Terminus: Ethnographic Terminalia

CRAIG CAMPBELL

‘‘Terminus’’ reflects on the curatorial impetus behind the 2010 Ethnographic Terminalia show, held in NewOrleans. [contemporary art and anthropology, curatorial practices, Wunderkammer, exhibition, trangression]

Terminus:The point to which motion or action tends . . .sometimes that from which it starts . . .1

I sat in the fourth room of the Du Mois Gallery, along shotgun-style house in New Orleans, on fourseparate occasions to watch Susan Hiller’s ‘‘Last Si-lent Movie.’’ The audio bounced around the smallroom and voices worked to raise the hair on my neckseveral times. I like gallery works of long duration.At least I like the idea of them, I like the implicit lackof expectation that I must experience the wholething in one sitting, or enter in to the watching at aspecific moment. It is rare that I find myself in theright space or moment for taking them in. There is aweight to the Hiller work that presses my attentionclosely to it. The mostly unfamiliar languages tendto have an effect of slipping into the background ofconsciousness but the matter-of-fact presentation ofthe translation is a hook to my attention. It sets thetone for the room and echoes through the gallery.

Ethnographic Terminalia (ET) is a project aimed atfostering art-based practices among anthropolo-gists and other cultural investigators or critics. It

accomplishes this mission through the organization ofexhibitions and workshops. A series of exhibitions iscurrently underway with support from the AmericanAnthropological Association and the Society for VisualAnthropology. These exhibitions are timed to coincidewith the annual meetings of the American Anthropo-logical AssociationFan event that draws thousands ofattendees (over 5,000 in 2009). The first exhibition washeld in Philadelphia at Crane Arts in 2009. This showbrought together 17 exhibitors (both anthropologistsand artists). The 2010 exhibition was mounted in NewOrleans at two galleries (Du Mois and Barrister’s). A thirdexhibition is planned for Montreal, Canada, in 2011.

Ethnographic Terminalia 2010: New Orleans hadmultiple threads woven together through efforts to speak

simultaneously to the broad membership of the Ameri-can Anthropological Association and the Society forVisual Anthropology, as well as an even narrowercommunity of visual anthropologists interested in con-temporary art. But these mobile and largely nonlocalindividuals are only part of the conversation. The otherpeople addressed are contemporary artists, patrons ofcontemporary art, as well as the local community (whoare interested or affiliated by dint of proximity to thegallery). These people might be said to comprise one ofEthnographic Terminalia’s publicsFthat grouping ofnonspecialists who exist largely outside the specificlanguage or jargon and theoretical and political currentsof academic cultural critique. It is in the possibilitiesprovided by the art gallery as a genre of experience thatallows us to engage various publics, constituted acrossspecific interests. As a conceptual platform, Ethno-graphic Terminalia supports a coalescence of activitiesand actors. It secures a space of emergence (or potentialemergence) through a loose participatory organizationconvened around the activities of looking, showing, anddiscussing.

Participating in the curatorial vision for Ethno-graphic Terminalia has been driven by an effort tonegotiate an emergent identity for gallery-based visualanthropology amid a raft of competing and contestedinstitutions and practices. The meetings of the AmericanAnthropological Association itself are evidence of this.Where the institutional framework provides the possi-bility of a sizable audience, it also necessitates aforfeiture of formal attention to corporate offerings.Visual anthropology, possibly more than any other sub-discipline, has suffered from this with substandardprojection systems, antiquated equipment, and regretta-ble audio. The experience, especially for filmmakers, isunderwhelming and often disappointing. While mem-bers of the Society for Visual Anthropology have laboredto make the events as good as possible, they are workingagainst a structure that is largely uninterested in formal

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 27, Issue 1, pp. 52–56, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. & 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7458.2011.01079.x.

qualities of experienceFor at least one that has resigneditself to suffering the mediocrity of American halls ofassembly. The specific needs of visual anthropologistsin most convention centers will never be more than anafterthought.

