Human Traces: Ephemeral Art

By Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

From archaic ochre marks on stones and Paleolithic cave murals of animals and hunters to modern art museums, humans have created many styles and forms of visual art. Some were created to enjoy, and others to enhance social occasions, after which they were discarded or destroyed. Ephemeral art or durable, it never mattered if it was aesthetic. This is the first comprehensive study of ephemeral visual art - an heir of the human evolutionary background that made it possible for us to create and appreciate art. Ephemeral artworks still permeate life, and this study honors their heritage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796073034

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, a retired Cultural Anthropologist, enjoys writing fiction, non-fiction and culinary history. After many world travels, she appreciates retirement in the beautiful, rocky desert surrounding Palm Springs. She invites you to travel with her on her published trips through the times and spaces of a fictional shared world and history.

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ISBN:    Softcover            978-1-7960-7304-1

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Rev. date: 02/07/2020

HUMAN TRACES:

EPHEMERAL ART

Image0001.jpg

MARILYN EKDAHL RAVICZ, Ph.D.

By the same author

Fiction

Requiem for Córdoba

Alexandre and Simone: The Two Musketeers

Blood, Soil and Art

Love Song for Dancing Strings

Murder as a Second Language

Alexandria: Cloud-Cuckoo-Town

Crossing to Samarkand

Non Fiction

Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico: From Zompantli to Golgotha (Catholic University of America Press)

Ken Friedman: The World that Is, the World that Is To Be

(Tennessee University Press)

Erotic Cuisine: A Natural History of Aphrodisiac Cookery

Crazy Feasts (an ebook)

Ergonomics for Home-Based Workers: Use your Brain to Save Your Body

A Promise Kept: Memoir of Tibetans in India (with Germaine Krull)

DEDICATED TO THE ‘ARTISTS’ AND COMMUNITY

MEMBERS WHO CREATE EPHEMERAL VISUAL

ART FOR THEMSELVES AND FOR US.

You needn’t ask the purpose of this or that work: they all have only one purpose - I had to make them, because I can free myself in no other way from the thought (or dream)…. Later you will understand me better. You say: Play! Of course! Everything the artist makes is after all play. He agonizes, tries to find an expression for his feelings and thoughts; he speaks with color, form, drawing, sound, word, etc. What for? Great question!…. Superficially, only play. For him, (the artist) the question what for has little sense. He only knows a why. So arise works of art, so arise also things that are not yet works of art, but rather only stations, ways to that end, but which already have within them a little glimmer of light, a Klang (resonance)…. I do everything that I must: it is ready within me and it must find expression. If I play in this way, every nerve within me vibrates, music rings in my whole body and God is in my heart. I don’t care if it is hard or easy, takes much or little time, it is useful or not….

Wassily Kandinsky (from a 1904 letter, cited in Weiss)

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent,

and independent with a tremendous spirit

of adventure, and a love of play.

Henri Matisse

Play is the highest form of research.

Albert Einstein

Acknowledgments

During the too-many years it has taken to gather data and complete this study, there were friends who politely queried me about the status of my ‘research.’ Some even offered ephemeral art examples to cheer me on my wandering way. You know who you are through the years, and I have appreciated your help.

Those who responded to my questionnaires about ephemeral art are acknowledged in the text. Others who learned about this project and informed me about pertinent research or examples are gratefully mentioned in the text. And then there are the many nameless persons in other countries who invited me to participate in making ephemeral art, or to enjoy the special contexts of their art. There are also those who nodded, stared a bit, and looked away with slow smiles after my answer to their inevitable question: ‘What are you writing about?’ A few added their two bits, and some comments were helpful. Yes, and there were also wry remarks about ‘bothering to document the ephemeral.’ The latter became expected. It is an attitude that seems contagious or endemic among intellectuals.

Yes, and genuine thanks to the many strangers – wherever you are - who described ephemeral art experiences that delighted them during special contexts, or during their own rites of passage. People are insightful and, after all, informants are the mother lode of data for anthropologists.

To Robert Ravicz, whose husbandly patience was unstinting for taking photographs and suffering my periodic participations during rituals with informants: amor hasta la proxima encarnación. My thanks to Dr. John Hotchkiss, an anthropologist who informed me about new ephemeral art discoveries and tracked my research with interest. His assistance was important. To Dr. Joe Carrier, another anthropologist, I offer gratitude for sharing information about Mexico and Southeast Asia. You knew what I meant and shared data freely, as did anthropologist Dr. Gerald Hickey, now deceased.

Overall, this work has been a rather solitary dedication to an ill-defined and casually ignored topic. In spite of the probability that visual ephemeral art was perhaps hominins’ earliest form of aesthetic visual expression, it has never been a topic of concerted research. I am aware of the current reclassification and current use of the subfamily term hominin, and this study uses that term in this more inclusive way, except where otherwise cited in referenced sources.

