25J. c. Howard
some sculpture-anthropology relations:
reading the agency of franz boas and lev sternberg
ABSTRACT. This article deliberates arguments for sculpture being considered 'the most anthropological of the arts'. After introducing British contentions for the anthropological aspect of sculpture (Barlow, Gell, Ades and Bunn), it then applies, not without a hint of irony, the concept to sculpture specifically made for anthropological and ethnographic museums, using examples instigated by Franz Boas and Lev Sternberg (for the United States National Museum in the 1890s and the Kunstkamera in the 1910s). Hence mannequins and copies of Kwakiutl and pre-Hispanic Andean ritual figures (living and carved) are, respectively, explored. Correlations with associated acquisitions are made, e.g. Nivkh and Kadiwéu wood carvings, these involving their contemporary analysis by Voldemars Matvejs and Alberto Vojtech Fric. Particular attention is paid to Sternberg's commission of concrete copies of the San Agustín megaliths from Karl Theodor Stoepel. The subsequent placement of these in the Kunstkamera courtyard is probed in terms of potential altered meanings, identity and agency. Thereafter the enquiry moves to examination of the 'sculpted anthropologist', again using Boas and Sternberg as case studies. Ultimately, through the combination of these two distinct and direct anthropological sides of sculpture, a restricted case is made for the plastic art's anthropological identity.
KEYWORDS: sculpture, anthropology, Boas, Sternberg, Kunstkamera УДК 069:39
DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2020-4(10)-140-156
JEREMY C. HO W A R D - PhD, Senior Lecturer, School of Art History, University of St Andrews (St Andrews, Scotland, UK) E-mail: [email protected]
INTRODUCTION: FOLLIES OF THE SCULPTURE-ANTHROPOLOGY RELATIONSHIP
In 2019 I was asked to present a response to British artist Phyllida Barlow's 'provocation' that 'sculpture is the most anthropological of the arts'1. Initially I thought that Barlow, author offolly (2017), had done a good job in being provocative because her statement was nonsensical2. I still think it is, but at the same time I believe I have also managed to find some ways of making sense out of the nonsense. Hence here I concentrate on showing why I think sculpture is 'the most anthropological of the arts', while also refuting it. The provocation is highly problematic, especially if we were to consider, as the anthropologist Alfred Gell would have been prone to try, all the axes of indexes and meshes of intentionalities that are the workings of sculpture, if not all art3. Gell's formulations themselves serve as axiomatic for this paper, construing as they do an 'artwork' as a visible, physical index of a series of cognitive operations, and as such making sculpture, for example, an agent that mobilises what can be deemed aesthetic principles in the cause of developing social interactions. Although Gell frequently investigated three-dimensional artworks, he did not categorically differentiate between art fields, and instead argued for the 'personhood of art objects', seeing all those objects as 'social agents... in the system of terms and relations envisaged in the [anthropological] theory' (Gell 1998: 7). Thereby, and irrespective of any other definitions of them as art, they are subject to anthropology's 'biographical' approach, i.e. a depth of focus on their 'act' within the context of their 'life' (Gell 1998: 10). As material entities, the stylistic and formal conventions, individual works display comprise familial relations with other works. Hence they are axes of coherence with a Janus-like double identity that fuses internal mental process and external transaction in objectified personhood. This personhood is one that is fractal and collective, i.e. it is a phenomenon of distributed mind and efficacious agency, a 'doing' characterised by an element of protention that anticipates future works and another of retention that derives from earlier ones. This accords with consideration of anthropology's aim as being the making sense of human behaviour in the context of social relations and its being particularly 'good at providing close-grained analyses of apparently irrational behaviour, performances, utterances, etc.' (Gell 1998: 10). All this said, and irrespective of any institutional, aesthetic or semiological status afforded them, three-dimensional art objects, that one may decide to term 'sculpture', often form a material culture basis for anthropological enquiry. In many ways then what we are dealing in this essay is something to which I shall ascribe the term iSculpture or a similar neologism.
If 'sculpture' is the most anthropological of the arts, would it not follow that anthropology is the most sculptural of the social sciences or humanities? More so than art history, or aesthetics or philosophy? Being anthropological means being engaged in scientific accounting for human nature. Sculpture can also do this, if not perhaps in the way intended by the 'provocation', as I attempt to show here. Sculpture's being rather anthropological is questionable not least because it could be taken as meaning that it is a Western- and industrialised- society derived and arts-based intellectual enquiry. It, if sculpture is an it, can be this but only on occasion, and sculptural practice around the globe and across time shows that such an aspect is relatively minor. Furthermore, and connected to such an erroneous premise, having an anthropological aspect might therefore imply that sculpture is a Western engagement with the practices of 'less complex societies' (a term I also find problematic since its gloss implies the suffix 'than us'), i.e. that sculpture is still a product of an industrialised West but that it interprets 'primitive', 'folk' or 'non-Western' ways for the benefit of a privileged Western elite (I do not rule out that this might have value, because surely that elite can grow wiser and less narrow in its comprehension of the world by
1 The invitation came from the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK, as part of its contribution to a festival entitled 'Yorkshire Sculpture International'. My intervention took place on 10 July at the institute. Barlow is a direct descendent of Charles Darwin.
