Hi all:

I thought Luis presented a very thoughtful critique of hooks’ text. He criticizes hooks’ oppositional gaze as necessarily being defined by the dominant gaze, and thus necessarily dependant on it in a way he finds oppressive. Luis acknowledges that hooks also promotes the idea of “alternative texts that are not solely reactions,” and that these creation have the power to transform because “of its independently conceived creation,” but doesn’t the very term alternative also imply an opposition to an already established vision? Dahlia wrote, “our dreams and schemes are still informed and shaped by who we are now and the contexts in which we live.” We can’t escape the dominant lens entirely, but I think Luis’s point, and Dahlia’s as well, is that the act of creating itself can lead to transformation and new possibilities – new ways of thinking about ourselves – even if they are colored by visions that circulate hegemonically.

Luis and Dahlia both talk about how to create transformative artwork that creates new visions of possibility and identity, and Lamar adds to this discussion by asking, “How can I enhance my freedom dreams project to join this process in which people will see our Black and Brown children with new eyes, eyes of love, care, beauty, and humanity?” Luis answers quoting hooks, “We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions“ (128). Is it possible to erase from oneself all the deficit images of black and brown people that are constantly bombarding us in order to create alternative liberatory visions totally free of dominant ones? What questions should Lamar ask his students to facilitate the creation of such images? Lamar asks, “Do/Can freedom dreams convey parts of our cultural identities? Our history of struggles? Are elementary school children too young to have identities that are names to give to the different ways they are positioned by, and positioned themselves within?” His very question implies the burden and possibilities that history and domination necessarily play in the forging of identity and the pervasiveness of stigma and self-stigma, though it also opens up the door to Dahlia’s idea of becoming and the fluidity of identity. Lamar focuses on how “people will see our Black and Brown children” but he also has to contend with how black and brown children see themselves, which is a subject he raised in previous posts. Under what conditions can children making art re-paint their self-image and possibilities? This would be “art as research” and might align with Luis’s idea of art created with the subjects though the nature of that “with” is complex.

I wonder how all these ideas intersect with Greg’s project, “I hope to guide and help produce a diverse and representative study through contemporary portraiture, where agency is in the hands of the subject and the narrative is their own.” How is this going to work? Will you ask individuals to take selfies and then also to frame the context in which the selifes are seen (though obviously the audience context cannot be predetermined). In the images you uploaded, is agency in the hands of the subjects? What do we know about the women who are pictured? What then is the role of the researcher and, in particular, what is your role? When is the race of the researcher important (some great black literature has been uncovered and framed by white researchers but maybe, necessarily, the narratives of some one like Jill Lepore, Eric Foner and Howard Zinn are different than those of Saidiya Hartman).

Indeed problematizing the role of the researcher is a common theme throughout the posts as it should be given our goals this semester. Luis takes a strong and an uncompromising stance, “I think there is something wrong with it [standing back and thinking”] and he is clear, “there is a moral conundrum… in nearly all qualitative research with human subjects.” He proposes “art created with [my italics] subjects” but recognizes how careful a researcher must be to do it well. Do we think then that being a researcher who works with human beings is a necessarily compromised and untenable profession? Are we more righteous if we refuse to take the photo than if we take it, if we refuse to write the article rather than write it. If taking a photo of suffering, or writing an article about it, is necessarily complicit with the suffering itself and exploitative, what are our roles as scholars and thinkers? Can we give others voice without our voice being present at all and, if we could, would that be a good thing? How do the photos that Lamar took in DR and posted qualify as research and how does his commentary change how we see the photos? Incidentally, I was recently in DR as well in a place filled with American Blacks, Africans, and Europeans of all sorts and felt the staff of the resort were treated terribly by everyone; what does that say about hegemony and class and racial politics?

Liberation, as many writers, scholars and artists have said (see Baldwin for example) cannot be given. Dahlia’s caution about thinking of ourselves as saviors, or even the possibility of being a savior, strikes a chord in this regard as does Luis’ skepticism of what researchers can do. It is interesting that Dahlia’s paragraph about savior-ness ends with a sentence in which she, collectively, is the subject, “Unless WE transform images of blackness… WE cannot make radical interventions that will alter OUR situation” even as Dahlia’s identity in the US is often read ambiguously. In the language she uses, she implicitly rejects that others can liberate her and her people or provide alternate images, which is probably what Luis is saying as well. But being a researcher is already a privileged position, and the moral quandaries that attach to that position are multiple even when you identify as part of the people you are serving.

