Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Get Animism in Art and Performance 1st Edition Christopher Braddock (Eds.) free all chapters
Get Animism in Art and Performance 1st Edition Christopher Braddock (Eds.) free all chapters
OR CLICK LINK
https://textbookfull.com/product/animism-in-art-
and-performance-1st-edition-christopher-braddock-
eds/
Read with Our Free App Audiobook Free Format PFD EBook, Ebooks dowload PDF
with Andible trial, Real book, online, KINDLE , Download[PDF] and Read and Read
Read book Format PDF Ebook, Dowload online, Read book Format PDF Ebook,
[PDF] and Real ONLINE Dowload [PDF] and Real ONLINE
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
https://textbookfull.com/product/art-artists-and-pedagogy-
philosophy-and-the-arts-in-education-1st-edition-christopher-
naughton/
https://textbookfull.com/product/performance-art-in-practice-
pedagogical-approaches-1st-edition-aapo-korkeaoja/
https://textbookfull.com/product/performance-and-spectatorship-
in-edwardian-art-writing-sophie-hatchwell/
https://textbookfull.com/product/nanomedicines-design-delivery-
and-detection-martin-braddock/
Fair Scheduling in High Performance Computing
Environments Art Sedighi
https://textbookfull.com/product/fair-scheduling-in-high-
performance-computing-environments-art-sedighi/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-art-and-science-of-seismic-
interpretation-christopher-l-liner/
https://textbookfull.com/product/artists-in-the-archive-creative-
and-curatorial-engagements-with-documents-of-art-and-
performance-1st-edition-paul-clarke/
https://textbookfull.com/product/embodied-performance-as-applied-
research-art-and-pedagogy-1st-edition-julie-ann-scott-auth/
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-performing-observer-essays-
on-contemporary-art-performance-and-photography-1st-edition-
martin-patrick/
EDITED BY
CHRISTOPHER
BRADDOCK
ANIMISM
IN ART
AND
PERFORMANCE
Animism in Art and Performance
“What beings are alive? What constitutes ‘alive’? Timely questions, in particular
to the notion of nonhuman lifeforms in a time of mass extinction; the ecological
resonance of the term ‘survive’, which is often mistaken for ‘alive’, and the ques-
tion of how indigenous cultures matter today, cultures where the concept ‘inani-
mate object’ don’t hold sway. Where such questions start and stop, who gets to
have them and why, are the subject of this wide ranging and learned book”.
—Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University,
USA, and author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence
Cover credit: Shannon Te Ao, Follow the party of the whale, 2013. Two channel video, colour
and sound, 12:51, 2:49 min. Cinematography Iain Frengley. Courtesy of the artist and
Robert Heald Gallery
Thank you to the artists represented in this book; for your cooperation
and enthusiasm, and for discussing manuscripts with your corresponding
authors.
Kōrero (talk) with my colleagues-in-writing is an animating force that
altered the course of this book. This began at the conference Animism
and Material Vitality in Art & Performance, 11–12 June 2015, hosted
by the Art and Performance Research Group, Auckland University of
Technology (AUT). Thank you to the Session Chairs: Leali’ifano Albert
Refiti, Caroline Vercoe, Victoria Wynne-Jones, Misha Kavka, James
Charlton and Eu Jin Chia. Thank you to the School of Art and Design
Research Committee (AUT) for Research Capability funding.
Olivia Webb has been an outstanding research assistant, and I thank
the School of Art and Design (AUT) Research Task Force for her
funding.
Thank you Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa) for invaluable editorial
advice and assistance.
I thank the two anonymous reviewers for Palgrave Macmillan who
gave clear and critical feedback.
