Comment
S O C I A L AG E N C Y A N D T H E
C U LT U R A L VA L U E ( S ) O F
T H E A RT O B J E C T
◆ FRED MYERS
New York University
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articulated in support for the art and its use in gifts and exhibitions
worldwide, addressed a rivalry with the US and a need to convince the
major Cold War protagonists that Canada was a ‘true Northern power’.
These constellations of interest define value in material objects, repre-
senting distinctive and changing regimes of value, but the essay
addresses itself equally to Gell’s charge that analysts should look to
agency in objects and their form. The essay directs us to Inuit art as a
collaborative production, its existence a testimony to (and an objectifi-
cation of) the participation of Inuit artists with outside agents. Concomi-
tantly, the Inuit have gained income and self-confidence from running
cooperatives, but their visibility as ‘artists’ (rather than mere commodity
producers) has raised their standing within and outside Canada and has
laid the basis for the credibility of forms of Inuit sovereignty within
Canada. Surely, this perspective on the circulation of indigenous arts –
moving significantly beyond the stale debates about authenticity and
appropriation – suggests the productive potential of viewing these
objects as distributed agency whose success is accorded back to those
who made them. Graburn’s example illustrates the complex way in
which indigenous art can simultaneously proclaim difference or distinc-
tiveness from the surrounding nation-state and also express that nation’s
identity within the world of nations. Objects, with their multivalent
potentials, seem uniquely able to carry out such symbolic projects.
Charlotte Townsend-Gault’s focus on the circulation of Northwest
Coast aboriginality in evanescent form – crest designs on copper-colored
tissue paper, stylized killer whales on canvas tote bags – makes the case
that these are ‘declarations that are also disguises’. Withholding while
giving (modifying Annette Weiner’s famous 1992 discussion of ‘keeping-
while-giving), these forms and their makers make tangible (i.e. they
objectify) a recent shift in Native/non-Native relations and Canadian
multiculturalism. The properties of glistening, copper-colored tissue, she
argues, convey and transmute something about coppers (like crests,
markers of social transactions on the Northwest Coast), and in this sense
they are not simply a degradation of the emblematic idea of the copper
for Northwest Coast people. These forms – the miniature, the mimetic,
the mechanically reproduced – are not just the inauthentic; they are not
simply commercial kitsch.
In a brilliant and subtle analysis of the meanings embodied in the
evanescent forms, Townsend-Gault explains the complicated stances
performed in these extensions of indigenous presence. Against the sense
that extreme circulation is the worst situation, they provide (1) an agency
disturbing to the spectatorial regime intrinsic to ‘not-yet post-colonial
relations’, a regime of display in which ‘conflicted political relations
were subsumed into looking relations’. (2) Further, as a form of action,
the visual deflects attention from or masks conflicts present. In this
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References
Burger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde (trans. Michael Shaw). Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Burke, Kenneth (1973) The Philosophy of Literary Form. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Clifford, James (1985) ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, Art in America
73 (April): 164–77, 215.
Clifford, James (1988a) ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, in James Clifford The
Predicament of Culture, pp. 215–51. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Clifford, James (1988b) ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, in James Clifford The
Predicament of Culture, pp. 21–54. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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