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Thick Description
In The Interpretation of Cultures, anthropologist Clifford Geertz states, “anthropologists don’t study villages, they study in villages.” As their first assignment together, these eight students were given a problem to find an image/object/site inside Macy’s that resembled another classmate’s artwork, both formally and conceptually. Through this exercise, each attempted to uncover the inner-woven complexity within the cultural field and analyze how unrelated signifiers can signify a comparable cultural meaning.
Thick description, a term coined by philosopher Gilbert Ryle, was later developed by Geertz as a way of providing enough cultural context for a person to interpret a behavior. In Ryle’s discussion of the term, winking is only a communicable gesture because of the pre-existing public code. The initiator and the receptor both have to understand the code to make the
gesture meaningful. In the context of this exhibition, the artist presents a series of gestures within an image/object/site; the audience is asked to observe, analyze, and interpret in order to describe the web of culture the artist is positioned in.
As Geertz points out, “cultural analysis is (or should be) guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses.” To be a human is to navigate through life with interpretations and misinterpretations. Nonetheless, the individuals who are constantly making analogies, creating references from what they know to what they don’t, will approximate to a truth.