READING DIARY: SEPTEMBER 2021- TT SESSION 10: METHODOLOGIES- RESEARCH STUDIO FOR THE ARTIST- A WORKSHOP WITH ABBEY ODUNLAMI- Readings 1-4
SEP21 WKS1-READING 1: In "The Creative Process", James Baldwin* (from Creative America, Ridge Press, 1962), writes on the existentialist topic of being…on “The state of being alone” and more specifically on the plight of the artist’s state of being essentially, even more alone than other members of society or a community.
Baldwin is funny and fatalistic throughout, i.e., It is for this reason that all societies have battled with the incorrigible disturber of the peace—the artist. I doubt that future societies will get on with him any better.…
His theme of salvation is revealed in statements like: And a higher level of consciousness among the people is the only hope we have, now or in the future, of minimizing human damage.
He places his own hopes in The artist (who) is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians, legislators, educators, and scientists—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being...
I am really trying to make clear the nature of the artist’s responsibility to his society. The peculiar nature of this responsibility is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own. For the truth, in spite of appearances and all our hopes, is that everything is always changing and the measure of our maturity as nations and as men is how well prepared we are to meet these changes, and further, to use them for our health.
I think about this a lot…that nothing is ever fixed. I think about how we are in constant motion on our earth, which is like a living, spinning bead in the solar system that’s endlessly twirls around the sun. And about how our cosmic ooze flies through space at unimaginable speeds. (The sun and the solar system appear to be moving at 200 kilometers per second, or at an average speed of 448,000 mph (720,000 km/h). Even at this rapid speed, the solar system would take about 230 million years to travel all the way around the Milky Way.)
I see Baldwin as almost a mystic... at least he acknowledges the mystical role artists have in their societies. He’s genius, and a real poetic thinker/writer...we see it when he writes things like... “That nation is healthiest which has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize these people—whom, as I say, honor, once they are gone, because somewhere in our hearts we know that we cannot live without them.” and “…the aloneness in which one discovers that life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful—could not be permitted….Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war, and he does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
SEP21 WKS1-READING 2: The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis, by Okwui Enwezor
Enwezor considers if questions raised in 1932 by Georg Lukács (“The conditions of production of the time was the struggle between capitalism and socialism as the driving force behind modern subjectivity.”) and in 1934 by Walter Benjamin (…to what degree does political awareness in a work of art becomes a tool for the deracination of the autonomy of the work and that of the author? And "What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?") are, in the context of the 21st Century’s critical context of contemporary culture…with a focus on “…(art) work driven by the spirit of activism…” still relevant.
Enwezor also asks Is the collectivization of artistic production not a critique of the poverty of the language of contemporary art in the face of large scale commodifications of culture which have merged the identity of the artist with the corporate logo of global capitalism? …Is he thinking of collaborations like the Warhol-Basquiat paintings?
Enwezor differentiates between two kinds of collaborations, one he states%“…can be summarized as possessing a structured modus vivendi based on permanent, fixed groupings of practitioners working over a sustained period. In such collectives, authorship represents the expression of the group rather than that of the individual artist.% (Ex. Based on Middle Ages collectives that constructed Romanesque and Gothic Cathedrals…Modern architects, builders, artisans for example involved in constructing the “new” Renaissance Vatican?). And The second type of collectives tend to emphasize a flexible, non-permanent course of affiliation, privileging collaboration on project basis than on a permanent alliance. This type of collective formation can be designated as networked collectives. Such networks are far more prevalent today due to radical advances in communication technologies and globalization. I ask, as in the The Dinner Party, produced from 1974 to 1979 as a collaboration, (but directed by and authorship is given to Judy Chicago
SEP21 WKS1-READING 3: Theory of the Dérive- Guy Debord
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In his study Paris et l’agglomération Parisienne (Bibliotheque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives… within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher. (Seems like de Lauwe may have stalked this student…?)
One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.
I love the term psychogeographical urbanism
Derive alone...Are Adrian Piper’s 1970’s street performance works (conceptual, socially “interactive”, identity based) examples of solo derives?
Or are derives actually “pass times” and/or “great games” as Debord states, and not conceptual (art)?
