African Art, Interviews, Narratives

Carol Magee, Joanna Grabski

Description

The interview as a critical research tool for African art

Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee bring together a compelling collection that shows how interviews can be used to generate new meaning and how connecting with artists and their work can transform artistic production into innovative critical insights and knowledge. The contributors to this volume include artists, museum curators, art historians, and anthropologists, who address artistic production in a variety of locations and media to question previous uses of interview and provoke alternative understandings of art.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Work of Interviews
Carol Magee and Joanna Grabski
1. Talking to People about Art
Patrick McNaughton
2. Ghostly Stories: Interviews with Artists in Dakar and the Productive Space around Absence
Joanna Grabski
3. Can the Artist Speak? Hamid Kachmar's Subversive Redemptive Art of Resistance
Joseph Jordan
4. Photography, Narrative Interventions, and (Cross) Cultural Representations
Carol Magee
5. Narrating the Artist: Seyni Camara and the Multiple Constructions of the Artistic Persona
Silvia Forni
6. Interview—Akinbode Akinbiyi
Akinbode Akinbiyi
7. Inter-Weaving Narratives of Art and Activism: Sandra Kriel's Heroic Women
Kim Miller
8. Politics of Narrative at the African Burial Ground in NYC: The Final Monument
Andrea E. Frohne
9. Who Owns the Past: Constructing an Art History of a Malian Masquerade
Mary Jo Arnoldi
10. Framing Practices: Artists' Voices and the Power of Self-Representation
Christine Mullen Kreamer
11. Undisciplined Knowledge
Allan deSouza and Allyson Purpura
Appendix: Interlocutors
Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Buildings
• African Studies
• African
• History of art
• African people
• Building
• ART
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 28 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780253006998
• Langue: English

Extrait

AFRICAN EXPRESSIVE CULTURES
Patrick McNaughton, editor
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Catherine M. Cole
Barbara G. Hoffman
Eileen Julien
Kassim Koné
D. A. Masolo
Elisha Renne
Zoë Strother
AFRICAN ART INTERVIEWS NARRATIVES
BODIES OF KNOWLEDGE AT WORK
 
 
Edited by JOANNA GRABSKI and CAROL MAGEE
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
B LOOMINGTON AND I NDIANAPOLIS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
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iupress.indiana.edu
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© 2013 by Indiana University Press
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
 
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-00687-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-00691-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00699-8 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 18 17 16 15 14 13
For Olivia Marie Grabski Clarke Ruth Smith
_______________________
CONTENTS
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction: The Work of Interviews
• CAROL MAGEE AND JOANNA GRABSKI
1.  Talking to People about Art
• PATRICK MCNAUGHTON
2.  Ghostly Stories: Interviews with Artists in Dakar and the Productive Space around Absence
• JOANNA GRABSKI
3.  Can the Artist Speak?: Hamid Kachmar's Subversive Redemptive Art of Resistance
• JOSEPH JORDAN
4.  Photography, Narrative Interventions, and (Cross) Cultural Representations
• CAROL MAGEE
5.  Narrating the Artist: Seyni Camara and the Multiple Constructions of the Artistic Persona
• SILVIA FORNI
6.  Interview: Akinbode Akinbiyi
• AKINBODE AKINBIYI
7.  Interweaving Narratives of Art and Activism: Sandra Kriel's Heroic Women
• KIM MILLER
8.  Politics of Narrative at the African Burial Ground in New York City: The Final Monument
• ANDREA E. FROHNE
9.  Who Owns the Past?: Constructing an Art History of a Malian Masquerade
• MARY JO ARNOLDI
10.  Framing Practices: Artists’ Voices and the Power of Self-Representation
• CHRISTINE MULLEN KREAMER
11.  Undisciplined Knowledge
• ALLAN DESOUZA AND ALLYSON PURPURA
APPENDIX: INTERLOCUTORS
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
 
