Nicole wallace thesisproposalpowerpoint_04_12_2013
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Nicole wallace thesisproposalpowerpoint_04_12_2013
- 1. Film + Photography as a Social Art: Occupy Oakland and the desire to be heard. Nicole Wallace MA Candidate '14 | Art & Curatorial Practice in the Public Sphere University of Southern California April 12, 2013
- 2. “Ballerina Dancing on Wall Street Charging Bull,” 2011 Adbusters #97: Post Anarchism — How To Live Without Dead Time, Sept/Oct issue 2011 ( Adbusters #97, cover image)
- 4. Portraits from the Occupation Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven Screen Shots, The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 1, 2010, http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/portraits-occupation
- 5. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland JR and Celsa Dockstader Screen Shot, Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “About,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com
- 6. “Aphasia,” 2011 Li Chen part of the exhibition: Occupy Bay Area, 2012, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Li Chen, ”Aphasia," Vimeo, Video Sharing For You. Web. Accessed March, 6 2013.still image, <https://vimeo.com/60402827>.
- 7. “Aphasia” “Portraits from the Occupation” “Inside Out, Occupy Oakland” Li Chen Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven JR and Celsa Dockstader 2011 2012 2012 Occupy Bay Area, YBCA The Oakland Standard
- 8. Martha Rosler, Decoys and disruptions: Selected Writings, 1975-2001 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press in association with International Center of Photography, New York, 2004)
- 9. Portraits from the Occupation Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven Screen Shots, The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 1, 2010, http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/portraits-occupation
- 10. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland JR and Celsa Dockstader Screen Shot, Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “About,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com
- 11. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland JR and Celsa Dockstader Urban Exhibition, Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “In the Streets,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com
- 12. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland JR and Celsa Dockstader Urban Exhibition, Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “In the Streets,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com
- 13. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland JR and Celsa Dockstader Installation Photo, Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “In the Streets,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com
- 14. Occupy Bay Area, 2012 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Curator: Betti-Sue Hertz Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Occupy Bay Area, Jul 7-Oct 14 2012, accessed April 2, 2010, http://www.ybca.org/occupy-bay-area#curator_statement
- 15. “Aphasia,” 2011 Li Chen part of the exhibition: Occupy Bay Area, 2012, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Li Chen, ”Aphasia," Vimeo, Video Sharing For You. Web. Accessed March, 6 2013.still image, <https://vimeo.com/60402827>.
- 16. “Aphasia” “Portraits from the Occupation” “Inside Out, Occupy Oakland” Li Chen Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven JR and Celsa Dockstader 2011 2012 2012 Occupy Bay Area, YBCA The Oakland Standard
- 18. Bibliography Abramovich, Alex. London Review of Books Blog. March 18, 2011 comment on “Portraits from the Occupation.” accessed on April 1, 2013, http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/05/18/alex-abramovich/portraits-from-the-occupation/ Hall, Stuart, and Open University. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage in association with the Open University, 1998. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “About,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “Kickstarter,” accessed April 4, 2013 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/insideoutoccupy/inside-out-occupy-oakland Lang, Amy Schrager and Daniel Lang/Levitsky. Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist, 2012 Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara and Jessica Hoffmann Davis. The Art and Science of Portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997 Mitchell, W.J.T. “What do pictures want?” Journal of Visual Culture 6 (1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009 Rosler, Martha. "In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography" in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Richard Bolton, ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990 Rosler, Martha. “Post-Documentary; Post-Photography,” Decoys and disruptions: Selected writings, 1975-2001. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press in association with International Center of Photography, New York, 2004 Schwendener, Martha. "Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation." Afterimage 39, no. 5 (2012): 4-7. Accessed April 3, 2013. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1001398790?accountid=1474 The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 1, 2010 http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/portraits-occupation Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Occupy Bay Area, Jul 7-Oct 14 2012, accessed April 2, 2010, http://www.ybca.org/occupy-bay- area#curator_statement
Editor's Notes
- In the fall of 2011 the Occupy Movement, influenced by the Arab Spring, the European Summer, and, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was gaining rapid momentum and quickly drawing the attention of artists all across America. An international protest movement against social and economic inequality (originally initiated by a call from Adbusters) attracted a large and diverse public eager for political and economic reform. According to art critic Martha Schwendener in her article Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation, “OWS dovetailed in many ways with current strains of art, like social practice, in which artists function more as event planners, organizers, sociologists, and activists, and participation that involves art made or completed by groups rather than singular, individual "geniuses.”
