Aesthetic Journalism

How to Inform Without Informing

Alfredo Cramerotti

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781841502687
• eBook ISBN: 9781841503417
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Addressing a growing area of focus in contemporary art, Aesthetic Journalism investigates why contemporary art exhibitions often consist of interviews, documentaries, and reportage. Art theorist and critic Alfredo Cramerotti traces the shift in the production of truth from the domain of the news media to that of art and aestheticism—a change that questions the very foundations of journalism and the nature of art. This volume challenges the way we understand art and journalism in contemporary culture and suggests future developments of this new relationship.

Chapter 1

ONE THING Among Many

 

As I understand it, a title is always a challenge

(Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator)

Aesthetic Journalism might sound a bold statement at first. Instead, I would consider the title as a proposal for one method of talking about something, one of many possible. It relates an idea rather than a story, and brings together various practices and ideas without being ‘about’ them. There are also personal reasons for this title. In 2003 I was commissioned to create an art piece taking as its inspiration the bridge in Istanbul that connects Asia and Europe. I invited another person to work with me. We travelled, came back and realized a three-minute video worked out of thirteen interviews, focussed on the perception of the bridges (two, actually) by the inhabitants of Istanbul. We exhibited the piece in Berlin. It went well. Upon its good reception, I realized something peculiar about the work. Not necessarily wrong, but interesting from a certain point of view, namely: we set off to realize an artwork; we came back with a journalistic piece.

‘The distinction between fiction and nonfiction is false […] There is only narrative.’ (Suchan 2004: 309). When dealing with creative practices, to attempt such a separation of genres is useless. Back then, however, we failed to question the nature of our means of production, such as interviews, the hand-held camera, questions edited out and visual illustration of statements. While aware of other elements and making certain choices – the author revealing himself with the last question, for instance, or the visuals being a graphic metaphor of the bridges, etc. – we did not query the investigative choice as a whole, and from which position, if such a thing can be defined, we were speaking. We just did it. That is the beauty of art, one might argue. Evaluations and concerns are for others. Well, what you are about to read here stems from that remote piece of artistic investigation; it was long dormant before reaching this form – a sort of alarm bell in my head. And whenever I can, I try to work on what makes the bell ring. That is not to say I have completed the task; in fact, I am just at the beginning.

I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area […] I don’t write for an audience, I write for users, not readers. (Foucault 1994 [1974]: 523–524)

A book is a form of communication that brings together aesthetics and information; the one you are reading attempts to also question the relationship between the two. Here, the text does not function as a voice for the artworks discussed; it exists in dialogue with artistic positions, media theories, journalistic approaches, theoretical debates and personal ideas throughout.¹ I have adopted a number of (journalistic) devices, such as the text box for in-depth notes, borrowed from the layout of weekly magazines, which break the surface and provide ‘tangents’ for reflection. In addition, the progression of the arguments follows the ‘5W+H’ convention; many readers might know that it stands for Who, What, Where, When, Why + How (albeit slightly re-shuffled here), criteria that originated with the Greek-Latin rhetoric discipline, still in use. Two more things: first, I discuss direct experience of artworks and artistic positions that I encounter in my profession, and these are determined by the conversations and access I have. This book, then, cannot claim a ‘global’ perspective (neither would I aim at such a thing, to be honest), but perhaps its structure and approach can help the pursuit of parallel research, and in organizing debate in other contexts. Secondly, the work has been a process of un-making, in the sense of dismantling my previous thoughts about art and journalism, and re-building them differently; a rather long route to (un)learn something (Rogoff 2002) in order to make room for something new, of which I was not aware before. Throughout the research and the writing, I put in conversation seemingly disparate areas of interest and perspectives – which may or may not have been brought close to one another in the past – to discuss or challenge their potential meanings according to a new reading. This, in short, is my take on the book. While all the knowledge herein is a shared effort (and I have probably forgotten someone in the final acknowledgements), the mistakes are all mine. Have a nice journey.

Note

1. My thanks to Emma Cocker and her Notes on Critical Writing (2007) for clarifying this point in relation to writing. The text was a response given to Chris Brown from a-n Magazine, http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/article/379627. Accessed 22 April 2009.

Chapter 2

WHAT is Aesthetic Journalism?

