call this the ’interpretive’ theory. The
great critical merit of the interpretive theory over the ’aesthetic’ theory
is that it is much more attuned to the realities of the present-day art world,
which has long abandoned the making of ’beautiful’-looking pictures and
sculptures in favour of ’concept’ art, e.g. of the exhibition of gallery
assemblages like Damien Hirst’s dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde
(Figure 1, to be discussed later) - not an object that could be called appealing,
nor a work of any excellence in terms of craftsmanship. But Hirst’s
shark is a highly intelligible gesture in terms of contemporary art-making,
not a stunt or a symptom of insanity. It is a work thoroughly grounded
in the post-Duchampian tradition of ’concept’ art and, as such, is capable
of being evaluated as good art, bad art, middling art, but definitely art of
some kind. Proponents of the ’aesthetic’ theory have difficulties with this
kind of work, to say the least, and may be inclined to deny that it is art
at all, but in that case they may be accused by critics and artists, rightly
to my way of thinking, of reactionary tendencies.
Finally, there is a more radical version of the ’interpretation’, theory,
which, provides the third possible answer to the question ’what is an
artwork?’. This theory, known as the ’institutional’ theory, claims, like the
FIGURE 1 Damien Hirst’s shark: The Impossibility ofDeath in the Mind of
Someone Living, 1992
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’interpretive’ theory, that there is no quality in the art-object, as material
vehicle, that definitively qualifies it to be, or not be, an artwork. Whether
it is or not is dependent on whether or not it is taken to be one by an art
world, i.e. a collectivity interested in making, sharing and debating critical
judgements of this type. The difference between the interpretive
theory and the institutional theory is that the institutional theory does
not presuppose the historical coherence of interpretations. A work may
be in origin unconnected with the mainstream of art history, but if the
art world co-opts the work, and circulates it as art, then it is art, because
it is the living representatives of this art world, i.e. artists, critics, dealers
and collectors, who have the power to decide these matters, not ’history’.
This view is the one put forward by a noted American philosopher of aesthetics,
George Dickie (1974,1984). It is a theory that does not seem to
have the support of anything like a majority of Dickie’s philosophical colleagues,
but that is perhaps, because it is a sociological theory rather than
a truly philosophical one - a theory about what is (really) considered art,
rather than what ought (rationally) to be considered art. But the objectionableness
of Dickie’s theory from the standpoint of traditional aesthetics
is precisely what constitutes its appeal to the anthropologist, since
it bypasses aesthetics entirely in favour of a sociological analysis much
of the kind this discipline would provide anyway (Bourdieu, 1984). None
the less, the merits of the ’institutional’ theory of art as a contribution to
philosophical aesthetics must be assessed independently of its usefulness
as a starting point for sociological study of the art world.
The points at issue between these various theories were brought very
much into focus at an exhibition, ’ART/ARTIFACT’, mounted at the
Center for African Art, New York, in 1988, under the direction of the
anthropologist Susan Vogel. (I never saw this exhibition, but it received
a detailed review in Current Anthropology outlining its contents and layout;
see Faris (1988), who makes certain critical comments that I take up later.)
The first exhibition space was entitled ’The Contemporary Art Gallery’
(whitewashed walls, spotlights) and the star item on display was a striking
object (Figure 2) - a Zande hunting net, tightly rolled and bound for
transport. Susan Vogel presumably displayed this item in this way
because New York gallery-visitors would be spontaneously able to associate
this ’artefact’ with the type of artwork that they would have looked
at in other galleries, or at least seen illustrated in newspapers and magazines.
(The closest immediate analogy is with the string-bound sculptures
of Jackie Windsor, see Figure 3). Faris (1988: 776) mentions Nancy Graves
and Eva Hesse as further parallels.) Vogel’s choice of this particular item
was a curatorial masterstroke, for which she deserves much praise, and
the ’net’ provoked an equally masterly catalogue essay by the American
critic and philosopher of art, Arthur Danto (1988), which was published
in the exhibition catalogue. What Vogel wanted to do was to break the
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F I G U R E 2 Zande hunting net, bound up
for transport (Central Africa)
Source. By courtesy of the Amencan Museum ofNatural
History (negative no 3444(2)). Photo] L Thompson
link between African art and
modern art ’Primitivism’ (the
Picasso of Les Demoiselles
davignon, pseudo-African
masks by Modigliani, Brancusi,
etc.) and suggest instead
that African objects were
worthy of study in a more
expanded perspective, including
the dominant art-style in
New York in the 1980s, i.e.
concept art, represented by
the likes of Jackie Windsor et
al. Vogel’s catalogue essayist,
Danto, had reasons for
wishing to resist this move,
inasmuch as he was not persuaded
that the hunting net
was, or could ever become, art.
’Institutionally’ speaking, the
net had indeed become art in the sense that it had been exhibited as such
by Vogel, and we may be sure it was received as such by a significant,
and very gallery-educated, segment of the visiting public. I would hazard
that had Dickie, rather than Danto, written the catalogue essay, the ’net’
would have been celebrated precisely as an instance of the way in which
an art world creates its artworks by labelling them as such. But Danto,
on the other hand, devoted his essay to proving that the ’net’s’ affinities
with contemporary concept art were only superficial.
FIGURE 3
Bound Square
by Jackie
Windsor, 1972
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In this essay I want to do two things: first, to consider Danto’s proposed
distinction between ’artefacts’ and true works of art; and, second,
to mount a little exhibition of my own (unfortunately consisting only of
text and illustrations) of objects that Danto would consider artefacts but
which I consider candidates for circulation as works of art, even if they
were not intended to be ’works of art’ by their originators, who indeed
probably lacked this concept altogether. If I persuade my public, and if
the institutional theory is true, i.e. art is what I and enough like-minded
people say it is, then a new category of art objects is about to be born. Or
not, as the case may be.... And especially not according to Danto, to
whose arguments I must now turn.
