ABSTRACT
The quest for meaningful context, and for meaning itself, has led these artists towards anthropology, which, even when it’s trapped in its own self-fulfilling prophecies, does offer significant contextual models. Within the mainstream, art that approaches social anthropology or sociology too closely is usually dismissed as aesthetically unambitious, unless it’s pretty enough to make it back over to the art side of the fence. No group in the US has been more wounded by anthropologists, as well as mainstream artists who still appropriate their images, than Native Americans. The artist and the anthropologist worked through historical narrations evoked by objects borrowed from some 700 barrio households, which were incorporated into an installation on a bus called El Museo Arqueológico del Antioquia’, which travelled through the barrios. In the process, the art mainstream has gradually constructed its own relationships with those once relegated to the ‘primitive’ and the other’.