Most of my artist friends were polite when interviewed, but remained leery of too much ‘conceptualizing’ about art - their turf. They often sighed when asked about their motivation and goals, except for the Fluxus group, with members like Ken Friedman, who is an artist and willing communicator. Besides, most artists think it matters very little if visual artworks are ephemeral or enduring, stationary or moving, changing or unchanging. Their critical judgments define their own tastes, and they tend to not generalize.

My few remaining philosopher friends from earlier Graduate days at Harvard remained less interested in probing the biological bases of human behaviors than in probing the pages of past thinkers. They typically smiled, and moved on to focus on more abstract concerns.

To Harvard Philosophy professors and those with whom I studied in Harvard Divinity School (as one of two first females to register directly in those sacrosanct halls), you knew you were not harboring a true heretic, but only a mild dissenter. In those days, it was often Paul Tillich, with whom I shared discussions about the importance of visual art to religion. He was knowledgeable about both topics, and I suspect would agree with my recent conclusions about the biological bases of art and ritual. After all, he maintained that truth is existential and accepted its new and changed manifestations into his Systematics.

To UCLA Anthropology professors, thank you for your guidance through the doctoral program, even when I proposed a non-traditional dissertation topic about Pop and Conceptual Art. You were patient as long as I completed all the traditional steps and questions. I suspect that all those mandated semi-sacred examinations were designed as a prolonged rite of passage, but I don’t recall that wine ever graced our seminars as it did for the ancient thinkers.

As Anthropologists know, life is a patchwork quilt of old and new, and adaptation is the machinery and means of our on-going evolution. This was reflected in the helpful authors I consulted about art and its neural pathways from perception to appreciation. I want to acknowledge nameless others in various laboratories, or in the wilds of Borneo: your work paved my path and challenged any tendency to accept ready conclusions. To acknowledge someone may be a small thing, a trifling tribute phrased in a few words without deeds to follow. Yet, however poor these phrases are, consider what Shakespeare said in Coriolanus. It is a sentiment with which I agree:

‘I thank you for your voices, thank you,

Your most sweet voices.’

Marilyn Ekdahl Ravicz, Ph.D.

CONTENTS

SECTION ONE

I. ART AND THE AESTHETIC

1. Background Ideas about Visual Art

2. How This Study Came To Be

3. Fine Art or Craft: Fact or Fictions of History

4. The What and Where is Visual Art Problem

5. The When and How of Ephemeral Visual Art

6. Visual Art and the Aesthetic Experience

II. EVOLUTION, ART AND HUMAN NATURE

1. How Nature Becomes Culture with Artists

2. Perception: the Path to Visual Art

SECTION TWO

1. SETTINGS AND INTRODUCTORY COMMENTS

II. EPHEMERAL ART EXAMPLES

1. Dry and Wet Pigment Paintings.

2. Food as Ephemeral Art

3. Altars, Offering Places and Devotional Shrines

4. Floats, Boats and other Vehicles

5. Banners, Flags and Decorated Hanging Objects

6. Fireworks, Lights and Illuminated Displays

7. Kites and Wind-Operated Phenomena

8. Pole or Tower-like Structures

9. Ephemeral Architectural Models

10. Body-enhancing Decoration: Painting

11. Body-Enhancing Decoration: Headdresses

12. Body-Enhancing Decoration: Costumes

13. Body-Enhancing Decoration: Masks

14. Reliefs and Three Dimensional Sculptures

SECTION THREE

I. EPHEMERAL ART CONTEXTS, LEARNING AND PLAY

1. Formal Aspects of Ceremony or Ritual

2. The End-game: Ephemeral Art, Learning and Play

ILLUSTRATIONS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

HUMAN TRACES: EPHEMERAL

ART AND EVOLUTION

SECTION ONE

I. ART AND THE AESTHETIC

1. Background Ideas about Visual Art

‘…A room was divided into a symmetrical space. One…wall was painted blue, the opposing wall orange. At the center of the room (was) placed a tiny…circle of steer manure…. On the floor, near the center of each wall, lay four props: one black blindfold, one jar of Vaseline, one tray of paint (orange and blue at their respective walls), and a twenty foot length of rope bolted to each wall.

(The combatants) proceeded to enter the room, nude except for skull caps. One man was painted orange, the other blue. Each stood crossing the room. With a piece of chalk he outlined the Orange Man on his wall, staring at his opponent…. Next, the celebrants covered the lower half of their bodies with jelly and tied the free end of their ropes around their waists. The ropes almost gave them then freedom of the room….The combatants simultaneously fixed the blindfolds over their eyes….

They placed each foot into their respective trays of paint and then walked straight ahead into the circle of steer manure. Magically footsteps in orange and blue lead out of the chalk outlines. With arms outstretched in simulate blindness the two man touched for the first time… removed the blindfolds from one another.

….Through the course of the aggressive dialogue, paint and steer manure intermixed with their bodies…. The result was satiation and monochronicity…and the lingering energy of the combat…’ (Burnham, excerpt 38-40, 1973).

