Download FROM NATURAL WHOLES TO PARTICULAR UNIVERSALITY

FROM NATURAL WHOLES TO PARTICULAR UNIVERSALITY
- the ethnographic collections at Moesgård Museum
Peter Bjerregaard, PhD Fellow
Dept. of Anthropology and Ethnography, University of Aarhus
[email protected]
Paper prepared for the Danish Research School for Anthropology and Ethnography PhD Workshop Beyond
the Whole?, Moesgård, July 7 2008
Introduction
In On Collecting Art and Culture James Clifford argues that ethnographic objects in Western
collections are brought within a capitalist system of objects in which they come to stand for
abstract wholes. This system of appropriating ethnographic objects and presenting them as
“curiosities to giggle at, art to be admired, or evidence to be understood scientifically” (217,
emphasis in original) is contrasted to the particular fetishist capacities of objects which Clifford
finds epitomised in James Fenton’s poem about Pitt-Rivers Museum, in which the autor is
captured by the claws and traps, and labels describing for instance “a djumka, used by aboriginal
tribes for hunting wild game at dark nights”. In other words, the ethnographic museum walks a
line between the abstract wholes, which makes it relevant to society en large, and the singular
objects of experience.
In this paper I will follow the development of a relatively recent ethnographic collection, The
Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård Museum. These collections were established through a
theoretical framework focussing on the development of forms of subsistence, which allowed
ethnographers and archaeologists of the 1940s and 50s to collaborate in the study of the cultural
development of man. Today, Moesgård Museum is about to move into a new state of the art
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museum building which have forced staffs to reflexively reconsider practices of ethnographic
collecting and display. A central problem that opens from these considerations touches upon the
question whether holistic collecting and display has become obsolete in ethnographic museums,
and whether we may conceive of ethnographic collections that are not holistic.
Detail from Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
(Photo: Peter Bjerregaard)
An ethnographic collection in Århus
In 1947 the town of Århus decided to support to Third Danish Expedition to Central Asia with the
aim of receiving ethnographic artefacts in turn to establish the first proper ethnographic collection
in town.1 The head of the expedition, Henning Haslund-Christensen, had approached the city
council, requesting an amount of 50.000 DKr in support for the expedition.
The mayor, Svend Unmack-Larsen, recommends that Haslund-Christensen’s request was accepted
since receiving a collection of ethnographic artefacts could be of ‘great importance’ to the town,
confirming the role of Århus as Denmark’s second capitol, and it might even strengthen the ties
between the town and its son’s and daughter’s who now resided elsewhere.
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The first ethnographic objects in a museum collection in Århus actually dates back to 1876, when a few objects were
included in the collections of what was then called Forhistorisk Selskab (Prehistorical Society). These objects are not
contextualised and no entries exist regarding their origin. Apparently most of the objects were handed over to the local
Museum of Natural History in the 1920s, probably due to the fact that they were made from bone, fur, feather etc. and
since the objects of primitive peoples, in the conception of the time, were relegated to the realm of natural history
(Ferdinand 1999).
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But possibly the archaeologist P.V. Glob also had a thing to say. In 1949 Glob was appointed as
professor of prehistoric archaeology, and director of the local pre-historic museum. P.V. Glob
envisioned a future research centre for archaeology and ethnography which aimed “[t]o provide a
better background for the understanding of the cultural development in Denmark” (UnmackLarsen in Ferdinand 1999).
The collection was to operate as a study and research collection under University of Aarhus, but it
was to be kept at the local prehistoric museum, Århus Museum.
Natural wholes
Since ethnography did not exist as a discipline either at the museum or the university in Århus in
the late 1940s, the creation of the collection had to be made in co-operation with the National
Museum in Copenhagen where the main character in Danish anthropology at that time, Kaj BirketSmith (1893-1977), was director of the ethnographic collection.
As a guide-line for the future collection in Århus, Birket-Smith advised that,
to avoid creating a haphazard collection full of gaps and thus without scientific or
educational value […] we ought […] to focus upon cultural forms from which it is
still possible to acquire a broad representation, and which together will make up a firm and
natural whole.
