If, fifteen years ago, you had predicted that documentary work
would come to make up a large and influential strand of contemporary
art, the idea would have seemed absurd.It would have been said that
documentary had surely had its day, perishing with the liberal politics
that had nourished it; and along with it, naïve ideas about humanitarian
reform and the ability of visual representation to capture reality. Yet
documentary work, often of an explicitly political character, and made
particularly in photography and video, is now increasingly common on the
global biennial scene.There are three linked reasons behind this
striking change: economic, technological and political.
- Economically, the growth of the biennial scene is part of
the general globalisation of contemporary art. As artists from many
nations outside of the US and Western Europe came to prominence, they
often brought with them distinct political positions and perspectives
that were quite alien from those of the old art world centres.
- Technologically, it has become much easier and cheaper to make
high-quality photography and video, and the media landscape has been
changed beyond recognition by mass participation through social media.
- Politically, given the events of September 11, 2001 and the
conflicts that followed, politics and its representation were pushed
violently to the fore.
This course will explore that transformation, and the
contrasting theoretical, political and economic accounts of its causes.
It will examine the great variety of work made under the broad term
'documentary', and the political, aesthetic and rhetorical affinities of
the term. It also considers the theories and history of documentary,
from its first heyday in the 1930s through to the present.The rise of a
documentary tendency in contemporary art has been accompanied by a
theoretical reconsideration of the once-despised term: we will be
reading theorists and historians including Ariella Azoulay, Judith
Butler, TJ Demos, Georges Didi-Huberman, Susie Linfield, Jacques
Rancière and Susan Sontag. We will be looking at the works of such
artists as Ursula Biemann, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Edmund
Clark, Haroun Farocki, Omer Fast, David Goldblatt, Alfredo Jaar, Silvia
Kolbowski, An-My Le, Trinh T. Min-ha, Walid Ra'ad, Allan Sekula and Hito
Steyerl.Throughout the course, we will look closely at critical and
theoretical texts, as well as conducting a series of in-depth case
studies, focusing on current exhibitions, artists' lectures and visits
to artists or curators. The course includes a study visit to a major
biennial or photographic festival in the Autumn or Spring term. Students
will be actively encouraged to develop their own research interests in
the context of a seminar with a strong collaborative ethos.
