ONE PLACE AFTER ANOTHER - Monoskop

�
THE (UN)SITINGS OF COMMUNITY
In the essay “The Artist as Ethnographer,” Hal Foster critiques the ways in which
contemporary art has absorbed certain methodological strategies from anthropology,
and deconstructs the “collaborative” interaction between an artist and a local
community group in ethnographic terms. 1 In his view, the artist is typically an outsider
who has the institutionally sanctioned authority to engage the locals in the
production of their (self-) representation. The key concern for Foster is not only the
easy conversion of materials and experiences of local everyday life into an anthropological
exhibit (as “cultural proxies,” as he puts it), but the ways in which the authority
of the artist goes unquestioned, often unacknowledged. 2 While noting the
aesthetic and political importance of innovative artist-community collaborations
that have the potential to “reoccupy lost cultural spaces and propose historical
counter-memories,” Foster warns that “the quasi-anthropological role set up for the
artist can promote a presuming as much as a questioning of ethnographic authority,
an evasion as often as an extension of institutional critique.” 3 For Foster, a vigilant
reflexivity on the part of the artist is essential if such reversals are to be avoided,
because, as he paraphrases French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, “ethnographic
mapping is predisposed to a Cartesian opposition that leads the observer to abstract
the culture of study. Such mapping may thus confirm rather than contest the
authority of mapper over site in a way that reduces the desired exchange of dialogical
fieldwork.” 4
Some of the economic, social, and political consequences of such a reduction
can be extrapolated from Foster’s comments. Just as the desire to engage
“real” (nonart) places can prepare the way for the conversion of abstract or derelict
(non-)spaces into “authentic” and “unique” locales ripe for development and promotion,
5 so the engagement of “real” people in community-based art can install
new forms of urban primitivism over socially neglected minority groups. The
“other” of the dominant culture thus becomes objectified once again to satisfy the