پژوهشنامه فرهنگستان هنر
پیاپی 6 (آذر و دی 1386)

Study of art has a long and old record in anthropology which can be traced back to the 19th century. Altthough it has deeper roots in the collections by unprofessional people in the previous centuries in the form of the “ancient” and colonial objects and handcrafts which led to the formation of the first anthropology museums in Europe. Therefore, Franz Boas’s Primitive Art can be considered as a turning point in this filed which made a revolution in previous approaches and rejected the discussion of the opposition of “high culture” in its Victorian significance against “primitive culture”. Then, Raymond Firth continued Boas’s studies which were focused on American natives in Australia. This was the time when anthropology of arts found its theoretical bases. British and French researchers studying Africa on the one hand and those who study Australia on the other progressed in this way. Accordingly, the binary oppositional approaches of primitive arts vs. western arts on the one hand and museum approaches on the other were gradually replaced with the analytical–aesthetic approaches in the anthropology of arts. In this article, after reviewing this historical background, anthropological theories of arts will be studied in various branches including evolutionism, functionalism and structuralism as well as more modern symbbolic and interpretive theories. Then, some perspectives of this field of study in Iran will be presented.

In western African societies, there is a close relationship between the world of the living and the world of ancestors which is provided through infinite ritual relationships. This relationship makes it possible for the living to perceive and accept transition to the other world through representational tools which are defined as “artistic” for us. Sculptures which are placed in holy altars and are representations of ancestors can be considered as some of these tools. Today, photographic portraits replace these tools. The image of human being in sculptures and today in portraits can be considered as a kind of relationship with a holy “couple” which in these people’s beliefs accompany human beings till their death and will rejoin them after their death and the period of separation. It can be stated that in this period human beings move from the world of the living to the world of the dead and become ancestors. In this article, the author describes this situation, mentioning its instances in western Africa and analyzes this situation in representational forms, sculpture and photography.

Discussing modern art has been very challenging for the phenomenologists. Since Hegel analyzed modern art under the light of phenomenology through his particular method and put an end to it through his own meaning and style, many thinkers after him have continuously been studying his deep thoughts. This article includes some of the most significant features of the modern art and some discussions about it, emphasizing Hegel’s phenomenological analysis and then considers some challenging interpretations by the greatest philosophers after him in this field.

Phenomenology, like the first modern art schools, was to find some ways to overcome the emerging crisis in science in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. In this way, these two new movements were trying to find some new layers of objective and subjective reality hidden from those eyes accustomed to the empirical reality. In fact, they were trying to expand and develop the range of empirical reality through discovering new dimensions of reality and they did not want to replace empirical reality with another superior reality. They have toughly criticized naturalism and historicism because these two approaches have considered scientific results of empirical sciences as absolute while they have claimed to recognize reality completely and absolutely. The common side of phenomenology and modern painting is their tendency to objectivity and absolute reality. They believe that reality must not be discovered indirectly, through images and symbols. Instead, it must also be perceived directly in a way that it manifests itself.

Comparative analysis has a long background in various scientific, philosophical and artistic fields. One of the most important challenges in this kind of study is the selection of the appropriate approach and methoodology to do researches. In previous decades, in humanistic and artistic studies, because of the inability of “quantitative research” to find meaning and essence of every phenomenon, there was an increasing tendency toward qualitative research. In this article, in addition to a brief mentioning of the features of the aforementioned approaches, the functionality of phenomenology as one of the methods of qualitative approach will be discussed, empphasizing Husserl and Heidegger’s ideas in art researches. The result of research will show the potential of phenomenological criticism to analyze and study artistic works. Phenomenology attempts to find common points, continuity, substructure order and pattern and the return to the object itself will lead the art research to find the origins of meaning and various cultures. Moreover, the study of differences and varieties will provide the meeting point between various cultural horizons and will help to create new meanings.

Gaston Bachelard who is known as the reformer of literary criticism in the 20th century is also known as the founder of thematic criticism as well as the founder of the criticism of imagination. Some consider him as a phenomenological critic, because in the second phase of Bachelardian criticism, phenomenology is dominant. It must be mentioned that Bachelard’s phenomenology is different from that of others, especially his contemporaries (Husserl’ epistemological phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontological phenomenologgy) in its corpus of study as well as in its goal and methodology. In this article, Bachelard’s phenomenology is described and its features are represented (especially the place of imagination and imagery), emphasizing the originality of Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination.

This article aims at introducing phenomenology, based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account, as less “method” than a commitment to the careful description of things as they show themselves in our experience of them. It also argues that although the direct influence of phenomenology on art history has been limited, both phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics, conceived more nearly as a movement than method, have played a considerable role in preparing the ground for many of the tendencies that are frequently (loosely) assimilated under the rubric of “new art history”. In this sense, phenomenology is more nearly a highly general and consequential way of understanding what kind of thing an object is, and its outcome, at this level of generality, is essentially anti-methodological, if not anti-theoretical. Hence, phenomenological interpretation returns to, and perhaps is only finally justified as, description. This is, in a sense, its continuing orientation to formalism, and this may suggest that such a reception of phenomenology understands it as having a relation to judgment rather than to method.