Dohmen - Encounters beyond the gallery: regional aesthetics and cultural difference

Renate Dohmen is a lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at the Open University. She was previously Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her prior teaching experience includes Goldsmiths (University of London) and the World Art and Artefacts Programme (a joint venture between Birkbeck College, University of London and The British Museum). Her research focuses on questions of art, visual culture and the global in contemporary and colonial contexts.

By expanding the concept of the relational into the sphere of culture, Dohmens ground-breaking and fertile thought experiment enacts a critical model discourse that has the potential to mediate between concurrent aesthetics and diverse cultural actors including those omitted from the current global.

Annette Bhagwati, Project Director 100 Years of Now, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

Encounters beyond the Gallery is a bold and imaginative exercise in bringing together domains of artistic practice traditionally kept apart by art historys classificatory boundaries. It points to a new methodological direction for a non-convivial dialogue with radical difference. By creatively drawing upon the resources of aesthetic theory and anthropology, Dohmen deploys a redeemed, extended version of relational aesthetics alter-relationality to offer a framework for studying contemporary art that unsettles its hegemonic metalanguage. In order to reach out to those art practices that were modernisms backwater utopias and which continue to fall through the net of contemporary art, the book proposes an experimental, performative approach to querying arts new globality and to re-envisaging the relationship between aesthetics, ethnography and art historical practice.

Monica Juneja, Professor of Global Art History, University of Heidelberg

Encounters
Beyond the
Gallery

Relational
Aesthetics and
Cultural Difference

RENATE DOHMEN

Published in 2016 by

I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

London New York

www.ibtauris.com

Copyright 2016 Renate Dohmen

The right of Renate Dohmen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 8

References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

ISBN:978 1 78076 371 2

eISBN:978 1 78672 025 2

ePDF:978 1 78673 025 1

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

Contents

List of Illustrations

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Just Smile and Dont Talk, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 11 July10 October 2010 in Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Photograph by Andreas Zobe. Courtesy of Andreas Zobe.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled 1992 (Free), 1992/2007. Here is the 2007 re-creation (David Zwirner Gallery, New York) of his original 1992 piece Untitled 1992 (Free) at 303 Gallery in Soho. Courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Gavin Brown.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (1271), New Museum. In situ in the New Museum exhibition NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star, 13 February26 May 2013. Photograph by Benit Pailley. Courtesy of Benit Pailley.

Shipibo-Conibo Indians in front of a hut with a large chomo. Photograph by Bruno Illius. Courtesy of bersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33489.

Chomo with three-partite design areas. Photograph by Angelika Gebhart-Sayer. Courtesy of Angelika Gebhart-Sayer.

Shipibo-Conibo woman in the process of drawing a so-called filler line. Photo by Bruno Illius. Courtesy of bersee-Museum Bremen, inventory number 33839.

Comparative chart that compares Knolls phosphene shapes with Tukano design elements. Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo (1978) Drug-Induced Optical Sensations and Their Relationship to Applied Arts among Some Colombian Indian, in Greenhalgh, Michael and Vincent Megaw, eds., Art in Society. Studies in Style, Culture and Aesthetics (London: Duckworth), 289304: 300. Courtesy of Duckworth Overlook.

Cashinahua design. Photograph by Barbara Keifenheim. Courtesy of Barbara Keifenheim.

A freshly drawn kolam. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

Tamil threshold design and bicycle. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

Threshold design on verandah. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

Designs drawn for a kolam competition. Photograph by author. Courtesy of author.

Acknowledgements

This volume started out as a doctoral dissertation and has been a long time in the making. Progressing in fits and starts, it endured extended periods of dormancy interspersed with intense periods of activity and is the product of an extensive journey that took me through libraries, universities, jobs, academic contexts and countries. I have incurred a great number of debts of gratitude in its many stages of inception, research, writing and revision, and would in the first instance like to thank Sarat Maharaj for being an inspiring teacher and thinker, and the students I taught at Goldsmiths College when the ideas for this project were taking shape. Their voracious intellectual appetite and excited discussions of A Thousand Plateaus carried over into this project. I am also immensely grateful to Howard Caygill who most generously commented on drafts of this project in its PhD stages, who oversaw the birth of Rikki T, never wavered in his encouragement and patiently discussed ideas over many cups of coffee at the Russell Square Caf. But I owe profound thanks and gratitude to many more individuals. To Dr Francoise Barbara Freedman for initially drawing my attention to Shipibo-Conibo art, to Angelika Gebhart-Sayer for her encouragement and generous access to private notes and photographs of the Shipibo-Conibo Indians, and immensely so to Bruno Illius. He most generously shared knowledge, photos and advice, carefully read and commented on the doctoral incarnation of this book, was unfailingly supportive of my unorthodox approach to the question of how to interpret Shipibo-Conibo designs and took the words that I put in his mouth in in good humour. I wish to thank him for wonderfully animated discussions and his friendship. I furthermore owe thanks to Michael OHanlon for bringing the article Could Sangama Read? to my attention, and to Arnd Schneider for his expertise and inspiration.

I am also indebted to Susanne Hermann and Britta Busch who unwittingly introduced me to Indian threshold designs when they showed photos from their research trip to South India to a group of family and friends. The images of their exploits had most unusual drawings in the margins that caught my attention but to which, as social scientists, they had paid little attention. Curious about these designs, I ventured to the library only to realize that references to the practice were few and far between and constituted snippets of information at best. My solution to this perceived lack seemed obvious at the time I had to go to India and see for myself. A lively research trip followed that took me to Chennai and then further inland to the small town of Tiruvannamalai where a friend had established links with a local primary school that served as my point of contact with the local community.