Chapter 5

Alex:

"In our recent history media information processes have increasingly

influenced the way we live: in 1951 a photo reportage on famine in Bihar (India) by

Werner Bischof for Life magazine influenced the US government’s decision to appropriate

a surplus of wheat (136 million tons) to alleviate the disaster. In the case of both the

Bosnian War and the Gulf War, documentary reports on US and European televisions

and newspapers provoked military intervention, mass panic and humanitarian relief

regardless of the fact that accounts might have lacked correspondence with factual truth

(Virilio 2004)."

This excerpt caused me to think of this comic I saw in the latest edition of Voo Doo, MIT's humor magazine:

The illustration makes a valid point, but why does Syria differ from the examples Cramerotti says he can go on forever with? Ultimately, countless situations that call for help are in the news regularly, but for whatever reason some catch on and others don't. I think there's a reasonable concern about going forward into something that causes more harm than good, or putting one's self in situations where one can come across, even if inadvertently, as attempting to subjugate someone different; however, that shouldn't serve as a blanket excuse for ignorance or inaction. At the same time, however, I sometimes feel like I'm being overly judgmental of people who are more conservative than I am. My mother is friends with a large number of senior citizens from the tennis league she plays in, and many of them went to UC Berkeley back in the day and were as, if not more, liberal than your average RISD student. Yet they all give off this sense of knowing better now, and tell me when I talk to them that one day I'll undergo this shift as well. Perhaps the lackluster response to Syria is part of some broader aging that I can't relate to, yet at least.


Advait:

So, the reason that art is able to draw attention to the representation of life is because it differentiates itself from life? It makes explicit that fact, that translation? Cramerotti’s position, with regards to these distinctions (and our ability to discern these distinctions) ties into what Jon Simons discusses in his essay on politicised aesthetics. There exists this notion of elevated sensuousness, of taste as a powerful kind of knowledge. Such hierarchies are undoubtedly problematic.

Later in this chapter, Cramerotti quotes Umberto Eco, writing that “every work of art…is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings”. The lack of a distinction between art and life has (perhaps) rendered art as meaningless as life (this is not to say that it is a fruitless pursuit, just as life is not a fruitless pursuit). I’m curious about the role of the story, or of meaning and truth, if this is the case. Azoulay wrote about the archive, about the power of art to afford us choices, to reveal alternate histories and constructions. However, if this is the goal (that the process should be infinite, that no single story should emerge, and multiplicities should be pursued), I don’t believe this to be a worthwhile undertaking. I believe it is useful for us to be able to see ourselves in history, to feel as though we have the capacity to tell our story, but the deluge would help no-one. I wonder if there is a kind of strategic essentialism that could be applied to the production of art, or of journalism, or of “story-telling”.

Caroline:

"Silverman goes so far as to say that in a given culture what is ideologically taken for reality is in actual fact a ‘dominant fiction’ (Silverman 1996: 178)."

In my view, chapter 5 ties in with a lot of issues that have been surfacing in class discussions. First, there is the idea that mass media, and what it chooses to represent for many obscure reasons becomes the representation of what we commonly culturally, societally agree as being "reality." One of the ways this has been theorized to happen is that, " since photography embodies two essential features – the spectacle (for the mass) and surveillance (for the government) – it provides the perfect tool for a dominant ideology." Given the undeniable power of mass media as a dominant ideology and a guide for societal behavior, Camerotti puts forth the idea that aesthetic journalism could be a way for artists to appropriate this "legitimate" power of journalism and media in order to fragment and fight back the "single story", the simplified truth that mass media tends to present as reality.

In his response, Advait refers to the mention of Umberto Eco's quote by Camerotti, which says that the advantange in aesthetic journalism is that  “every work of art…is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings.”  My view is that, by letting the work open, the result is not only a fragmentation of realities and the infinite deluge of subjectivities. By letting the work open, the artist also poses an invitation for entering this work by the viewer. More than an invitation, it is an intimation. If at least for a few seconds, the viewer cannot help but be sucked into the world that the work of art is opening and is in some ways forced to activate her imagination. This mechanism of forced interaction and opening up of the imagination is but a small step, but it is a step towards action and future change. One cannot do anything that one cannot imagine. In that sense, I agree with Advait that creating open works of art just for the sake of fragmenting a reality is productive, but it is productive in a sense that it opens up doors for action.

Sierra:

"In this regard, it is crucial to bear in mind the performative aspect of the spectator’s reading or seeing. I borrow the concept from a few theorists who have examined this closely. Jacques Derrida wrote at the beginning of the 1970s that the acts of speaking and showing are both ‘performative acts’; that is, they are operations that galvanise a movement outside of the self, transform a situation and bring forth consequences that are not necessarily those predicted by the author of the speech or show (Derrida 1982). Mieke Bal, on another side, stresses that any aspect of knowledge is not simply received, but also performed. What becomes known and what remains unknown is dependent on the culture and the intention of who is ‘performing’." 

This passage was interesting to me in consideration of how the nature of performing journalistic knowledge compares with the performance of artistic knowledge. Cramerotti earlier states that "I am not suggesting here that journalism is the same thing as art; they differ in essence, the former being a coded method, the latter a practice that constantly questions itself and its means." Because the journalistic method has been standardized for so long, the consumption of information through its industries is familiar to audiences while in an artistic context (galleries or shows), performance of knowledge is more ambiguous because the means of providing information is always changing as well as the ways in which to read it. "If artistic, political or journalistic manifestations are equivalent in their structure, what appears as knowledge (awareness of facts and situations) is only knowable through the practices that we use and are familiar with: this position is not outside the existing world, but embedded in it." I can see how in some ways creating artistic content is benefitted by the dynamic nature of its methods, which calls for vigilance from its viewers in interpretation. At the same time, if the performance of artistic knowledge is ever changing, unable to become standardized, I wonder if as a platform it will ever be capable of rivaling that of journalistic media, as cramerotti idealized in the beginning of the book, when the latter has the advantage of comfort and stability.