2 folly was Barlow's large, multi-material bauble- and column- dominated installation for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2017. Seven models for the columns, made of plywood, polyurethane foam, hessian, concrete and cement, and with the appearance of a thicket of roughly capped and pedestaled upright human excrement, were exhibited at the Henry Moore Institute in 2019. These then are Barlow's version of that which I term iSculpture, as explored in this essay.
3 See, in particular, not least for this terminology, Gell (1998).
exposure to such interpretations). One problem with this is that it smacks of social evolutionism, i.e. Western culture is a pinnacle of civilisation and development, and that it is so because of a unilineal evolution of societies from most primitive to most civilised.
Dawn Ades has claimed that when Henry Moore spoke (in 1961) of the benefits of 'the new friendship between art and anthropology', he quite possibly did so with anthropology being 'a euphemism for primitive' (Ades 2015: n.p.). This is, in part at least, based on his being inspired by non-Western art following his initial visit to the Ethnographic Gallery of the British Museum in 1921. So the provocation could suggest that sculpture is the most 'primitive' of the arts. Or the most primitivist. If so, this implies a somewhat shallow, narrow understanding of anthropology as well as a bland glossing of primitive/ist. In any case, it suggests an 'us' and 'them', with the axial index still Western modern art. If this is so then Moore's aim, as stated in a 1926 notebook, to 'keep ever prominent the world tradition' was not motivated by a desire for such 'tradition' to be nurtured by its makers or their closest descendants, or even helped in this by wealthy outsider benefactors, but rather for it to be somehow promoted through interpretation by remote, connoisseurial artists from 'advanced' societies (Ades 2015: n.p.). This certainly can have value, despite its limitations and potential for association with colonial practice. Alternatively, the provocation could also suggest that sculpture is anthropological because it is a practice with considerable agency (more than other arts) in societies deemed less complex. And in those societies its material form and making act as indices for concepts of personhood and community, life and death.
This leads me to the idea that what might lie behind the provocation's apparent claims is a more general notion that something called sculpture has greater agency within and upon human behaviour and society than two-dimensional art. It is an old argument of course. Flat means one surface, means visual, means the making is less embodied, means unlikely to be tactile, means unlikely to be outside in a community space, means limited agency or efficacy. That much white-cube installation or conceptual 'sculpture' could stand aloof in distinct but related ways should not be overlooked. Plus, that the implied privileging of sculpture over other arts denies the anthropological aspects of, say, performance and the crafts with all their living, aesthetic, materialities, is hugely problematic. It also denies that boundaries between the 'categories' of arts only exist in certain instances, i.e. that much practice has no such distinctions.
Such sculptural privileging has long since been debunked, not least by the work of sculptor, craftswoman and anthropologist Stephanie Bunn, whose sinuous, woven, organic Winged Arch (2006) was a willow, reed, walnut and living plant fence and gateway designed to protect and draw attention to the vulnerable, sandy shoreline at Gibraltar Point, Toronto Island, Canada4. However, Bunn concluded her important 'Importance of Materials' article (Bunn 1999: 16-26) by indicating, through four citations, why sculpture AND craft can be considered anthropological. The reason, for her, is in the making, and this means in the working with, more than the doing to (for her anthropologists are all too often guilty of limiting themselves to simple viewing, thus distancing themselves from the essential process and material). She quotes: (1) the Chinese master carpenter Chi'ing, on carving a bell stand, who said (according to the fourth-century BCE Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu): 'I bring my own natural capacity into relation with that of the wood'; (2) an Inuit bone carver for whom: 'A carving, like a song, is not a thing, it is an action'; (3) Constantin Brancusi, whose aim was 'to bring out the being that is in within matter'; and (4) Andy Goldsworthy, who felt: 'When I work with a leaf, rock, stick... it is an opening into the processes of life within and around'. This might lead us towards a counter-provocation: that painting and printmaking are the most literary of the arts, since sculpture (and craft) are the least literary. All of which is humbug but has some truth.
In the wake of this introductive sophistry, the paper that follows is divided into the following two sections: (1) Institutionally Anthropological Sculpture: iSculpture Made for the Museum; and (2) Sculpted
4 Designed by Bunn, Winged Arch was made by her in collaboration with Jon Warnes. See Warkentin 2010: 109. For images, see, for example: http://jonwarnes.co.uk/courses/ (accessed 23.11.2020).
