Looking, seeing and being seen: connecting and controlling through visual representation .
Panel W010 at conference EASA08: Experiencing diversity and mutuality.
Focussing on visual representations, our take is two-directional in that we focus on ways of seeing, but also of being seen, which might entail being controlled by a gaze. We would like to invite papers in three thematic areas: seeing and being seen, visual representations, global art.
Long Abstract:
Visual representations impact on everyday life and are distributed in various ways around the globe. Confronted with diverse forms of visual representation, this workshop will scrutinise the relationships of the different gazes that are connected via images, pictures, objects and other visual signs. Our take is two-directional in that we not only focus on ways of seeing, but also importantly of being seen, that is looked at, which might entail being controlled by a gaze. However, the gaze may also be returned. To this end, we would like to invite papers in three thematic areas:
1. Seeing and being seen: examples of visual systems are visual signs guiding travellers through airports, pedestrians through a city, but also control technology such as CCTV, as well as biometric passports. One aspect of visual systems is the potential to produce new differences between people.
2. Visual representations: what images are people creating in order to represent themselves? What images (logos are but one example) are being created and/or appropriated by those in power to represent institutions (nation-states, political parties, corporations, etc.)?
3. Global art, many modernities? There is, on one hand, the idea of one global art world quite similar to the idea of one world culture. The proliferation of art biennales supports this perspective. On the other hand, there is a growing claim that contemporary art expression is multifaceted. How is art across the globe connected and controlled through gazes?
Following the idea of a world culture, this paper considers art biennales as global places. It will consider which aspects of biennales support this assumption, and whether the notion itself is another universalistic production.
Paper long abstract:
The art world is at the forefront of processes of globalization in various perspectives: economically with the art market and the movement of art works around the globe; culturally, by determining which objects may be included or excluded from such interconnections. A contemporary global art world however is still largely determined by criteria defined within the European-North American art world. Museums of contemporary art neglect the art, which is created outside this art world. Art biennales, actually, have been spreading around the globe since the early 1990s. They are nowadays handled as those places, where new gazes are made possible, where the one global art world may intersect with multiple, regional ones.
Following the idea of a world culture, this paper proposes to consider art biennales as global places. A major question will be, which aspects may determine biennales as such places: are these the selected artists, the biennale curators, the critics, the audience? One also has to ask, whether art biennale constitutes another European-North American category, a universalistic one, or whether the notion has to be considered according to the particular locality, and how it stretches out into other spaces.
The paper analyses contemporary artistic practices which actively include people as subjects of art production who were so far only present as objects of representation. Therefore the postcolonial concept of the “contact zone” will be confronted with Pierre Bourdieu´s concept of the power relations of the social space.
Paper long abstract:
Looking at artistic practices in the course of recent art biennales, festivals and public art projects, we can identify a tendency for including people actively in the process of art production and reception who were so far not present as subjects within the field of contemporary art. Although working with them in separated areas such as art education, art mediation, community art or art therapy since decades, they are nowadays revaluated as emancipated spectators or equal collaborators. Thus the field of contemporary art is transformed into a "contact zone" (Mary Pratt, James Clifford) where people with different social and cultural backgrounds negotiate different forms, values and interests. So, for example, artists collaborate with the inhabitants of a social housing block in marginalised urban areas to exhibit the process to the art audience on site, rural Chinese are invited to the documenta of Kassel or homeless people from different European cities meet for a conference in the course of an Austrian art festival, being accomodated in a first class hotel.
Taking significant participatory art projects as examples, the paper traces the causes of their increased prominence within the legitimized field of contemporary art. Based both on the postcolonial concept of the "contact zone" and Pierre Bourdieu´s theory of the social space, it examines the notion of this longing for mutual exchange. Are ideas of "happy interactivity" (Nicolas Bourriaud) a useful tool of networking as empowerment or do they rather euphemise the powerful distinctions of the social space?
What is the purpose of a book fair? Who goes there and why? What do participants do when they get there? This paper is based on fieldwork at the Frankfurt and London book fairs and examines visual aspects of the book trade. Who is looking at books? Who is looking at people looking at books?
Paper long abstract:
What is the purpose of a book fair? Who goes there and why? What do participants do when they get there? This paper is based on fieldwork at the Frankfurt and London book fairs and examines visual aspects of the book trade. Who is looking at books? Who is looking at people looking at books?
Publishers display their books at various different events: academic conferences, library association meetings and international book fairs. Although book fairs differ in their focus, the biggest ones in Frankfurt and London are concerned primarily with the sale of rights. They thus draw publishers, distributors, retailers and associated service personnel (in primarily printing and electronic publishing spheres) who, over a period of between four and five days, gather from around the world in a single venue to meet partners, gather information on publishers' planned offerings, place orders, negotiate translation rights, give feedback on the past year's activities, and so on and so forth.
