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1 (Contemporary) Hungarian Art Practices, Their Political Field and their Tentative Inclusion in Alfred Gell’s Art Anthropology SZIGETHY Gabriella 1. Introduction My aim in this paper is twofold. First, I’d like to re-read Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency nearly twenty years after it was first published and see how his idea of a radical re-positioning of objects in „art-like situations” can be used in politically informed interferences in a place never exactly defined in Gell’s work, Eastern-Europe which is neither East, nor West in his binary view. Gell’s essentially homogeneous understanding of the Western art canon does not calculate with the specificities of art production on the peripheries of this canon where similar institutions of art exist with very different histories, impacts and ways of usage however. Why I think so or how I can prove this is probably part of this first endeavour. Secondly, since my academic background is that of art history and aesthetics I am especially interested in how what we mean by Western art production or ideologies informing this specific branch of objects can be explained without aesthetics. In my understanding aesthetics has been an unalienable part of this production since the end of the 18th century. Gell’s view is evident in this respect: evaluative, prescriptive, meaning-oriented ideologies are hardly of anthropological interest. Quite understandably the postcolonial discourse unfolding in the years before and after Gell’s book has been effectively casting away aesthetics as an elitist, white privilege on ethical grounds and as such has apparently been the love-child of Gell’s anthropology. Here I’d like to argue for a more nuanced view: Jacques Ranciere and more recently Claire Bishop have been reclaiming aesthetics by rephrasing the socio-political ambience of its origins and history. Maybe in that light Gell’s abduction of agency can still be explained in a meaningful way? Maybe aesthetics is capable of encountering the other without the exploitation of the other after all? In the last couple of years all components of what we call the institution of art have been questioned and requestioned, challenged and contested, endlessly. This has been a period of grave disunity and increasing restlessness. By „the institution of art” I mean a conglomerate in fact, the artist, the actual art object, the viewer, the place where art is stored, ie. the museum and art criticism in general, too. To add to all this apparent „freeze and liquefy, […] freeze and liquefy again” (Sholette 2016) situation in contemporary art the content of each and every component of this conglomerate has endlessly been redefined, too, so from that angle we cannot even be sure whether contemporary art is a meaningful entity at all. By the redefinition of contents of these components I mean giving up authorship for the sake of participation and distributed responsibility, giving up objecthood for the sake of process-based events and interventions, giving up spectatorship for the sake of the equal partner or collaborator, giving up the idea of a museum inherited from the 19th century and going out with art production into hitherto unprivileged and unframed places and spaces and finally adopting new languages to describe this production altogether. Hans Belting, one of the few remaining representatives of a grand school of art history - who however hammered the first nail into the very coffin of this grand school at the beginning of the 1980’s when he asked if it was the end of art history after all -, (Belting 1983) has recently declared that „There is no common notion of art that necessarily applies to all societies around the world.” (Belting 2012: 16) By admitting this he seems to have had admitted defeat in a battle having been fought about one of the most crucial historical issues in and around art, namely, whether it is possible to find a common denominator for objects and activities whose aims are manifold: to please, to shock, to awe or maybe to teach or to freak out or to engage their viewers in a devotional manner or otherwise. Belting’s main concern in this essay is this common denominator: he argues that for this to be born the West has to give up its obsession with history, the East its obsession with ethnicity so 2 that in this new global world a new global art, (a new contemporary art in the East, too) be born whose place will be the (occasionally) newly politicized museum, a desirably independent and local institution. The museum, one of the most successful and probably least ethical realizations of aesthetics in the Western world, and its defence against a surge of restitutory claims, has for now been in the centre of debates for at least two decades and Belting’s standpoint is articulate: to simply say that Western museums (or any museum in fact) are the only places where previously acquisioned objects can safely be stored for future reference is not enough, to say the least. I should also add here, already referencing Gell’s argument to some extent, that neither will any museum survive by repositioning their artefacts and exhibits according to a simple new shelf order where aesthetics is introduced as something already accessible to any culture or site of production of objects and activities. New contact networks are needed, both analogue and digital, where ownership and knowledge can be renegotiated (Hogsden – Poulter 2012). Belting however mentions „societies” in his aforementioned statement and for me it suggests maybe even he thinks any new discourse on the institution of art should open up into the direction of wider contexts. Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, published originally in 1998 was at the time and still remains one of the most radical structural repositions of the notions of art (Gell 1998). It has been rethought and criticised by many: its „raw” and tragically „incomplete” nature (Gell already knew only too well his condition was incurable while he was finishing his book and did indeed leave behind notes for a revision) still gives you food for thought. A book of essays, edited by Robin Osborne and Jeremy Tanner and published in 2007 (Osborne – Tanner 2007) or another one, edited by Liana Chua and Mark Elliot in 2013 (Chua – Elliot 2013) are cases in point: these publications took up the line where Gell had dropped it nine and fifteen years before respectively by inviting authors to use Gell’s system in more or less established sub-branches of Western and Eastern art canons. In the 2007 publication the editors’ main initiative was to open up a bit Gell’s system and see if his Gellogram, his algebra-like formalization of relationships in „art-like situations” can be and if yes how exatly put to use in a variety of situations from Early Egypt to the Elizabethan age to Peru or to Athenian painted pottery. The 2013 volume goes further down this road and invites chapters which investigate the disciplinary boundaries of the Gellian system. My paper is intending to follow this line: through occasional critique of Gell’s original book I’ll try to bring back to his system something whose Gellian criticism at the time was just and appropriate but which has since been partially reclaimed and repositioned, that is, aisthesis. In this paper I can only address a fraction of these compex issues: Belting’s admission of a grave new turn in the assessment and appreciation of art is the door through which I go back in time and take up Gell’s definition of an anthropology of art he left to us as his legacy nearly twenty years ago. Reading Gell in retrospect is I know a somewhat a-historical thing to do, however, this is how the extraordinary clearness of his predictions will be shown best, on the one hand, and this is how my reading his book will best signal a personal shift from the history of art towards the anthropology of art on the other. I will only look at the first chapter of the book („The Problem Defined: The Need for an Anthropology of Art”) and will focus on two conspicuous absences or only half-heartedly addressed issues which has since turned out to register two very important issues of the art industry and in it, the reposition of aesthetics, in the past two decades. One is the grey area that is neither Western nor Eastern (tribal, primitive, aboriginal etc) in a traditional sense, the art output of Central and Eastern Europe. For obvious reasons this is the geographical area I can at least in part account for. This issue altogether misses from the book. The other trajectory is the notion of the political or of politics where by the political I certainly do not understand an ever historical outline of party politics. For Gell it is a part of the social, a definitive and distinct way to hold power and control but certainly always different from aesthetics. As far as I can assess his standpoint 3 politics plays a very important part of the social and the very logic of Gell’s system will call it forth, but it never has anything to do with aisthesis, not even in connection with the Western artefacts he analyses in his books. Which is all the more surprising in light of his interest in Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and its vandalization in 1914. There is a third, maybe I should call it this time, „missing accent” which I intentionally have left out so far since it goes below the two trajectories mentioned before but which is central to my upcoming analysis of some situations of Hungarian art, and this is sculpture. Gell does mention by way of comparison some iconic pieces of Western sculpture in Art and Agency, like Bernini’s Pluto and Persephone or Michelangelo’s Moses and David, in fact, he gives a pretty comprehensive Gellian treatment to the Moses but apparently with sculpture the tentative array of interpretations would open up dangerously and rip up the rigorous framework of the Gellogram.1 Even when his choices are obvious pieces of the Western museum canon. 