Writing Art and the Transfiguration of the ObjectFred Myers Department of Anthropology
New York University Abstract: This paper takes up the question of “artwriting” as a material practice of commodification, moving objects between regimes of value. We draw on the resonances between McChesney’s recent dissertation on the production and circulation of Hopi pottery and Myers’s study of Aboriginal acrylic painting to illuminate our delineation of artwriting as a signifying practice that is central to the recontextualization of new, hybrid or “reproduced” indigenous objects within the regime of value delineated by what James Clifford calls the Western art-culture system but which might also be understood as “the aesthetic industrial complex.”
In considering artwriting’s contribution to the particular materiality of fine art objects and their wider valuation as objects, we have three points to develop. The first point concerns the commoditization process; the second concerns the materiality of the artwriting representations themselves (their own materiality); and the third concerns the potential for agency to emerge from this process.
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