A couple of ideas that have been meandering through my mind in relationship to next week’s class (and life, in general, really) are those of “with-ness” and messiness.
The pieces by Pink and Jordan discuss in one way or another, the idea of being with – ethnography being with multimodality, our senses being with each other, a researcher being with those we research, an artist being with those who experience our art, and art being with its environment. And really, to do any of these things we have to be with ourselves also and not remove ourselves (our biases, our quirks, our intuition) from our researcher persona.
With-ness is an idea that comes up a lot in my research and in my constant self-inquiry. “Being with and doing things with” as Pink describes is at the heart of my research as we walk and walk and walk through the community, taking pictures and talking, recording videos and sitting together in quiet. I’m also struck with the idea of producing new knowledge together, rather than just documenting what is there. But a question that keeps popping up for me relates to the fact that different people can be together differently. For some, the being with is helpful and for others, being with in certain moments can take away from our experience of a place. How much can we really be with others, even if we are a few inches away? How much could Matta-Clark really be with the surrounding community, especially younger people, homeless people and new immigrants? Being with is relational. It cannot be just one-sided. I think of this with my kids – I think of being with them. But I am still an adult, still the “official” researcher, still their former teacher. Like the youth and homeless people who worked with Matta-Clark…how do they view our with-ness?
Pink writes about the constant tension between neat discrete categories and the messiness of how we actually experience things in a connected way, senses intertwined with each other and with memory and space. Yes, the five senses are a neat way to categorize as are different modes. But they do not reflect how we actually take in a moment even if they help us distill specific aspects of it. This idea had already been in my thoughts based on a reading for another class – The Wonder of Data in which the author, Maggie MacClure, talks about the constant tension in research between organizing our data into neat themes and codes and the thrill and wonder of the pieces that resist this categorization and force us to really lean in and wonder. I think of my niece who is almost two and who walks around the world using every sense to experience new (and familiar) things. She does not put markers into the category of things we touch but don’t taste – for her, every sense is available for experiencing and if you can color with a marker as you bang it on the table and chew on the cap, then life is really grand!
Matta-Clark blurred and blurred and blurred the lines – between artist and activist, art viewer and artist, reality and imagination, art and the world around it. I feel like many of us are trying to craft identities as researchers that embrace this blurriness and that bring in our whole selves. I am eager to discuss our work next week in the context of these pieces!
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