Ethnographic Terminalia 2010: New Orleans pre-sented itself as a constellation of events, a structureengineered to accommodate different visions and possi-bilities. Understanding the relationship of the variousnodes to one another as informal and sometimes hap-hazard should not, however, preclude a recognition ofthem as autonomous points of intensity and emergence.There were five principal nodes in the EthnographicTerminalia 2010: New Orleans exhibition: Du MoisGallery, Barrister’s Gallery, Art Spill, Ethnographic Ter-mini round table, and the Ethnographic Terminaliawebsite.

The Du Mois Gallery became the central point in theconstellation of ET-related events. With 23 projects, theDu Mois Gallery was turned entirely over to the work ofartists, anthropologists, and collaborative teams. An-choring the show was Susan Hiller’s The Last SilentMovie, Robert Willim and Anders Weberg’s Elsewhere-ness: New Orleans, and Fiamma Montezemolo’sBelonging Machine: Color by Chance, One Thing ANDAnother, and Tijuana Bio Cartography. The Du MoisGallery is an independently run commercial gallery, op-erated by Renee Deville and Jean-Paul Villere.

Ethnographic Terminalia positioned two works atBarrister’s Gallery: Ryan Burns’s Profane Relics and LinaDib’s Recantorium. The location of Burns’s piece couldnot be more perfect. The yard at Barrister’s Gallery of-fered a kind of open antechamber for the alcove thathosts Burns’s work. The detritus and waste of Burns’s fi-cto-archaeology provide a powerful counterpoint toLina Dib’s interactive work on the mundane affects sur-rounding the collection and accumulation of things.Barrister’s Gallery is run by the curator Andy Antippasand is located in the St. Claude arts district, which is alsothe locale of the third node, Art Spill. Art Spill emergedas a project after Ethnographic Terminalia had alreadybegun to curate the show at Du Mois. Following MariaBrodine’s enthusiasm, Art Spill produced a dialogue be-tween anthropology, art, and activism. With an officialAAA-sponsored event an Art Spill panel discussionhelped to situate the art works. Maria discusses Art Spillat greater length in this edition (Figure 1).

While Ethnographic Terminalia seeks to operate as apara-site to the American Anthropological Association

meetings, it is also designed to engage specifically withthe community of anthropologists who gather each yearunder the banner of the AAA. This year Maria Brodineand Craig Campbell organized an invited round tablesponsored by the Council on Anthropology and Educa-tion and the Society for Visual Anthropology. From theround table abstract:

The lecture hall, the project space, the gallery, theclass room, the space of the monograph or the jour-nal, subversive spaces, the website: all of these, areimagined within a discursive geography of connec-tions and non-connections. The goal here is to bringartists, ethnographers, and curators into close prox-imity to see what happens when their discursiveapproaches brush up against one another. This no-tion of proximity must also be central to the guidingtheme of the conference: circulations. This round-table is in its own way performative of circulations.As a generative project it reflects the larger programof Ethnographic Terminalia, which is to hasten andamplify circulations between different creativeactors.

Participants in the round table included Tarek Elhaik,Fiamma Montezemolo, Morgana King, Nicky Levell,Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Thomas Ross Miller, andCraig Campbell.

Finally, it is important to recognize the crucial roleplayed by the Ethnographic Terminalia website as a nodein our constellation. Not only has the website provided ameans of communicating details about the exhibitions,but it also serves as an archive of the show and thusworks toward the development of greater recognition forworks of visual anthropology. Ethnographic Terminaliawas created not only to provide a venue to show works(to our peers and to others) but also to parlay the eventinto greater academic currency. The website is thus notmerely a tool for promotion but an archive for legiti-mation.

The terminus is the end, the boundary, and the bor-der; of course the terminus is also a beginning aswell as its own place, its own site of experience andencounter.

Ethnographic Terminalia has been a boundary-workprojectFan investigatory and ultimately generative ef-fort. A focus on rhetorical, political, and disciplinaryconventions extends beyond the study of visual regimes

Craig Campbell is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Forms (Anthropology) at the University of Texas at Austin.

