In the mid-nineties Hal Foster wrote an essay titled “The Artist as Ethnographer” in which he identified a trend in contemporary art towards the appropriation of practices and methodologies of the social sciences especially ethnography and anthropology. This tendency, according to Foster, is a result of the increasing relevance of context in contemporary art. Field work has been one of the more common strategies employed by artists when addressing the issue of context in their work and a part of this exhibition is devoted precisely to the idea of field work, as well as related notions of travel and exploration. The work of Mark Dion, Desk of a Tropical Ecologist (Guyana Field: Semang Creek), 1999, is indicative of this type of strategy, in which the artist takes on the role of the field scientist, in this case an entomologist, to actively engage in field work. Dion’s work, in general, addresses the way in which knowledge is classified and exhibited by institutions. In Lothar Bumgarten’s photographs, from his series There I Like It Better Than In Westphalia, El Dorado, 1968-1976, the artist prefigures the jungles of the Amazon basin in a forest on the banks of the Rhine in Germany, photographing found or placed objects in the midst of the wilderness. Juan Downey’s drawings on maps of South America are related to his series “Meditaciones”, executed during his stay in the Venezuelan Amazonian forest between 1976 and 1977, and consisting of drawings that reflect on the Yanomami cosmogony but that at the same time act as field drawings that document his experiences. The encounter between the Western subject and the Other is also present in the drawings of Fernando Bryce, titled Tarzan (2006), based on the covers of the homonymous comic books; even if Tarzan has been raised by the apes in the jungle, he still embodies the figure of the West; the white man who is in constant struggle against Arabs, Africans or even extraterrestrials, who respectively take on the role of the Other in this series. The work of Rosangela Rennó, Bibliotheca, 2002, alludes to the idea of the archive as well as to a random anthropologic field work by collecting these photo albums found in flea markets or on the streets all over the world. Ideas related to travel are also present in the work of Mateo López, Pulsar Project, 2006, although this particular piece could best be inscribed in the tradition of portable museums initiated by Marcel Duchamp and his Boîte en valise, made between 1936 and 1941. The museum and its modes of representation are addressed by many of the works in this exhibition, and in the process, they call into question the distinctions between cultural artifact and work of art. Simon Starling’s Pink Museum, 2001, is an installation of photographs that depict objects belonging to the collection of an ethnographic museum in Porto. Starling participated in an exhibition organized by the Fundação de Serralves in which the artists were invited to intervene or occupy locations all around the city, noticing that the Serralves and the ethnographic museum shared the same pink color Starling decided to photograph the objects against a pink background, virtually recontextualizing them in the space of the contemporary art museum. The work of Jesús (Bubu) Negrón, Honoris Causa, 2006, operates in a similar way, recontextualizing the work of the hot dog and African mask vendors, who have worked for decades outside the Whitney Museum of American Art, inside the museum space during the Whitney Biennial. Christopher Williams’ photograph Njiram Issah, 1998, depicts an African artisan with his sculptures outside a van on a street. Williams, whose work addresses the complexities of photography’s indexical nature --and who never takes his photographs but instead directs a professional photographer-- questions photography’s claim to objectivity and its instrumental role in the human sciences such as ethnography or anthropology. The cultural conditioning of the museum and its modes of representation --most of all in regard to the artistic production of the third world, which generally is classified into categories such as handicrafts or cultural artifacts in the space of the ethnographic museum rather than the art museum-- makes us see in this image an artisan and not an artist, the objects he creates as utilitarian objects or handicrafts and not as works of art; a similar situation to that faced by Mr. Ibrahim who sells his masks outside the Whitney Museum. The ethnographic gaze is also present in Fernando Bryce’s Museo Hawai Internacional, 2006, a miniature museum of colonial and postcolonial histories that define present-day geopolitics.

The works of Louise Lawler (Blue Line, 1984 and Untitled (Theodate Pope Riddle), 1984) and Mark Dion (Rescue Archaeology 3, 2000-2004) focus on the idea of museum as mausoleum discussed by Theodor Adorno in his essay Valéry Proust Museum, where he states that “museum and mausoleum are connected by more than phonetic association. Museums are like the family sepulchers of works of art.” Untitled (Theodate Pope Riddle), 1984, alludes to private residences and collections that become museums after the death of their owners. Mark Dion’s Rescue Archaeology 3, 2000-2004 consists of fragments of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s townhouse, which was demolished to make way for the Museum of Modern Art’s twentieth-century buildings, found by Dion while excavating under the museum’s garden during its expansion. Both Fragment/Frame/Text; "Served the Needs of Northern European Grand Tourists, 1984, by Louise Lawler and Título prestado, 2007, by Mario García Torres, focus on museographic devices and their function in the representations articulated by the museum. In the case of García Torres, the artist intervenes in the space of the museum by asking for the title of a work on loan (William Harnett’s, Materials for a Leisure Hour, 1879) from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The title and the act of requesting it on loan was presented as a work by García Torres in a commercial gallery in Madrid as part of a solo show of his works. What we see here is the work that was presented in the gallery space accompanied by the label that was placed next to Harnett’s work during the time the title was on loan.

The specular image of the museum reflected in the aforementioned works by Lawler and García Torres is reiterated in Christian Jankowski.’s Group of Naked Women, 2007. This painting is part of the “China Painters” series, made by Jankowski in Dafen, a town on the outskirts of Shenzhen, known for its painting sweatshops. These workshops reproduce works from the repertoire of Western classical painting, for interior decoration of hotel lobbies in the United States and Europe, accounting for almost 60% of low-cost paintings in the world. With China’s capitalist transformation, some of these artisans have become entrepreneurs, and in recognition of their growing industry the Communist Party decided to build them a museum. Jankowski visited this museum, as of then unfinished, and photographed its empty spaces. He then invited some of these painters to paint their favorite work in the context of the museum spaces he had photographed. This work not only reflects the image of the museum and its modes of representation but also some of the ideas addressed in this section of the exhibition, such as the distinction between cultural artifact and work of art, notions of authorship, mass production and contextualization of objects in the museum space.