Conceptualism, Ethnographic

NIKOLAI SSORIN-CHAIKOV
National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia

Ethnographic conceptualism (EC) takes its cue from conceptual art that creates art-
work with concepts of art and with ways in which art is situated. EC is art that engages
with anthropology’s conceptual foundations and with contexts and impacts of anthro-
pological knowledge. But EC is emphatically both art and anthropology that uses art
as a fieldwork tool. EC originated in anthropological exhibition practices in Russia and
echoes Moscow conceptualism’s critical engagement with the ideology and aesthetics
of state socialism. The term “ethnographic conceptualism” was coined to sum up the
methodological intervention of a project by art historian Olga Sosnina and anthro-
pologist Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Kremlin Museum, Moscow,
2006). This exhibition was conceived as a triple unity of a reflection on the vast and
complex ritual economy of public gifts that Soviet leaders received from Soviet citizens
and international leaders and movements, a distinctly post-Soviet political and cultural
artifact, and a tool for the ethnography of postsocialism. EC’s key postulates are: (1)
for EC, art and anthropology are symmetrical, so (2) EC is conceptual art conducted as
ethnography and, conversely, (3) EC is ethnography conducted as conceptual art and
(4) in contrast to ethnography as participant observation of what exists, EC explicitly
constructs the reality that it studies. EC’s contribution to anthropology is in the area of
performativity theory, epistemology, and ethnographic methods.
EC’s thesis of symmetry of art and anthropology has a genealogy in leading concep-
tual artist Joseph Kosuth’s 1975 statement that conceptualism is an “anthropologized
art” that makes “social reality conceivable” by “‘depiction’ of art’s (and thereby cul-
ture’s) operational infrastructure” ([1975] 1991, 117–24). EC as anthropology includes
the anthropology of art (Carroll 2014) and architecture (Murawski 2015), as well as such
topics as the anthropology of the state, money, and markets; legacies of empire and state
socialism; memory; and futurity.
EC situates and explores anthropology, linking EC as a method both with the
discursive perspectives of cultural critique and actor-network theory. Olga Sosnina’s
Caucasus Dictionary (Tsaritsyno Museum, Moscow, 2012) approaches material
artifacts (including ethnographic ones) as actants in Russian orientalist imagination
of this region. Caucasus Dictionary arranges objects, photography, and art from and
about the Caucasus neither regionally nor chronologically but by key words, such as
“feast,” “war,” “horse,” and “bandit” (abrek), including a composite entry on the figure
of “ethnographer,” “archaeologist,” and “tourist” as the producer and the consumer of
this imaginary. An exhibition of photo art about two Russian regions, Mari.Research
and Chivashi.Research (Vinzavod, Moscow, 2015), displays “scientific” comments of
anthropologists, sociologists, economists, and the like, on individual photographs
The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea1783
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as artifacts on a par with artwork. Deployed symmetrically, these comments and

