Jordan, C. M. (2017). Directing energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s pursuit of social sculpture. In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (pp. 36–63). New Haven, CT: The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Yale University Press.

Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 261–276. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835

In reading Sarah Pink there is an effort to take the current definitions of sensory modality and expand them.  She writes that Guerts and Howes have demonstrated that the 5 senses we utilize are a western cultural construct, and further illustrates that KL Guerts, in studies of Angolan tribes, found that their perceptions of sensory stimuli did not map directly to our 5 sense modality.  She uses terms like synaesthesia, implying a blending of sensory inputs to create a unique perception, to describe that for which we in our culture do not have an accurate language taxonomy. 

The sensorial  dichotomy between written language and visual art is explored, with both critique of, and expansion on, some of the work of anthropologists. Kress’ assertion that words are in themselves “empty and vague” and that images specific and inherently precise seems a forced binary, and didactic; words can be quite precise and even totemic, while images can be filled with layers of meaning and possible perceptions.  Pink proposes the use of “affordances” a term that allows for both relational sensory perceptions and the inclusion of work of other scholars in broadening the language of meaning.

…

Revisiting CM Jordan’s piece on Gordon Matta Clark I was able to look at his work in a way that eluded me only a week ago.  In my first exposure to his photography I recognized the journalistic aspect and the gaze of the outsider. There were elements of the political (to me) in images of poverty and urban decay; the lens I viewed it through was that of distance and privilege.  In learning more of his immersion in the communities and environments I found his gaze to be less journalistic and more integrated sociologically. He was illustrating the life of the community in imagery that exists as both a single “journalistic” statement (photo-accuracy),  but allows for meaning to be derived through complete immersion in the social framework of that community in depiction and presentation.  As Matta Clark intended his work to be social anthropologic, and grounded in socialist democratic principle, I found ironic how his work “Graffiti Truck” which was meant to be the work of all the various graffiti artists that embellished the vehicle, wound up being viewed as his singular creation.

Both Luis and Lamar discuss modes through which experiences are conveyed and the limits of language to express the fullness of those experiences, what Luis calls the “mix of lived experience.” I think one of Pink’s main contributions to the discussion is her insight that no mode by itself (including the visual mode) is itself sufficient to the task of carrying experience, and yet each mode evokes a sensory response that invokes the other modes because on the level of the body experience is not allocated to only one sense but engages them all. When we talk about experience, because of the “crisis of representation,” we don’t have the language to do it justice. If we did, then we wouldn’t be talking about modes at all.

Of course the sensing of an image is mediated by how the viewer (hearer, reader) has learned to engage with her world, and Lamar points out (as Pink does) that these ways of engaging are culturally mediated. For Lamar to think with his students about the different ways to sense Freedom is a brilliant idea. in addition to the 5 senses, we might probe motion, balance, ethics, and intuition as sensory ways of enriching how we think of our own experiences. And there are certainly other “senses” as well.

I wonder if what Luis is calling “distortion” is what happens when artifacts/art are interpreted by the viewer, because the viewer (hearer, etc) immediately senses through experiential ways of feeling and interpreting that are not identical to those of the “creator.” By “distorting,” the audience to the art/artifact is becoming a creator as well, though when the artist’s goal is very specific that may not be to her liking (but it’s also not within her control). When we are using art to express what “others understand and feel” the discussion obviously becomes more complicated given the impossibility of conveying what we ourselves feel.

When we think about poetry, we think about words, music, rhythm and imagery. This is text as art and multisensory. Has it been used for revolutionary purposes? We could argue that it has been used to at least inspire, something we might say about visual art as well.

Luis asks if Matta-Clark is more of an artist or an activist, and both Luis and Lamar applaud his engagement of the community during his art-based endeavors. Just as we expand the definition of research to include any means through which we explore, we could expand the concept of art to include anything that incites new expereinces, that breaks established boundaries, that breaches established ways of thinking. Maybe we could describe anything that anyone makes as art. Noor, in her previous post, writes about visual arts-based research as a “form of humanization.” Could we think of any research process that puts us in touch with our full human potential as art? Does this blurring of boundaries serve us (as individuals and as societies) or does it muddy the waters in ways that are not helpful to our goals? Do you think Theaster Gates was more successful than Matta-Clark in involving the community in the process of creation, in help the everyday person realize their artistic self?

