An Ethics of Engagement

a) Highlight 3 insights that your reading has helped bring to the surface. Use specific text evidence to link your insights.

1. It's very interesting the connection that the author is making between community engaged art and ethnography. I know a little bit about ethnography and it's historically problematic gaze, so it help that this connection is being made. "This is not so much to posit the collaborative artist as an ethnographer per se, or ‘outside observer’, as it is to note the extent to which participative art practices often involve a close, if not intimate, degree of familiarity and involvement with given social groups over extended periods of time." This quote perfectly lays out the fundamental association in a way that's really eye opening for me.

2. The idea of aesthetics vs ethics has always been such an interesting thing for me to think about. I've watched countless ethnographic films and can pull a lot of enjoyment and meaning from them. It was only once I got to CalArts where this idea of the ethics behind the creation of the films was brought into play. In a class I took my first year here I was shown how flawed and problematic the gaze of the "outside observer" can be. Claire Bishop says this, " the social turn in contemporary art has prompted an ethical turn in art criticism … accusations of mastery and ego centrism are leveled at artists who work with participants to realize a project instead of allowing it to emerge through consensual collaboration."  It's interesting that even after the world of ethnography had began to deconstruct itself and the way it interacted with its subjects, the art world was finding itself in the beginning phases of what ethnographic film had experienced. 

3. I also found it really interesting that the author was able to fairly criticize each work that they brought up. On pages 9-10 the author describes the work of two different individuals and how they are both exploitative but may not come across as such to the lay-person. These kinds of criticisms are incredibly value for me to understand and hear about as they make me more critical of the media I am consuming. Being able to see through a work and understand its pitfalls and issues is really valuable as an artist and a conscious consumer.

b) If you could ask the author 3 questions,  what questions might those be?

1. What is your favorite ethnography?

2. Is there ever a point where aesthetics can out weigh the ethics of the way an artwork was made/produced?

3. What are important artworks/ethnographies to consume that are not produced ethicly?

c) What applications might this work have to your understanding of an ethical approach to community-engaged arts?

Understanding the direct tie between an ethnography and community engaged arts allows me to see the utility that might come from doing community engaged arts. I still have a hard time understanding or believe that it has a value other than aesthetic, but this paper has helped me to see a different perspective.

d) Consider the work we have been exploring this semester thus far.  Choose one artist or project that resonated with you. What ethical considerations were in place on this project?

The roof is on fire seemed to have a lot of input from the community and from the performers themselves. An ethical concern however might be that there was too much oversight from the producers, and that perhaps there was too much of a power dynamic between the older white producers and the younger performers of color.