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Anthropology Matters Journal 2000
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A curious relationship
Virginia Whiles, SOAS
Two debates were held at the exhibition ‘Terrains Vague’, drawing on Hal Foster’s text ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ to examine the relationship between art and ethnography. Participating artists and anthropologists discussed three themes; participant-observation, ‘The Gift’, and the artist as shaman. Areas of affinity would appear to lie within a feminist framework. Areas of opposition may lie in the apparent differences in epistemological concerns. Cultural studies and material culture could serve as a bridgehead between art and anthropology. However, vigorous ethnographic investigation of contemporary art remains scarce.
This text proposes some reflections on the curious relationship between anthropology and art. The roots of western art history as an academic discipline lie within the 18th century Age of Reason. Embedded in colonialist ideology, its perspective is ethnocentric. With the late 19th Century mode for primitivism, it took on the orientalist ‘self-othering’, thus entering into a relationship with both anthropology and psychoanalysis: the two fields described by Foucault as ‘the most privileged of modern discourses’ (1966: 364).
Having experienced various forms of censorship throughout my teaching and curating of non-western art in both France and England, I turned towards anthropology in the hope of finding in its critique of ethnocentrism a means of developing a clearer (de-orientalised) understanding of how different modes of representation relate to their cultural contexts. My projects over the last few years have involved working with South Asian and western artists and theoreticians on exhibitions and debates. As I had hoped, a dialogue between artists and ethnographers has begun but it proves to be somewhat disingenuous. Their apparent ‘mismatch’ is not due to any outright conflict, so much as to a rather fickle liaison which hesitates between mutual fantasy (or envy) and disregard.
The last exhibition I curated, called ‘Terrains Vagues’ (‘Wastelands’ 2 ), invited fourteen artists from nine countries to show works representing concepts and rituals around the common destiny of death. The site, Aitre St Maclou in Rouen, formerly a medieval cemetery for plague victims and now an art school, orientated the theme, which elicited diverse responses from the artists.
A debate followed the exhibition opening, in which the artists exchanged views with the anthropologists (who were invited not as ‘pundits’ but as ‘participantobservers’). My inept attempt at a ‘Blind Date’-style introduction inferred gender categories to each discipline (art as feminine, the ‘older, wiser woman’ and anthropology as masculine, the young, materialist ‘toy-boy’…). This drew wan smiles from the women artists and weary sighs from the male anthropologists. Unabashed, I insisted that their liaison had a lot of potential especially since the surrealist ‘re-evaluation’of the primitivist fantasy, ‘Is not every ethnographer something of a surrealist, a re-inventor and reshuffler of realities?’ referred to by the (neo-surrealist) James Clifford (1988: 147). I spoke of Hal Foster’s witty text ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’ (1996), which described the relationship between anthropology and art as based on a mutual envy, sharing common passions for alterity, critiques of ethnocentricity and inter-disciplinary techniques.
Recent art, western and non-western, has revealed a number of practices which apply ethnographic modes such as participant-observation, in-situ installation, sociological mapping and documentation 3. Our exhibition proposed to address two questions. First, how does the artist manage to sustain her/ his identity within the current mode for hybridity? And, second, how can ethnographic theory be integrated into a critical art practice? 4 In order to address these issues, three topics were selected as grounds for comparison: participant-observation, Marcel Mauss’ concept of ‘The Gift’ (1970) and Victor Turner’s notion of the artist as shaman (1969).
In relation to the first topic, Susan Hiller (participating artist and former anthropologist) has written that ‘By definition art is an anthropological practice and anthropology is by definition an art – the role of the artist is to unveil codes not yet articulated within a culture... to manifest a collective belief not yet revealed… to look for new forms known but as yet not understood’ (1996: 214). We compared this with a text by the French artist Boltanski, who tells us that ‘The painter is somebody who reveals or who underlines those realities too close for us to perceive’ (1996). Both declarations embody the notion of distance, but the question of how to compare the ‘subjectobject’ distance between artists and ethnographers was raised by an anthropologist during our debate. Certainly the traditional practice of participant-observation, based on unwritten rules of scientific observation, has been subject to criticism since the Seventies. The recent inversion of strategies between artists and ethnographers has led to the adoption of subjective narratives by ethnographers and of objective analysis by artists. As Clifford observed in relation to the surrealists: the artist’s aim is to make the familiar seem strange whereas the anthropologist wants to make the strange seem comprehensible. Susan Hiller stated during the debate that her choice of art practice over ethnography was due to its means of ‘foregrounding experience rather than abstraction’. In contrast, the anthropologist Carlo Severi 5 described the role of the artist as increasingly objective, a far cry from the stereotyped and romanticised image, one which, he noted with irony, may well be ascribed to the recent self-fashioning of certain ethnographers.