Fig. 1. Photograph of Franz Boas and Lev Sternberg at 21st Congress of Americanists, 1924 (from: http://www. kunstkamera.ru/en/museum_structure/research_departments/department_of_america)
Anthropologists: iSides. While the sections are of uneven size, with the heart of the paper being (1), the intention is to offer and establish a certain (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) range of sculpture's most anthropological identity. It uses the agency of anthropologist-friends Franz Boas and Lev Sternberg as a model to argue the case. Whether their examples make sculpture the 'most anthropological of the arts' will, however, remain a moot point.
1. INSTITUTIONALLY ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCULPTURE: iSCULPTURE MADE FOR THE MUSEUM
Our first form of sculpture that is anthropological is that actually created for new anthropological institutions. By focussing on sculpture made for two major museums in the USA and Russia from the 1890s to 1910s we are able to trace a certain development in material articulation that in each case both signals and is an agent for a range of new social relations. Each example is contextualised by indication of the nature, anthropological or otherwise, of counterpart collected pieces.
1.1 Boas's Kwakiutl Turn: Mannequins for the United States National Museum [1890s]
A unison of human figure and a pedagogically-intended two- plus three-dimensional artistic process that is at once sculptural, craft, photographic and worldview-oriented, is to be found in early photographs of the Kwakwaka'wakw ('Kwakiutl' or Kwagu'l) peoples of what became known as Vancouver Island on Canada's Pacific coast. In late 1894, backed by the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Museum (Smithsonian, Washington D. C.) and the American Museum for Natural History (New York), Franz Boas lived with the Kwakiutl at Tsaxis (Fort Rupert) for several weeks. Keen to develop his holistic concept of culture, and in particular to compile data for his theory of kinship between the first nations of America and Asia, he devoted much of his attention to the arts of Kwakiutl ritual. Of particular concern was the Hamat'sa initiation ritual, the most significant part of the Tsetsaeqa Winter Ceremonial. Boas employed a local photographer, Oregon Columbus Hastings, to document these to a limited extent. Once back in Eastcoast USA, Boas used his own body to simulate Hamat'sa poses for the National Museum's sculptor (whose current anonymity/lack of identity can be seen to accord with some concepts of sculpture's being anthropological).
Fig. 2.1. Photograph of 'Hamat'sa emerging from the Ma'wil'. Display, United States National Museum, Washington D. C. 1895
Twelve photographs survive of Boas 'as sculpture', this in preparation for a diorama for the 'Native American' ethnology section of the new museum (Hamat'sa emerging from the Ma'wil (Secret Room)), of which at least two photographs also survive5. With their study of gesture, expression and craft, the photographs reveal great artifice. In eight, Boas is semi-naked in a variety of poses, from standing to squatting and kneeling. In nine, he is depicted atop a plain cloth-covered table, as if on a pedestal. Seven
5 For reproductions of all twelve photographs, see: https://leaminglab.si.edu/search/?f%5B_types%5D%5B%5D=resource&st=Franz%20 Boas%20posing%20for%20figure%20in%20USNM%20exhibit&s=&page=1 (accessed 23.11.2020).
Fig. 2.2. Photograph of Franz Boas posing as Hamat'sa emerging from the Ma'wil. National Anthropological Archives, Maryland
times he is depicted frontally, five times in profile. In four photographs he is dressed in a suit, three of these showing him with a Kwakiutl-style blanket wrapped over his 'Western' attire. With intense facial expression and taut limbs he is seen with a baton in distinct positions in seven images and a tasseled head ring in one. Three photographs (one in suit, two semi-naked) have him posed squatting with arms outstretched as if ready to spring. He is viewed frontally in two of these, from the side in the third. Behind him in the two frontal 'spring' images is a hoop which relates to the initiated Hamat'sa's climactic emergence from the Ma'wil. Here Boas, right down to his frowning, askance, gaze and open mouth, is turning himself into a model for the sculptor's central mannequin in the museum's diorama. His other poses were to be replicated by those of the six surrounding Kwakiutl mannequins.
These images, as Boas's anthropology, are salient examples which can serve to counter Ades's pejorative contention that the 'so-called 'museums of mankind'... amassed... and classified... objects from non-Western cultures. in various ways. none of them to do with art' and that they showed heterogenous 'primitive' things 'together without any regard for aesthetics' (Ades 2015: n.p.). Nothing could be further from the truth in this case. For museums were actually rather creative in their curations and presentation of such 'others', so much so that Boas himself turned against their simulations and trickery, finding their form of visual spectacle an unworthy paradigm of anthropology6.
