Response to Hal Foster's Artist as Ethnographer

One of our readings this semester was by Hal Foster whose 1996 essay, "Artist as Ethnographer" criticized the practice of artists acting as quasi-anthropologists. He appears particularly concerned with site-specific art that acts in critique of its surroundings -- and often fails to truly digest its surroundings before forming its critique. Another problem is that site-specific art is often commissioned by the institution in which it attempts to critique.

Foster is working well beyond my range, but I found few of his points to be resonant. Artists who are marginalized socially and culturally -- by ethnicity or affluence -- are perceived as having automatic access to transformative "otherness". or access to "primal psychic and social processes from which the white bourgeois is blocked." In other words, we lack the street cred.

He argues that this "primitivistic fantasy" was exclusionary and limited Bataille's surrealism and Cesarie's Negritude movement.

Foster says post modern deconstruction has pushed art into the field of social anthropology. Such quasi-anthropological artists who seek to work with sited communities or institutions may have the bet motives and only partly want their work to be received as social outreach. (sarcasm intended)

The problem he says is that the representation of the surroundings are more often fitted into an artistic guise rather than the artist getting to know the surroundings.