All posts by Pat Thomson

I see/ not see

The art historian James Elkins writes about seeing. He challenges a number of taken-for-granted ideas about sight and vision. Here are three of his big ideas:

(1) Elkins says that a lot of what we call seeing is actually not-seeing – we screen out much that is actually  in our scope of vision, because we are unable to process the sheer amount of available visual  information. So as we see, we always simultaneously not-see. We are both sighted and blind at the same time.

(2) Elkins suggests that seeing is not simply what happens in the brain ‘inside ‘ us – it is what happens in between our eyes and objects. And this is not empty space but is actually light. Light joins our eyes and the object we are ‘seeing’. We are not separated from the objects we are looking at but are joined to them by and through light.

(3) Elkins maintains that objects look at us. A knife says pick me up. A cookie says eat me. An unused box reminds us of things we haven’t done. The object can resist being noticed, or invite us to notice it.

This is a challenging idea and Elkins proposes a reason for this:

” A psychoanalyst might say that we need to believe that vision is a one-way street and that objects are just the evasive recipients of our gaze in order to maintain the conviction that we are in control of our vision and ourselves. If I think of the world in the ordinary way I am  reassured. Everything is mine to command: if I want to see a movie I go and see it. if I want to look at my cat, I look at her. But this implies something darker: that if I resist the idea that objects look back at me and that I am tangled in a web of seeing, then I am also resisting the possibility that I may not be the autonomous, independent, stable self that I claim I am. I may not be coming to terms with the thought that I need these reciprocal gazes in order to go out and be myself.”  (p. 74)

Elkins, James (1996) The object stares back. San Diego: Harvest

 

more than a single event

All manner of research relies on noticing and on being alive and alert to the possibility of the unexpected.

One of the researchers I admire most is Jocelyn Bell Burnett, the physicist. She ‘discovered’ pulsars. She noticed an aberrant signal on a printout from a radio telescope and then eventually, much later and almost serendipitously, noticed another.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-4e93q1NdI

Bell Burnett’s doctoral supervisor won the biggest science prize going for this noticing – and it’s often referred to as the No-Bell as a result.

Dérive

The dérive is tool to stimulate noticing – see Guy Debord’s theorisation in the Internationale Situationiste journal. It was specifically directed to noticing the mutual interactions of spatialities and subjectivities.

The dérive is a walk in which “participants let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (p. 62) It is a playful psycho-geographical practice.

The dérive usually involves a small group walking independently but pooling their awarenesses and impressions at the end of a designated time. They often recorded their experiences in writing and/or image.

The dérive is beyond a casual stroll and usually involves strategic experiments in the production of random-ness. These might be in the form of reconstructed maps, instructions, throwing a dice or other predetermined prompts.  An oh yes – there’s an app for that too!! This kind of guidance helps to break the invisible boundaries of habit and familiarity.

( Long youtube lecture on the Situationist Internationale and the dérive by Tyrus Miller)

noticing haunting

Avery Gordon looked at a photograph taken at an early meeting of pioneer psychoanalysts. She noticed that someone was absent – a young woman who had been Jung’s lover and then a patient of Freud’s. Sabina Spielrein was listed as being at the gathering, yet she was missing from the official portrait. Why was this so, Gordon wondered. Her book Ghostly Matters investigates the missing Sabina and other ‘hauntings’.

Gordon  sees the recognition – the noticing – of ghosts as a profoundly political matter :

I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what‟s been in your blind field comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. As I understand it, the ghost is not the invisible or the unknown or the constitutively unknowable, in the Derridean sense. To my mind, the whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, demands your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we‟re notified that what‟s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us. 

Gordon’s concern is with the ghosts of trauma, exploitation and genocide and how they haunt everyday life, events, conversations. She sees the noticing of these ghosts as a call to action, not a reason to lament or  memorialise.

Gordon, A (2011) Some notes on haunting and futurity. Borderlands 10(2) p. 4

noticing with all senses

It’s easy to think that noticing must be done with the eyes. But when we notice in everyday life, we often use our full sensory palette – we are struck by a sound, a smell, a taste, the feel of something.

Sensory noticing generally involves more than one sense at the same time. It also quite often means that we imagine beyond the immediate thing/event/action/person. So when we watch a film, we might notice an image or a sound or both as movement or a moment – but we  might also imagine at the same time what this smells like. We might also imagine an emotional state accompanying this noticing.

Sometimes of course we notice an  absence or we just sense something we can’t put our finger on.

Ethnographers like me want to notice and to interpret actions and events using all of our senses. This is a film used in research training; it was made as an exercise in sensory noticing, interpreting and imagining into the action/events.

 

vibrant matter

In her book Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (2009) Jane Bennett investigates “thingness” – the way in which objects can make us notice them.  She suggests that thingness is an idea which “stretches concepts of  agency, action, and freedom” and “dissipates  binaries of life/matter, human/animal, will/determination and organic/inorganic” (p. x). Bennett has looked particularly at trash and hoarders to help her make sense of ‘the call’ of things.

How do resources about art and artists call to those who use them?