Luis writes about ethics and ownership in relationship to the Matta-Clark article and how important it was. These are good questions to ask. I was wondering how to read the photo of the homeless person on page 42. The photo was attributed to Matta Clark and exhibited in an important Manhattan gallery. Do you think it was exploitative? And how does it make us think about photographic ethics

Pink, S. (2011). Multimodality, multisensoriality and ethnographic knowing: social semiotics and phenomenology of perception. Qualitative Research, 11(3), 261–276. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794111399835

Jordan, C. M. (2017). Directing energy: Gordon Matta-Clark’s pursuit of social sculpture. In Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect (pp. 36–63). New Haven, CT: The Bronx Museum of the Arts and Yale University Press.

In PInk:  “Perception begins in the body and ends in objects”(Csordas, 1990, p. 8, as cited in Geurts, 2003)” (265).  

Theme: The visual in use as a sensory ethnographic evocation in “phenomenological” ethnography, rather than as a traditional recording of data in classical ethnography, can lead to a more comprehensive anthropological ethnography.  Pink reaffirms Merleau-Ponty’s views that the body senses with all its organs simultaneously and in an interconnected manner.  But in the attempt to linguistically express that sensory experience we find restriction by the conventional five-sensory model.  The breadth of sensory experience,  requiring a true “phenomenological ethnography,” cannot, even in moments, fit neatly into the limitations of linguistic-based models. (270)

Not only can Art be used as a tool of expression when the linguistic mode may not be sufficient to the task, a phenomenological ethnography of ”being with” seeks to understand and express what others understand and feel.  The visual, for instance, is not viewed merely as a “photographic” recording of data or evidence as in classical ethnography, but as a means to elicit, empathize, or to evoke a more comprehensive experience of a moment, a true anthropological ethnography.  Imaginative use of even one sensory mode, such as the visual, say, can evoke a multi-sensory experience (synaesthesia). It is intriguing that the visual alone can be more precise than the linguistic:  although Pink disagrees with Kress’s binary schematic between words and images in general, she appears to agree with Kress’s (2005) counterintuitive assertion that images can depict experience with greater fullness of meaning, detail and precision, while words are more “general, ….empty and vague.” (264). Although most would agree that words, by context for instance, are indeed imbued with meaning anew in any instance by the hearer/reader (264), is the visual truly less amenable to that distortion in communication? It is so counterintuitive that it must be true.

I am most intrigued by the use of visual arts as a means of approaching a fuller anthropological ethnography, with its attendant precision, and how this ethnography would manifest in a range of practices, including that of educator, student and researcher.  

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So, is Matta-Clark a community activist who employs arts-based research, or an artist who employs community-based research?  Although either description is easily justified, the former may be closer to the core of his identity.  Ultimately, he wanted to realize community engagement and empowerment, the identification of and resistance to socioeconomic inequality and governmental neglect, and a heightened community political awareness.  Matta-Clark’s experience may be emblematic of realizing the potential of this methodology in other vocations that aim to employ arts-based research, including educators who aim to employ arts-based research.  It also highlights possible questions of ownership and ethics.

His arts-based research provides a tool for participants to shape their world.  Ironically, this was most apparent to me in the photo of the four men sitting in a dirt lot with shovels in hand, ready to begin that act of creation upon a blighted, desolate lot.  The shape that it would take was yet to be realized. I wonder what it was going to become. Completed installations, including Pig Roast and restaurants such as Food, Matta-Clark incorporated highly participatory experiences with food in community. He aimed to employ “professional and non-professionals” alike as participants in work valuing inherent “human capital,” not the narrow political or economic capital that is often absent from such communities.  The work characterized the creation of a community that together invests in themselves and addresses together the problems that they face.

Is the question about the attribution and ownership of community-based works of art in fact an important question or not? There is an ethical rub here that Jordan insinuates.  Ownership of many of these works and extant installations were, in the end, attributed solely to the artist, as was the case with Matt-Clark and Beuys, although many community residents together created the work.  Is this important?  If it was their aim, then these great artists were ultimately not successful in that attempt to “…eliminate the hierarchic relationships between [artists] and their audiences”( 53).