2. Grey Zones Twice Over In this chapter I’ll outline first very quickly what is important for us now from Gell’s introductory chapter and then see to what extent it is possible to incorporate into all this a more acute understanding of the political in connection with some old and new Hungarian art production whose aesthetic evaluation is problematic or non-existent so will probably lend itself relatively easily to an anthropological survey. Gell’s main point in this first chapter is to move away from then upcoming contemporary assumptions of „tribal”, „primitive”, „non-western”, „exotic” (all in quotation marks), art granted equal status with Western art on the grounds of not being essentially different from „ours”. This approach, he says, is rooted in the same modernist aesthetic it apparently, and rightly, dismisses. In fact culture-specific or period-specific aesthetics in and of themselves will not create a new common definition for all arts of the whole world ever, because they are meaning-based, static, evaluative schemes he says. Instead, we need an anthropology of art whose subject-matter will be social relationships where objects can as well be agents just like human beings. Gell’s main concern throughout the whole first chapter is to get rid of „culture” which he apparently considers a heavy ballast in the history of anthropology, an abstraction, a burden aesthetics has likewise carried ever since its inception at the end of the 18th century. Anthropology the way he sees it („to put it bluntly, considered good at providing close-grained analyses of apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances etc.” at a biographical level, he adds) (Gell 1998: 10) will have to be differentiated from sociology (supra-biographical) on the one hand and from social or cognitive psychology (infra-biographical) on the other. Gell’s recognition of the importance of social relationships, their inception, their dynamics, their mobility, their variedness in the assessment of artefacts was to signal with exceptional clairvoyance a radical turn (one of the many) for historians and theorists of Western art. Belting’s already mentioned question, or rather, dictum that had put an end to 1 Maurice Blanchot phrased this beautifully when he wrote about sculpture as „rebel space” inside, „in the center of space” (Blanchot 1982 [1955] :191), as something in isolation, in „haughty remove”, in possession of an „orphan wisdom” created apparently by the chisel alone (ibid: 192). Blanchot’s phrasing is indeed catchy and is a good example for where, among others, Gell’s understanding of aesthetics might have originated from. The difference between literature and sculpture according to Blanchot is in reading which is „the chisel alone” in the case of sculpture. Aesthetic autonomy in both cases is however evident, to be upheld, retained. The question is whether the act of reading equals the work of the chisel. I think not and Blanchot’s tone is slightly doubtful, too. Separation alone will not tell us how the space „unoccupied” between the object we call artwork and the viewer/reader operates and to what extent it operates in fact towards the production of aesthetic autonomy. Maybe this unoccupied territory is where social interaction and intervention is happening. 4 exclusively historical studies of art and was followed by a semantic turn towards the inner workings of the art object (critiqued already by Gell on the same grounds as culture or aesthetics earlier on: he avoids he says throughout his work the notion of symbolic meaning because these are abstractions of no use to the anthropologist) (ibid: 6) was now further scrutinized from a spatial, and then from a social point of view. With the spatial turn in visual culture came around a new interest in local, non-canonical, often popular art productions, Eastern - Europe amongst them and so now I should get down to see how to insert this into Gell’s system. Instead of further historisizing Art and Agency (which so far has proved useful for me since I originally set out to bring back something that was nearly lost and for this we need some kind of reconstructive surgery on the one hand, on the other as a one-time art historian I intuitively still look for solutions first in history. Sometimes it lets me down.) let me introduce here a situation, the one that originally made me read and „use” Gell. Basically all of my study-abroad students who arrive in Hungary for the first time routinely go and visit the Budaörs Statue Park (Memento Park) sometime early on during their semester in Budapest. Most of them come from, say, the unspecified and undefined West. Judging by the fact that you can find the Park’s little brochure everywhere in youth hostels in Budapest, which are potentially frequented by a young, international clientele, also, by how the website of the park operates, the visuals of it and the sights and somewhat clickbait-y activities it advertises you may safely assume that my students are part of a new spectatorship. What I mean by this is coming on next. My students generally react to what they see in the park and the way the statues are exhibited there in two distinct ways. Option 1: the majority of them take it as some kind of a local amusement park or a funny theme park. Now I think an amusement park and a theme park are different spectacles or at least are spectacles on a different scale and the dangerous closeness of them to each other in young people’s mental maps of the world is somewhat frightening. An amusement park would be a glocal phenomenon: a localized global way of interacting with tourists, offering them places to go to spend their time. There are certain similarities in amusement parks, certain „rides” you can find in each and every amusement park around the world, so no matter where you are geographically you’ll find the same or similar activities, the same or similar affects you are supposed to be feeling. A theme park however is the recolonialization, precisely, the „disnification” of the public space: certainly has roots in and relations to the actual surroundings, the actual social and political context. Its obvious