The relationship between journalism and art is a difficult territory to chart. What I call aesthetic journalism involves artistic practices in the form of investigation of social, cultural or political circumstances. Its research outcomes take shape in the art context, rather than through media channels. I am aware that ‘media’ is not a monolithic venture that encompasses every production and circulation of information, and I will clarify this. I use ‘media’, ‘mass media’ or ‘media news’ throughout the book to indicate the currents of mainstream broadcast and printed news, often tied up with multinational and governmental publicity resulting in a sort of (private or public) corporate-led information. I focus here not on the political, social and economical nature of such agglomerates, but rather on the information that is produced, distributed and absorbed via them. In an attempt to construct an alternative to such mainstream apparatuses, art tends to use investigative methods in order to achieve a certain amount of knowledge about a problem, situation, individual or historical narrative. The artist thus absorbs him/herself in professional tasks that occasionally are at odds with art production. Sometimes this artistic practice aims to counter today’s media news of flashy headlines and ‘parachuted’ journalists (those assigned to cover issues, on which they have no possibility of doing research); other times it complements (without contradicting) the media view, providing an extra gaze. Journalism, for its part, has always embodied an internal conflict in relation to the production of information. On the one hand, it implies the eyewitness approach of the reporter and field journalist, mediated (hence the word media) despite adopting a non-subjective style in the spirit of a claimed objectivity (Huxford 2001). On the other hand, the use of a precise aesthetics by means of photo, video and graphic display of that information provides a sense of witnessing an unmediated account. Thus, even if rarely acknowledged, the interaction of aesthetics and journalism is a common feature: a widespread cultural artefact, not a special field of practice.

Why aesthetic?

Aesthetics is that process in which we open our sensibility to the diversity of the forms of nature (and manmade environment), and convert them into tangible experience. Taking this as a starting point, my suggestion of a journalism ‘being’ aesthetic takes into account a concept of aesthetics as something other than a state of contemplation. It is rather the capacity of an art form to put our sensibility in motion, and convert what we feel about nature and the human race into a concrete (visual, oral, bodily) experience. The potential of aesthetics in relation to journalism is based on two considerations: first, as mentioned above, traditional journalism itself uses a highly developed aesthetic tradition, which in time has gained the mark of objectivity. (In fact, as soon as a language is in use, the user faces aesthetic choices.) Thus, by being ubiquitous and universal, the ‘consumer’ no longer regards it as aesthetics, and accepts it uncritically. Secondly, the implementation of different aesthetics is a way of questioning the hegemony of the status quo. Content is – and stays – important, but it is very hard for an artist to live up to the research capabilities of a standard newspaper or TV station. Therefore, the artist has to play his or her cards by disclosing a universally accepted aesthetics of truth, that is: using another aesthetics, which reveals the former as such. Aesthetic journalism makes it possible to contribute to building (critical) knowledge with the mere use of a new aesthetic ‘regime’, which has the effect of raising doubts about the truth-value of the traditional regime. Not because one is better than the other (or more efficient), but because the appearance of both brings focus to the aesthetics itself, this way denouncing the claim that the system of representation is the same as what it represents (that journalistic representation is the same as the facts represented).

Truth in reporting is a myth: except for a direct involvement in the events of life, only degrees of approximation are possible, those being more or less reliable according to the position of the author, prejudices and obligation towards employers. Only in fields such as law, science and media can one still encounter the presumption of an unbiased representation of facts based on documentation. The artist who uses the tools of investigative journalism in their work adopts techniques like archive and field research, interviewing, surveys; they also employ specific narrative and display formats such as documentary style, graphic visualization, text-based and photo reportage. Ideally, their work offers a grasp on actuality relying on the viewer’s sensibility, therefore helping to develop the skills to ask proper questions; the journalistic approach of the artist is geared more towards the ‘effect to be produced’ rather than the ‘fact to be understood’ (Rancière 2006b: 158, Demos 2008: 6). One might argue that this very ‘artistic’ information is also ‘consumed’ as an aesthetic product within the art world, but such major questions cannot be confined to the art circuit. We no longer consider artists as specialized craftspeople: to produce sense socially and politically one has to abandon the notion of artisanship in favour of innumerable forms of expression, which include film festivals, newspapers, television, internet, radio and magazines. Also, it has to avoid a certain ‘spectacularization’ of violence and suffering, which may result in an even worse outcome than embedded journalism. There are ways to avoid this and yet still employ fiction as a subversive but meaningful and effective agent of reality, which is precisely one of the aims of this book.

Why journalism?

Journalism is intended to be a service in the interest of the highest number of people possible, not an opportunity to influence decisions and gain power. It defines what is perceived as ‘common’, and constructs the boundaries of normalcy for both representation and reality. Journalism as a coded, professional practice establishes a cultural and social order: we read the conventions of representation as though they were reality itself (Williams and Delli Carpini 2000). We accept the journalistic attitude as the bearer of linguistic and visual documents of the reality, because it relates occurrences (on a global scale) to a pattern immediately understandable to our mind frame. The journalistic method is the principal instrument to read the world; it provides a certain security, by establishing an order for the things ‘out there’, and by constructing a universal form of communication, as such:

People obtain knowledge of the world outside their immediate experience largely from mass media, where journalistic content predominates. Journalistic ways of depicting reality, journalists’ models and modus operandi also influence other social institutions: politics, market actors, educational institutions and so forth. (Ekström 2002: 259)¹

The power of journalism derives from its alleged capacity to contain the entire world in familiar narrative forms, those recurring in the daily routine of news (Schudson 1995). Thus, the increasing presence of the journalistic method in contemporary art (and many other fields) does not come as a surprise: journalism is the interface we use to understand how things work and affect us, and it forms the base for public knowledge in science, politics and many other fields.² In their Phenomenology of Journalism, Joseph Bensman and Robert Lilienfeld (1969: 107) indicate that the journalistic attitude is applied not only to information, and not exclusively by journalists, but also in a number of areas outside the journalistic field. For example, scientific knowledge relies on ‘visualization’ to be accepted; politics makes use of daily news to build its credibility and so on.

Starting from the nineteenth century, news (as we know it) became a system to validate the world around us (Wall 2005); we need the journalistic mediation since we are no longer able to unravel things in any other way, due to the amount of communication processes and relations in which we are embedded. The professional figure of the journalist is necessary to deal with an increasingly complex civilization, which includes the separation of roles and a huge number of processes in administration, science, culture and technology; it mediates these fields to the majority of the population, who have no direct experience of all the multifaceted aspects of society. The definition of aesthetic journalism does not distance itself much from the notion of investigative journalism,³ given that objectivity is not a measurable feature. For instance, journalistic reportage is intended to produce a deeper understanding of current news events, by means of background analysis, field observation and personal accounts, going further beyond prime-time news reports. Supposedly, investigative journalists travel to the scene of events (or take up a specific subject), gather information and report on the facts and actions of individuals, businesses, crime organizations and government agencies. To obtain this information for their reports, journalists cultivate the confidentiality of their sources: people directly involved or familiar with the topic investigated. The result of the investigation takes the form of reportage: a term thus signifying a ‘witness’ genre of journalism, researched and observed first-hand and distributed through the media. The activity of presenting information often blends documentary style, physical or psychological perception and evidence of various natures: a non-fiction cultural production. For an author, to reveal oneself through the work would mean to take a step forward and disclose one’s presence, manipulation and influence on the viewer’s perception, at the cost of spoiling the entire work by flagging up a warning sign for the spectator not to trust the author’s gaze. Yet, a news photograph showing a subject staring directly into the camera is considered non-professional (Becker 2004): how did we end up with such an impersonal (and quite absurd) approach?

The crisis of traditional journalism

By the middle of nineteenth century the idea of the ‘average man’ in the public eye was firmly grasped, and daily papers commonly presented simple question-and-answer features, usually connected with crime stories. Newspaper and press began to report on social investigations and tribunal decisions, ballots results and average wages, often including interviews and statistical information, like in the case of Henry Mayhew’s articles on London poor between 1849 and 1850 in the Morning Chronicle (Winston 1995: 133). In the United States media mogul Joseph Pulitzer advanced an idea of journalism intended as a service, with newspapers conceived as public institutions with a duty to improve society. Journalism (and documentary making) borrowed the techniques of investigation and evidence-gathering proper to the legal system, and placed them in the open public realm. Since the emergence of bourgeois society and the raise of modern democracy, journalistic and documentary-based practices have been accepted as a radical form of criticism and truth-telling, without ques...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION Art and Journalism: A Perspective Shift of Meaning
• Chapter 1: ONE THING Among Many
• Chapter 2: WHAT is Aesthetic Journalism?
• Chapter 3: WHERE is Aesthetic Journalism?
• Chapter 4: WHEN did Aesthetic Journalism Develop?
• Chapter 5: HOW shall we Read Aesthetic Journalism?
• Chapter 6: WHO produces Aesthetic Journalism Today? From Which Position?
• Chapter 7: WHY is Aesthetic Journalism Relevant, Now and in Perspective? 101
• Chapter 8: REFERENCES and Niceties
• AFTERWORD