FORUM
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The Editorial of our Winter 1997 issue.
The wide range of cultural expression addressed in the pages of this publication derives from almost every continent on earth and almost every age of the history of human culture. What binds together the varied threads of these wide-flung traditions is that they are non-Western, non-industrial, or not centrally associated with one of the cultural or political entities whose pressures have shaped Europe. As such, the material culture of these societies tends to fall outside the daily workings of Western consciousness and, except by specialists, are often bundled together for easy reference under a blanket term that seeks to define them as an entity. This terminology has varied over the years and has included such references as specimen, artifact, ethnographic art, primitive art, indigenous art, tribal art, and, more recently, arts premiers and even simply "art." None of these terms successfully convey the range of expression that they are intended to define, and particularly not the short and well-intentioned word art.
An interesting teaching exercise common in cultural anthropology, and also the subject of a small but thoughtful exhibition mounted by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, seeks to illuminate the differences between our perception of our own culture with our perception of others. It does so by defining aspects of ours using the terminology usually reserved for theirs. An example is the commonly used term "ethnography," a word that implicitly defines the material it is describing as occurring outside our cultural realm. In short, the artistic expression of other cultures, particularly those less technologically developed, can be referred to as ethnographic, while some comparable Euro-American objects are art. Once realized, this is a jarring revelation.
Not often broached in such exercises, however, are the valid aspects of the perception that it illustrates. Objects that are referred to as ethnographic can be imbued with meaning and intent that is not part of the history of our culture. Although we study them, appreciate them, and perhaps even own them, we can never understand these works the way we understand the products of our own artistic traditions, which we read with a vocabulary, both intuitive and learned, that is informed by our rootedness in our own culture. We may learn the vocabulary of another culture, but it is impossible for us to intuit its works in a way that is identical to a native of that culture. While ideals of artistry may be undeniably central to the execution of these works, to refer to them simply as art in the same way we refer to our own is to distort the intent of the makers. This process obscures the less readily accessible aspects of the works by drawing them through the paradoxical filter of ethnography into what we can define as art.
In the end, these objects are not simply art. They are more than art, and for us they present a window through which we can glimpse both differences and similarities in perception and differences and similarities in defining the place of man in the world, although vast distances of geography, culture, and time may separate us from their makers. While we are unlikely to ever grasp these objects in exactly the same manner as the peoples who produced them, our efforts can only bring us closer to an awareness of their thoughts and lives, and a better understanding of humankind.
-Jonathan Fogel