Why is an artist investigating visual sociology?
Becuase my art is about people, and visual sociology has many cross overs with art. Though no doubt the purist in both camps will hate me for such a statemet... I have some research questions and I use art practice to go abut answering them, but I am always asking myself the questions, "what makes me qualified to be the one to make assumptions on behalf of other people? Who am I to say that what I am saying is right?" Perhaps there is no way of really knowing definitive answers like that, but if I look to precedents in related discplines this may help me think through my own answers.
Its about methodology for me. How can I use what I am creating in a way that is effective in eliciting answers to my research questions? I've not studied sociology so I need to know the lay of the land before I go out there like a bull in a china shop. So far what we have been doing has been reaffirming my own approaches, rather than teaching me anything new, but this is good. I need the reality check that what I am doing is sane and there are precedents out there. It's interesting being here with a whole bunch of sociologists and a few anthropologists, and finding that neither is able to articulate succintly what the difference between the two actually is. This is another question that may never be answered, because everyone seems to have their own interpretation on it.
I don't know why, but I really (clearly naively) thought that there might be at least a couple of artists here but no, to my knowledege not a soul. Yet artists are often looking at the same things that visual sociologists are looing at, just from a different point of view, so it would make sense to combine forces. Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting. Why isn't there more interdiscplinary communication? Are we really so protective of our own fields we don't want to help the others out? In discussions and group work, I find myself having to remind the people that I am with that what we are doing is visual, not just theoretical, and that we can use images for more than just evidence that something is happening.... and I am learning from the sociologists alot more about people, how they behave, their representations and the ways in which others who do not have an art background interpret images, which is invaluable. The relationship is symbiotic.
So much of the "participatory" methods that have been discussed and theorised as novel ways of research are what community artists have been doing for decades. The difference I can see though is that whilst the artists facilitate ways of empowerment though art for communities, I've not observed so much of the products of community art then being used as artefacts which can articulate research outcomes. I guess this is because community artists are not going in with an agenda of elicitiing information, instead they are facilitating creativity and self expression. But, what a great team a visual sociologist and a community artist could make.... incidentally I am neither and do not have any desire to fill this niche myself, but I can still recognise the potentials that are there.
Simone O'Callaghan
in anthropology, art, phd, research, sociology, visual sociology
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You say "Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting", which it is (as is also the case with information visualisation in computer science), so I'd just like to know a bit more about how you see these debates, please :-)
Hi Dave,
thanx for your comments and interest: I guess the key thing that sprang to my mind during the visual sociology summer school was the fact that community artists have been doing for years what visual sociologists are just cottoning on to. Community artists have been using art as a means of drawing out concerns and fears, working with ways to overcome them through community art projects. In visual sociologist speak this would be akin to photo-voice (letting subjects/ participants shoot from their point of view) or… Community artists don’t debate or question the validity of what they are doing. They just get on and do it.
In Scotland, where in comparison to England and Australia, there is a strong community arts presences, I personally have been involved with projects dealing with - empowering the over-60’s to use technology for creative purposes; helping teenage Muslim girls create their own magazine; facilitating confidence and communication skills for disabled people in institutionalized housing. In each of these projects I’ve seen the positive social changes that have occurred as a direct result of taking an arts based approach.
The most inspiring results I have seen was working where the larger overriding project had the aim of giving disabled people the confidence to leave instutional care when they wanted to, with an art project about about dreams and aspirations to facilitate this. Using drawings as a means of elicitation and discussion and I spent a lot of time talking to each person finding out their dreams and helping them express these visually.
One man stood out in this, because he loved the workshops. He was registered blind, had cerebral palsy,was not able to speak very well, and his carer helped to draw his pictures. After a few weeks he stopped coming and I missed his quiet enthusiasm in the group. A few more weeks and he was back again with a heartwarming story. The workshops had unlocked his dream to go to the Scottish Island of Iona and feel the patterns in the stone of celtic crosses that are there. He had not attended because he had managed to get someone to take him to Iona. When he came back to my workshops, he, and not his carer, drew a picture of himself going across to Iona on the boat, and then the patterns of the celtic crosses that he had traced over with his fingers. Through this we discovered, after a lifetime of being labeled as blind (he was about 40 odd), that he was actually partially sighted – first shown by the way he would put his face very close to the paper and make marks. This opened up a whole range of possibilities to provide him with resources for the partially sighted, rather than being treated as fully blind.
No doubt this is just one of many stories that has happened as a result of a community arts project, and this is where I wish there were more cross over between disciplines. The impact that community arts projects have are often far greater than long winded consultancies with focus groups, surveys, questionnaires and reports, which are on the whole boring and inaccessible to the community, especially those who are unable to articulate what they feel.
Whilst the visual sociologists are busy scratching their heads theorizing about various things, the artists are out there in the community actually doing what the visual sociologists are thinking about doing once they have written a pile of academic papers to prove that it might be a good idea. Having said this though, I do believe there is a need to disseminate to academic audiences, but a better model, in my opinion would be for visual sociologists to team up with community artists and the two disciplines to work collaboratively to make the most of each other’s strengths.