Danto is responsible for both the interpretive and institutional
theories of art, in that it was he, originally, who introduced the expression
’art-world’ into philosophical aesthetics (Danto, 1964). But whereas
Dickie (1974) developed Danto’s ideas in the sociological direction outlined
above, so that being a ’work of art’ becomes a matter of social consensus
among the art public, Danto tends towards a more idealist view
of art, with many explicit references to Hegel in his later work. Danto’s
position is that art objects are such by virtue of their interpretation, and
that interpretation is historically grounded. He has written two very
important and well-received studies on the philosophy of modem art
along these lines (1981, 1986). I agree with Danto’s output in many, probably
most, respects; but I am forced to say that the weaker points in
Danto’s version of interpretive theory emerge rather visibly in the
anthropological, cross-cultural context of his ’ART/ARTIFACT’ essay.
According to Danto, there are no characteristics that an object can
have which make that object a work of art; the ’objective’ difference
between a real Brillo box and a mock Brillo box by Warhol is not what is
responsible for the fact that only the latter is a work of art. Indistinguishably
similar objects could be differentiated such that one would be
an artwork and the other not. (This is exhaustively discussed in Danto,
1981.) But there is a big difference between the kind of interpretation,
context, symbolic significance, etc. that an object must have if it is to be
an artwork, compared to that attached to a non-artwork or ’mere’ artefact.
The interpretation must relate to a tradition of art-making that has
internalized, reflects on and develops from its own history, as western art
has done since Vasari, and maybe before. According to Danto (and I am
entirely persuaded by this) modern ’concept’ art corresponds to the total
take-over of the ’image-making’ side of art by the ’reflecting on history’
side of art: concept art is the final convergence of art-making, art history,
art philosophy and art criticism in a single package. However, the key
concept here is the notion of a progressive, cumulative tradition (Geist,
spirit, etc.). What is Danto to do when New York gallery-goers seem to
want to enthuse over a hunting net as if it was the latest production of
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Geist in the person of Jackie Windsor or her ilk? Can contemporary art
swallow extraneous objects in this way? Is the absence of an identifiable
maker, and any recognizable ’artistic’ intention on his or her part, an
obstacle? Danto cannot but assume a critical position because intention,
meaning and groundedness in a discrete, self-reflexive tradition is essential
to his understanding of contemporary art, and indeed all western postRenaissance
art. The Zande hunter who made or commissioned the net
did not participate in the historic frame of reference to which Windsor’s
similiar-looking work refers, so the analogy between them is misleading.
Nor could it be alternatively argued (Danto does not even consider this
possibility) that the ’artist’ here is Vogel, who is presenting the ’net’ as a
’ready-made’ in the tradition of such Duchamp prototypes as the shovel,
coat rack, urinal, etc. - because Vogel is not presenting herself as a second
Duchamp, but as a museum curator, offering us something to admire
made in Africa, by an anonymous ’artist’ who is certainly not Vogel
herself.
Danto’s dilemma is, essentially, that his interpretive theory of art is
constructed within the implicit historical frame of western art, as was its
Hegelian prototype. If he says that nothing that comes from without the
historical stream of western art (which is certainly a broad stream) is ’art’
in his sense, then he is certainly open to an unwelcome charge of Eurocentricity
; but if he admits that exotic objects that do not participate in
the Geist of western art are nonetheless art, how is he to exclude the ’net’?
And if he allows the ’net’ to be included, what is left of the explanatory
value of the historically grounded interpretation, and the art/artefact distinction
that is founded on it? The philosopher is truly ensnared in Vogel’s
net, fulfilling, at long last, its function, if not in the originally intended
way.
There is only one way out for the idealist under these circumstances;
he must assume that there are underlying interpretive or symbolic affinities
between all true works of art in all traditions. The Zande net is to be
excluded in Zande terms, because in Zande culture, as in all possible cultures,
art objects have to have a particular type of symbolic significance,
which a mere hunting net could safely be assumed to be lacking. Having
been excluded (presumptively) by the Zande, it cannot be included by the
New Yorkers, beause to do so is to contradict their own principle of ’no
interpretation - no art’; having agreed that not just any Brillo box but
only a Warhol Brillo box is’art’, they have to accept that this net, in Zande
terms, is no Warhol, but just any old net.
But how to specify the basis of the affinity between (qualifying)
African artworks and western artworks, and the non-affinity between the
Zande net and either of these? Danto argues that ’great’ African sculpture
was recognized as on a par with Donatello, Thorwaldsen, etc. by a
process of ’discovery’ that he likens to scientific discovery, carried out by
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Picasso, Brancusi, Roger Fry and their contemporaries; this greatness was
always there but had been obscured by prejudicial canons of taste associated
with colonialism. But this kind of African art was produced, it is
implied, by individual, highly talented and discriminating sculptors, who
had specific artistic (aesthetic) intentions that they carried through in
their work, which ultimately became accessible to the non-African public
via the efforts of sympathetic westerners. However, this approach to the
incorporation of African art into the Danto scheme of things carries with
it a certain risk of aestheticism - and is not Danto the one responsible for
telling us that what makes art art, is not any external (aesthetic) characteristic
it may possess? So Danto is obliged to change tack, and consider
an instance in which there might be African ’art’ that would not be obviously
different, in any external or visible respect, from African non-art,
a stipulation not applicable to famous examples of Africa sculptural art,
whose art-object status is never in doubt, for Danto at least.
Danto is a philosopher, so he does not take the obvious course of
turningto the tomes upon tomes that have been written on material culture
in Africa - instead he obeys his disciplinary imperative and indulges in a
Gedankexperiment, in which he happens to be a particularly skilled practitioner.