Since, as Augé (1994) repeats, ‘le terrain est partout’, distance is no longer a criteria for fieldwork, especially with current experiments in multi-sited, interactive, polyphonic and indigenous practices. This may lead to an easier mimicry of fieldwork ethnography by artists. As Foster warns ‘the quasi-anthropological role set up for the artist can promote a presuming as much as a questioning of anthropological authority… an evasion as often as an extension of institutional critique’ (1996: 197). Susan Hiller’s defence of ‘immersion in one’s own culture’ as the true fieldwork was immediately attacked when the anthropologist Denis Vidal questioned what it means to say ‘one’s own culture’. The observation made here, was that whereas both practices share a propensity for self-reflection, an artist’s professional code engages her/ him to exhibit, (whether the piece be about a whale or a whisper), and however de-materialised it may become, the work rarely plunges to the deconstructivist depths reached in some recent ethnographies. (This might suggest a very good reason for some anthropologists’ ‘artist-envy’…).
In the above citation, Hiller stresses the artist’s intention to search out the ‘unknown’, the ‘inarticulate’ and the ‘unrevealed’; similarly Boltanski refers to the ‘imperceptible’. Such terminology resembles that applied by Shirley Ardener to hermodel of ‘muted groups’ (1975), which places women high on the anthropological agenda. Placed in this context, it was interesting to note that our debate revealed how the art/ anthropology relationship warms up when the two disciplines share a feminist approach. Reference was made to feminist anthropologists writing on gender relations, such as Henrietta Moore (1988) or to the rare feminist texts by anthropologists about women artists, such as that of Shirley Ardener (1975). Indeed, one of the artists in our exhibition, Helene Hourmat, has been written about by Annie E Coombes, an art historian who uses an anthropological methodology. 6
On reflection, the ‘mis-match’ may have less to do with style and more to do with ‘apparent’ epistemological status. Although both fields have always been concerned with encounter and alterity, where the anthropologist’s intention is seen to be that of contextualising social relations, the artist’s role is seen to be that of juggling with chance affinities. To juggle can mean ‘to misrepresent facts’, ‘to re-arrange adroitly’(OED)… it is interesting therefore to observe the recent pressure to reinsert ethics into aesthetics, coming from artists involved in social issues, 7 and to compare this with the shift towards fiction amongst certain ethnographers.
The second part of the discussion concentrated on how Mauss’ theory of ‘The Gift’ as a social fact formed the framework of Moulignat’s work. Inspired partly by Islamic architecture but chiefly by the French state’s lack of provision in France for the four million Muslim population to practice freedom of worship, Moulignat’s project proposed a ‘gift’ of a painted structure to the Muslim community. This was to serve as part of a mihrab (the orientation niche in a Mosque). His work set out to explore the functions and limits of art on several levels. If accepted as an element within a mihrab, ‘by entering the sphere of the sacred it will cancel itself out as an artwork, and as a ‘graft’ be absorbed by the organism. Thus functional it will no longer be seen.’ 8 His installation also tested the exchange between Muslims and non-Muslims, between art and religion, and between appropriation and donation. The evolution of the project thus brought in political dimensions. His meetings and discussions with members of Islamic communities were positive in both theoretical and practical terms. Inevitably, this work proved to be highly polemical and led to heated debate, the details of which warrant a further text. Questions touched on issues of appropriation, compensation, symbolism, mimesis and formalism. Moulignat insisted on the integrating function of the act of the gift, which according to Mauss, works two ways, via the giving and receiving and the returning of goods. Finally, the important point is that Moulignat’s gift was accepted and has initiated the dialogue he had hoped for.