During these business transactions, face-to-face communication takes place for perhaps the only time in a calendar year. (All other business is conducted by e-mail.) Judgements are made about a potential business partner's reliability and deals are signed. Publishing houses may splash out on receptions of one sort or another, to enable those in the publishing world to gather in more informal conditions to exchange information and gossip. And all the time, participants are reading, as well as being read by, others in their pursuit of books.
The Slovene artist Tadej Pogačar uses manipulation of the (in)visibility as a operative strategy in his art work, which is related to museums and the wider social sphere. Manipulating the (in)visible in the realm of museum narration of history or in the seemingly homogenous social tissue is the core of Pogačar’s focus: the means of deconstructing any notions of “neutrality” and “naturalness” (of mechanisms of knowing and social systems).
Paper long abstract:
The Slovene artist Tadej Pogačar (born 1960) uses manipulation of the (in)visibility as a operative strategy in his art work, which is related to museums and the wider social sphere. Pogačar defines his artistic strategy as the "new parasitism", which is based upon the complex approach towards the notion of a museum. The presentation of museum artefacts explicitly concerns the past but implicitly also the current mechanisms of the production of knowledge. It is precisely these narrative mechanisms, which often prove to be sophisticated systems of exclusion and ideological disciplining of society (European "orientalism", unauthorized histories, post-colonial production of The Other…) that Pogačar transgressively exposes into visibility/knowing through "parasitic" interventions into existing museum collections. Pogačar's work in the wider social sphere (projects "Kings of the street", CODE:RED, "Parallel economies") concerns the topic of social (in)visibility: erasure of certain marginalized social actors from the field of vision is a symptom of the predominant distribution of power in macro-social structures. Their entry into (social) visibility - through the use of art strategies, advertisement, theatre -subverts the invisible into visible and thus reveals the existence of a parallel social reality, which is oppressed due to its incompatibility with the predominant social regime. Manipulating the (in)visible in the realm of museum narration of history or in the seemingly homogenous social tissue is the core of Pogačar's focus: the means of deconstructing any notions of "neutrality" and "naturalness" (of mechanisms of knowing and mechanisms of social systems).
American Indian self-representation, alongside “Native Curating” within U.S. tribal museums and cultural centers reflect a multi-layered presentation of the contemporary American Indian voice with through a desire to control their own identity through contemporary art and exhibitions involving their material culture, where indigenous knowledge is the primary voice and authority.
Paper long abstract:
The visual representation of the American Indian, from cabinets of curiosity to Boas' ethnographic displays with the use of comedic icons as sports mascots have affected the social reception of Native populations in the United States for centuries. Today, in the years following legal and social movements on the North American Continent, various legislations have been put into practice concerning collaboration with Indigenous communities in regards to sacred, traditional, and sensitive material caring within state and nationally funded institutions.
These movements have been slowly redefining the notion of the 'museum' and have allowed for American Indian populations to have increased control and authority over their own visual displays, as well as have a very singular voice in regards to their cultural patrimony. "Indigenous Curating" has risen, through collaborative exhibitions within ethnographic museums or institutions holding ethnographic collections, with increased numbers of Tribal Museums and Native American Cultural Centers where the contemporary indigenous voice is privileged.
Often, Contemporary Art is now presented and used by these native communities within exhibitions of their communities alongside 'traditional' ethnographic displays. "Native Curating" and the Native Voice is disparate and multi-layered, but through exhibitions within these native-run institutions, as well as the Contemporary Art of artists such as Erica Lord (Inupiaq/Athabaskan), the visual politic of the American Indian resonates of past injustices, cultural preservation, and social development and awareness. A view into "Native Curating" through various tribal museums, cultural centers, and contemporary works of art provide an insight into the layers of indigenous self-representation today.
During this session, I would like to explain the dynamic process build up to conduce teens to portray themselves and the so called “Teens Culture”.
The organization of this collaborative workshop with 12 teens, emanates from a research development started few years ago, when I decided to focus more precisely on the capacity of digital technologies to promote creative process.
Paper long abstract:
The first part of my presentation could on one hand, briefly, presents the ways of seeing with a camera and the impact of this specific technology on visual anthropology methodologies and on the other hand to underline digital technologies' capacity to create representations with computational means.
The second part could focus more specifically on the process followed by these 12 teens during 18 days in order to create representations of their own life and cultures.
I started the project in collaboration with a media artist, Renaud Parmantier, and a music composer, Philippe Autuori, and set up a writing workshop with Nicole Simonet. The challenge was to elaborate reflections on this antinomic but meaningful opposition between identities and otherness. From this, we decided to focus on the ways "people" perceived their "Teens Cultures" and the ways to shape their ideas.
