“Re-thinking Artistic Knowledge Production: Global Media Cultures—Distributed Creativity.” An Introduction

Franziska Koch, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

This section, “Re-thinking Artistic Knowledge Production: Global Media Cultures—Distributed Creativity,” features two contributions chosen from a symposium with the same title [1] that took place May 23‒24, 2013 based on a collaboration between members of the DFG research network “Medien der kollektiven Intelligenz” (2011–2014, University of Konstanz) [2] and hosted by the chair of global art history at Heidelberg University.[3]

An investigation of distributed forms of artistic, or more generally of aesthetic, knowledge production in times of global connectivity calls for a transcultural perspective. Such a perspective presents an academic challenge at two levels. At the level of empirical research, targeting transculturality in the global field of artistic and aesthetic practices requires researchers to trace various—often intricate or obscure—trajectories when analyzing how art works, concepts, or aesthetic practices travel from one location to the other and how their agents and technological mediation actively promote or refuse to negotiate cultural differences at specific moments. At a more reflexive level, the transcultural lens calls for a critical and historical awareness of how the very research methodologies that we apply to study these trajectories are part of epistemic formations that cannot be separated from culturally specific practices of knowledge production. This obliges us to re-consider post-colonial theories that called for a paradigmatic self-reflexive change in research, which would acknowledge and overcome the epistemic violence that the use of “Western” analytic frames or concepts brings with it when answering questions of artistic or aesthetic knowledge production.

In the last decade, scholars discussing the critical potential of a transcultural perspective to respond to this epistemological challenge have built on this agenda. They take post-colonial theory’s earlier call for an institutional critique seriously,[4] but are concerned about its tendency to absolutize the dichotomy of Western vs. other epistemic frameworks. Consequently, they seek to avoid imposing the theoretical findings resulting from a politically informed engagement with (post-)colonial power structures on historically and regionally different and very diverse socio-political and cultural contexts.

In the wake of the “global turn” of the late 1990s, scholars of art history,[5] visual (cultural) studies, and visual and media anthropology [6] have begun to critically discuss and constructively overcome those cultural assumptions, as well as nationally or civilizationally defined, static units of research, which have historically shaped these disciplines and crucially (in-)formed their methodological approaches. To take the example of art history, this multi-fold engagement has brought forth a range of very instructive, innovative case studies,[7] theoretically highly engaging monographs,[8] and manifesto-like writings.[9]

The research on constellations—both contemporary and historical—of “collaborative” or even “collective” artistic knowledge production reflects a dialogue among and across disciplines, as demonstrated by the contributions from an art historian, Samantha Schramm, and a visual anthropologist, Cora Bender. Their articles address both the epistemological legacies of such knowledge, and the ways in which scholarly work on these processes might (only) be nested in specific localities, nurtured by certain cultural beliefs, and shared by particular agents, despite the involved and resulting notions of (globally) shared and/or “distributed creativity.”[10] Yet, while the latest media paradigm of the worldwide web and its impact on professionals as well as amateurs, who are engaged in a vast, increasingly overlapping field of creative practices, has prompted academics to reconsider issues of participation and collaboration in art and artistic practices,[11] cross-culturally or even transculturally framed studies of these issues have remained rare.[12]

The two authors rise to this challenge by each offering a detailed analysis of two very specific and not directly related cases: the historical role of indigenous people in shaping modern North American popular culture, and a contemporary exhibition project that socially engaged (with) a Spanish-speaking neighborhood in New York. Both texts zoom into complex phenomena of collaborative creative knowledge production as they reflect on the methodological decision to limit their scope to one region or an even narrower urban locale. The articles thus demonstrate that an analysis that addresses both collaborative practices at a micro level, and the new media technology that supports actors in their local settings, is invaluable when attempting to answer the large question of transculturality. Both articles take North America as the main geographical context, and consider conceptions of “globality” that obviously changed over the twentieth century. The articles innovatively address two recent academic discourses and explore their existing, but largely understudied connections: on the one hand, media-related research on aspects of collectivity (as foregrounded by the symposium sub-title “global media cultures”), and on the other hand, art-related research on aspects of transculturality (as a specific connotation of the symposium sub-title “distributed creativity”). Both articles address the subject of artistic knowledge production from the related vantage points of a) collective authorship in processes of distributed creativity and b) transcultural phenomena in shared or even collective creative/artistic practices, while at the same time framing these points as particularly prominent aspects of (modern or contemporary) global media cultures.

Samantha Schramm’s contribution focuses on the exhibition The People’s Choice. (Arroz con Mango) (New York, 1981) by the artists’ collective Group Material as a case study to analyze processes of cultural transformation in collaborative artistic practices that raise questions which go beyond the notion of (single) authorship. Her article relates to forms of shared knowledge production shaped by the artists themselves, who made such practices a subject of explicit reflection on the level of the display. At the same time, Schramm considers how the objects from private homes that were put on display in The People’s Choice refer also to cultural everyday-life practices on a larger scale. Taking her cue from Bruno Latour’s notion of the circulating references of objects, she asks how transcultural collectivity is shaped by the circulation and transformation of the objects themselves, which become creative mediators in processes of transcultural knowledge production.

Cora Bender’s article extends the temporal and geographic horizon of the section to include the beginning of the twentieth century and post-frontier American popular culture. She analyzes entanglements of newly emerging media technology (especially photography and film), rapid industrialization, and the invention of leisure time on the one hand, and the opening up of the vast American interior for touristic exploration following the end of the “Indian Wars” on the other. Her study demonstrates how new arenas of cultural representation such as rodeos, fairs, and exhibitions went hand in hand with a shift in American politics towards a more or less forced integration of the diverse American populace under the umbrella of American patriotism. Yet, despite the violence involved in this integration, Bender argues from a media anthropological point of view that indigenous actors played a crucial role in bringing forth the new creative forms which marked this era and then subsequently evolved into what is nowadays called “global media culture.” Her article provides a strong case study to learn how the imagination of a community and the new media-based distribution of its representations can actually include as well as cover up many, often conflicting voices and creative agents without them necessarily contesting the overall imaginary.

Bender’s argument that native people “were not hapless victims of mediatization,” but that “they were there when media first happened, and they collaborated in making them happen” does indeed challenge the concept of cultural appropriation (Aneignung) that is so prominent in media and communication studies. While such a position does not contradict the other symposium contributors’ scepticism regarding today’s media user—aptly called a “prosumer”[13]—and his/her inability to maintain strong cases of independent and creative authorship,[14] it affirms the overall impression that historical as well as contemporary media developments and related cultural practices attest not only to forms of cultural “appropriation,” but to that of a cultural “cooperation” between locally situated agents, (digitally) inter-connected media, and increasingly global communicational networks.

A comparative reading of Bender’s and Schramm’s articles makes clear that the specific power relations within each of the socio-political and historical settings is a key factor in explaining how forms of cultural appropriation as well as cooperation evolve, change, and might continue to (in-)form distributed creativity across further locales and times. Taken together, the articles also provide partial but complementary answers to some of the symposium’s lingering questions, while highlighting the need to address those questions that only appear as an afterthought of a comparative reading: Are there new ways of collectively producing and sharing artistic knowledge in the broadest sense, which would transcend earlier practices by which artist groups and networked amateurs alike, as well as artistic or simply creative media, were able to overcome the (modernist) ideals of single authorship? Or do we see historical conflicts of “authentic” authorship, unequal power relations, and cultural misunderstandings taking on a new look and becoming viral on a new, global scale?