Giving the Body a Voice: Introduction to the Cameraethnographic Approach (original) (raw)
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The Erotic Gaze: Documentary, Performance and the Body
This article was published only in spanish in the magazine of the University of Los Andes in Colombia "Antipoda" (https://antipoda.uniandes.edu.co/view.php/143/index.php?id=143) It reflects upon the idea of David MacDougall that ethnographic films are in fact declarations of love, in the sense that more than just representations of reality, films articulate complex crossing points of ideas, feelings and emotions, which have traditionally been left “outside the frame” of the anthropological and ethnographic texts. Emotions are left aside to be published in other kinds of texts as the Diary of Bronislaw Malinowsky, (published in 1967) or as Bill Nichols would say, emotions are left aside in “the anthropological unconscious”. In this essay I work around the ideas of ethnographic filmmaking as a performance related practice and the possibility of achieving an erotic of the gaze that conceives film as the inscription of experience. An erotic of the gaze may overcome the difference and hierarchy established in the ethnographic filmmaking practice and help to form a new connexion and interaction in the field with the subjects: a performance or interaction that doesn’t leave out the emotional part of the relationship, since film must reflect also on this level of “reality”. Key words: emotion, communication, visual anthropology, film, performance, ethnography,
In Visual Pleasure, Laura Mulvey describes how human curiosity and the desire to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. 1 Mulvey's analysis of scopophilia, deriving pleasure from looking, emphasizes recognition and misrecognition in objectivity and self-image. " The image recognised is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior, projects this body outside itself as an ideal ego, the alienated subject." (Ibid., 17) Consequently, this misrecognition is caused by the gendered difference in spectator and image representation. Mulvey argues that there is a "determining male gaze" in mainstream cinema, which "projects its fantasy onto the female figure," creating a split between the active male and passive female. 2 For this reason, the scopophilic pleasure in looking by way of cinematic forms continues to determine the female body as a sexual object.
RETURNING THE RADIANT GAZE: Visual Art and Embodiment in a World of Subjects
The Goose: Journal of the Association for Literature, Environment + Culture in Canada (ALECC), 2018
Drawing on the latter thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as on the ideas of other contemporary philosophers and theorists, this essay considers the denigration of vision from Plato to twentieth-century antioccularism, and argues for the reclamation of vision and visual perception as sensuous, embodied interplay between humans and world, self and other–an opening to wonder and more sensitive human-world relations. It does so through a phenomenological exploration of the process of art-making, and consideration of the role and value of artworks and images in the world. This essay is first and foremost an enquiry. As such it promises no final conclusions but is rather a process, a journey through the contested territory of the sensual world of art and vision. Recommended Citation Carruthers, Beth (2018) "Returning the Radiant Gaze: Visual Art and Embodiment in a World of Subjects," The Goose: Vol. 17 : Iss. 1 , Article 32. Available at: https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol17/iss1/32
Art as experience of the living body, Introduction
Art as experience of the living body, an East/West experience, 2023
This book analyses the dynamic relationship between art and subjective consciousness, following a phenomenological, pragmatist and enactive approach. It brings out a new approach to the role of the body in art, not as a speculative object or symbolic material but as the living source of the imaginary. It contains theoretical contributions and case studies taken from various artistic practices (visual art, theatre, literature and music), Western and Eastern, the latter concerning China, India and Japan. These contributions allow us to nourish the debate on embodied cognition and aesthetics, using theoryphilosophy, art history, neuroscience-and the authors' personal experience as artists or spectators. According to the Husserlian method of "reduction" and pragmatist introspection, they postulate that listening to bodily sensations-cramps, heartbeats, impulsive movements, eye orientation-can unravel the thread of subconscious experience, both active and affective, that emerge in the encounter between a subject and an artwork, an encounter which, following John Dewey, we deem to be a case study for life in general. Ce livre analyse la relation dynamique entre l'art et la conscience subjective, selon une approche phénoménologique, pragmatiste et enactive. Il vise à faire émerger une nouvelle approche du rôle du corps dans l'art, non pas comme objet spéculatif ou matériau symbolique, mais comme source vivante de l'imaginaire. Les contributions théoriques et les études de cas sont prises à diverses pratiques artistiques (arts visuels, théâtre, littérature et musique), occidentales et orientales, ces dernières concernant la Chine, l'Inde et le Japon. Selon la méthode husserlienne de « réduction », en écho à l'introspection pragmatiste, les textes témoignent que l'écoute des sensations corporelles-crampes, battements de coeur, mouvements pulsionnels, orientation des yeux-mises en jeu par l'oeuvre, permet de dénouer le fil de l'expérience inconsciente, à la fois kinesthésique et affective, qui émerge dans la rencontre entre un sujet et une oeuvre d'art, une rencontre comprise, à la manière de Dewey, comme un cas d'école de la vie en général. