Interactions between Sensuosity and Institutions: Examining Evocation and Valuation in Art Practices

Keywords

Sensuosity,Institutions,Evocation

Objectives

This inter-university research project will examine the inseparability of sensuosity and institutions in the production and exhibition of art, with a focus on “evocation” and “valuation” in the agency of various entities including non-human ones such as things and institutions.
The relationship between local practice and global institutions based on the power involved in presupposing the universality of beauty and art has been an issue in the anthropology of art since the late 1980s. However, since the end of the 1990s, the study of material culture and agency theory have flourished, showing the linkage and co-production between the agency of people and of things. But it has not been fully examined how the “evocation” and “fascination” addressed in the latter are connected with the institutions and aesthetic decisions dealt with in the former.
This research project will examine how sensuosity and institutions are inseparably connected, and shed light on the diversity of “evocation” and “valuation” in art practices, including painting and other forms of arts and spatial design around the world, music, landscapes of different time periods and countries, and performance.

Research Results

The joint research project workshops were held a total of 13 times in the period between December 2019 and March 2023, which includes the two years during which it was almost impossible to undertake overseas travel and carry out the project according to plan. The entire research team was able to meet in person only once, at the first workshop in 2019; the only other occasion on which more than half of the team participated in person was the final workshop in 2023. Nonetheless, through a combination of online workshops held over Zoom and hybrid workshops offered both online and face-to-face, we were able to maintain high attendance rates for the entire 13-workshop series across almost three years. The COVID-19 pandemic forced several members of the research team to make major changes to the research plans they originally formulated in 2019. But despite the pandemic, close and lively communication in the online mode proved effective in enabling all members to inspire one another and gradually establish a common direction for the research through presentations and discussions at each workshop.
Hashimoto, Hasegawa, and Takehisa are all curators, but each brought different experiences and practices to their discussions of institutional elasticity and flexibility in art museums, curators’ “consultations” for art workers at the interface of sensuosity and institutions, and the coexistence of diverse value outlooks and sensuosity grounded in bodily experience in art centers. Archeologists Teramura and Mitsumoto explored the inseparability of sensuosity and institutions through two differing cases: a novel theoretical attempt to reassess institution-theory-based Japanese archeology using the theory of “”becoming”” , and intersection between institutions, such as rules and conventions for archaeological recording, and physical sensations entailing sensuosity. Cultural anthropologists Nobori and Watanabe explored the evaluation of feelings and the senses through expressions of domestic violence in exhibitions, and the relationships between art and victims of domestic violence in contemporary Fiji. Ogata, Kanematsu, and Tanaka reported on the nature of the complex, but inevitable, intertwinements of sensuosity and institutions through studies of the most well-loved art in a provincial city in Nigeria, art practice and art education in the Niigata-Chuetsu region, and art music in Cuba.
Through a joint criticism workshop on the book Jomon runesansu (Jomon Renaissance ) by special invited lecturer Yoshiaki Furuya and comments from Professor Furuya on the research project, we were also able to consider potentials for sensuosity outside or above institutions, and potentials for non-institutionalized sensuosity.
This research project thus produced more vivid insights into the specificity and flexibility of both sensuosity and institutions, and their inseparability, by traversing the three different disciplinary fields of contemporary art, archeology, and cultural anthropology.