Institute
Keynote address:
Ethics
and Engagement: Representation, Documentation and 'Doing the "Right"
Thing.'
Pam Hall
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Like many artists, I am a "LEARNER"... and learn from many sources, and primarilythrough interrogation... through asking questions. |
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One follows
the questions of practice and finds theory... discovers more questions...
follows them... and if I have learned one thing in the last few decades,
it is that these questions of voice, authority and authorship are in no
way restricted to filmmakers and anthropologists. Indeed, they are embedded
across most disciplines within in the act of constructing knowledge, making
"representation" and in the act of "looking" itself...
in the GAZE. Whether framed by the "male" gaze, the clinical gaze,
the gaze of the camera or through our own "gaze" as artists and
makers of meaning, these questions and others which spin out from them invite
us into ethical ground... into the terrain of moral geography.
My intention today is to tell you a "story"... about a practice, which led one artist into that terrain with neither a map, a compass, nor a guide. Led to a long search for "navigation" tools and rules. Led inevitably to my current preoccupation with ethics and my belief that whether we work alone in a studio or together with others in a community, there are significant consequences to our work as artists. Consequences which can do "good", AND can do "harm", and for me at least, demand an attentive and earnest reflection on the ethical issues embedded in HOW we do our work as artists. |
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Since I
get to be one of the storytellers, I ought to admit that I am as colored
and constrained by my history as anyone else, so before I dig in to the
story, let me situate myself a little. My earliest awakening to "ethics", was formed in a film community, which routinely paid for access to other people's stories, property, and time, and did so within a well-established tradition of formal "permissioning", release forms, and fee structures which recognized the "value" of contributions made by "non-creators" to the creation of a "new" piece of "intellectual property" which would benefit its "authors". My own documentary film experience took me directly into the ground of telling other people's stories and forced me to confront the challenges of collaborative authorship. These "film" roots represented a radically different "tradition" than that defined by "the freedom of creative expression" routinely constructed as a "right" of the artist within the modernist canon in which I was trained as a visual artist. |
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My "ethical" interests were deepened by five years of site-specific work on the land which forced me out of the safety of the studio and into the terrain of fisheries and environmental ethics, and serious "documentation" work. They were further advanced by 3 years in a Faculty of Medicine, first studying and eventually becoming a "member" of that community as their artist-in-residence. The foundational notions of bio-medical ethics, as well as the well-developed protocols around human subjects research, seemed to have important echoes in artistic practices which "used" or engaged others aside from the artist, in the artistic process. My participation in the 3-year scholarly study about Ethics the resource crisis in the Canadian Marine Fisheries, extended my investigations into deeper ground, back towards the environment, turning my gaze from the body, to the body politic. This experience solidified my instincts that self-examined ethical decision-making is usefully embedded in art practice whether we work alone, or with others, and regardless of the subject matter or content preoccupations of our work. |
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Finally, as a Faculty member in an graduate program which requires a community-based practicum from all of our students as part of the degree criteria, I am especially aware that these ethical questions are fundamentally and urgently important not only to myself, but to other artists working in the ground of community practice and public art. Like many artists who are
privileged to teach, I am also privileged to learn from my students. So,
from them, I have borrowed three phrases that, for me at least, describe
the terrain and trajectory of the story I want to share today... |
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Somewhere between these opposing notions that "ART CAN'T HURT YOU" and "ART IS AS BENIGN AS TRUTH" lies the ethical terrain we navigate as artists. Whether we work in solitude or in community, from the personal or the political, towards the process or the product, we are surrounded by ethical questions and challenged by the consequences of WHAT we do and HOW we do it. |
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FROM ONE TO
MANY is the title of another MFA Portfolio... this one by Jason Bagatta...
and I want to acknowledge and thank these three artists for giving me their
words to help focus and delineate my thoughts today.
