Undefining art: Irrelevant categorization in the anthropology of aesthetics

Conclusion: What is to be done with the concept of art?

What, then, does one do with the concept of art? I suggest that we simply drop it. The fact is, there is no such thing as art. That is, there is no such thing as art in itself. Art in itself is not a universal human phenomenon, but a synthetic Western category, and a relatively recent one at that. The concept has generated endlessly misleading ethnography, art history, and esthetic theory, and has acted mainly to mystify the social conditions which keep acts of creation and sensual pleasure out of the experience of the socially exploited majority. I suggest that those acts and products which we have been calling art simply be returned to the domain of labor, or better, work. Work, in that sense, is the application of human energy to matter, and the consequent production and reforming of that matter in new forms. Work is human making, culture creating. Verum factum. For humans, that which is true or real is that which is made; the very basis of humanity is the drive to transform the socio-natural world through the imaginative application of work.

In “making,” a person may at almost anytime exercise the human aesthetic faculties, that is, he or she strives to get pleasure, formal or sensual, from the making, and to give a similar formal or sensual pleasure to other people who will perceive that which is made [46]. In this sense, the Pakot have a more fruitful and probably more accurate definition of the aesthetic process than we have. One makes things, and where one can, one makes them “beautiful,” pleasing to the senses and to the apprehension of form. So — one throws a spear and throws it with a smooth flow and sharp snap beyond what is necessary to the kill. One makes a garden and lays it in rows, with an eye to varied heights and colors and textures. One paints a wall and lays on figures as well as color. One dances to honor the gods, and also takes pleasure in the blending of body and music. Most elementally, and most poignantly, one makes a social self and concomitantly makes it as aesthetically pleasing as one can; the Nuba, for example, in marking their bodies with the signs of the appropriate patriclan, physiological condition and ritual status, also make their bodies objects of beauty [47] and therefore, for them, specifically human. A Tikopia man [48], in making and using a headrest is at once differentiating himself from women, stating and preserving the sacredness of his head, and taking and making pleasure in something beautiful. My point is precisely that abstract beauty is not at the core of art. One makes, and sometimes the thing made, or a part of it, is beautiful and sometimes the thing, or any part of it, is not. The beautiful things do not cluster together into a significant category. The “made” things do; they are the emergent, constituted human products of human labor.

Let us say, further, that I make a picture of a fountain in Galicia, to give to a friend who has lived there. The given or, better, the series of givens, include the appearance of the fountain, the state of my relationship with my friend, my paints and paper, and my complex and ambivalent feelings about Galicia. I am making: a gift, a statement of my affection for the friend, a concretization of my feeling for Galicia, an affirmation about myself as a friend and as a maker of beautiful things, a picture of a fountain, and a pleasing arrangement of lines and colors. In making my picture, I am doing nothing fundamentally different from that which the potter making a pot, the housewife cooking a meal, the farmer planting a field is doing. I am taking a given and by my work transforming it into a new reality so designed that it gives sensual pleasure in a new context. The great danger is that of mystification, of calling art, as Mills [49] does, “a sacrament,” in which the artist controls, while creating, the conditions of qualitative experience. Such a position both magnifies and diminishes the real actions of real artists, whose conceptual and material artifacts are drawn from the experienced world. The material-social world is changed by the artist (that is, everyone) and the artist is changed by it; the result of the dialectical relation between actor-artist and cultural given is a “new world,” a synthesis, a new context, with the two components (the human actor-subject and the nature-culture object) in a new relationship to each other.

When work is such that it no longer transforms the given world, where it is no longer directed by the imagination and by the creatively constituted needs of the human worker, where it acts only to reinforce a stultifying status quo, it has become a less than human action. A man on a General Motors assembly line is not applying his imagination to alter the world in consonance with emergent human possibilities; he is simply reinforcing the current state of affairs. The painter making a picture that will sell in an art gallery and gain him a small income and a place in the catalogue of Contemporary American Artists, is in much the same situation; put to the service of something called “Art,” his skill is failing to transform the world or even his perception of it in any meaningful way.

Our primary, over-arching category, then, should be work, and is is this on which we should be focusing for both our ethmography and our theory. Such an un-defining, or disalienation of art, has a number of advantages. It changes our understanding of human effort by allowing for the possibility that work may be both creative and pleasurable — (hardly a new point), and yet a consideration rarely in the minds of ethnographers studying people at work. Surely it would help to get rid of those superfluous, half-hearted, and pen-ultimate chapters on “art” in most anthropology textbooks, and describe aesthetic activities in the same way they are actually integrated into people's lives. More to the point, the nondefinition of art can contribute to the demystification of aesthetics in our own society. In recognizing that “art” is not separate from “life” and is indeed simply a form of work, that ordinary people (that is, those not labeled “artists”) are doing something not basically different from that which “artists” are doing, we can encourage the laymen, the non-artists to take more legitimate pleasure in their activities and to reclaim for themselves the right to make their work pleasurable and beautiful. We might, simultaneously, help the socially proclaimed “artists” to drop the illusion, which is shared in our civilization at large, that they are indeed a special class, higher than, and hence unaccountable to society. Indeed, it is precisely that illusion which, paradoxically, privileges the artist, while isolating him and his activities as a convenient object of repression; the artist becomes a symbol of everyman's potential challenge to the civilized order, the unwitting assumption being that everyman is potentially an artist.

I suggest, then, that we define art along with Rousseau in his widely misunderstood First Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, by undefining it, that we in reality, acknowledge it by denying its reified existence. By assuming that there is a class of activities and consequent products which pertain to special areas of life and to privileged people, we have denied the exercise of the aesthetic faculties to the majority of people. We may now help to undo that repressive assumption-action, and acknowledge and thus foster the unity, in human work, of making, creating, and beautifying.

This is, of course, a political position, not political in the sense of insisting that architecture or painting or poetry serve overtly propagandistic, or even ideologically explicit revolutionary ends, but it is political in the insistence that the exercise of the aesthetic faculties is a human imperative and a human right. Any society, cultural order, or set of definitions which acts toward denying that right is destructive and de-humanizing. With that acknowledgement, the anthropology of aesthetics begins.