Week 3 - Reading Notes

Reading 1: The Ethical Force of Photographic Mediation, 2013, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska

Source: http://photomediationsmachine.net/2013/04/29/ethical-force/

Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with new media, photography and feminist cultural approaches to science and technology. She is the author of a novel, The Optical Effects of Lightning (Wild Wolf Publishing, 2011) and a short story, ‘The Mysterious Case of Mr. Charles D. Levy’ (Ether Books, 2010). Her experimental work includes an edited open access book, Astrobiology and the Search for Life on Mars (Open Humanities Press, 2011). Her latest academic monograph, co-written with Joanna Zylinska, is Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (MIT Press, 2012). She co-edits the journals photographies and Feminist Theory. 

Joanna Zylinska is Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of four books – most recently, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process (with Sarah Kember; MIT Press, 2012) and Bioethics in the Age of New Media (MIT Press, 2009) – she is also a translator of Stanislaw Lem’s major philosophical treatise, Summa Technologiae (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). Together with Clare Birchall, Gary Hall and Open Humanities Press, she runs the JISC-funded project Living Books about Life, which involves publishing open access books at the crossroads of the humanities and the sciences. She combines her theoretical writings with photographic art practice and curatorial work.

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- Given that mediation is, like time (or, indeed, life itself), both invisible and indivisible, any attempt at its representation must ultimately fail. In this piece, we offer a challenge to the representationalist mode of perception by exploring, perhaps counter-intuitively, a form of media practice that is most readily associated with representationalist ambitions: photography. Our aim is not so much to raise familiar questions regarding photography’s truth claims and its supposed ‘indexicality’, i.e., the relation the photographic image allegedly maintains to an object it is said to represent. Rather, we are interested in foregrounding the productive and performative aspect of photographic acts and practices that are intrinsic to the taking or making of a picture. With a view to this, we propose to understand photography as an active practice of cutting through the flow of mediation, where the cut operates on a number of levels: perceptive, material, technical and conceptual.

- In introducing a distinction between photography as a practice of the cut and photographs as products of this process of cutting, we aim to capture and convey the vitality of photographic movements and acts. Indeed, if ‘To live is to be photographed’ (Sontag, 2004: non-pag.), then, contrary to its more typical association with the passage of time and death, photography can be understood more productively in terms of vitality, as a process of differentiation and life-making. It is precisely in its efforts to arrest duration, to capture the flow of life — beyond singular photographs’ success or failure at representing this or that referent — that photography’s vital forces are activated, we claim.

- Photography fits perfectly into the dualist schema due to its uncertain ontological status: it is both an act of carving the world into manageable, temporarily stabilized two-dimensional images of it and a set of institutions and conventions that arbitrate over doing things with a camera in a variety of different contexts.

- Most people’s everyday experience positions them as collectors of memories, viewers of moments of captured temporality, and producers of such moments. Arguably, over the last half century, photography has become so ubiquitous that our sense of being is intrinsically connected with being photographed, and with making sense of the world around us through seeing it imaged. Yet even though photographs are indeed ubiquitous and even if their primary mode of functioning is that of recording (the passage of) time, and of introducing a differentiation between the now-time and the-time-that-once-was, this relational, dynamic aspect of photography arguably gets lost amongst the plethora of photographic objects and artifacts. 

- This problem is exemplified in Barthes’ position as presented in Camera Lucida, whereby his search for the essence of his dead mother in the Winter Garden photograph, which supposedly represents her (and which we never see), ‘supersedes, and overlays, his search for the essence of photography. It leads him to replace photography with the photograph, memory with the memory, virtual existence with actual existence, and, ironically, perhaps, (her) life with (his) death’ (Kember, 2008: 177).

- To answer the question posed at the beginning of this piece: ‘what does it mean to cut well?’, we want to suggest that a good cut is an ethical cut, whereby an in-cision is also a de-cision. Cutting well therefore means cutting (film, tape, reality) in a way that does not lose sight of the horizon of duration, or foreclose on the creative possibility of life enabled by this horizon.