Finally, having a vision of justice and liberation implies that you think you are enlightened. Reading Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, it seems clear to me that much as he writes about listening to the people and helping them to problematize their situation in their own words and based on their own experiences, there is the belief that if the people follow Freire’s pedagogy they will come to the same beliefs about liberation and justice as Freire has himself. Don’t we all believe this on some level? How can we be humble, good listeners, and good guides without being dogmatic and ideological? How do our own visions of the world and hopes for that world find nourishment and growth in the visions of those we work with so that we also continue to become and become enlightened?

In the time since we last met, I have been coalescing and preparing my project for this course.  I found that this weeks assigned readings were both ones that I had read immediately in the week before our semester began.  I realized that they had directly informed the premise for my project and, in the case of Bell Hooks, not just the execution/representation, but then the interpretation of the research.

James Van Der Zee was a commercial photographer who worked in the early to middle of the 20th century, and was known particularly for his images and portraiture of middle class African Americans in Harlem.  His photography illuminated a people not just marginalized, but largely made invisible in the dominant segregated culture of America at the time.  I have been familiar with his work and ethos for many years,  and  I have also been thinking of the power of the portrait and who wields that power.

I am taking Van Der Zee’s portraits of African American Women, and using that as an informing framework for a new series of images of women of color, all from a subset of NYC women in the universe of public education.  But rather than the gaze of the outsider composing and capturing, these images will be self-captured.  Not casual “selfies” but leveraging the ease of use and quality of digital photography so that the subject Is the photographer.  The gaze is their own; the narrative in their hands/eyes.

Hooks is invested in knowing that the representations in imagery are not controlled by an outside or colonizing gaze; Cole, through Ariella Azoulay reflects that regardless of the creators control, “(Taking photos), looking at photos and being the subject of photos are mutually reinforcing activities in which the participants are interdependent and complicit.”

I hope to guide and help produce a diverse and representative study through contemporary portraiture, where agency is in the hands of the subject and the narrative is their own.

hooks, bell (1992). Black Looks: Race and Representation , Boston: South End Press. 115-31

hooks’ essay is an inducement to challenge and subvert a black imagery in America that she believes perpetuates, in black identity, an exploitive and immanently harmful status quo.  So how is this done?  I’m not sure.

The essays, hooks asserts, are…”gestures of defiance” (4). But I think, and she later asserts, that art can play a role that is more than mere challenge, resistance, or defiance, all of which I believe are terms that are essentially reactive, even passive—since they still have the need to acknowledge a perceived outsider, dominant power against which action is necessarily directed.  Why must we refer or even acknowledge any other power? A new creation that is transformative is not necessarily a reaction or resistance to any other perceived power or threat, as it can be likewise said that dominant power, where it exists, does not appear to acknowledge what it is dominating.  hooks herself later affirms this in her essay ( I think mis-titled), “Oppositional Gaze,” in reference to the creation of radical black female subjectivity in film:  a critical gaze by black female spectators will have to “… do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions“ (128).  This is the creation that is truly transformative because of its independently conceived creation.   Thus, revolutionary attitudes, the titular theme of her introduction, can be a creation wholly independent of any considerations of perceived domination or exploitation.  She alludes to how such independently operating power may be instigated when she cautions, “…that little progress will be made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking”(4).

Yet, in this worthy pursuit, I think she slips back frequently into unhelpful tropes—that the root of much of this oppression lies in “white supremacist ideology,” or that white people cannot help but reproduce the imperial gaze of colonization and dehumanization (124).  It may also not be realistic to think that any one person has the ability or the power to deliberately steer change in broader social perceptions towards a particular aim, that is, to “collectively change the way we look at ourselves and at the world [so] that we can change how we are seen”(6).   Such utopian generalizations presume individuals can engineer perceptual changes of collective identity on the grand scale of the social, whose complexity no one will ever understand.  It pulls focus from the imperative of each individual to work in their art on their own particular vision, for him or herself.  Perhaps it may be sufficient unto itself, perhaps even for a lifetime, for any one individual to endeavor to accomplish this shift of paradigm, this change of perspective, in their own life.  Art may offer that necessary means through the explorations of image, within this or any other theme, that reflect, refract, re-create paradigms of perceived reality for an individual.

In chapter 7, hooks asserts that existing film theory paradigms, whose visuals she asserts have been and continue to be in conformance to prescriptions of a dominant white, male perspective, reinforce a dominant male/female power dynamic that ignores race, and hence, disallows any radically subjective racialized perspectives. The woman inscribed in early film narrative is actually the white woman, a role later replaced by the black woman.  “Woman” is the representation, not necessarily the “black woman.”  The distinctness of the black woman’s reality is never represented.  But this may be one consequence of who is making the art.  As she aptly states in her later search for the black female perspective, “It is difficult to talk when no one is listening” (125).

