The line as mediator: mapping the lacuna in contemporary Icelandic art

Abstract

This paper takes as its subject the conceptual valence of the line to bring together the disciplines of anthropology and art practice and, in doing so, reconfigure the knowledge practices and methodological stances embodied within both. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Reykjavik with a contemporary Icelandic artist, I suggest that the line's specificity can act as a means of mapping the move from an anthropology that is retrospective and static towards an approach that shares much in common with art practice and is, potentially, projective and imaginative. Taking seriously the recent call to develop ‘an anthropology with’ (Ingold), this paper explores the epistemological limits in the artist's drawn line. In so doing I suggest that the specificity of the line for these disciplines lies, conversely, in their ambiguity and openness of form: an approach that has the capacity to bridge our knowledge practices towards an open-ended interpretation.