Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing
210
Visual Arts Practice and Affect: Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783487387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/30/2016 |
| Series: | Place, Memory, Affect |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 210 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
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Visual Arts Practice and Affect
Place, Materiality and Embodied Knowing
By Ann Schilo
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Anne SchiloAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-738-7
CHAPTER 1
Residency
An Account of Otherworldly Dwelling and the Artefacts of Place
Anna Nazzari
Every square inch of Snowball's Auction House is filled with stuff. Erin and I navigate our way through 1980s-styled bookcases, wardrobes, wooden tables, antique chairs, lawnmowers, sewing machines, cabinets, strangely shaped handcrafted objects, oily machines, old tools, and vintage bric-a-brac. The air has a slightly musty smell and layers of dust trace the clutter, like chalk outlines at a crime scene. From my position, I can see that this room steps up into another, which folds out into a larger Lshaped space that is spilling over with even more stuff. I look around; every turn is a visual reminder of a life lived. Objects and artefacts with nowhere else to go have somehow ended up here, waiting in limbo, in a superficial graveyard of discarded things. Amid this array of cast-offs, I can see that the event is over. The auctioneer is packing up his microphone, and the place is almost deserted of people. We approach the front counter to ask the attendant if we are too late. Motioning left, she leads us through makeshift aisles constructed of ageing furniture and ornamental knick-knacks and stops abruptly at an antique display cabinet with a large glass casing. She quickly unlocks it and reaches in to pull out a scuffed plastic bag, the type used to store large lunches and other miscellaneous odds and ends. She opens the bag and pulls out one small item and places it in the palm of my hand. In this unrefined state, it is not what I imagined. An off-yellow stain spreads from its pointy tip to its widening base. It has a coarsely ribbed surface that is peppered with fine grains of unidentifiable dark matter. There is a disfigured hollowing in its centre, and it is much heavier than I expected. Although not to scale, its irregular form mirrors a dog's canine tooth, and as I marvel at this palm-sized specimen I realize that this is my first physical encounter with a whale's tooth.
While studying its imperfections, my eyes shift to the remaining contents of the bag. Clumped together in this crude transparent container is an assortment of oddly shaped whale teeth. A lot number is scrawled messily in black marker on the exterior of the bag, making it clear that the contents are to be auctioned together as a whole. I casually asked the attendant if she knows anything about the history of the teeth. She is unable to pass on any information about the seller, but reveals that the teeth in the bag are antique and probably from more than one whale. The anonymity of the teeth is very conspicuous (figure 1.1). Not knowing the origins or approximate age of the teeth is disappointing – yet it is here, in this place, my conversation begins.
BACKGROUND
In 2012, Erin Coates, a Western Australian curator and artist, asked if I would like to be a part of a project she was proposing for the Spaced 2: Future Recall Residency Program, which places international and Australian contemporary artists with communities throughout Western Australia. The project was to be located in Albany, a small coastal city in Western Australia, and would engage with the community to reexamine the history of whaling and the art of scrimshaw: the technique of carving or engraving sea ivory (whale teeth). The residency was to take place over a two-year time frame and would involve at least a one-month per year stay in Albany. It was agreed, if we were successful, I would complete the residency in Albany, and Coates would curate the work to be exhibited at the Western Australian Museum (henceforth WA Museum) in 2015.
At the end of 2012, we received confirmation that our project had been accepted and that I would commence the first part of the residency in October 2013. It is worth pointing out that the distinctions between artist and curator ended up blurring somewhat: the result being a collaborative film titled Cetaphobia, and a separate series of drawings and scrimshawed whale's teeth produced by myself. It is not my intention to discuss the final outcomes of the residency, though aspects of this may filter into the conversation. What I am interested in proposing is a consideration of the residency as a type of otherworldly dwelling in place, and how artefacts within this domain generate meaning that is shaped by my specific perceptions of this experience.
RESIDENCY AND DWELLING
In 'Insites on Residency and Collaboration', Harriet Hawkins (2013) notes that in the context of the art world, a residency signifies a precise, often limited, period of time spent away from work or day-to-day activities, to research, reflect, present, and produce within the structure of a specific institution, organization, or art practice.
