Alyssa Grossman
Review of Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina, by Arnd Schneider. 2006. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 22(6): 801-803 (2008).
In Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina, an ethnography of the contemporary “art world” of Buenos Aires, Arnd Schneider makes an important contribution to the growing body of anthropological literature that addresses the social and cultural processes of artistic creation. By analyzing non-indigenous artists’ practices of appropriating indigenous cultural forms, Schneider examines how artists are constructing new discourses of Argentinean identity, and thus contributing to wider frameworks of “cultural globalization.”
emphasizing how visual artists mediate between local and global levels, using these techniques to reposition themselves against existing hegemonic national ideologies about Argentine identity.
The book is structured into eight chapters, beginning with descriptions of Buenos Aires’s political, social, and cultural climate, and explanations of the theoretical paradigms to be used in his analysis. The data is taken from fieldwork done over the course of a year from October 1999 to September 2000, and a month and a half in November to December 2001. Schneider’s methodologies are remarkably varied; as he himself observes, there is no straightforward path for following entire processes of artistic creation, let alone for mapping out the less tangible discourses of identity construction. But his combination of conducting unstructured interviews, studio and home visits, accompanying artists on their field expeditions, and actively engaging in participant observation provided him with a wide range of contacts with craftspeople (potters, graphic designers, textile artists), photographers, filmmakers, and other multi-media artists to inform his research.
informants’ activities led to a deeper understanding of both the process and the significance of their work; he argues that “new forms of research and (re)presentation could be possible in such collaborations, especially in order to capture the enormous wealth and variety of sensorial data gathered during fieldwork” (2006: 185). Actually experiencing the material time and space of artistic production, as well as the related activities of sharing food, personal encounters, and day-to-day discussions with his colleagues, gave him a means for accessing other issues embedded in the routines of everyday life, such as family dynamics, gender roles, politics, and economics. Valuing such tactics in his own research process underlines Schneider’s advocacy of anthropological studywith,as opposed to simplyof, artists and artistic practice.
His findings about how different artists have appropriated indigenous elements into their work, as well as the political, cultural, and ethical implications of these appropriations, are mixed. As Schneider notes, “‘becoming indigenous’ is not a uniform artistic practice” (2006: 164). While he finds different artists engaging to varying degrees and in a range of ways with indigenous people, and using different spaces and media to create and transform messages about indigenous “others,” he ties together certain tendencies or “trends” that he has observed, relating them all to the larger process of diffusing local images and meanings among global networks of communication.
privatizations, and investments of the 1990s, followed by the severe economic crash in 2001, non-indigenous Buenos Aires artists began to draw upon and re-claim indigenous forms in their work. Such practices have been geared towards exposure to the international art world in particular, as Argentinean official ideology (in contrast to that of other Latin American countries) does not deem “indigenousness” representative of “typical” national culture.
Both Argentina and the city of Buenos Aires are socially stratified, with a unique combination of inhabitants from immigrant backgrounds, mixed Spanish colonial origins, and indigenous roots. While the term for such mixtures, “criollo,” is used in positive, negative, and neutral ways, and does not indicate a fixed or static ethnic or class status, it still reinforces the old paradigm depicting Argentinean national identity as a “melting pot.” Schneider suggests that the search for a “new Latin American identity” defies this paradigm. For many individuals, cultural capital is more readily gained through emphasizing cultural acquisition over biological descent, through creating rather than merely finding roots. Schneider critically examines a number of artists engaged in such appropriations in this capital city, who practice this “traffic in culture” by adopting local and indigenous art forms and bringing them into global contexts.
new meanings. He suggests that to a certain extent, these practices can be compared to the Western tradition of novices copying and appropriating works of the established canon. However, Schneider finds that with situations of non-indigenous appropriation of indigenous motifs, the issue of power differentials is rarely problematized, and fails to address related ethical considerations.
Schneider further explores such ethically ambiguous appropriations in his study of a commercial photographer’s project portraying non-indigenous models in indigenous-like apparel for a fashion calendar. The calendar’s contributors, he argues, wind up playing on sexist and idealized stereotypes about indigenous people without being critical of how such images have been used in past political, academic, and historical discourses, ironically because they wanted to publicly demonstrate the “origins” of the Argentine population in a “positive” way. The commercial success and publicity of the project conveying these specific messages about national identity were viewed as more important than questioning or directly challenging these stereotypes.
Another multifaceted example of an artist’s interpretations of indigenous identity emerges in the work of Teresa Pereda, who uses anthropological methods of field work, interviews, and photographic documentation, as part of her data gathering and research preparation for creating artist’s books. Pereda is explicit about her goal of adopting and re-interpreting her country’s “mestizo” heritage. Accompanying her and her assistants to various field sites, Schneider observes the “problematic and complex negotiation between indigenous expectations and the agenda and practice of Teresa Pereda’s team” (2006: 144). Despite her attempts to engage in dialogue with her informants, to “respect” and compensate them by “giving back” certain images as she takes others away, as well as the indigenous people’s own active re-appropriations of her photographic equipment and other Western depictions of indigenous cultures, Pereda’s work retains fundamental imbalances of power. Her practices still involve attempts to incorporate indigenous cultures into a new conception of Latin American identity, firmly rooted within the Argentine nation-state.
