Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ISSN 0141-6790
Vol. 24
No. 1
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Ethno-Graphics
Ben Highmore
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Foster provides a useful framework for any initial discussion of the work of the four
artists whose books are the topic of this review. The recognition of an ethnographic
orientation in the work of Martha Rosler, Krzysztof Wodiczko and in the recent work of
Komar and Melamid seems essential for grasping the challenges that this work holds. But
while Foster is primarily concerned with what an ethnographic orientation means for the
practice of contemporary art, I am more interested in what it means for the practice of
writing and picturing culture in general (an ethnography that would include art alongside
anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc.). If ethnography is the practice of writing
and picturing human culture, then the question of how to do it is going to be central to all
areas of the `human sciences'. The challenge that faces contemporary ethnography is
daunting: simply put, it is the challenge to fashion a practice that is at once both
deconstructive and constructive, both critical and generative. The work of Wodiczko,
Rosler, and Komar and Melamid do not constitute a new paradigm of ethnography (their
differences, as we will see, are too great) but they do suggest some inventive responses to
the ethnographic impasse (the impossibility of doing ethnography) that is often the
outcome of critiques of ethnography (Foster's included).
Historically the primal scene of ethnography is the `discovery' of the `New World'.
Here ethnography is `writing that conquers'. For Michel de Certeau this writing `will use
the New World as if it were a blank, ``savage'' page on which Western desire will be
written.'4 Ethnography emerges as both a repression and an inscription of power. The
work of Michel de Certeau is, I think, crucial for re-imagining ethnography and it
provides a productive resource for attending to the ethnographic work of Wodiczko,
Rosler and Komar and Melamid. In a number of essays and books, Michel de Certeau
charts an ethnology that expands and mutates from this inaugural moment of colonial
encounter across the centuries to the present. From Jean de Lery's sixteenth-century
account of his voyage to Brazil to recent television documentaries dedicated to `real life',
de Certeau argues that the writing and picturing of culture is based on repression (of the
other, of everyday life). For instance, de Certeau shows how the cataloguing of various
dialects and patois in France (in the years following the Revolution) coincides with the
repression of local languages and the establishment of a `proper' French language. He
writes in The Practice of Everyday Life that in contemporary culture the everyday is
` ''recorded'' in every imaginable way, normalized, audible everywhere, but only when it
has been ``cut'' (as one ``cuts a record''), and thus mediated by radio, television, or the
phonograph record, and ``cleaned up'' by the techniques of diffusion'.5
De Certeau's work is, in his own words, polemological. The productivity of his
position is therefore not to be tested through a realist mode that might (quite rightly
perhaps) worry about the validity of using the same terms to describe the colonization of
the Americas and the ethnography of contemporary Western culture. What it does provide
is an ethical provocation that sees repression as the unavoidable outcome of inscribing
culture in texts. Why, de Certeau seems to ask, would we want to exempt an ethnographic
study of modern dance culture (for instance) from being seen as an expansion of a
repressive ethnology? To do so is to offer a sanctuary, free from the contamination of
power and repression a false comfort. On the other hand what might it mean to
recognize ethnography as inevitably tied to repression? Instead of arriving at a dead end
(all ethnography is similarly repressive), de Certeau's work offers the chance to rethink
ethnography. If ethnography rests on a repression, de Certeau is also clear that
ethnography leaves traces of the other. Here de Certeau's psychoanalytic sensitivity is at
its most vivid: repression produces symptoms; what is repressed returns. Ethnography
then is constituted by a double movement; on the one hand a repression, but on the other
hand the traces of what it represses erupt in the text (even if these traces only appear as the
`presence of absences'). Rather than searching in vain for a scientifically validated
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under altered conditions (a theme begun with the Homeless Vehicle Project). From 1992
Wodiczko's work has been particularly focused on the experiences of migration. He has
made a number of electronic instruments for people to use both to help tell their stories,
but also to give their stories a different visibility (to interrupt the invisibility of the migrant
experience). The alien Staff (19926) is a rod with a video monitor at the top. In the
central section, clear plastic cylinders can be filled with `relics' of migrations (immigration
papers, family photographs, etc.). The video monitor screens a testimony (an oral history)
of migration. The migrant, who is also the user of the Staff, composes these testimonies
and controls the `play-back' when out on the street. A similar logic informs the
Mouthpiece (Porte-Parole) (19926), which Wodiczko describes as a `cyborgian bandage'
(p. 201) a video monitor of a mouth talking which is placed in front of the user's mouth
thereby contesting the myth of `direct address' (as unmediated communication). These
instruments have been used in various cities across the world. In the United States they
were used by various groups to tell stories of what it means to be an immigrant, what it
means not to have a `green card' and to have to find the most poorly paid menial work.