The third area of debate was around the concept of the artist as shaman or ‘passeur’. This arose from the theme of the exhibition ‘Rites of Passage’. 9 Carlo Severi was firm in his dismissal of the notion implicit to this exhibition (Kristeva 1995), that therapy was a common attribute of both art and shamanism. Neither issues of good health, nor of good will he insisted, were as important as the exploration and furtherance of ideas and knowledge, in both fields. The significant link lies in the fact that, since the Seventies, ritual has served as a vehicle for several art movements, particularly those concerned with the body, with nature and with performance (Lippard 1983). How such perspectives saw the role of art as replacing the loss of ritual in western everyday life was discussed in relation to our exhibition’s theme of mourning. Yet again the question around distance was a key point; how distancing functions as a form of self protection within western cultures has been analysed from Freud (1972) to Virilio (1993). They both conclude that the main mechanism of cultural defence lies in consumerism. Banalised by the media, ‘necrophiliac’ imagery has led to a palling of reality next to cyber-culture, to the point where mass consumption becomes a form of mass anaesthesia. 10 Designating this as ‘destruction of experience’, Agamben (1993) describes how, for many ‘cultural tourists’, photography or video becomes the preferred substitute for the real experience.
These points were taken up in the discussion and related to the mode for simulation in much art practice of the Eighties. Foster’s (1996) contention that this had dissolved with the Nineties’ ‘Return of the Real’ was considered in the light of the concern with social issues which had come to be foregrounded in the work of many artists. Such work revealed inspiration from ethnographic procedures. 11 Was this artistic endeavour a substitute for ritual, comparable to the way fieldwork serves as a ‘rite de passage’ for ethnographers?
The discussion concluded with a summary of the four central issues felt by the participants to be shared by both practices. First, the slippage between the personal and the political. This was particularly observed amongst the women artists; five out of the nine had framed their work within autobiographical narratives whereas only one out of the five male artists had done so. Three works by male artists directly addressed the public political sphere, but those works by women artists who were concerned with political violence, approached the subject through personal stories. Second, the interplay between truth and fiction. Observations were made on the loss of fixed criteria common to early anthropology: ‘searching out truths’ has changed to ‘questioning assumptions’ (as James Fairhead neatly put it in a recent seminar at SOAS: ‘to generate debate where there hasn’t been any’). 12
The third issue was a comparison of the recent shifts in methodology, focusing on two approaches shared by art and ethnographic practices: collaborative and multisited techniques. The fourth debate concerned the appropriation of cultural symbols by artists. The initial critique, made by Susan Hiller on the grounds of cultural (mis)appropriation, was attacked by some for being reactionary and essentialist, and defended by others as a warning against the fetishisation of hybridity.
Ideas from these debates have been developed in further discussion with art students in my seminars, 13 in which I introduced them to anthropological theory. Apart from the intentions already cited, my aim was to discuss the implications of ‘critical distance’ and to help students site their work within a social context which relates local to global. Specific topics, artworks and ethnographic texts have been selected in order to open up a dialogue between the two fields. 14 A seminar that I conducted in Rouen over several years, was entitled ‘Contextualisation’. I encouraged the students, in a round-table discussion outside the studio, to study a practice (their own or a n o t h e r’s) without images, using oral description framed within a network of references (personal and historical) in order to construct a kind of kinship matrix before reading or interpreting intentions. This experiment proved unusually constructive by its very deconstruction of their habitual frame of analysis, based on a formalist perspective.
Visual anthropology is a strange phenomenon; as David MacDougal wrote, ‘the history of visual anthropology suggests that most anthropologists have never known quite what to do with the visual’ (1997: 276). In a recent seminar of Ethnography At The Third Millennium, some younger students of anthropology expressed frustration with the inaccessible j a rgon of theory and called for visual ethnography as a possible solution. Banks and Morphy (1997) have asked whether visual systems suggest distinctive patterns of understanding. I think the very positive reply to this holds within it the clues as to why contemporary art has been so neglected by ethnographers (except for Australians!) 15. Talking to SOAS Mphil students about this problematic, the overall reaction towards contemporary art was one of polite yet wary interest. The apparent lack of enthusiasm seems to stem from a strong sense of inaccessibility. Similarly, art students seem to find anthropological theory ‘alienating’. Each practice implies an initiation process, which is represented by the other as extremely difficult to enter into.