 
This book is the product of countless conversations exploring how we give shape to our research and writing. It represents our shared commitment to rethinking the dominant approach to using interviews in research and writing about African art and artists. We endeavor not only to examine the methods, instruments, and processes at the heart of knowledge production but also to take them a step further by experimenting with their possibilities. With this project, we aspire to spark dialogue about the overlaps between the methodological orientations at play in Africanist art studies and those relevant to other art historical fields and interdisciplinary platforms. The contributions brought together here articulate some new possible directions for these exchanges.
We are especially pleased to be part of the African Expressive Cultures series and owe a considerable debt of gratitude to Patrick McNaughton, the series’ general editor, and Dee Mortensen, senior sponsoring editor at Indiana University Press, for their comments, insights, and enthusiasm. Our thanks also to this project's anonymous reviewers for their feedback, and to Sarah Jacobi and the staff at Indiana University Press for seeing us smoothly through the publication process. It has been deeply rewarding to collaborate with each other, and we appreciate the perspectives our contributors have brought to this conversation. Finally, we express our gratitude to our families, friends, and colleagues who supported various dimensions of this project and created the context for its completion.
Joanna Grabski and Carol Magee
 
Introduction
The Work of Interviews
CAROL MAGEE AND JOANNA GRABSKI
 
 
 
Who could deny that interviews occupy an exalted place in our research imagination? This is the place where one of the most ordinary of human activities—dialogue—becomes a research instrument, a tool to both extract and produce understandings, and an indispensable resource to be put toward our interpretive undertakings. For those of us writing about cultural production in Africa, interviews figure across the strata of our scholarly projects, from the research process to its formal presentation in publications and exhibitions. We use interviews to generate and acquire perspectives, gird our interpretations, authorize our claims, and expand the purview of objects and other creative expressions. Interviews are so fundamentally embedded in the scholarly projects of African art studies that the relationship between them appears implicit and even naturalized. It is time to unsettle this relationship, open it up, and examine its possibilities more explicitly.
To do so, we begin with the theorization that interviews do productive and constitutive work. In researching and writing about art and artists, we attribute to interviews many capacities to work toward making meaning. Read from several angles, interviews represent bodies of knowledge that generate other bodies of knowledge. Building from the most basic understanding of interviews as exchanges from which we glean information, we envisage them broadly, and in positing interviews as bodies of knowledge, we underscore the multiple forms an interview might take. These range from formal inquiries designed to elicit specific information, such as those proceeding from questionnaires, to the casual, meandering conversations that take place with one or many individuals in person, over the telephone, or via the internet. Even as we acknowledge that the format an interview takes distinctly shapes the body of knowledge from which we draw, we present neither lengthy interview excerpts nor the analysis of specific interviews. Rather we reflect on what we do with the interview once we have it— how we put it to work. Focusing on the work of interviews opens up this project's terrain of inquiry, a terrain where various bodies of knowledge (interviews as well as field-notes, visual propositions, exhibitions, and archival and indexical documents of all types) engage in and entangle with the processes of scholarly production.
Our analysis is oriented by the following questions: how, why, and to what ends do we use interviews to create and structure scholarly narratives; and what are the complexities and contingent variables involved in this relationship? The contributors in this book engage with these questions from several directions, and in doing so, they originate experimental thinking about the unbounded possibilities for interviews to work as productive research instruments and constitutive elements in knowledge production. Not only does this project illuminate the work that interviews do in our scholarship, but the individual chapters further reveal our propensity to attribute to interviews the capacity to do work.
The questions we pursue here draw upon insights from scholarship in art history, anthropology, and history; while much has been written on interviews in these disciplines, no project has yet considered their relationship to producing art historical texts. Our volume, therefore, charts new territory by untangling and examining the relationships between various bodies of knowledge and by proposing a new consideration of the many ways interviews work in scholarly narratives. In turning our attention to how we use interviews, this book aligns with and continues the undertakings of anthropologists who, beginning in the 1980s, turned a critical eye toward their own disciplinary practices. James Clifford and George Marcus's edited volume (1986) examined writing as central to the practice of ethnography and considered the structure, flow, and poetics of the stories that ethnographers write. We bring a similar reflexivity to the interactions and processes that take place prior to the act of writing while addressing our use of research to constitute our narratives and give form to our subjects. The importance, then and now, of projects that push at the edges of various forms of cultural analysis to expose both their limits and potentials is noted by Kim Fortun in her foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of that text. One such project, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson's (1997) anthology, challenged the idea of “the field” as a “bound and normalized” anthropological practice to envisage possibilities for new questions and methods. 1 Like it, our volume dislodges interviews from their settled position in the bedrock of our research and writ