Content of the verbal presentation
In my disciplinary project, I chose to secure insights into the working principle of investigative journalism and how art takes advantage of the journalistic methodology to produce something that affects our perception of reality. Since now in the era when digital technology and increased disruption have led journalists and artist to demand each other to make progress in their informing effectiveness, including multimedia storytelling, stylized visuals, and interactive techniques to create a more personal and emotional experience.
In the beginning, I found a book called Aesthetic journalism, which has introduced me many deep insights on the co-operation between art and journalism, here I would like to categorize what exactly are the journalistic techniques, I personally divided them into two groups, the investigation techniques, and presentation techniques.
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Presentation Techniques: the display of evidence - documentary making, reporting, graphic visualization, text-based and photo reportage
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Investigation approach: background-analysis (evidence-gathering, surveys, interviewing, archive research). field observation (field research, documentary) personal accounts (personal interpretation and insights)
Different artists adopt a different way to display the information of their investigation results
The first one is the text-based reportage:
Normally it is consisted by the text of testimony given from people who have been involved in those events including the victim and witness (not in my main interest, I personally prefer visualization materials) I looked at an early instance, an international art activity Tucumán Ard , that was an exhibition in Argentina questioning and against the government repression on the local economy and art, which was basically consisted by testimonial materials, (Newspapers articles reporting the closing of sugar mills were displayed and statistics from the province were handed out to the public.), Artists gathered those information by making a trip to the real site– Tucuman, about the region social economic conflicts to establish the overall context, in which they later added more visual proof like photograph and short video.
this exhibition was deemed as the aesthetic journalism which we can understand as a series of artistic practices in the form of investigation of social, cultural or political circumstances. Its research outcomes take shape in the art context, rather than through media channels. And the place for transmitting information is usually the art gallery or museum, in this case, exhibition rooms allowed audiences space and time to debate what is lacking, what is missing, what has happened.
The second is the Photographic reportage (archive and field research)
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Before demonstrating photographic artwork, I suggest that again that the space for storytelling is very different between the normal press and artistic reports, which can generate different levels of effects and public resonance. photographic reportage often uses the exhibition as a form of public conversation. such as documentaX and 11, these art projects raise awareness and inquiry through exhibition space. which introduce more authenticity.
Work by Martha Rosler
The work, a series of twenty-one black-and-white photographs, twenty-four text panels and three blank panels, is a photo-text experiments applied to the urban issues of poverty and alcohol-abuse, also this work expressed the artist’s disappointment and frustration to the mainstream documentary that tends to misuse visual and verbal tools. shifting the focus from a critique of social inadequacy to a critique of media representation of that inadequacy.
The Rwanda Project(1994–2000)
by Alfredo Jaar, for which Jaar spent six years following the genocide and its brutal aftermath, amounting to a series that reflected the indifference of the world as witness.
He and his one assistant went to gather evidence, they spent time talking to people, photographing the situation. they accumulated probably thirty-five hundred images of the most horrific things—so much so that, when I got back to New York, he didn’t want to look at them. he realized that he couldn’t use them. people did not react to these kinds of images. Why would they react now? he was starting to think that there must be another way to talk about violence without recurring to violence. There must be a way to talk about suffering without making the victim suffer again. Then he came up with a strategy that was to reduce the scale of the tragedy. Basically, when we say, “one million dead,” it’s meaningless. So, the strategy was to reduce the scale to a single human being with a name, a story. That helps the audience to identify with that person
And this process of identification is fundamental to create empathy, solidarity, and intellectual involvement.
From this example we should acknowledge that the way media represents issues is sometimes incompetent to deliver information and alert people so Artistic journalism needs to question the means of information production.
(a woman who had witnessed the murder of her husband and sons by a death squad: photograph close-ups of her eyes are presented on light boxes in a semi-dark gallery. A text panel tells the story, which begins: ‘Over a five-month period in 1994, more than one million Rwandans, mostly members of the Tutsi minority, were systematically slaughtered)
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Work by Santiago
(photographic reportage) The artist who uses the tools of investigative journalism in their work usually employ specific narrative and display formats -like artist, Santiago Mostyn whose work is experiments with new means of documentary production and dissemination
In these three archival inkjet prints, African-American man being detained during the Tulsa Race Riot. The man is standing next to railroad tracks and is holding his hands in the air as if being arrested. Several white men watch from the other side of the tracks. in this work- the set- up of screens, monitors and printed material is usually only a moment of an articulated aesthetic experience, and it serves as an occasion for something else to happen.
The intersection of art and journalism requires the participant to use "investigative approach" such as, fieldwork, reportage, interviews, document analysis, graphic mapping and information distribution.
journalism is not the same thing as art; they differ in essence, the former being a coded method or we can say, a ruling system that subjectively generates the truth, the latter a practice that constantly questions itself and its means.