Our network of authors and artists has grown out of a pedagogical
community. The Art and Performance Research Group (AUT) activi-
ties, including studio critiques, reading groups and supervisions, inform
this book. I thank in particular Darcell Apelu (Nuie–NZ), Cora-Allan
Wickliffe (Ngapuhi, Tainui/Alofi, Liku), Layne Waerea (Te Arawa
and Ngāti Kahungunu), John Vea (Tonga–NZ), Kalisolaite ‘Uhila
v
vi Acknowledgements
vii
viii Contents
6 The Storm and the Still in the Art of Bridie Lunney 109
Simone Schmidt
8 Intra-inanimation 153
Rebecca Schneider
Index 277
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on Contributors
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Christopher Braddock
Positioning Animism
Exploring the interconnecting fields of visual arts, media arts and
performance art, this book investigates scholarship that might be under-
stood as corresponding with the term ‘animism’ along with a question
of ‘who’ or ‘what’ is credited with ‘animacy’. We are seeking out a loosen-
ing of the tenacious dualisms of the animate/inanimate in order that who-
ever or whatever might appear gains animacy. We explore this rich but
also contested area of scholarship through the discussion of potentially
controversial themes organized into four interrelated parts that address
Indigenous Animacies, Atmospheric Animations, Animacy Hierarchies
and Sensational Animisms. Using animism—and the interrelated notion
of animacy as a central construct—rather than, say, new materialism,
the post-human, the anthropocene, performativity or liveness (though
these remain part of the conversation in this book), helps us explore
ideas often discredited in Euro-American thought and scholarship. These
ideas include an acknowledgement of the personhood and hau (life
breath) traversing art and other treasured things (taonga) in te ao Māori
C. Braddock (*)
School of Art and Design, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland,
New Zealand
e-mail: chris.braddock@aut.ac.nz
(the Māori world) (Cassandra Barnett), kōrero (talk) with the dead
through photography (Natalie Robertson), the sun as an animate being
with mauri (life force) (Janine Randerson and Rachel Shearer), life in the
algorithm (Anna Gibbs), breath as mobile energy (Simone Schmidt),
atmospheric communities (Edward Scheer), intra-inanimacy in queered
and raced formations (Rebecca Schneider), feminist new materialism
and interanimacy (Amelia Jones), pure and present action-at-a-distance
(Chris Braddock), posthuman animalistic play and ritual (Martin
Patrick), art as hylozoic convulsive matter with spiritual movement
(Stephen Zepke) and a mineral ontology of contemporary art (Amelia
Barikin).
But before continuing, I need to point out that there is a problem
with the title of this book. And it’s not the sleight of hand that separates
art and performance. Animism is the problem, and what it summons up
for the shores of Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). It’s good to talk about
problems. Māori call this kōrero. I find myself saying to students on an
almost weekly basis, ‘In every problem there’s a gift, so let’s talk about
it.’ In the chapters that follow, Cassandra Barnett (Ngāti Raukawa),1 and
Natalie Robertson (Ngāti Porou), explore kōrero as a vehicle of mauri
(life force); a force that travels between people, people and things. But
Māori would not call this animism.
As Cassandra has noted, there is a wider philosophical and cultural–
political question hovering over parts of this book which percolates into
the rest. The question circulates around when and how it is appropriate
to use Māori concepts such as ‘mauri’ in the discussion of non-Māori art
practices—and more generally within Western discursive paradigms such
as animism—without misrepresenting the cosmology they come from
(while always reminding ourselves that there is no one Māori and no one
West). We don’t expect this book to answer that question, but we feel
obliged to raise the issue. And since the book is clearly a participant in
that debate, it’s good to be witting rather than unwitting about these
problems. This book was never conceived as a book uniquely concerned
with Māori world views about, for example, taonga and mauri. However,
stemming as it does from the shores of Aotearoa NZ, we necessarily need
involve, even be guided by, those indigenous frameworks (and clearly
state why, when we appear to be eliding those indigenous contexts).
From this perspective, the conceptual arc of the four parts of this
book is informed by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and educa-
tion) and Pasifika knowledge. Consequently, a number of chapters
1 INTRODUCTION: ANIMISM AND ANIMACIES 3
Ethnographic Animism
The reason for prioritizing a term such as animism—and questions of
human and non-human agency that arise from its critique—is strikingly
clear for writers in this book who address issues of indigenous culture.