- After OWS, Occupy Oakland (OO) was the most visible American Occupy. OO became a constant presence in the news media and can be seen as microcosm for the whole Occupy Movement. Due to the pervasive media coverage of OO.several collaborative projects using documentary photography and film (Portraits of the Occupation; Inside Out, Occupy Oakland; and Occupy Bay Area) were brought to fruition by artists and Bay Area institutions in an attempt to represent the complexity and the myriad of perspectives from the Occupy Oakland movement, and to give a “voice” to those marginalized or ignored by the mainstream media. The tension between mainstream journalistic representations of the “other” and the art world’s critique of those practices is nothing knew. The uncomfortable interlude of photographic journalism within a contemporary art context, as ChusMartínez called it in his article on the 2010 Whitney Biennial published in Art Forum International the same year, remains relevant today as most of what we know about Occupy Oakland is through mainstream media images and video. The conscious choice to use documentary photography and film within the three projects listed above provokes questions regarding the role of documentary today, notwithstanding the paradox inherent in distinguishing documentary as both social art practice and news media.
- In order to begin to investigate these questions, I will be examining three projects working with documentary in different ways as catalysts for starting a dialogue that precludes social change. All three projects are related to issues surrounding Occupy Oakland: notions of identity, gender, class relations, and specifically include the use of portraiture. The first project I’d like to discuss, entitled Portraits from the Occupation, was commissioned by the Oakland Standard in 2012 and conceived by Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven. The Oakland Standard was a two-year experimental initiative by the Oakland Museum of California. Oakland Standard projects took many forms, including blogs, workshops, meals, films, and artist installations. Portraits from the Occupation comprised of a series of video interviews with sixteen individuals involved with or impacted by OO. The project was conceived by the artists and commissioned by the Oakland Standard to capture the complexity of the Occupy Oakland movement and to document a moment of social unrest that will have historical resonance.First screened on May 5, 2012 at the Oakland Museum of California, Portraits from the Occupation has remained available online as a permanent archive on the Oakland Standard website. The collaboration between Abramovich and Raven highlights an uncomfortable dichotomy of journalist as artist and vise-a-versa (Abramovich: journalist; Raven: artist) How did the two come together on this project? How does this project relate to their individual careers? Why use documentary? A writer/journalist hailing from Queens, NY, Abramovich has worked and written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other newspapers and periodicals. Lucy Raven is a filmmaker and artist currently teaching at the California College of the Arts.The Oakland Standard was a two-year experimental initiative by the Oakland Museum of California. Oakland Standard projects took many forms, including blogs, workshops, meals, films, and artist installations. The Oakland Standard, “People”
- Focusing more on the power of photography, the second project Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, is part of a global participatory art project created by French artist JR (recipient of the 2011 TED Prize) that uses large-scale portraits to transform messages of identity into powerful urban exhibitions. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland is an ongoing collaborative project locally spearheaded by University of California, Berkeley graduate and Oakland based photographer CelsaDockstader. To date, 44 portraits of individuals involved in the Occupy Oakland movement have been taken and legally posted—through owner approval—all over the city of Oakland from brick walls, to metal garage doors, to fences, rooftops, smokestacks, alleyways, windows, and many other creative locations. Dockstader believes that the strength of Occupy lies in the fact that a professor, a laborer, an artist, a student, an immigrant, the unemployed, and a business owner can stand together in an effort for change.
- The work I will discuss is by artist Li Chen called “Aphasia”. Aphasia is a disease caused by damage to parts of the brain that are responsible for performing language and speech functions. This project—combining mostly documentary photos and audio, but edited as a film—considers the Occupy Oakland Movement from a Chinese girl's perspective. On the surface, it talks about democracy in America, but it alludes to democracy in China as well.Returning to notions of subjective positions of production, I will not only examine this work individually, but also within the larger context of the exhibition itself. What was the curatorial inspiration for including this works? How does it exist in dialogue with the rest of works in the show, which include political posters, installations, paintings, and sculpture. From the exhibition catalog we learn: “In response to the significant output of art and documentation produced in support of the Occupy Movement in Oakland and San Francisco, YBCA has put together an exhibition of works that have proven to be particularly effective in supporting the goals and aspirations of the Movement… In many ways these works, by twenty-five Bay Area artists, carry forward the region’s long tradition as a leader in political struggles, from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, to struggles by communities of color in the 1970s, to AIDS activism in the 1980s. The exhibition also includes a selection of photojournalistic and documentary photography and video that serve as a record of the events around the Occupy Movement.” This exhibition also included a range of lectures and panel discussions (that remain available online), performances, and events.
