The artist as anthropologist of the current globalisation: a view on the present-day cultural imagination in the artworks of Xu Bing, Takashi Murakami and Shahzia Sikander

Abstract

Drawing on Joseph Kosuth’s characterisation of the artist as an engaged anthropologist, Maet argues that nowadays we can consider visual artists, such as Xu Bing, Takashi Murakami and Shahzia Sikander, as artist-anthropologists who express and research how cultural imagination is affected by globalisation. First, in line with De Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the author stresses the relativity of the cultural references that are present in their artworks. Because the considered artists cut across the divisions between different cultural expressions of art, he argues that they bring an enlarged modernisation process into view, called global modernity. Next, the article elaborates on the connotations of signifiers. The author maintains that Xu Bing, Murakami and Sikander play with forms of cultural expressions, as well as with the cultural connotations attached to them, and that in doing so they create a new cultural imagination. Finally, the discussed artworks are typified as balancing acts respecting different cultural influences. In reference to Papastergiadis, this is interpreted as an aesthetic cosmopolitanism and it is argued that the discussed artists respect aesthetic and cultural limits to enable this ethical stance.