Documentary reborn: Photography, film and video in global contemporary art

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.

American Media: Publicity and the Logics of Surveillance - Stephanie Schwartz

‘We have become a society of surveillance.’ This refrain, once the stuff of fiction and born out on the pages of George Orwell’s now prescient 1984, is today a hackneyed fact. We have become a society obsessed with—as well as frightened of and exhilarated by—burgeoning technologies of surveillance. For some, the reiteration of this fact merely contributes to our complacency, to our embrace and internalization of the state’s surveillant eye. For others, it is a reminder that we are a society in urgent need of surveillant literacy.

This seminar addresses this need through a historical examination of the emergence of new devices for seeing, looking, counting, filing and recording in the 19th and 20th centuries. Our goal is not—or not simply—to acknowledge the historical precedents for today’s ‘Big Brother’ in earlier photographic and filmic practices. It is to suggest that any investigation of the post-9/11 frenzy with looking and seeing, witnessing and being seen requires a parallel investigation of how we think about, examine, critique and historicize technology. Focusing on a set of key episodes in the history of American media (1880s-1950s), this seminar calls into question what counts as a technology of surveillance. Is it the eye? Is it the lens? Or is it the ways in which the eye and the lens mediate new social spaces and publics? Should we focus on the visual or the ways in which new technologies—from statistics to biometrics, for example—account for and address the limits of looking?

The seminar is divided into four sections, opening with an examination of how we historicize technologies and how those histories have shaped our histories of surveillance. Of particular importance to this conversation will be recent debates about digitalization and the claim that photographic truth is no longer possible. What are the implications of this history for the ways we look at the past? Was truth ever the goal of recording devices and spying eyes? Taking this theoretical ground as our starting point, the class will explore three aspects of American film and photographic production, all of which stress the organization of the American public: ‘Engineering Social Space,’ ‘Bureaucracy’ and ‘Public and Counter-Publics.’ In each section, we will examine historical episodes in photography and film production alongside contemporary artistic and cultural examples of practices geared to frame and reframe debates about surveillance and what counts as public. Key issues for debate will include the differences between state and corporate surveillance as well as between private viewing and public watching, resistances to technologies, the ways in which debates about surveillance frame current studies of labor and technological determinism.

Suggested Summer Reading/Films

• Aldous Huxley, A Brave New World (London: Chatto & Windus, 1932)
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949)
• Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Ballantine Books, 1952)
• Peeping Tom, dir. Michael Powell, 1960
• The Conversation, dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1974
• Caché, dir. Michael Haneke, 2005

Notes on "Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation"

Foucault and biopolitics

French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault first discussed his thoughts on biopolitics in his lecture series "Society Must Be Defended" given at the Collège de France from 1975–1976. Foucault's concept of biopolitics is largely derived from his own notion of biopower, and the extension of state power over both the physical and political bodies of a population. While only mentioned briefly in his "Society Must Be Defended" lectures, his concept of biopolitics has become prominent in social and humanistic sciences.^[14]
Foucault first mentioned biopolitics on 17 March 1976, during his "Society Must Be Defended" lectures. He described it as "a new technology of power...[that] exists at a different level, on a different scale, and [that] has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments." More than a disciplinary mechanism, Foucault's biopolitics acts as a control apparatus exerted over a population as a whole or, as Foucault stated, "a global mass." In the years that followed, Foucault continued to develop his notions of the biopolitical in his "The Birth of Biopolitics" and "The Courage of Truth" lectures.
Foucault gave numerous examples of biopolitical control when he first mentioned the concept in 1976. These examples include "ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on." He contrasted this method of social control with political power in the Middle Ages. Whereas in the Middle Ages pandemics made death a permanent and perpetual part of life, this has shifted around the end of the 18th century. The development of vaccines and medicines dealing with public hygiene allowed death to be held (and/or withheld) from certain populations. This was the introduction of "more subtle, more rational mechanisms: insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures, and so on."


What is "art documentation"?

Art documentation refers to art in at least two different ways. It may refer to performances, temporary installations, or happenings, which are documented in the same ways as theatrical performances.
Meanwhile, however, more and more art documentation is being produced and exhibited that does not claim to make present any past art event(e.g. complex and varied artistic interventions in daily life, lengthy and complicated processes of discussion and analysis, the creation of unusual living circumstance, artistic exploration into the reception of art in various cultures and milieus, and politically motivated artistic actions. None of these artistic activities can be presented except by means of art documentation, since from the very beginning these activities do not serve to produce an artwork in which art as such could manifest itself.

Barthes, Roland (2000), Camera Lucida, Vintage: London

PART ONE

1. Specialty of the Photograph

Barthes decided he liked Photography in opposition to the Cinema, from which he nonetheless failed to separate it.
"ontological" desire: Photography was "in itself"--was to be distinguished from the community of images (technology and usage)
Barthes wasn't sure that Photography existed, that it had a "genius" of its own.

2. The Photograph Unclassifiable

We impose upon: empirical (Professionals/Amateurs), or rhetorical (Landscapes/Objects/Portraits/Nudes), or else aesthetic (Realism/Pictorialism)
However, these classifications might only applied to older forms of representation because without relation to the essence of object--Photography is unclassifiable

Wood, Paul(2002), Conceputal Art, London: Tate

1. Approaching Conceptual Art

Conceptual art gets to be like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left but a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small number of artists, the most important of whom soon went on to do other things.

Conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge around which the past turned into the present

e.g. Art and Language

Joseph Kosuth accused the historian Benjamin Buchloh of partisanship and bias after Buchloh had accused him for falsifying his role in the movement's origins.

another example: Mel Bochner vs Lucy Lippard

The critic and historian Charles Harrison regards Conceptual art, particularly the work of the Art & Language group, not as break with modernist principles in the name of re-engagement with social modernity, but as a necessary re-formulation of the grounds of art's critical independence.

The present book has located the Archimedean point from which a fully finished accout of Conceptual art may be levered into the edifice of art history.