origin is in the Disneylands based on the classic animated feature figures of the movie giant but the idea has since devoured and sanitized a lot of previously publicly owned space. So for the sake of the ever fuller economic exploitation and commercialization of the public space a new narrative, one that sometimes entertains real bits of a social, historical context, sometimes entirely fictitious, is spread out on a growing perimeter of the neighbourhood. A theme park is the Disneyland-type amusement park taken to a new level. Examples would include the Golden Lane and its neighbourhood in Prague, the entire city of Venice in Italy by now or, for that matter, large parts of Budapest where the desirable affect is the authentically seedy, late state-socialist Eastern-European outpour of melancholy.2 Or, option 2, a few of my students always ask if I think this is art. To these students my answer is always yes. And then they would say ok, but in what way. They perfectly sense the statues being outcasts, locked away, displaced, uprooted. The less than glamorous installation which altogether decanonizes these objects. Also, they often complain about something you can at best call an „unframed” quality of the site. These young people would want some more 2 A good theoretical summary of recent studies in the commercialisation of the public space is Bodnár 2015. 5 and this time authentic information: the somewhat cheesy and by all means awkward display of merchandise is not enough interaction for them. Not to mention the fact that interaction is not necessarily the kind of relationship they want to engage in this time. More like participation probably, a meaningful, digested way of intervention. Out of codified space obviously means to them out of (art) history, at the same time, the commercialized open-air museumisation of a place which does not have direct, local contacts with the dire events, only some vague seal of quasi-authenticity raises doubts in them as to how exactly they should behave or remember in this place.3 I would certainly fail if I wanted to explain these statues and the context of their ending up in the park based on an art-historical agenda. Instead, I chose to leave out aesthetics altogether from our discussions of these statues and steered my students towards Gell’s analysis. A Gellian analysis of any one of these statues as agents in a socio-political ambience would probably take them closer to an understanding of how any artefact operates in its inmediate place and at the time of construction. By calling these statues indexes according to the Gellogram they will be able to look at non-canonical artworks, products of popular culture, of peripheral geographies as material things which are capable of motivating „abductions of an art-related kind.” (ibid: 28) What’s more, since Gell explicitly says he knows such a system frees him from the uncomfortable pressure, even constraint to precisely define what art is (ibid: 6-7) we are now free to turn towards the issue of „unframedness”. Once we have unloaded the weight of aesthetics we can start thinking about repositioning the artefacts as indexes into new contexts and see if they can still operate as agents, i.e. what kind of knowledge, control or power relations they will channel about and of their prototype. Now who or what the prototype is an intriguing question. To show how his system can operate in Western art contexts Gell looks at Reynold’s portrait of Doctor Johnson, the Mona Lisa and the Slashed Rokeby Venus, Velazquez’s painting being slashed multiple times by Mary Richardson in 1914 in Art and Agency. The portable, framed picture, especially a portrait, is certainly the best embodiment of what art means in the West, also the best example to show how a prototype works in a Western context. Sculpture has always been a more complicated story, especially since the beginnning of the 19th century when it was discovered sculpture in the public space could generate uncomfortable misunderstandings.4 The multiple reactons to a sculpture, especially in an extended field (Krauss 1979) can make it impossible to formalize the specific interactions and agencies at work and can dilute the agentive web into a meaningless hub of tentative options eventually: Modernist art in the West certainly has some peculiarities which make Gell’s system seem ponderous and stiff, not seamlessly adaptable at all. One reason for this feeling is what Belting has called the West’s obsession with history which in turn is associated with value, aura, singularity and, well, aesthetics after all. You can never by the nature of things can discover the facts, accents and power relations to the full inherent in a Western artefact, so you decide to radically curb the scope of the object and put it into a theoretical frame. This has proved impossible in the case of the gigantic statues in the Memento Park: altough there is a physical and theoretical frame whose obvious task would have been to seal 3 A somewhat similar issue has been recently raised by Berlin-based Israeli artist Shahak Shapira’s Yolocaust project whose website was taken down two weeks after the lauch of the project. The artist himself claimed his „undouche” projekt a success, however, a lot of researchers worldwide have pointed out, mostly in social media, the necessity to differentiate between a memorial site and a memorial. 