Afterword: Why ‘Art Makes Society’?

In addressing how art makes societies, many of the contributors in this issue attempt to shed some of the lingering intellectual burdens that come with the notion ‘art’. These burdens have their origins in the West and in recent history; and they are especially related to the intervention of the modern and the art world, as well as the problematic notion that Euro-American aesthetic systems and ways of seeing and making should be privileged (see Davis 2011; Elkins 2002; Gell 1998; Morphy 2008). Art history aims for a ‘continuous reshaping of the past, an ongoing attempt to keep it relevant and infuse it with meaning’ (Elkins 2002, xii), yet that past, broadly construed, will need more than artworks to keep it relevant or meaningful. We suspect it will require the contexts, histories, empirica and understandings that comprise the complementary work of prehistorians, archaeologists, linguists, scientists and other scholars – for whom the past presents discoverable countries too.

In the process, the entire material and symbolic record of humankind remains a potential laboratory for experimentation, contemplation, creativity and study – a point that George Kubler made so vociferously in the opening paragraph of The Shape of Time:

Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful and poetic things of the world. By this view, the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. (Kubler 1962, 1)

Written a half century ago, this passage marks more than a golden anniversary. Grand commentaries about the relations between art and society, despite some legitimate discontents, seem to be making a comeback. This occurs both in art history treating things and visual culture (Davis 2011; Pasztory 2005; Summers 2003) and related fields considering art through various kinds of writing on anthropology, prehistory, biology, environment and society around the globe (Descola 2010; Gell 1998; Onians 2007; Zeki and Nash 1999). This ambition may be part of larger scholarly developments interested in the possibility of universalities and ‘Grand Unified Theories’ after decades of post-modern searching and post-colonial critique. David Summers (2003, 16, 19, 38) champions that there is a ‘truly foundational universal heritage’ in the art and architecture of the world, for ‘social space has been artifactually shaped’. Notwithstanding, Bruno Latour (2009, 2) would admit that ‘moving on from the modernist and then post-modernist predicament,’ the ‘search for a common world is immensely more complex now that so many radically different modes of inhabiting the earth have been freed to deploy themselves.’ It follows that multiple perspectives and disciplines will be needed just to recognise, much less document (Onians 2004) and understand, one shared way of inhabiting the earth – that is, with and through (and not uncommonly against) art.

How do recent writers theorise art ‘making’ society? Probably the most outward answer to this is that art is understood not just merely as an inert reflection, expression or output of society. Nor is it merely something for aesthetic or philosophical contemplation or academic analysis. Rather, the works called art actively work to produce and shape society and vice versa. However, they work in different ways to achieve this.

Some artworks are involved in making persons and social collectivity in myriad forms: parts, extensions and, with particular emphasis here, totalities of actors, agents and audiences – those whom the anthropologist Alfred Gell (1998), for example, would implicate in his ‘art nexus’. At another level, art impacts, at various gradations of intensity, on succeeding related forms, on the next generation(s) of kindred things (whether a painting, a body, monument, person, submarine), and sometimes maybe not so kindred or predictable (Stafford 1999). Thus, societies are referenced, connected and networked through things. Yet, more than that, societies are called into being and related expressly through them. One might think of the internet as one complex instance of this (for example, with Facebook and tweeting sub-communities), or compare kula valuables or the finely made Acheulean point. If idols have long been the foci for social cohesion, the reverse is also true: furore in their hatred and destruction also defines social groups.

Summers’ project (2003) emphasises artworks in their original social context, in ‘real spaces’ that are shared and mediated by other people and things; these elements work to condition how artworks are experienced. Recent thinking also presumes a recursive process, where artworks emerge out of systems of looking, experiencing and making, which in turn feed back into themselves. Thus art systems are constantly in flux, always in the process of retooling and remaking, in a feedback loop. These processes embed something of diachrony as well as the systemic. Of course, archaeologists have long claimed expertise and special purchase on these subjects, but any world art history and prehistory must engage with them as well.

