Assembling nature as an art object
A single video case analysis of two landscape artists navigating social context
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/si.v3i2.115673Keywords:
ethnomethodology, the new sociology of art, gestalt contexturesAbstract
Using video data obtained from a one-day field ethnography, I utilised the ethnomethodological respecification of ‘gestalt-contextures’ to describe in fine detail how two artists and a social researcher haphazardly organised themselves to navigate river terrain. The art object took on many meanings within the ongoing context of the group’s verbal and non-verbal, vernacular, and expert ability to observe the subject matter. Whilst organising join-attention to an array of natural objects, the participants defined pathway limitations, and rerouted, reviewed and positioned their bodies amongst the landscape. These socially acknowledged features typically remain unexposed when art sociologists discuss ‘artwork’. Due to the value of understanding the production of artistic objects in, and as a variety of socially maintained endogenous orders, the reportage of ‘gestalt assembly’ may furnish ‘the new sociology of art’ with materials for pursuing an alternative style of social research: the investigation of ordinary social context as member’s ongoing enacted achievement.
References
Acord, S.K. and DeNora, T. (2008) ‘Culture and the Arts: From Art Worlds to Art in Action’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 19(6), 223–37.
Alexander, J. (2004) Cultural pragmatics: Social performance between ritual and strategy. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 527–573.
Bar-Hillel, Y. (1954). Indexical Expressions. Mind, 63, 359-379.
Baxandall, M. (1972) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Becker, H., Faulkner, R., Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. (eds) (2006) Art from Start to Finish: Jazz, Painting, Writing, and Other Improvisations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
De La Fuente, E. (2007) ‘The New Sociology of Art: Putting Art Back into Social Science Approaches to the Arts’, Cultural Sociology, 1(3), 409–25.
De La Fuente, E. (2010) ‘The Artwork Made Me Do It: Introduction to the New Sociology of Art’, Thesis Eleven, 103(1), 3–9.
De La Fuente, E. (2019). After the cultural turn: For a textural sociology. The Sociological Review, 1-16
DeNora, T (2000) Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
DeNora, T. (2014). Making Sense of Reality: culture and perception in everyday life. Sage, London
De Stefani, E. (2014). Establishing joint orientation towards commercial objects in a self-service store. How practices of categorisation matter. In. Nevile, E., Haddington, P., & Heinemann, T. (2014) (Eds.). Interactive with objects: Language, materiality, and social activity. London: John Benjamin’s Company
Dominguez Rubio, F. and Silva, E. (2013). Materials in the Field: Object-trajectories and Object-positions in the Field of Contemporary Art. Cultural Sociology, 7(2), 161-178.
Fele, P. (2008). The phenomenal field: ethnomethodological perspectives on collective phenomena. Human Studies, 31, 299-322.
Fox, N. (2015). Creativity, anti-humanism and the ‘new sociology of art’. Journal of Sociology, 51(3), 522 – 536
Garfinkel, H. Lynch, M & Livingston, E. (1981). The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11(2), 131-158
Garfinkel, H. (2007) Four Relations between Literatures of the Social Scientific Movement and their Specific Ethnomethodological Alternates. In, Orders of Ordinary Action. Aldershot: Ashgate
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall, New Jersey.
Garfinkel, H. (2002). Ethnomethodology's Program. Rowman & Littlefield, London
Garfinkel, H., and Sacks, H. (1970). On formal structures of practical actions. In: JC McKinney, and EA Tiryakian (Eds.) Theoretical Sociology. (pp. 160–193). Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York
Garfinkel, H. and Wieder, L. (1992). “Two incommensurable, asymmetrically alternate technologies of social analysis”, in: Text in context: studies in ethnomethodology (Graham Watson, Robert M. Seiler, eds. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, pp. 175-206.