He imagines that there are two related, contiguous, but historically
divergent African tribes, whom he names the Pot People and the
Basket Folk, respectively. To outward observation the material productions
of these two tribes, which include both pots and baskets, are pretty much
identical. But the Pot People revere Pot makers, who are their priests and
wise men, and the making of pots is a sacred activity that recapitulates
cosmogeny, since God was a potter who formed the earth out of mud. The
Pot People also make baskets, for utilitarian purposes, but they do not
regard basket-making as a particularly noble activity. On the other side of
the hill, among the Basket Folk, things are otherwise; here God was a
basket-maker who wove the world from grass, and it is pots that are considered
merely utilitarian. So here the basket makers are the wise men of
the tribe and the potters are mere technical specialists, artisans.
Danto maintains that even if only the most minute examination
enables the museum experts to distinguish the pots and baskets of the Pot
People from the pots and baskets of the Basket Folk, the difference in the
spirit in which potting is engaged in among the Pot People is sufficient to
ensure that their pots are works of art, as opposed to the Basket Folk’s
pots, which are not (and vice versa for their respective baskets). The pots
of the Pot People and the baskets of the Basket Folk belong in the prestigious
Kunsthistorisches Museum; the baskets of the Pot People and the
pots of the Basket Folk in a quite different collection, the Naturhistorisches
Museum. The works in the Art History Museum emanate from Absolute
Spirit, they are vehicles of complete ideas, stemming from, and illuminating,
the human condition in its full historic density and fatefulness,
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whereas the objects in the Natural History Museum are means towards
ends, implements that help human beings to live out their material lives
they
are, in another Hegelian expression, only part of ’the Prose of the
World’.
Danto, by implication, excludes the hunter’s net on the grounds that
it is ’prose’ in object-form, and it will be seen that he draws a particularly
sharp distinction, on the basis of his thought-experiment, between
art objects and artefacts. But, as with all such experiments, one is entitled
to ask whether it is realistic. Anthropology ought to be able to pronounce
on these matters, since Danto’s experiment is clearly meant to evoke real
ethnography as the prototype for useful expository fictions. According to
Faris, in his review of the exhibition, anthropology is only too willing to
oblige with copious corroborating instances of wise men uttering Dantoesque
things - and that is the problem. He roundly denounces Danto’s
piece for promoting tainted orthodoxy, both art-historical and anthropological.
Modernists like Danto are
paralysed by the acceptance of all cultural tyrannies and the consequent
blindness to specific tyrannies [so that] they frequently fall into the most
banal of humanist sentiment and idle gush about expressive and emotive
power.... [T]hey do so largely in acceptance of the anthropological enterprise
- the notion that, for example, African objects cannot be fully understood
without indigenous Africans in the specific cultural setting that
produced them.... Danto might agree, and while it is trivially true that
context is relevant to meaning, it cannot be accorded axiomatic value, particularly
as such context and such meaning have been structured by anthropology.
(Faris, 1988: 778)
Faris argues that this kind of liberalism ostensibly receives the productions
of the ethnographic Other on the Other’s terms, but in fact only
does so if the Other comes up with something acceptable - consistent
with an existing concept of Absolute Spirit, perhaps. Danto’s imaginary
ethnographies of Pot- and Basket-cosmogeny reveal exactly what kind of
anthropological story-telling he would find congenial, but in reality
anthropologists and indeed their informants have never been slow in providing
just this sort of thing. Faris’s Foucauldian point is that the whole
anthropological enterprise is slanted towards finding the sort of wise men
Danto endows with the power to distinguish between art and non-art,
because we want to pin these objects down and attribute to them fixed,
controllable meanings. I agree with Faris that Danto’s (fictional) wise men
are palpably projections of authority, and that they deserve to be
unmasked. But unfortunately Faris does not really grapple with the ’art
object’ vs. ’artefact’ distinction, except to indicate that it is subject to continuous
redefinition (cf. Clifford, 1988: 224) and can be hardly disentangled
from issues of ideology and power.
Danto himself has more to say on the subject than simply that wise
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men can provide the interpretations that make true artworks fragments
of Absolute Spirit. In the second half of his essay he dwells on the idea
that artefacts are ’incomplete’ whereas artworks embody complete, selfsufficient
ideas. Citing Heidegger, he remarks that an artefact is always
part of a Zeugganzes - a system of tools, a technical system forming a
whole. There cannot be a hammer by itself; a hammer implies nails to
be hammered, wood to hammer them into, saws to shape the wood, and
so forth. The net (implicitly) is only a component of the Zande hunting
Zeugganzes, and has no meaning in itself. However finely crafted, an
object like a net, a hammer, or even a very decorative door-hasp or other
example of applied art, is incapable of conveying the kind of idea that
distinguishes the art object, which always addresses the universal:
It would be baffling were someone to say such things [pertaining to universal
truths] about knives or nets or hairpins, objects whose meaning is exhausted
in their utility. Universality belongs after all to thoughts or propositions, and
no one would have supposed that knives or nets or hairpins express universal
content. They are what they are used for, but artworks have some higher
role, putting us in touch with higher realities: they are defined through the
possession of meaning. They are to be explained through what they express.
Before the work of art we are in the presence of something we can grasp only
through it, much as only through the medium of bodily actions we have
access to the mind of another person. (Danto, 1988: 31)
But even Danto is forced to qualify this, since it is obviously the case
that the bulk of the art comprising the western art tradition was not produced
to be appreciated by an art public, but to fulfil instrumental purposes.
