Thursday, November 9, 2017

Week 8 Readings - Michael

Pg 128 Preface

When Hal Foster noted an ethnographic turn in the art
world in the 1990s, he was eluding to broader ‘impulses’
that had haunted avant-garde movements throughout
most of modernism, such as surrealism. However, the
ethnographic turn did not just have an impact in the
visual arts – areas such as cultural studies felt a shift from
the textual towards the ethnographic. Two and half
decades on, the pervasive nature of ethnography can be
felt across the disciplines as ethnographic approaches
evolve, migrate and transform, especially through the
growing ubiquity of the digital. In this context, various
entanglements need to be defined – especially the drawing
upon ethnographic aesthetics and ethics in art practice.
But is this ethnographic compulsion just a stylistic trend
or does it speak of deeper concerns in the arts about
engaging with social and cultural practices and reflexive
participation? Drawing on case studies in contemporary
art, this article focuses upon the haunting of the
ethnographic turn in art through numerous guises from
relational aesthetics onwards.

Pg 128 bottom right column
With reflexivity and
participation being central tenors in relational aesthetics,
it is no surprise that the haunting of the ethnographic
and art’s perpetual appropriation and misappropriation
should come to the forefront. Yet over a decade later
since relational aesthetics has the art world moved onto
more sophisticated understandings of ethnography? In
sum, has ethnography moved beyond an aesthetic
gesture towards an ethical practice in art?

Pg 129 first column
It is about repositioning participation and its
relationship between maker and the audience, a
relationship that has increasingly been challenged with
the rise of the professional amateur (pro-am) and the
producing user (produser). If contemporary media
culture is characterised by participation and
collaboration, then this challenges art to move beyond a
mere adoption of Internet terminology (as in the case of
relational aesthetics). This shifting media scape has
given way to the need, if not compulsion, for art to
evoke the ethnographic; this is particularly significant
given the ways in which ethnography has become an
important approach in understanding digital and online
spaces (Boellstorff et al. 2012). The ethnographic can
help the artist/curator probe the cultural context,
providing a nuanced space for the audience and artist to
reflect. 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?

Pg 129 middle right column
‘identity’ continues to underpin so much of
how art is being presented. In terms of biennale
curating, it’s as if it’s part of the very grammar
and logic of these productions. Geography and
ethnicity are privileged in biennales, to the
extent that one could describe their mode of
knowledge as ‘ethno-geographic’.

Q: I can barely understand the logic laid out here. However I can infer gently (or heavily) that this statement means to say that the curation of art is racist and classist. If they are so broad to say that it's so ingrained in the culture that the process’ and outcomes are inevitable, why do we as a species condone such egregiously obvious failures at democratic social orders?

Pg 130 top right column
If we apply this model to
the art world and its role in constructing, and being
constructed by, place-as-event (a.k.a. post-relational
aesthetics) we can begin to define new ethno-
geographies. The oscillation between viewing social
cartographies in art practice as ethno-geographies and
geo-ethnographies reflects the need to centralise the
question of place in this discussion.

Pg 130 bottom right column
Here 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).

Pg 132 top left column
Such methods would utilise a combination
of participatory modes of observation and
documentation, such as multi-modal forms of
documentation including, video, stills and online
critically reflective writing during the process. Such
‘embedded’ processes need to be cognisant of the
importance of critical reflection around subject–object
positions and try to delineate ‘insider/outsider’
perspectives. Online social media is a useful format for
this as it enables a range of easily accessible modes of
presentation and access, and it is very much focussed on
‘being present’ rather than only providing archives or
historic repositories of information.

Q: Is this Instagram? Will digital social culture evolve? What will it look like? Will there be exclusively internet/digital art spaces? Does that already exist? In what ways are we a digital art market? In what ways are we heading towards? What are we afraid of in regard to the digitization of art?

Pg 132 top left column
This
acknowledges the imaginative and creative elements
involved in this form of research. This method,
acknowledging a collaborative dynamic between
researchers and the subjects of study, has been an
important method in ethnographic research since the
1960s (Foley and Valenzuela 2005; Lassiter 2005). In an
art context it creates an approach whereby the researcher
is embedded with the artists in developing techniques for
documenting and presenting the process of collaboration.

Q: Does this make research art? When is it research and when is it art? Is research a form of art making? What if its participatory and/or collaborative?

Pg 133 bottom left column, continued on the top right
Rather than aiming for some essentialized ‘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. This type of open
structure encouraged participants – artists and others –
to apply their own cultural lenses to identities of place.

Q: This citation makes me think of a debate that is ongoing within discourse I’ve been having about participatory work. The question being, if an event planned as an artwork has participants with a level of agency that they begin to produce content outside of the original stated mission of the work, does this new unplanned content exist within the context of the original work? Or is it a new work entirely, or not a creative artwork at all, that is simply happening concurrently with the source event?

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