The term 'residency' also has direct associations with place as it encompasses the state or reality of living in a place. In their essay 'Dwelling, Place and Landscape: An Orchard in Somerset', Paul Cloke and Owain Jones (2001) assert that places are vibrant entities, co-founded and performed by human and non-human subjects alike, and that dwelling offers a means of understanding how non-human and human subjects are embodied in landscapes and places, how nature and culture come together in place, and how these formations inevitably have a depth of time where past, present, and future are all intimately intertwined.
Hawkins suggests that place no longer situates dwelling as a static mode of enquiry attempting to isolate and preserve the past, but rather a valuable, personal way of exploring the connections of place. For her, dwelling and place are perpetually binding, and she specifies that 'applying this dwelling perspective to an artist in residency develops an understanding of it as involved in thinking and living in a space, as works being formed in the context of a being-in-the-world, which in turn effects that forming' (2013, 165).
To contemplate dwelling, it is necessary to mention Martin Heidegger's essay 'Building Dwelling Thinking'. Here, Heidegger establishes that although building and dwelling appear as separate constructs, they are actually intimately paired activities, for within the idea 'to build' is also the notion 'to dwell'. Tracing the etymology of both terms, he discovers that the German word for the verb to build, bauen, originates from the Old English and High German word buan, which means to dwell. He notes that bauen also contains two other meanings. The first concerns an idea of protection, preservation, nurture, and cultivation, which relates to tilling the soil; and the second refers to the construction and erection of edifices. For Heidegger (1971), this historic understanding of building – as a system of construction and cultivation – incorporates dwelling and implies that dwelling has a far more extensive reach than occupation; it points to a practical way of being-in-the-world, one that actively engages with the possibilities the world presents.
While Heidegger implies there is a definite need for humanity to reclaim dwelling as a way-of-being-in-the-world, Tim Ingold (2000) elevates this concern in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. He outlines the differences between what he terms the building and dwelling perspectives and utilizes the latter to advocate for an ontological immersion with the environment/landscape. As such, it is his perspective on dwelling, which has been identified by a number of commentators on place (Cloke and Jones 2000; Malpas 1998) and also underpins Hawkins's considerations of residency as a dwelling.
THE PERSPECTIVES
Ingold defines the building perspective as a theoretical separation between the perceiver and the world, as the perceiver has to rebuild the world in their mind before any consequential engagement with it can occur. The building perspective ensures 'that worlds are made before they are lived in; or acts of dwelling are preceded by acts of world making' (Ingold 2000, 178–79). For Ingold (2000), this is problematic because it replicates a duality between cultural mind and physical nature, and inserts a barrier between human and natural worlds.
This type of division can be traced back to Cartesian dualism, which is often associated with the philosophy of René Descartes. In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes composes a theory of Cartesian doubt, which advocates that in order to determine what is true, one must begin by doubting the certainty of everything. To test his theory, he questions his own existence and determines he can only be certain of one thing, that is, he is a thinking being, writing: 'I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward in my mind' (quoted in Newman 2015). His test, though, creates a split between the mind and the body by implying that the nature of the mind (i.e. a thinking, non-extended thing) is completely separate from that of the body (i.e. an extended, non-thinking thing).
In Landscape, John Wylie (2007) asserts that Descartes's non-thinking body, understood as a sensory organ with the capacity to deceive, has repeatedly reinforced rigid associations between seeing and thinking, as well as between visual perception and certainty. He argues Descartes's logic ensures ways of seeing become restrictive, because vision is bracketed to reason and the mind, and the gazing subject becomes the centre of agency and reason. The end result is that the external landscape is reduced to static matter, because it is only interpreted through the linear dimensions of seeing and thinking, which separate the subject from their environment, and reinforce barriers between human and natural worlds.
While Ingold (2000) perceives the body as abstract and detached within the building perspective, he deems it as an embodied presence within the dwelling perspective. He defines the dwelling perspective as symptomatic of the real or imagined forms people build, which arise out of involved activity in the context of practical and interactive engagement with their environment. The body, as integral to a way-of-being-in-the-world, is therefore an embodied presence.
His perception of the body, as engaged and conscious of its surroundings, incorporates an understanding of the body as outlined in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty (2002, 94) stresses that individuals are conscious of the world through their bodies: 'The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a definite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and to be continually committed to them'.