4 Politics and sculpture, their interconnections, their complex and complicated history together would be an interesting idea to explore with the help of the Gellogram: the relations between sculpture and viewer, the expected impacts of sculpture on viewer and the use of sculpture in the public space by the viewer are all implicitly parts of an anthropology of art. 6 the theoretically porous (otherwise hard and inpenetrable) surfaces once and for all and to create a new, desirably somewhat comic, distancing system of agencies the objects still transmit a lot of their original prototype’s dictates. So when my students are looking for answers, would like to know more, would like to see these statues in their original habitat they are basically looking for meaningful reactions and want to behave as an active spectatorrecipient. They first turn to me and ask me how it was back then when as a 6-year-old I first walked past the huge Marx and Engels statue on Jászai Mari Square alone, unattended on my way to see my Grandma and soon understand occasional non-reaction is a reaction, too. Now to round off a bit this chapter here are two more suggestions to my students for an agenda for future research. One is the positioning of the prototype who or what is not simply a patron or a commissioner whose likeness the artist creates in portraiture. It is a human agent of something more of a compound so when they feel they actually deal with something bigger than lifesize they are probably right. If they look around in Budapest today they will actually see a lot more public memorials which are informed by the same prototype.5 It’s true the agencies of the prototype and of the index seem exceptionally strong in the case of public memorials in general and locally in Central-Eastern Europe particularly. The blatantly aggressive political content however is not a novelty or local phenomenon. If they understand this, it is going to be easier for them to understand even the gigantic dimensions better. The other would be some help maybe as to what it means to meaningfully react to such objects and how they can actually initiate these interventions. As belated recipients of these statues they can either be agents or patients in Gell’s system. But even as spectatorrecipients they can go over to the other side and in that way effectuate substantial modifications to the original Gellogram where it is the patron-recipient who can only be an agent. This would be a novelty in the Gellogram but certainly not a novelty in terms of spectatorship and its 20th-21st century history. Very recent debates in the West over the nature of the participatory/collaborative show this will not be an easy story either. I am specifically thinking about here the Grant Kester - Claire Bishop polemic that has been going on since the middle of the 2000’s and flared up with Kester’s The One and the Many (Kester 2011) and Bishop’s Artificial Hells (Bishop 2012) about the nature and place of the political on the map of spectatorship and active participation versus passive or one-sided interaction/collaboration. Bishop’s insightful book does exactly the kind of thing my students can capitalize on: through first historisizing participation by going back the the Futurists’ theatrical engagements in the 1910’s and second broadening her scope by including EasternEuropean (among others), that is, non-Western participatory art practices she does what probably Gell would have liked to see to happen. Even though she does not mention his work her nuanced and substantiated vision of an active recipient as spectator with a thorough understanding of the peripheries of the West is in my view a great hommage to Gell’s and a treasure-house of hardly visible interventions through which the agent recipient is borne. 3. Aesthetics as Critical Act In the previous chapter I was trying to show, apparently further complicating an already challenging system, how spatial extension together with a new understanding of spectatorship, where all kinds of objects, even gigantic statues from the state-socialist era can trigger meaningful responses, work in reality. My theoretical background and somewhat a justification was Claire Bishop’s excellent book Artificial Hells which in ways complemented 5 Newly installed sculptures in Budapest, even the seemingly most harmless of them are politically heavily meaningful, prompting and expecting impacts and behaviours in favour of a certain political agenda. 7 my teaching practices once I had made an initial shift from art history and aesthetics towards an anthropology of art. Her treatment of participation in art, originally directed at the „misconceptions” she had encountered in terms of the growing exclusivity of the artist-aswitness-to-act-of-creation, that is, in Gellian terms, the artist as patient, has the unexpected result of giving if not an equal, but certainly a responsible enough role to the agent recipient, who is not a patron. Unexpected from the viewpoint of the Gellogram, not so unexpected from the viewpoint of Western ideologies on art though where the act of reception has for some time been considered an active role, if not exactly a participatory one. Obviously it would be meaningless and a-historical indeed to start tearing down the organic structure of the Gellian system, rather we should probably name that lurking shadow, the very reason for this perception of a hiatus on