What does this excerpt describe? Actual combat? An agonistic ritual to stabilize village aggression, or to appease the gods? These are fair but incorrect guesses. The excerpt documents an art exhibit staged in a popular San Francisco art gallery in 1972. It was an early example of what became a wave of performance art exhibitions ultimately critiqued by several of more aware art critics. There and gone! They were ephemeral, and the performance had ritualistic characteristics.

This excerpt, with its storyline format, parallels a florescence of subsequent performance pieces that were ‘exhibited’ in art-oriented environments. Some performances, like this one, resembled ritual-like personal or social enactments. Some performances invited viewers to respond with their thoughts, or by playfully participating. These performance artists were consciously or unconsciously ‘testing’ and exploring two factors: the traditional parameters of visual art; and the nature of aesthetic audiovisual stimuli and perception. Each made its own neural-based way from perception through cognition into meaning and memory.

This opening citation is included for several reasons. It represents one type of agonistic spectator-oriented struggle common to sports and play. It shares characteristics common to ludic scapegoat rituals, and was defined by participants, spectators and some critics to be visual art. Then too, it was ephemeral! All these elements are germane to this study in one or more ways. Thus, the citation essentially sets the conceptual stage for several basic topics addressed herein.

The ‘predisposition’ to imagine, plan, and fabricate visual aesthetic phenomena is universally expressed in humans, and generates the ‘heart’ of cultural expressive communications that shape most aesthetic formats. Some art expressions almost resemble scientific procedures that alternate testing and media methods until gaining an imagined cognitive goal. This view is suggested by Kandinsky’s and Einstein’s introductory quotations. The aesthetic is one of what are called ‘universal human traits’: the inherited cognitive and biologically evolved behavioral predispositions all humans share (Barrow, 6-7, 1995). Insofar as we know, Homo sapiens evolved to be the only aesthetic animal.

To study ‘universal human traits’ through their many enacted expressions, and to link historical theories to current concepts about human evolution are processes explored by Biology and Anthropology. These disciplines typically also include some aspects of Psychology, Paleoevolution, History, general Science, as well as the latest bloomer: Neuroscience. Each discipline also enriches our current knowledge about cognition and other ‘how’ and ‘why’ factors germane to ‘universal behavior traits’ that define Homo sapiens. This study is a small example of how human characteristics and expressions are inevitably interrelated in fact, theory and actual behaviors.

Human Traces: Ephemeral Art does not offer a definition of visual art as a class category, and only summarizes key stages of evolution as a background. This study, however, does not depend on art professionals’ classifications or critiques about visual art history and aesthetic criticism. In fact, it strives to avoid previous oftentimes illogical class definitions of visual aesthetic expressions. Moreover, although this study is anthropological, it also remains different from most anthropology studies about visual art, which are fieldwork-based empirical studies of traditional socal lifestyles. The latter studies are not traditionally linked to the psychobiological bases of what is studied empirically in the field.

Instead of being a traditional anthropological study, this study interrelates research data and conclusions from several disciplines that touch on archaic, historical, and even current forms of cross-cultural expressive visual art communications. It seeks to address how and why ephemeral visual artworks were and continue to be widely expressed cross-culturally in certain social contexts. In sum, it is partly traditional and empirical, and partly theoretical and interdisciplinary.

Several research decisions were required in order to undertake this project, because there are no previous studies that focus on the nature and evolved perceptual processes that generate ephemeral visual art. This historical void is unusual, since ephemeral visual artworks have an ancient and rich history of cross-cultural expressions that continues today. The tasks addressed in this study include: to define and address the ‘how’ of ephemeral art, as well as ‘where, when and why’ it occurred and remains present in certain special contexts today.

We can easily identify the ‘who,’ but not the scope of perceptual and other neural pathways stimulated by visual art phenomena. Their ‘existential history’ travels from stimuli to perception and cognition with their own self-rewarding emotions intrinsic to aesthetic experiences. Ephemeral art expressions continue as expressive formats because they are valued and appreciated, in spite of their having been ignored by art historians and critics. Art professionals employ their own criteria for what they consider to be genuine visual art, as we shall learn.

Paleoarchaeology artefacts suggest that ephemeral visual art and music might have been among the earliest forms of hominin aesthetic expressions, and both flourish today as universal forms of aesthetic communication. One proof of their universal importance lies in their continued presence as aesthetic communications across the human cultures we know, and through long periods of time. Perhaps dance could be added as well, since even infants react by swaying or moving when they hear rhythms and musical percussive sounds.

While visual and other aesthetic expressions share enormous heritages of valuable research and historical studies, the author has not been able to discover a serious study of ephemeral visual art as a valued form of aesthetic visual communication. Apparently nobody has questioned the psychobiological reasons for the widespread history and persistent presence of ephemeral visual art. Moreover, neither art historians and critics nor social scientists have explored its frequent presence in repeated specific social contexts. While there are several anthropological reports and journal articles that describe cross-cultural occurrences of ephemeral visual artworks, they neither address their psychobiological bases nor investigate their cross-cultural relationships to widespread patterns of certain contexts and learning. This study undertakes first steps in these multi-faceted unaddressed directions.