6 Concerning Boas's diorama work, and its relation to his Kwakiutl report, see Glass 2009.
Much of Boas's 350-page published analysis of Kwakiutl society and its ceremonies is dedicated to reading their art, be that their song, dance, textile, metalwork, wood carving or painting, and be that visually or literally. Differentiating between different tribes and phratries, he reveals how all their arts are intricately linked to their social organisation, belief systems and traditions. He devotes considerable attention to the tall carved totem posts that stand in front of houses. Likewise he closely examined the masks (not least the multiple-faced transformation masks), copper plaques, batons, red cedar bark head and neck rings, headdresses and blankets of the Kwakiutl, particularly in relation to their spiritual performative function. In comparison, the Boas photographs, as well as the mannequins, batons, box drum and Hamat'sa's hemlock spruce twig dress of the Kwakiutl life group in the National Museum, for all their apparent support of sculpture being more anthropological than other arts, can be seen to mislead. They shift the balance between documentation and fictionalisation towards the latter, this through their encased faux representation of a certain brand of decontextualised anthropological spectacle.
1.2 Sternberg's Nivkh and San Agustín Twists (via Kadiwéu Turns): Wooden and Concrete Idols for the Kunstkamera [1910s]
Organised by the British Royal Anthropological Institute, the eighteenth International Congress of Americanists took place at the University of London in 1912 (27 May-1 June). Among the delegates who gathered from far and wide were Boas (by then Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York) and Lev Sternberg, who since 1904 had been Senior Ethnographer at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences in St Petersburg. The long, trouble-strewn, life paths of these indefatigable Jewish scholars, and their mutual, often coordinated, intricate studies of American-Asian cultural confluence, had led them to become colleagues on close, friendly terms. Boas had even commissioned, in 1905, a monograph from Sternberg on the Nivkh (Gilyak) peoples and their neighbours from Sakhalin Island and the Amur River region of Northern Asia (for the American Museum of Natural History). Sternberg had been studying these peoples since his exile to their lands in 1890. The two discussed the book further while in London for the 1912 congress. As 'rounded ethnography' it was to include material culture and art (Kan 2009: 189-190)7. Though mentioned in the Congress proceedings as being 'about to appear' (Sternberg 1913: 319), it took a further two decades for versions of the tome to see the light of day in Russian (and over seventy-five years for an English edition)8. However, each of these was then so focussed on kinship that art was all but absent. Despite such omission, Sternberg's interest in Nivkh (and neighbouring, e.g. Nanai [Goldi] and Unangax [Aleut]) cult artefacts was considerable, and it included his collecting numerous examples of carved idols, masks, costumes and musical instruments during his fieldwork. A selection of these was given its own display case in what Irena Buzinska has called 'a shaman gallery' at the Russian Anthropological Museum (Howard et al. 2015: 132).
Sternberg left it to the Latvian Voldemars Matvejs (pseudonym: Vladimir Markov) to visually analyse the North Asian carvings. Matvejs' photographs, taken in the museum in late 1913, comprise a significant study of what he termed creative, expressive facture (фактура), i.e. the Bunn-Brancusi-like bringing of being out matter9. We see this, for example, in his three views of a Nivkh Healing Spirit. Matvejs crops the carved wooden figure so that only the head, short neck and upper torso are visible. He then turns the figure so that his three views are different: frontal, profile and three-quarters. For the latter he moves the lens further away than for the other two in order that a hint of striated relief carving can be seen where a wing or arm might be expected. His camera picks up the cutting marks, grooves, splits and grain of the wood so that the materiality and creative process are emphasised. The exploitation
7 Sternberg gave a detailed report on his study of the peoples of Northeast Asia at the London congress. See: Sternberg (1913).
8 Two Russian editions appeared in 1933 (six years after Sternberg's death), one being (Штернберг 1933).
9 For Matvejs' theory of creative process, with his call for appreciation of 'primitive' approaches to simple material form in sculpture, see his essay on 'Faktura', in English translation, in Howard et al. (2015: 179-216).
Fig. 3. Voldemars Matvejs. 3 Photographs of Nivkh (Gilyak) Healing Spirit. Carved wood. Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera), St Petersburg. 1913
Fig. 4. Alberto Vojtech Fric. Photograph of Kadiweu Spirit collection. Carved wood. International Congress of Americanists 1912 (Fric 1913).
of close-up technique was novel, it helping viewers to comprehend the rugged yet sophisticated nature of the carving. Through this we can perceive how the pillar-like upper part of the spirit figure utilises the properties of the tree from which it derives, its bulbous head and narrow 'shoulders' containing nothing extraneous or protruding. Lacking ears, even the eyebrows, cheeks, nose and lips are created by incision, the two sides of the concave face being carved out of the mass in a way similar to that of the bowl of wooden spoon. Here then, again we find evidence of a substantive aesthetic take on the art of 'less complex' societies, being nurtured by an anthropological museum.