Perhaps the problems are to do with the mis-recognition of patterns of understanding. In a fascinating text entitled ‘Academic Literacies: a Critical Perspective’, Brian Street analysed the standard views on student writing in higher education. 16 He advocated a model which sees literacies as social practices but views student ‘working and learning’ as issues at the level of epistemology and identity, rather than skill development or socialisation. His Foucauldian perspective views educational institutions ‘as constituted in and as sites of discourse and power… that which constitutes a discipline and its ways of thinking and knowing are actually embedded in that discipline’s writing process, its norms and conventions’(also, I would add, within any process of representation). Such norms, says Street, are treated as common sense rather than explicitly addressed and analysed, and thus ‘they remain illusive to many students’.
In relation to the ‘mis’-alliance between art and anthropology, Street’s insights might mean that although each discipline’s learning process has developed a specific epistemology, its representation is treated as a skill which, if not grasped by the reader (or viewer), makes her/ him feel inadequate. Thus the apparent split between content and form is manipulated by institutional powers, as indeed was the split between fine art and craft set up for ideological purposes by the British colonialist art administration in India (Mitter 1994). How form and content construct each other is something art students learn quickly because of the need to address both issues at an early stage. Whether this process differs within ethnographic practice needs examination.
Writing, according to Street, should be taught as an integral part of the discipline and its ongoing changes. Inter-disciplinary methods have been proposed as a way out of the blockage in ‘communication competence’. Cultural Studies, the departments in art schools which teach critical theory, are heralded as inter-disciplinary and according to Paul Gilroy, ‘have fostered a different sense of where education might itself fit into the logic of personal development and inter-subjective relations’ (1999: 18). Stressing the inverse mode of reading culture as text and text as culture, Foster asks how truly inter-disciplinary the results can be, since the danger is to rely on a single discourse. He cites Althusser, ‘… that common theoretical ideology that silently inhabits the consciousness of all the specialists’ (1990: 97), to underline the point that although new ethnographies question ethnographic assumptions, other disciplines, such as cultural studies or the new historicism, which adopt an ethnographic approach, do not question their assumptions to their detriment.
I would suggest that this accusation can sometimes be levelled at ethnographers themselves. One of the rare (and non-Australian) examples of ethnographic critique of contemporary art is to be found in a text by George E. Marcus (1997: 201). Although rigorous in his analysis, his final judgements of art writing seem oddly prejudiced and over generalised: ‘… often self-fashioned and autonomous, there is a fascination in art writing with a competitive aesthetics of discourse with impressing, with one-upmanship, with exclusivity of one’s own position, inaccessible to another’ (Marcus 1997: 208). It is one thing to assert that ‘art writing should be opened to critical ethnography’ (Marcus 1997: 210) in the name of relativity, but it is another to abuse this situation with value judgements such as ‘the verbal images of contemporary artists who participate in art writing are often much stronger than the material forms they create’ (Marcus 1997: 218). By whose criteria are they ‘stronger’? Art writing is seen by Marcus as ‘a discursive space that is a significant barrier or challenge to independent perspectives or discourses coming from anthropology ’ (Marcus 1997: 213). He thus claims a status of objective impartiality for anthropology and yet on the same page he celebrates the ‘family resemblances’ between recent experiments in ethnographic and art writing! His assessment of the gap between artists’theoretical texts and practice on account of a ‘lack of grounding in their own specific positions and experience’ (Marcus 1997: 219) is judgmental in a way that lays him open to Foster’s critique of the dangers of ethnographic authority.
The branch of visual anthropology known as material culture, focuses on the transculturation of artefacts and seems to serve as a contact agency between art and anthropology. ‘The art of the colonised… was spoken of in terms of artefacts or material culture, made by craft-workers, not as works of art made by artists’ (King 1999:8). As John Picton has pointed out, words like art, craft, even technology, all derive from words for skill and ‘their separation into seemingly distinct frameworks of activity is very much a part of the development of ideas and practices in eighteenth century Europe’ (1997: 21). From the beginning of western art history in fact. As already stated, the art/ craft split was rigged by colonialist, patriarchal enterprise in such a way as to enable hegemonic control over class, race and gender. These are the very issues currently undergoing rigorous critique by indigenous practitioners and theorists. Does the privilege accorded to craft/ material culture by ethnographers imply a degree of political correctness? Or is it that, for the reasons cited above, material culture appears more accessible? Another reason might be the primitivist legacy of ‘pastoral preservation’ which fears pollution by westernisation. However, since the time/ space mapping of the primitive has been so clearly exposed by Fabian (1983) to be a racist game, this is unlikely.