In this initial chapter, the author confesses that, as a first study dedicated solely to ephemeral visual art, Human Traces is necessarily maieutic. For this reason, the first chapters pose specific questions and ideas about why no similar studies of this widely experienced art form were undertaken. It necessarily also touches on certain difficulties germane to art criticism that, explicitly or implicitly, address all visual artworks as if they composed a class category of human visual phenomenal expressions, albeit that conclusion is illogical and not ‘true’.

This study suggests that perhaps ephemeral artworks did not intrigue art professionals because they were not considered worthy of serious study. If true, this omission might have resulted from ‘incorrect’ or limited criteria of what visual art includes, why it is valued, and why it cannot be defined as a closed class category. Sometimes even serious studies and critiques degenerate into ‘habits of historical thinking.’ Most disciplines have suffered from time to time from their own intellectual bias burdens.

These initial chapters review some of the logical problems incurred by scholarly art professionals who established their own definitions and critiques of visual art, based on limited or no basic research of varied world expressions of visual artwork examples. This approach means that such definitions of a universal behavior trait expression (visual art) were based on limited empirical class sampling. Social scientists, on the other hand, seem not to have been interested in investigating the ‘why and how’ factors of many ephemeral art examples they described based on their empirical fieldwork studies of social organizations.

How did this pervasive gap happen among serious art professionals and human behavior scholars? Examples and photos of ‘exotic foreign’ artworks were widely available to educated Europeans for over two hundred years, primarily because they began promoting trade and colonialism by the late sixteen hundreds. Quite soon thereafter, ‘exotic’ artworks were described or imprinted in popular travel books and magazine articles, and many ‘curiousities’ were collected and featured in growing museum exhibitions. However, because these phenomena were visually different from accustomed art forms, they were often perceived and described in memoirs as ‘primitive,’ sometimes even ‘savage,’ and obviously not acceptable examples of genuine visual art. At most they were simply ‘foreign native curiosities,’ in Victorian terms.

Cross-cultural descriptions of visual artworks and other aesthetic phenomena, like music and ‘native’ theater, were also available for review by colonialists; however, these were also received with negative judgmental responses like: ‘that polytheism’ and ‘barbaric bad taste’. Thus, we leave this introductory chapter with a basic question: how and why did the first monograph about the widespread historical pattern of aesthetic expressions, ephemeral visual art, not appear until now?

Had there been a dearth of information about art history and criticism; or a dearth of data about the biology of visual perception? While the latter alternative was partly true, it is more likely that Western art historians and critics considered only ‘familiar’ (Western) historical durable artworks to be ‘worthy’ of their documentation. These questions will be addressed more directly in chapters that precede the Second Section of this study. In the Second Section, examples of ephemeral visual art are featured, along with their fabrication methods, typical media, and their special contexts, when adequate data are available for documentation of these details.

Until about the mid-twentieth century, there were few data available about psychobiological cognitive processes that might have helped explain the importance and perceptual efficacy of traditional or cross-cultural ephemeral visual artworks; therefore, they continued to be considered as limited ‘folk’ art, or, at best, ‘interesting’ curiosities, but nor genuine art. Their functional efficacy was ignored even by some social scientists, although they were ’admired’ by a few. Earlier judgments by art professionals reflected Victorian prejudices, and the usual derogatory colonial attitudes toward ‘natives’ of the countries they occupied for economic reasons. The occupiers also tried tirelessly to change the religions of ‘native’ cultures into Christian beliefs, thereby also limiting indigenous rituals that included many ephemeral artworks.

Today we are heirs to neuro-cognitive knowledge and theoretical models that help explain how perceptual processes, cognition, visual art stimuli, media and their contexts interrelate to shape the aesthetic experience. Research studies can be more sophisticated about preferred tastes and positive emotions generated during the aesthetic experience. Current science offers new insights regarding the nature and linkages of aesthetic stimuli to perception, learning, and other cognitive processes that compose the complex aesthetic experience.

The author’s review of an unusual topic, ephemeral visual art, was prolonged but taught this researcher many things. It taught that even anthropological studies, like this one, are obliged to address and examine not only empirical sociocultural factors, but also the psychobiological processes that enable the various human behaviors being expressed. In this case, it also includes the aesthetic visual art experience. Moreover, since humans have often elected to create specifically ephemeral visual art, the relationship between perception, cognition, and the special contexts in which this art form appears merit examination with respect to related ‘how’ and ‘why’ psychobiological factors, and not only historical or current social issues.

By better understanding the relationship between nervous system processes and related universal trait behaviors, like visual art, ritual, learning and play, a more complete comprehension is gained about how and why ephemeral aesthetic visual expressions are often produced cross-culturally. This research approach will also, at least briefly, need to mention basic evolutionary factors that shaped the brain and nervous system ‘processing machinery’ of Homo sapiens, since human perception is the ‘gate’ to the aesthetic experience. We are, after all, the only aesthetic-animal, insofar as we know: the creative primate that can paint the Sistine Chapel, and even pile rocks into sculptures.

