For the reading prior to Workshop 1, I chose to read Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne. I chose to read this as it looked like an unusual text and because it references Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan on the first page. The text reads as a discussion or low-key interview between two friends.
The text discusses the difference between realist ethnography and creative ethnography or auto ethnography. I think. It is a little confusing if I am entirely honest. The below quote sets out the position of the interviewer and the interviewee:
“They want to master, explain, grasp. Those may be interesting word games, but we don’t think they’re necessarily important. Caring and empathising is for us what abstracting and controlling is for them. As you just said, we want to dwell in the flux of lived experience; they want to appropriate lived experience for the purpose of abstracting something they call knowledge or theory.”1
I feel some parallels to this quote in my new teaching context at Sunny Arts. The teaching at Sunny Arts is built around teaching painting and drawing from a technical and more traditional position, as opposed to my position which is less about building technical skills or tricks, and more concerned to help the students to build their inner, as opposed to outer worlds. There is of course merit and a great deal that can be gleaned from learning and building a technical skill set that allows one to create works of a hyper realist style. However, for me, in painting and drawing, I feel technical skills or tricks can be more synced up with the exterior, with show as opposed to building connection with ourselves and what we are working with. I feel more interested in helping students to develop realist ways of working by helping them to really look at what they are making. For me, this is a key thing for all artists and something which is rarely afforded to us in our contemporary lives: to really take the time to look at an object, say an apple, and to render it not by filling in our page with what we think we know an apple to look like, but to make the commitment with our eyes to study each and every apple as if it is a unique world in itself.
This distinction between learning to look as opposed to learning technique to me is about a way of working that can help students to think and connect with the world like an artist, to pay attention to the world around them. By concentrating on connecting with what is around us, we habituate the building blocks of seeing and perhaps feeling things in a deeper way. This quote below also speaks to what I hope to make space for students to find by teaching from a person centered rather than technique-based position:
“Autoethnography wants the reader to care, to feel, to empathize, and to do something, to act. It needs the researcher to be vulnerable and intimate. Intimacy is a way of being, a mode of caring…” 2
I am aware that my position stems from my own education and learning. For example, on my BA at Chelsea College of Arts and my MA at the RCA, in other words, over the course of five years of education, I was never once taught a technical skill. I am not the most technical of painters, but when I want to, I can get my own work to a standard I am happy with through looking and drawing or painting what I see.
In addition to this, my experiences of discussing and teaching through primarily technical based making methods, is one of feeling ungrounded in myself and in my teaching. Whilst I think a position of feeling lost or unmoored can lead to greater understanding of oneself, this feeling for me is one of disconnection and this what I always worry traditional or technical modes of making and teaching could lead to: academic (and therefore steeped in something authoritarian) and disembodied making.
In some ways, I think these concerns around academic and technical making/teaching methods are because I feel that they have the potential to close down one’s connection with one’s embodied self and more importantly, with one’s own vulnerability. Which for me are at the key to both teaching: the vulnerability to connect with another person’s inner world of making and that of making: the vulnerability to strive to make something that is embodied and true to who we are.
In my experience this is also one of the key differences that students from East Asia find when they come to study at UAL. This shift from precise technical rendering to a more experimental and looser way of working is most probably very jarring.
I think at the heart of my position on this, is that I want my teaching to be a co-performance and activity with students. I want them to be empowered by and in charge of their own learning, and for me, helping them to connect with their own internal worlds feels like the best route to do this.
I would like to coopt this quote below and replace the word stories with the word teaching:
“The difference between stories and traditional analysis is the mode of explanation and its effects on the reader. Traditional analysis is about transferring information, whereas narrative inquiry emphasizes communication. It’s the difference between monologue and dialogue, between closing down interpretation and staying open to other meanings, between having the last word and sharing the platform.” 3
In addition to this, I feel the auto-ethnographic position links to what we can and cannot truly offer our students on fine art courses, as opposed to an abstract social sciences analysis which would include: a purpose, findings and conclusions. I am not sure that we can offer definitive outcomes or conclusions in fine art, as students, teachers or makers. I am not sure that I think that definitivity is what making art is for. Should there not always be room and space for others beyond ourselves to journey in learning, teaching and making? Could embodied making be the key to navigating traditional skill based hierachies?
“Instead of being obsessively focused on questions of how we know, which inevitably leads to a preference for analysis and generalization, autoethnography centers attention on how we should live and brings us into lived experiences in a feeling and embodied way. This is the moral of autoethnographic stories—its ethical domain.” 4
Other thoughts I had on this text:
I appreciate and feel aligned to the general aims for connection that are being posited in this text:
“I want to write something that shows what we do rather than argues against what others do. I want to demonstrate my passion for autoethnography through a story or a conversation that shows multiple voices and positions. I want people to feel the story in their guts, not just know the ‘facts’ in their heads.” 5
In many ways this position of building out of connection rather than difference feels at odds with the contemporary Western landscape. In politics and even in the arts where identity and difference can be used to give voice to those marginalised by Western patriarchal society but also to create polarities and to section off groups from one another see Brexit, Trump etc. I would wany my teaching to create space for flexible thinking and awareness of, instead of adherence to hierarchies. With the idea of connection and embodiment, for me, being one of multiple internal and external access points, not one that comes from a single, monolithic (or phallic) position.
In some ways, I think the placing of connection and feeling above a concern for facts and figures are radical and are connected to feminism and ideas around de-militarisation. At the same time, I also feel this is a position which one can take up when one’s history does not contain a battle for accurate figures or to be seen, in other words, it has the slight smell of a position which one can only take up from a position of power.
Or could power be seen as not stemming from control, but from being flexible, malleable, could power come from elasticity rather than rigid control? The power of being able to detach, to have enough awareness to see and connect with other perspectives.
There is another thing that interests me here and that is that auto-ethnography seems to draw a line between undercutting or rebalancing hierarchies or at least educational hierarchies (the learning of facts or in my line of work, techniques) with its concentration on more intangible or tacit things like feeling and empathy. This is something which I have always tried to find ways of doing in my own pedagogy, as a re-balancing act when teaching students with language barriers or different levels of experience. I do this through things like experimental drawing warm up activities or teaching life drawing not focusing on anatomical precision but with a focus on drawing and thinking about colour and light (or in other words looking rather than measuring).
In this text, auto-ethnography offers its key mode operating or function to be storytelling:
“I think the simplest way to state the differences between us is to refer back to Hannah Arendt’s conception of storytelling as an activity which ‘reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it’” 6
Which also links to my short course Narrative and Identity which was built around finding ways to help students to consider their intersectionality through making. This link was made through a concentration on using materials or objects to language and process different aspects of their own narratives and identities. Connection through materials and mark making was empathised on the course as a means to empower students to lean into their own creative journeys and to trust in their own experiences and feelings as valid and enough. To attempt to dim the self-critical voice that we all have and to feel free, connected and embodied to make.
References:
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 433
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 433
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 438
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 439
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 435
- Analyzing Analytic Autoethnography An Autopsy by Carolyn S. Ellis and Arthur P. Bochne, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Volume 35, Number 4, August 2006, page 438