Derive in small groups... Do Alan Kaprow’s 1950’s outdoor happenings count, or were they “too large” and because often a loose concept pre-existed, do they not qualify?
SEP21 WKS1-READING 4: James Elkins (School of the Art Institute Chicago | Chicago, USA) "What is Research?" Keynote speech of the conference Black Mountain - Educational Turn and the Avantgarde at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin on the 25 and 26/09/ 2015.
Elkins discusses the rise of the practice based PhD program in the Western world and in Japan, and the issues surrounding the quantification of creative expression (artwork). Ex. He references assessment models that science based education uses/applies and how they do not readily work with practice based knowledge. He discussed is the linguistics of creative products/art, the H-index, and referenced the Bologna Process.
H-index, sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
The Bologna Process is a series of ministerial meetings and agreements between European countries to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher-education qualifications en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process
My overarching question/thought is regarding Elkins talk is that if we via post-structuralism determined that all naturally existing and created phenomena are language, or elements of language, then does it not stand to reason that if experience is what brings language into knowledge, then all experienced or lived phenomena, creative experiences included, is also knowledge?
SEPTEMBER 2021- TT SESSION 10-2: METHODOLOGIES- AUTOETHNOGRAPHY – PERSONAL AND POLITICAL IN RESEARCH CONTEXT- A WORKSHOP WITH ELENA MARCHEVSKA- Readings 1-3
SEP21 WKS2-READING 1: Venus in Two Acts, Small Axe 12, 1-14, 2008, S. Hartman
This is a brutal, beautiful, brilliant piece of writing. Wow… after a young black southern woman named Brianna Taylor was brutally shot and murdered by police who raided her apartment at night while she slept, in the US, say her name became a national mantra…this comes to my mind as soon as I start reading Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts.
Hartman writes her name, Venus, which is the transformational act. Not believing that it is enough, she imagines “out loud” what stories she would like to write. This allows her to leave the historical accounts, which are woefully lacking in too many ways to list, and infuriatingly unjust in every way) intact…all important to the writing of a history writer, i.e., Initially I thought I wanted to represent the affiliations severed and remade in the hollow of the slave ship by imagining the two girls as friends, by giving them one another. But in the end I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic.
And then similarly, Hartman weaves her ideas (or temptations to have ideas) for stories that she might like to create about the black Venus/es by denying herself out loud too. I.e., In the end, I could say no more about Venus than I had said about her friend: “I am unsure if it is possible to salvage an existence from a handful of words: the supposed murder of a negro girl.” …I could not change anything: “The girl” never will have any existence outside the precarious domicile of words’ that allowed her to be murdered.
…I could not have arrived at another conclusion. So it was better to leave them as I had found them. Two girls, alone.
Then in “The Reprise” Hartman explains herself, I chose not to tell a story about Venus because to do so would have trespassed the boundaries of the archive. History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are produced by terror.
And, again out loud, Hartman questions herself too… By retreating from the story of these two girls, was I simply upholding the rules of the historical guild and the “manufactured certainties” of their killers, and by doing so, hadn’t I sealed their fate? Hadn’t I too consigned them to oblivion? In the end, was it better to leave them as I found them?
She goes on to question why we (all) want to tell untold stories, stories that are not retrievable, stories so woefully archived, barely footnoted. This brings to mind that we ought to each be doing past life regression therapy, and writing/recording each memory retrieved. I reason this will simultaneously assist us in retrieving our untold stories/histories. The body knows…our bodies and minds remember it all…every detail.
When Hartman writes, My account replicates the very order of violence that it writes against by placing yet another demand upon the girl, by requiring that her life be made useful or instructive, by finding in it a lesson for our future or a hope for history. We all know better. It is much too late for the accounts of death to prevent other deaths; and it is much too early for such scenes of death to halt other crimes. But in the meantime, in the space of the interval, between too late and too early, between the no longer and the not yet, our lives are coeval with the girl’s in the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. In the meantime, it is clear that her life and ours hang in the balance…and later,%“… we too emerge from the encounter with a sense of incompleteness and with the recognition that some part of the self is missing as a consequence of this engagement…%she confirms a pressing sense that we must do something, take some kind of action to change our (humanity’s) trajectory…even if we simply "say her name".