2. How This Study Came To Be

This study is the first attempt to address and analyze ephemeral visual art expressions by referring to neurobiology and perception in the framework of a brief summary background about human evolution. It also describes typical media used for ephemeral artworks, and the contexts in and for which these artworks were and are most often created and viewed. As a first study, it is important to describe how it came about, burdened as it was by a dearth of past research, minimal scholarly interest and limited personal time. In other words, why spend so many years on an ostensibly unimportant and perhaps wisely ignored topic, even as a minor vice? The author’s ‘Frenchified’ answer is: purquoi pas? Why not, indeed, since related data gathered by the author became ‘curiouser and curiouser.’ And we all know how what this mental state goads one to do: investigate.

The author first became interested in ephemeral visual art as the by-product of two learning processes: observing diverse examples of cross-cultural ephemeral artworks during fieldwork and travel; and as a side-bar interest stimulated while researching contemporary art trends for a doctoral dissertation: Aesthetic Anthropology: Theory and Analysis of Pop and Conceptual Art in America.

One might well ask how such a backward conceptual time-trek moved from ‘contemporary art’ to pre-Paleolithic hominins and archaic visual artworks with such casual insouciance. The answer is simple. Ephemeral visual art seemed to resonate through many aspects of these two widely separated time periods. This awareness happened so often it became conceptually annoying and required serious consideration. So how could appropriate research be conducted to gather data that might help explain the continued presence of ephemeral visual art phenomena? It seemed natural to seek answers by referring first to the venerable disciplines that focused on human aesthetic visual expressions across the centuries. These disciplines include Art History, Art criticism, and Cultural Anthropology.

Initial research in art histories and criticisms failed to produce relevant data until the contemporary era, which is precisely what had incited the author to look initially at ephemeral and changing art media in the first place. Even then, there were only a few relevant published examples, and none referred to causal psychobiological processes. Most art historians and critics evaluated contemporary visual art by referring to three factors: what these works allegedly express about current life and times; how they relate to the use of new technology as media; and how unusual their media were compared to earlier artworks. Historically, neither art historians not critics described or discussed ephemeral artworks, and rarely mentioned such phenomena as significant. If even noticed, it was considered to be ‘decorative,’ a ‘folk’ expression, or related to process art, but not a unique expression of genuine fine art created by genuine artists.

Yet, even art historians noted that Leonardo da Vinci created ice sculptures, small firework blasts, and many ephemeral art displays to enhance Lorenzo de Medici’s court celebrations. Moreover, other renaissance artists created numerous ephemeral artworks for special contexts or occasions on behalf of their patrons. Nevertheless, these phenomena were not considered ‘genuine fine art,’ and thus escaped serious consideration. They were not critiqued as genuine artworks, as were durable murals, paintings, sculptures and architecture. At best, they merited being mentioned in a few words.

This obvious dead-end research probe redirected the author’s research focus to a different question: what judgmental criteria did/do art historians and critics employ to define their areas of expertise? In sum, what criteria are typically used to define ‘fine or genuine visual art,’ a class that merits art professionals’ serious considerations?

If the criteria art historians and critics used for judging visual artworks were found to be conceptually limited, this could explain their having excluded certain art formats from their art histories and critiques. In sum, art professionals’ definitions and evaluations were and are acceptable and helpful when they refer to the particular artworks they observe, and cannot purport to be germane for all visual artworks. In other words, their accepted aesthetic opinions were and are limited, and cannot be transformed into universal criteria by which to address all visual art.

This step in reasoning suggested it was necessary for the author to identify what implicit or explicit aesthetic qualities were used by art professionals to evaluate visual artworks. This task was important for this study, or ephemeral artworks might be deemed irrelevant at best, and not worth considering at worst. This question generated another search among Western art historians and critics’ works to identify their evaluation criteria. Art histories and critiques were perused with variable success. More about these witless but necessary searches are detailed in Chapters Three and Four. After all, the author did not wish to research a subject deemed by art specialists to be unworthy of attention.

What about the third discipline mentioned: Sociocultural Anthropology? Did this discipline address ephemeral visual art or not? Or does Anthropology also perceive and define examples of ‘visual artworks’ by evaluating their empirical characteristics in a way similar to art professionals? Did Social Scientists also describe only what appeared to be proven instances of genuine fine art based on the same criteria used by art professionals and their own cultures?

In essence, how does Sociocultural Anthropology address visual art as a cross-cultural aesthetic form of expression with multiple and varied formats? For Anthropology, fieldwork observation has been the primary research method applied to document whatever ‘appears’ to be accepted as visual art phenomena cross-culturally. The opinions of local informants are elicited regarding who, why, and when these phenomena are fabricated. Next, once isolated as material culture atefacts, these ‘indicated artworks’ were examined with respect to how they relate to organizational social processes in the society that fabricated them. Little to no interest focused on their ephemerality or durability, and few evaluative critiques were made. Visual artworks were simply described, and some analysis might be offered with respect to their functions, emotional vectors, and any economic impact the artworks had on their society. Anthropologists did not create class categories of visual artworks.