Matvejs' interpretation of North Asian carving was radical, and extended to related North American work in the museum10. As such it partnered Sternberg's less creative yet nevertheless important collection
10 He had written a book of his study but his early death in 1914 and the subsequent loss of the manuscript in the wake of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia meant that publication never occurred. Among his photographs of objects in the Anthropological Museum is one of a ritual mask of the Kodiak Alutiiq peoples of Alaska (see Howard et al. 2015: 146).
of sculpture and other arts from South America. This was also considerably enhanced through meetings and the exhibition at the Congress of Americanists in 1912. In the first place came the relationship with Alberto Vojtëch Fric, a Czech ethnographer, who was already an agent supplying numerous artefacts for the Russian Anthropological Museum. In London, Fric gave an extensive report on the spirit 'idols' of the Kadiwéu people living in the jungle of western Mato Grosso do Sol, southwestern Brazil (Fric 1913)11. He illustrated it with numerous examples of carved wooden cult figures (the photographs of which were also shown at the Congress exhibition). While Fric collected such works himself and gave or sold some of them to European museums (including the Kunstkamera [see Аборигены 2005: 47-50]), those presented in the Proceedings of the Congress were assembled into nine sets covering two full pages, e.g. 'bone puppets', 'wooden toys', 'wooden idols', a 'hammock', 'anthropomorphic tobacco pipes' and 'animalistic leather dolls' (Fric 1913). This means of representation lacks the intense attention to the material creative process seen in Matvejs' photographs of North Asian sculpture since most are placed frontally, seen full figure and compiled into rows or columns in a relatively crude visual style of group classification. Yet the post-like anthropomorphic, non-anatomical, form of Fric's Kadiwéu 'wooden idols', with their short necks and emaciated arms (often lacking 'hands') being rendered in low relief, bears much in common with the Nivkh spirit figures brought to the Kunstkamera by Sternberg and interpreted by Matvejs.
Sternberg had visited Fric in Prague in 1908, and, having persuaded his museum authorities to finance Fric's most recent South American expedition, added over two thousand South American objects, among them numerous Kadiwéu works, to the St Petersburg ethnographic collections (Корсун 2012: 72-73). But equally, if not more, important for the anthropological sculpture considered here was another Sternberg encounter at the 1912 London congress. For, upon hearing Heidelberg geographer Karl Theodor Stoepel's presentation on the ancient megalithic monuments of San Agustín, in the mountainous Huila region of west Colombia, and seeing photographs in the accompanying exhibition, Sternberg bought twenty-two concrete copies12. Stoepel directed the making of these in Germany by a construction company, Steinindustrie Gmbh Dossenheim. It used the papier-mâché moulds he had had made during his 1911 expedition. Thus it came about that in i9i3 the St Petersburg Anthropological Museum acquired at least eighteen concrete versions of the enigmatic pre-Hispanic Andean stone sculptures13 that to this day historians argue about in terms of origins, date, and function14. Some were certainly burial monuments, protective spirits of the dead, others guardians of the living. Stoepel recorded and interpreted the San Agustín sculptures thus:
In the village square there are now fourteen sculptured stones including two columns said to have been excavated by Dr Stübel. One of these, the statue of the so-called god of sculpture No. 17 (Fig. 3) was bought here at the time of Codazzi's visit in 1857. Together with statue No. 18 (Fig. 4) it has now been erected in the Centenary Park at Bogota... Statue No. 17 has a remarkable resemblance to one in the Trocadéro Museum at Paris (No. 10,398), said by C. Wiener to be from Pachacamac in Peru, and also to another at San Agustin. The material employed for the figures is chiefly a ferruginous sandstone, but some are of granite and eruptive rocks.
The gigantic figures of mythical and other persons tell us something of the religious, public, and domestic life of the people and of their artistic skill. The costume, the geometrical figures, the ornamented robes worn by the priests, and the symbolical groups of snakes, monkeys, pumas, frogs and birds afford scope for a variety of speculations.
I discovered more and more figures and sculptures. e.g. a male deity wearing a necklace, a sun-god, and a 'child-eater' 4 m. long and i m. 20 to i m. 50 broad, resembling the Supay [devil] of the Quitos (Stoepel 1913: 255).
11 Concerning Fric's anthropology, see Kfízová (2018).
12 Concerning the acquisition, see Корсун 2012: 7б; Кинжалов 2002: 14б-147.
13 In MAE Collection No. 2227, this having 19 numbers relating to 22 objects (Аборигены 2005: 51). Stoepel wrote (1913: 255) that he made eighteen moulds and obtained two cups, one earthenware bowl and a small carved stone.
14 See, e.g., Botera (2001). This impressive study is based on the Colombian Museo Nacional, Bogota, Musée d'Etnographie du Trocadero, Paris, British Museum, London, and Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin.