Cole, Teju. (2018, May 24). What Does It Mean to Look at This? The New York Times Magazine.

Like the “brilliant skepticism” initially exercised by Susan Sontag in her work, “On the Pain of Others,” as the art scholar Susie Linfield characterized it, I am skeptical too about the value and aim of photography of human subjects as “objects,” and especially of that depicting human suffering.  I would disagree with Sontag’s later relaxation in her stance, that “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.”  I think there is something wrong with it.  Beneath every stance taken in representing another person is a moral conundrum, and I find that conundrum in nearly all qualitative research of human subjects:   there is always a cost and it is hard to pin down when it is often unrecognized, its danger compounded by its subtlety.  In particular, images of suffering, as both Sontag and Linfield observe, position any viewer of that work, however moved emotionally, as separated consumers of an image whose evocation and effect on the viewer the human subject may not have intended nor given consent to.  In today’s media-saturated ethos, were it not for the discernment of the journalistic profession, seldom would consumers concur that there exist images that no one has the right to ever see.

On the other hand, art that respects the complexity of its ethical and moral dimensions may the sine qua non of any transcendent art.  For instance, art freely created by the subject is obviously created with the full consent of the artist, who consciously creates with the intention of sharing, welcoming the range of possible impressions upon, and interpretations by, viewers.  Art created with subjects, which arts-based research can at times employ, does require researcher care in the ways of interacting with subjects that preserves the ethical and moral integrity of all participants.

Last Monday Noor and Dahlia gave two fantastic presentations about their art-research projects and the themes they’ve been pondering for a while. I left that class both very excited about what they were doing and full of questions. Particularly, I was thinking about the many ways they could approach or continue their research. I don’t want to call those approaches “methods,” because methods sound formulaic, pre-determined and dull when their projects are full of the unexpected, the contingent, and the uncertainty of not knowing even fully where they want to go.

Noor’s project on inter-generational knowledge involves doing collages and collages on collages with others while talking within spaces made for talking (like kitchens). When we think of Pink, this brings to mind what other sensory stimuli are present in those environments (coffee, cooking, maybe pollution and noise from the outside, light from the windows etc.) and if these are important to the research and need to be evoked or described. If the answer is affirmative, how do we do that? I also was curious about not only the transcript of the conversations taking place but the sounds of those conversations, because speech will reveal nuances and meanings that text cannot because of qualities like prosody (rhythm, pitch, volume). There are also facial expressions (remember the expression of La Toya Ruby Frazier’s grandmother in the video we saw?) that are hard to verbally translate though a poet might be able to do so visually with words. I think Victoria Restler’s work (she will be with us in a few weeks) could be very helpful to help us think about how to evoke the conditions that accompany fruitful inter-generational collage making. It could easily involve visuals that include but are not limited to the actual collages made together, and it could include video and sound experiments.

The question of what inter-generational knowledge is and why it’s important is also a present question in Noor’s work. Anything spoken between an elder and a younger is of course inter-generational communication. And maybe knowledge is conveyed even when the words themselves seem banal or inconsequential. Certainly relationship is cemented when you are in with someone else in a way that is nurturing. But what do mean by knowledge and how do we create it and pass it on?

In any case, all of you should be taking field notes all the time (these can be textual, audio, visual) so that you remember what you are saying and thinking and what those you work with are saying and thinking and doing. Do not count on your memory to remember. With every second that passes, you replace what you’ve seen or heard with imaginings (also interesting of course). So take good field notes!!!!!

Dahlia’s maps and the images she showed us struck me on a number of levels. First, there is what maps represent – geography, identity, routes to get from one place to another. In this sense the map that a person might choose to represent them has deep significance whether it is the map of a country, a city, a street, a house or a room that has deep significance for that person. So maps can represent various breadth of vision though even when the map is of something much more meso-level, a room of a house for example, it is infinite in the intimacies it has for the creator. Its visual qualities for the viewer, however, may be very different. Maps are famous for not giving us a feel or telling us what is really going on. We see a map of the US but don’t see from it the poverty that pervades it, the racism, the homelessness, the wealth, the people-power that actually live in the spaces represented by the map, pollution etc (though there are now some people making maps that focus on these very qualities). At best, even when they focus on a particular aspect of the geographic space they tend to be more informative – flat and illustrative- than evocative. There are ways around this, but they need to be contemplated. Furthermore, show me a map of your kitchen and I might likely think of my kitchen rather than yours, and associate with your image the smells, sounds, and conversations that my kitchen has for me. Show me a map of the lower-East Side and I will remember my experiences there – including muggings, mural painting, revolutionary incitement, and the homelessness that pervaded that area when I was in my 20s. So there is connection of some sort, but also certainly difference.

