Staff Seminar Series - Victoria Walters Seminar

In this paper, Victoria will discuss her research on German 20th Century artist Joseph Beuys and how this has brought her into contact with anthropology as a discipline. The quotation in the seminar title is taken from the work of Paul Stoller, an anthropologist who sees in Beuys’ work one of several “artistic detours” the discipline might consider in order to expand its frame and evoke more fully and sensuously the cultures it seeks to understand. She will ask: can Beuys’ precedent be usefully instrumentalised in this way, or does it point to a more radical position with respect to anthropology? Could Beuys be seen as an applied anthropologist, or is the location of Beuys’ work in the field of art a vital part of its critical force?