At the end of their one-year fellowships at eikones Adrian Anagnost and Matthew Vollgraff sat down for an interview with David Bucheli and Simon Lindner, both PhD candidates of the Graduate School. We discussed research interests and new takes on methodology while also reflecting on their recent workshop “Critical Dislocations: Art, Geography, Method”.

David We thought we could start with the both of you shortly explaining what your projects are about and what you've been doing the last year.

Adrian I've been working on a book on Louisiana landscapes and thinking about ecological history and territorialization. That includes histories of race and a lot of overlapping colonial projects in the region. Besides working on that book, I also took a sideways maneuver and wrote a mini book on documenta fifteen of 2022. Both cases have a lot to do with how art intersects with geography and space. So the projects are conceptually linked.

Matthew My current book project deals with the history of a scholarly approach to human history known as diffusionism, mostly during the first half of the 20th century. I’m looking specifically at how a range of different scholars compared images, artifacts, tools, bones and stories in order to reconstruct narratives about cultural contacts in the deep past. These narratives of ancient migrations and cultural “diffusions” dramatically expanded the earlier map of cultural history, suggesting in effect that every cultural form derives from somewhere else. This was a very double-edged premise in practice, and I’m particularly interested in how this methodological approach articulated with different political agendas in the period around the two World Wars. How did modern geopolitics shape these scientific visions of pre- and protohistory? Through several case studies in this ambivalent method, I ultimately hope to explain why diffusionist ideas continue to inflect thinking about collective identity, territory and sovereignty today.

Simon Geography is a common ground for both your projects, which you built on in your workshop “Critical Dislocations: Art, Geography, Method” taking place here at eikones on May 10th 2024. How did you find this common ground, what was the process leading up to this tandem workshop?

Adrian Well, I think it was just sharing our work and then seeing where it went. Then it became clear there were certain lines of inquiry, mostly around geography, around bad politics in geography, like fascism or faux liberatory politics. Matthew’s and my academic backgrounds are a little bit different, and therefore we would each bring in thinkers with whom the other person was not familiar, but who proved super useful.

Matthew Yeah, we just began discussing people whose research interested us and it converged very organically. This goes for the speakers of our workshop, too, all of whom addressed principal problems of historiography and methodology and the way that space is articulated in visible and invisible ways.

David Could you go a little bit more into the question of methodology? What interests you about your own method or the methods of your discipline?

Matthew Diffusionism developed before the distinct academic disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and art history had come into being. In examining this way of extrapolating culture contacts from material objects, I aim to provide a fluid history of knowledge that goes beyond disciplines. For instance, one of my actors, the Austrian anthropologist of Southeast Asia Robert von Heine-Geldern trained as an art historian in Vienna, and his speculations on transpacific culture contact between South Asia and South America attest to his well-developed aesthetic sense for comparison. My own methodology, by contrast, is that of historical epistemology: by embedding these theories and actors within the ‘force fields’ of their respective political moments, I want to illuminate the conditions of possibility for radically reimagining culture as a product of mobility and migration. This requires close critical attention to the images and objects they used to produce that knowledge.

David Adrian, your protagonists are not exactly well-known figures of art history, but yet, method plays a crucial role to your research.

Adrian I'm working on the “what are my methods?” section of my book right now. And it's really difficult because I want to draw on archeology and material culture, but I don't want it to be overly deterministic. The methodological problem is that not all of my protagonists have texts. And so you get this dilemma: Whose text is going to count? I'm bringing in oral history and some cosmological background, and then material culture and archeology; I’m looking at hundreds of maps, lots of pots. I’m also thinking about how to incorporate the work of Indigenous contemporary artists.

Matthew What you say is really important, since it pinpoints another one of our mutual interests: the reconstruction of history in the absence of textual evidence. How does one extract a narrative from of a corpus of objects? And whose narrative is it? In the early 20th century you had the so-called pots and people paradigm, which attributed certain objects or styles to an (often otherwise unattested) “culture”, which was then effectively understood in the modern sense as an ethnic group. While that approach has been justly criticized and rejected, it somehow remains part of the common-sensical understanding of how we deal with material culture. It’s part of a scientific legacy that we still have to continually wrestle with.

Adrian A scholar might say: Okay, these objects are from here and there's a people that live here, too. But where are the edges? At what point does one pot start to look different enough from another that is constitutes a border? This is what art historians have dealt with for hundreds of years. So, how do you get out of that and what would it look like to get out of that?

Simon You already mentioned one way of addressing this question: You include oral history into the range of art historical methods and work with these encounters in your book.

Adrian Talking to living people about historical objects and ancestral knowledge systems is not something I've done before. So that is a new method for me. It is difficult because when you're working with people, you have to be credulous, the privileging of experience as a sort of data point. On the other hand, I want to balance what artists say about their work with art historical contextualization. So I'm not sure how to resolve the hermeneutics of suspicion with a method that gives a certain authority to experience.

Matthew Thinking about the way a discipline produces its data, it is not only about the histories of the collections and how they were assembled through colonial extraction. It is also about the taxonomies according to which information is gathered and organized. This structuring of knowledge is deeply interwoven with often unreflected ideologies and spatial imaginaries. There was an insightful example in the workshop of how the colonial archive could be read against the grain. Chonja Lee (Neuchâtel) discussed the Swiss manufacturing of textiles called chintzes that were exported to West and Central Africa in 18th century, where they served as a veritable currency and were sometimes exchanged for enslaved people. Besides the merchants’ and travelers’ reports, however, little is known about the African consumers’ own attitudes and practices relating to these fabrics. However, Chonja brought up a Congolese power figure, an nkisi now in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, with strips of these chintz fabrics attached to it. That was, I found, an eye-opening way of taking material culture seriously as a historical source that can fill gaps in the written record. It also raises questions about what other sources we're ignoring because they're in the wrong museum, or the wrong archive, or not in an archive at all.

