Reading: Hal Foster: The Artist as Ethnographer

Some Key Points:

Assumption that the site of artistic transformation is the site of political transformation. this site is always located elsewhere.
Assumption that the other is always outside and that this alterity is the primary point of subversion of dominant culture.
Assumption that if the artist is not socially or culturally other - then he has limited access to this transformative alterity.
if the artist is perceived as other - then he has automatic access to it.
The danger: ideological patronage.

Marxist: this quasi-anthropological paradigm in art tends to displace the problematic of class and capitalist exploitation with that of race and colonialist expression.
Post-structuralist: It doesn't displace this productivist problematic enough, because it tends to preserve the structure of the political, to retain the notion of a subject of history, to define this position in terms of truth and to locate this truth in terms of alterity.

'Other' the self versus 'selve' the other.
Effect of projecting alterity; overlapping with our own unconscious.
Self-othering can easily pass into self-absorption.

Why this prestige of anthropology in contemporary art?
- anthropology is prized as the science of alterity.
- it takes culture as its object and it is this expanded field of reference that post-modernist art and criticism have long sought to make their own.
- ethnography is considered contextual, what contemporary artists and other practitioners aspire towards today.
- it is interdisciplinary.
- it is the self-critique of anthropology that makes it so attractive.

Over the years, the institution of art, could no longer be described simply in terms of physical space - studio, gallery, museum etc - it was a discursive network of other practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities.
Art passed into the expanded field of culture that anthropology is thought to survey.

What are the results?
Ethnographic mapping of a given institution or a related community.
But these 'critiques' are often commissioned, and site specific work faces the danger of becoming a museum category, where the institution imports critique for purposes of inoculation.
Values like authenticity, originality, and singularity, banished under critical taboo from post-modernist art, return as properties of the site, neighborhood or community engaged by the artist.
Naturally and unintentionally, focus can wander from 'ethnographic self-fashioning' in which the artist is not decentered so much as the other is fashioned in artistic guise.