In consequence, any serious ethnographic investigation of contemporary art practice will necessarily have to consider its participation in the global discourse as well as its local heritage. It needs to address the specific aesthetics of cultural differences as well as the particularities of each confrontation, adaptation or resistance to western, or indeed other, influences.
‘Objects are not innately "ethnographic" but must be designated as such’ (1997: 264), writes Nicolas Thomas, one of the rare (but Australian) ethnographers to write on contemporary indigenous art. Such a statement echoes Duchamp’s reduction of the creative act to ‘the single intellectual, largely random decision, to name this or that object or activity, art’ (Robert Smith, 1980: 258). This would suggest that perhaps one role shared by western male artists and ethnographers is still the authorial one!
A counter blast comes resonating loud and clear in the words of the African woman artist and former anthropologist, Everlyn Nicodemus:
‘the modern African artists have been hit especially hard by the recent weakness of the western art establishment surrendering to an anthropological approach when dealing with the contemporary visual creation of other cultures. Surviving ritual image-making and folkloric artefacts with no bearing on the time we live in have been raised to the status of authentic cultural expression. Meanwhile, the trend followers tend to marginalise and neglect us modern artists, stamping on us as a-typical in our own context…. Your institutions have the power to define and confirm what is perceived as art… Your artists keep their unshakable identity as artists, that is not the case with us… The lack of visibility and the nearly total lack of institutionalised confirming presence makes us vulnerable. So don’t come with all that anthropolo, ethnolo, sociolo trash!’ (1994:100).
References cited
Agamben, G. (1993). Infancy and history: the destruction of experience. London, Verso.
Ahmad, A. (1992). 'In theory': Classes, nations, literatures. London, Verso.
Althusser, L. (1990). Philosophy and the spontaneous ideology of the scientists and other essays. London, Verso.
Ardener, S. Ed. (1975). Perceiving Women. London, Dent.
Ardener, S. (1975). Defining Females. London, Croon Helm.
Auge, M. (1994). Pour une anthropologie des mondes modernes. Paris, Flammarion.
Banks, M. and H. Morphy, Eds. (1997). Rethinking visual anthropology. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Boltanski, Y. (1996). Catalogue: Jakob Gautez. Paris.
Clair, T. L. (1987). Don de Lillo and the systems novel. Urbana, University of Illinois Press.
Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture. Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Coombes, A. (1994). The distance between two points: global culture and local dilemma. Robertson et al.Travellers' tales. London, Routledge.
Fabian, J. (1983). Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York, Columbia University Press.
Foster, H. (1996). The return of the real. Cambridge, MIT Press.
Foucault, M. (1966). The order of things. New York, Vintage Books.
Freud, S. (1972). Civilisation and its discontents. London, Hogarth Press.
Gilroy, P. (1999). On the state of cultural studies (interview with M. Smith). Third Text 49.
Hiller, S. (1996). Thinking about art. Manchester, Manchester University Press.
Howell, S. (1997). Cultural studies and social anthropology. Nugent and Shore (eds) .Anthropological and cultural studies. London, Pluto Press.
King, C. (1999). Views of difference: different views of art. The Open University & Yale.
Kristeva, J. (1995). Catalogue: Rites of Passage. London, Tate Gallery.
Lippard, L. (1983). Overlay: contemporary art and the art of pre-history. New York, Panther Books.
MacDougall, D. (1997). The visual in anthropology. M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds). Rethinking visual anthropology. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Marcus, G. and F. Myers (1995). The traffic in culture. Berkeley, University of California Press.
Mauss, M. (1970). The gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies. London. Cohen and West Ltd.
Mitter, P. (1994). Art and nationalism in colonial India. 1850-1922. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Moore, H. (1988). Feminism and anthropology. Cambridge, Polity.
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Smith, R. (1980). Conceptual art. Stangos. Concepts of modern art. London, Thames and Hudson.