Whitney Davis’ recent general theory (2011) stresses vision and visuality in culture. He argues that artworks and artefacts, more broadly, may favour successions of forms of perceived likeness. Visuality may have the virtue of effecting, ‘succeeding to,’ other key dimensions of culture that may intervene collectively or be coordinated socially (Davis 2011, 335, 337); and it would follow that those dimensions might include landscape, historicity, numeracy, temporality, and so forth. ‘[T]he formal, the stylistic, and the pictorial aspects of sensuously configured things … are mutually “interdetermined”’ and are used by people to see (Davis 2011, 9–10). While some advocate cognition in art (Mithen, Renfrew) and stress the neural basis of seeing (Ramachandran, Zeki, Onians), Davis privileges the culturalness of vision, that is, the historied build-up and contingency that intervenes in visuality, and its continuity or not. In other words, seeing, itself, has styles (Davis 2011, 7). In this, he draws from and engages explicitly, more or less, a formidable trajectory of Wölfflin, Gombrich, Baxandall, Danto and Wartofsky.

Alfred Gell (1998) also contemplated recursions and successions. Yet he looked to past stylistic choices and flows of intentionality in material culture production rather than to a visuality (or visual system) per se. An artwork, or any object, in fact, owes its form to an ‘infinite number of tiny social initiatives.’ The key point, though, for ‘art makes society’ is that a suite of salient dispositions hold a promise to transfer a cognitive scheme based on social relations (for example, hierarchy, transformation, kinship) to one of object/material formal relations, and vice versa (Gell 1998, 219). Curiously, in taking diachronic, systemic perspectives, there is something serial and evolving, admittedly, for both Gell (1998, 158, 218) and Davis (2011, 15–16, 97; see also Kubler 1962, 37, 64) – in the sense that they advocate notions of art-making and visual culture more or less as a kind of descent with modification. In doing so, there is more than a nod to anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu's influential notion of a recursively, constantly produced habitus – that is, briefly, an enduring set of cultural dispositions that inform perception, actions and worldview (Bourdieu 1990). The virtue of all these approaches is that there is no prescription for what can be society nor what can be art. Yet nonetheless both entities gain from a systemic relationship, for they mutually engage and shape each other.

In the context of this issue, it is noteworthy that the perception of artworks and aesthetic modes have relation and, more than that, basis outside the visual (see Summers 2003, 41–42). They are often rooted in sensorial practices of both routinised and special sorts. One might contend that the cognitive weight of landmines, Gell's oft-cited example about how things, including works of art, are purposeful extensions of people, are not mainly from their visual form (though see World Art 2, no. 1), nor completely from the imagery of people being killed and disfigured. It gains by entangling these with the promise and fear of corporeal harm, experiences of injury, and prior familiarity in bodily- and culturally-conditioned logics. One could make similar set of points about, for example, European miniature portraits of the early modern period. These were designed as a form of jewellery, to be held, worn and exchanged, often as tokens of affection or loyalty. They were, therefore, highly sensate tools of both memory and sociability, deeply enmeshed in lived, embodied experience.

The works in this volume help to reveal such embodied practices through objects, places and monuments from the Paleolithic to the present. Amongst other things, they challenge the notion that art is primarily or even fundamentally about the visual. Instead, artworks play crucial roles for moving towards and appreciating society. They are key because they are indispensable images, tokens and props, made meaningful through action and display. And they may be finished, unfinished, and often fragmented intentionally and accidentally, and repurposed. Often they carry, formally, the traces of their own social agency.

By way of conclusion, it is worth itemising several issues not explicitly explored in these pages, but which we believe will be crucial for future synergies among the many disciplines working in the vicinity of art and art-like things, and the problem of ‘art makes society’ for the ancient past. Importantly, they are familiar topics to archaeological practitioners: theory and chronology building, reconstructions of pasts, and sampling.