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Reading 2: Stranger than fiction: Should documentary photographers add fiction to reality? 2013 by Olivier Laurent

The Laundry Sherpas of Brooklyn is Erica MacDonald's first fictive picture story – a documentary project based on a narrative construct that mixes fact with fiction. Yet McDonald doesn’t see her story as fiction. “I prefer to use the word fictive, in the sense that it doesn’t oppose itself to the facts. In Brooklyn, people carry their laundry to the laundromat fairly regularly,” she explains. “Only a percentage of people have cars, and I'd guess that fewer people have washers in their homes. Even though many of the people who live here are affluent, there's something very democratic about walking to the laundromat.” 

Seeing people carry their laundry through the streets in Brooklyn, McDonald was reminded of people in developing countries, who might have to walk for miles on foot to reach the bank of a river where they can wash their clothes. Since MacDonald has been living in Brooklyn for more than eight years, wanted to use the people she photographed in a collaborative way, to emphasize the idea that they were wandering through a built-up area. In other words, she says, “I wanted them to participate in this story that came out of my imagination.”

While the narrative construct is based on a story McDonald created, she’s not misleading the viewers. “The people I photographed are actually carrying their laundry. It’s all true – it’s all real – and that’s the documentary aspect of this work. They truly are on their way to the laundromat.” Meeting these people, McDonald explained her idea to them and asked whether they would pose for her and “engage with the concept, pretending they had been wandering for hours”.


Being able to create something from her imagination is exactly what attracted McDonald to combining fictive elements to her documentary work. "By telling a story in this way, you get to put yourself first, and that's a nice change." she explains. "People seem to enjoy looking at such work. With my other documentary projects, I found that people would talk about single images a lot, yet with The Laundry Sherpas of Brooklyn people wanted to eat it up; they were fascinated by the idea itself.”

Reshaping Reality

“A lot of photographers find that using fiction is being dishonest,” explains French photographer Samuel Bollendorff, a photojournalist and web documentary producer. “But then when you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have any avenues to express what you have to say – the press has been decimated, for example – you have to think about new narrative structures, which means you have to revolutionise the craft and look at other ways of telling your stories.”


Photography has an incredible potential. Freezing the image allows you to understand reality in a different way. It has much more potential than writing and the moving image. It’s the most powerful tool we have, so why not use it to tell a story? Why do we have to stick to reality? We should tell stories in different ways. We just need to redefine our craft, and now is the perfect time because there are so many platforms available for our work.”

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Reading 3: Participation and Spectacle: Where Are We Now? 2011 by Claire Bishop

Spectacle Today

One of the key words used in artists’ self-definitions of their socially engaged practice is “spectacle,” so often invoked as the entity that participatory art opposes itself to, both artistically and politically. “Spectacle” has a particular, almost unique status within art history and criticism, because it directly raises the question of visuality, and because it has incomparable political pedigree (thanks to the Situationist International - An International group of revolutionary Marxist writers, poets, theorists, painters and film-makers active 1957-72, and who had a key influence on the strikes of May 1968.).
(p. 1)

 “Spectacle” today connotes a wide range of ideas—from size, scale, and visual pleasure to corporate investment and populist programming. And yet, for Debord, “spectacle” does not describe the characteristics of a work of art or architecture, but is a definition of social relations under capitalism (but also under totalitarian regimes). Individual subjects experience society as atomised and fragmented because social experience is mediated by images—either the “diffuse” images of consumerism or the “concentrated” images of the leader.
(p. 1)

Boris Groys has suggested that in today’s culture of self-exhibitionism (in Facebook, YouTube or Twitter) we have a “spectacle without spectators”:

"the artist needs a spectator who can overlook the immeasurable quantity of artistic production and formulate an aesthetic judgment that would single out this particular artist from the mass of other artists. Now, it is obvious that such a spectator does not exist—it could be God, but we have already been informed of the fact that God is dead."

In other words, one of the central requirements of art is that it is given to be seen, and reflected upon, by a spectator. Participatory art in the strictest sense forecloses the traditional idea of spectatorship and suggests a new understanding of art without audiences, one in which everyone is a producer. At the same time, the existence of an audience is ineliminable, since it is impossible for everyone in the world to participate in every project. 
(p. 2)

“Art must be directed against contemplation, against spectatorship, against the passivity of the masses paralyzed by the spectacle of modern life” (Braudillard 1983, p. 54) *1


Two Critiques

Surely it is better for one art project to improve one person’s life than for it not to happen at all? The history of participatory art allows us to get critical distance on this question, and to see it as the latest instantiation of concerns that have dogged this work from its inception: the tension between equality and quality, between participation and spectatorship, and between art and real life. These conflicts indicate that social and artistic judgments do not easily merge; indeed, they seem to demand different criteria. This impasse surfaces in every printed debate and panel discussion on participatory and socially engaged art.  