The question of durability is related.  After the death of Matta-Clark, and of Beuys, the power of their work would dramatically diminish later for those who were not present firsthand to experience it with the artists’ direction (53).  Evidently, the artist was the lodestar of an ephemeral artefact of community shaping only for an instant in time.  Perhaps the the return of attribution to the progenitor artist also made vulnerable the legacy of that art’s influence.  Nevertheless, the arts-based research in shaping community did in fact impact the community in that time in significant ways.  The fact that such artefacts are not eternal, like great art is supposed to be, does not diminish the fact of what the community created, even if ephemeral, using arts-based research.  Thus, the question, “Was it ever art?” is moot.  So is the question “Whose art was it?” The only answer that matters is that the sensibility of art as a methodology was successful in allowing citizens to create and shape a community, at that instant in time.  It is also crucial that the research project was conducted ethically, with transparency and respect for all who participated. I like that art is not held in reverence here;  the community is.  We do not have to esteem “art” too highly in arts-based research, where we have the right to demote art to take a subordinate role in the service of other higher purposes, even other higher purposes that are ephemeral.

Eisner writes, “Visual arts are used to communicate the way something feels, that is, its emotional character.” As I was reading this week, I couldn’t help but think about visual arts based research is a form of humanization that flows back and forth through the researcher and the work, in the case of Eisner who allowed his deep love of art to take over the strict training at the University of Chicago. It makes me think of the large growth of Ivy on a building in Berkeley many years ago.  The Ivy made a home in every wall of a building, until the paint and original structure became obscured by years of natural growth. These readings ask us to explore what may be possible, if we allow ourselves to grow beyond the structured design of our own methodological programming. Further, all of the readings address the emotionality which allows the researcher but also those who read the research to be partners, through what Dewey offers as slowing “down perception and invit(ing) exploration” among all people. What is the purpose of static knowledge, if we are in a world that is expansive and ever changing? Like the Ivy plant, what we know can be reduced with sheers or statistical analysis but what of the possibilities when we allow ourselves and the research to flow out and over the tools made for reduction?  What is possible when we research with the purpose of creation? Where is it necessary to reduce and in what ways is this harmful to what we come to know as truth or “fact” thinking of Barone, who writes, that facts are not adequate for telling the whole story?

I really loved thinking of arts based research and methodology as a heuristic and would love to explore how different researchers have done this work. I agree with Eisner and Barone who write that “the borders between art and science are malleable and porous” and further, see how Western society has yet to tap into the potential of interdisciplinary pluralist research. These readings made me think of Sylvia Wynter’s piece, The Sociogenic Principle, which examines how the division between science and art leave major gaps in knowledge. She writes advocating for a deepening of understanding of poetic knowledge as a means to understand all that is not known within “hard sciences” like physics and chemistry, etc. Why is the western conception of science devoid of humanity? I loved how the authors included their personal narratives or what Carol Gilligan might call the roots of their work, and also offer simple and profound questions for researchers.  Some that are sitting with me currently include, “what does the reader take away?” What is the impact of the tools we use on our research but also on ourselves? How does feeling and expression shape our understanding of a person, place or situation? How might we as researchers and educators touch the souls of students as well as measure their sleeve or hat size? How can our research address help readers to learn and notice aspects of the world and further debate or dialogue with another?

2/3/19

Hello all:

I thought I would take this time to reflect on the comments that have been posted on our website. I’ve really enjoyed reading them and thinking about them, and I look forward to us continuing the discussion tomorrow.