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) is an art historian and museum curator (emeritus). She is an Associate researcher with Héritages (CYU) and a member of the Doctoral School 628-AHSS. Her research relates to the capacity of art to transform representations within an individual and in the collective mind, through embodied, mnemonic, and affective processes, in a global, comparative (East/west context). She works at the crossroads of art theory, anthropology, and neuroaesthetics. Christine Vial Kayser (PhD, HDR) est historienne de l'art et conservatrice de musée (émérite). Elle est chercheur associé à Héritages (CYU) et membre de l'ED 628-AHSS. Ses recherches portent sur la capacité de l'art à transformer les représentations au sein d'un individu et dans le cadre collectif, à travers des processus incarnés, mémoriels et affectifs, dans un contexte global et comparatif (Est/Ouest). Elle travaille au croisement de la théorie de l'art, de l'anthropologie et de la neuroesthétique.
My paper seeks to explore interlinks between gender, photography and pleasure and how gender is mediated through photography in the works of Barbara Kruger, Orlan and Cindy Sherman, who use the female, gendered and erotic body in order to rewrite the parameters of happiness and 'jouissance' by producing ad-scapes and photographs which bespeak the suture between the 'femaleness' of identity and the stereotypical notions of aesthetic female beauty as they are valorised and canonised in the West. In the first instance, the photographs themselves serve as an instance of the commodification of desire and pleasure in consumerist culture. Yet beyond their fetishistic value, they also exemplify an attempt to undermine phallogocentric discourse and the objectifying, 'penetrating' and all-seeing male gaze. By drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Cadava, Benjamin, Barthes and Sontag I hope to show that although such photographic representations can be extremely empowering and engaging in light of the various provocative issues they raise in relation to gender and the female body, they also freeze and stultify the female body in a kind of temporal death by placing it into and within the photographic frame and locking it into a framework of reciprocal (mostly male) gazes and exchanges.
Working on Gazes : An Example for Artistic Research
2014
Situated at the boundary between Liberal Arts and diverse scientific approaches, artistic research has been developed within the last few years in terms of admitting various forms of knowledge acquisition. My presentation will deal with a film project which is actually not meant to be artistic research: In „Through the Eyes of Others“ Heike Schuppelius (2001) sent out four performers equipped with video-glasses (a small, not visible camera, built into ordinary spectacles) on foot through a certain area. The resulting filmed sequences are determined by the field of vision and by the head movements of the participants. The scenes are therefore supposed to present an approximation of the authentic view-point of the performer. They follow up the subjective awareness of a path determined by the actions and reactions, personal customs and interests of each of the acting persons. Also unplanned events, chance encounters and the urban environment are written into the film. I argue that this...
The Implications of an Ethnographic Approach to Portraiture
The dissertation explores contemporary portraiture by two well-known photographers who have used an ethnographic approach to their work. Beach Portraits by Rineke Dijkstra and Signs That Say by Gillian Wearing are analysed using theories outlined by Roland Barthes, Richard Brilliant and Julian Stallabrass. The ethnography of the late 19th century is known to be objectifying resulting in the “control” of the subject. The role of ethnography within these contemporary portraits is also seen as objectifying. Regarding objectification, representation and identity this paper explores the methods, origins, and approaches within the artists work. A number of their images are compared and discussed answering the following questions, are the methods they have used an effective way of revealing the subject’s identity? How can we have a universal method deal with the specifics of an individual and unique identities? How can these groups of works overcome or salvage uniqueness out of seemingly shared identities? The paper shows that by using the ethnographic method it suppresses individuality under social masking and self-representation. To overcome this dilemma the investigation reveals that the subject’s handwritten text from Wearing’s Signs series adds individuality; in other words, it is the text that dilutes the universality of the pose revealing their unique identities.