Gerber, A. and Klett, J. (2014). The Meaning of Indeterminacy: Noise Music as Performance. Cultural Sociology, 8(3), 275-290
Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, 96,(3), 606-633
Goodwin, C. (2000). Action and embodiment within situated human interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1489-1522.
Green, G. (1996). Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Gurwitsch, A. (1964). The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Hanks, W. (2009). Fieldwork on deixis. Journal of Pragmatics, 41, 10-24
Heath, C. and Vom Lehn, D. (2004) ‘Configuring Reception: (Dis)-Regarding the “Spectator” in Museums and Galleries’, Theory, Culture and Society, 21(6), 43–65
Hester, S. Francis, (2007). Orders of Ordinary Action. Aldershot Ashgate.
Hennion, A. (2019). Objects, Belief, and the Sociologist: The Sociology of Art as a Work-To-Be-Done. in A. Smuditis (ed.), Roads to Music Sociology, Musik und Gesellschaft, Springer
Hennion, A. and Grenier, L. (1999). Sociology of Art: New Stakes in a Post-Critical Time. In Sociology: Advances and Challenges in the 1990s. SAGE Publications.
Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C. (2000). Embodied reference: A study of deixis in workplace interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 32, 1855-1878
Kelly, R. (2019). “It’s over There. Sit Down.” Indexicality, The Mundane, The ordinary and The Everyday, and Much, Much More. Human Studies. Online: 11 June 2019
Kreplak, Y. (2018). Artworks in and as practices. The relevance of particulars. In: Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field, edited by Philippe Sormani, et al., Routledge
Laurier, E. (2004). Noticing. In R. Leen. Castree and R. Kitchin. The SAGE handbook of human geography (vol.2, pp. 250-272). London: SAGE publications
Lynch, M. (1993). Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lynch, M (2015). Garfinkel’s Studies of Work. Douglas Maynard and John Heritage (eds.), Harold Garfinkel: Praxis, Social Order, and the Ethnomethodology Movement, submitted to Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Lynch, M. (2011). The origins of ethnomethodology. Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology: A Volume in the Handbook of the Philosophy of Science Series. New York: Elsevier Science & Technology
Liberman, K. (2013). Semantic Drift in Conversations. Human Studies, 35(2), 263-277
Livingston, E. (2016). Ethnographies of Reason. Aldershot: Ashgate
Maynard, D. and Clayman, S. (1991). The Diversity of Ethnomethodology. Annual Review of Sociology, 17, 385-420.
Nishizaka, A. (2006). What to Learn: The Embodied Structure of the Environment. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 39(2), 119-154
Schegloff, M. (1972). ‘Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place’, in Studies in Social Interaction (David Sudnow, ed.), pp. 75-119
Sudnow, D. (1978). Ways of the Hand. Cambridge: Polity Press
Tanner, J. (2010). Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art. Cultural Sociology, 4(2), 231-256
Turner, R. (1970). ‘Words, utterances and activities’, in Understanding Everyday Life: Toward the Reconstruction of Sociological Knowledge. (Jack Douglas, ed.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Watson, R. (2008). Comparative Sociology, Laic and Analytic: Some Critical Remarks on Comparison in Conversation Analysis. Cahiers de praxematique, 50, 203-244
Watson, R. (2016). Harold Garfinkel and pragmatics. Handbook of Pragmatics. Vol. 20. John Benjamins Publishing Company
Watson, R. (2017). De-Reifying Categories. Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis. London: Sage
Zembyalas, T. (2014). Artistic Practices. Routledge. New York
Zolberg, V. (2015). A Cultural sociology of the arts. Current Sociology, 63(3), 1-43
Zolberg, V. (1990). Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2020 Author and Journal
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
We follow the Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of Open Access.
The journal allows the author(s) to hold the copyright without restrictions.
The journal allows software/spiders to automatically crawl the journal content (also known as text mining)
The journal provides article level metadata to DOAJ
The journal allows readers to read, download, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and allow readers to use them for any other lawful purpose.
