Please post your questions and comments about our one sole short reading for this week below: The Art of Ethnography: The Aesthetics or Ethics of Participation?
This article references Art Historian and critic Hal Foster's Artist as Ethnographer, which is a short highly influential essay that is often brought up as a critique of some aspects of socially engaged art.
Page 131
ReplyDelete“Collaborative methods establish different forms of intersubjective effect, identification and agency (Kester 2011, 68). This subsequently requires new forms of documentation and critique of artwork beyond an analysis of the ‘finished’ work or the ‘singular’ participatory event in order to capture the social and ethical relationships between artists and participants, the structures of operations and relations of power in collaborative practices.”
Page 132
“This requires the adoption of a reflective practice-led research method, which involves the researcher as an active partner in the collaborative project observing, documenting, reflecting upon and then presenting the social nature of creative knowledge production.”
Page 133
“While artists in Underground Streams produced a number of different works for the project ranging from performance and mobile gaming, to socially collective activities (walks alongside the covered river), community activities such as lantern making, and video and sound documentation – they collectively produced a SYMBOLIC DIALOGUE on the meaning of water and river ecologies in urban space which stretched across art and into urban planning and social activism.”
Page 133
While there are similarities to earlier practices in activist and community art, particularly that which rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, the type of public engagement facilitated through Spatial Dialogues appears less focused on a specific political outcome – such as a direct form of urban transformation or community building – and more about allowing for aesthetic as well as SOCIOCULTURAL REFLECTION about the changing environment of the city.
QUESTIONS
Is the word choice “savage” on page 130 chosen in irony? Is there a synonym to ethnography?
Can balances of power be addressed in gallery contexts? Are other contexts feasible (to Bishop)? Or is then the aesthetics lost???
From page 129, what does the class think - “But is art’s adaptation of the ethnographic about a criticality and reflexivity or is it a mere aestheticisation of ethnographic? Is it a style or a politics?”
Quote 1 p. 130: Here we are thinking about place as a concept that is lived and imagined, geographic as much as conceptual… place [is] a space that not only is geographic and physical but also evokes cartographies of the imaginary, emotional, mnemonic and psychological.
ReplyDeleteQuote 2 p. 130: Foster calls on ethnography as a way in which the artist can be reflexive to their own assumptions in order to delve into the muddy waters of collaboration in which power, labour and subjectivity come under question. One of the key ongoing factors, of which ethnographers need to be continuously reflexive, is their role in participation. After all, ‘cultures . . . [do] not hold still for their portraits’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986).
Quote 3 p. 132: …in the art world… artists are increasingly mobile, circulating and engaging in transnational and transcultural experiences as a form of global cosmopolitanism (Meskimmon 2010). …As an increasingly visible area of contemporary art practice (Bishop 2006a; Storer 2009), collaboration provides an important method for engaging this changing landscape. It creates opportunities for experiencing and understanding the key relations and tensions arising in globalisation, particularly those of individual identity, knowledge production and cultural difference. What is significant here is that unlike Foster’s concern with art’s potential adoption of the Eurocentric desire for engaging and representing the ‘other’, the contemporary art environment is one in which artists engage in transnational projects which allow for a constant traversing of cultures and identities – indicative of the mobile contemporary and part of an increasingly digital world.
Questions:
1. Where is the sweet spot where a writer can both describe actual events in actual space AND connect them to big ideas? I have only a vague idea of what these writers are trying to say, because they’re stringing together references to various previous theorists instead of giving much of a coherent description of actual people having actual interactions within the examples they’re using.
2. What are some artistic strategies to engage with globalization and the art economy without getting pushed towards missionary/colonizer-type roles? Can I engage with/learn from global culture, while keeping roots in a place where I both affect and am affected by people who do not fly around the world constantly? What is the relationship between doing a project in an unfamiliar country and doing a project in an unfamiliar neighborhood?
3. When is it interesting/effective to use social media as a venue for interaction, and when does it actually just drain all of the blood and potential from flesh-and-blood real-time encounter?
“With the ‘geo’ added to ethnography a new way to think about, and narrate, place is provided. Here we are thinking about place as a concept that is lived and imagined, geographic as much as conceptual.” (pg.4)
ReplyDeleteQ: The authors’ use of the term ethnography is a departure from how it is used in the social sciences, and I’m curious as to how they would define it, procedurally? A traditional ethnography entails months of observation in a given setting, but it sounds like they are suggesting another model, which is fine…but I'm a little fuzzy on what it is or can be.
