The art of making images: technological affordance, design variability and labour organization in the production of engraved artefacts and body paintings in Tierra del Fuego (Southern South America)

Abstract

This paper contributes to the conception of visual art as a material culture artefact produced through a work process. Art-making work processes condense economic factors (raw material exploitation, labour organization, etc.), technological factors (materials, tools, techniques, etc.) and cognitive factors (knowledge, values, visual perceptions, etc.), all of which are inextricably linked in the creation of visual images. The paper argues that the analysis of such work process is a key element in understanding and interpreting the role of visual images within the social contexts in which they were made and used (displayed/worn, viewed), insofar as many of their functions, meanings and effects stemmed from such production contexts and from the different affordances of image-making techniques. These concepts are applied to the research of the body paintings created and worn by the Yamana/Yagan, whose ancestral territory is located in the southernmost region of Tierra del Fuego, where traditions of bone artefact decoration and pigment use have been documented along seven millennia. Body painting is analysed using a ‘visual archaeology’ approach, through the systematic study of a photographic record of 76 images taken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, combined with information from the written record (50 historical-ethnographic sources from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, which are summarized for the first time in this publication). Results show that (a) the affordance of image-making techniques was flexibly exploited in order to generate design repertoires of higher or lower variability according to the type of situation of body painting display and (b) part of the visual and social effects of these images stemmed directly from their production contexts (e.g. domestic versus ceremonial, public versus secret) and from their techno-visual and performative affordances. Thus, the paper shows that art images-objects should not be interpreted only as final products, since many of their material and social qualities were deeply rooted in the very production processes that led to their existence.