- When thinking about documentary practices one cannot help but look to Martha Rolser who has written extensively on the subject since the early 1980s. Rosler’s influential essay “In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography” first published in 1981, questioned the status and efficacy of documentary photography as a medium for social and political change. In fact, she argues that “The exposé, the compassion and outrage, of documentary fueled by the dedication to reform has shaded over into combinations of exoticism, tourism, voyeurism, psychologism, and metaphysics, trophy hunting—and careerism.” In 2001, Rosler returned to the topic of documentary photography in her article, “Post-Documentary, Post-Photography” suggesting that documentary photographers should strive to strike a balance between “observing the situation of others and expressing one’s own point of view and that this should be done within the context of an analytic framework that proposes remedies.” In this latter article, Rosler states that the pressures and difficulties should not deter people from doing documentary work, but rather inspire change in their modes of production. She suggests that a possible methodology for overcoming the inherent problems of documentary work is to empower the subjects to create self-representations (something we see in these three projects).In lieu of the rise of social art practice over the last decade, I am interested in examining contemporary documentary photography and film produced as a result of Occupy Oakland in relation to Rosler’s critiques: are her arguments relevant within the context of social practice today? Since our understanding of social art practices have shifted, how we interact with these photographs and films has changed. How does the public engage with a photograph and/or a film of a particular event—such as OO— published in a mass media outlet, versus an image/film of the same event exhibited in a museum or within a public space? Acknowledging the act of “observation” inherent within documentary, an extensive consideration of ethnography and social anthropology must also be considered, including the study of visual representation and reception across different cultural contexts.
- In order to begin to investigate these questions, I will be examining three projects working with documentary in different ways as catalysts for starting a dialogue that precludes social change. All three projects are related to issues surrounding Occupy Oakland: notions of identity, gender, class relations, and specifically include the use of portraiture. The first project I’d like to discuss, entitled Portraits from the Occupation, was commissioned by the Oakland Standard in 2012 and conceived by Alex Abramovich and Lucy Raven. The Oakland Standard was a two-year experimental initiative by the Oakland Museum of California. Oakland Standard projects took many forms, including blogs, workshops, meals, films, and artist installations. Portraits from the Occupation comprised of a series of video interviews with sixteen individuals involved with or impacted by OO. The project was conceived by the artists and commissioned by the Oakland Standard to capture the complexity of the Occupy Oakland movement and to document a moment of social unrest that will have historical resonance.First screened on May 5, 2012 at the Oakland Museum of California, Portraits from the Occupation has remained available online as a permanent archive on the Oakland Standard website. The collaboration between Abramovich and Raven highlights an uncomfortable dichotomy of journalist as artist and vise-a-versa (Abramovich: journalist; Raven: artist) How did the two come together on this project? How does this project relate to their individual careers? Why use documentary? A writer/journalist hailing from Queens, NY, Abramovich has worked and written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and other newspapers and periodicals. Lucy Raven is a filmmaker and artist currently teaching at the California College of the Arts.The Oakland Standard was a two-year experimental initiative by the Oakland Museum of California. Oakland Standard projects took many forms, including blogs, workshops, meals, films, and artist installations. The Oakland Standard, “People”
- Focusing more on the power of photography, the second project Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, is part of a global participatory art project created by French artist JR (recipient of the 2011 TED Prize) that uses large-scale portraits to transform messages of identity into powerful urban exhibitions. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland is an ongoing collaborative project locally spearheaded by University of California, Berkeley graduate and Oakland based photographer CelsaDockstader. To date, 44 portraits of individuals involved in the Occupy Oakland movement have been taken and legally posted—through owner approval—all over the city of Oakland from brick walls, to metal garage doors, to fences, rooftops, smokestacks, alleyways, windows, and many other creative locations. Dockstader believes that the strength of Occupy lies in the fact that a professor, a laborer, an artist, a student, an immigrant, the unemployed, and a business owner can stand together in an effort for change.
- Finally, I’d like to incorporate a documentary short film from the 2012 exhibition Occupy Bay Area curated by Betti-Sue Hertz, Director of Visual Arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).