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or systems to encompass the challenge of producing artexhibitions that are in dialogue with contemporaryanthropological discourse. There is a danger in foldingthe truth claims of intellectual research into the oftenvague and ambiguous milieu of the white (or black) -cube gallery. In 2009 and 2010, this danger is cultivatednot only in the choice to exhibit works in a gallery spacebut to exhibit them in a way that eschews thematicoversight and that mimics one of the obscene forms ofcolonial exoticism: the wunderkammer.

Wunderkammer as Curatorial Principle

Where conventional academic monographs are designedto illuminate and provide historical clarity, art galleryspace provides interpretive frictions that can impede andconfound interpretation. The curatorial approach for the2009 and 2010 exhibitions was aimed at agitating theexperience of documentary clarity and was designed toproduce an effect that places the spectator in a positionof relative uncertainty vis-a-vis the larger project. In thiscabinet of wonder, the operational logic is montage thatlends itself to uncertainty about the overarching mean-ing: discerning one project from the next, as well ascuratorial intent from convenience. While each exhib-ited work is self-contained, they are all made to speakon (or within) another register where new, possiblyunexpectedFeven unwantedFmeanings might begenerated through juxtaposition and contextual shift.Such a montage as a curatorial principle rejects overtformulations and, following Walter Benjamin, is de-signed to allow the individual works to come into theirown, without subsuming them into any obvious frame-

work (Benjamin 1999:460; N1a, 8). Benjamin’s approachto literary montage was meant to be carefully orches-trated and constructed, just as Dziga Vertovassembled Man With a Movie Camera (1929), but it alsoleaves something to intuition. The naıvete of intuition isboth dangerous and attractive as it is an unformedthought observed at a moment of emergence but neithercaught nor completely explained. Assembling the exhi-bitions for Ethnographic Terminalia balanced suchsensibilities but was ultimately driven by a desire to leteach work have a place of its own (Figure 2).

In Collectors and Curiosities (1990), Krzysztof Pom-ian notes the role of curiosity in the wunderkammer. Hewrites that the wunderkammer ‘‘was a universe to whichcorresponded a type of curiosity no longer controlled bytheology and not yet controlled by science, both thesedomains tending to reject certain questions as eitherblasphemous or impertinent, thus subjecting curiosity toa discipline and imposing certain limits on it’’ (originallycited in Yanni 2005:16). The metaphor of the wunder-kammer as an interval of formal curiosity carriesforward to this particular moment in the development ofvisual anthropology. That its appetites are shifting, wemight be said to be in an era when anthropological cu-riosity is no longer controlled by science, nor is itcontrolled by narrow politics of representation (i.e., be-ing driven by pedagogy rather than critique).

While each artist is free to frame his or her ownwork, we have insisted that there are some traces andlinkages provided to visitors in the gallery. Unwilling, inmost cases, to relinquish all explanatory authority, thecuratorial collective sought to provide some interpretivedirection without making it the primary means of con-tact between the spectator and the work. Interpretive

FIGURE 1. Scenes from Ethnographic Terminalia 2010: New Orleans (Du Mois Gallery).

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direction, then, is a rough principle of limits rather thana walled garden of hermeneutic possibility. The catalogfor the show functioned as a reference point betweeneach statement and its corresponding work, indexed bythe name of the exhibitor. The catalog as a companion tothe exhibition meant that we produced two archives inparallel, allowing for the performative cross-indexing ofwords and works. This formula of companion pieces re-duced the subordination of one to the other. Somevisitors engaged with the works outside of any particularreference to the catalog and its textual framing and ex-position. Others began with the catalog and then soughtout particular exhibitors or works. Multiple points ofengagement with each exhibitor’s project generated atextured and layered experience, producing multifacetedpoints of engagement for each contribution.