From One to Many describes a trajectory... a journey taken, I suspect, by most artists who find themselves working "in community", or in the realm we now call "public art"... as activists, collaborators, witnesses, allies, facilitators of change... working beyond the traditional relationship to "others" in which the "community" was constructed as the "audience" for the creative expression of the artist. As audience, the community was the "viewer" - the artist was the "doer". Art "spoke" - audience" listened". For artists of my generation and training, those were the heady days of the "freedom" of the individual artist, and the notion that ART CAN'T HURT YOU was strong, even if unstated, in our bellies. Even within the crumbling canon of modernism... the early days of "concept art", process art, and yes, those glory days in art school when young women were challenging the notion that women could NOT be "ARTISTS", we learned little language as object makers and meaning makers that made tangible either our role within community or our responsibilities.I was trained in the late sixties, and certainly we believed that "change" was as important as "ART", that one must participate in order to earn the right to speak, but in many ways our "dialogue" remained primarily with materials, with mark and media, and with the struggle to make meaning visible in some kind of significant form. That ART might not be the only or the quickest or even the BEST way towards social change, seemed obvious to a generation used to sit ins, demonstrations, volunteer work and all those strategies for engaging one's "activist" instincts or agendas. We thought about ethics, we struggled with moral questions... we just didn't do so within the context of our individual art practice, and our preoccupations with building our own voice as artists. |
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It was only when I stepped outside of the studio... onto and into the land... that the "geography" itself delivered its "moral" questions for consideration. Even alone in the landscape... moral or ethical considerations became not only "visible", but foundational to the way I was invited and yes, forced to pursue my practice. One could NOT avoid the questions... Whose land was it anyway? Did I need permission to be there? Whose permission? What could I "hurt" or damage in such a solitary and "simple" process? How much flora was I willing to pull up by its roots dragging "art" through fragile environments? What "entitlement" was presumed in "using" the landscape ? In representing it in what I thought was a personal way, but one which was, like everything else, constructed by privilege, colored by colonialism, and contexted by traditions in land art which were neither ephemeral nor transient? Indeed, how does a visitor, a "stranger" and "outsider", enter territory not their own with the intention to "speak"? This was the beginning of my "ethical" education. Real questions, raised by real "terrain", and by the real people who became my crews, my hosts, indeed, my partners in a process I could not undertake alone. The sunburned crew, the pulled shoulders, the rigorous stewardship of park officials, the passionate connection to place of those who told me where I must "go"... the regulations and traditions that told me where I must not... taught me well that it was possible to do damage. That indeed Art was NOT Benign... I had my first inklings... and began to Pay ATTENTION in a bigger way to the "consequences" of practice... to the "ethical" issues that accompanied working on the land and in the landscape... Doing site-specific work, I had imagined that these questions were site-specific... had thought I had a handle on them... had worked out the necessary creative strategies which would sustain me outside the studio... |
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Until... in
one of those Life/Art, Art/Life collisions, the questions CUT close enough
to home, that they became "general"... applicable not just to
the "body of the earth" but to my own body, and from there...to
the body politic...to bodies of knowledge.
Through an encounter with surgery in 1992, I was lured into ground which sharpened, focused, and indeed still fuels, my interest and interrogation of these questions, and because other women helped me navigate this experience, I realized that they were not MY questions alone. And so I stepped for the first time really, "into" community, by choice, rather than by accident, first as a place to learn, and secondly to find a way to tell a story too big, too complex and too diverse for my voice alone. |
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I had worked
in film since 1987... as a designer, and art director... as part of a
creative team...and knew well the traditions of release forms, and rental
agreements, of not only acknowledging, but indeed, permissioning, renting,
or buying other people's contributions to the "art object" being
created. Having been through the surgery, and the confusing "culture of institutional medicine" which delivered it, I was also keenly aware of the fragile and potentially traumatic terrain I was entering as a first-time filmmaker. Like many women, my step into the "political" emerged from the "personal"... yet I was not telling my own story...so I was VERY VERY careful, and learned strategies which, while still evolving, are now foundational to how I dance with others when my practice takes me into that ground. I learned to make a safe
space for the sharing of hard stories... |
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Not knowing the power of film language, editing, emphasis, POV... not knowing how an image alters the meaning of a word... not knowing the power of representation... They offered full permission
to use their words following the voice interviews... TRUSTING me to context
their words well, to honor and value their stories. They had no idea what
meaning I could "put" into their mouths... and until I spent
days at the Steinbeck, cutting sound, neither did I... and yes, I was
"tempted" ... an artist after all... used to the "freedom"
of solitary practice... the freedom of "fiction"... used to
"manipulating" meaning... which is, after all what artists do...
.I was tempted to add, to alter, to construct poetry and drama, to pull
out humor, to provoke tears... and yes, tempted to take a "position"
, argue a case... advance an agenda. |
continues...