Cut-ups and collage are approached in this project (and have been approached in the scrapbooking project) as a way of making the familiar strange.  As the American writer and critic Greil Marcus said in an interview:

“I always hope that people will find what I do interesting and that it will spark questions of their own. If my writing has any goal it is to show that the world is more interesting than we sometimes think it is and that it is more full of contingency and doubt” (interview, Dec. 18, 2007).

For cultural studies and analysis that can be taken as a challenge to consider the limits of our techniques for looking (observing), comprehending, and representing.  You are encouraged to engage with cut-ups and collage as a way improving your skills as a cultural analyst or critic.

In this studio class you will have the opportunity to work on a collage/cut-up.  The piece you work on is up to you but keep in mind that I have been asking you to focus your scrapbook work so far on observation and social environments.  Extending your last scrapbook entry would be good.  Alternatively you could use this as a chance to explore your final scrapbook assignment.  You could also do something completely different (say work on a question of subjectivity, think about a particular built environment, or you could look at a found object or image).  You will be using the cut-up as a mode of inquiry and will come away at the end of the studio class with a tabloid-sized collage.

When: Monday, March 2nd. (9am – 10am)
Where: HUB mall, ground level Art Studio (Studio 3, room 154).
What you need:

• Necessary
  • scissors (and/or a scalpel or knife)
  • glue stick
• Optional
  • scrabooking embellishments
  • magazines
  • better quality paper
  • old shoe, bit of wool, dead ant, bird wing, quart of milk, cutting of human hair, the last breath of a dying rat, sparkle from a unicorn’s eye, etc.

resources:

• William Burroughs on cut-ups

March 2 – 6:

• Storey: chapter 6 (structuralism and post-structuralism)
• Edwards: chapter 6 (fantasy and remembrance)

March 9-13:

• Storey: chapter 7 (feminism)
• Storey: chapter 8 (postmodernism)

March16 – 20:

• Storey: chapter 9 (politics of the popular)
• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

March 23 – 27:

• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

March 30 – April 3:

• Taussig: Law in a lawless land

Hey all, sorry about the SNAFU this morning. I returned from Texas and came down with a nasty bit of food poisoning. In my delirium I asked the department of sociology to post a notice that class would be canceled for 9:30, not 9am. Any how please accept my most humble apologies.

All will be back to normal on Wednesday. See you then.

-Craig

Update. Scrapbook entry #3 is now due on the 27th of February.

After class today I came across this article in the New York Times about the “Dissonant undertones” of M.I.A.s songs. While the author has obviously little capacity to sympathize with ‘terrorists’ there is a pretty reasonable coverage of the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. It certainly lights up our discussion of the ‘culture industry’.

see also this video: Delon diss’ MIA

This will be a good point to talk about remix and resistance.

Photo-Study (30%)

Due last day of examination period:

You will select and generate a research topic of your choosing that makes explicit use of photography.  The subject is open as is the way that you use the photographs.  The written portion should be between five and ten pages (1.5 pacing, 11 or 12pt. font) the visual portion can take the form of a scrapbook, a photo album, a slide show, a web page, etc.  You are encouraged to build on the work that you have begun with any of the previous scrapbooking projects but you are not required to do this.

You need to consult with me on this assignment (email or hand in a proposal by March 2nd).

References should follow the APA or MLA styles (the main thing is that you are consistent in the style that you use).  See this website for more details:

http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html#mla

re-photography assignment (an exploration of everyday spaces)
Due: March 16
Value: 25%

In Steve Edwards’ book we learn that photography is a complex set of social and technical interactions that has had a revolutionary impact on the way that people interact with one another and with the world in general; taking a picture is never a simple act of snapping the shutter.  In this assignment you are asked to reflect not only on the act of taking a picture but also on the act of taking a picture over again.  The practice of taking a picture that has already been taken is called repeat photography or simply re-photography.  Repeat photography is not only a way of thinking about photography (and photographic histories, gazes, etc.) but it can also be a powerful technique in the analysis ‘place’ and its social construction.

In this course we take photography as one of the key technologies for representing the world today.  It is a transformative but it is also continuously being negotiated.  One thing we can say about photography with some certainty is that the photographs most definitive quality is its indexicality, the way that it points to the absolutely specific and particular.  In this specificity, the photograph reproduces and reconfigures our experience of time and place.  In this assignment we are concerned particularly with place and with the way that places are made meaningful by everyday patterns of use, misuse, and disuse.

What you need to do:

• Find a public area — a space where people gather or pass through.  Winston Churchill square, Whyte avenue, the local 7-11, etc.
• Find an historic photograph (one that is more than twenty years old).
• Produce a visual exploration of the ‘scene’ or the place.  Using your experience from scrapbook assignments 1 – 3 you need to go into this site of everyday experience with your camera as a supplement to your vision.
• Try to reproduce the photograph you have found.
  • For the scrapbook you may also consider extending your study of the place you have chosen with more photographs. (could be more detailed, more specific, could be pictures of trash, or the sidewalk, or a detailed picture of a storefront window.
• Map the site in google maps and upload both the original photograph and the photograph that you have taken to reproduce it.
• Take care not to shoot identifying shots of people in the picture.  We will share these in class (you will work in small groups to present what you have and try to imaging other ways of representing your site.).
• You will be graded on the following:
  • 1. Two photographs and a 200-300 word ‘caption’ on google maps
  • 2. A written study making explicit use of course materials (through references and quotations) situating your exploration and ‘analysis’ of the place.  This should bebetween 1000 and 1500 words.

