Saturdays 19 June – 17 July 2010
SOLD OUT

19 June, 12.00-16.00 Level 2 Seminar Room
26 June, 13.00-16.00 Level 2 Seminar Room
3 July, 13.00-16.00 Level 2 Seminar Room
10 July, 13.00-16.00 Level 2 Seminar Room
17 July, 11.00-16.00 Level 2 Starr Auditorium

Led by www.no-w-here.org.uk founder Brad Butler

"The camera tells a lie that the audience tends to believe." (Young)

Nowhere are the politics of image-making more debated than in contemporary anthropology. This five-week course explores the tension between the rawness of the documentary image and the impossibility of anthropological 'truth'. Drawing on the field of experimental ethnography, participants will consider the ambiguous relationship between image, narration and representation and explore ways of re-contextualising or disrupting visual 'evidence' through the creative use of text, voice, sound, performance and space. Emphasis will be placed on participants not only debating issues and watching films but also producing ideas and work for group feedback. Films studied will include work by Ian Breakwell, Jean Rouch, Timothy Asch, Dan Graham and Maya Deren. This course is open to everyone including those interested in visual anthropology, experimental film, documentary and video art.

Please note the course location for Saturday 17 July only is the Starr Auditorium 

Tate Modern  Seminar Room
£90 (£70 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes refreshments

SOLD OUT


  

Course outline:

Course participants will be able to access a private blog space with reading lists, weblinks and over 30 extracts from important works in-between sessions. This space will also allow for participants to be in communication with each other outside of the class and to share their own references and ideas.

Week 1: The Politics of the apparatus
This first session will start with an introduction to key historical developments in the field of Experimental Ethnography. From this introduction it will become increasingly clear that Experimental Ethnography is a multi layered collection of micro-histories, a process of rapid expansion and consolidation of terms and conditions across time. In this session we will engage in several practical exercises and we will also view and discuss the politics of representation in relation to three specific works: The Ax Fight (dir. Timothy Asch), The Girl Chewing Gum (dir. John Smith) and Extracts from the Diary (dir. Ian Breakwell). This will be followed by a discussion about what the tensions, processes and ideas developed in this session mean when applied to contested contemporary images, in this case from Abu Ghraib.

Week 2: Here and Elsewhere
In the film Here and Elsewhere J.-L. Godard and A.-M. Mieville state that the viewer must "Learn to see here, in order to understand elsewhere". This closely follows a line of thought argued by the anthropologist Anna Grimshaw that "What we see cannot be differentiated from how we see". These ideas about 'vision' underpin this session in which we will think about and discuss where the anthropological field is located. How are we to approach material that we generate ourselves? Who is talking on behalf of whom? We will also discuss Marc Auge's contention that modern societies increasingly live through and by image. We will watch extracts from Here and Elsewhere (dir. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Mieville), Enjoy Poverty (dir. Renzo Martens) Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (dir. Johan Grimonprez), The Museum of Accidents (Paul Virilio), You Tube (anon) nostalgia (dir. Hollis Frampton) and The Autonomous Object (dir. Karen Mirza/Brad Butler).

We will end the session with a practical performative exercise: Film without Film.

Week 3: Beyond Text?
In 1994 anthropologist George Marcus wrote about six cinematic structures to be used to expand the language of anthropological text making. This manifesto for future relationships between text and image is all the more exciting as Marcus fails to provide examples for his propositions in all but one case. In this session we will draw from anthropology and the film avant-garde to explore ideas of what this might mean for a future anthropology including current debates around anthropology and the senses (other senses than vision). Starting with no.w.here's own Instructions for Film series, this session will focus on the ideas around the work of G. Perec, J. Rouch, A. Ginsburg, G. Debord, D. Vertov, R. Gardner, Al-Sharif, E. Jacir, L. Bunuel, J. Smith and S. Brakhage. We will discuss the following: the role of anthropologists in Iraq, embedded anthropology, the unreliable narrator, Haptic cinema, Text as Image and Image as Text. The practical exercise in this session will sit in the real of imagination rather than in the real.

Week 4: Open Systems
At the start of this session we will work to consolidate the practical exercises we have done so far and start to form ideas for the final fifth session which will be held in the Starr Auditorium. This will be a concerted drive to think about where the ideas we have been encountering can be realised as a work/situation/event. In particular we will think about how documentary and art practices intertwine as argued in key texts by Peter Wollen, Catherine Russell and Hal Foster, and as evidenced in the work of Martin Arnold, Harun Farocki, Hans Hacke, Sophie Calle, Maya Deren and Vito Acconci. We will also consider voices coming from 'inside' and 'outside' of cultural spaces. This will include early work by Dadasaheb Phalke who argued for an Indian Cinema to be made by Indians for Indians about Indian issues. In our contemporary 'post colonial' condition we will ask ourselves what does this mean for the anthropologists' position in making their work? In the second half of this session we will see how this is being argued by Karen Mirza and course tutor Brad Butler in their recent work The Exception and the Rule and The Museum of Non Participation. This work confronts an arc of issues raised over the previous sessions.

Week 5: (Final session) Performance and Gesture
In this last session participants will seek to embody representational issues raised in weeks 1 to 4 in a series of performed / presented works back to the group for further elaboration and discussion. This will take place in the Starr Auditorium and will be a private session where we can start to draw ideas directly into our own practices in art and beyond.