Daniela Félix MARTINS (UFBA - Federal University of Bahia - Brazil, Brazil) | [email protected]
The sociological study of the arts locates itself in the first instance in competition with the humanist perspective that amalgamates the history of art, aesthetics, and criticism. The fundamental question in this confrontation, for the sociological approach, lies in its accusation of a lack of acknowledgment of the scientific process by the rival analysis. In other words, the humanist perspective is tributary to the erudition of intellectuals, and their almost esoteric capacity for the analysis of formal elements, being as it is, weak in guarantees of objective parameters capable of generalization.
The heart of its preoccupations, for the historians of art, is the work of art understood from the “internalist” point of view. The properly formal elements of the work(s) in question are analyzed: the content of the images, the techniques and other means of creation, and the influence of other works from the same tradition. In this way, we understand the work as a singular expression significant of its creator.
For this tradition, the personality and psychology of each artist are intrinsic to the works and styles. One considers them spontaneous expressions of individual genius, responsible for master works that make evident a universally acknowledged greatness. As a consequence this tradition put into common currency the idea of the genuine that attracts to itself the original and
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the authentic. The accusation of sociologists of the arts is that usually, this tradition mixes itself with a psychological formulation for the study of art as a social phenomenon.
The social sciences established other bases for understanding art: an “externalist” perspective. That is to say, one investigates how the relationship between the two fields of art and society, recognized as distinct, establishes itself. The fundamental point of this analysis is the presentation of the artistic as immediately and directly referent to something external to the aesthetic or to art itself. Delineating the social as an autonomous field through a controllable method, art becomes in this way a means to ask sociological questions. One refers artistic productions to social causes: through considering these, one investigates how the artistic is the reflection of a determined group or certain social forces. The sociology of art should see in its object, specifically a representation, more or less precise, of the social. Art would reveal in this manner a structure, the interests of certain groups, as a reflection or form in which the social transfigures itself.
The social sciences produced, starting from the 19th century a new style of thought: the causal style of explanation based in the prior existence of a given structure, fairly inaccessible, in which one encounters already established, all the social actors and their roles. One deals here with the explicative status of the analysis, the search for the final causes which phenomena have, as a characteristic necessity of an image of thought that makes regularities, the logical chains innate to social facts, emerge. Consequently, a panoramic vision capable of incorporating great conjunctions or macro models is fundamental. In this way, the alternative to the diletantism that conceived art as creation ex-abrupto, fruit of subjects bequeathed with free will, acting according to their wishes, is a species of sociological determinism in which creation becomes impossible. The artistic phenomena appear to be the expression of a march in single file arbitrarily traced through successive phases.
For sociologists, the humanist perspective accepts a conventional definition of art, without questioning the socially constructed nature of such a definition. In the first instance, art for the sociological perspective never has anything to say, it is derivative of these extra-aesthetic aspects located in another dimension. Work, author, reception, etc. are the representations of this “macro-reality” that is the social context. Interest is not in what art does, but in what is possible to analyze through art but outside of it, that is to say society. Artistic phenomena in this perspective are immutable and a temporal. One deals with a type of social science which, as an inheritor of hylomorphism, thinks form and matter as ontologically separate conditions that a given creator could unite and, putting occidental thought at the disposal of the imaginary, ramify itself in such a way that “form came to be viewed as imposed by an agent with a certain intention or objective in mind regarding a passive and inert matter” (INGOLD, Tim)
A one-way street, either artistic creation is the emanation of an exceptional individual and we respond in general terms to the questions that confront us, for example: how to comprehend the late artistic status of various works? What are the parameters for conceiving determined works as artistic and others as not? Or, no creation is possible because art is the reflex of a determined social order, submitted to an evolutionary process that transcends particular events and situations. One deals with the dichotomy between individual and society, in which the emergence of one hides the other. Individual and society, as with the corpus of Newtonian physics, cannot occupy the same time and space, or as Gabriel Tarde argued:
The interminable battle between free will and determinism, the epic duel between these two adversaries […] is the most admirable spectacle, whose surprise, however, diminishes if one observes that in general there is a profound equivocation, a reciprocal incomprehension, at the base of these “eternal problems”. (TARDE, Gabriel)
In this sense, the initial methodological effort is to found an alternative territory, by saying good bye to thought sustained by interrogations such as “who made it; what does this signify; what is it?”, and moving instead toward the space of the problem, “how does one make it?” One will define the research then as confidence in this adventure of launching oneself together with
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artists, producers, the public, as well as public policy makers, galleries and museums. The methodological dimension of this research is distinct from the classical sociology of art. In this sociology, the researcher assumes a distanced position as a privileged observer capable of identifying the truth of the social, starting from the artistic phenomenon. In my case a less aseptic posture is fundamental; it is necessary to be amongst events and get your hands dirty, or, thinking along with Stenger in her reflection about the ecology of practices:
"(...) An ecology of pratices may be an instance of what Gilles Deleuze called ‘thiking par le milieu’, using the French double meaning of milieu, both the middle and the surroundings or habits. ‘Through the middle’ would mean without grounding definitions or no ideal horizon. ‘With the surrounding’ would mean that no theory gives you the power to disentangle something from its particular surroundings, that is, to go beyond the particular towards something we would be able to recognize and grasp in spite of particular appearance."(STENGER, Isabelle)
One understands performance art in this research as a confluence of associations between artists, audience, producers, public policy makers, galleries, museums, etc. Each of these agents manifests elements of performance art in the world, and through them, we can follow its existence by the singularization that performance art demands in terms of practices from these agents. Therefore, the research is a kind of ethnography of artistic practices.