Religious pictures serve liturgical functions (as altarpieces, aids to
piety), portraits convey likenesses, statues dignify public spaces and
glorify rulers, and so forth. The same is even more glaringly true of
African products of the kind Danto is prepared to concede artwork status
to; not one of them was made to be admired as an independent artwork
rather than as an adjunct to public ceremony - ceremonies that cannot
be exported when the artworks are exported. In short, not just nets but
things like African masks are part of Zeugganzes, too. Danto deals with
this problem by admitting that
until very recent times [and even now, presumably, in Africa] artworks
enjoyed double identities, both as objects of use and praxis, and as vessels of
spirit and meaning. African art, once exported, loses its former functions, but
retains its latter ones. One does not want to make placelessness one of the
defining attributes of art, because that would disenfranchise as art the artworks
of Primitive cultures. In their own societies these works have a place,
but it would not be the kind of place they have in the Zeugganzes in their
dimensions as tools in system of tools. The important point is that the whole
practical life of those societies could go forward if the society had in fact no
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works of art ... granted that works of art play roles in ritual that are believed
to have practical efficacy. (Danto, 1988: 29)
This is surely a puzzling statement, even for a philosopher. Danto
wishes to say that artworks have meaning apart from their use, and
insofar as they are art they are not useful but meaningful. The self-same
objects do have uses, though, in rituals of presumed efficacy. Now we
could subtract the artworks and ’practical life’ would still be able to continue,
minus artworks, because the self-same objects, in their guise as
tools or artefacts, would still be there to fulfil their previous extra-artistic
functions. This is surely casuistry. How could African masks be deployed
in a ritual context as instruments of efficacy and not simultaneously have
whatever cultural-interpretative significance they would have to have,
according to Danto’s own theory, to qualify as artworks? The proposed
separation between instrumentality and spirituality is not feasible. And
if artworks are implements of a kind (which would not I think be disputed
by African carvers) then is it not also conceivable that implements
might not also be artworks of a kind?
When you come down to it, the reason that Danto excludes the ’net’
as art is that he cannot imagine a wise man who might be able to tell him
a tale sufficiently compelling to induce him to think otherwise; he
assumes that because it is a net, and nets are used for hunting, and
hunting is a means of obtaining food, ergo, the net is a mere tool, like a
cheese-grater. In this he reveals lack of familiarity with African ethnography
where most of the hunting is described as taking place either as
part of specific rituals (initiations, annual festivals, etc.) or at the very
least in a highly ritualized manner, certainly not as a routine means of
obtaining the staff of life. So had the ’net’ been properly documented at
the time of its collection (c. 1910) it is most likely that it would have
figured ritually as an attribute of the ’hunter’ role in the collective drama
of the ritual hunt - or at least one cannot exclude this possibility - in
which case it would be functioning in a way not too different from any
other item of ritual paraphernalia, such as a mask.
Meanwhile, one is able to know that wise men in Africa are prepared
to tell stories to anthropologists that reveal not only that hunting is ritually
important (as a source of augury, an ordeal for the youth, and so on)
but that the means of hunting, i.e. nets, or in this case, traps, are metaphysically
significant. The source I use here is Boyer’s (1988) account of
wise men, chanters of magical epics, mvet, among the Fang of West Africa.
Boyer is explicitly trying to understand the nature of ’traditional’ wisdom,
and in the course of his enquiries he comes to know a certain expert
chanter, Ze, with whom he holds long discussions on the nature of wisdom:
Like wild animals, and like evur (wisdom/magical power) mvet (epic) is a thing
of the forest, in that it is evanescent; you think you can get hold of it, but it
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escapes, and it is you who gets caught. It was with Ze that I pointed out that
at a certain point the complexities of mvet were often being comparedto traps.
In response, he told me the following story:
’In my youth I got to know the Pygmies well. The Pygmies belong to the
forest, they are not village people like us.... I often went hunting with the
Pygmies, they have special traps for every kind of animal, that is why they
obtain so much game. They have a special trap for chimpanzees, because
chimpanzees are like human beings: when they have a problem, they stop
and think about what to do, instead of just running off and crying out. You
cannot catch a chimpanzee with a snare because he does not run away [and
thus does not pull on the running-knot]. So the Pygmies have devised a special
trap with a thread, which catches on the arm of the chimpanzee. The thread
is very thin and the chimpanzee thinks it can get away. Instead of breaking
the thread, it pulls on it very gently to see what will happen then. At that
moment the bundle with the poisoned arrow falls down on it, because it has
not run away like a stupid animal, like an antelope would.’ (Boyer, 1988: 55-6,
my translation)
This is not a dumb hunting anecdote, but Ze’s way of communicating
to Boyer (among other things) the basic Faustian problem about knowledge,
a problem that is no less salient for the Fang of the Cameroonian
rain forest than it is for the professors at MIT.
It seems unquestionable, on the basis of this testimony that for this
Fang wise man, the idea of a ’trap’ is a master metaphor of very deep significance,
a refraction of Absolute Spirit if ever there was one. But let us
bear in mind Faris’s strictures against wise men, who may be considered
not to be talking about utilitarian traps, traps in prose, but about imaginary,
spiritual traps, traps as tropes, not common or garden traps. The Fang
wise man does not produce any traps for Boyer’s inspection. Can we move
one step on from Boyer’s text, to the point at which we could mount an
exhibition, in a gallery, of animal traps, and present this to the public as
an exhibition of artworks?
Let us leave wise men out of it for the present and ask ourselves what
animal traps reveal about the human spirit, even in the absence of native
exegesis. Do animal traps, in their bare, decontextualized presence, tell
us no more than that human beings like to consume animal flesh?
In order to allow you to arrive at a judgement, I offer the accompanying
illustrations, drawn from the ethnological literature on traps. Take the
arrow trap (Figure 4). Remember that Danto says that looking at a work
of art is like encountering a person; one encounters a person as a thinking,
co-present being by responding to his or her outward form and behaviour
- similarly one responds to an artwork as a co-present being, an
embodied thought. Now imagine encountering the arrow trap, not (one
hopes) as the victim is going to encounter it, but as a gallery-goer
encounters an ’installation’ by the latest contemporary artist. In those
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FIGURE 4 Arrow trap, Central Africa; sketch by Weule
circumstances, and without additional context, what might the sensitive
gallery-goer intuit as the thought, or intention, in this artwork?
