Articles with the keyword aesthetics

• Anna Laine

  Complementarity between Art and Anthropology: Experiences among kolam makers in South India

  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(2) 2009: 58-69

  Abstract

  As their first daily task, women in South India draw geometrical images, kolams,
  in front of their homes to greet the deities. These images engender and reinforce
  moods in the community, they construct feminine gender and they define the
  landscape as social. The paper describes how the employment of an artistic
  practice—photography—can affect the understanding of the kolam, an artistic
  practice in itself. Photography has a key role in that it has been used as a tool
  during field work, as well as in the presentation of research in the form of
  photographic essays. The expressive aspects in particular of this media are
  considered as means to address visual and sensory experience and as
  complementary to analytical texts. It is suggested that the use of artistic practice,
  in dialogue with texts, productively engages the tension between the sensory and
  the discursive, between intimacy and distance. The aim is to contribute to
  anthropological understandings of, and approaches to, images, aesthetics and
  artistic practice. The aesthetic aspect of the kolam is presented as local social
  aesthetics; an appreciation founded in local morality, and continuously reproduced
  as well as contested in a social environment.

  Keywords aesthetics, art, gender, kolam, photography, South India, visual anthropology

• Ruth Woods

  A Nice Dandelion: Visual experiences at a shopping centre in Trondheim

  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society Volume 34(2) 2009:70-83

  Abstract

  The Dandelion, a nine meters tall naturalistic sculpture painted in bright green
  and yellow car paint, was installed on a traffic island outside the City Syd Shopping
  Centre on August 9th 2007. The sculpture provides an example with which to
  study the role art plays within public places. Aesthetic qualities are a useful place
  to start when trying to understand the role of public art. The Dandelion’s form,
  colour and physical connection with elements within the same location, give the
  sculpture an opening to establish a relationship with its public. The Dandelion’s
  public is the focus of this paper. What the public sees may lead to talk of other
  things connected to the Dandelion, but it is the sculpture’s physical form and
  visual qualities which initiate the response. The judgement of form is a constant
  preoccupation; we make value judgements about many of the objects around us
  in day-to-day life. Taste is based on everyday experiences, and not on fixed
  standards. The dandelion provides visitors to the shopping centre with something
  with which to consider and measure other elements in the area with. It is likely
  that they would have done this anyway, but the Dandelion provides them with
  an aesthetic standard with which to do this. This paper is based on fieldwork
  experiences in 2007 and 2008 at the City Syd Shopping Centre, which is located
  in the Tiller neighbourhood on the outskirts of Trondheim, Norway.

  Keywords aesthetics, agency, public art, shopping centres