Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
From time to time, people come along whose ideas or creations
challenge existing understandings of how a specific genre (or sub-
genre) of communication is defined, and where its boundaries lie. This
highlights the capacity for genres to change over time. Take the world-
famous British artist Damien Hirst. In several of his early works, he
utilised the bodies of dead animals. For instance, in 1992 he famously
displayed 'The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone
living', a 14-foot (4.3 metre) tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde in a
vitrine. Eight years later, Marco Evaristti exhibited ten ordinary kitchen
blenders inside which were goldfish - visitors were given the choice to
switch the blenders on. Works like this attracted a lot of criticism from
'establishment' figures in the art world, and they also perplexed many
members of the public accustomed to thinking that 'art' is synony-
mous with painting or sculpture. Much more recently, a similar stir was
caused when the internationally prestigious Turner Prize was awarded
to the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz in 2010 for her 'sound installation'.
Philipsz's aural creation was a recording of her singing three versions
of a Scottish folk song over the River Clyde in Glasgow. The works
of Hirst, Evaristti and Philipsz made many people ask the question
'Is this art?' Outside the art world itself, what's often forgotten is that
what counts as 'art', in terms of both substance and style, is ultimately
decided by artists, their patrons and their audiences. In other words,
there is nothing intrinsically 'artistic' - to take one famous example -
about the much admired natural landscape paintings of Canada's so-
called 'Group of Seven' (who worked in the 1920s). Conversely, there's
nothing intrinsically 'non-artistic' about the works of Hirst, Evaristti,
Philipsz or other innovators. Upon close inspection, the history of art
in the West and beyond shows it to be highly changeable, notwith-
standing some people's insistence that its role - or, rather, the role
of 'true art' - is to communicate universal, timeless truths about life
and living.
For more on genre, see John Frow's (2006) excellent book
Genre
.
While I will make an analytical distinction in this chapter between the
genre, the content and the mode of any given act of communication,
in practice the three are inextricably intertwined. This is well illus-
trated in Howard Becker's (1982) wonderful study,
Art worlds
,which
details the complex community of actors and the elaborate mate-
rial infrastructures required to make and sustain the genre known as
'works of art'.
What's interesting, I think, is the
ease
with which we recognise that
different epistemic communities are engaged in throwing different 'styles'
of representation our way. We often receive the particular content of their
