Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
Guest: Artist Allison Rowe, https://allisonroweart.com/
The Art of Ethnography: The Aesthetics or Ethics of Participation
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.
00/00/00 1:53 PM
Hjorth, Larissa and Kristen Sharp. “The art of ethnography: the aesthetics or ethics of participation?” Visual Studies. Vol. 29, No. 2, 2014, p. 128-135.
QUESTIONS
What is geo-ethnographies? How is ethnography used as a method in arts, how does “procedural documentation (eg. photographs)” fall short? How does a project ensure it is “critically and reflexively engaged?” What did Foster say about ethnography in arts?
READING NOTES
- concepts central to ethnographic practice
- reflexive negotiation of self, power, labour and participation
- Bourriaud (Relational Aesthetics)
- relational aesthetics – “human and social relations as context and content for art production and consumption.”
- contemp art must move beyond 1960’s philosophies and toward internet, co-creation, DIY, etc. Audience is community to collaborate with.
- Clare Bishop
- relational aesthetics = MO of curator/gallery = “imbalances of power relations that in turn lead to various uneven forms of participation.”
- “Has ethnography moved beyond and aesthetic gesture towards and ethical practice in art?”
- ethnographic art
- not documenting but method and criticality
- not co-location but co-presence (Beaulieu)
- ethno – centres people (Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities)
- “moving from period of networked visual events to emplaced images,” multisensoriality, place-as-event, post-relational aesthetics (Pink)
- “reflexive hospitality” (Papastergiadis), artist speedy collaborate/engage w/ community fashions ‘other’ in artistic guise. questions of power, labour, subjectivity.
- “cultures… [do] not hold still for their portraits” (Clifford and Marcus)
- “negotiate the politics of everyday as dynamic and yet prosaic”
- Kester – collaborative methods – needs new documentation/critique that moves away from completed work and takes into account different forms of identification and agency of artist and participant and relations/operations of power (prioritizing ethics over aesthetics)
- Bishop – critical of “good intentions,” prefer disrupt and provoke
- “[in art] how to respond and adapt to the reconfiguring of identities and practices”
- Underground Streams – “emphasis is not on art as a centralised fixed object but rather as a structure through which dialogue is encouraged”
- art as “living process” (aucklandtriennial.com)
- Place (Geo)
- online/offline relationships, symbolic ideas of place
- identity politics – geography and ethnicity
- multiple forms of presence
- digital overlays, “stories-so-far”
- “co, net, tele, absent, ambient”
- digital/mobile media = shift from co-location to co-presence
- mediated by memory, language, gesture
- lived, imagined, geographic, conceptual
- “evokes cartographies of the imaginary, emotional, mnemonic and psychological” (Massey)
- shaped by movement / meshwork of moving things (Ingold)
- “[how might art] reimagine the identity and place as something contested, dynamic and contingent?”
- “artist does not simply dwell in a place but collaborates with place” (Papastergiadis)
- (artist)researcher – in collaborating, active practice of observing, documenting, reflecting, and presenting social nature of knowledge production
- danger in using social-practice-art as “lab” w/o power analysis, becomes closed-loop, one ended discussion
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
Beaulieu, A. 2010. “Research Note: From Co-location to Copresence: Shifts in the Use of Ethnography for the Study of Knowledge.” Social Studies of Science 40 (3): 453–470. doi:10.1177/0306312709359219.
Bishop, C. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110: 51–79. doi:10.1162/0162287042379810.
Bishop, C. 2006a. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” Artforum Feb.: 179–185.
Bishop, C. 2006b. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Bourriaud, N. 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. First published in French 1998.
Foster, H. 1995. “The Artist as Ethnographer?” In Traffic in Culture, edited by G. Marcus and F. Myer, 302–309. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Foster, H. 1996. “The Artist as Ethnographer.” In The Return of the Real, 171–204. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kester, G. 2004. “Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art.” Accessed February 7. www.greenmuseum.org/ generic_content.php?ct_id=208
Kester, G. 2006. “Reply.” Artforum May: 22–23.
Kester, G. 2011. The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage.
Papastergiadis, N. 2011. Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Papastergiadis, N. 2012. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Pink, S. 2009. Doing Sensory Ethnography. London: Sage.
POST-READ
In this text Hjorth and Sharp provide an overview of ethnographic research as applied in arts-practice, and use Kester’s “The One and the Many” (2011) to analysis the balance of ethics and aesthetics in two case studies of collaborative, ethnographic social-practice art. A primary concern in this text is geo-ethnographies in relation to identity, place, and power. “Identity” is connected to geography and ethnicity (grid?), “place” is envisioned as symbolic and changing, and power is an ever present haunting of anthropology’s “othering.” This text argues for the necessity of focus and rigour to maintain and demonstrate critical reflection in arts-based ethnography and collaborative practices. It also emphasizes the need to move away from prioritizing static art resolutions/outcomes towards dynamic experiences of engagement, a move away from judgement and aesthetics to rigorous criticality and ethics.
