Field Work in Visual Culture
Berlin / February 2004
I had previously thought and written about geography and topography, in
quite concrete terms such as mapping and borders, luggage and bodies.
This was an attempt to think cultural difference onto the actual map
knowledge. An attempt to see whether one could rethink the relations
between subjects and places in the post colonial, post migratory, post
communist world away from the epistemological legacies of geographical
knowledge which together with the nation state, insisted on certain
belongings and on certain inclusions and exclusions, such as those that
Western Europe is now grappling with. But that is older work and I want
to talk about what I am thinking currently, about another set of emergent
possibilities that I am calling “Field Work’.
Contemporaneity – not the objects of study but the temporal location of the
studying.
Field – not discipline or expertise but a confluence of possible connections.
Boundary – not border but against thinking the limits of the possible.
Mobility – when it is not determined by where you are coming from and
where you are going to. Rather in a state of productive tension with
‘location’ it becomes a dynamic mode of thought.
‘Field work ‘ expresses a preoccupation with contemporary permutations
of location and mobility, with the production of a witnessing voice that is
nevertheless not one of didactic analysis. Equally it poses questions
concerning the constitution of a ‘field’: of inquiry, of activity, of
interpretation, of relationality etc’. It is, for the purposes of this
presentation, an attempt to come to grips with how different elements of
knowledge and of activity are positioned in relation to one another and to
ask whether a re-conceptualisation of ‘positionality’ might actually come
to alter or transform some of our practices. I am going to try and think this
through three different problematics; that of the anthropological model,
that of the shift from ‘critique’ to ‘criticality’ which I will try and clarify a
bit further on and thirdly and in response to Nicholas Bourriaud’s writing
in relation to what he has termed ‘relational aesthetics’.
‘Field work’ is obviously a borrowed term -- borrowed from the reflexive
debates that have been generated within Cultural Anthropology over the
past 20 years , but it is not a borrowed term taken up here in the form of a
metaphor to be dragged around across different arenas of practice in order
to somehow unify them – to merge them with some semblance of
coherence of either project or method. To do that would involve us in the
workings of metaphor with its mechanisms of likeness and of equation,
which at this stage of our activities we would probably wish to avoid
altogether.
Instead, it is perhaps the conjunctions of simultaneously occupying a dual
positionality of being spatially located in an inside and paradigmatically
on the outside, or vice versa, that this deployment of “Field Work” actually
aims to capture. This disjunction and this very necessary duality , offer us
not the multi-inhabitation of one space as in the discourse on space offered
up by Henri Lefevre and his followers such as Edward Soja, Rosalyn
Deutsche or Neil Smith among others, but the internal split that demands
that we perceive of ourselves as both inside and outside of the field of
activity and of its perception.
In critical cultural anthropology , George Marcus put this very well when
he stated that the great turn in anthropological perception of ‘field work’
in the late 20th cen. was its move from “being annals of rapport (between
subjects of discourse and objects of knowledge) to being replaced by
annals of complicity -- as constructing the primary field work relation” .
‘Rapport’ was fed by an illusion of understanding, empathy and the ability
to seamlessly translate between knowledges while ‘complicity ‘ stands for
the stoppages and blockages of self conscious reflection which perceive of
us as the producers of the very knowledge we aim to transmit through the
languages, narrative structure and cultural tropes that constitute our
consciousness. And the entire enterprise of such complicitous ‘field work’
is understood as a mis en scene , a conscious staging, obviously implying a
performance and several sets of audiences at which this performance is
directed. This as Marcus states, is “The very basic condition that defines
the altered mis-en-scene for which complicity , rather than rapport, is a
more appropriate figure for an awareness of existential double ness on the
part of both anthropologist and subject; this derives from having a sense
of being here ,where major transformations are underway that are tied to
things happening simultaneously elsewhere , but not having a certainty or
an authoritative representation of what those connections are”. In part
Marcus’ distinction highlights a familiar anthropological as well as artistic
dilemma between the raw materials of events and conditions and the
means of representations and the interpretative structures which allow us
to transport them half way across the world for the purposes of being both
informative and of making a point. We have seen many instances of
artistic practice that simply imports the images of the camps in Palestine or
the deaths in Rwanda or the Homeless in Kiev and we have all felt the
discomfort of having to somehow plot for ourselves a positioned response
that would use these images within the critical trajectories we inhabit as
thinking, responsible viewers. To show or to agree that something is
‘horrible’ is simply not enough.