(Birket-Smith in Ferdinand 1970: 14)
Birket-Smith’s idea of collections “that together would make up a firm and natural whole” must be
related to his strong orientation towards the study of forms of subsistence2. Birket-Smith was
heavily inspired by German geography and anthropology personified in Ratzel and Boas. His
approach combined Ratzels Kulturkreis-theory with a Danish historical approach in the way that
only particular elements and not complete cultural sets travelled. In this sense, Birket-Smith
operated with a cultural history, in which certain traits could be traced to interaction with other
2
It is difficult to translate this concept properly. Erhvervskultur in Danish is a translation of the German Berufskultur,
i.e. an understanding of culture as based in the relation to the natural environment. Cultures were categorised according
to their way of exploiting the natural environment, and as means for establishing the relation to land, objects became
central to these studies. In this way the concept of Berufskultur confirms the German romantic idea of culture being
connected to the land which is also apparent in the concept of Naturvölker (Nature people) which was translated to
Nordic languages but never into French or English (see Høiris).
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groups, and adaptation, through which the cultural apparatus was adjusted to the natural,
geographical surroundings (Høiris 1986: 160-175).
This idea of cultural development through travelling elements and geographical adaptation was
embedded in the development in which Mankind had developed from gathering societies to
higher form of agriculture. And this implicit evolutionary (though Birket-Smith often rejected
evolutionism) scheme was the basis for Birket-Smith’s argument about creating a ‘natural whole’
out of the future collections in Århus. He suggested the making of collections that would illustrate
the main forms of subsistence: hunters and gatherers, higher hunters, nomads, semiagriculturalists, full agriculturalists without the plough, and full agriculturalists with the plough.
Each of these forms of subsistence could be illustrated through collections from one or more
appropriate cultures according to this scheme:
Collectors and hunters
Indian primitive tribes and Australians
Higher hunters
Greenlanders
Nomads
Lapps, Arabs, Todas
Semi-agriculturists
Indian primitive tribes, Papuans and an East African tribe
Full-agriculturists without the plough
Mexico or Peru
Full-agriculturists with the plough
Afghanistan, India and China
(Ferdinand 1974:476)
In this way the ideal ethnographic collection would reflect, not simply a contingent jumble of
artefacts from primitive cultures, but the entire human development – in a sense, as we shall see
was the intention of P.V. Glob – such a collection would establish an archaeology of our own
cultural development.
The early collections
While Birket-Smith’s ideas framed the initial interest for developing an ethnographic collection in
Århus, he never headed the future collection or organized any concrete collections. Importantly,
though, he was the professor of the first collectors attached to the new institution in Århus,
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Johannes Nicolaisen and Werner Jacobsen, and of the first head of collections in Århus, Klaus
Ferdinand. Furthermore, in the early years of the collections Glob relied on Birket-Smiths ideas
when it came to ethnography.
In the early 1950s Glob sent out an open letter to Danish missionaries asking for their help in
collecting objects to establish the collections in Århus. This letter was almost a direct copy of a
pamphlet, Birket-Smith had distributed as a special issue of Danmarksposten (Birket-Smith 1931), a
bulletin for Danes working abroad, in 1931. In this pamphlet Birket-Smith tries to induce Danish
ex-pats to collect objects for the National Museum stressing the aim of collecting as ‘through
objects to shed light on life in all its phases […] among all peoples who do not own the ordinary
European culture”.
It seems clear that Glob’s approach was based in Birket-Smith’s advise with a strong emphasis on
saving artefacts from cultures ‘that are facing extinction’ (ibid.), and on the use of ethnographic
artefacts for comparison with Danish archaeological material in order ‘”to know more about our
own prehistory”. In an application for support to procure a collection from New Guinea in 1958,
Glob envisions how such a collection could become a part of the future exhibitions at the museum:
In the completion of the museum’s new scheme we plan to display the ethnographic
collections along with the collections from our own ancient past to shed light on the
different phases our own culture has passed through in the 10.000 years our ancient history
comprises. Since only a small part of our domestic cultures has been preserved […] such a
display would in a striking way be enlightening to the audience, since our collecting and
acquisition of ethnographic artefacts has been focussed on representing the different
cultural phases […] Thus, it will be possible to show the cultural development of our planet
from the most ancient times to the first town cultures. In an excellent way the collection
offered would illustrate primitive agrarian societies with a highly developed hunting
culture.