photography comprise The Book of the Scientist that echoes Livre d’artiste (artist’s book)
the genre of artists’ handwritten and illustrated copies of poetic and literary work
(Ssorin-Chaikov, Romanova, and Gavrilova 2015).
EC as conceptual art is deliberately Cartesian as it casts a critical doubt on the sensual
as a source of experience and calls attention to viewing as thinking. In doing so, EC fol-
lows conceptual art’s double move of dematerialization of art, on the one hand, and, on
the other, its textualization—the expansion of commentary inside the artwork’s frame
that includes not merely the work’s title or curatorial preface but also views of the audi-
ences and readings of art critics and art historians. It is from this point of view that this
encyclopedia entry on EC is a work of conceptual art. At the same time, as ethnography
EC is empiricist as it uses art events to generate ethnographic situations that reveal social
and aesthetic potentialities that escape theoretical preconceptions, elicit new responses
and reactions, and explicate unexpected links. EC describes this ethnographic mate-
rial as “anti-facts” (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013, 15–17), an anticonceptual unknown that is
different both from facts and artifacts.
EC as art that draws on ethnography is exemplified by Dissident Domesticity, an
immersive installation that replicates WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s diplomatic
asylum. Blurring the boundary between art, media spectacle, and political propaganda,
it is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews and participant
observation, carried out at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Shortlisted for the
Artangel Open Commission in 2014, iterations of this project have been exhibited at
SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin (Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jesse Shipley,
Investigated, 2014) and at University College London’s Urban Lab (Khadija von
Zinnenburg Carroll and Michał Murawski, Ethnographic Conceptualism in the City,
2014).
One example of EC as ethnography conducted as conceptual art is Gifts to Soviet
Leaders’ exploration of the post-Soviet public through Soviet things. This is a study of
links between the exhibited socialist-era gifts and the postsocialist gift infrastructure
of museums, museum sponsors and goers, and the state. Its conceptualist artifact is
a visitors’ book performing the role of artwork and ethnographic notebook—with
comments not merely calling for “Stalin to come back” or denouncing neo-Stalinism
but also having “found the visitor’s book particularly interesting and educating.” Such
comments transformed the heated polemic about Soviet history and memory into
an artifact, which can be viewed and studied like an exhibited object, and turned the
very audience into the exhibition’s artistic coproducers and ethnographic informants.
But, in contrast to conceptual art, EC as ethnography takes an art event not as a final
point of a given research project but as an entry into it. Gifts to Soviet Leaders as
ethnography extended from the interpretation of reactions of its exhibition audience,
to its institutional settings and patronage—including sponsorship as well as the
subsequent decision of the Kremlin Museum to gift the exhibition catalog to President
Putin for his fifty-fifth birthday in 2007.
Such a study that charts as well as manufactures gift relations highlights the thrust of
EC’s contribution to performativity theory. This theory follows J. L. Austin’s (1962) dis-
tinction between “constative” (“representational”) and “performative” utterances—the
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ones that describe things versus the ones that do them—and it is highly relevant for
the studies of science, gender, and knowledge relations more broadly, including state
socialism and economics. EC advances this perspective in two ways. First, it redefines
the performative not as a type of utterance that is distinct from the descriptive but as the
act of drawing this distinction. Second, EC suggests that there is always already more
than one side to the act of drawing the distinction of the descriptive and the performa-
tive; this act is relational rather than merely discursive. In other words, such an act is
not merely that of utterance but exchange. It follows that what is given as performative
can be taken as descriptive and vice versa—that, for example, Gifts to Soviet Leaders
as ethnography describes postsocialism for some of this project’s givers and receivers
and, for others, partakes in the construction of postsocialism (Ssorin-Chaikov 2013,
184–90). Further theoretical and philosophical implications of this relational approach
include considering the distinction of the performative and the descriptive as a matter
of being given rather than merely a matter of being.

SEE ALSO: Anthropology: Scope of the Discipline; Art, Anthropology of; Art and Par-
ticipation; Contemporary Art; Fiction, Anthropological Themes in; Geertz, Clifford
(1926–2006); Postcolonialism; Postsocialisms; Reflexivity; United States, Anthropol-
ogy in

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things With Words. London: Clarendon Press.

Carroll, Khadija von Zinnenburg. 2014. Art in the Time of Colony. London: Ashgate.
Kosuth, Joseph. (1975) 1991. “The Artist as Anthropologist.” In Art After Philosophy and After.
Collected Writings, 1966–1990, by Joseph Kosuth, 107–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
̇
Murawski, Michał. 2015. Kompleks Pałacu Kultury: Zycie ̇
społeczne stalinowskiego wiezowca w
post-socjalistycznej Warszawie [The Palace Complex: The Social Life of a Stalinist Skyscraper
in Postsocialist Warsaw]. Warsaw: Museum of Warsaw.
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai. ed. 2013. “Ethnographic Conceptualism.” Special issue, Laboratorium
5 (2): 4–193.
Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai, Kristina Romanova, and Sophia Gavrilova. 2015. “The Book of the
Scientist, Livre du scientifique: Introduction.” In Mari.Research/Chivashi.Research, 8–13.
Moscow: Triumph Gallery.