To some extent it might also be said that the distinction between ‘rapport’
and ‘complicity’ is equally applicable to various art practices and their
relation to location. One of the hopes in taking up ‘Field Work’ was to be
able to get away from the notion of ‘site specificity’ which in art practice
terms has assumed the establishment of a ‘rapport’ with a site through an
immersed investigative knowledge and the subsequent attempt to reveal
and unmask some of the deep structures and unacknowledged interests
and affiliations that its surface might have glossed over. In ‘Field Work’ ,
as we might be able to see, location goes beyond digging to expose what
lies beneath the surface and towards the invention of new sensibilities
through which one might live out and experience them. We can compare
some endlessly serious investigation of urban spaces such as the work of
Martha Rosler for example or that of Hans Haacke with Francis Alys
lugging around a block of melting ice or dribbling some blue tinted water
along the city streets he haphazardly happens to be walking along – from
exposing and making visible the hidden structures of social and cultural
existence to inventing new and imaginative modes of inhabiting space.
This second example is a relation which is far closer to a notion of
‘complicity’ in the ways in which the inarticulatability of the fantasmatic
is brought into play, a condition that cannot be made subject to rational,
analytical discourse. I am thinking here also of such projects as that of
Waalid Raad under the aegis of the Atlas Group, in which the civil war in
Lebanon is explored through tales of covert gambling at horse races by
respected university professors and tales of kidnap and political captivity
which resonate with the unspoken sexual frissons of capture and
domination as put forward by a highly gendered, masculine in this case,
imagination. To unframe the conflict in Lebanon from being purely the
staging ground of political forces, of colonial legacies , of ethnic conflicts,
of ideological battlegrounds, of hostile and opportunistic neighbours to
the south and to the east, of super power interests that want to maintain
the region in an endless state of unresolved turmoil – to allow it speak at
such oblique angles to the conflict itself, allows us to establish a whole set
of alternative entry points and identifications, to inhabit it without being
compelled to produce some highly moralised set of positions by which we
pass declaratory judgement.
The other relation which I would hope that the notion of ‘field work’ might
help us shift away from is one that Hal Foster, in a very strict and
censorious tone of voice, has termed “The Artist as Ethnographer”. In an
argument that I personally completely disagree with, but which has
circulated quite widely and has thus boxed in various interesting practices,
Foster characterises the present engagement with anthropology, as
differentiated from earlier ones at the beginning of the 20th cen. That were
preoccupied with “Primitivism” or a 60s and 70s practice of inventing
archaeological sites and anthropological civilizations such as the work of
the Poiriers or of Charles Simmonds.
To begin with says Foster ,the engagement marks a shift from a subject
defined in economic relation to one who is defined in terms of cultural
identity therefore part of his criticism is that this faux ethnography is one
that allows the artist to move from a material base to a cultural
relationality . Equally abhorrent in Foster’s analysis is the assumption that
this site is always elsewhere, in the field of the other – in the production
model it is with the social other, , the exploited proletariat, in the
ethnographic paradigm however, the site is with the cultural other, the
oppressed post colonial, subaltern or subcultural – and that this elsewhere,
this outside is the Archimedean point from which the dominant culture
will be transformed or at least subverted. Finally Foster takes issue with
what he seems to think is the necessary assumption that the artist is
equally perceived as socially or culturally other and therefore has access to
this Tran formative alterity.
“ So what distinguishes the present turn, apart from its relative self
consciousness about ethnographic method ? First, as we have seen,
anthropology is prized as the science of alterity : in this regard it is, along
with psychoanalysis, the lingua franca of artistic practice and critical
discourse alike. Second it is the discipline that takes culture as its object
and this expanded field of referees the domain of post modernist practice
and theory. Third, ethnography is considered contextual. The often
automatic demand for which contemporary artists and critics share with
other practitioners today, many of who aspire to field work in the
everyday. Fourth, anthropology is thought to arbitrate the
interdisciplinary, another often rote value in contemporary art and
criticism. Fifth, the recent self-critique of anthropology renders it attractive
for it promises a reflexivity of the ethnographer at the centre, even as it
preserves a romanticism of the other at the margins. For all these reasons
rogue investigations of anthropology, like queer critiques of
psychoanalysis, possess vanguard status: it is along these lines that the
critical edge is felt to cut most incisively.”