(Glob, letter to Aarhus Oliemølle, 2/9 1958, my emphasis)
In the scheme of the development of forms of subsistence, archaeological and ethnographic
material could thus be unproblematic combined. While ultimately concerned with presenting the
local Danish past, ethnographic objects could be applied to cover developmental stages that were
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only scarcely documented through archaeological objects. We may argue that this approach was
holistic, in the sense that it included our own past with the history of the Other – in other words, it
dealt with mankind.
Photos from the joint ethnographic and archaeological exhibits Hunting People (1963) and From
Pickaxe to Plough (1965) reveal how this approach was carried through in displays. These two
exhibitions followed the development of weapons and hunting techniques, and agrarian tools
respectively, and demonstrated through individual archaeological or ethnographic cultural
examples how these tools and techniques were related to ecological environments in which the
cultures in question were set. Presented side by side you would find Danish Maglemose agrarian
culture and Mumuye the latter as an example of a contemporary people using pick axe.
In terms of material culture certain objects are presented as metonymic for these cultures. The pick
axe, the plough etc. come to stand for a whole cultural stage, since it was exactly tools and
techniques that marked the adaptation of human societies to the ecology.
What falls immediately to the eye is, though, the fact that this whole of human cultural
development includes neither the Western researcher nor the increasingly pervasive presence of
industrial products found in indigenous cultures. In other words the idea of the ‘natural whole’
implies the fall of grace through which Western society has now moved beyond the whole. The
‘natural whole’ of Birket-Smith’s advice would, in other words, be a whole that would never
incorporate the contemporary world referring only to the vanishing ‘authentic indigenous’
cultures.
Cultural Wholes: The clash of the traditional and the modern
In 1958 Klaus Ferdinand was attached to Århus Museum as the first ethnographer. Initially, he
was employed as an assistant professor with the task of teaching ethnography to archaeology
students, and taking care of and developing the ethnographic study collection, but in 1963 he
started to teach students at the newly established Department of Ethnography.
While Klaus Ferdinand initially carried on the legacy from his professor Birket-Smith, he gradually
developed a new collecting strategy that was shaped by the winds of change of anthropology in
the 1960s. Ferdinand started out letting the new read Birket-Smith and Pater Schmidt, and had
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them follow his courses on the main forms of subsistence at the department of archaeology, but
very soon things started to change. Ferdinand’s own approach to anthropology was still anchored
in material culture but he had to accommodate this approach to the fact that the discipline was
moving away from objects. In the mid-60s functionalism filled the horizon with Barth as a regional
star (ibid. 18-19)3, and a few years later American social anthropology, iconised by Bohannan,
paved the way for a more theoretical approach.
Strandgaard describes Ferdinand’s double task of establishing the collections and the new
department as a mission impossible.
The museum was a frame for our everyday life as students. We took part in
making exhibitions. But the discipline was rising to a higher sphere, and soon we,
the students, developed a mild disdain for museums.
In other words the museum ethnography could not accommodate the interests and wishes and of
the students. Therefore, Ferdinand also had to reformulate the aims with ethnographic collecting.
In 1970, Ferdinand thus describes the kind of collecting, the ethnographic collection in Århus had
strived at as based in a three-fold aim:
1. Complete or as complete collections as possible from individual societies, as far as
possible including all aspects of the relevant cultures
2. Collections which constitute well balanced wholes, illustrating e.g. technological
processes with the relevant tools and products at different stages of completion
3. Single objects, which can be used in comparison with corresponding objects from other
cultures, such as agricultural tools, pots, firemaking equipment etc.
(Ferdinand 1970: 15)
The wholes referred to in Ferdinand’s principles are no longer ‘a natural whole’ of cultural
development, but cultural wholes in the sense of objects being linked within a meaningful social
framework, and serial wholes connecting the production, use and trade of objects .
Bouquet (2001) mentions as an “unfortunate corollary” of Barth’s influence on Norwegian social anthropology in the
1960s that “interest in museum-based material culture dwindled to the point of near abandonment by a whole generation
of anthropologists” (181). The students in Århus were not only inspired by Barth at a distance – a few of them studied
by him in Bergen for shorter or longer periods (Strandgaard 1991).
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Another point that may reflect Ferdinand’s efforts to reconcile museum ethnography with the
aspects of industrialism and traditionalism, inequality etc. that appeared as new central issues to
the academic discipline in the 1960s is dealt with a few paragraphs later in the same article.