Then there is the visualness of the maps that may contrast to its symbolic representation, the rivers and roads looking like veins that crisscross the body that may transmit a sense contrary to the intimacy intended. How does the visualness of the map, what it looks like and evokes, align or not align with what the map is thought to represent by the maker of those maps? Is that contrast helpful or not helpful to convey what the artist wants to convey? Should she double down on the dissonance to create that rupture that collage is supposed to create (rupture of easy meaning), or alter the map to create a different type of visual power? Does it make sense to have discussions with the makers of the maps to understand their motivations and inspirations (which would make the study more “traditional” in some ways), and if so do we need sound files (or text files) to accompany the visuals? Of course these sound files could be played with as well, layered and jumbled, to jar rather than to explain. How does exhibiting the art by itself represent a stance about research that differs from a stance demanding that text and audio be exhibited together? Does the visual seen by itself just become art? Or because research (certainly of self and other) was central to the production of the maps, should we let the visuals “speak” for themselves and allow them to be vehicles through which the viewer will also examine/research herself? Is our objective disruption leading to examination? Is it understanding? Is it empathy?

As Lamar point out when talking about his work, the creation of the art is self-exploratory for the maker – though often that self-exploration is accompanied by discussion. Does research, to be research on the professional level, need to be exhibited? Does research need to have evocative, persuasive, or informative attributes for a public beyond the writer or maker? Is there a question of assessment that we need to consider, or is assessment old-school, old methods, old approaches for different types of research?

I’m forgetting some of the images that both Dahlia and Noor showed us, so please post them to the Commons site so we can all look at them again and think about them. I remember thinking how proud the figures in Dahlia’s images were, but I can’t remember the iages themselves.

Gene

https://wp.nyu.edu/latinxproject/event/pelea-visual-responses-to-spatial-precarity/

“If you have come to help me, then you are wasting your time . But if you have come because your destiny is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Australian Aboriginal Woman

Sarah Pink writes, “The practice of sensory ethnography involves the researchers’ empathetic engagement with the practices and places that are important to the people participating in the research. And by association it does not therefore principally involve the collection of data about them that can later be analyzed. Rather it involves the production of meaning in participation with them through a shared activity in a shared place.”  In this passage the author offers a way to produce knowledge that recognizes that knowledge production is a multi-sensory experience made with and among people. Traditional ethnographers, like Geertz, provided a method which asks for a researcher to collect data, a process that indirectly and directly places a one way relationship between people and therefore, the roles participant and researcher, where the researcher extracts from the experience of the participant in order to understand their actions and life ways. The turn that Sara Pink offers asks for research to expand toward the embodied theory and practices of Theaster Gates and Matta Clark. Pink’s sensorial ethnographic approach begins by engaging in relationship with people as they conduct their lives as a means to understand their full experiences and life ways.  She writes, “In ethnography, interviews might range from the form of a more casual conversation to sitting down with an audio recorder to discuss specific issues in a focused way. Whatever the context, I understand the interview less as a data collecting exercise than as a shared conversation through which new ways of knowing are produced.” These moves reflect on what everyday and theoretical decisions are necessary to shift the traditional approaches of social science research practices toward more humanistic and relational methods that ask for people to work together non-hierarchically to build knowledge and learn from one another.

In terms of Sensory Ethnography, Sarah Pink offers, “By asking a research participant to guide one around a particular locality (in my work this has included homes, a garden and a town) that holds meaning for him/her, and in which he/ she is engaged practically on a regular basis, enables the researcher to move through and be in and part of an environment with the participant. When viewing the subsequent video recording the researcher is thus re-experiencing a route through a material, sensory and meaningful world, as already seen through the viewfinder. This is rather different from the perspective of looking at and reading from video-as-data from which cultural meanings can be interpreted/read.” In this way, Sarah Pink shows how necessary it is for researchers to become fully immersed in the sensorial experience which calls for a deeper connection to the various meaning that are produced across the lifeways of individuals she is learning from. Thus researcher’s are asked to call on their own embodied experiences with the research participant, which is asks for a level of self reflexivity in the analytical process.  Matta Clark was successful in building art spaces, like Food, that became hubs for social life but wasn’t able to address social inequality in the sustained ways Theater Gates has in Chicago. I wonder what this means for research that isn’t interested in just producing theory but aims to support action and social change. Is there a certain rootedness and commitment that is necessary for social change research, whether that is art based or not? What possibilities are visible for Theaster Gates as a artist, designer, developer, researcher who grew, learned and worked with the same community for 20 years versus a visiting artist developing an art center? What relationships (within and outside of the community) were at the foundation of his work and create a fertile ground for sustainable art based social change methods?