Artist as Ethnographer: Workshop with Karen Mirza (& Brad Butler)
Artist as Ethnographer: Workshop with Karen Mirza (& Brad Butler)
Tuesday, May 8 @ no-w-here
One of the early interests of our anthropological film “The Exception and the Rule” (2009) was whether we could make a work that invited the viewer to make theory, and not just consume it. That is, to create a filmic space where a viewer actively works through politics of representation for themselves. This mirrored our questioning of the very foundations of our own artistic practice, our imagination, our processes of withdrawal and our political perspective during the making of “The Exception and the Rule”. As a result we began to manifest a context that would envelop, extend and provoke our ideas: a “forcible frame”. The resulting body of work ‘The Museum of non Participation’ is a confluence of 15 years of artistic practice across disciplines, platforms and physical locations. It sits both inside and outside of our long term film practice, offering both a position to speak from and a way to elicit our (common) struggle ‘to speak’. Recent articulations of the Museum have taken place at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and in Spring 2012 we will present a new permutation of this work at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In this talk I will overview key questions and concerns of this museum and how these have manifested into a variety of Acts in Art, Anthropology, Pedagogy and Film.
“Inseparable from economic advantage was the superiority of knowledge. Ownership involved greed, and the advantaged tried as long as possible to block the road to education to the have-nots. The privileges of the ruling class could not be eliminated until we gained insight into the conditions and acquired fundamental knowledge. We kept getting repulsed over and over because our ability to think, deduce and conclude was insufficiently developed. This state of affairs began changing with the realisation that the upper classes essentially opposed out thirst for knowledge. Ever since, our most important goal was to conquer an education, a skill in every field of research, by using any means, cunning and strength of mind. From the very outset, our studying was rebellion”. (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance)
This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 11:20 pm
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