the artist-recipient axis of the Gellogram. In this chapter my intention is to raise the issue of the political in art in terms of Jacques Ranciere’s understanding of the sensible and its distribution. Ranciére’s oeuvre in the past 15-20 years has been consistently revolving around aesthetics and politics, their relationship and dynamics. To put it very simply according to Ranciére aesthetics and politics are mutually unalienable from each other in the aesthetic regime of art which is different from and partly chronologically follows the ethical and the representative regimes of art respectively. He says „Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time”. (Ranciére 2004: 13) The aesthetic regime of art is basically what we call modernity, roughly the past two centuries. At the beginning of the 2000’s he was not alone with his interest in issues of visibility (see e.g. Bal 2003) but he definitely was one who connected these issues directly to politics: the tools of control and power in his view have always been intricately linked to visibility and vice versa. In his "Les paradoxes de l’art politique” Ranciére says the art object, once an object of viewing, now becomes act or is becoming bond but that this becoming is only effective (meaning it only retains its art-like qualities) if it keeps reflecting on its very act of becoming (Ranciére 2008: 78).6 This would be a new understanding of once evaluative, normative aesthetics based on objecthood, authorship and autonomy, more like a constant oscillation between reality and reflection. There is no this side and the other, only a critical realization of a refraction through which, to use Gell’s term, art-like situations are happening. Apparently here between 2000 (the original year of publication of Le Partage du sensible) and 2008 Ranciére moved closer to contemporary art and became more interested in the mobility of the distribution of the sensible and the critical features of art production. And finally in his Aisthesis (Ranciére 2013) he outlines something that looks like an alternative history of modernity based on personal choices, substories, forgotten places and people. Gell’s original art nexus, his formal sytem of relations between agents and patients through indexes, is felt not enough flexible to handle this oscillatory nature of much of today’s Western art, however, it was one of the first initiatives to respond to a growing disbelief in aesthetic values. Ranciere’s understanding of the political in art and his redefinition of aesthetics in „Les paradoxes…” are registering a social turn in the West, the production of an 6 For some unfathomable reason apparently there is no valid English translation of this essay, originally published in Le spectateur emancipé, in 2008. The Hungarian translation of this book follows the original, French line-up (published in 2011). A text („The Paradoxes of Political Art”) at some points resembling „Les paradoxes…” was published in 2010 in a collection of essays entitled Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics. And finally the book The Emancipated Spectator (published in 2009) contains a wholly different essay „Aesthetic Separation, Aesthetic Community” (first version published in 2008 in Art and Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods ) at where „Les paradoxes…” should be. 8 increasing amount of socially-engaged (or participatory or collaborative) art which can only be explored with the expansion of the Gellogram. At this point I think it will be useful to sum up a bit my somewhat diverging thoughts. I do not mind at all this divergence however: what I’ve written so far is due to the agentive qualities of Gell’s book as an index (Boutcher 2013: 155) I’ve kept talking to him and showing him new books, asking for his opinion as it were… I am a visual type so for me the Gellogram works best when it is made slowly morph into three dimensions, a bubbling globule where infinite variations of agency are possible. Which I know may threaten the integrity of the system which in turn cannot be made account for some of the inherent characteristics of Western material culture. I have to be very cautious here because my academic toolkit is nowhere enough substantial to speak for the majority of material culture ever globally done but here is what my main concerns are. First of all, Gell’s system was designed to handle precisely this, material culture, artefacts, objects. So consequently it does not seem to be so „readily applicable” when it comes to processes or events of whatever nature. The problem is not that today’s Western art practices are often socially-engaged and people have problems to define them as art, but that they have given up objecthood and materiality, authorship and autonomy so it cannot be said for sure who or what the four entities of the Gellogram are any more. Not to mention Claire Bishop’s assumption again, that process-based participation is not a 21st century novelty at all, so we are talking about a lot of visual art here which apparently cannot be researched with the Gellogram. Secondly, the Gellogram is very „positive” so to say in that as Boutcher puts it „wants to keep problems of ’discourse’ – for the most part – in a separate, unopened box […]” (ibid: 162).7 The Gellogram cannot handle counter culture, opposition or critique which have been substantial parts of the material culture