References should follow the APA or MLA styles (the main thing is that you are consistent in the style that you use).  See this website for more details:

http://library.concordia.ca/help/howto/citations.html#mla

resources:

Smith, Trudi. 2007. Repeat Photography as a Method in Visual Anthropology. Visual Anthropology 20, no. 2/3 (March): 179-200.

View Larger Map
You need to email me to be added to the group of people who are collaborating on this map.  Once you’ve been added, you’ll be able to add placemarks to the map (and to link to images and add commentary).  There is a good tutorial for google maps here, here, and here.

note: To be able to edit the collaborative map, it seems that you need to have a google account.  When I send you an invitation to see the map, you’ll be able to view it.  You’ll also have an option to “Save to my maps”.  If you follow that link, you’ll be given the option to log in to your google account or to “Create an account now.”  Follow one of these options and you’ll be able to edit the map.

note 2: Here are explicit directions for editing a map: http://maps.google.com/support/

due: feb 23February 27
value: 5%

Techniques of the observer, making sense, and the violence of order

This assignment will extend your exploration of the everyday world through observation, notation, and representation. You are asked to observe a location of public gathering or passing (an arcade, a bar, a coffee shop, a mall, etc.). Try to go to this place more than once and stay longer than fifteen minutes. Map this place into google maps and create a scrapbook entry. For this assignment I don’t want you to take any photographs but rather to find images (from newspapers, the internet, magazines) that can be used in a collage. The point is to explore the way that non-specific photographic elements can be used to illustrate, ’embellish,’ and extend your observations.

Think of Hoggart’s descriptions of the milk bar as an example:

“One supposedly striking portent of the journey in to the candy-floss world is the habitual visitor to the new milk bars, ‘the juke box boy’ . . . Milk bars are themselves symptomatic: they ‘indicate at once, in the nastiness of the modernistic knick-knacks, their glaring showiness, an aesthetic breakdown so complete . . . Patrons are mostly ‘boys between fifteen and twenty, with drape suits, picture ties, and an American slouch. . . Their amin reason for being there is to ‘put copper after copper into the mechanical record player’ . . . Records are played loud: the music ‘is allowed to blare out so that the noise would be sufficient to fill a good sized ball room’. . . . Listening to the music, ‘The young men waggle one shoulder or state, as desperately as Humphrey Bogart, across the tubular chairs’ . . . Compared even with the pub around the corner, this is all a peculiarly thin and pallid form of dissipation, a sort of spiritual dry-rot amid the odour of boiled milk. Many of the customers – their clothes, their hair styles, their facial expressions all indicate – are living to a large extent in a myth world compounded of a few simple elements which they take to be those of American life.” (Hoggart in Storey 2006: 33).

note: This passage is just over 200 words.

Deliberate in terms of mass culture and trends. You might consider going to a place that is not familiar to you, where you even maintain some disdain or contempt for the kind of culture that you’re observing. If you were doing something on youth culture, you could consider juxtaposing youth culture to your own experiences. Think about Hoggart’s idea of the ‘chains of cultural subordination’ and creativity (or the lack of it). Are we looking at people who are caught up in a swell of consumer culture or mass produced culture or is this somehow authentic?  What does authenticity mean, anyway?

Remember you are not taking photographs in this space but you will nonetheless be scrapbooking your assignment. Part of the challenge will be the inclusion of collage elements, documents, embellishments, etc.  If you go to a public park, you might seek out images in a magazine (perhaps even drawing attention to the difference between an idealized version of this location and the location you visited).  Cut in parts of a map or a napkin from the cafe.  Consider how the addition of these elements can add to your observation.  Don’t add elements if they don’t extend or add to your observations.

As always you also have recourse to a metacommentary that can help to provide direction and commentary on the reading of your scrapbook. You should have around 500 words of written text (in total, including the metacommentary). This is only worth five percent of your grade so you need to be frugal with your time. The more focused you make this assignment the easier it will be for you.

due: February 9
value: 5%

Mapping the extraordinary in the ordinary

This is your second scrapbooking entry.  For this assignment you are asked to photograph at least three scenes (up to five) from a route that you typically follow to and from work, the university, or home.  You will need to create extended captions for each of the photographs.  This written part will be an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between writing and photography.  What is a typical caption?  When does a caption cease to be a caption? How do captions frame interpretation?  You should be prepared to share at least one of these photographs and captions in class.  As with the first assignment you can use metacommentary to reflect on your work and/or to give reading directions for me.  You should have around 500 words of typed text (in the form of captions and/or commentary).

The idea of following a route that you are familiar with is important because it allows you to engage with the ‘mundane habits of seeing’.  You are useing your camera as a tool of inquiry.  What you see before you take a photograph is different than what you see during and after.  The key is that you take the time to explore your route and most importantly that you take time to defamiliarize the world around you.

The second component of this assignment will be to create a collectively generated Google map.  I’ve already created the map, you just need to send me your email address (use the subject line: “soc345 google map”) and I can add you as a collaborator.  You will then be able to begin to map your sites of observation.

What are the scenes that you need to photograph?  I can’t tell you that because it is a highly subjective thing.  You won’t know until you begin looking out.  I tend to think of myself as a coinnoseur of public street art and posters, so there are not a lot that get by my gaze.  Then again, when I look more carefully, there may be an entire category of posters that I don’t look at or consider.

reference articles for this assigment:

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991) Towards a Sociology of Photography. Visual Anthropology Review. Vol.7, No.1: 129-133

Campbell, Craig (2008) Residual Landscapes and the Everyday: An Interview With Edward Burtynsky. Space and Culture. vol. 11: 39-50

Miller, C. C. (2006) A Beast in the Field: The Google Maps Mashup as GIS/2. Cartographica, 41: 187-199.