Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society Without a Story Line by Néstor García Canclini (review)

The Latin Americanist, September 2015 perspective to the study of the Trujillato and of contemporary Dominican literature produced both on the island and in the United States. Sobeira Latorre Department of World Languages and Literatures Southern Connecticut State University ART BEYOND ITSELF: ANTHROPOLOGY FOR A SOCIETY WITHOUT A STORY LINE. By Néstor Garcı́a Canclini. Trans. David Frye. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 201, $23.95. Néstor Garcı́a Canclini, the distinguished anthropologist and cultural critic known internationally for his groundbreaking work on globalization and cultural hybridity, has penned yet another major book—Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society Without a Story Line. First published in Spanish in 2010 and translated into English in 2014, the book offers readers a cross-disciplinary analytic framework for understanding contemporary visual art works and art practices in the new millennium. In this intellectually stimulating and timely study, Garcı́a Canclini engages with such noteworthy scholars as Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Jacques Rancière, whose work has described aesthetics, art, and the art field. Garcı́a Canclini at times draws on their ideas and elsewhere renders them obsolete as he elaborates his argument that art has become decidedly post-autonomous and less exclusive in the new millennium. Contemporary art exists in a much more dependent art field than the one Bourdieu is famous for describing: in fact, as Garcı́a Canclini deftly argues, art has seeped into just about every nook and cranny of society. The new art world he describes is characterized by its interdependence on and intersection with a wide range of human practices and creations. Among these, the author highlights the importance of tourism, design, fashion, mass media advertising, online social networks, the Internet, urban development, and the movement of people and products through national borders. This complicated web of human creations and practices affects the production, circulation and reception of contemporary art, and has produced the need for a new framework for understanding art in a world that is strikingly different than it was through most of the twentieth century. This change, he theorizes, is due to neoliberal economics and the current state of geopolitical instability resulting from the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and the 2008 economic crisis. These factors have created profound political, economic, and societal changes that have left us without a unifying narrative, yet have created a bewildered population that wishes that one could exist. Art of the new millennium, he argues, represents both imminence and society’s lack of a unifying storyline created by geopolitical instability. The position that art tends to reveal 98 Book Reviews imminence (what is about to occur) is not a new idea; Garcı́a Canclini, however, offers readers the acute observation that art’s place today has shifted because economics and politics now share with art a detachment from reality, a prioritization of form over function and a widespread propensity to create spectacles. Contemporary art’s representation of this imminence points to the complexity of Garcı́a Canclini’s attempt to define art’s role in a civilization too intricate and unwieldy to comprehend using the analytic frameworks with which we have grown so accustomed. Garcı́a Canclini’s seven chapters are more concerned with constructing the approach to understanding contemporary art’s place in society than with creating a canon of present-day visual artists. Each chapter offers ideas and explanations about art’s less exclusive and autonomous role in today’s politically tense and economically precarious world. Insightful interpretations of exemplary artists from Spanish America, Spain and Brazil support Garcı́a Canclini’s chapter-by-chapter illustrations of art’s shifting role in our society-in-transition and model ways his framework can be used to understand art works, practices and processes, including the creation of tourist sites, the Internet’s growing role in the art field and the shifting position of museums and biennials in the art world. The author’s in-depth analyses of works by Gabriel Orozco, Carlos Amorales, Teresa Margolles, and Marco Ramı́rez ERRE of Mexico, Antoni Muntadas and Santiago Sierra from Spain, Brazil’s Cildo Meireles, and the well-known Argentine, León...