Thus these instruments are not themselves messages, but tools for facilitating certain
utterances. In this sense Wodiczko does not `do' ethnography; rather, he builds
instruments that will allow ethnographic exchanges to take place. Critical Vehicles
details the rationale for the production of these devices, as well as the `ethnographic'
testimonies that they relay. In terms of ethnography, Wodiczko's instruments contest the
classic anthropological position of participant observation (where the utterances of the
`native informants' are sympathetically managed and interpreted by the ethnographic
observer) to a situation where `native informants' (and that means everybody) are invited
to be their own ethnographers. Ethnographic `objects' become subjects of their own
ethnographies. Critical Vehicles also gives an account of the experience of using these
devices: this is another turn in self-reflexivity and calls on the `client group' (or the
subjects of ethnography) to give account of the instruments' effects. In this sense these
works would need to be judged (ethnographically) for the different kinds of contact and
communication they allow to take place. Critical Vehicles evidences a range of
`communication scenes', from the painful and self-conscious use of testimony (an almost
confessionaltherapeutic use) to their use as `a starting point for [. . .] exchange and
sharing' (p. 195). Ironically, perhaps, the most successful use of the instruments might
come when they are abandoned: `Conversation developed so well between the immigrants
around the stick [the Alien Staff] that they forgot about it. They ended up in a restaurant
and the stick was just leaning against the wall.' (p. 204).
Like de Certeau (whom Wodiczko acknowledges as a reference), this work privileges
speech as the scene of otherness and everyday life. While the work exists in Critical Vehicles
as so much writing, these are documents of a much more oral and active performativity.
What makes Critical Vehicles such a useful resource is the mixture of documentation: an
`image track' (that continues along the bottom of the page) documents the devices and their
uses, and is coupled with a `sound track' that includes not simply Wodiczko's writing, but
the transcripts of testimonies, interviews with users, etc. Wodiczko's instruments provide a
way of operating that allows for a challenge of the various discourses around migration
(assimilation, for instance, as the neo-liberal dominant discourse) by the uncanny
strangeness of geographical displacement and the possible recognition (for those that
stumble across these instruments) to become `strangers to ourselves'.9
Although certain of her works have been consistently reproduced, most notably The
Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (19745), Martha Rosler's work has never
received the attention it deserved. Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World should begin
to redress this neglect.10 The book combines a number of critical essays focusing on
various aspects of her work with documentation of her many projects. If Wodiczko's
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work demands the full resources of MIT, Martha Rosler's production has always abjured
technological prowess. Rosler's work has been described as `intentionally flat-footed'11 or,
in her own words, `ham-fisted': `think of me as a ham-fisted person who is trying
something that they [the audience] could do better.' (pp. 545) If Rosler's work
purposefully looks like it is financed by welfare cheques rather than by the National
Endowment for the arts, then this is itself a tactic of a larger cultural politics. The basis of
this is in an explicit cross-current of Marxism and feminism that has informed all her
work. As an uncanny ethnographier, her work has often oriented itself to the spaces of
domesticity and everyday life (spaces traditionally associated with femininity), only to
undo the social separation of such spaces by infecting them from both outside and inside.
As she states on the back cover of Positions in the Life World:
I want to make art about the commonplace, art that illumines social life. I want to
enlist art to question the mythical explanations of everyday life that take shape as
an optimistic rationalism and to explore the relationship between individual
consciousness, family life, and the culture of monopoly capitalism.