Fig. 5.1-5.5. Karl Theodor Stoepel. 4 Photographs of megaliths and a drawing of areconstructed shrine, San Agustín. International Congress of Americanists 1912 (Stoepel 1913)
Stoepel illustrated his paper with four photographs and a drawing depicting the sculpture and these we can compare with the surviving concrete copies now in the courtyard of the Kunstkamera. The photographs are of two kinds: two are elongated horizontally to show a line of regularly-sited stone figures (eight and five respectively) in front of a row of small thatch-roofed cottages; the two others are separate, portrait-format, images of his Statues 17 and 18, which he indicated had been moved to Bogota. While confirming that the others were in the San Agustín 'village square' he does not reveal how the two images relate to one another (e.g. continuation of one line, perpendicular, or opposite). All four photographs show the sculptures frontally and full-figure, the image of the row of five adopting a slightly lower viewpoint, closer to the ground, than the others. The drawing features Stoepel's visual interpretation of a reconstructed dolmen-like shrine, presumed to be a funerary monument, the remains of which he saw 'in the woods, 3 to 4 kilometres west of San Agustin' (Stoepel 1913: 255). It has a central, broad figure grasping, upright in front of its body, two flat pointed spears. A pair of relatively slender columns support a large flat horizontal capstone either side of the broad sculpture, each of these featuring a highrelief figure holding a club surmounted by a smaller, low-relief, child-like, figure who reaches towards the distinctively covered head of its protector below. The drawing contains a second, much smaller, image at top left. This represents the back of the central figure with low relief carved image of a bird surrounded by heart-shaped wings. The three sculptures of the drawing appear in Stoepel's photograph of eight idols, this according to their having been moved there by the Italian military cartographer Agostino Codazzi, head of the Colombian Geographical Commission, in 1857. Very similar reconstructed funerary monuments, along with the original sculptures, are to be found in the San Agustín Archaeological Park of the early twenty-first century.
I have been able to identify eight of the figures shown in Stoepel's photographs from the nine concrete copies in the Kunstkamera courtyard (seven from the row images, plus 'Statue 18'). That they do not adhere to the order of arrangement supplied by Stoepel is comprehensible, especially when that order was, at the very least partially, a product of outside intervention. One is a particularly flat broad figure whose round head with wide quadrangular mouth emerges straight from its shoulders. This is the central, guardian spirit figure of Stoepel's shrine drawing that also appears close to the centre in his row-of-eight photograph. With its concrete decaying and the occasional chalk emoji drawn to accompany the geometricised bird-heart on its rear, the sculpture now forms an essential link in the St Petersburg 'megalithic' circle, it standing out as the flattest and most abstract of the anthropomorphic figures.
When there is no trace of the makers of sculpture it could be argued that its anthropological value gets diminished. Intentionality and indexicality, Gell's favourite concepts for his anthropology of art, become much more speculative questions than otherwise. But in the St Petersburg San Agustín case we know the maker, patron and place, and hence a new anthropological aspect is acquired. This is enhanced by the modern setting, from the mid-1960s, of nine concrete figures in the eighteenth-century Kunstkamera's courtyard. This physical space, with its Tsarist, late Soviet and post-Soviet ambience—plus its northern, east Baltic coastal location—combines with the sculptures' presence on cyberspace where a range of blogs and websites host interpretative images and texts15. The effect is an alternative agency to that of the originals. With seven placed in a circle and two smaller ones nearby, the main group looks inwards towards a flowerbed and separated by paths, benches and waste bins, thereby allowing new relations, meanings, myths and functions evolve. Having survived revolution and war, since coming out of storage a whole range of local beliefs about their spiritual powers and identity have emerged. Their circle has become regarded by some as somehow sacrosanct, it remaining largely free from vandalism and rubbish, and a site where lying will be punished, sick can be made well, and the relationship between the figures and their neighbouring trees is one of mutual protection. Some even believe that among those represented are Aztec deities, i.e. the fertility goddess Huiztocihuatl, a god of creation Tloquenahuaque/
15 See, for example: «Дворик Кунсткамеры», https://www.spb-guide.ru/page_12948.htm, https://peterburg.center/story/dvorik-kunstkamery-v-sankt-peterburge-magicheskie-idoly-pomogayut-vlyublyonnym-i-bolnym.html, http://www.ipetersburg.ru/dvorik-kunstkamery/, https:// sasha-lotus.livejournal.com/268186.html and http://piterlive.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_9096.html (accessed 05.05.2020).
Tezcatlipoca, and Xipe Totec, a god of life-death-rebirth. Their efficacy is multiple. Open to touch, play, meditation and imagination, their form and materiality allow being to turn into becoming.