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The third is Multimediality (Documentary film)
Normally documentary is demanded to include the observation process and the audio narratives which normally are the interview fragments, bits of environmental recordings and voice-over comments. This form of story-telling indicates reality in Coherence that is produced when facts are inserted into a narrative that has a structure that is familiar to the viewer. So When facts are embedded in a coherent narration that appears to be real and authentic, they become plausible and convincing. (A.J p70)
For this part, I turned to Artist- Jordan baseman’s work, https://www.jordanbaseman.co.uk. In contrast to the conventional form Jordan’s film is instead separating the narratives from the visual content. Soundscape does not relate to the visual stuff. Its editing, re-interpretation and re-positioning of speculative ideas, opinions, beliefs and anecdotes towards the production of new, layered meanings within narratives are central to his objectives. The resulting artworks address questions about the relationship between moving-images and the manufacture of portraiture, fact and fiction.
There is a sense of him using certain techniques like interview and information gathering, to place spoken words with other images. People telling stories. that sound like novels but are the truth there is certain things that harbor between story and narratives. His way of non-fiction filmmaking informs people in a realistic manner, with ‘a sense of spontaneity in the footage, and an interest in banal scenes from everyday life’, reflects upon a book called in cold blood, which read like a novel but is actually based on the real stories. So in this case, the content is real but introduced by a fictional representation.
Film by Susan Schuppli:
http://susanschuppli.com/exhibition/naturerepresentsitself/
Compared with Jordan Baseman, her work is primarily adopting the form of traditional observation process and documentary, with certain visual effects made in the later editing. Her work has explored the ways in which non-human witnesses, such as materials and objects, enter into public discourse and testify to historical events, especially those involving political violence, ethnic conflict.
In the collaboration between journalism and art. the artists are just like reporters who decided early on what they wanted the story to say and then set about gathering evidence to support that message.
Art as an investigative tool:
The truth has become increasingly abstract, what we need rather do is attempting to construct the first-hand experience. Which is what the present journalism that uses non-fiction narrative wants to achieve the most. For example, the war situation very often we can not be there at a time when war is destroying the cities, communities. But The possibility opened up by the internet to play with its own means of production allowed artistic and journalistic practice alike to occupy positions previously foreclosed - non- professional operators bring to surface situations, stories and news - distribution of the mainstream news, according to statistic survey that non- professional citizen reporters produce 70 percent of the media images. Journalism takes advantage of the huge number of footages generated and shared by normal citizens through internet, Citizens are monitoring the world, all the state crimes can be traced, We cannot speak about a ‘whole truth’, but only about moments of truth, throughout a variety of means in time and space. What we get from official documents or unofficial witnesses are only moments. Each image or video is not isolated but rather the co-production from the societies. Whether the journalism or art they are analyzing and reworking on this evidence .for this it is useful to look at the work of forensic architecture, that utilizes the public evidence and data to construct analysis in the form of art.
Now is an era when ‘eyewitness news’ for example, the cell-phone (mobile devices and digital recording equipment), video and photo, have become the main source of objective truth for war reportages and terror attacks. The instantaneity of these devices constructs ‘an impression of significant unfolding events with the reporter as an eyewitness.
Forensic Architecture:
Thus, Forensic architecture is a perfect example of how artists tackle social and national problems(violence) by working on the source materials contributed by the mass. Their members include Investigators, activists, writers, filmmakers, etc. They look at political problems and urban conflict that had occurred in a place, then bring in different perspectives when employing their major techniques in team work. In a speech, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn8xZneY6_kavailable online. The team leader states that “ this is the simplest way to think about through buildings, contemporary violent affairs are mainly urban, so architecture somehow is the right position to understand what happened within so we might be looking at the building that has been destroyed, reading the ruins and try to understand what happened.” When their results are illustrated in Exhibition rooms, the exhibition is the only place to raise questions - how does art relate to those affairs Through the frame of an image, and reconstructing footages taken by others, in order to testify what these people want to say about their desire, fear. By working close with community underground that is not trivialized in act of violence. This team has set a clear example that art is a work we can do with very basic tools and techniques.
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Reflection towards this unit3 project:
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Throughout this study of intersection between art and journalism, I literally understand that the idea of truth comes from our understanding and knowledge of the world, those artists mentioned above, no matter the sorts of medium they use, are basically encouraging people to question what they have seen, an artist is not better at producing a more transparent picture of the real than a journalist. What the artist can do better, instead, is to construct a self-reflective medium.
journalistic techniques have granted artists more chances and way to do an experiment. In all kinds of manners, I consider Documentary film as a medium that can give inspirations to my painting methodology. Since Artistic practice is to put a view on the view produced by documentary means. In film-making many art-filmmakers are dealing with and integrating the fragmented archive materials, Similarly, in the painting process, for example, if you work on photographs or even the screenshot from documentary , it is always needed to manage and analyze the fragments and single still moment of the pre-existing reality that was produced by various means of witness.
Technically, the approach of making film inspires me to make compositions like, cropping, close-ups, framing, and sequencing, which offer fresh perspectives on the medium of painting. Also by which I can introduce a sense of distance measure to my painting (shown below), there are images that zoom in the subject, but there are also some images working from out of distance. I think this is quite engaging and significant for audiences to get different views and understandings.
There is a huge gap between the reality and its representation, so as an artist we should focus on the experimentation of representation, even for painting, there are many chances to make a transformation in terms of color, layers, materials, and composition.