Anthropology and Art Practice [Paperback]

Anthropology and Art Practice takes an innovative look at new experimental work informed by the newly-reconfigured relationship between the arts and anthropology. This practice-based and visual work can be characterised as 'art-ethnography'. In engaging with the concerns of both fields, this cutting-edge study tackles current issues such as the role of the artist in collaborative work, and the political uses of documentary. The book focuses on key works from artists and anthropologists that engage with 'art-ethnography' and investigates the processes and strategies behind their creation and exhibition.

The book highlights the work of a new generation of practitioners in this hybrid field, such as Anthony Luvera, Kathryn Ramey, Brad Butler and Karen Mizra, Kate Hennessy and Jennifer Deger, who work in a diverse range of media - including film, photography, sound and performance.Anthropology and Art Practicesuggests a series of radical challenges to assumptions made on both sides of the art/anthropology divide and is intended to inspire further dialogue and provide essential reading for a wide range of students and practitioners.

WhatAnthropology and Art Practiceillustrates above all else is that anthropologists and artists are already crossing disciplinary boundaries and not only working in each other's fields but literally working together. There is no need, then, to make speculative remarks about the similarities between artwork and anthropology-work or about the possibilities of collaboration. It is true, of course, that anthropology entails creativity and that art entails culture, but the book opens up a world of art-anthropologists and anthropology-artists that is already testing, exploring, and creating on multiple borders--or showing that borders are unstable, porous, and inevitably indefensible. Jack David Eller

This volume is an exciting contribution to a burgeoning literature on the ways that artists and anthropologistlÃu