Adrian That is the question: What forms does knowledge take? And can you recognize it? Or maybe that's the wrong question. The psychologist Abraham Maslow said: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” That can be rephrased into a methodological issue: All too often, a scholar’s method makes it that they see the nail of data everywhere. For other people, however, “data” might be lived experience or a religious object. But the art historian wants to make it into form again and process it with their instruments.

Matthew There were two main methodological tendencies that came out of the workshop discussion: datafication and formalization. On the one hand, we considered how some scholars transformed their objects and histories into data – as Brooke Penaloza-Patzak (Vienna) discussed with respect to German and American ethnological museums around 1900. On the other hand, there were those who sought to render history into form. Jesse Lockhart (Oxford) and Meekyung MacMurdie (Utah) talked about the sources that informed Alois Riegl’s Stilfragen, a work that attempted to render very different types of data into “pure” form. His formalist method justified the elision of the materiality or the historicity of its sources in the name of art history’s epistemic autonomy from archaeology or anthropology.

David Interestingly enough, this talk was titled “pattern recognition”. I thought it was quite a clever way to connect these two questions of datafication and formalization. It reminds me of another example that you presented during your NOMIS session, Adrian. I keep thinking about this deerskin map and its French translation. 

Adrian There are two different things going on. There are lots of different indigenous groups in the region I’m studying that share some general kinds of spatial conventions, like the Catawba, and the Cherokee. The British and the French are talking directly to different groups. And the British end up with two deerskin maps in the British Library, and the British National Archives. Those maps are probably early 18th century copies of lost originals. Meanwhile, the French are translating maps – maybe from deerskin, maybe from oral tradition – to paper. So there are two different kinds of translations going around. One that's in the same medium, deerskin maps copied on deerskin, and one that goes into paper that's going to be put in a kind of portfolio for colonial administrators to deal with somehow.

David I wonder if the example you shared with us, the French one on paper, could be understood as a moment of datafication, or maybe of pattern recognition, or formalization. Because the French add a wind rose and a scale to the map. It feels like they recognize its cartographic qualities, but they need these specific western features to make it legible as a map – to make the data computable.

Adrian Yeah. I don't know who added that. I would suspect it's the French transcriber, but you're right. I'm thinking about the other maps that have indigenous informants, and I don't remember scales. And also, the Indigenous spatiality in a deerskin map is not identical to Western mathematical scale. If you look at where Charleston is in comparison to the middle of North Carolina, to Virginia, it doesn't follow. Yet, the map does make sense. If you're thinking about travel routes, it helps you to know who's trading with whom and who's allied to them. Because a lot of times the size and the lines would mean either “we often go from here to here” or “these people, these two groups are connected”. Sometimes you'll see a line that skips a bunch of groups in between. So, there is useful information, it's just not topographically or mathematically conveyed the way that it would be in a Western style map.

David It’s such an interesting clash of representational systems.

Matthew Thinking about the clash of representational systems, that was another topic that recurred continuously throughout the workshop. Anna Grasskamp (Oslo) showed this 17th century Chinese print based on Dutch landscape paintings and prints. It showed some trees framing a landscape with a little town and a river, but these trees were at a very different scale from what they would have been in a Dutch naturalist print. So when you were talking about the deerskin maps, I remembered how Anna called the Chinese-Dutch images composite geographical fictions. I found this was a very productive formulation. Would you also describe those maps as composite geographical fictions in this sense?

Adrian They're a little different. I think the North American maps are more about recording a thing that you know but can’t see. Even with the French or British maps it's usually an aerial view or a bird's eye view rather than landscape view. But with Anna’s examples, it's really clear that it's about seeing, with all the lenses, binoculars and telescopes. Still, I love that kind of phrasing: It's not cut and paste exactly, but composite.

Matthew Composite images and collage turned out to be fruitful ways of thinking about geography and spatiality in the workshop: No geography is ever complete. And the question of what gets included and what gets excluded is itself part of a creative process, a negotiation that happens sometimes at a more manifest, sometimes at a more unconscious level. And there's also a great deal that's missing or unknown that gets filled in in unpredictable and revealing ways.

Simon Let's round out our talk with a final question. Was there anything that surprised you here in Basel? It might be academic or really any kind of serendipitous find.

Matthew In terms of serendipity, I would say that one of the most generative finds for me in Basel has been the Museum der Kulturen, which holds the archive of the American art historian and anthropologist Carl Schuster. It was Schuster’s unfinished life project to trace the evolution and diffusion of indigenous ornament around the world, from from Eurasia to Oceania, from prehistory to the present. His archive can be taken as another case study in method, not to mention an archivist’s nightmare: the sheer wealth of photographs and visual material that Schuster collected defies understanding. I’m still making my way through it now, but entering Schuster’s world in this way really brought me forward in all sorts of unexpected ways in this book project. So, a big shout out to the museum curators and staff if they're reading this.

Adrian I don't have a magical archive find. I really like the Gelateria Di Berna ice cream place. Also, there were so many different talks in so many different departments here. It’s just been great. And the trains! Being able to hop to other places. Have you guys seen the bronze show at the Bern Historisches Museum? There's a Bronze Age hand dug up in a Swiss farm field. The day that I went, one of the guys who unearthed it was actually there, he showed us his iPhone pictures of having found it seven years ago. So that was pretty cool.

This is what’s next for Adrian and Matthew: Adrian is heading to Massachusetts where she will be an autumn 2024 Clark Fellow with the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program. And Matthew will be taking up a new position as Senior Research Fellow in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of the NOMIS project Depicted Worlds: The Perceptual Power of Images.