SEP21 WKS2-READING 2: Creative Selves/ Creative Cultures. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. Holman Jones S., Pruyn M. (eds)
When Stacy Holman Jones writes As arts-based and practice-led scholars, we aimed to explore what critical autoethnography and performance in particular have to teach us about creativity and pedagogy (which includes formal educational contexts alongside the broader concerns of public pedagogy and creativity education). We approached our work with the aim of joining the explanatory power of critical theory and inquiry with creative, specific, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at work—in cultural context, in practice, in people’s lives.
The result is a collection of essays that we believe fills a much-needed gap in creativity and education by providing you, our readers, with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars in multiple disciplines not only a method for creatively putting critical theory into action, but also a means for forging more creative selves and creative cultures in a time when neoliberal discourses and the forces of globalization are working against (while trying to capitalize on) the cohering and enlarging of both self and world.
...I ask, is she saying she is anti-globalist? Anti-neo-liberal?
She addresses her main question, What is critical autoethnography and why is it an innovative and educative approach for building, understanding, and transforming creative selves and cultures?... with a definition ...Critical autoethnography is, most simply, the study and critique of culture through the lens of the self. Critical autoethnography merges the practices of autobiography—writing about the self—and ethnography—the study of and writing about culture. Critical autoethnography is a thoroughly qualitative and intimate method in that it provides us with nuanced, complex, and specific insights into particular human lives, experiences, and relationships. Where quantitative approaches to research give us general insights into the cultures and experiences of large groups of people, telling us about the who, what, when, and where of life, critical autoethnography teaches us about the why and how and so what of those lives.
And she continues ...Critical autoethnography helps us create ‘living bodies of thought’—work that uses story to bring theory alive and shows us how stories are embodiments of knowledges that can and do create movement and change in the world (Holman Jones, 2016 ). As “an embodied method,” critical autoethnography “articulates and makes material what is and should be” (Spry, 2016 , p. 34). In other words, critical autoethnography critically imagines a future world through the very performance of other ways of living, being, and becoming.
Holman Jones makes a case for performative autoethnography throughout the rest of the piece…A performative approach to autoethnography foregrounds five intersecting commitments: focusing on embodiment, valuing diverse forms of knowledge, creating relationships, highlighting the affective and emotional in narratives of experience, and seeking change.…and she continues, Critical autoethographers, particularly those working in and through the method and lens of performance, embrace, rather than erase embodiment; we make the body the “nexus of meaning-making”—the source of the stories, movements, and speech that is created in the ethnographic exchange (Spry, 2016 , p. 35). Indeed, as Spry notes, "All research ultimately, pragmatically, brutally emanates from a corporeal body that exists within a sociopolitical context (2016 , p. 37)."
I think of the works of Adrian Piper, Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Venessa Beecroft and others. Am I on the right track with this?
…our work is our shared and communal effort to “understand the human as a relational and social being, one whose action depends on equality” (Butler, 2015 , p. 88).
Holman Jones essentially states that we are literally bodies of knowledge… (the best idea of the piece)… speaking with one another vs. speaking for the “other” ...critical autoethnography is not, as some assert, ‘me-search,’ nor is it a means for a “single and unified subject [to] declare its will” (Butler, 2015 , p. 156). Rather, autoethnography is interested and invested in assembling a we —a clutch of listeners and speakers— who, before uttering any words, are already enacting (and speaking) a collective and popular ‘will. And what is the collective will in critical autoethnography? It is the will to connect, to be in conversation with each other and in the world.
SEP21 WKS2-READING 3: Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, W. D. Mignolo, 2009: 26-28: 159-181.
