Writing history? or making it?

Its after midnight on Saturday and I’ve stuck myself in a beige room at the university in order to write. I’m feeling droopy BUT I MUST WRITE!
I’ve been writing all night. Long emails, long postings, long bog entries on other web logs. Anything to defer the serious writing I am meant to be doing most of the time.
Oh hell.

Times like these I wonder why the hell I am doing this. What a boring topic! And who really cares and how the hell can I say anything new or interesting about it anyway?

It happens often when I interview people – ad I'll ask them a question and they won’t have any sort of answer – or they’ll go blank or what they say will be boring – or it wont be what I’d expect…….. or they won’t have anything to say.

God and so if models have nothing to say on this – then maybe there is nothing to say. Am I barking up the wrong tree????

This is one of the dilemmas of methodology. I started on a topic with almost nothing written about it at all. Then after spending a year exploring the complete absence of anything on what I wanted to research – I thought “Yeah, OK I’ll go and do my own research”. Then spent AGES working out how it would be done.

Now I’m doing it. I compiled a list of people basically from models and teachers that I know. This is called using existing networks. I also did some lit searches to find other prominent people identified with teaching or practicing the life class. I knew I’d have to ask heads of all the major art schools in Sydney. anyway each time I interview someone I ask who they recommend. Often people suggest someone I’ve thought of or know, but sometimes they suggest someone I haven’t thought of. Sometimes they suggest someone I’ve never heard of, or who I don’t know. Sometimes they suggest someone I know and don’t like. They might be a model I don’t really enjoy drawing or find difficult,, or a teacher or writer who I don’t like or don’t agree with. And I’ve realised how ‘flawed’ this is. None of my tomes on reflexive ethnography mention this at all. (not yet anyway).

All the ficto critical accounts don’t mention the dilemmas of choosing subjects who we ‘like’ and ignoring subjects we don’t ‘like’, thought I reckon people must do it all the time. I guess the ones people don’t like get called ‘uncooperative’. I’ve found it hard introducing myself to people I don’t know, and having to establish a rapport with them and persuade them to reveal things that I want to hear. Usually I’ll ask some general questions and just let people talk about whatever they want to. Usually this is fine, although one respondent – ended up admitting that they’d had a psychiatric episode – and they were sensitive and embarrassed about revealing it – and it had only come out after I’d asked quite an innocent seeming question about their art training……

The position of investigator is an odd one – and I’ve realised now why I never really wanted to be an investigative reporter. I find the position of investigator really weird. For people I don’t know – I feel obliged to adopt a position of neutral researcher – which means I can’t be fully open about my interests in this research, and then end up saying vague kind of stuff that isn’t really what I think. I made a couple of gaffs in this way. One person actually got really aggressive and insulted me as some kind of arrogant intellectual wanker, and refused to help me at all. Another person to umbrage at me describing the life class as anachronistic. Worse still I’d only used it because I’d assumed he’d regard it as this – and he didn't at all. Bringing long 2 page information letters with university letterhead, and rocking up with my glasses and serious air – I guess I must seem like some earnest nerdy social researcher.

Maybe I should have do all the interview as some sort of ostentatious naked performance. Lay my cards on the table! People could look at me naked and answer my questions. God how ghastly.

The real reason for doing my research as an oral history– and doing the formal questionnaire procedure – is largely because the recording and form filling is a very elaborate way of honouring the informal knowledge’s and practices of many artists and models. Many models aren’t recognised as having an intelligent and knowledgeable relationship to their work & the life class is largely regulated by gossip. Sleazy models, sleazy teachers, or dodgy gigs are all communicated by word of mouth and so communicating the attitudes which comprise these forms of social regulations, without compromising or using anyone’s stories – can be problematic. The consent forms and the recording allow a way for me to ritualise and acknowledge where I’m getting stories/information form, how I’m getting them, and gaining permission to make these stories part of my work.

