Southeast Asian Ritual Crafts and the Artworld's Descriptive Power — Epoche B2
Beyond the Circle: Javanese and Balinese Ritual Craft and the Limits of the Artworld The standing complaint against George Dickie's institutional definition of art is that it moves in a circle [1] : art is what the artworld makes art, and the artworld is the body that makes things art. This essay grants the circle [2] , follows Dickie in denying that it is vicious, and then argues that the theory faces a different and more damaging difficulty which the circularity debate has obscured. The theory is not empty; it is parochial. It has one component that does not travel, and the sharpest way to see this is to apply the definition, term by term, to a practice it was not designed for. Ritual craft and performance in Java and Bali serve well, not because they are exotic, but because they are highly organised, hierarchical and self-conscious, and so are exactly the sort of case the theory ought to handle. One thing must be said at the outset about the essay's method. Nothing in the argument turns on any claim that Javanese or Balinese practice is closer to some essence of art, or that comparison across cultures dissolves philosophical problems. Comparison here does one job only: it supplies instances that test a definition. A definition either applies to them or it does not, and either result is informative. Danto and Dickie are not the same theory A correction first, because the two names are routinely run together. Arthur Danto's 'The Artworld' (1964 [3] ) introduced the term but not the theory. Danto's claim was interpretive [4] : what makes Andy Warhol's stacked cartons art, when the cartons in the stockroom are not, is that the one is seen against a body of theory and a history that make it about something. His famous formulation is that to see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. That is a claim about the conditions of interpretation, not about anybody conferring anything, and Danto later declined to be counted an institutional theorist. His own definition, developed in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), turns on a work's embodying a meaning. Dickie took the word and built something else with it: a definition in terms of a social practice and the roles within it. The circularity complaint is aimed at Dickie, and it is Dickie's definition that is tested below. The circle, and why Dickie stopped trying to escape it Dickie's 1974 definition in Art and the Aesthetic made a work of art an artefact upon which the status of candidate for appreciation has been conferred by someone acting on behalf of the artworld. Critics observed that 'artworld' cannot be understood without already understanding 'art'. In The Art Circle (1984) Dickie accepted the point and changed his defence. The five central terms — artist, work of art, public, artworld system, artworld — are, he argued, inflected together, and there is no way to define one without the others, any more than one can define 'move' in chess without 'piece' and 'board'. A definition of that shape is uninformative only if the relations it states are already obvious. His are not: that a work is made for a public, that a public is prepared to receive it, that the artist occupies a role rather than merely a job, are substantive claims about how the practice hangs together. His 1984 definition drops conferral altogether: a work of art is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public. This is the version worth testing, and it has three components: an artefact, a kind created to be presented, and an artworld public. Testing the first two components Take the components in turn against a set of cases. The artefact condition survives without strain. A bronze gong for a gamelan ensemble is forged, tuned and finished by specialists over a long period; a shadow-play figure is cut from buffalo parchment, perforated, painted and mounted; a Balinese mask is carved from a particular wood, often taken with observances attached to the felling. These are artefacts by any standard, and more elaborately so than most objects in a modern gallery. The created to be presented condition also survives, and does so more interestingly than one might expect. These objects are not by-products of use. A shadow-play figure is made for performance and for nothing else. A gamelan set is commissioned for an ensemble. The sacred sets kept by the courts at Yogyakarta and Surakarta and brought out for the Sekaten festival, described in Sumarsam's history of Central Javanese gamelan [5] , are made and maintained precisely for occasions on which they will be heard. Dickie's second condition asks whether the object belongs to a kind made for presentation, and the answer is plainly yes. So far the definition is doing well, and this is itself a result. A theory often accused of describing nothing but the modern gallery has correctly classified two of three conditions in a practice with no galleries in it. The component that does not travel The third condition is where the theory runs out. An artworld public , in Dickie's sense, is not merely an audience. It is a set of persons prepared to receive an object in a particular way: to attend to it, to consider it, to hold it up for regard. The role is defined by that readiness, and the readiness is what makes conferral or presentation intelligible. Ritual practice does not always supply such a public, and the failures are of two distinct kinds. In the first kind, the object is presented, but not to the assembled people. Offerings made at a Balinese temple festival are addressed to deities and ancestors. Consecrated Barong and Rangda masks are kept in temple storehouses and brought out under conditions; when they appear, they are not exhibits but participants, and the people present are not primarily an audience for them. Bandem and deBoer's study of Balinese dance turns on exactly this division between perform