Finally says Foster “ With a turn to this split discourse of anthropology,
artists and critics can resolve these contradictory models of symbolic logic
and of exchange systems, magically: they can take up the guises of cultural
semiologist and contextual fieldworker, they can continue and condemn
critical theory, they can relativise and de-center the subject, all at the same
time. In our present state of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and culturaloptical impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice.”
Now we, widely read and speculative subjects that we are, can recognise
in this sarcastic and ridiculing characterisation of ‘complicity’ – the
mysterious anxieties concerning some form of ‘relativising’ that recently
seems to have gripped the writers and readers of October magazine. We
also know that what we are witnessing are actually anxieties about
territorialized knowledge, about making judgments concerning excellence
and value and the authority of western knowledge, of maintaining some
form of sacred zone for art, of trying to hold onto to the uniqueness of an
art practice against a tide in which the quotidian and the inventive
intermingle almost seamlessly – claims that at this point are so
uninteresting that they barely need to be engaged with in refutation.
Field Work in Visual Culture
Instead of this mournful condemnation, how then does ‘field work’
operate in visual culture ? to begin with through the recognition that the
old boundaries between making and theorising, historicizing and
displaying have long been eroded. Artistic practice is being acknowledged
as the production of knowledge and theoretical and curatorial endeavours
have taken on a far more experimental and inventive dimension. The
former pragmatic links in which one area ‘serviced’ another (such as
theory legitimating a certain practice, or art work illustrating certain
theoretical stances) have given way to an understanding that we all face
cultural issues in common and produce cultural insights in common.
Instead of ‘criticism’ being an act of judgement addressed to a clear cut
object of criticism, we now recognise not just our own imbrication in the
object or in the cultural moment but also the performative nature of any
action or stance we might be taking in relation to it. Now we think of all of
these practices as linked in a complex process of knowledge production
instead of the earlier separation into creativity vs. criticism, production
and application.
In my own thinking it is not possible to divorce the notion of 'criticality' which
I see as foundational for Visual Culture from the processes of exiting bodies of
knowledge and leaving behind theoretical models of analysis and doing
without certain allegiances. 'Criticality' as I perceive it is precisely in the
operations of recognising the limitations of one's thought for one does not
learn something new until one unlearns something old, otherwise one is
simply adding information rather than rethinking a structure. It seems to me
that within the space of a relatively short period we have been able to move
from criticism to critique to criticality -- from finding fault, to examining the
underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing
logic , to operating from an uncertain ground which while building on
critique. In the shift from ‘critique’ to ‘criticality’ what we give up is the
knowing distance in which we, armed to the teeth with critical theoretical
insight are able to stand at a fair distance outside of our object of attention and
to reveal and unveil its hidden structures and agendas. In the shift away from
critique one wants to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical
analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating
blames. One is after all always at fault, this is a permanent and ongoing
condition, since every year we become aware of a new and hitherto unrealised
perspective which illuminates further internal cultural injustices. Criticality is
therefore connected in my mind with risk , with a cultural inhabitation that
acknowledges what it is risking without yet fully being able to articulate it. We
are simultaneously as I quoted Marcus earlier “in a state of simultaneously
occupying a dual positionality of being spatially located in an inside and
paradigmatically on the outside” – the unresolved tension of being both
embedded and living out the problematic and at the same time perfectly able
to analyse it and see through it.
The hope for this conference then, was our intention to explore the notion
of 'field work' through a variety of prisms in order to see if it can
contribute to an emergent vocabulary of Visual Culture and get away from
all those old anthropological metaphors. ' I work within the contexts of
two projects; one is the an AHRB research project on Cross Cultural
Contemporary Arts which set out to think various global circulations and
cross cultural translations of difference within the international
contemporary art world. Within this project we have been focusing on
how a broad range of mobilities; archives on the move, the detritus of
conflict once the main actors have moved on, hybridised practices , critical
sensibilities suspended in states of conflicted loyalties and identifications
and the utterances of unstable and unreliable, in that old cultural sense,
cultural subjects , are in fact one of the major tenets of an emergent art
world around us. Not an exceptional purview of the displaced and
dislocated, not a subject position of the late and unlamented project of
identity politics, but rather a set of circumstances necessary for the very
understanding of contemporary cultural production.