This may be because the term animism arose directly from late nine-
teenth-century ethnographies on so-called ‘primitive’ indigenous peo-
ples. Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) was where the
term was reintroduced. Tylor understood the concept of animism as
a belief in a soul that could leave the body as an ethereal or vaporous
materiality and survive beyond death as souls or spirits belonging to all
manner of things, including ‘rivers, stones, trees, weapons’ that he notes
‘are treated as living intelligent beings, talked to, propitiated, punished
4 C. Braddock
for the harm they do’ (1920, 426, 457, 477). In this context, Tylor said
of Māori that they consider ‘the dreaming soul to leave the body and
return, even travelling to the region of the dead to hold converse with
its friends’ (1920, 441). And four pages later he notes that ‘spiritual ani-
mism’ crosses into a problematic lack of distinction between subjects
and objects: ‘Even in healthy waking life, the savage barbarian has never
learned to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective,
between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main
results of scientific education’ (1920, 445).
We will return to the evidently racist and evolutionist theories of Tylor
in a moment. For now, however, it is apt to point out that Ngā Puhi
tōhunga (expert) Māori Marsden is on record as saying that he disagreed
with early anthropological notions of animism. Marsden mentions ani-
mism during his conversation about the Māori idea of tapu, which he
defines as the ‘sacred state or condition of a person or thing’ (1992,
121). He criticizes early anthropologists for their view ‘that primitive
man held an animistic view of nature, by which they meant’, he quali-
fies, ‘that primitive man believed all natural objects to be animated by
its own spirit’ (1992, 121). Marsden does not cite which anthropologi-
cal viewpoint he is referring to, but he clearly puts forward a view that,
for Māori, ‘all the created order partook of mauri [which he defines as
life force and ethos] by which all things cohere in nature’, to which he
adds the addendum that ‘in human beings this essence was of a higher
order and was called mauriora (life principle)’ (1992, 121). Elsewhere,
he defines this life force or ethos in almost ecological terms:
An animate and other forms of life such as plants and trees owe their con-
tinued existence and health to mauri. When the mauri is strong, fauna and
flora flourish. When it is depleted and weak, those forms of life become
sickly and weak. (Marsden and Henare 1992, 18)
where one might least expect it. Talking about the impossibility of going
back to what the notion of animism might have once meant or stood for,
Isabelle Stengers states that ‘Reclaiming means recovering what we have
been separated from, but not the sense that we would just get it back. It
means recovering, or recuperating, from the very separation, regenerat-
ing what it has poisoned’ (2012, 187).6
Contagious Animism
This project of retrieving and regenerating animism in the context of
art and performance was central to my exploration of what I call ‘con-
tagious animism’, which was put forward in my Performing Contagious
Bodies: Ritual Participation in Contemporary Art (2013). In that book
I focused a good deal on those outmoded tropes of Western animism in
late Victorian anthropology on magic. I was keen to explore the incred-
ible history of Western perceptions of magical ritual and, in turn, their
relationship to art. What struck me was the equivocal manner in which
some late nineteenth-century British anthropologists—such as Tylor,
Henry Balfour (1863–1939) and James George Frazer (1854–1941)—
dealt with their ethnographic material. They seemed bemused by the
continuation of so-called ‘savage’ beliefs and practices in their own
contemporary societies. For example, Tylor chooses to overlook a his-
tory of the Protestant Reformation with its prohibition of Catholic
sacraments because transubstantiation was, in part, viewed as magical
practice. Tylor’s ability to disavow evidence of animistic practices in his
lifetime extended to his own experiences of English spiritualism and in
the seances that he sometimes attended, as noted in his diary of 1872
(Stocking 1971). In an 1869 paper titled “On the Survival of Savage
Thought in Modern Civilization”, Tylor equates what he calls folklore
traditions with the female, the lower classes and the infantile (Braddock
2013, 164–165). Yet his diary notes indicate that he is clearly bewil-
dered at how prominent members of society (such as the lawyer Edward
Cox, who founded the Psychological Society of Great Britain in 1875,
and General Augustus Pitt Rivers, founder of the Pitt Rivers Museum
in 1884) could take spiritualism seriously (see Stocking 1971, 102;
Braddock 2013, 165–166). Tylor’s perplexing analyses are standard for
a late nineteenth-century Victorian ethnographic separation of culture
and nature, in which a white, male intellect was seen as having evolved
to a superior cultural understanding separate from the natural and
6 C. Braddock
For Derrida, the trace is much more than the remainder of that which was
(for example, the trace fossil of a dinosaur footprint preserved in stone).