Among the empirical data gathered by anthropologists, no art definitions were attempted based on their physical characteristics. On the other hand, anthropologists did try to elicit and report their informants’ opinions about artwork ‘meanings,’ and what was implied by their depicted symbols. These data were elicited and analyzed based on verbal reports by local informants. Moreover, references were included about the ‘positive affect producing’ aspect of visual art expressions, as well as their contexts, ritual usage, and related meanings. This summary profile reflects the anthropological method of case by case field research, without attempted classifications. Anthropologists did try to avoid applying their own tastes to judge aesthetic fieldwork artworks.

The author of this study is an Anthropologist, who examined publications in her own professional field, Sociocultural Anthropology, for answers to research questions. Although no specific answers were forthcoming, the author decided to emulate the fieldwork approach for her needed research. To whit, not only publications would be consulted, but artists, art viewers, critics and historians would be queried about contemporary art, what they consider to be genuine visual art. Their general opinions about ephemeral visual art in particular would be elicited, preceded perhaps by a few photos of what this term includes.

While the answers gathered were enlightening with respect to their various views, especially about current art, no uniform pattern or general visual art definition emerged. This suggested that most art critics and historians were only partly aware of the implicit criteria of their own artwork evaluations, whether historical or current. And, as far as artists were concerned, there was minimal agreement between them and art critics, who typically compared current artworks to past styles.

Artists oftentimes were disinterested in art history or cross-cultural evaluations in their comments. They tended to note that ideas about their own field of endeavor, art and expressive media, were self-determined and emerged from their own imaginations, not templates from the past. Thus, artists were usually focused on their own personal goals of visual expression, which were frequently changeable. Artists often projected their positive comments about what they were struggling to express by referring to similar artworks done by their peers or the international community of artists, but neither to art critics nor to past ‘famous’ artists’ styles.

When American artists or rare critics who appreciated pop, performance, or conceptual art expressions were asked why they enjoyed these contemporary artworks, the majority summarily reported as follows: ‘It’s exciting to view common objects and actions portrayed as icons in unusual ways and places.’ Others noted that, ‘Seeing and considering common objects, events and environments as artworks forces us to think of their meanings and how we relate to them.’ A few reported they enjoyed the, ‘Implicit satire’ of seeing familiar objects displaced from their usual locations and/or normal sizes.’ A few also noted they appreciated seeing, ‘Objects embodied in odd ways that gave them a kind of hieratic beauty.’ These remarks were all cognitive, and focused rather on the surprise, originality or novelty of the current art.

When the researcher asked artists what elements or styles they thought visual artworks should include, most informants often shrugged, laughed, but typically agreed that art should depict, ‘Genuinely novel ways’ of presenting the world or ideas in special, surprising, attention-worthy or intriguing ways that made them perceptually interesting.’ Some suggested that new visual art forms resembled new musical and literary forms: ‘They surprise and force us to reconsider what is artful and what is not artful in life.’ However, no specific artwork examples were typically cited, and most artist respondents wanted to remain unnamed. Interestingly, the author found that artists’ opinions resemble some neuroscientific ideas about stimuli and perception, as discussed in later chapters.

None of the author’s art professional-informants reported any current interest in defining art as a class category, but offered their own taste preferences with respect to ‘appropriate’ art styles and media. The majority also commented that, ‘New visual art expressions taught or stimulated new ideas or renewed awareness about daily life and its physical and social environments.’ These particular comment were made by art professionals who were also published professors, and therefore interested in the didactic aspects of aesthetic expressions.

In lieu of trying to define visual art, most general art-interested informants shrugged and summarily reported: ‘Art is whatever truly draws your attention and makes you enjoy seeing it.’ Or, ‘Art is what makes you think for some minutes about why it or you exist.’ A few respondents simply said: ‘Art is whatever I really like to look at again and again.’ When artists, critics, and general art-interested persons were queried about their preferences, they all commented that their art viewing experiences generated positive affect, even when the images depicted were ‘negative, sad or dangerous things, like pistols, death, or electric chairs.’

Studying the informants’ collective answers led to an important conclusion. Basically, elicited informants’ answers suggested that positive perceptual and cognitive processes were stimulated in persons who viewed novel, changing or surprising visual artworks, whether durable, ephemeral or changing. They commented on how ‘unusual art stimuli’ led them to reconsider ‘how and why daily life is full of repeated images and objects, whereas visual art can be ‘the familiar, but made novel or surprising’. In essence, they were being self-reflective in their answers, and less judgmental about the degree of aesthetic perfection was embodied in the artworks viewed. Their collective responses tend to touch on cognition and learning, more than concern for shape, color or stylistic differences.