It seems to be that all who posted responded strongly and mostly favorably to the Barone and Eisner piece, with Luis being a bit skeptical, an attribute of his that will help us all to make sense of what we’re doing. It is interesting to me that when Lamar cited from Wang, he cited Wang’s excerpts from Eisner. This makes total sense, because Eisner, who is really seen as the central founder of arts-based research as an academic “discipline,” looks at arts-based research through a very broad and exhilarating lens. Creativity, disruption, imagination, ambivalence, understanding evocation and exploration are all celebrated by Eisner and Barone; their writing is best in my opinion when they don’t try to define precisely what arts-based research is but concentrate on what it can do. I laughed when Dalia wrote that despite her impulses that seem difficult to constrain, she found Wang’s organized and logical categorizations useful (as did Gregory), and of course Rose is even more analytical and “scholarly”. I, too, find Wang et al., useful for thinking about arts-based approaches to research, but I remain unsatisfied with Wang et al’s definitions (I think the categories are very permeable and their borders unsustainable). Meanwhile Rose presents the many different aspects of any artwork/artifact that mediate how it works and is seen and felt, but as Lamar points out it is unclear to what degree the researcher should try to predetermine the evocative success of any work to others given the impossibility of prediction and the possible negative affect that over-thinking might have on the creative process. Luis goes even further, questioning if art should be theorized at all. After all these exhilarating ideas that Barone and Eisner propose as strengths of arts-based research are all a bit fuzzy, hard to pin down and very subjective. And yet Luis, citing Heidegger, talks about the experience “of unhidden-nees.” In doing so he addresses Lamar’s question, paraphrased here, “Can art help my students discover what they are unaware of. Can drawing help them contemplate their own sense of what freedom means? If so, isn’t that enough?

I think it’s interesting that for Gregory, the categorizations by Wang et al helped him see the artifacts/art produced by Victoria as legitimate self-standing research not merely appendages (or illustrations) to written text. The constraints of categories made it possible to abandon the constraints. If the work on its own gives you insight that written text does not provide, insight that is “beyond” words, then does it count as research? What do we value qualitative research anyhow?

Dahlia ponders how the form we choose contributes to the constraining and shaping of meaning (and of course the affordance and illumination of meanings as well). We want to acknowledge the importance of that insight and consider it when embarking on our own research; I believe Luis makes this point as well. At the same time we want to be humble about our goals, understanding that our purpose is explore not necessarily to find. It is what makes arts-based research so exciting or, as Dahlia emphasizes, we use arts-based methods heuristically to gain a deeper and more complex “understanding of the world.” Luis, if I understand his text correctly, is more interested in art as a practical teaching method. And indeed there are studies of schools that correlate arts infusion with academic achievement, in part I think because of the emotional effervescence that circulates through a school in which creativity and imagination are valued. I’m still thinking about what Luis means by precision in expression, something we will no doubt discuss further. In arts-based “products,” precision might be equated with emotional resonance, but Luis is being more down-to-earth than that.

Lamar, clearly an advocate for his students, deliberates whether the drawings his students make are viable and significant because of what they do for their makers regardless of what others might think. I wonder if the students who make those drawings are using the drawing process heuristically (Dahlia liked that idea), trying to figure out how they feel about freedom through the drawings they make. Are the drawings helping them think about freedom. If so, we could call this “art as research”- using Wang et al.’s term: they are using art to be reflexive, to makes sense of their world. If this is taking place, no other justification for the process is needed. And yet, how do we know that the students are using the drawings that way rather than as maybe doing something simpler (though also legitimate)– quickly deciding what freedom looks like and then documenting that image. If my memory serves me well, the images you showed us Lamar (certainly one of them) were of a nature scenes (I remember flowers and pretty colors). We often, idyllically, associate nature with peace and freedom, and that might be a very surface metaphor for freedom. There is a body of literature (I’m thinking specifically of Lefebvre’s The production of space) that argues that we maintain pockets of nature (parks, national forests) as a symbol of freedom, which allows us to destroy nature writ large. So I am curious if the drawings are followed up with discussion and probing (or does that maybe occur during or before the drawing process)? Are you using the drawings as part of an ethnographic study (i.e. documentation) or/and as a way for students to transform themselves and their world. Purpose needs to be considered here as well when we discuss audiencing. You can be your own audience, your family and friends and classmates can be your audience, and, especially if you are using digital media (going back to Dahlia’s comment about form), then the world can be your audience. As Rose points out, evocation is mediated by a million conditions and you can’t predict what a drawing will evoke to others (especially others not like you). In a brilliant book by Susan Sontag (Regarding the pain of others), she points out that images of dead Vietnamese evoked very different feelings from the Vietnamese and from American soldiers.