“…the type of public engagement facilitated through Spatial Dialogues appears less focused on a specific political outcome – such as a direct form of urban transformation or community building – and more about allowing for aesthetic as well as sociocultural reflection about the changing environment of the city.” (pg. 7)
Q: I wonder how often these types of project actually do inspire advocacy and action? Is that usually a goal? I also wonder how much the platform is a determining factor, ie. a project that's presented by a museum might feel more like capital "A" art, whereas a non-profit or other type of org might be more conducive to action.
“There is significant potential here to harness the influence of social media in constructing intimate engagements with art and the performativity of the political and engaging with audiences beyond physically locative practices of such face to face structures.” (pg.6)
Q: This is exactly what I’m pursuing with my final project, and I’m wondering how this type of engagement enhances and/or limits results? Self-selection bias is one dimension, as well as access to technology. For this reason, can we feel that we’ve thoroughly engaged with representatives of a geographic population through online social media platforms? If not, does that compromise the value of the work?
My contribution can be found here https://hsp2017psu.blogspot.com/2017/11/week-8-readings-michael.html
ReplyDeleteQuotes:
ReplyDeleteP128: "Throughout this evolution, some concepts have remained central to ethnographic practice – the reflexive negotiation of self, power, labour and participation."
P130: "One way of seeing 'places' is as on the surface of maps... But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abondon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space."
P133: "Rather than aiming for some essentialised ‘truth’ to emerge about the identity of the river, what emerged was a plurality of perspectives from locals reflecting on their encounters with the river in its past uncovered state, to others discovering that a river existed in the area at all, to re-imaginings of the space through dance, food, mobile gaming and live performance."
P134: "There is a need for more rigorous understandings and deployments of ethnography as a method in the arts – mere procedural documentation (e.g. photographs) do not equate to ethnography. This situation is particularly prevalent within the arts with the rise of socially engaged projects that tend to be merely stylistic or aesthetic, rather than critically and reflexively engaged."
Questions:
How can a social practice artwork negotiate the politics of everyday as dynamic and yet prosaic as stated in the quote, "Hence, by re-examining ethnography, and particularity ethnographic approaches, the place of art might be able to negotiate the politics of everyday as dynamic and yet prosaic."
How does social engagement look online in discursive ethnographic projects? How is more than a hot reddit topic or trending meme?
QUOTES:
ReplyDeleteOne way of seeing 'places' is as on the surface of maps.. But to escape from an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories. -Massey (2005) quoted on p130
Many of the artworks....were reliant on common forms of ethnographic practices - video documentation, soundscapes, observation and open-ended interviews - to emphasise interpretive narratives and subjective encounters to re-imagine a place. p133
Like the ethical issues facing socially engaged practices of art, one of the key challenges in using ethnographic research is understanding how place and presence can be entangled and overlaid in different ways across the online and offline, here and there, now and then. p134
QUESTIONS:
In my experience, the multiplicity of perspectives on place (referencing the Massey quote, p130) has always existed it's just now, in the era of the internet, more superficially evident. I am surprise that this is an new theoretical awareness. Can I not see the era before this stance because I have only existed in a time when this multiplicity is present? Or do I understand the multiplicity of place because I was raised in a tiny small town in which each place's history was part of our collective knowledge. Was this not true in a city context too? I guess, I am confused, when did this concept become revolutionary? And if it was since 1980, in what era did we loose this recollection that places have multiple histories?
Can we discuss the phrase "critical reflexivity"? What is it? (Discussed on page 129)
L. Hjorth and K. Sharp posit that "online social media is a useful formate...as it enables a range of easily accessible modes of presentation and access and it is very much focused on 'being present' rather than only providing archives or historic repositories of information." (p132). I would like to talk about this. Do you guys think social media is interested in "being present"???
Quotes:
ReplyDelete"Thus, art's ability to facilitate a deeper and more critical reflection on the ethno-geographic and on its own methodologies of practices remains an exception rather than the rule when it comes to current practice." (134)
"[...] the type of public engagement facilitated through /Spatial Dialogues/ appears less focused on a specific political outcome - such as a direct form of urban transformation or community building - and more about allowing for aesthetic as well as sociocultural reflection about the changing environment of the city" (133)
"The artist does not simply dwell in a place but collaborates with place" (Papastergiadis, quoted on 133)
Questions:
1. "Specifically, how might the art world utilise ethnographic approaches to reimagine the identity and place as something contested, dynamic and contingent - beyond just invoking Foster's quasi-anthropology?" (131)
2. Is it important that people/artists start seeing setting and place as dynamic and ever-changing rather than a fixed spot? When should they/should they not?
3. Im curious if there is any imbedded cultural practice (either here or anywhere) that already does what (most) social practice aims to do and how does that look? What is the "artwork"?