Most of the models I am interviewing are artists as well – and I’m interested in the crossover, and the experiences of working class artists – who are involved in a practice seriously – but don’t’ have independent (parental) support or institutional support and rely on a low paid low status but non intellectually demanding profession to support themselves. Most but b no means all of these artists are women. In many ways I am writing my own history, but I am also writing the history of my peers and my mentors. I want to differentiate this from a type of insular indulgent ‘snapshot” but take this seriously as an ethnographic project.

I am interested in how the service economy of recreational culture circulates. High art is always a contested and tricky term – but is much more a question of sociology given the enormous proliferation of art school graduates – and also ‘visual culture centres’. That's a cute word isn’t it? – apart from galleries and museums and community art centres, and design centres, and art courses……what are there. So many – and what is art? This is a question made famous in the off cited preamble of Baudelaire as art critic. What is the role of the avant garde art critic. I know in my own art criticism, that I end up rapidly assimilating and circulating a set of venues, styles and names, who are all being cited by the other art critic in town. I do this largely in order to legitimate my position in the art media. This proves that I know what is art in the town. And what is art – is what is being described as avant garde – what is able to convey the maximum amount of cultural capital in the present moment. This is conveyed by the artist, the venue, the audience who attend opening night and the reviewer. “have you seen so and so” is a cover for “are you in the loop? Do you know do you know who was at their opening, were you seen there?” it's a funny cycle of citationality – and it has very little to do with the work or the people involved. In Sydney there are a number if distinct art circuits – with some crossover, but not much. Most of them are based on fanning alumni from each art institution, and various disciplines. This includes amateur art societies – which act, as much as professional government institutions to create a network of producers and critical admirers and buyers. My real stance – hoo! Oh!1 well, my real stance is that I don’t know much about art but I know what I like. I like a lot of things for a lot of different reasons. I almost always have more time for work if I know the artist, or know something about them. It usually gives me an easy filter – or a way ‘in’ to allow myself time to give the work a closer look. I almost never read art magazines. Broadsheet and real time can be OK – but there is a lot of guff – waffly pitch that says very little – and acts more as a filler for the oohs and ahhs of happy punters. I have been asked by various friends to write catalogue essays – and initially thought I’d be happy to hire myself out as a wordsmith. But now I’ve realised that I’d hate to write catalogue essays – I hate reading most of them – and feel odd – when I’m put in the position of having to praise and fluff up and often obfuscate someone’s work. In my criticism, I’d rather work to open peoples eyes up to work – to help them look and acknowledge what they can or could see. I also think its really important to acknowledge my own limitations and prejudices – because everyone has them, and I don’t think they diminish anyone’s cultural capital to admit them – and it makes it easer to pinpoint where the fashion cycle insinuates itself into aesthetic choices. Having said that – basically I believe that being a contemporary art academic is extremely difficult – and its not something that I can do serious or original research on. At the end of first year - I realised that a survey of contemporary figurative art – would end up just as extended catalogue essays for whoever was ‘big’ in art at the moment – whoever it would benefit me to include in my survey. You get it? This is not independent research, and would not produce an inquiry or interesting writing.

So I’ve chosen to retreat – not into history – because I want to write from my own time – but into a position where I am not writing as a critic or someone separate from the practices I am wanting to write about. My own slightly prmiscuous position is as an artist, aslo an art teacher, a seomtime model, and a writer. The latter category is the only one that separates me from many others in this research study. Writing is what gives me an option of reflexivity, of (aspiring to) translating the knowledges aquired by people in my position into another discipline where these knowledges can influence that discipline. Social sciences, cultural studies and gender studies are obsessed with practices of looking, self presentation and representation. The life class is imbued with all three and offers a profoundly ritualised context in which people can enact such rituals. It is stragnely and compellingly ocntiguous with wider social attitudes toweards specatorships and perfomrativity. (and I use that word consciously). SO my conviction is there – but draggin it out from peoples mouths into my thesis is proving difficult.

I’m thinking of doing some ‘active fieldwork’ off going to lifeclasses with a notebooks as well as my sketch book – My fingders are tired. I won’t be able to draw tomorrow. I must stop now.