In a range of early works the domestic everyday (cooking, looking after children, `keeping
house') is interrupted and invaded by other representations. In her collage series Bringing
the War Home (196772) Rosler takes images of bourgeois homes (culled from lifestyle
magazines) and inserts into them images from the Vietnam War. Patios become
battlefields and mutilated Vietnamese families populate the plush interiors of an ideal
suburban USA. In Semiotics of the Kitchen, a videotape from 1975, Rosler is shown in her
kitchen slowly speaking the names of kitchen utensils as she demonstrates possible uses.
`Knife', for instance, is named as she then maniacally stabs the air. In the tape Domination
and the Everyday (1978) images of the Chilean dictator and murderer Augusto Pinochet
are shown alongside the domestic routines of putting children to bed and other aspects of
possible family life. A series of titles relays a text putting domination at the centre of daily
life. The complex weaving of `simultaneous worlds' is impossible to unpack and to
manage, with the result that the everyday no longer fits into a comfortable realm `free'
from politics. Here feminism is not a specialized discourse of `identity issues' but a
position from which to engage all aspects of culture and society. These works have often
used an auto-ethnographic approach (Rosler is the one looking after her children in
Domination and the Everyday, for instance) but not so as to reveal an autobiographical
truth. Any simple recourse to ethnographic `truth' is undercut by the impossibility of
sewing together the various elements in the work.
Like Wodiczki, Rosler acts as an ethnographic facilitator. For instance the videotape
Seattle: Hidden Histories (19915) is a compilation of testimonies from Native Americans
living in and around Seattle. The role of ethnographer as archivist, organizer, educator,
public intellectual, etc. is shown most vividly in her curatorial project `If You Lived Here
. . .'12 which is described as
Comprising three exhibitions (Home Front; Homeless: The Street and Other
Venues; and City: Visions and Revisions) on housing, homelessness, and
architectural planning, with work by artists, film and videomakers, homeless
people, squatters, poets and writers, community groups, schoolchildren and others.
With four forums featuring the participation of artists, activists, advocates, elected
representatives, academics, and community members. (p. 299)
In her most recent work she has investigated aspects of modern culture that the
anthropologist Marc Auge has called the `non-places' of supermodernity.13 Indeed March
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Auge 's book would make a useful accompaniment to her works In the Place of the Public:
Airport series (19908) and Rights of Passage (1995). These works document the transit
spaces of international airports and the freeways around New York. Such non-places have
`surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, [and]
offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object'.14
As Helen Molesworth has suggested, there are parallels between Rosler's work and
the work of people like Mary Kelly. Here, perhaps, is a strand of feminist ethnography
that combines a poetics of the everyday with an investigation into the political and
libidinal economy of otherness. Although traditional anthropologists have also been
concerned with cooking and childcare, this strand of uncanny feminist ethnography is
concerned with an `anthropology of the near'. The forms it takes deliberately un-manage
accounts of daily life, allowing for a `wild' orchestration of voices and marks.
Komar and Melamid's recent work is a series of paintings dedicated to the `People's
Choice'. As it states in the introduction: `To date, the artists have surveyed the opinions of
close to two billion people almost one-third of the world's population and have
translated the numbers into paint on canvas' (p. 2). Painting by Numbers is the story of
this project, illustrated with paintings based on the various national results obtained
(`Turkey's Most Unwanted' painting, `Turkey's Most Wanted painting', etc.) and
combined with samples of statistics, interviews and commentary. For the most part, the
paintings have an uncannily familiar look you have seen them before, but only in your
artistic nightmares. The `most wanted' are consistently blue/green landscapes with lots of
water and a combination of naturalistic elements. The `most unwanted' are usually
geometric abstractions in reds and purples. Komar and Melamid employed the services of
specialist poling agencies and have produced a statistical archive of massive proportions.