Rather, the trace calls up a spectral ‘absent presence’ that is also an ‘absent
present’, implicated in what Derrida calls the ‘becoming-time of space and
the becoming-space of time’ or espacement. (see Derrida 1984, 8)
1 INTRODUCTION: ANIMISM AND ANIMACIES 7
For centuries, but with particular intensity in the later nineteenth century,
scholars in the so-called Western tradition have taken it for granted that
some concepts are not just culturally but racially superior to others. Do
not pretend, then, that the philosophy of language is not a racial project.
Prejudice is at work not only in the application but in the production of
categories of thought. ‘When we do philosophy,’ says Wittgenstein, ‘we are
like savages [die Wilde], primitive people.’ Philosophers are comparable to
‘savages,’ in his view, because they pay too much attention to what words
mean and think too little about how they are used. Tylor affirms the oppo-
site. Savage philosophers, by his account, are too preoccupied with how
words are used and pay too little attention to what they mean. It does not
8 C. Braddock
matter who is right. The point is that a difference between races has been
projected onto an enduring scholarly debate about the relation between
signs and things. (2007, 6)
Entangled Animisms
All these entanglements are approached differently in the book you are
holding.8 As Barnett notes, within te ao Māori, animism is a practice to
be activated for its efficacies, rather than a term to be understood, cri-
tiqued or explained. In line with her comment, she offers an important
opening thought when she writes:
Such proximities and interleavings afford closer enquiry into where recent
Western animisms (as enabled by new materialisms and philosophies of the
posthuman and anthropocene) and indigenous world views meet—and
where they part ways. Like Māori taonga, contemporary art can invoke a
cosmic vibrant materialism, an interconnectedness of all things, and a con-
cern for the role/responsibility of the human within this. But somewhere
around the assigning of ‘anthropomorphic’ personalities and behaviors
(and even names) to things, the Western philosophies still tend to become
troubled. Taonga Māori land us in a place where ‘animism’ has profound
efficacies, yet does not exist as a critique-able term or concept.
‘animate and alive because they instantiate ancestral hau (life breath),
mauri (life force) and mana (spiritual power) in the present’.
Barnett’s indigenous world view prompts a few more preliminary
observations about this book. As already emphasized, many of us are
writing from the shores of Aotearoa NZ. This fact pervades even the
style guide for this book, where Māori terms such as wairua (spirit) are
not written in italic because they are not ‘foreign’ words to Aotearoa NZ
as te reo Māori (Māori language) is the founding indigenous language.
From these shores, an idea that mauri pervades the atmosphere and land,
with a capacity to move through people and things, is not a concept (not
a ‘representation’) that signifies or stands for something else (Henare
et al. 2007, 2, 12). As with what we are slowly learning from the onto-
logical turn in anthropology, instead of asking, for example, ‘can mauri
move through photographs of the dead?’, we take this as something that
is. Accordingly, the ‘can’ question about mauri turns to a question of
how we might kōrero this phenomena and its efficacy as an experience
encountered. The editors of Thinking Through Things suggest this as a
heuristic approach that seeks to animate possibilities (2007, 6) in a shift-
ing focus from questions of knowledge and epistemology towards those
of ontology (2007, 8). They go on to write: