Seth Keen

This morning after my phd supervision meeting this week, I took time out to reflect on where things are heading with the approach being taken towards writing up theory on the key WVA project. I returned to Paul Carter’s book Material Thinking for some guidance. An issue that is emerging in the current writing is a tendency towards being descriptive. This is not that surprising, as I have been working off interviews as a way to understand the perspective of the other collaborators involved in the project and also learn more about the process that took place. But, on top of this, what has emerged is a lack of focus in terms of what the key research inquiry objectives are overall, which means this writing/chapter for the moment lacks a key argument. In other words, it is exploratory like pre-production research to determine what a documentary might become. Caught up in the detail of the process I have also lost sight of the underlying theoretical influences which are needed to support the theorising of the completed projects.

Looking at Material Thinking (p.10), he writes about an issue that occurs in a lot of writing that examines in this context, art:

The language of creative research is related to the goal of material thinking and both look beyond the making process to the local reinvention of social relations. This is not achieved by more poetic writing about art, which merely perpetuates the process/study split identified by Feyerabend. Writing of drawings of Rodin, the German poet Rilke observed, ‘As always when I fall into the error of writing about art, it was valid more as personal and provisional insight than as a fact objectively derived form the presence of pictures.’ This is a typical error of artists and plastic-makers generally: called upon too talk about what they do, they rationalise its internal logic instead of gauging its social effect. Rather than account for the work as a structure for reinventing human relations, they explain the ideas behind the work. As a result they dematerialise the process that produced it, creating a two-dimensional text so self-explanatory, so easy to interpret’ as Rilke found that one is ‘limited precisely by what ordinarily seemed to open up all sorts of vistas’.

…to document the making of a new social relation through a concomitant act of production

Then I went onto look at how Carter approaches writing up a project which has a reasonably set framework across the number of varying projects discussed in the book. The unifying thread across all these projects no matter how varied is an inquiry into a specific type of ‘social relation’, namely his concept of ‘place-making’.

Reflecting back over my own trajectory of practice a reoccuring theme that I would identify in connection with the concept of ‘social relations’ is gravitating towards documenting people in a way that reveals simplistically, how they are effected by where they live and what they do. This ties in with the environmental portraiture theme that I have taken up. ‘Place-making’ in this instance becomes ‘environmental portraiture’, a term that could easily be named something else. For example, I do not think this term has to necessarily be defined in relation to ‘environmental portraiture’ as a practice/genre. Instead like ‘place-making’ it becomes a concept to explore and define this specific creative research and the projects that are produced.

Another thought when thinking about ‘…than as a fact objectively derived form the presence of pictures’ is Roland Barthes’ pivotal work Camera Lucida.

References:

Carter, Paul, Material Thinking, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004. p. 10

Rilke, Ranier Maria, Letters on Cezanne, trans J Agee, Jonathan Cape, London, 1988.