In the kind of collecting we would like to realise there is a more or less fundamental break with
the traditional museological standards for objects, and an obvious break with the requirement
that objects have to be old and represent the culture unaffected by recent developments […] In
most places in the contemporary world we see a conflict between new and old. We would like
to catch the adaptation and the changes induced by this in our collections […] Most of the
collections we establish become snapshots tied to a particular historical period, and as such
they are, by the end of the day, antiquarian anyway.
Ferdinand 1970:15.
If Birket-Smith had been pre-occupied by the pure objects (that we now know have gone crazy)
which would allow comparison on a large historical scale, Ferdinand’s principles included
industrial products as they were seen in the contemporary setting.
Ferdinand describes collections as ‘snapshots’ – that is, a fragmentary freezing of a life in flow. He
was very conscious about this historical limitation of ethnographic collecting. A collection did not
tell about a culture as such, detached in time and space. The collection documented everyday life
somewhere in the world at a given time in history. Therefore, the collection made up a specific
time-space which was in contrast to Birket-Smiths’ ideas of documenting “traditional cultures
facing their extinction”. To Ferdinand the clash between the traditional and the modern, industrial
world was a fact and was to be documented. Doing this priority was given to the documentation
of everyday life around the world through comprehensive collections, ideally based in long term
field work. Only after having spent a considerable time in the field would the collector be able to
judge what kinds of objects would be needed to create the proper snapshot of a particular culture.
Therefore, Ferdinand also increasingly included trained ethnographers and ethnography students
as collectors.
In 1970 the Århus Museum moved to its current premises at Moesgård and was renamed
Prehistoric Museum Moesgård. With the opening of the new museum at Moesgård ethnography had
been allocated a separate space for a permanent exhibition. This move clearly marked the
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independent status of ethnography as a discipline. While the two disciplines of archaeology and
ethnography still shared institutional framework, they had become theoretically incompatible with
each other. Ethnographic artefacts could no longer be applied as comparative material for Danish
pre-history, and the anthropological approach to culture was no longer compatible with the
framework of the development of economic culture.
In terms of the style of display the opening exhibition on Nuristan, based in Lennart Edelberg’s
impressive collections, consisted of reconstructions of a Nuristani house and a temple set within an
environment of contemporary photos of Nuristani landscape and villages. Furniture and religious
sculptures were set ‘naturally’ within these environments.
The style of display of the first permanent exhibitions came to characterise future temporary
exhibitions at Moesgård, as it linked very well with the new principles of cultural holistic
collecting. For instance, one of the major exhibitions in the 1970s, Afghanistan (1976) reconstructed
an Afghan bazaar in detail featuring shops with all kinds of goods available, and a tea bar fully
furnished with bed, posters and a stove with chimney. In a way this kind of display established a
certain ‘object democracy’, levelling the importance of all objects.
Details from the exhibition Afghanistan, 1976. The exhibition allowed the audiences to take a walk through Kabul
bazaar, and even visit the tea bar. (Photo: Moesgård Museum)
In contrast to the high lighting of metonymic objects of the 1960s the photo material from the 1970s
and 80s reveals how rarely show cases and display of individual objects were actually applied.
Like the collections sought to document relations between objects in creating cultural (all
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important aspects) or serial (all phases of production and use) wholes, so the exhibitions
established such wholes, were the single object became meaningful only in relation to the
conglomerate of objects it was a part of. In this way, unspectacular objects as bowl, cans, simple
furniture etc. became spectacular by being inserted in lifelike sceneries, and no single objects were
more important than the scenery itself.
Interestingly, these exhibitions also reveal how far museum ethnography and university
ethnography had departed from each other. After the stroll through Kabul bazaar the
exhibition suddenly turns into much more textual ways of explaining divisions of land and
labour in Afghanistan, unequal exchange, and exploitation of the work force. In this way the
exhibition combined Ferdinand’s collection-as-snapshot approach with the critical approach
apparent among students and young lecturers. In time, this gap would cause the collections
to live their own quiet life while the university discipline ventured further into Marxism,
discourse, praxeology etc. finding no interest in objects.
Particular universality: re-embedding objects in experience?
