'Words Have a Charge': Six Moments from a Dialogue with Homi K. Bhabha (original) (raw)
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2012
The thesis puts forward close readings of Amar Kanwar's essay film A Season Outside (1997) and the multiscreen installation The Lightning Testimonies (2007) to explore how an ethicalpolitical spectatorial mode is produced in the two documentary-based artworks. The applied understanding of an ethical-political mode is derived from what Okwui Enwezor claims is a new articulation of the ethical-political in contemporary art, located in the encounter between the artwork and the spectator as an increased sensitivity to the other, related to human rights, biopolitics and the consequences of globalization. The readings of the two artworks suggest that a particular "community of sense" is produced by means of an allegorical layering of polysemic narrative structures that interlace different texts of communalism, colonialism and nationalism from the Indian subcontinent. As evoked by Jacques Rancière, a "community of sense" designates the sensory fabric that binds human beings together, thinking politics as a sharing of the sensible. The narrative techniques also draw on features of Indian narrative traditions incorporated into new art history in India, and aspects of storytelling, as viewed by Walter Benjamin. The readings propose that the image-word operations at play and a heterogeneous exchange of media approaches the allegorical qualities and paratactic logics in what Rancière terms "the great parataxis" as an organizing principle with renewed political force within the aesthetical regime. The result is a kind of community of sense where the spectator as a site of meaning-making is woven into the composition of the work to create emancipation and a politics of plurals. The textual perspective offers a different approach than previous research history regarding the artist, suggesting that a narrative approach opens the image-word relations onto another political function. The textual optics enables an understanding of how the sense community of the artwork is construed, but does not access questions of embodied perception and affect in screen spectatorship. The thesis was a part of the master's program of the research program CULCOM (Cultural complexity in the new Norway), University of Oslo. If the world is a book of words and images, it comes with an ethics of transnational reading, according to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The book is also a vast network of signs, and as we go along we produce text even as we are written in text not of our own making. In this fabric we are together building sense communities, attesting to the political importance of being sensed. This text of course would not have been possible without the articulations of the others. My deep gratitude goes to all those who have helped me on the way: To Amar Kanwar who shared his time and most generously let me sit watching for days in a studio in Saket, New Delhi; to Sanjay, who came by with a smile and a cup of tea; to Shomo, Ravi and Dorothea, Gargi, Julie and all the others who enlightened my restricted competence in India, as anywhere else; to Levin, who provided the shelter; to Ragnhild and Finn, who helped to keep befuddlement at bay; to dear family and friends in extended family; to Tom, who always believed in me; and to those who tried to talk me out of the venture-we all belong to the same universe of learning. The faults, however, are mine alone and, as always, serve to provide yet another possibility of understanding. CULCOM provided the grant and the abundant interdisciplinary support to set off, and IFIKK also kindly contributed to the travels of this text, between Oslo, Paris and New Delhi. Gallery Marian Goodman shared essential research material, and the images. Holly T. Monteith helped with proofreading. At the Humboldt, the late David Craven taught me a lesson or two about Hans Haacke with a most generous intellectual spirit that lives on. As a lecturer and supervisor, Ina Blom's sharp eye and thinking have been a strong presence in my attempts to access the field of art history from the present. Elisabeth Eide, as in a previous passage to Delhi, reminded me to keep the necessary grounding in political realities. Thank you for your poetic minds in the academic world. My profound thanks go to my parents, who, with unwavering support, took care of my daughter Tyra in the best of ways, which made it possible to navigate the work through its final stage.
Panel 3 ASA2015: Visual anthropology in the New World society (2015)
Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA15), 2015
The rapid expansion of visual anthropology has evolved through new social networking technologies, which have contributed to the widening of the ethnographic scope, but at the same time, limiting ethnographic film-making to a technique without a substantiated anthropological vision or theoretical aim, raising the question of relevance of contemporary anthropology to the rapid changes in world history. Furthermore, the visual turn inwards, towards subjectivity and self-reflection as the new metaphysics of anthropology, unearthed old methodological issues regarding representation and interpretation, manifested in the widening gap between anthropological theory and ethnographic practice (Asad 1973, Bourdieu 1977, Clifford and Marcus 1986, Grimshaw and Hart 1996, et al). This raises further questions regarding the ethnographic authority in respect to realism and the ethnographer's presence in the field (Foster 1990, Grimshaw 2001, et al). Since visual anthropology has lost its 'objective' claim to reality, which has been traditionally the source of anthropological authority, where does this leave our discipline, particularly in relation to the current changes in world history? Furthermore, how and where are the boundaries of visual anthropology defined in relation to art film-making and the avant-garde, and how can visual anthropologists reclaim their ethnographic authority? This panel invites papers that will contribute to the investigation of the boundaries between visual anthropology and visual arts, on the one hand, by looking at various ways in which the two fields co-emerge in a fruitful manner, and on the other, by re-examining their historical and social relevance to world history.
Introduction Writing Visual Culture Volume 9.0
Writing Visual Culture, 2020
Introduction to the peer-reviewed volume published by the Theorising Visual Art and Design (TVAD) research group based in the School of Creative Arts, University of Hertfordshire. The volume includes papers from the 2019 TVAD international symposium, Artists and the Philosophers We Love.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in …
Review By Debasish Lahiri The idea of vision and the idea as vision have a very long history. Idea derives from the Greek verb meaning 'to see'. This deep etymology signals towards the fact that the way one thinks about the way one thinks in Western culture is guided by a visual paradigm. In such a scheme of things looking, seeing and knowing become perilously intertwined. Thus the manner in which one comes to understand the concept of an 'idea' is deeply bound up with issues of 'appearance' of picture, and of image. As the early Wittgenstein had stated, a picture is a fact; and a logical picture of facts is an idea. In fact 'visual culture' has emerged as a history of images rather than a history of art. The visual never comes pure; it is always contaminated by the stain of other senses, touched by other texts and discourses. It is not now a question of replacing the blindness of the 'linguistic turn' with the 'new' blindnesses of the 'visual turn.' To hypostasize the visual risks of reinstalling the hegemony of the 'noble' sense, the visual, we may argue, is 'languaged,' just as language itself has a visual dimension. Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture approaches the content and form of Western intellectual history in terms of how they 'look'. The manifest phono-logo-centrism of the volume about 'visualising' culture attests to this point. A general pattern emerges in the essays of the volume whereby we begin from visual forms and talk and theorize and achieve understanding of those forms through mental constructs. The book, in fact, takes off from the complaint that the siblings Poetry (read literature) and Painting have fallen into a disquieting ekphrasis and need to be called back from their esoteric exiles on the margins of modernity. This project of mutually remembering the tattered body of Western art and literary copia under a metaphysical cupola begins in the Early Modern period and extends to the 19th century visual stratification of political power in revolutionary France.