Art, Architecture, and Collective Representations in a New Guinea Society

The assertion that art ‘communicates’ is one that is very commonly made about painting, sculpture, and other visual art-forms in both Western and tribal societies. But establishing with any degree of certainty what a particular painting or sculpture might ‘say’ about the society which produces it is no easy matter. And teasing the ‘meaning’ out of art objects is made all the more difficult by the fact that artists generally (including writers and composers) typically show little interest in, or even aptitude for, translating into ordinary discourse what their creations are ‘about’-something that has been noted since at least the time of Plato (Plato, 1984: 51; see also Blocker, 1979: 57-9, 67, 324). This lack of concern, or even ability, on the part of the artist to interpret what he has created for the benefit of an observer means that when the anthropologist sets out to enquire into the ‘meaning’ of a particular visual art-form, more often than not he or she is confronted by a seemingly in surmountable wall of silence. It is largely for this reason, I believe, that so much of the anthropological literature on art is distinguished more by what it does not say than by what it does. As Anthony Forge (1979: 280) has remarked: ‘It is a truism that art communicates, but what does it communicate? Here the philosophers and historians, and indeed all students of art, seem to become evasive, trivial or unintelligible ‘

Aesthetics · Art · Assertion · Certainty · Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Painting · Sculpture · Silence · Visual arts · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Archaeology and Rock Art Studies · Architecture · Computer Science · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Philosophy

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