The strange thing was that even if theoretical approaches to ‘culture’ changed dramatically up
through the 1980s and 90s this fact hardly affect the kinds of exhibitions and collections made at
Moesgård. It seems as if exactly the fact that a certain style had developed made these kinds of
exhibitions quite resistant to change.
Co-students I have talked to explain how they, while collecting in the field, tried to figure out what
was needed for recreating social environments in the style known from previous collections and
exhibitions. So, while the idea of recreating social wholes had somehow become obsolete in the
theoretical framework of the collectors as anthropologists, collections were still made according to
this particular form of collecting and display.
In latter years, it has become too evident that the holistic re-constructive approach to ethnographic
display is no longer viable to an audience accustomed to long distance travelling, the Internet,
watching Discovery Channel etc. With the recent plans for building a completely new museum
building with app. 1200 m2 allocated for ethnographic display the need for reconsidering
practices of ethnographic collecting and display has become very acute.
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Therefore a series of three workshops headed by anthropologist Inger Sjørslev from University of
Copenhagen were conducted from the summer of 2006 till January 2007. The three workshops
focussed on new theoretical approaches to humans and things, the role of collections, and new
approaches to museum display, and the results of the workshops were published in a report
entitled The Ethnography at the New Moesgård: A cosmopolitan local museum.
The report focuses on three overarching themes: the ethnographic museum and politics of
exchange, the museum and its audience, and finally, the need to rethink the role of objects in social
experience and in exhibitions.
For the present analysis what is particularly interesting is the wish to rethink ethnographic
museum practices in theoretical perspectives. The proposal for the workshop series asserts
that:
By incorporating anthropological research on the social life of things, the relation between
objects and people, and the role of material objects in the global world, the framework for a
really original ethnographic museum can be created.
Thus, the background for the first of the three workshops was the observation that after having
been neglected in anthropological theory for a number of years, objects seem to have taken their
place in the disciplinary development anew. Therefore, this moment in anthropology seemed to
offer a good opportunity for rethinking practices of collection management and display.
In the report the reconsideration of the relation between human beings and objects is made central
for the future ethnographic practice at Moesgård for two reasons: first, it offers a new way of
looking at objects and their role in human experience, guiding new research on objects and
materiality; and second, they suggest new ways of utilising objects in museum display.
The former point takes the collections back into the scope of anthropological research. The
perspective that emerged with the workshop series focuses at the multiple intersubjective relations
established between human beings and objects. The theoretical approach of the report focuses on
questions of animism, perspectivism, fetishism and exchange. In this framework objects are neither
utilities nor superfluous signs, but part of the very stuff of social experience. We relate to and
experience the world with and through the materiality that we are engaged with.
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The latter point confers these insights to the issue of exhibition making. In the museum audiences
can be exposed to the forces related to objects in animism and other perspectives. Rather than
describing how other people experience the world culturally, the museum offers a chance for
letting local audiences be exposed to the same kind of dynamics:
The museum’s magic has to be displayed by maintaining that magic emerges in a relation,
in a process. A processing of the substance, in the broadest meaning of the word, occurs
and therefore there is also magic in the creation of an exhibition. The foreign people that
have supplied the objects for the ethnographic collections are often very familiar with these
magical powers, and the exhibitions must be able to employ the anthropological
knowledge about magic both by showing how it appears to the others and by exploiting it
in its own activities.
(Sjørslev 2008:26)
Furthermore, it is asserted that the secluded space of the museum may draw connections in the
world that might be difficult to establish in the stream of information audiences are exposed to
from news media. In this sense the materiality of the museum itself can be used as a way of
condensing parts of the complexity of social experience in becoming a plane of projection in itself.
The approach presented in the report takes objects back into consideration, but with a kind of
surrealist twist. Objects are no more mere objects – they are animated, personalised and active. As
ethnography has moved towards a focus on experiencing rather than ordering, so the approach to
objects is based on experience. And, while objects are obviously experienced differently in
different places, we are all exposable to the materiality of things.
In this sense objects are reinserted in a universal perspective, but a perspective that does not rely
on a unitary framework as the concept of forms of subsistence. Surely, people in different places
experience the world differently, but if we are able to locate the dynamics of these experiences we
will be able to translate, or maybe rather, transplace these experiences by use of objects, and use
the display to confront ourselves with our own unconscious.