There would be nothing amiss, I think, should the imaginary visitor
to our exhibition see here, in the arrow trap, a representation of human
being-in-the-world. It is a representation that the narrow-minded might
prefer to censor and repress, were they only aware that the trap could be
a representation. For it shows being-in-the-world as unthinking, poised
violence, which is not perhaps a pretty thought, but not for that reason
an untrue or inartistic one. Initially, a trap such as this communicates a
deadly absence - the absence of the man who devised and set it, and the
absence of the animal who will become the victim (the artist has indicated
this victim in the background of the illustration). Because of these
marked absences, the trap, like all traps, functions as a powerful sign.
Not designed to communicate or to function as a sign (in fact, designed
to be hidden and escape notice), the trap nonetheless signifies far more
intensely than most signs intended as such. The static violence of the
tensed bow, the congealed malevolence of the arrangement of sticks and
cords, are revelatory in themselves, without recourse to conventionalization.
Since this is a sign that is not, officially, a sign at all, it escapes
all censorship. We read in it the mind of its author and the fate of its
victim.
This trap is a model as well as an implement. In fact, all implements
are models, because they have to be adapted to their users’ characteristics,
and so bear their imprint. An artificial leg is a model of a missing
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real leg, a representation that functions as a prosthesis. The arrow trap
is particularly clearly a model of its creator, because it has to substitute
for him; a surrogate hunter, it does its owner’s hunting for him. It is, in
fact, an automaton or robot, whose design epitomizes the design of its
maker. It is equipped with a rudimentary sensory transducer (the cord,
sensitive to the animal’s touch). This afferent nervous system brings information
to the automaton’s central processor (the trigger mechanism, a
switch, the basis of all information-processing devices) which activates
the efferent system, releasing the energy stored in the bow, which propels
the arrows, which produce action-at-a-distance (the victim’s death). This
is not just a model of a person, like any doll, but a ’working’ model of a
person. What carving, it is surely reasonable to ask, which only shows
us our outward lineaments, actually reveals as much about human being
as this mechanical device? Much more of what there actually is to a
human being is present here than in any carving, but because it is not an
obvious instance of an ’art’ object, it is never to be looked at in this light.
Moreover, if we look at other traps, we are able to see that each is
not only a model of its creator, a subsidiary self in the form of an automaton,
but each is also a model of its victim. This model may actually reflect
the outward form of the victim, as in the comical giraffe trap shown in
Figure 5, which delineates, in negative contour, the outlines of the lower
half of a giraffe. Or the trap may, more subtly and abstractly, represent
parameters of the animal’s natural behaviour, which are subverted in
order to entrap it. Traps are lethal parodies of the animal’s Umwelt
(Figures 6, 7). Thus the rat that likes to poke around in narrow spaces has
just such an attractive cavity prepared for its last, fateful foray into the
dark (Figure 6). Of course, it is not really the case that the trap is clever
or deceitful; it is the hunter who knows the victim’s habitual responses
and is able to subvert them. But once the trap is in being, the hunter’s
skill and knowledge are truly located in the trap, in objectified form,
otherwise the trap would not work. This objective knowledge would
survive even the death of the hunter himself. It would also be (partially)
’readable’ to others who had only the trap, and not the animal lore that
was reflected in its design. From the form of the trap, the dispositions of
the intended victim could be deduced. In this sense, traps can be regarded
as texts on animal behaviour.
The trap is therefore both a model of its creator, the hunter, and a
model of its victim, the prey animal. But more than this, the trap embodies
a scenario, which is the dramatic nexus that binds these two protagonists
together, and which aligns them in time and space. Our
illustrations cannot show this because they either show traps awaiting
their victims, or victims who have been already entrapped; they cannot
show the ’time structure’ of the trap. This time structure opposes suspended
time, the empty time of ’waiting’, to the sudden catastrophe that
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FIGURE 5 Giraffe
trap drawn by Wood
FIGURE 6 Rat trap, Vanuatu;
sketch by Bell
FIGURE 7 Trap from Guyana; sketch by
Roth
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ensues as the trap closes. This temporal structure varies with the kind
of trap employed, but it is not hard to see in the drama of entrapment a
mechanical analogue to the tragic sequence of hubris-nemesis-catastrophe.
Consider the doomed hippopotamus (Figure 8) lulled into a sense
of false security by sheer bulk and majesty. How many tragic heroes have
suffered from the same hubristic illusions and have invited the same
fate? If the chimpanzee who falls for Boyer’s trap is Faust, perhaps this
hippopotamus is Othello. The fact that animals who fall victim to traps
have always brought about their downfall by their own actions, their
own complacent self-confidence, ensures that trapping is a far more
poetic and tragic form of hunting than the simple chase. The latter kind
of hunting equalizes hunters and victims, united in spontaneous action
and reaction, whereas trapping decisively heirarchizes hunter and
victim. The trapper is God, or the fates, the trapped animal is man in his
tragic incarnation.
It therefore seems to me that, even without ethnographic context,
without exegesis from any wise men, animal traps such as these might
be presented to an art public as
artworks. These devices embody
ideas, convey meanings, because
a trap, by its very nature, is a
transformed representation of its
maker, the hunter, and the prey
animal, its victim, and of their
mutual relationship, which,
among hunting people, is a
complex, quintessentially social
one. That is to say, these traps
communicate the idea of a nexus
of intentionalities between
hunters and prey animals, via
material forms and mechanisms.
I would argue that this evocation
of complex intentionalities is in
fact what serves to define artworks,
and that suitably framed,
animal traps could be made to
evoke complex intuitions of
being, otherness, relatedness. The
impact of these traps, now being
presented as artworks, might
however be increased if theywere
exhibited in conjunction with
western artworks (of which it is
FIGURE 8 Hippopotamus trap drawn
by Boteler
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easy to find numerous examples)
that seem to occupy the same semiological
territory.
The work of Damien Hirst, the
most media-exposed of younger
British artists in recent times,
seems to be a case in point. In fact,
it was Hirst’s notorious Turner
Prize exhibit at the Tate Gallery in
1992 that first induced me to start
thinking about traps as art objects.