Dahlia raises an important question about the effects of an adult researcher choosing an arts-based research method to use with children. Luis also raises the question of ethics in research. If we work with children, we want to be always aware of how we manipulate the research process even when we claim to be fully participatory. In my own work, I worry about exploitation a great deal. We will be definitely discussing research ethics throughout the semester; though it will be front and center in some of my work, it will certainly be present in the work of others as well So it’s something I hope we continue to discuss.

Dahlia also cites LeGuinn’s idea that whole always seems beautiful and Muir’s idea that everything is connected. Hegel famously said, “the truth is the whole.” It all depends though from where you look and who is doing the looking. Sometimes the part is a whole in itself, the parts more complicated than the sum of them. And so scale is really important even while embracing the idea that we all, together (along with all other living and non-living things) comprise the universe.

I look forward to continuing the discussion tomorrow as we look at some videos together.

Thanks so much to all of you. I’m sure there is much you wrote that I did not properly address. If I’ve misrepresented any of you, please make that clear in class.

Gene

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2006). Arts-based educational research. In J. L. Green, G. Camilli, & P. B. Elmore (Eds.), Handbook of complimentary methods in education reserach (pp. 95–110). Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association.

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (2012). What is and what is not arts-based research. In Arts-based research (pp. 1–12). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.

Eisner, E. W. (2001). Concerns and aspirations for qualitative research in the new millennium. Qualitative Research, 1(2), 135–145. https://doi.org/10.1177/146879410100100202

One of the primary challenges that confronts me from this first set of readings is the need to make a distinction between art and arts-based research, that is, the determination of what is uniquely able to be obtained not solely from an encounter with art, but from the practice of arts based research.

With respect to art, Eisner (2001) evinces the ability of visual art to express “…by nuance and drawing attention to particulars, which …slow down perception and invite exploration” (Dewey, as cited in Eisner, 134). Eisner’s focus is to compare the similarities of the quality of art to that of qualitative research.  What interested me was his observation that  “Researchers involved with human relationships do not solve problems, they cope with situations….whose resolutions lead to other situations” (138). Further, there exists the potential to address the concept of form, for the artist knows “…that form and content cannot be separated” (138).  It is vaguely provocative: “..that the form of representation one uses has something to do with the form of understanding one secures” (139).  These would certainly be components to be mindful of in the design of art-based research. Though Eisner believes it is necessary to theorize arts-based research, I am not yet convinced by this argument.

Barone & Eisner (2012) reaffirm the role of art, and art-based research in particular, as one means of seeking and expressing truth, a way to provide “methodological permission for people to innovate with the methods they use… “(2), which may not necessarily conform to that of the conventional scientific paradigm.  But what are the more general kinds of truth beyond that of scientific propositional truths, and how can such truths be sought and expressed?   In Heidegger’s philosophy , Truth is more generally defined as revelation, the  experience of unhidden-ness.   Perhaps this is one possible notion that I suspect would be relevant in seeking other forms of truth, those less easily quantifiable, and even ineffable.

Seeking expression for such non-propositional forms of truth has value, but what value may it have as a research methodology?  Barone & Eisner (2012) allude to its potential to “..adumbrate in symbols something important….that can become a source for debate and deliberation” (5), and to function as …”illuminating vehicles” in research activities (6). I think it can allow students a wider canvass upon which to express and un-hide their thinking, both to others, such as the teacher, and to themselves.  I also believe in the primacy of developing aesthetic judgment, which ABR may engender in students, and which I believe may most enable students to appropriate knowledge and to exercise power and discrimination over it.  As Barone & Eisner (2012) comment, arts-based research is “..the utilization of aesthetic judgment and the application of aesthetic criteria in making judgments about what the character of expected outcomes is to be” (8).  (however, I do think that his later generic descriptions fall short of developing this thread, i.e. that ABR’s benefit include the ability “…to create an expressive form that will enable an individual to secure an empathic participation in the lives of others and in the situations studied” (9), or that arts based research is “an emotionally drenched expression that makes it possible to know how others feel.”  Not as helpful. I would like to develop myself.. )