(p. 3)

The clash between artistic and social critiques recurs most visibly at certain historical moments, and the reappearance of participatory art is symptomatic of this clash. It tends to occur at moments of political transition and upheaval: in the years leading to Italian Fascism, in the aftermath of the 1917 Revolution, in the widespread social dissent that led to 1968, and its aftermath in the 1970s. At each historical moment participatory art takes a different form, because it seeks to negate different artistic and sociopolitical objects.  
(p. 5)

Jacques Ranciere argues that in art and education alike, there needs to be a mediating object—a spectacle that stands between the idea of the artist and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator: “This spectacle is a third thing, to which both parts can refer but which prevents any kind of ‘equal’ or ‘undistorted’ transmission. It is a mediation between them. [...] The same thing which links them must separate them.” *2
(p. 6)


The Ladder and the Container

Most of the contemporary discourse on participatory art implies an evaluative schema akin to that laid out in the classic diagram “The Ladder of Participation,” published in an architectural journal in 1969 to accompany an article about forms of citizen involvement.14 The ladder has eight rungs. The bottom two indicate the least participatory forms of citizen engagement: the non-participation of mere presence in “manipulation” and “therapy.” The next three rungs are degrees of tokenism—“informing,” “consultation,” and “placation”—which gradually increase the attention paid by power to the everyday voice. At the top of the ladder we find “partnership,” “delegated power,” and the ultimate goal, “citizen control.” The diagram provides a useful set of distinctions for thinking about the claims to participation made by those in power, and is frequently cited by architects and planners. It is tempting to make an equation (and many have done so) between the value of a work of art and the degree of participation it involves, turning the Ladder of Participation into a gauge for measuring the efficacy of artistic practice. *3
(p. 7)

While the Ladder provides us with helpful and nuanced differences between forms of civic participation, it falls short of corresponding to the complexity of artistic gestures. The most challenging works of art do not follow this schema, because models of democracy in art do not have an intrinsic relationship to models of democracy in society. The equation is misleading and does not recognise art’s ability to generate other, more paradoxical criteria. The artist relies upon the participants’ creative exploitation of the situation that he/she offers, just as participants require the artist’s cue and direction. This relationship is a continual play of mutual tension, recognition, and dependency.
(p. 7)


The End of Participation

Since the 1990s, participatory art has often asserted a connection between user-generated content and democracy, but the frequent predictability of its results seem to be the consequence of lacking both a social and an artistic target; in other words, participatory art today stands without a relation to an existing political project (only to a loosely defined anti-capitalism) and presents itself as oppositional to visual art by trying to side-step the question of visuality. As a consequence, these artists have internalised a huge amount of pressure to bear the burden of devising new models of social and political organisation—a task that they are not always best equipped to undertake. 
(p. 10)

We need to recognise art as a form of experimental activity overlapping with the world, whose negativity may lend support towards a political project (without bearing the sole responsibility for devising and implementing it), and—more radically— we need to support the progressive transformation of existing institutions through the transversal encroachment of ideas whose boldness is related to (and at times greater than) that of artistic imagination. 
(p. 10)

By using people as a medium, participatory art has always had a double ontological status: it is both an event in the world, and at one remove from it. As such, it has the capacity to communicate on two levels—to participants and to spectators—the paradoxes that are repressed in everyday discourse, and to elicit perverse, disturbing, and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew. But to reach the second level requires a mediating third term—an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle—that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imaginary. Participatory art is not a privileged political medium, nor a ready-made solution to a society of the spectacle, but is as uncertain and precarious as democracy itself; neither are legitimated in advance but need continually to be performed and tested in every specific context.
(p. 11)

Bibliography

*1 - Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), 54.


*2 - Rancière, “Emancipated Spectator,” lecture in Frankfurt.

*3 - Sherry Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35:4, July 1969, 216–24.