In sum, current artists’ novel presentations of popular people, cultural icons, or even natural processes like growth or dissolution, stimulated aesthetic experiences that often renewed or transformed participants’ perceptions about daily life. Whether or not it was realized, cognition was stimulated by unusual, changing or ephemeral visual artworks. These collective answers suggest that the aesthetic experience is complex, but typically positive emotionally. A pattern was already emerging. Art professionals made no efforts to classify artworks based on evaluations of past art; however, that may be because the general tenor of the author’s questions or discussions were more contemporary.

Based on all respondents’ opinions, the author also concluded that new art styles, like those from the past, stimulated aesthetic and cognitive awareness through unusual or novel perceptual stimuli. Modern artists had consciously coopted common images and processes, and made them ‘special’ in surprising perceptual ways such as: unusual formats and sizes; placement in surprising or novel locations; by repeating visual icons until they stylistically mimicked movies or advertisements; and by centering perception and thinking on organic processes, change and human environments. Artworks engendered cognition, and could even transform aggressive images like pistols and electric chairs into cultural icons for reconsideration in an oddly contemplative or whimsical way.

When artists were specifically queried whether or not an artwork should be ephemeral or lasting, they consistently said that duration was not an important factor. The perceptual value of any artwork (undefined but recognized by them) proved to be the critical factor, and not its durability. Some artists added that: ‘Artwork durability is only important for museums or art dealers.’ For artists, the entire question of long-term durability was irrelevant to the intrinsic value of any artwork, which was to stimulate an aesthetic experience when perceived. Although artists did not specifically mention cognition, this factor was implicit in all their answers.

It is important to note that the informant sample for the author’s questions is too small to be statistically representative of any overall classes they represent; however, as a group, they seemed to be representative of most answers or opinions given by peers. Fortunately statistical significance has no direct relevance to the conclusions of this study about ephemeral art, but consistently similar responses do matter, and did direct the author to reconsider certain aspects of the ‘cognitive’ when related to perceiving visual artworks in general.

The anthropological approach to visual art has not generated a general definition of the class category ‘genuine visual art,’ except to note visual art’s experiential value as able to stimulate pro-social emotions based on their being aesthetic audiovisual communications. Neither artists nor anthropologists were interested in defining all visual art as a universal class category of durable or ephemeral visual aesthetic expressions. When art historians or critics were directly queried if they had an overall definition of visual art, they either declined to say, smiled and made comments like, ‘Not likely,’ or claimed disinterest in such a general issue. This response suggested to the author that current art professionals may prefer to avoid issues, which might have many implicit professional issues and qualifications, or simply wish not to be tied to any too explicit opinions with non-art professionals.

Some decades ago, professional anthropologists became aware of the uneven and limited status of their own professional fieldwork approach to visual art-related research, and determined to address this problem directly. Therefore, as early as 1973, the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences directed its Annual International Congress to reconsider: ‘the status quo of Anthropology studies of the visual arts and their uniquely human symbolizing process.’ To this end, the Congress focused on what it defined as: ‘the pervasive capacities of human expressions as they produced and appreciated the many faces of affect-producing aesthetic visual phenomena.’ That sounded like a disciplinary reach for help from psychology and motivation research, but at least cognition with affect was included as a critical criterion for the art experience.

Respected professional anthropologists presented many Congress papers, some of which eventuated in a notable publication: The Visual Arts: Plastic and Graphic (Cordell & Tax, (eds.), 1979). The ideas presented therein varied, but generally addressed the aesthetic, affective and symbolizing aspects of visual arts produced by ‘human nature’ through social structural-functional explanations. There was an added emphasis on the pro-social aspects of experiencing artworks, and how this aspect was reflected in changing issues of their social organization.

A summary statement in the Introduction of the conference publication cited the following critique of professional Anthropology’s limited stance with respect to analyzing specifically how and why ‘affect-producing aesthetic visual phenomena’ relate to social groups:

‘Many of us have already come to the conclusion that we know far too little about the state of research in the discipline of psychobiology regarding the perception and response to stimuli of color and form. It is felt that this is an area that should be investigated by our students when feasible, so that future fieldwork would yield enriched material through cross-disciplinary training’ (Cordell & Tax, op cit., 57).

That statement was an accurate and forward-looking charge for anthropologists to address causal psychobiological issues; however, it must be admitted this challenge was not met by most anthropologists thereafter. This lack was partly the result of the ‘when feasible’ subscript. Years passed before cross-disciplinary new data from either paleoarcheology or neuroscience became readily available to challenge or change teaching and professional research orientations. Even today, anthropologists gather important research data about visual artworks and their symbolic meanings, but rarely explore the ‘why’ or ‘how’ of these psychobiological nervous system perceptual responses. However, anthropologists continue to attribute empirically observed prosocial emotions to the structural-functional social aspects of the culture being researched. The emotional valence of visual art seems basic to everyone.

