Aesthetics of Abduction and Fragmentation

This fourth chapter of critical aesthetics discusses the political and economic dimensions of artisanal production in Santa Clara del Cobre. Market exchanges, production chains, and other relationships are often purposefully made opaque, invisible. To trace this consumption and abduction of maker’s agency and copper things, several scenarios are presented here occurring between artisans, and between artisans and institutions, designers, collectors, artists, museums, galleries, and other players. These stories elucidate aesthetic aura and agency through empirical analysis of authenticity, generational stylistic legacies, simulacra, prototypes, authorship, artisan anonymity, the art of metamorphosis, fetichism, and artifacts as subjunctive events of “as - is” and “as if.” How did Santa Clara become the “ready-made” or “objet trouvé” of one prominent North American artist in the early 1970s? How did this experience of neocolonialism spur a human rights struggle and revolt in Santa Clara? How was this related to the Arts and Crafts movement and its revival? How is this relevant to Santa Clara today? What happens when artisan’s social and representative performance becomes separated from their aesthetic and reproductive performance? How does this complicate Strathern’s (1988) concept of the distributed person and Gell’s (Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) concept of abduction, agency, and the social relations of things?