5 Art Makes Society

Art makes society: an introductory visual essay

Elizabeth DeMarrais and John Robb

Art is doing, not viewing!

Regarding art as a behaviour an instance of ‘making special' shifts the emphasis from the modernist’s view of art as object or quality or the postmodernist’s view of it as text or commodity to the activity itself (the making or doing and appreciating), which is what it is in many pre-modern societies where the object is essentially an occasion for or an accoutrement to ceremonial participation . . . (Dissanayake 1995, 223)

Art as material culture

An excellent example is Ku ̈chler’s (1988) study of Malanggan statues, which were never intended to last. Although Western collectors treat the statues as art, purchasing them for display in museums, the statues were meant to decay, with the making of the statue serving to cement and to secure the memory of the deceased. Thus, the things archaeologists and anthropologists understand as ‘art’ include images and objects produced for uses that range well beyond what ‘art’ does in our own society.

Art as action

To the extent that art grows out of performance and participation, it involves a sequence of gestures that may draw groups of people together. In this way, art may constitute a group of participants, involve them in making it or using it in ritual and other ways. These social activities will frame art for discussion or reaction as well as, in some cases, involve viewing by an audience. These approaches to art are distinct from recent conventions invoking a solitary artist producing work for the museum or gallery wall.

In modern society, art allows people to ‘remake themselves and their worlds, while commenting on their values and beliefs’.

Art creates sites of activity

Figure 1. Ypres, Belgium: memorial arch for British war dead of World War I. The walls are covered with the names of the dead, in a form of textual art; note space for ceremonial assembly within monument. Photo: J. Farr.

Visual art can help to create a ritual setting by setting it apart, distinguishing ritual space from quotidian contexts.

While ancient people no doubt took aesthetic pleasure in such settings, we cannot simply regard them as ‘art for art’s sake’ in the modern sense; much as in the example of paintings in a doctor’s waiting room, the choice of content, style and placement for such imagery 
 whether theological and mythological, naturalistic or erotic, or geometrical 
 may have helped create appropriate spaces for particular activities or social relationships.

Art is participatory

Masks are quintessentially participatory art; they enrol people into temporary assemblages of people and artifice, or create composite, living moments of altered realities.

Beyond specific events, the wearing of badges, insignia, or regalia in daily life also generates shared identities, marking out individuals as members of groups. Figure 5 shows a pilgrim badge from England, worn to display the pilgrim’s active participation in pilgrimage and his or her wider affiliation with Christianity. Such forms of dress not only allowed people to objectify and to categorise themselves; they also enmeshed others in political relations such as colonialism (Loren 2013).

In addition, the making or using of art objects or images may involve multiple participants, who forge bonds of solidarity through shared activities. The making of the art may be as (or more) important as the final product, seen for example in the collective endeavour of sewing a handmade quilt. Handprints attesting presence and participation are among the oldest motifs in human art, occurring in Palaeolithic painted caves. 

Figure 5. Pilgrim badge, England, fourteenth century. British Museum 1898,0720.1. Image: # The British Museum.

In modern settings, graffiti can attest to a human wish to assert one’s presence. The epigraphs, all along the lines of ‘Peppe loves Maria’, convey anything but the patriotic sentiments that the monument is supposed to evoke, but they do attest participation in the spirit of a school trip.

Other art objects whose appropriate use involves destruction include Mexican pin ̃atas, elaborately decorated wedding cakes, ritually punctured Mimbres bowls of the American Southwest, and ‘Celtic’ metalwork deposited as votives in rivers and bogs. As a further archaeological example, the earliest clay figurines, made during the Palaeolithic of Central Europe, may have been ‘action art’ intended to explode dramatically when placed in a fire (Farbstein 2013).

Art creates representational models for social relations

Over time, images are inter-nalised as people absorb cues that guide behaviour and ensure conduct appropriate to a given social setting. Bourdieu’s (1977) insightful analysis of habitus made clear that children and others learn by doing (and by observing others), rather than through direct instruction. Since art objects are often lasting, durable, and visible, they reinforce a vision of ‘the way things are’ that may be difficult to contest.

Art as cultural capital

Architectural styles provide a particularly prominent way of asserting cultural capital.

Inomata suggests that the willingness of high-status individuals to engage in demanding craft produc- tion work is evidence of their commitment to cultural ideals. 

Art as a medium of exclusion, resistance, or layered meanings

Brumfiel (1996) provides a compelling case that healthy-looking, standing female figurines, produced by local communities in the Aztec hinterland, were intentional forms of alternative art, produced in response to negative depictions of women (often shown dismembered or kneeling in submission) 

Arts of protest and resistance are two manifestations of this phenom- enon. Both may be expressed through unsanctioned, counter-authoritar- ian genres. The graffiti example above seems innocent of political critique, but graffiti and defacement often express political sentiments. The spray can may be a ubiquitous tool for contemporary dissent, and sometimes this contestation of meaning is intentionally foregrounded in art. In a recent article on the BBC website, the artist Antony Gormley described his experience of erecting an early sculpture of a life-size human figure in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1987, during the Troubles, a time of often violent political conflict (McCann 2011). Intending his work to be ‘a poultice, and a benign piece that related to the feelings of the people in that place and their situation’, he remembers the vigorous attack on the work as it was being placed in the ground. ‘They were throwing stones and sticks and then spitting on the sculpture. The sculpture came over the top dripping with saliva, the missiles kept coming.’ The work was eventually doused in petrol and set alight. Gormley continues, ‘This was excellent. This was the work as poultice throwing violence and evil onto itself that would otherwise be experienced in other ways.'