Kazuto Nakatani

<p>One pressing issue in the anthropology of art today is to overcome 'representationalism,' Representionalism here means a standpoint that seeks to inquire into questions about art by reducing them to questions about the representation of any world or reality. Whether relativism or constructivism, much of our theorizing on art has shared that standpoint. However, representationalism ultimately leads to excluding the origin of art from the world in which we live, because that standpoint is actually enabled by the premise of the dichotomy between the external-objective world (the physical, body, nature, etc.) and the internal-subjective world (the mental, mind, culture, etc.) . That standpoint is based on the traditional idea of so-called 'cognitivism,' which reduces human cognition to the operation of mental representations in our brain, so as such, the origin of art is often shut away in the 'inner world' of artist, completely mystifying the practice. For example, one genre of modern art is called 'Art Brut.' But it is a typical case of the mystification of art in a sense that its notion is defined by the peripheral condition in the sociocultural world in which its makers (include psychiatric patients, prisoner, or the mentally-disabled persons) are situated, and their absolute 'solitude, silence, and secret.' The ecological approach created by J. J. Gibson, an American perceptual psychologist, suggests one way out of the problem of representationalism and dichotomy. His perspective, which stresses in principle the reciprocity between humans and the environment, closely parallels M. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological thought on body and his unique theory of painting. Merleau-Ponty says that every use of the human body is already 'a primordial expression,' and that the painter's work is to prolong that expressive operation of the body and amplify it into painting. 'It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into painting.' According to Merleau-Ponty, painting/art is not the representation of the world but the crystallization of the painter's/artist's style of dwelling in the world. Another crucial implication of Gibson's approach is pragmatic ontology. Unlike substantial ontology, pragmatic ontology associates reality not with substantial essence but with relational action. As Gibson says about his theory of affordance, 'the object offers what it does because it is what it is.' By the way, Gibson's view shares basic ideas with the anthropological theory of art of A. Gell, since he also seeks to consider the efficacy of the art object in the relational field of actions in which objects are situated. According to Gell, the art object is not a vehicle of meaning, such as a sign or symbol in semiologic or interpretative theories of art, but an index in which the artist's intentionality and agency are inscribed. It causes its viewers to act through the process of abduction, and by doing so it creates a social relation around itself, which in turn provides a channel for further social relations and influences. Based on the above discussions, this paper examines painting activities in two art schools for people with mental disabilities in Denmark. Those schools are a part of the network of activity and employment offers for the mentally handicapped that has been established in each community since the 1990's. But their distinctive feature is their management by the framework and ideas of adult learning (leisure), known as folkeoplysning, which developed in Denmark in the 19^<th> century. Some of the students in the art school participate for just one year, while some move into and out of the school every a few years. Still others have continued to participate for many years as 'artists.' First, it should be noted that</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>

<p>In this research, I looked at two facilities in Japan that are developing art activities for people with mental or physical disabilities, and explored the external promotion and internal practices of those activities. Such facilities have been on the rise in this country since the mid-1990s. Art has been one of the most important fields for anthropological study since the mid-1980s. The authenticity or universality of art can no longer be dealt with in a way unrelated to specific historical contexts and the relations of power. Therefore, critical studies of the Western art world and its institutional and ideological system-the so-called "Art-culture system"-have been widely carried out, with the production or construction of cultural differences being of central interest in that field in the past two decades. Art activities of people with disabilities are also closely related to these discussions, because the objects they create are often considered to be endowed with special worth, connected with their social or cultural marginality in the Western art world. Namely, that genre is called "Art Brut" (i.e., "Raw Art") or "Outsider Art." Today, those concepts have also received wide recognition in Japan as well, through publications and exhibitions. The first purpose of the paper is thus to explore how the hegemonic system of the Western art world has exerted power-through the collection, classification and evaluation of objects-on the art activities of people with disabilities in contemporary Japan, and also to explore how these activities respond to that system. But there is an important point to be stressed here. Namely, people who can be recognized as 'artists' do not always create something autonomously and reflectively, referring widely to the external art world or their social or cultural situations. In other words, the above-mentioned perspective postulates the particular notion of a 'subject' who can negotiate, contest, or the like. Discussions about art so far have often failed to notice local contexts, for they have paid too much attention to the process of responding to the hegemonic system of the Western art world, such as negotiation, resistance, and contestation. To consider only such relations with the external system is likely to abstract difficulties, social relations, and the plurality of art in local practice. Alfred GELL's anthropological theory of art suggests one way out of this problem. He analyzes art-like situations or works of art through social relations in the vicinity of objects mediating social agency, instead through the institutional system of art world, indigenous aesthetics, and semiotic (symbolic) functions. He focuses on the network of agent-patient relations in which an art object is embedded, and also points out that such relations must be articulated to the agent's biographical "life project." The second (and most important) purpose of this paper, accordingly, is to explore the kind of social relations formed between people with disabilities and others through art activities in local contexts, and how such relations are articulated to the lives of the agents (i.e., the people with disabilities) themselves. For, example, one of the facilities examined in this paper is promoting a strategy to accomplish its purposes of escaping from poverty and normalization by making use of discourse in the art world. Indeed, the strategy of ensuring people with disabilities ('clients') by selling their works at a high price in the Western art market can be interpreted as negotiation for the hegemonic system. But it is also true that asymmetric relations of power can be seen between people with disabilities and those without them in the process, as far as the authenticity of art is concerned. Meanwhile, the other facility studied in this paper is promoting the</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>