Expressed through dwelling, Ingold (2000, 42) considers the human condition as more accurately an embodied immersion 'in an active, practical and perceptual engagement with constituents of the dwelt world'. Landscape, which Ingold intimately connects with dwelling, 'is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein' (193). It is not a mathematically definable, specifiable, or measurable entity, a place without emotional investment, or somewhere separate from, or against, humanity. Landscape is anchored in human-embodied perception and everyday dwelling, and it is these features that also make it temporal. In this way, humans engaging in bodily activity are not perceived as spectators but rather as participants in the very tasks they perform.
DWELLING: A PLACE OF CONFLICT
In her analysis of Caravanserai, which is a socially engaged art project by Annie Lovejoy and Mac Dunlop, Hawkins praises the artists for creating an 'embodied' dwelling that imagines and enacts community and the local differently. In this environment, Hawkins (2013) asserts art making is completely dependent upon the insights originating from exchanges with humans and non-human others. She sees the project as welcoming de-individuated artistic practices through forms of distributed creativity that are open, inclusive, and communicative. She describes the project as successful because it fosters negotiation, creative engagements with space, a sense of belonging, ownership, agency, empowerment, and self-esteem for all involved.
Hawkins (2013, 165), who held a residency on site and collaborated with Lovejoy to produce an artist book, points out that residency as a dwelling 'has come to offer a means for thinking place as in process, within which engagements with place become part of a dynamic fluid context'. Her understanding of dwelling is not limited to one individual's phenomenological experience but rather charts the embodied experiences of a whole community. Hawkins rigorously opposes the building perspective, arguing dwelling is not about imposing human constructs or building contained worlds.
Within art-based histories of residency, Hawkins identifies the building perspective as traceable to those programmatic forms of production, whereby the artist's deductive reasoning, rather than 'lived' experience, is imposed on a site. Her examination rejects the 'culture-vulture' model of experience outlined by Hal Foster (1996) in 'The Artist as Ethnographer?' For Foster, the artist is strategically positioned as an interloper, one who is wholeheartedly endorsed by 'bourgeoisie' institutional powers, to engage the culturally and/or ethnic 'other' in their construction of self-representation. He sees the issue as not only the distasteful appropriation of the materials, experiences, and histories of these 'others' but also that this forms the basis of ready-made anthropological exhibits whose artist-cited 'truths' often go unrecognized or undisputed.
Other theorists such as Grant Kester suggest that 'programmatic' collaborative relationships with set agendas spawn a type of sinister exclusivity, primarily because not only do they exploit communities but they also diminish art to some kind of derisory and distasteful form of social work. In Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary and Community Art, he writes:
The 'artist' is differentiated (or aesthetically 'distanced') from the community as an enunciate channel, matrix or catalyst. Each of these functions in turn implies a particular representational relationship of speaking 'for,' 'through,' 'with,' 'about,' or 'on behalf of' other subjects whose own unity as a community is in turn the product of contingent processes of identification. (Kester 1995, 5–6)
Although the above examples illustrate how a priori models of artistic production are potentially damaging, it is worth noting, as Miwon Kwon (2004) indicates in One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity that it is a mistake to assume that only one party is operating with an agenda within community-based/art-specific projects. All parties (the artist, the community, the curators, and the institutions) are in negotiation with each other, and all possess their own particular goals, requirements, and actions. While Hawkins's de-individuated model of embodied dwelling may provide a greater spectrum of inclusivity, I question if this model is achievable. For it seems a more complex narrative is at play, one largely dependent on how the residency is structured. In relation to my own experiences, I would argue that any residency including more than one party is bound to encompass building perspectives.
As indicated, my own residency had been organized through the Spaced 2: Future Recall Residency Program, which had its own specific set of goals. Spaced, for example, emphasizes that residencies should incorporate meaningful and multilayered cultural exchange involving immersion in another culture. They stress that contemporary art should not be segregated but rather be an active participant in a broad, cross-disciplinary dialogue concerning an extensive range of other cultural and social practices. As such, the residency programme advocates a conversation between realities that are typically isolated by cultural, social, economic, ethnic, or geographical distances. It seeks to provide Australian and international artists with varied and thought-provoking opportunities; generate a legitimate voice for the numerous representations of Australian culture within the contemporary arts; establish direct relationships between communities and contemporary art that are meaningful and raise an awareness of, and engagement with, contemporary cultural production (Spaced 2015).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Visual Arts Practice and Affect by Ann Schilo. Copyright © 2016 Anne Schilo. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd..
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