But research methods were and are changing in most social science disciplines, including Anthropology. These professions now include more interdisciplinary orientations in their graduate programs and research goals. As the result, the next comprehensive and relevant Anthropology reader, The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, Morphy and Perkins eds., 2006, included more varied articles. While most papers still considered questions of empirical affect, cultural tastes, functional values and society, a more sophisticated view of aesthetics identified change and symbolism as they relate to cognition and perception. In other words, these nervous system functions were cited as proven to be causally related to the the aesthetic experience. This step is closer to a more scientific research approach, and to explanatory factors.

In sum, perhaps it is now more important for a graduate-level fieldwork social scientist to learn more about basic psychobiological or neuroscientific principles of perception, and more precisely why and how affect is related to cognition. It is no longer adequate for anthropologist fieldworkers merely to learn the language of their informants, but to be able to refer to the causal psychobiological processes behind the social interactions they observe. This knowledge would also assist the fieldworker to understand the elicited meanings that support each culture’s values, and how their aesthetic expressions substantiate them. By now, Neuroanthropology is a more important component in Anthropology (Platek, et al., 2007). By the time this study is published, more relevant articles will have appeared to guide future fieldwork.

Since its inception, Anthropology has avoided applying traditional Western-derived critical evaluations of what might or not be ‘visual artworks’ when working in traditional exotic cultures. In fact, one entire section of this later reader, ‘Primitivism, Art and Artefacts, (pp.123-236), deals directly with the recurring philosophic problem of trying to define or identify visual artworks during empirical fieldwork in exotic cross-cultural situations. For Anthropology, the ‘evaluation process’ entails dual issues such as: the artefact as abstract historical cultural expression, versus being able to identify an actual ‘artwork’ and evaluating it aesthetically according to origin or local taste values. Since this issue becomes a question of epistemology, we summarily mention, but cannot resolve it in this study.

However, one needs to approach classifications logically, since logic is the final ‘court of appeal’ regarding correct classification procedures. In this case, the critical issue is the use of selected phenomenal qualities to define all the empirical instances of a class of behavioral expressions (visual art). However, in any case of human universal trait enactment, there occur endless phenomenal qualities of expression that per se are not amenable to defining class categorizations. This point of logic will be addressed in another chapter.

The valuable updated 2006 Anthropology publication was still critical about how traditional Anthropology had been operationally precluded from researching basic causal psychobiological perceptual questions pertinent to aesthetic expressions due to the technological limitations of empirical fieldwork research. This problem also entails a reevaluation of previously accepted fieldwork techniques, and what were assumed to be proofs for structural functional conclusions about prosocial affect and the aesthetic. However, current anthropological methodologies are changing, but predicting the future results of increased interdisciplinary research is beyond the perameters of this study. Moreover, each fieldwork situation has its limitations with respect to the use of technology. Many places do not even have electricity.

Anthropology remains important, since we live in an era when tribal cultures are pressured to change or be lost to human history. Anthropology is trying to improve its research quality by including interdisciplinary professional-level research methods to gathering empirical fieldwork data in traditional cultures. Their fieldwork aids now include Visual Anthropology, as well as an improved awareness of data from basic Neuroanthropology. The former trend remains allied to photography and film to document value-free data for the analysis of social behaviors. Captured empirical impressions in film can be compared and validated through objective retrievable documentation. Visual Anthropology utilizes and affirms the importance of film for retrievable history, semiotic analyses, and even as a way for informants to select and film what they judge to be socially important.

Neuroanthropology places the brain and nervous system at the center of discussions about cultural characteristics, as well as their observed behavioral enactments. Improved technology has modified research orientations, changed research methods, shifts educational directions, and enhanced data exactness with respect to ethological questions about cognition, emotions and social patterns.

These new interdisciplinary fields may provide more specific answers to social questions previously addressed only by empirical data that were transformed into structural-functional ‘causal’ analyses. However, since most field anthropologists cannot carry or use sophisticated electronic equipment in field situations, fieldwork observations will need to be reduced to include more specific hypotheses that can be tested by later research in laboratories. Many fieldwork situations are still without any or reliable electricity, and this status may not change for years.

The author found using artists as informants about general art-related issues proved valuable, because they inadvertently made issues more obvious or apparent. For example, when most artists were asked if they thought artworks could be reduced to a universal class category of expressions, they responded by suggesting this was a: ‘…Non question, since it is impossible to define all visual artworks.’ That conclusion, which oddly enough agrees with logic, suggests that most artists have been ‘telling’ the world through their ever-changing styles that the aesthetic experience is the primary locus for identifying whether or not something is a genuine artwork. Artists pointed out that: ‘Art styles always change, so who can say one style is more genuine or better art than another?’ Most artists finally shrugged and added, ‘Why bother, anyway?’

Artists prefer to challenge the perpetuation of any single style by using their creativity and imagination to create new stimuli. They seem to need fresh perceptual stimulation for the aesthetic experience, even in themselves. Ideally, creative artists prefer not to replicate successful styles or past artworks overmuch. Intuitively, artists prefer creating unusual, surprising or novel stimuli in their