Contemporary Fieldwork Aesthetics in Art and Anthropology: Experiments in Collaboration and Intervention

Abstract

This essay suggests affinities between contemporary changes in classic research practices of anthropological ethnography and forms of research built into projects of conceptual, performance and installation art. The scene of fieldwork encounter is transformed by the challenges of new objects and conditions of research in anthropology. These challenges are thought through the description of an exemplary conceptual art project produced at the Tate Modern Museum, while allowing for the differences between the aims and ethics of anthropology and those of art.