of the West whose spatiality (the rules of decorum, of hanging, of usage) has been integral to it, at least as we know it now, having given up our „obsession with history”. Even if Ranciére redefines aesthetics (the once evaluative, normative tool of canonization) as the skill of reflection, the ability to index refraction, it remains a discoursive element of Western material culture. Also, even if we have effectively given up, (as I strongly hope) the notion of „the culture” as a ballast since Gell’s book was published the respective knowledge of certain cultures for the researcher to be able to draw the formula for the given object’s social relations is strongly required. History seems to be part of this unopened box of discourse, too: the Gellogram, quite predictably and understandably, „does not see” vertically, only horizontally which is not very helpful when we deal with cultures whose memories have been plagued with recurrent periods of remembering and forgetting, of nostalgia and discontent, all present in their material culture, too, of course. And in that respect my original presupposition, that the non-existence of peripheries of what Gell calls the West, the grey zones like Central-Eastern Europe would be a problem, is not valid after all: the history of these parts is just one of many other discourses Gell does not want to deal with. So what I oh so secretively called a lurking shadow earlier in this chapter is nothing of a mystery at all: it is simply the discoursivity of Western material culture where social relations are ripe with (counter)-cultural and historical inhibitions if you wish. The Gellogram remains ever so true to itself when it declares its predominant interest and scope in objecthood. It is its realization and extension of the idea of agency in art-like-situations which I still find a brilliant and very helpful recognition. 7 I am greatly indebted to Warren Boutcher’s essay, for two major reasons. First, obviously, for having made me realize in my moments of despair that there always are relatively simple answers to seemingly disintegrating issues. Secondly, for his disarmingly frank reflection on the pronunciation of Gell’s name early on in his essay and settling this issue once and for all : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o02kr5taBEQ&t=207s . 9 And it is here now, at the end of the chapter that I can explain why „twice over” in the title of the previous one: in fact it is not twice over, it is as many times over as you wish, since it is always only a single one object you can put under the lenses of the microscope. The picture you get is always going to be pretty much framed in its own way; but even with the finest of resolutions what you see will only get more and more horizontal, never vertical in a discoursive sense. 4. Conclusion Having given up the problem of grey zones and that of aesthetics altogether by having replaced them as parts of the discoursive nature of Western material culture, I still have my initial two questions to answer. First, yes, I think Gell’s abduction of agency can still be explained and used as a methodology in a meaningful way. I in fact see more abductions of agency today than what Gell would have ever thought of. The question is not whether there is abduction of agency, but rather, how it is done and for what reasons. Is it state-funded propoganda art or critical of the institutions of late-capitalism? Is it an object or a process-based event? Is there single or multiple authorship? Is it a canonical object or something popular, peripheral, transitory, socially-engaged? And secondly, yes, I think aesthetics is capable of encountering the other without the exploitation of the other after all if and when we reposition it as a critical and reflexive skill and teach it as such. Social connectedness can work well with aesthetics if its preoccupation with chosen, canonical, auratic artworks is given up for the sake of a broader understanding of (the sometimes invisible) agency, all times. Political commitment (as altogether different from sheer extortion and vindication of power) is also an integral part of it. The broader understanding of agency means one more significant shift: the researcher, who does not feature in the original Gellogram will have to be a part of the newly extended notion of the agent recipient. The agent recipient is no longer simply a spectator the theory of which we have seen unfold in Claire Bishop’s book, but a participant, a collaborator and a researcher or critic, too. Through constant feedback and education this is how eventually multiple authorship is born. Encountering the other in art-like situations does involve the abduction of agency but I truly believe it is possible without exploitation. Update and acknowledgements: I dedicate this paper to Rahil, my brilliant Iranian student who, when she looked at the Gellogram for the first time in her life, asked me right away if it was possible to be an agent and a patient at the same time. She understood something. Bibliography Belting, Hans (1983): Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?. Deutscher Kunstverlag. Bal, Mieke (2003): Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture. Journal of Visual Culture, 2 (1): 5-32. Belting, Hans (2012): Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age. Disputatio. 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