Of course, as you would expect from Komar and Melamid, this is all achieved with
humour and irony. The question though is where is the humour directed? Most evidently
it consists of insistently noting the disparity between what counts as `great art' and what
most people `want'. If 88 per cent of all those surveyed prefer `outdoor scenes' then how
can this possibly square with the kind of contemporary art that is current being circulated?
But this statistical naturalism is jeopardized immediately by the very absurdity of the task:
to create the paintings that are `most wanted'. Here the humour is directed at what might
be called `the democracy of the commodity' the tools that Komar and Melamid use (an
expensive and sophisticated from of market research) are the same as those that are used
for big business. So on the one hand Komar and Melamid point to a situation where most
people's desires are simply ignored (art), and on the other they seem to demonstrate that
where most people's desires are most evidently addressed (in high street shops, for
instance), `popular' desire is simply missing.
Thus the final joke is on the scientificity of knowledge. The massive resources that are
geared to finding out what people want is not underwritten by what people actually want,
it is undone by their desire. Along the bottom of each page of Painting by Numbers are
some of the answers given to the question: `If you had unlimited resources and could
commission your favorite artist to paint anything you wanted, what would it be?.' (p. 4)
These answers are significant precisely because none of the `most wanted' paintings come
close to satisfying any of the answers given. For instance:
Something with clear lines, bright colours yellows and reds something that
would show a distortion of the human form in an almost grotesque way, and that
would have some erotic aspect (Fred, Upper Darby, Penn.). (pp. 223)
A huge lizard walking across the Sahara saddled by this guy Phil I know (Jesse N.
Hive, Ithaca, emblem of my generation)
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1988, p. xxv.
5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
(Volume 1), trans. Steven Rendall, University of
California Press, 1984, p. 132.
6 ibid., p. 28.
7 ibid.
8 Denis Hollier, `While the City Sleeps: Mene,
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin', October, 64, 1993,
pp. 315. Dick Hebdige, `The Machine is
Unheimlich: Wodiczko's Homeless Vehicle
Project', Public Address: Krzysztof Wodiczko,
Walker Art Centre, 1992, pp. 5467. Dick
Hebdige, `Redeeming Witness: In the Tracks of
the Homeless Vehicle Project', Cultural Studies,
7:2, 1993, pp. 173223.
9 Kristeva is another resource; see Julia Kristeva,
10
11
12
13
14
15
The Sound of Painting: Music in Modern Art by Karin v. Maur, Munich and New York:
Prestel, 1999, 128 pp., 60 col. plates, 30 b. & w. illus., 14.95
Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen by Michel Chion, foreword by Walter Murch, ed. and
trans. by Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 239 pp., 12.50
Analysing Musical Multimedia by Nicholas Cook, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, 278
pp., 35.00 hdbk; 2000, 13.99 pbk
Noise-Water-Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn, The MIT Press,
1999, 466 pp., 1 col. plate, 4 b. & w. illus., $27.50
In 1985 (6 July22 September) Karin v. Maur curated a major exhibition at the Staatgalerie,
Stuttgart, entitled Vom Klang der Bilder: Die Musik in der Kunst des 20 Jahrhunderts. She
also edited the catalogue,1 a work which is still one of a small number to deal with the
interrelations of visual art and music and one of the most thorough empirically. This
catalogue was never translated from the German (although not all contributors involved
were German). It is known to specialists in the field, but has had a more limited impact on
the wider, English-speaking academic communities. Her recent book The Sound of Painting:
Music in Modern Art comes out of the earlier catalogue and exhibition, but is not a
substitute for it; it is more in the nature of a palimpsest, an abbreviated survey which is by no
means as scholarly, or as theoretically engaged as the earlier work.
However, surrogacy does not appear to be its purpose. It aims at a different market,
and as a book for a general readership it does fulfil a more modest function. It serves as an
introduction to issues raised by cross-disciplinary analysis of the impact of music on
modern visual art. Like others in the Pegasus library series, it is most accurately described
as an extended essay on an aspect of art's history, one that draws on current research but
provides fewer footnotes and other academic apparatus, in aiming for a fluid narrative.
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