- The work I will discuss is by artist Li Chen called “Aphasia”. Aphasia is a disease caused by damage to parts of the brain that are responsible for performing language and speech functions. This project—combining mostly documentary photos and audio, but edited as a film—considers the Occupy Oakland Movement from a Chinese girl's perspective. On the surface, it talks about democracy in America, but it alludes to democracy in China as well.Returning to notions of subjective positions of production, I will not only examine this work individually, but also within the larger context of the exhibition itself. What was the curatorial inspiration for including this works? How does it exist in dialogue with the rest of works in the show, which include political posters, installations, paintings, and sculpture. From the exhibition catalog we learn: “In response to the significant output of art and documentation produced in support of the Occupy Movement in Oakland and San Francisco, YBCA has put together an exhibition of works that have proven to be particularly effective in supporting the goals and aspirations of the Movement… In many ways these works, by twenty-five Bay Area artists, carry forward the region’s long tradition as a leader in political struggles, from the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s, to struggles by communities of color in the 1970s, to AIDS activism in the 1980s. The exhibition also includes a selection of photojournalistic and documentary photography and video that serve as a record of the events around the Occupy Movement.” This exhibition also included a range of lectures and panel discussions (that remain available online), performances, and events.
- As a starting point, four topics of discussion are of particular interest to me —1) the hybridization of documentation and social practice, 2) the notion of “site-responsive” versus “site-specific” works, 3) the impact of the digital age not only on the modes of photographic reproduction, accessibility, circulation, and manipulation, but also on our reception of those images within a media saturated society, and, 4) how the de-professionalization of media experimentaion has bridged the gap between documentary journalism, self-coverage, and art-making. Within a society where we can no longer escape the pervasiveness of digital media, how are artists using documentary photography (one of the most universal of media) and film as a catalyst for social change and/or social awareness? It will be important to consider, however, due to this pervasiveness and accessibility that the production of photographic images no longer rests solely in the hands of the professional elite; content is now considered to be the right of anyone technologically enabled.
- At this point, I would like to address the methodologies I intend to employ in relation to my inquiries. I will discuss the concepts of pedagogy and sociology, and their relationship to social practice specific to the San Francisco Bay Area’s socio-political landscape and demographics. The first two projects in many ways mirror the pedagogy outlined by Pablo Helguera in his book Education for Socially Engaged Art. I would like to explore these ideas (in addition to other writings on social practice by Claire Bishop and Grant Kestler) further, while bringing in additional elements of theoretical discourse surrounding documentary photography/film by writers like Fred Ritchen, David Levi Strauss, and Abigail Solomon Godeau. Lastly, it will be pertinent to include theories on portraiture, gender representation, and economic theories as they relate to the Occupy Movement and each of the three projects discussed.
- Abramovich, Alex. London Review of Books Blog. March 18, 2011 comment on “Portraits from the Occupation.” accessed on April 1, 2013, http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/05/18/alex-abramovich/portraits-from-the-occupation/ Hall, Stuart, and Open University. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage in association with the Open University, 1998. Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “About,” accessed April 3, 2013, http://insideoutoccupyoakland.wordpress.com Inside Out, Occupy Oakland, “Kickstarter,” accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/insideoutoccupy/inside-out-occupy-oakland Lang, Amy Schrager and Daniel Lang/Levitsky. Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement. Oxford, UK: New Internationalist, 2012 Lawrence-Lightfoot, Sara and Jessica Hoffmann Davis. The Art and Science of Portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997 Mitchell, W.J.T. “What do pictures want?” Journal of Visual Culture 6 (1). Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 2005. Ritchin, Fred. After Photography. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009 Rosler, Martha. "In, Around, and Afterthoughts: On Documentary Photography" in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Richard Bolton, ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990 Rosler, Martha. “Post-Documentary; Post-Photography,” Decoys and disruptions: Selected writings, 1975-2001. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press in association with International Center of Photography, New York, 2004 Schwendener, Martha. "Arts & Labor in the Age of Occupation." Afterimage 39, no. 5 (2012): 4-7. Accessed April 3, 2013. http://search.proquest.com/docview/1001398790?accountid=1474 The Oakland Standard, “Portraits from the Occupation,” accessed April 1, 2010http://museumca.org/theoaklandstandard/portraits-occupation Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Occupy Bay Area, Jul 7-Oct 14 2012, accessed April 2, 2010, http://www.ybca.org/occupy-bay-area#curator_statement