The artist and the stone: project, process and value in contemporary art

Translation

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2020.171004

Keywords:

Art, Project, Process, Product, Value

Abstract

Contemporary art practices are often described as projects or processes. But when can we say that an art project or process is finished? How is it valued? Does it become a product? In this article, I will present a particular artwork, ‘The Artist and the Stone,’ that consisted in taking an artist and a 2 tone stone from Palestine to Barcelona, Spain. Through this example, I will explore the different temporalities of process, project, and product in contemporary art. My argument is that process, project and product are often contradictorily juxtaposed in an ongoing tension that is revelatory of a deeper contradiction between art as a form of value and art as a form of life.

The article The artist and the stone: project, process and value in contemporary art, by Roger Sansi, is available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17530350.2019.1604401

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

  • Roger Sansi, Universitat de Barcelona

    Doutor em antropologia pela Universidade de Chicago (2003). Foi professor em Goldsmiths, Universidade de Londres, UK, e atualmente é professor na Universitat de Barcelona, Espanha. Tem feito pesquisa sobre religião e arte AfroBrasileira e Arte contemporânea em Barcelona. As suas publicações incluem. Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian art and culture in the 20th century (Berhan, Londres 2007) e Art, Anthropology and the Gift (Bloomsbury, Londres 2014).

References

Abbing, Hans. 2002. Why are artists poor? The exceptional economy of the arts. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Bergson, Henri. 1998 [1911]. Creative evolution. New York: Dover.

Bishop, Clair. 2012. Artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. London: Verso.

Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2006. The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. 1999. Formes de Vie. L’ art moderne et l’ invention de soi. Paris: Denoel.

Buskirk, Martha. 2003. The contingent object of contemporary art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cabanne, Pierre. 2014. Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp. Paris: Bibliotheque Allia.

Collier, Stephen and Andrew Lakoff. 2005. On regimes of living. In Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, ed. Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier, 22-39. Oxford: Blackwell.

Dominguez Rubio, Fernando. 2014. Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA. Theory and Society, vol. 43, no. 6: 617-645.

Eco, Umberto. 1962. Opera aperta. Milano: Bompiani.

Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and agency. London: Clarendon Press.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value. New York: Palgrave.

Grant, Kim. 2017. All about the process: the theory and discourse of modern artistic labor. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Gratton, Johnnie and Michael Sheringham (ed.). 2005. The art of the project. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Groys, Boris. 2002. The loneliness of the project. New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory, vol. 1, no. 1.

Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being alive: essays on movement, knowledge, and description. London: Routledge.

Kester, Grant. 2011. The one and the many: contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Durham: Duke University Press.

Kunst, Bojana. 2014. The project at work. In The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour, Frankfurt, 29th May to 1st Jun. 2014.

Lee, Pamela. 2004. Chronophobia on time in the art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lidow, Derek. 2014. Start-up leadership. New York: Wiley.

Lippard, Lucy. 1997. Six years: the dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Mauss, Marcel. 1985 [1938]. A category of the human mind: the notion of the person; the notion of self. In The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history, ed. Michael Charriters, Steve Collins and Steven Lukes, 1-25. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Munn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of gawa, a symbolic study of value transformation in massim exchange. Durham: Duke University Press.

Myers, Fred (ed.). 2001. The empire of things: regimes of value and material culture. Oxford: James Currey.

Plattner, Stuart. 1996. High art down home. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The politics of aesthetics: the distribution of the sensible. New York: Continuum.

Sansi, Roger. 2015. Art, anthropology and the gift. London: Bloomsbury.

Schneider, Arnd and Christopher Wright (ed.). 2013. Anthropology and art practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. Cutting the network. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 2, no. 3: 517-535.

Velthuis, Olav. 2007. Talking prices: symbolic meanings of prices on the market for contemporary art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Weiner, Annette. 1992. Inalienable possessions: the paradox of keeping-while giving. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Published

2020-08-24

Issue

Section

T.I.R. - Translations, Interviews and Reviews

How to Cite

Sansi, Roger. 2020. “The Artist and the Stone: Project, Process and Value in Contemporary Art: Translation”. GIS - Gesture, Image and Sound - Anthropology Journal 5 (1). https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2525-3123.gis.2020.171004.