[-empyre-] Transdisciplinary metodologies and artivism

[Camilla Møhring Reestorff]

Hello from Melbourne,

To follow up on Patrick and Selmin’s posts I would also like to welcome you to this hopefully inspiring discussion on “documenting digital artivism”. I am pleased that Tim and Renate have provided us with the opportunity to discuss research questions that – at least for us – are pressing.

I have been studying questions of artivism for several years. I am currently working on a book (based on my PhD) that studies the intertwining of art and politics in the Danish culture war. In this book I argue that both politicians and artists use art as a strategy to visualize the nation-state and to generate media attention, documentation and circulation. These mediatized struggles have simply become legitimate means of conduction politics. My work concerns the ways in which politicians, artists, activists and artivists render use of aesthetic strategies in political practices. I have recently written articles on the Femen movement’s mediatized practices, Mads Brügger as an “unruly” artivist and methodological concerns when studying artivism (in “From Artwork to network”) and I am working an article on the documentation of genocide in The Act of Killing.

As Selmin I have encountered “resistance” when I suggest that in order to study contemporary art and artivist practices it is necessary to combine studies of “documentary practices and documentation, digital practices and new media, art, and activism” as well as sociology and political science.

I think this resistance stems from misguided defenses of disciplinary traditions and boundaries. In Australia there currently is a quite heated debate about art history. In a review of Terry Smith’s What is Contemporary Art (2009) and Contemporary Art: World Currents (2011) Nikos Papastergiadis (who is the leader of the research center in public culture where I am currently affiliated as honorary research fellow) took up the questions: what is the history of the emergence of contemporary art and in what form is contemporary art manifest in the world? While acknowledging the scope and sweep of Smith’s work Papastergiadis challenges the contention that an art historical perspective needs to be reclaimed in the telling of the story of contemporary art. He argues that art historical narrativisations needs to be supplemented with an interdisciplinary approach. This suggestion resulted in a 25 pages response from Smith generally taking up the defense of disciplinary boundaries. Too paraphrase “bad things happens when media studies take up contemporary art”. But is it not true that contemporary art has left the traditional representational systems? I think the vast material that Selmin, Patrick and I investigate under the heading “documenting, digital artivism” is a testimony to this transformation. And I believe that it calls for new transdisciplinary methodologies if we are to apprehend the qualities of artivism as it emerge and manifest in the world.

As such I am interested in the same shift as Andrew, namely the one “from a view of documentation as a passive activity” to a perspective on artivism that involves “not just the perspective of the artists of the organization, but also the community attending and participating”. I think Andrew’s suggestion rely on the kind of transdisciplinary methodology that I am interested in pursuing.

In my own work I have focused on a shift from “from artwork to net-work”. The digital culture and its user generated production and participation entail that both art and artivism are played out across social fields, technologies and collaborative practices. This further requires a methodology in which art and artivism is studied not on the basis of coherent artworks but as open-ended net-works. My approach is inspired by ANT and I will suggest that artivism can be studied as assemblages – in which an “artwork” might be one node out of many – of various participatory engagements, representational structures, technologies, materiality and affective modalities.

I am very interested in hearing other perspectives on the methodological approaches to the study of artivism.

Sincerely,

Camilla
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