Other generalities may not uncover the true value of arts-based research, such as the assertion that it “…addresses complex and often subtle interactions and that it provides an image of those interactions in ways that make them noticeable… It is a “heuristic through which we deepen and make more complex our understanding of some aspects of the world (3)”.  I am not so sure that complexity is what is always desired.  Specificity and detail, perhaps even simplification, can also be possible, as Eisner (2001)  asserts below.  Nevertheless, I would like to explore potential methods relevant to me within the ABR methodology:  how art can provide emotional dimension to STEM education;  how art can be used as a tool for student self-discovery;  how the use of limitation can, like in theatre, catalyze the imagination; how art can support equity in the STEM classroom (not only participation, engagement, but as an aid in understanding, and in precision of expression)…. Can art-based research unify content areas that presently appear distinct? Can the precision of the scientific inform traditional art and elevate it?

I appreciate the cautionary in both Rose and Eisner’s articles.  What does “critical” mean in the context of ABR?  She does state the danger of a criticism that is both “easy and ineffectual,  because it changes nothing of what it criticizes “( Rose 29). The act of observing art for the sake of critiquing it can in effect cheapen the very experience it has the potential to evoke (29).  (As I mentioned earlier, I am not sure that Art is meant to be theorized.)  Further she affirms that “there are many times that I yearn for something in excess of the research” (Holly in Cheetham et al., 2005:88, as cited by Rose,29).  Scholars emphasize “the embodied and the experiential as what lies in excess of the representation” (Marks and Hansen, as cited by Rose, 29). Delueze suggests, with reference to cinematic art, that perhaps this “beyond” may consist in the ability to “…lose control of ourselves, undo ourselves, forget ourselves while in front of the cinema screen” (29).

Rose, G. (2016). Visual Methodologies (4^th Edition). London: SAGE Publications.

Rose also insinuates some ethical concerns with subjects in ABR.  Thus, I would expect research guidance is vitally important and necessary in order to responsibly and ethically employ arts-based research in the classroom, and more generally, in educational research.  It is not anyone’s right, for instance, to expose or to reveal the feelings of others, if they are not so informed and freely participating in the search, etc..

In the arts, there is the notion of subjectivity and relativity in judgment, an indeterminacy that can appear to subvert its value in arts-based research.  However, Eisner (2001) addresses this and provides a counterpoint to universality:  art can in fact delineate distinctive individuality of creation and expression of understanding.  Perhaps the most value for pedagogy that an arts-based research method can assess is that distinctiveness “…if the tasks that students are asked to engage in are sufficiently open ended to allow their individuality to be expressed and if the appraisal of their performance employs criteria that suit the work to be assessed”(142).  It is not valid to compare one’s work with that of another in this context either.  He reminds us of Dewey’s cautionary note about the uniquely distinctive and particular nature of art, and that “…nowhere are comparisons more odious than in the arts” (141).  Lastly, work and skill with art must be developed as well as appreciated by practitioners of ABR.  “You need refined sensibilities, you need an idea, you need imagination, and you need technical skills” (143).

In reading the first piece by Eisner and Barone I was introduced to a a new world in approaching inquiry, and indeed in finding a place for the aesthetics of art to inform and give meaning in qualitative research.

I will admit at this early stage that the possibilities and questions this addition presents are both overwhelming. I read through Victoria Restler’s dissertation, and initially perceived the artwork as merely complementary non textual media; I needed a framework to understand how the various pieces were more than just additive but integrated and coalesced into the support of the underlying thesis.

It is the Wang, et al paper that provides a framework for how to organize and understand the approach of ABR.  The 3 “families” of classification – Research about Art, Arts Based Research, and Art in Research, delineate perspectives, and clarify function and intent.

I was then able to revisit Restler’s work,  now seeing the use of Art In Research as liberating way of approaching understanding. It enhances the thesis that has been supported both quantitatively and qualitatively in text, and the format introduces meaning, thus broadening understanding that would not exist in the more traditional textual research format.

I’m particularly interested in how the paradox of interpretation between artist intent and audience interpretation will play out.  Will integration of art in support of a thesis lead a reader to the direct conclusion in alignment with the scholars thesis?  Or will the interpretative and deeply subjective perceptions of art inject different meaning and understanding;  that possibly counters the argument of the research?