Ethnographic Terminalia has been an opportunisticproject with broad categorical imperatives. The simpledesire to find a place to show boundary-oblivious worksof research-based art or intermedia ethnography hasgenerally disregarded the formalities and politics ofmuseums and galleries. Without being naıve to the cri-tiques of institutionalized ideologies of museums andgalleries, Ethnographic Terminalia has entered into thesesites in a spirit of experimentation. The use of the wordterminalia plays on the linguistic implication of term,such as disciplinary terms and terms of art, suggesting aquestion like ‘‘what are the terms of ethnography?’’ Butmore importantly, terminalia invokes the Latin wordterminus: the limit or the end. Terminalia itself refers toa festival celebrated in ancient Rome on the 23rd of

February. It was a ritual marking the boundaries betweenone demarcated territory and another. It is said thatlandowners made sacrifices at zones of abutment, erect-ing statues and stone markers in honor of the godTerminus. Whatever it was then, today we are left withthis word that suggests primarily the end of somethingand the beginning of another thing. Where one thingends another one begins. In the spirit of the frontera, ofworks that have been of critical importance to me (GloriaAnzaldua’s Frontera work [1987]; Ann Fienup-Riordan’sbrilliant ethnography of Eskimo cosmology, Boundariesand Passages [1994]), the liminal is a supremely pro-ductive and interesting zone. Where does somethingcease to be ethnography, or anthropology? What are itslimits? Occupying the space between, rather than a ca-nonical center, seems to be both productive anddangerous (Figure 3).

In the name of this project, ‘‘ethnography’’ is meantin the broadest of ways and is designated as a signifier ofcultural study, analysis, critique, and expression. It is anethnography that is open to other voices, one that re-fuses the narrow orthodoxy of Malinowskian practices;the methodology of long-term fieldwork in far-flungplaces.2 In any event it is the -graphy, the writing ofculture, that interests me more at this point than does theanalytic and methodological prescriptions surroundingthe study of culture and ethnos. And it is precisely theimagining of what ethnography can be, might be (ormight have been) that drives this project. EthnographicTerminalia is an exploration of definitions, borders,boundaries, edges, frontiers, and margins. It is premised

FIGURE 2. Scenes from Ethnographic Terminalia 2010: New Orleans (Du Mois Gallery).

Terminus CAMPBELL 55

on the idea that what lies beyond the ethnographicmonograph is interesting and inherently valuable. Assuch it is a project concerned with form and the aes-thetics of ethnographic representations. While theconceptualization of objects of study might be taken forgranted (as a question of professionalization or disci-plinary socialization), it is largely the point of expressionthat is of interest in this anthropology inter-media.

The name Ethnographic Terminalia, then, is a goodplace to end. With the publication of a small raft ofbooks on art and ethnography and a growing number oftenured and tenure-track anthropologists engaged inproducing nonconformist visual anthropology, there isan acute pressure for recognition by the profession atlarge and, more importantly, in the academy.

Notes

1 ‘‘terminus, n.’’ OED Online. November 2010. Oxford Univer-sity Press. http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view/Entry/199440, accessed January 12, 2011.

2 As Bruce Albert noted in Critique of Anthropology over adecade ago, ‘‘the founding mythology of Malinowskianfieldwork continues to haunt anthropology’s imaginary’’(Albert 1997:53). By no means is it a denigration of this,though. I still hold fieldwork and slow scholarship as anideal of committed and ethical research practice.

References

Albert, Bruce1997 ‘Ethnographic Situation’ and Ethnic Movements:

Notes on Post-Malinowskian Fieldwork. Critique ofAnthropology 17(1):53–65.

Anzaldua, Gloria1987 Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1st edi-

tion. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.Benjamin, Walter

1999 Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of HarvardUniversity Press.

Fienup-Riordan, Ann1994 Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup’ik

Eskimo Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Okla-homa Press.

Pomian, Krzysztof1990 Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–

1800. Cambridge: Polity Press.Vertov, Dziga, dir.

1929 The Man with a Movie Camera. New York: KinoVideo.

Yanni, Carla2005 Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Archi-

tecture of Display. New York: Princeton ArchitecturalPress.

FIGURE 3. Scenes from Ethnographic Terminalia 2010: New Orleans (Du Mois Gallery).

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