Consider Hirst’s shark in a tank of
formaldehyde (Figure 1). This
work captivates because of the profound
contrast between the gigantic,
ultra-biological fish and its
aseptic glass cage, or trap (recalling
Eichmann at his trial, trapped in a
glass box) whose reflective walls
project virtual images of the
equally aseptic surrounding
gallery into the shark’s biological
domain. A distant echo of the
upper (biological) and lower
(mechanical) halves of Duchamp’s
Large Glass? - no doubt - but also
a reflection on our power to imFIGURE
9 Coffin lid being painted
with the image of a trapped shark
Source. Morphy, 1991, Figure 7.4 and pp 125-6. By
courtesy of Howard Morphy. Photo Howard Morphy
mobilize elemental forces, which nonetheless always seem potentially
liable to escape. Even Hirst’s shark, as dead as a dead thing can be, is still
residually alive, watching and thinking, or seems to be, because it keeps
its eyes open and stares at us. One day it is going to get out.
It would be appropriate to place the shark alongside this barkpainting
scene from Morphy’s Ancestral Connections (Figure 9) showing
the painting of a trapped shark, visually nearly identical to Hirst’s installation
in the Tate. The Yolnngu produce this painting during funerary
rituals, and it refers to the up-river journey of a mythical ancestral shark,
which was temporarily trapped on the way, but which escaped. This
painting refers to the deceased’s clan affiliations, and metaphorizes the
journey of the spirit towards the ancestral country, and the need to transfer
power to it (via funerary ceremonies) so that it, like the ancestral shark,
can burst out of the ’traps’ that threaten to impede its progress. The
episode of the shark being trapped, and escaping, is enacted by the participants.
These eschatological ideas are, of course, specifically Yolnngu,
but I would submit that the surface similarity between Hirst’s work and
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the Yolnngu work are not just superficial, and that a metaphor is being
deployed here that is accessible cross-culturally in a highly transformed,
but still readable, way.
Meanwhile, to reinforce the point that Hirst’s work is in a rather deep
way about traps, and the network of complex intentionalities that the
notion of entrapment sets up, I should simply describe another of Hirst’s
works in the same exhibition, which actually incorporated a working trap
device. I refer to the installation consisting of a decaying sheep’s head in
a glass box, which breeds maggots, which turn into flies, which then
become victims of a butchers’-shop type fly trap, which attracts the flies
by violet light on to high-voltage electrified wires, on which they die. A
trap within a trap, victims within a victim: as anthropologists we should
be the first to recognize redundancy within the mythological code as a
means of underlining the dialectical message, which in this case is to
induce the spectator to identify him- or herself with the victims in this
assemblage (the dead animal, the maggots, the flies) and at the same time
with the vicious God who has set this rigmarole of a world in motion, the
maker of traps, Hirst, you, me ...
Hirst would not be the only western contemporary artist whose work
would be on display at the exhibition of traps. Next to the arrow trap, for
instance, I might install the work by the concept artist Judith Horn (Figure
10), consisting of two shotguns suspended from the gallery ceiling, which
periodically blast one another with red, blood-resembling liquid, drawn
off from tanks above them. Evidently, at one level, this is a commentary
FIGURE 10
High Noon by Judith
Horn
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on the senselessness of war, but the key to this work is not so much the
theme of mutual violence as the marked absence of its perpetrators - precisely
the theme I identified earlier in relation to the arrow trap. In fact,
Horn’s installation directly relates to the type of ’class war’ man-traps
(shotguns triggered by tripwires) that were set to deter poaching on shooting
estates in times past
Additional examples of post-Duchampian artworks (even work by
Duchamp himself, such as the Trébuchet of 1917) that could figure in this
exhibition could easily be selected, but Hirst and Horn will do for now.
It is not that I would insist that a trap from Africa and the latest work of
Damien Hirst are instances of the same kind of thing at all, but only that
each is capable, in the context of an exhibition, of synergizing and drawing
meaning out of the other. They are not the same, and are not entirely
different or incommensurable either; they are, in Marylin Strathern’s
(1991) phrase ’partially connected’.
Nor do I suppose that for an African trap, or a trap from any other
exotic part of the world, to function as an artwork it is actually necessary
or desirable for the ethnographic context to be stripped away. The artistic
meaning of certain traps can often only be established ethnographically,
and this makes essential a textual component to any satisfactory
exhibition of ’trap’ artworks - but there is no need to apologize for this;
since Duchamp it has gone without saying that written notes and commentary
in the form of interviews and suchlike are necessary for the comprehension
of contemporary artworks - just as a knowledge of
neo-Platonic philosophy is necessary for a true appreciation of Renaissance
art, I would say (Wind, 1957). I simply happen to have no exegesis
for the arrow trap, for instance, but this trap is so graphic it hardly needs
any. With certain other traps it is essential.
Take, for instance, the angling trap from Guyana, illustrated in Roth
(1924), see Figure 11.I would hardly have regarded it as a particularly
artistic trap unless Stephen Hugh-Jones had informed me (pers. comm.)
that the equivalent type of fishing trap among the Barasana (in neighbouring
Colombia) is known as the trap ’which turns fish into fruit’. Given
this information one sees at once how wittily metaphysical and magical
this trap is. One moment the fish is placidly swimming along belonging
(so it thinks) to the animal kingdom and then, bang, before it knows what
has happened it is a vegetable, dangling from the branches of a tree, to
be plucked like any other fruit by a passing Indian. What a come-uppance,
in more senses than one! This transubstantiation recalls the (dead) sheep’s
head/maggot/fly/(dead) fly transubstantiations in Hirst’s installation discussed
above, but more radically, in that the fish moves between kingdoms,
while the sheep’s head, rather more literally, only moves between
orders. Certainly, this point would not occur to a non-Barasana art public
without textual clues - but once the clue is provided one does not need
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FIGURE 11Spring-hook fishing trap, Guyana; sketch by Stedman
a PhD in anthropology to enjoy the joke, nor, I think, to be led to reflect
on its deeper implications.