While reading Walter D. Mignolo’s piece, I keep thinking about Hélène Cixous and other poststructuralist feminist theorists... In Cixous 1975 article "Le rire de la méduse" ("The Laugh of the Medusa" 1976 in English). Cixous and Luce Irigaray combined Derrida's logocentric idea and Lacan's symbol for desire, creating the term phallogocentrism. They share Derrida's phallogocentric reading of 'all of Western metaphysics'. For example, Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous in "The Newly Born Woman" (1975) decry the "dual, hierarchical oppositions" set up by the traditional phallogocentric philosophy of determinateness, wherein "death is always at work" as "the premise of woman's abasement", woman who has been "colonized" by phallogocentric thinking. According to Cixous and Clément, the 'crumbling' of this way of thinking will take place through a Derridean-inspired, anti-phallo/logocentric philosophy of indeterminateness. (Wikipedia)
I think it may be helpful in solving some of the issues of racism, which, as with sexism, and most other forms of oppression, are in part, linguistically based problems. Overall, it’s such a dense read. For me, these are some of the most interesting parts:
…“If you are getting the idea of what shifting the geography of reason and enacting geo-politics of knowledge means, you will also be understanding what the decolonial option in general (or decolonial options in each particular and local history) means. It means, in the first place, to engage in epistemic disobedience, as is clear in the three examples I offered. Epistemic disobedience is necessary to take on civil disobedience (Gandhi, Martin Luther King) to its point of non-return. Civil disobedience, within modern Western epistemology (and remember: Greek and Latin, and six vernacular European modern and imperial languages), could only lead to reforms, not to transformations...
…pg 174 The differences between bio-politics in Europe and bio-politics in the colonies lie in the racial distinction between the European population (even when bio-politically managed by the state) and the population of the colonies: less human, subhumans, as Smith pointed out. But it is also important to remember that bio-political techniques enacted on colonial populations returned as a boomerang to Europe in the Holocaust. Many have already underlined the uses of colonial techniques applied to non-European populations to control and exterminate the Jewish population...
Thus, body-politics is the darker side and the missing half of biopolitics: body-politics describes decolonial technologies enacted by bodies who realized that they were considered less human at the moment they realized that the very act of describing them as less human was a radical un-human consideration… Body-politics is a fundamental component of decolonial thinking, decolonial doing and the decolonial option.
To better understand the distinction and history on geopolitics and biopolitics, I found this side bar reading helpful...geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2012/02/0…
Historically, geo-politics of knowledge emerged in the ‘Third World’ contesting the imperial distribution of scientific labor that Pletsch mapped out. Body-politics of knowledge has had its more pronounced manifestations in the United States, as a consequence of the Civil Rights movement. Who were the main actors of the body-politics of knowledge? Women – first white women, soon joined by women of color (and linking with geo-politics, so-called ‘Third World women’); Latino and Latina scholars and activists; Afro-Americans and Native Americans, mainly.
Pg 177… Theo- and ego-politics of knowledge also bracketed the body in knowledge- making (Mignolo, 2007a). By locating knowledge in the mind only, and bracketing ‘secondary qualities’ (affects, emotions, desires, anger, humiliation, etc.), social actors who happened to be white, inhabiting Europe/Western Christendom and speaking specific languages assumed that what was right for them in that place and which fulfilled their affects, emotions, fears and angers was indeed valid for the rest of the planet and, consequently, that they were the depositor, warrantor, creator and distributor of universal knowledge.
Pg 178… Racism, as we sense it today, was the result of two conceptual inventions of imperial knowledge: that certain bodies were inferior to others, and that inferior bodies carried inferior intelligence. The emergence of a body-politics of knowledge is a second strand of decolonial thinking and the decolonial option. Decolonial thinking presupposes de-linking (epistemically and politically) from the web of imperial knowledge (theo- and ego-politically grounded) from disciplinary management. A common topic of conversation today, after the financial crisis on Wall Street, is ‘how to save capitalism’. A decolonial question would be: ‘Why would you want to save capitalism and not save human beings? Why save an abstract entity and not the human lives that capitalism is constantly destroying?’ …In the ‘politics of life in itself’ political and economic strategies for controlling life at the same time as creating more consumers join forces...
This is the point where decolonial options, grounded in geo- and bodypolitics of knowledge, engage in both decolonizing knowledge and de -colonial knowledge-making, delinking from the web of imperial/modern knowledge and from the colonial matrix of power.
