I had visited the ethnographic museum in Frankfurt ten years earlier in the autumn of 1999 as the newly appointed guest professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. On one occasion, the dean of the art school, Kasper König, took me to meet the director of Frankfurt’s department of culture. They both knew of my background in cultural anthropology and wanted me to take on the vacant directorship of the ethnographic museum. At this first meeting, I declined. It felt anathema to the excitement of teaching art students. A couple of months later, the director invited me back to his office. Again, I refused. The main reason for not accepting the offer was informed by my studies of anthropology in the mid-eighties. At that time, the subject of analysis was not the foreign culture and its artifacts so much as the figure of the ethnographer. Anthropology, the “maculate,”14 soiled science, could be deconstructed by decoding the tropes employed to “write culture.”15 Neighboring literary criticism, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, this radical strain of semantic anthropology was barely engaged in defusing the charged condition of its founding institution, the colonial museum and with it, the hundreds of thousands of confiscated artifacts. Studying anthropology and art practice in Vienna in the early eighties, I read everything I could that was brought out by German publishers such as Syndikat, Suhrkamp, or the Qumran Verlag. I discovered texts by ethno-psychoanalysts Paul Parin, Fritz Morgenthaler, and Mario Erdheim, essays by transgressive thinkers like Hubert Fichte, the work of Michael Oppitz and Fritz Kramer, alongside the more mystically oriented research of Hans Peter Duerr. This theoretical material played a role in the German-speaking art world of the time. As art students we read anthropology because there was little else. There were no formalized courses in curatorial studies and no transcultural academies; nothing but a relatively conservative art history, which bore little relation to the heteroclite practices of Actionism, Concept Art, and performance.
Key to this interdisciplinary crossover was a text written in the seventies by American artist Joseph Kosuth titled “The Artist as Anthropologist.”16 In a sequence of numbered paragraphs, Kosuth cites economist Michael Polanyi, philosopher Martin Jay, sociologist Max Weber, and anthropologists Stanley Diamond, Bob Scholte, and Edward Sapir, and draws a map of contextual adjacency with which he aims to destabilize the narratives of Western modernism and scientism as the defining references in contemporary art. He argues for an “anthropologized art,” “an art manifested in praxis,” an “engaged” activity founded on “cultural fluency” whose criticality succeeds because it “depicts while it alters society.”17 Kosuth’s article—with its typically male figureheads—was more than merely a reading list for emerging artists. His intellectual stance corresponded with the aftermath of the first Independence period in sixties Africa, emancipatory movements in the US, the global student demonstrations of 1968, and the fallout of the Vietnam War. The relationship between contemporary art and cultural anthropology was built upon the articulation of linguistic and contextual propositions that might activate a recursive adjustment to ways of understanding and representing art itself.18
As a doctoral stu