Another instance (which must be the last) of a trap that can function
as an artwork only with the assistance of a certain degree of exegetical
material is the Anga eel-trap described in a recent paper by Pierre Lemonnier
(1992). This trap consists of a long cylinder of rolled-up tree-bark,
bound together with numerous coils of rattan, reinforced with wood and
provided with an ingenious sprung trapdoor. Eels are trapped in elongated
traps like this in many parts of New Guinea and, indeed, elsewhere.
What is significant about the Anga trap is the context in which it is made,
and the care which is lavished on it, which could not be apparent to the
uninstructed. Lemonnier’s Anga trap eels in traps like these in the context
of mortuary ritual, specifically, at the end of the period of mourning,
when the mourners must be revived in preparation for their return to
ordinary life. Feasting on eels is efficacious at this time, not just because
eels are excellent, valued food; but also because eels are associated with
the penis of the founding ancestor, detached because it was superfluously
long. They are thus a source of spiritual vitality as well as superior
nourishment, not that these categories can be completely dissociated in
local terms. Were this all, the traps themselves might still be considered
mere implements, because the fact that eels are sacred to the Anga does
not necessarily also mean that the means of obtaining eels are sacred, or
in any way extraordinary. Even the fact that the traps are constructed in
the course of a ritual, with much magical attention being given to them,
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might not suffice to take them outside the ruck of common objects. But
what Lemonnier can show - and this, very probably, would only be apparent
to an anthropologist, poised between the Anga world and the western
one, not a native - is that it is actually in the fabrication of the traps that
the Anga construct their notion of the ’power’ inherent in eels. The traps
are made of strips of bark bound together with hoops of cane and provided
with a trapdoor at the wider end. What Lemonnier notices is that
the cane ’binding’ hoops are far stronger, more numerous and more carefully
made than would be needed to restrain a few eels, and, similarly,
the trapdoor is much sturdier than strictly necessary. Thus it is the trap,
rather than the real eel, that carries the message of eel-power. As a symbolic
artefact that captures and contains eel-power, it functions,
metonymically, to empower the eel, by virtue of its own sturdiness and
strength. Indeed the trap, which is shaped to accommodate and attract
eels, is a representation of an eel, both in the already-mentioned sense of
being an objectification of eel behavioural lore, but also more directly, in
that it is itself eel-like (eel-ongated), phallic, ingestive and reproductive.
There could not be a clearer refutation of the thesis that would
consign things like animal traps to the status of ’mere’ artefacts, by comparison
to ancestor-carvings and the like (which the Anga, incidentally,
do not make) as candidates for artwork status. If the Anga embody their
ancestors in fabricated form, it is surely in the form of traps such as these
(as well as other artefacts, such as initiation temples). These traps are
’images of the ancestors’ in the sense that they contain, embody and communicate
ancestral power. Moreover, they make possible its realization
of ancestral presence in the here and now as few conventional images
may be said to, not ’in spite of’ the fact that they are also useful implements
for catching eels, but because of this fact. We in the West have
longed for (and fantasized about) statues or images that would move, or
bless, or make love, but, for centuries, always in vain. The Anga, by contrast,
have ’images’ of ancestral power that actually accomplish work,
actually nourish those who make them, and so achieve a goal that has
always eluded our artists, waylaid as they have been by the need for realistic
representation of (surface) forms.
CONCLUSION
Suppose, then, that such a hybrid exhibition of animal traps from far and
wide, interspersed with relevant western artworks, were to be presented
to the gallery public. What might that imply for the problem with which
I began this essay - the dispute concerning the criteria for artwork status?
I hope that I might have said enough to convince at least some people that
such a conjunction would not be wholly inopportune. The institutional
theory of art would at this point immediately ’enfranchise’ a large array
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of artefacts - hithero consigned to the Naturhistorisches Museum - to a
place in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, assuring them a quite different audience
and reception, since by being successfully circulated as artworks,
these works would become nothing less. Would that be a retrograde step?
Speaking as an anthropologist concerned with art, rather than as an
art critic or a mouthpiece for Absolute Spirit, I believe that this would be
a welcome development. The worst thing about the ’anthropology of art’
as at present constituted is precisely the way in which it has inherited a
reactionary definition of art, so that it more or less has to concern itself
with objects that would have been classified as ’art’ or, more likely, ’craft’
at the beginning of this century, but has little or nothing to do with the
kinds of objects (installations, performances) that are characteristically
circulated as ’art’ in the late 20th century.
In effect, ’art’ for the anthropology of art consists of those types of
artefacts one might find on display as ’art’ only in a very sleepy provincial
town which (as most of them do) boasts a ’gallery’ where one finds
folksy ceramics, carvings and tufted woollen tapestries, not to mention
innumerable still-lives and Palmeresque rural idylls. The tradition of
middle-brow art that produces and consumes these things is of course
indestructible, but why should the ethnographic Other be deemed a producer
of ’art’ only if he or she produces work that is generically analogous
to such reactionary dross, even if individual works of ’primitive
art’, so circumscribed, are actually of the highest quality. The reason for
the persistence of this state of affairs - which may, however, be unravelling
as I write (see Weiner, 1994) - lies in the continuing hold of the ’aesthetic’
notion of artworks over the anthropological mind (Maquet, 1986),
since it is this definition of artworks that ensures that only ’aesthetically
pleasing’ carvings, paintings, pots, cloths, etc. are to count as ’art’.
The move I advocate is the abandonment of the aesthetic notion of
artworks by the anthropology of art (Gell, 1992), which alone would
permit the kind of direct confrontation described above, between the artefacts
of nonwestern peoples and the productions of post-Duchampian artmaking,
i.e. the central tradition of contemporary art, properly speaking,
not the ersatz to be seen in provincial arts-and-crafts galleries. One should
accept the essentially liberating premise of the institutional theory of art,
which has arisen precisely to accommodate the historic fact that western
artworks no longer have an aesthetic ’signature’ and can consist of
entirely arbitrary objects, like dead sharks in tanks of formaldehyde, and
so on.