The other project is the newly founded department of Visual Culture at
Goldsmiths, where for the past 5 years we have been struggling to
understand , not what Visual culture is ( there is far too much
authoritarian, territorializing and censorious writing being produced at the
moment, as in the JVC, which is attempting to define, tie down and
normativise the activity of Visual Culture – to tell us what it is , what it
should be, what its methodological components must be, who is doing it
right and who is doing it wrong etc’…)so not what it is but what
possibilities it opens up for us; how it might point in a direction we were
not able to look or recognise. One of the most significant of these
possibilities is that instead of studying some agreed upon subject, we
might produce a great deal of work that would eventually constitute itself
as a new subject. Another, is that enfolded within this exploration we
might have another relation with art which as J.L.Nancy says in “Being
Singular Plural” – “Everything that takes place – passes between us”. This is a
relation in which a notion of with and between are central, rather than look
at art, we look with art, rather than write about it, we write with it, Rather
than have art illustrate our theoretical armature , we understand it to
produce theoretical knowledge, to puncture some conditioned labouring
under the banality of fixed moralising positions, with unexpected insights
and possibilities. This is not an argument about the power of art to do all
this, but an exploration of what might be inherent in the relational
possibilities of the with and the between.
To these elements I would want to somehow adapt the model articulated
by Nicholas Bourriaud of “Relational Aesthetics” . “These days” says
Bourriaud, “ communications are plunging human contacts into
monitored areas that divide the social bond up into (quite) different
products. Artistic activity, for its part , strives to achieve modest
connections, open up one or two obstructed passages and connect levels of
reality kept apart from one another”(p.8). So here we have a notion of
‘field work’ in which it is human relationality and connectedness that are
what needs to be joined up through the art work after extended separation
and isolation. “the possibility of a relational art, “ Bourriaud further states,
(an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions
and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and
private symbolic space) – this relational art points to a radical upheaval to
the aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art”(p.14).
“over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of
art represents a social interstice….. the interstice is a space in human
relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall
system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within
this system. This is the precise nature of the contemporary art exhibition in
the arena of representational commerce: it creates free areas and time
spans whose rhythms contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and
it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the
‘communication zones’ that are imposed upon us.”(p.16)
‘Field Work' then, connotes an anthropologically informed model in which
there is recognition of exiting one's own paradigms in order to encounter
some form of difference and of doing so with an articulated sense of self
consciousness about who is doing the encountering and through what
structures and languages and interests. Similarly 'Field Work' connotes the
convergence of fields of activity; intellectual disciplines and methodologies
with forms of artistic and other cultural practices, none of which can exist
in discrete bounded isolation. Rather than interdisciplinarity which
produces an intertextuality out of named and recognised disciplines, ‘Field
Work’ suggests that if we focus our well furnished attention on an
unnamed something, it might constitute itself as a field. Furthermore 'Field
Work' breaks down the mapping of the world away from countries, states,
continents, regions and other historical articulations of power as land or
cultural mass and instead suggests a more fragmented set of locations in
which a street corner, a landscape, a cultural horizon and the ambient
aurality of language or music might define an alternative set of spaces.
As issues and critiques of alter-Globalisation and mobility have been
increasingly taken up within cultural practices, our understanding of the
role of 'networks' and ‘flows’ stemming from information technology and
society and from floating capital , has widened to encompass certain links
and movements within worlds of cultural practices. One of the
possibilities inherent within ‘field work’ is an alternative set of relations
which operates as a network rather than the aggregate continuum of land
mass or state. Within a network , borders do not chafe against one another
and do not fester with the labour of exclusion and inclusion.
In art work the field is expanded – “The setting is widening” says
Bourriaud “ after the isolated object, it now can embrace the whole scene.
The form of Gordon Matta- Clarke or Dan Graham’s work can not be
reduced to the ‘things’ those two artists ‘produce’; it is not the simple
secondary effects of a composition, as the formalistic aesthetic would like
to advance, but the principle acting as a trajectory evolving through signs,
forms, gestures,…. The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out
from its material form: it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic
agglutination. An artwork is a dot on the line.”(pp.20-21).
Thus ‘field work’ is the process of expanding the field without either
breaching or re-introducing revised boundaries and through a
relationality that insists on alternative connections between the
components of culture.