The first concerns the role of explicit methods and theory. Perhaps more than anything, archaeology is an assemblage of methods handily brought together, in bricolage fashion, to develop understandings of the past. In Euroamerican practice, its epistemology and practice regularly seek to generate arguments and models, very often drawn from anthropology and social theory, and more occasionally from philosophy, psychology, and art history. Future study of ‘art makes society’ might further interrogate the definition, characterisation (formal and chemical), and taphonomies of art-like things. With greater appreciation of how art has been monitored in complementary disciplines, archaeological commentators will have more to say about the variability in the ways that people engage with and make sense of art objects.

Another way forward, we believe, will be to develop chronologies for art or visual systems. This is not necessarily in search of styles, although of course the items with features seen to constitute style will be at play. We are referring to large-scale changes in visual and cultural systems in which artworks are made and exist. These might include, for example, Davis’ ‘successions’ to visuality; Baxandall's ‘period eye;’ Kubler's ‘series of linked solutions;’ patterned ways of ‘abducting agency’ per Gell. These are likely to be variable, synchronically and through time, and we can hope they leave tangible traces. As we have seen in this issue, while most groups and societies will have them, it is fair to say that the modes for knowing, materialising and doing art are rarely identical. Sometimes, even if they might work the same way (for example, idol worship), they may be antithetical, for example, in finding faith or artifice in god-images (Latour 2010, 4–7).

Archaeological commentators might begin to map out and theorise long-term trajectories which exhibit change. One of the greatest ages for artistic innovation and production in the world, the Early Intermediate Period of the Central Andes (approx. A.D. 1–700), was owed in great part to a dramatic replacement in the ways that people saw, represented and engaged with social others through objects (Lau 2013). Art and monuments no longer flourished as the exclusive worlds of pilgrimage cults, temples and universal divinities. Ancient groups created new things (portrait head vessels, colourful tapestries and embroideries, and ancestor sculptures for example), which oriented how to see their worlds and societies: and, in particular, how emerging leaders and nobles came to be recognised as different and embodied analogically through objects, in life and death. Suffice it to say here that the processes of this change in art-making society were complex, but they only emerge as a problem after having recognised a sequence of change.

A final point of reflection concerns analytical units. Further thinking is required about how singular artworks can be representative of collectives (whether societies of people or societies of objects), and how collectives relate to (for example, amplify, contain, transcend, display) the individual artwork. Can social (pre)histories be drawn from single objects without texts, and how? This is not merely a problem of working outwards from masterpieces, originals, or ‘prime objects’ (Kubler 1962, 39ff.). It is also one of working ‘in’ from the record, by selection and sampling. The analytical unit and its comprehension form a basic problem because the record of the past cannot help but be partial and mute; regularly, artworks are found de-contextualised and hold status as artworks ex post facto. Archaeologists very often deal with classes of objects or phenomena from which things come to be singled out, but in so doing, the process of examining that thing, say an ‘artwork’, then runs the risk of tautology. One increasingly vital way this has been mitigated has been to reconceptualise artworks/objects as extensions or parts as persons, who are themselves networked and implicated in social relations and object histories. We have also seen in this volume a great reliance on ethnographic comparison, insider commentary and author experience to secure lines of reasoning. These provide some foothold to observe and gain traction on singularised, analytical units.

It is paradoxical that one of the keys for examining the future of ‘art makes society’ may be by revealing the pasts of those societies evoked by the art. For example, many Amerindian art traditions, ancient and historical, share the commonality of emphasising the mythic past, on the one hand, and involve their art objects to refresh society through that past, on the other. This seems to obtain in any number of cultures, wherein people use elaborate objects, the things they value greatly, to reference the past but also facilitate reenactments of a past narrative to constitute new persons within established social arrangements. This describes the Hamatsa Dance, with its giant bird masks which initiate new dancers, just as well as the splendor of burial cults of Classic Maya nobles, the god-image costumes in the Moche Warrior Narrative, Araucanian burial mounds, among many other examples. By intervening in narrative traditions, art objects become enmeshed and fundamental in the practices of social reproduction. Just as important, we can recognise continuity in art's function, as it were, yet also recognize spectacularly distinct ways for instrumentalising that capacity to fashion societies anew.

George Lau, Veronica Sekules and Margit Thøfner

The Editors, World Art