All this tells much about the folk (predominantly Russian, from different walks of life, ages and genders) who engage with them as well as the times. Thus the concrete copies are material and virtual entities capable of generating more anthropological theories of agency than the originals. As such formal analysis of their aesthetic qualities, i.e. the abstracted, geometricised figurative treatment, can engender ideas on familial or stylistic relations both between themselves and with others. It is probably fair to say that the duplicate troubles anthropology much less than it does art history, the latter, despite numerous welcome exceptions, frequently obsessing with uniqueness and originality. Yet a great many artists make (or have made) multiples, Bunn, and as we shall see, Konenkov, among them. We know that much art and craft is copy and reinvention but when there are disconnects between original and secondary the scope for anthropological thinking increases. So ultimately the Kunstkamera has spawned new iSculptures that can, for now at least, serve to support the assertion in Barlow's provocation.
2. SCULPTED ANTHROPOLOGISTS: ISIDES
In this paper I have tried to illustrate some anthropological sides to sculpture that might otherwise have been overlooked. So we have seen anthropologists as sculptors and sculpture in anthropological museums. Let us end by turning to the sculpted anthropologist, and, in particular, our two main protagonists, Boas and Sternberg. When anthropologists get turned into sculpture the act is a statement to society of some indexical role they are considered as playing. By creating, looking at, deconstructing the sculpted anthropologist we are enmeshing ourselves in more networks of intentionalities than those already covered. Or rather we are seeing more of the complexities of the original network.
2.1. Boas as iBusts
When Roger Fry curated the 1928 retrospective of The London Group (at the New Burlington Galleries in London), foremost in the sculpture section, alongside Gaudier-Brzeska, was Jacob Epstein, with three bronzes from a recent visit to the USA. Reviewing the exhibition, James Bone, of The Manchester Guardian, noted: 'Mr. Epstein's. Professor Franz Boaz [sic] of Columbia College, with his tuft of hair blowing back against the wind of criticism, is one of those efforts of the sculptor besides which other sculptured portraiture of our time seems tame and non-committal' (Bone 1928: 12). While the critical defences embodied in Boas's hair could be combed for pertinence and applicability, Epstein himself raked together some ideas of making and man in his subsequent description of the work: 'Professor Boas was ... interesting to work from. His face was scarred and criss-crossed with mementoes of many duels of his student days in Heidelberg, but what was still left whole in his face was as spirited as a fighting cock. He seemed to be a man of great courage, both mental and physical' (Epstein 1940: 123).
Then, nine years later in 1937, when the bust was shown at Epstein's personal exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries, the critics decided that 'only in Professor Franz Boas does Epstein seem to have found a portrait-subject that really suited him' (Our Correspondent 1937); noting its 'ruggedness' (Our Own Correspondent 1937); 'astonishing vitality' (Consummatum 1937); and, 'looking wise and unworldly', it was deemed 'perhaps Epstein's most expressive head since he modelled Einstein' (N. 1937)16. Furthermore, it appeared as the first (top left) photograph of nine Epstein busts reproduced in The Illustrated London News's visual review of the exhibition (New Epsteins 1937). Despite the contemporary plaudits Epstein's Boas has been neglected in studies of the sculptor. Yet consider its relating of sculptural i-transformation, i.e. from Boas having been a thirty-seven-year-old prototypical Hamat'sa poseur, often semi-nude with smooth light skin, to a wrinkled seventy-year-old head and
16 Epstein's Boas actually predated his Albert Einstein (1933) by a little over five years.
shoulders. Yes the facial features, including bushy moustache and critically-alert mop of hair, are still Boas's, but his own coming-of-age is now rendered. From a Kwakiutl mannequin model he has morphed into a bronze bust in jacket, collared shirt and prominent tie. His brow is higher, eyes baggier and his earlier spirit of dynamic initiation has turned into that of a cropped careworn effigy. Now the sculpted anthropologist, with the emphasis on his head and 'enlightened' brow, is a static male i-pillar of intellectual Western society ripe for exhibition, on a pedestal, in fashionable London galleries (and ripe too for disappearance, presumably, into the collection of a wealthy, metropolitan, individual). Now, too, he has become a manifestation of Epstein's creativity and therefore we see in the rough, hand- and tool-marked finish not just Boas, but his sculptor and 'the being' he has brought out of his material.
A similar turn (and neglect) is witnessed in another Franz Boas, this also being a bronze bust created during his later years, i.e. that by Sergey Konenkov, of 1936. Made for the anthropologist's family when Boas was seventy-eight and when Konenkov was in the middle of a twenty-three year sojourn to the USA from his native Russia, now his hair has receded further while simultaneously retaining its, no doubt astute, mop-like waves. Still wearing jacket, waistcoat, shirt and tie, a right hand has been added and is posed as if ready to write. Here, however, the jacket is opened and he has gained a slimmer, smoother face with gaze containing a thoughtful smile. Konenkov's Boas is more comfortable, at one with his immediate surroundings and society, than Epstein's brooder.