A cover term for this approach could be ‘particular universality’. While not really arguing for a
new universal framework, like the main forms of subsistence, this new approach argues that
universal ways of engaging with objects exist in the sense that we are all exposable to the powers
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of objects. And these ways of engaging intersubjectively with objects can be applied in new ways
of engaging with objects in museum display. As such intersubjectivity is approached through the
particular – the particular objects, or the particular installation of objects that does not necessarily
relate to a larger abstract whole outside the object itself or the installation.
Beyond the Whole?
In this paper I have tried to demonstrate how the practices of collecting and display at The
Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård reflects changing theoretical understandings of the relation
between culture and holism. By way of a conclusion I will try to open a discussion on how objects
come to stand as parts and wholes in the visual displays related to the mentioned
conceptualisations of holism at The Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård.
In the framework of the development of forms of subsistence Birket-Smith imagined a ‘natural
whole’ as the ideal for ethnographic collecting. This whole would represent the undisturbed
relations between human societies and their natural surroundings as they were integrated through
objects – a whole which the industrial world had moved beyond. In matter of display, particular
objects - a pick axe, a fishing net, a plough – became the focus of particular forms of subsistence
(and, implicitly, of the ordering of human societies in terms of the development of culture). A part
from being presented through such objects, the display would typically show what kinds of crops
to be harvested or what kind of game to be hunted with the highlighted implements.
In this scenery the society in question becomes a part of the universal whole of possible human
adaptation to the natural environment, and the object in focus appears as the whole that comprises
a complex set of relations between man and nature. Thus the particular object may be presented in
the exhibition as metonymic for a particular society and metaphoric for a certain stage of human
cultural development.
With the changed perspective of the 1970s and onwards ‘the clash of the industrial and the
traditional’ becomes pertinent. The focus changes to cultural wholes, rather than natural ones, in
which also industrial objects can be appropriated. The single society is seen as a ‘snapshot’, a
particular time-space located in history – a snapshot that has been preserved through the
collection, like the photographic image.
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But apparently this approach looses any kind of theoretical anchoring. Collecting is no longer
legitimated through a larger theoretical framework, but as the documentation of historical timespaces. Human societies must be understood through their particular historical configuration. In
terms of display this means that objects loose all capacities of symbolism. The objects exhibited in
the environments are merely what they are – parts of the reconstruction of the world out there, and
each object can only be comprehended as meaningful as a part of the larger picture of the bazaar,
the home, the school etc. No particular object can represent the whole, and the whole can only be
attained by the most detailed (re-)configuration of its parts.
The approach suggested with Inger Sjørslev’s report suggests that we may return to the particular
object as a focus multiple perspectives. In a world that has moved beyond the grand narratives of
human development, the aim is no longer to prove the existence of developmental stages or
reconstruct cultural wholes – rather, this approach looks objects as parts of social relations, and
reconfigure this relation somehow in the exhibition. As such, this approach does not represent the
world out there, neither in the abstracted sense of human development, or the documentary
reconstruction of social milieus. What this approach aims at is to re-empower objects in the
exhibition hall – in ways that may not necessarily correspond to the practices of the original users,
but tries to evoke the directedness of objects in an environment that is comprehensible to the
museum audience.
In this sense this approach is similar to Alfred Gell’s (1996) imaginary exhibition of a Zandean
hunting net next to Western conceptual art, like Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank (The Impossibility of
Death in the Mind of Someone Living). By doing this, Gell argues, we may draw out a perspective
from the Zande net that might never have come to the mind of the Zande people, but is still
embedded within the directness of the object – the question of fate and the ultimate directedness of
life towards death.
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A Zande hunting net and Hirst’s The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.
The question is, though, if such an approach actually can be realised outside the framework of
holism. How may an object become powerful as focus for the audience’s attention if the nexus
within which is directed is not somehow rendered for? In Gell’s case of the Zande hunting net,
would the net be as powerful if it was presented as the work of a Western artist for purposes of
display? Or does the power of imagination, related to the net, stem from a certain contextualisation
of the object as part of a larger whole in which hunting game is imperative to the survival of the
group, which also connect the ways of producing and handling the net with magical connotations?
And is it exactly this kind of contextualisation that might also provide us a new perspective on
Hirt’s shark in a tank as more than Western provocative artistry, and in fact an image of the basic
conditions of being?
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