We do not approach visual ethnography exactly like it would be in an anthropology department. As a laboratory space for performative art-making, we would spend a substantial amount of class time in discussing our own regular field work and seeking to transform our field experience into artistic actions, in ways that art-making can find ways to re-inject into our everyday life, thus what we call “creative intervention.”
CASE STUDIES: ARTISTS AROUND THE WORLD
Auto-ethnography: narrativity as interpretation
*Double Game by Sophie Calle (see book & installation & performance) [link]
*Murder & Murder (Yvonne Rainer, 1996?)
Artists’ intervention: “Collecting” and "archive" as creative, critical intervention, history-making
***being there; ***collecting; ***archiving
*The Arcade Project (Walter Benjamin)
*Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982), Immemory (1998)
*Illumination (an video and object installation project on Polish home cinema since 1970s to now, exhibited at London’s White Chapel)
*Vito Hannibal Acconci [link]
*Jo Spence [link] [article on her: "The Wounded Photographer"]
*KUBA (an Artangel projecty by Kutlug Ataman) – see: www.kuba.org.uk (a traveling multiple dvd installation project, exhibited since October 2004 at Pittsburg, then London’s Sorting Office, Stuttgart’s railway station and Sydney’s ferry terminal on Circular Quay, and returning home to Istanbul in 2006) (Kutlag Ataman spent more than two years exploring Kuba, mapping its physical and psychological terrain through the lives of forty inhabitants whose remarkable stories were documented and turned into a multiple DVD installation.)
*"The Atlas Group" and Walid Raad (Beirut) [link] [article on the project: "Missing in Action"]
*Project on Hashem El Madani’s Studio Practices
*Kuba (a 176pp full-color, velvet-bound, photo album with an introduction by Bill Horrigan and extracts from the testimonies of all forty Kuba residents.? See: www.kuba.org.uk
* Enthusiasts: from amateur film clubs (Marysia Lewandowska and Neil Cummings) (White Chapel Gallery, London; relevant texts to the “Enthusiasm,” Polish home cinema exhibition)
*Inventory projects and others from Reading Things (ed. Neil Cummings)
*[CD-Rom] Rimer Cardillo: “from the Purple Land to the Hudson River Valley” (dialogues between and art and anthropology) [Tate Modern Fieldworks: 26-28 September 2003, London]
*[CD-Rom] Eugene Atget: Paris 1900 (Bibliotheque nationale de France)
*[DVD] London Orbital (Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002)
*[DVD] Lagos Wide & Close: an interactive journey into an exploding city (based on research by the Harvard Project on the City under the direction of Rem Koolhaas (directed by Bregtje van der Haak; DVD funded by the Amsterdam Foundation for Visual Arts, Dutch Cultural Broadcasting Fund and VPRO Television)
Artists’ intervention: Performativity, postmodern narratives
*Photography projects by Wendy Eward: "I Dreamed I Had a Girl in My Pocket" (children of Vichya, India) [link], LTP (Literacy Through Photography) Project [link]
*Double Game by Sophie Calle (see book & installation & performance) [link]
*Murder & Murder (Yvonne Rainer, 1996?)
*Maya Deren’s works
*Fredrick Wiseman’s various works [link]
*Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch, 1961)
*Guatemala project: "Creative Arts and Photography in Participatory Action Research in Guatemala" by M. Brinton Lykes (See: Handbook of action research: participative inquiry and practice, edited by Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury; Sage 2001; pp. 363-71)
*Yunnan project [Visual Voices, 100 photographs of village China by the women of Yunnan Province 中國雲南農村婦女自我寫真集]
*Abigail Child’s fabrication history with found footage. [link]
*Tracey Emin (1963- ): Exploration of the Soul (1994); Outside Myself (1995), a large-size colour photo of artist herself with two other works of hers – Exploration of the Soul and There’s a lot of money in Chairs (1994) (Note the auto-ethnographic dimension of her mixed medium series and her fascination with story-telling… Her piece Exploration is a work of herself in dialogue with her other works showing possible connections, i.e. an act of interpretation); also see (already purchased) This is Another Place (Tracey Emin); [DVD] Tracey Emin
Key works: documentary and anthropological films & experimental ethnography
*Robert Flaherty: Nanook of the North (1922), Man of Aran (1934)
*Maya Deren's works
*Fredrick Wiseman’s various works [link]
*Jean Rouch: Chronicle of a Summer (1961), Chasse a l'hippopotame (= Hippopotamus Hunt, 1950), Cocorico monsieur Poulet (1974)
*Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982), Immemory (1998)
*Trinh Minh-ha: Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Reassemblage (1983), Shoot for the Contents (1992)
*Yvonne Rainer: Murder and murder (1996)
*Chantel Akerman: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)
WORKS FOR REFERENCE BY SCM STUDENTS & TEACHERS
AUTO-ETHNOGRAPHY
Video/DV
Recursive / Yvonne LAU / HK 2005 / DV / search for release of body pain
4748 Moons & 13 Elliptical Years / Linda C.H. Lai / HK 2002-5 / video cycle (13 years of video diaries)
Book
Motherism (book project, Irene Kong, 2005 FYP)
Crypto-glyph: dialogues in many tongues in the hidden crevices of an open city (Linda C.H. Lai & Theresa Mikuriya)
*??? (Hung Ying, 2003 FYP)
DIGITAL SERIES/ARCHIVE
Donut-face/Database / Reine Wong / HK 2005
Inter(views)??? (DVD, Zoie So, 2004 FYP)