Street, B. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Street, B. (1996). Academic literacies: a critical perspective. Alternate ways of knowing: literacied, numeracies.
Thomas, N. (1997). Collectivity and nationality in the anthropology of art. M. Banks and H. Morphy (eds). Rethinking visual anthropology. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Thomas, N. (1999). Possessions: indigenous art/ colonial culture. London, Thames and Hudson.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process. New York, Ithaca.
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Willis, P. (1997). Ties. Nugent and Shore. Anthropology and Cultural Studies. London, Pluto Press.
Notes
1 My attention has only just been drawn (for which I must thank Chris Pinney) to the very interesting article on the same subject by Arnd Schneider (1996). The similarity of our titles is a most fortunate coincidence! back
2 Exhibition and Conference. Ecole des Beaux Arts, Rouen. 5-30 May 1998. Kent Institute of Art and Design. 15 October - 11 November 1998. The artists who participated in the exhibition (and subsequent conference) were Shelagh Cluett, Anita Dube, Jimmie Durham, Jakob Gautel, N.S. Harsha, Susan Hiller, Helene Hourmat, Guy Lemonnier, Alice Maher, Francois Moulignat, Yoon Swin, Risham Syed, Vasudha Thozhur and Shen Yuan. The following anthropologists attended the conference: Carl Severi (C.R.I., C.N.R.S., E.H.E.S.S., College de France), Denis Vidal (C.E.I., E.H.E.S.S., O.R.S.T.O.M.). Nicole Deshyes Doctoral Research in Ethnology, Paris 9, and artist) and Mounira Khemir (writer and curator, Orientalist photography). back
3 Examples of these ethnographic themes can be seen in the work of Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Mary Kelly, Mona Hatoum, Mark Dion, Kabokov, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Vivan Sundaram and many others. back
4 To do this in a way that ‘subverts the threat of post-colonial theory to reinscribe the west’s cultural authority’ (Ahmad 1992:137). back
5 Carlo Severi completed his Doctoral thesis on shamanism in Brazil under the tutorship of Levi-Strauss. A Curious Relationship pp14-21 © V. Whiles 2000 back
6 Helene Hourmat’s work was examined by Annie E Coombes in 1994. back
7 See the debate between Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Libre Exhchange, 1997. back
8 Moulignat’s text in exhibition booklet. K.I.A.D., 1998. back
9 Rites of passage:Art for the End of the Century, 1995, Tate Gallery. Curator: Stuart Morgan. back
10 See Don De Lillo, 1987, cited in Tom le Clair, 1987. back
11 Particularly in new sitespecific work ‘re-mapping’ museologyf Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Mark Dion, James Luna, Jimmie Durham, Renee Green and G. McCaster. back
12 James Fairhead, ‘On elegance and dirt in Guinea:theatrical power/theoretical knowledge and an ethnographic imperative for "development"’. SOAS department of Anthropology Seminar Series, 24th January 2000. back
13 These seminars were held at The London Institute:Chelsea College of Art, and in Rouen at the Ecole Regionale des Beaux Arts. back
14 Texts included those by Bourdieu, Douglas, Bataille, Turner, Said, Kristeva, Appadurai, Fabian, Bakhtin, Bhabha, Foucault, Irigaray, Mulvey, Spivak and Butler. back
15 There are other exceptions such as Elizabeth Edwards (Pitt Rivers Museum), Chris Pinney (University College London), and Clementine Deliss (PhD, SOAS, Curator of African Art). back
16 Brian Street, paper given to E@TM, 24th January 2000. back
Figures
Anita Dube, ‘I know only this pain’. This exhibit represents a personal narrative concerning death in the artist’s family. The artist is from Delhi, and the media is charcoal and pastel on paper and glass. 1m x 2m.
Francois Molouignat’s exhibit in ‘Wastelands’. This piece was intended as a gift to the Muslim community in France, and to serve as an element within a mihrab. Wood, plaster and gessop. 5m x 3.5m.
Virginia Whiles is an art historian, critic and curator who is now working towards here doctoral dissertation on "Gender and Class in Colonialist and Post-colonialist Art Education in South Asia. She will carry out her fieldwork in the National College of Arts in Pakistan.