There are at least two bronze Konenkov Boases. Both derive from the plaster original that was in the Boas family collection. The first, from 1936, belongs to the American Philosophical Society. The second, from 1977, is at Columbia University. The only mention of their making known to me is by Margarita Konenkova in a letter to Boas: 'My husband speaks often of you and of the inspiring and happy hours he spent while working on your portrait in Columbia University17.' Monographs on Konenkov omit the bust. So, despite the prominence of Epstein and Konenkov in respective histories of British and
17 Object Record for Catalog Number 1995.01, American Philosophical Society, https://amphilsoc.pastperfectonline.com/webobject/606DBC2A-F8AD-48FA-BC8E-156225855407 (accessed 7 August 2019).
Fig. 7. Jacob Epstein. Bust of Franz Boas. Bronze. 1928. Columbia University, New York (Photograph by Paul Laib, 1942)
Fig. 8. Sergey Konenkov. Bust of Franz Boas. Bronze. 1936. columbia university, New York
Russian modernism, their material reflections on Boas have been largely ignored. Hence the multiple sculpted faces of Boas, their offering of an East-West bridge in keeping with Boas's ideas, reveal the Janus propensities of our intellectual enquiries. One could consider this strange, for surely 'sculpture being the most anthropological of the arts' means that it is the art, more than any other, which represents anthropologists, their theories and discoveries. And you can hardly get a much more significant anthropologist than Franz Boas.
2.2 Sternberg as iStele
Boas's bronze i-turns may be markers of his later life status in United States' intellectual society but they bear no resemblance to his plain, low, rectangular, polished face, granite gravestone that, since 1942, he has shared with his wife Marie in Dale Cemetery, Ossining, New York State. As such his
Fig. 9. Lev Sternberg. Gravemarker. Transfiguration-Jewish Cemetery, St Petersburg
commemorative sculpture contrasts with that accorded Sternberg. While I am unaware of any figural sculptures of the Russian anthropologist, his gravemarker in the Transfiguration-Jewish Cemetery of St Petersburg survives. It stands just to the north of the graveyard synagogue in the southeastern outskirts of the city. With a small bust photograph of Sternberg, together with a Westernised version of his name (Leo Sternberg) in the Latin alphabet, on one side, and his name and life dates (21 April 1861-14 August 1927) in Russian on the other, its upright polished grey stone stele is capped by an orb. A central band envelopes the otherwise plain sphere, as if marking the parallels of latitude between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Around the band is the upper-case inscription: 'ALL HUMANKIND IS ONE' [ВСЕ ЧЕЛОВЕЧЕСТВО ЕДИНО]18. Thus the globe essentially dots Sternberg's i. In so doing we should let it both epitomise and round off the idea of sculpture's high rank in the anthropological arts.
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отношения между скульптурой и антропологией: прочтение АГЕНТНОСТи фРАНцА БОАСА и львА ШТЕРНБЕРГА
АННОТАЦИЯ. Рассматривается точка зрения, в соответствии с которой скульптура считается «самым антропологическим видом искусства». Представив различные взгляды британских исследователей (Барлоу, Гелл, Адес и Банн) на антропологический аспект скульптуры, автор (не без доли иронии) применяет эту концепцию к скульптурам, которые были изготовлены специально для антропологических и этнографических музеев, обращаясь, в частности, к образцам, созданным по инициативе Франца Боаса и Льва Штернберга для Национального Музея Америки в 1890-х и для Кунсткамеры в 1910-х годах соответственно. В этой связи рассматриваются манекены и копии квакиутлей и андские ритуальные фигуры (реалистические и резные) доиспанского периода. Устанавливаются также связи с музейными приобретениями, сделанными в соответствующий период, например с резными деревянными предметами нивхов и кадивеу, которые были проанализированы в свое время В. Матвеем и А. В. фричем. Особое внимание уделяется заказу Штернберга Карлу Штёпелю на изготовление бетонных копий мегалитов из долины Св. Августина, Южная Колумбия. Делается предположение, что их последующая установка во дворе Кунсткамеры сопровождалась изменением их смысла, идентичности и агентности. Затем автор переходит к анализу понятия «скульптурный антрополог», снова используя Боаса и Штернберга в качестве примеров. Наконец, посредством сочетания этих двух отдельных и четко различимых аспектов скульптуры, автор выдвигает доводы в пользу наличия у пластического искусства антропологической сущности.
КЛЮЧЕВЫЕ СЛОВА: скульптура, антропология, Боас, Штернберг, Кунсткамера
ХОВАРД ДЖЕРЕМИ Ч. — доцент, Школа истории искусств, Университет Сент-Эндрюс, Шотландия (Сент-эндрюс, Великобритания) E-mail: [email protected]