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Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research
In this article, we explore whether or not arts-based research engages different ideas and processes—different nouns and verbs—when the art form is understood as design, craft, or “fine” art. We propose that the fine, craft, and design arts each provide opportunities for conducting research, that their identities are built upon mutual support and willful self-separation—”I am a crafts artist not a designer;” that the distinctions mark the boundaries of our research but aren’t fixed; and, that they provide a framework for a comprehensive art education program in which the disjunctions among the three disciplines provide opportunities for critical discourse. The disorder, the complexity, and the contradiction that the three disciplines of craft, design, and fine arts bring to one another is further complicated by art educators’ and their students’ knowledge, primarily the memories and cultural histories that they bring to their craft, design, and fine art making practices and research. In doing so, the discourse about craft, design, and fine artmaking is forever unfinished in the classroom. This article is the authors’ attempt at introducing a writing style that best exemplifies the ambiguities and incompleteness of arts-based research. We have chosen aphoristic writing to provide art educators opportunities to enter the fray, to intervene in the openings between our writing by reading between the aphorisms that follow.
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White, John Howell and Charles R. Garoian, and Elizabeth Garber. “Speaking in Tongues: The Uncommon Ground of Arts-Based Research” Studies in Art Education, Winter 2010.
QUESTIONS
What is the difference between artist, designer, craftsperson and why do they separate themselves? What opportunities and barriers are there in having different identities and vocabularies for similar research practices? What do memory and cultural histories have to do with it?
READING NOTES
- crafts/design/fine arts – identities formed+held through “networks of people, actions, objects, histories, and economies.” (William James + Ludwig Wittgenstein).
- aphoristic methodology – challenges chronological and analytical approach to history (Walter Benjamin)
- aphorism used to avoid hierarchical order
- transitivity, indeterminancy – correspondences w/ relational aesthetics – “forever unfinished discursiveness, a never recaptured desire for dissemination” (Bourriaud)
- aphorism + collage – perpetually unfinished, “the dictum says Something. The aphorism shows Something else… the dictum must be complete or it is nothing… an aphorism is pertpetually unfinished, always reaching beyond itself” (Gary Saul Morson, lit theory).
- misreading, aphorism does not conclude but opens opportunities, liminality, ambiguity that are being applied to arts language in this text
- disquieting objects – juxtaposition between prayer meditation bowl and porcelain cup – cannot wear ring because blood diamonds, cannot put up flower house numbers because of presentation – ghost of prophecy, materiality, order, tradition – control for fear of falling into abyss – craft verb/craft noun – “the encounter w/ materials as the point where personal history is problematized”
- Disquieting actions – “make-it” phenomenon – mechanics of crafting+play – action in crafting, enjoyment of watching to seek techniques and skill to express experiences, ideas, emotions – The Pencil story, logic and rationality suspended, “walking stick of research” – returning/rememberance/research/resonance, the past is not the presence, traction (methods and results) and slippage (novelty and variety)
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
aphorism: a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment : ADAGE (MW)
transitivity (transitive): characterized by having or containing a direct object(grammar); being or relating to a relation with the property that if the relation holds between a first element and a second and between the second element and a third, it holds between the first and third elements; relating to, or characterized by transition
POST-READ
i made a nice egg and cheese and veg scramble. craft/design/fine art objects create tension the same way, craft/desgin/fine art mechanical movements are acted on the same way.??
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Arts-Informed Research
Contemporary American artist Martha Rosler (cited in Gever, 1981) states, “[If you want to] bring conscious, concrete knowledge to your work . . . you had better locate yourself pretty concretely in it” (p. 11). We are life history researchers with deep roots in meaning making systems that honor the many and diverse ways of knowing—personal, narrative, embodied, artistic, aesthetic—that stand outside sanctioned intellectual frameworks. To begin this chapter we surface these roots.
00/00/00 03:00 PM
Cole, Ardra L. and J. Gary Knowles. “Arts-Informed Research.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Sage Publications. 2007. p. 55-70.
READING NOTES
- dissatisfaction and disillusionment
- academy – use vocab to explain phenomena experiences processes context systems, although it feels false
- transforms rich life stories and emotions into something dry
- using integrity, relevance, accessibility, engagement to reach audience outside academy
- enter the arts
- arts-informed research
- defining elements and form
- ways and means for finding form
- qualities of good arts inormed research
INTERESTING CITATIONS AND DEFINITIONS
logical positisim
technical-rationality
POST-READ
vagueness and ambiguity are big themes ive been readng
Mixed Methods Procedures
Creswell, JW. “Mixed Methods Procedures.” Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Sage Publications. 2014. p. 215‐240.
READING NOTES
- mixing 2 data types makes better understanding of problem/question
- qualitative – open ended
- quantitative – close ended
- 1) intent + def of design of mixed methods 2) reasons, value 3) choose mixed methods design 4) discuss data collection, analysis, interpretation, validation 5) discuss anticipated ethical issues
- includes diagrams to use in describing methods
- social and human sciences
Artist: Allison Rowe
Guest: Artist Allison Rowe, https://allisonroweart.com/
POST-READ
“Trying to talk to climate change scientists about the future and their feelings,” 2018 was the most interesting to me because of the way the narrative got shorter and more succinct as the interviews go on. The lack of visual / audio exhibit materials is fitting for a project where the participants unanimously did not feel it appropriate to respond. It also illuminates how the artist came to develop a later project, “Emotional Labor Specialist, Climate Change Hotline” 2019, wherein the specialist is often absent. I wonder how the work she has done at Artscape Gibraltar Point connects to the research and theory we have been reading.