They had access to Frutiloop, a software for conceiving music and Director, multimedia authoring tool for "la mise en scène".
The Mairie de Paris and the CNRS has founded this project and a website presenting their work is accessible: http://www.cultures-jeunes.org/index.html.
Actually, I'm working with Alex Chan, author of the French Democracy, on a project to handle the question of the "Family reality" for young people and the ways they will represent it, after being trained to create "Machinima" on their own.
This paper will discuss the relation between tourism and the historical dialectics of self-imaging as a 'magical island' in La Reunion. It will use ethnographic and ethno-historic data collected in La Reunion, Indian Ocean from 1995 to 2007.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will discuss the relation between tourism and the historical dialectics of self-imaging in La Reunion. Like other island populations that have been in continued contact with travellers, explorers, colonial settlers and tourists from continental societies, people in La Reunion, Indian Ocean today tend to auto-glorify their island, especially by attributing it magical qualities. Common sense discourses and images by Reunions for instance frequently affirm that matter brought into the island is becoming bigger, livelier, more powerful, more sexual, juicier, able to break out of established boundaries and constraints. At the same time, this quality of the island to transform or 'awaken' things (often presented as alienated from an existentialist nature of being - as part of its ideology) inflects on the very identity of the islanders in relation to the outside world. In this paper I will argue that the mobilisation of these tropes within the contact zone with Western strangers results from a dialectical process of gazing at each other, of imaging the self in the mirror of the other; from the transculturation and the auto-ethnographic use of European visual and literal romantic tropes of the 18th and 19th century introduced to, and reworked in, the island by European travellers, local European elites, and the island's 1960s decolonisation movement. In the recent and contemporary past, these tropes and their visual embodiments are once again picked up and re-twisted in the intersubjective space of tourism and related museum and heritage projects.
My paper discusses the articulation and consumption of the iconography of Cretan pastoralism and links it to issues of "tradition", tourism, national imagination, and indigenous aesthetics in contemporary Greece. It focuses on the ‘’social life’’ of photographs that represent Cretan shepherds and discusses their meanings in different contexts.
Paper long abstract:
The paper is concerned with diverse significations of a certain visual imagery that evokes "tradition", ruggedness and masculinity in contemporary Greece. This imagery is currently central in both global (commercial products, tourism) and local contexts. It draws on my fieldwork observations in the Sphakia region of south-western Crete and elsewhere in Crete and Greece.
The paper focuses on the images of specific Sphakian shepherds who were photographed throughout their lives by professionals and tourists. These photographs are currently used in various contexts, such as public state displays, on commercial products, as postcards but also in household photographic albums.
Sphakia is a region in contemporary Greece that holds an evocative "myth" of masculine tradition which is understood within a visual, typological aesthetic of a warrior-shepherd who displays embodied tradition and hardship. Such imagery (initially the product of 19th century folklorists and travellers) which is central in the national imaginary, has been recently re-used within a context of global commercial potentials but also of Cretan re-engagement with the past. The imagery entails both glorifying and exoticising facets.
In my analysis I explore different spheres and engagements with the discussed images and thus examine the location, dislocation and production of meaning, paying attention to consumption as well as to the pictorial strategies involved. Broadly, the paper engages with issues of power in visual stereotypical motifs but focuses on signification thus exploring the importance of the aesthetics of ruggedness for different ''agents'' in a time when tradition and the past are objects of great interest.
With the visual turn in the social sciences, text has often been left out of the analysis. This paper explores (in)visible connections between image and text by focusing on Irish travel advertisement.
Paper long abstract:
With the visual turn in the social sciences, text has often been left out of the analysis. There has been some interest in the relationship between image and text, but rarely in any greater detail. In visual anthropology, there was the debate over image versus text where one side argued that images present circumstances that cannot be expressed in words, while the other side voiced the traditional anthropological view that text is the superior of the two forms. This paper explores (in)visible connections between image and text by focusing on Irish travel advertisement on the Internet and in travel catalogues. Images in Irish travel advertisements are characterized by scenes of hospitality, traditional music and dance, heritage and culture. There are green landscapes and dramatic cliffs along the coast. Following the notion that images are ambiguous, it will be argued that part of the particular power of images is what the viewer makes of them, the fact that personal emotional experiences are inserted into images. There are many ways of seeing, of looking at an image even though some images offer more room for flights of imagination. There are instances when images have a capacity to evoke emotional states to which it is difficult to do justice through words. Images are not contra text, in some kind of opposition to text. It is crucial that text and images belong together, they influence each other in a dialectical relationship. Images help to explain texts, texts steer the viewer´s interpretation of an image.
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