shift from function to meaning

Well it's apparently the most influencial piece of art ever made. Old Duchamps fountain function to meaning in all it's glorious simplisity. Kate Pahl comments on Boston talk so good I need to publish them and final comment very interesting - can we reverse it for the achedemics to make things more interesting are you bringing the Comtempory socially engaged arts practise into the ethnographic project - we must have a new project in here somewhere just need a funder

STEVE

Systems of objects – linking back to the abstract- our worlds are shaped by our interaction with made objects. Kate P explores objects and meaning and objects as collective texts and looks through an ethnographic material culture lens. We explore objects and their personal resonances and meanings through practical making and juxtaposition. This paper presents the notion that through collaboration Artist and ethnographer can work side by side to explore the same area of study and use their distinct approaches to enhance and triangulate research to produce outcomes which have value within both the artistic and academic context. Presenting the idea of validation for art practise within the academy but also the validation and visability of ethnographic research within the sites and communities explored.

Quote Baudrillaud

So perhaps talk about the fact that we are interested in the same thing and open to sharing insights rather than looking for a tool or a resource or something to study.

Set the scene:
Artemis – the background to residency, why academics
Background to our practice, what as artists do we do.

Conversation bit:
Kate we want you in this conversation – we intend to flash up paragraphs on a power point, so you become part of the conversation. In red is our questions
Kate’s bit:

Kate Pahl – where am I coming from:

· My work had been looking at ‘sedimented identities in texts’ (Rowsell and Pahl 2007) how far could this theory be applied to artists?
· I had increasingly been looking at ways of creating material cultural displays in museums that reflected home objects – Ferham families grew out of that (www.ferhamfamilies.com) and more recently a project developing a family learning resource pack called Every Object Tells a Story (www.everyobjecttellsastory.org)
· I wanted to work across homes, schools and museums to look at how artefacts open up learning and literacy.
· This project, with its focus on the role of a collection of artefacts, Artemis, in opening up learning, plus with a focus on two artists and their work, was therefore ideal for me.

I see the role of artist as a kind of ‘fast academic’ (in conversation Steve Pool 2006) and wanted to work with artists for the following reasons:

· Steve and Kate were working on themes that I was interested, in particular how ways of being could be described in their art,
· They were also working across domains of communities, schools and museums in a way I wanted to learn from
· I saw their work as a kind of intellectual visual space I could both learn from and contribute to

The role of Artist - seeing the value in the difference – frame of reference and lens
We are interested in systems, community, people and objects therefore the collboration is affective, reference art and anthropologly book. Please comment
Relationship to the field – do we /can we have a different relationship to ‘field”

Process of doing the project – artists and academics together:

· Collaborative, dialogic meaning making in project team meetings.
· Process of learning from each other, not seeing ‘academic as expert’ or ‘visual artist as expert’ but looking at cross-over.
· Ethnography seemed important site for this generative collaborative intellectual work
· Making the familiar strange (Agar 1996) important for project

We think that the AAA will like the fact that we are both practising artists and we want to sort of let the work do a bit of the talking for us so this bit is the meat of the presentation and we want to make the dialogue about the pieses why and how they work their agency the ability for a piece to make thinking visiable and be about very complex things but in fact be very simple. We also want to feel confident about what we are talking about and felt we could address the main points in our abstract submission by talking about the work rather than abstract ideas which seems
Steve bit – breakfasts - altering system and meaning
Kate bit – dwelling, we all have to dwell, function and meaning and how that says everything. Value.


Value, summing up, ideas for future
Kate / Lou please say something about the items in red
Where is the value in this kind of work? Where do we want to go?
Validation – do we and can this be about validating each others work, rather than the artist being the resource to open up academies. Not make work about people but with people.
Revelations – what does this collaboration offer for new ways of working and thinking for future. –

Kate’s bit

Kate Pahl found it useful to go back to the origins of British Social Anthropology to think through Kate G’s work. Her work, in focusing on the everyday usefulness of tools on her family farm, reminded Kate of the shift in British Social Anthropology from Function to Meaning (Pocock 1985) and the way in which the cargoes in Malinowski’s fieldwork in his seminal 1023 book, Cargoes of the Western Pacific, were analysed in relation to their function, whereas Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (1950’s) focused on wider issues of symbolism and meaning in her study of Leviticus. The work of British Social Anthropology enabled there to be a connection across the project Kate was engaged in to a reflection on an academic tradition and to understand more clearly the role of anthropology in looking at the relationships between objects and people.

The project team saw these ideas as generative when looking at a collection of objects as vast and randomly assembled as the Leeds Artemis collection, which was a collection of objects derived from museums, with their own logic of practice.
The artists’ use of the Aura Scorer, deriving from Walter Benjamin, while light-hearted, pointed to a more serious discussion the team had about value, identities and objects.
Objects had their own Auras, that could be graded and assessed and these gradings were tied to identity narratives that could be summonsed with particular objects.


Joint phd’s artist and academis working in same ‘field’ to explore same subject

I would like to see this continue with a kind of interrogation of some key domains of academic knowledge eg social anthropology with you and Kate doing a test site of this eg ethnography, doing tools etc and me and Lou discussing the moving of ideas from academic to artistic domain through that.

We are quite confident speaking about our thing and the theory around it. Our concerns are we don’t want to sound thick or ill informed. Yet we want it to be accessable and personal.
Please advise
Do we need to frame it more in an academic context. Shall we talk about praxis. What about material culture stuff do you think we need

I think you could mention the Pocock stuff – move from Function to Meaning in your work (Kate G could do that bit)
I also like the focus on Benjamin and how you adapted his ideas for your own. (both of you)
What I think is interesting is your TAKE on academic ideas. Academics are very solemn and alsways cite stuff. You have a more playful approach. (both of you)
Therefore the shift from function to meaning becomes both re-vitalised and re-contextualised.

There! I have it!
This project had been about re-contextualising academic ideas in the artistic domain.
This is so interesting.
Will write later as am in Dorset and it is very far away.