Do I mean that any object of human manufacture whatsoever can be
circulated as an artwork? Is this what is implied by the ’institutional’
theory of art? Potentially, perhaps, yes; but this has been trivial, in terms
of contemporary art theory, since 1917, when Duchamp exhibited his
notorious urinal (or Fountain). That was in the time of my grandfather,
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and the time of the great-grandfathers of today’s artists, such as Damien
Hirst. So if selecting and exhibiting arbitrary objects as ’art’ were all that
defined the post-Duchampian tradition, there would be little left to expect
from it by this late stage. Actually, things are otherwise; Duchamp’s
ready-mades were carefully selected and thematically tightly integrated
to his two major projects (the Large Glass (1915-23) and the Waterfall
(1944-66)). What is interesting about Duchamp’s ready-made art objects
was never the objects themselves, but Duchamp’s reasons for selecting
them (divulged in the course of a life-long strip-tease performance) and
the same is true for the art produced by his many followers. The apparently
’arbitrary’ objects of concept art are only apparently arbitrary, and
they all work, if they do work, because they have complex (Dantoesque)
historic and iconographic resonances, of which the gallery public is, to a
greater or lesser extent, made aware. They are objects that are scrutinized
as vehicles of complicated ideas, intended to achieve or mean something
interesting, difficult, allusive, hard to bring off, etc. I would define as a
candidate artwork any object or performance that potentially rewards
such scrutiny because it embodies intentionalities that are complex,
demanding of attention and perhaps difficult to reconstruct fully (cf.
Kant’s notion of the ’free play of cognitive powers’).
Thus it takes more to make a post-Duchampian artwork than merely
exhibiting it in a gallery - an interpretive context also has to be developed
and disseminated. In this respect the purely institutional theory of the
artwork is less than satisfactory because it has nothing to say about the
criteria that govern the creation of the kinds of contextual resonances to
which the educated gallery public are sensitive. To this extent Danto is
right to insist on the priority of interpretability in the constitution of the
artwork. What is wrong with his theory, at least so far as the artwork vs
artefact distinction is concerned, is its dependence on an over-idealized
distinction between ’functional’ artefacts and ’meaningful’ artworks. This
is a legacy of post-Enlightenment philosophers such as Hegel, but it
obscures the view of any art world other than the one Hegel had specifically
in mind. Perhaps contemporary gallery artworks do nothing but
evoke meaning; but most artworks have political, religious and other
functions which are ’practical’ in terms of local conceptions of how the
world is and how humans may intervene in its workings to their best
advantage. Artworks can also trap eels, as we have seen, or grow yams
(Gell, 1992: 60). The ’interpretation’ of such ’practically’ embedded artworks
is intrinsically conjoined to their characteristics as instruments fulfilling
purposes other than the embodiment of autonomous ’meaning’.
A half-way house between the ’institutional’ and ’interpretive’
theories therefore seems to me the best option. The institutional theory
of art is amenable to the idea that artworks can be ’arfefacts’ securing a
range of human purposes, so long as they are simultaneously deemed
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interesting as art to an art public. But the institutional theory has a
problem in that it is less clear about the kinds of criteria that dictate
whether candidate objects will or will not be selected as artistically ’interesting’.
The Danto-Hegelian conception of an autonomous art ’Geist’ will
not enfranchise any but a narrow and unrepresentative range of human
productions, and fails to account for the rather successful artwork candidacy
of Vogel’s ’net’ except as the result of a category mistake on the
part of the art public. A broader notion of interpretability, encompassing
the objectification of ’complex intentionalities’ in pragmatic and technical
modes, as well as the project of communicating autonomous symbolic
meaning, seems to me to overcome the problems contained in both the
’interpretive’ and ’institutional’ theories of art.
What the ’anthropology of art’ ought to be about, in my opinion, is
the provision of a critical context that would enfranchise ’artefacts’ and
allow for their circulation as artworks, displaying them as embodiments
or residues of complex intentionalities. Anthropology should be part of
art-making itself, insofar as art-making, art history and art criticism are
a single enterprise nowadays. Partly this would consist of the provision of
relevant ethnography (such as provoided by Boyer, Hugh-Jones, Lemmonnier,
mentioned earlier) and partly the discovery of connections
between complex intentionalities in western artworks and the kind of
intentionalities embodied in artworks and artefacts (now recontextualized
as artworks) from elsewhere. This would be a one-sided transaction in artmaking,
in the sense that essentially metropolitan concepts of ’art’ would
be in play, not indigenous ones; but objects, as Thomas (1991) has shown
are ’promiscuous’ and can move freely between cultural/transactional
domains without being essentially compromised. This they can do because
they have indeed no essences, only an indefinite range of potentials.
So was Vogel’s net an artwork? I believe that the New York gallerygoers
who took it for one were not mistaken. Nor were they entirely
swayed by the mere fact that they were institutionally invited to see it as
one, by the gallery setting and the chance rhymes between the Zande net
and the work of well-known western concept artists such as Jackie
Windsor. They were also, I am sure, responding to the very notion of a
’net’ and the paradoxical way in which this net had been itself caught,
and tightly bound, within a second net. This recursive metaphor of
capture and containment would have been itself enough to give them
pause, halt them in their passage, and induce them to stand and stare,
like Boyer’s fated chimpanzee. Every work of art that works is like this,
a trap or a snare that impedes passage; and what is any art gallery but a
place of capture, set with what Boyer calls ’thought-traps’, which hold
their victims for a time, in suspension? Vogel’s net was set with care, and
in it she captured, besides sundry philosophers and anthropologists including
this one - a large part of the question ’what is art?’.
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Maquet, Jaques ( 1986) The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the
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* ALFRED GELL is Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics
and Political Science. His current research interests are in the anthropology
of art. Address: Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
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