Posted on Behalf of AMBARIEN ALQADAR who does not yet have access to the blog...
Anti-Narratives and Collage
I want to begin my response by going back to what I was doing a couple of days back. Santiago, Oscar and I were filming for the Bolex exercise at the Philly Zoo.
I had just arrived from India a week back.
The idea in my head while I was at the Zoo was ‘What makes one more of a Tourist-leaving a familiar place or going to a new place’?
Before I left New Delhi, I found myself obsessively making pictures of home, familiar people and streets I knew and loved. And here in Philly I was doing the same. The Zoo was a perfect place for this.
These pictures (in India) were being taken in all kinds of ways-on grainy mobile phone cameras, professional cameras, as video and stills, audio with a blank screen, collected objects, postcards, kitsch and street art work, visits to rural artists park, objects sold in specific locations/bazaars. An overabundance of these objects and images provided an almost physical interface to some of the ideas that I found evocative in the readings.
David Harvey in ‘The Condition of Post Modernity’ 39-65 proposes that a ‘change in the structure of feeling’ in the era of advanced capitalism becomes the organizing principle for a series of stylistic reorientations to emerge in the fields of Architecture, Planning, Literature and Philosophy. Central to this change is a recognition of human consciousness as decentered and fragmented. Architects are to learn more from popular street forms than from an engagement with broad theoretical ideas. The Novel marks a shift from ‘epistemology’ to ‘ontology’; a shift that can be understood as a move away from concerns/pursuit of ‘Knowledge’ to the ‘Being’. Planning stresses urban design as a collage of highly differentiated spaces and forms and there emerges an idea of the ‘Collage City’.
Central to understanding this shift are the works of Foucault and Lyotard. Infact Lyotard describes Post Modernism as ‘an incredulity towards mata-naratives’; broad theories that explain the existence of phenomenon and events. The ‘local’ emerges as a unique determinant. In practice, this urges a practitioner to think around issues of ‘positionality’ and articulation of multiple perspectives. Foucault’s proposal to understand power as not only located in the State Apparatus but as permeating through the everyday as power capillaries, reaffirms the importance of the local. Foucault’s concept of the ‘Heterotopia’ is reflected in Cinema- in films like Citizen Cane’ and ‘The Blue Velvet’ where the narrative strategies give space to heterogeneity, fragmentation and suspension of the worlds they dwell in. By ‘Heterotopia’ Harvey proposes that Foucault means the ‘co-existence of an impossible space’; ‘a large number of fragmentary possible worlds or incommensurable spaces that are juxtaposed over each other’. The emergence of Collage as a narrative by itself finds a strong proponent in Derrida who proposes that ‘ the Collage is the primary form of postmodernist discourse’.
The idea of understanding the ‘Collage’ as a lyrical juxtaposition of often contradictory materials and forms is echoed in Perloff’s ‘Invention of The Collage’. He goes on to explore how a desire to work with different, contradictory forms, materials and representational techniques leads to a re-definition of ‘a picture as a window to reality’ in the field of painting.
This brings me to the point I started with- given that with an overabundance of sense, impulses, memories, objects, smells, forms, formats, uploads and downloads, what are the new narrative strategies one could think of? As a practitioner, how much relevance does the idea of ‘Collage’ has given that we work across media platforms across time zones combining it all into one. What could be the organizing principle if in the end one does want to say something despite the chaos and breakdown; infact if one wants to make it a part of what one is to say. With a democratization of media technology as far as even into the Third World, what are the ways in which one is to distinguish professional practice from an amateur one. Or is there even the need to do so. What if one arrives at a form where the artist/producer and audience/consumer binary is dissolved and reaffirmed in the same moment….unendingly.
Am thinking. -- AMBARIEN ALQADAR
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