Disciplines as Domination: How interrogating traditional research and knowledge will help make our libraries and archives more equitable
Originally presented as a keynote presentation for the Triangle Research Libraries Network Annual Meeting, July 31, 2020. This version has been edited for Medium. For inquiries about presenting the full presentation, please contact me.
Just having returned from an artist residency earlier this year, I really appreciate the opportunity to reflect and speak on my work as artist and librarian. What I hoped to accomplish through this talk is to provide a frame of reference for research for a non-traditional discipline as a means to interrogate research within traditional disciplines, and how research is associated with power and domination, particularly outside European and Western culture. This contributes to the larger conversation of the library’s long legacy of upholding white supremacy and systemic oppression.[1]
Throughout this presentation I reference Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People, first published in 1999. This book has been critical to my work as a librarian.
I’d like to start with this quote and and an excerpt from a soundscape.
“From the vantage point of the colonized… the term ‘research is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research,’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary.”
— Linda Tuhiwai Smith
This quote is how I open my Researching Community History workshop, which largely focuses on archival research and navigating archives as institutions.
When listening to the soundscape, I’d like you to hold these questions in your mind: Is this excerpt knowledge? Is it information? We’ll return to this and contextualize the excerpt.
Unlike academic work, there is no requirement on the part of an artist to cite what they were thinking, watching, reading, or doing when they made a work. If we take a museum exhibition, for example, as a method of art consumption, the exhibition labels don’t usually include words directly from artists.
The audience doesn’t see a bibliography that accompanies the artists work. For example, the museum label above, which I chose solely for its clarity and exemplary format. We see this format often: Artist name, dates associated with the artist, title of work and date produced, medium(s), how and when it came to the museum. The image of this artwork and accompanying text on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco digital collections page is not much different from the label, offering just a few more details for search term purposes, such as “American painting.”
Often, exhibitions are contextualized by curators, through methods such as introductory texts and catalogs. They provide the written word where there might not be any.
We accept the general narrative that artists are inspired by something or someone to make work, but unlike academic work, the bibliography can be speculative and left to those who critique or curate the work. “This artist is clearly inspired by this work,” as an example of how we talk about artwork. Interviews with artists can also reveal influences and inspiration first hand.
An example of this can be found on my research guide to Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade. There is a large amount of editorials, lists, criticisms, and other writings that made connections and assumptions about this one-hour film released in 2016. The page above is dedicated to the art and culture references of the film, illustrating, among other things, the connection between Beyoncé’s work and the work of artist Pipilotti Rist. Additionally, the visual works we see from artists might even be the research for them.
Art making is not a traditional discipline and it doesn’t require a certain education or resume of experience. All of that helps, but is not required for practice. Artists don’t typically talk about their work as being within a “field,” as academic professionals might, but rather associate their work within a particular medium or mediums or movements. “I’m a painter,” “I’m a photographer and sculptor,” “I’m a conceptual artist,” etc.
Our work as librarians however, depend on systems that work within traditional disciplines. These disciplines have come from European and Western ideas of what constitutes knowledge. How does this impact how we work with our communities?
“Most of the ‘traditional’ disciplines are grounded in cultural world views, which are either antagonistic to other belief systems or have no methodology for dealing with other knowledge systems.”
— Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
The outdated term “primitive art” is an example of this.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) defines this term as:
“A term that has been used to refer to the art of various historical European periods and of non-Western societies. In the mid-19th century, it was primarily applied to 14th and 15th century Italian and Flemish art, which modern artists prized for what they saw as its simplicity, sincerity, and expressive power. Use of the term then broadened to encompass a range of non-Western art, sweeping from South America to Southeast Asia. At the beginning of the 20th century, European artists embraced African and Oceanic masks and statuary and the term came to be associated with work from these regions. Such work deeply impacted these artists, who perceived in it a physical directness and emotional charge that they found exciting and distinct. By the late 20th century the term, with its derogatory connotations, fell out of favor.”
— Museum of Modern Art.
In 1984 MoMA exhibited “Primitivsm” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, which included 150 modern works and more than 200 “tribal objects.” The press release boasts it as “groundbreaking” explaining that it is the first ever to “juxtapose modern and tribal objects in the light of informed art history.” It also explains that “primitivism” can be traced to Paul Gauguin. “It was he who just before the turn of the century began melding the perceptual realism of impressionism with flat decorative effects and stylized forms found in many non-Western arts, including sculptures from Cambodia, Java and Polynesia.”
This is a great example of Western obsession of the individual: Paul Gauguin is named, credited, and celebrated as bringing to light a culture and its peoples. Other examples include the highly coveted and honorable solo exhibitions and artist such as Jeff Koons who is highly praised, but the team that makes his work possible is not prominently recognized… or maybe because some are robots?
The press release goes on to say, “This shift away from the purely perceptual to a more conceptual style gathered momentum in the first decades of the 20th century, fueled at least in part by the ever-increasing availability of African and Oceanic tribal objects in centers of artistic activity such as Paris, and by pioneer modernists’ ‘discovery’ of the beauty and complexity of objects previously considered mere curiosities.”
“Classification systems were developed specifically to cope with the mass of new knowledge generated by the discoveries of the ‘new world.’”
— Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
Art historian Thomas McEvilly publicly criticized the exhibition in Artforum, pointing out the curators’ omission of “dates of the [indigenous] works and [explanations of] their functions, their religious or mythological connections, [and] their environments,” which in his view resulted in an “absolute repression of primitive context, meaning, content, and intention.” He concluded by saying “Primitivism” was ultimately a demonstration of “Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and sourvenirism.”
In this example, the academic field of art history denies Indigenous knowledge, determining it unimportant by excluding context, and adding its own, crediting those who made “discovery,” rather than the work. One can relate this to things such as cultural appropriation today.
This, of course, is prevalent in other areas, other disciplines. For example, the article in The Conversation, “It’s taken thousands of years, but Western science is finally catching up to Traditional Knowledge,” by George Nicholas (2018) on the behaviors of ‘firehawks,’ or nighthawks that intentionally carry burning sticks to spread fire in order to take advantage of the result of natural fires. Something Indigenous peoples of northern Australia whose ancestors have occupied the land for tens of thousands of years have long known. Here the author writes, “The worldwide attention given to the firehawks article provides an opportunity to explore the double standard that exists concerning the acceptance of Traditional Knowledge by practitioners of Western science.”
“Art is information,” is something I’ve written on previously and is included in my short bio. I articulated this concept shortly after I started in my current position at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). To contextualize it, I’ll give a short background on where I’m coming from.
I not only work at MICA, but I am an alum. I did horribly in high school and art was my only way into college. Returning to MICA as a librarian first and not artist eight years after graduating was especially exciting and challenging. I entertain jokes about art school, which can be used as a derogatory term when said with a certain inflection by those who studied traditional disciplines, including colleagues, but in reality art and design college is an extremely intense, difficult education. Students are expected to ideate and create work in a (sometimes) brutal peer-to-peer critique environment on a consistent basis. The bar is set pretty high.
When I was a student, I might have visited the library once with a class, but I never had information literacy classes. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that I was taught how to actually use a library. This is part of the reason I never wanted to be a librarian. I had no idea what librarians did. I went to graduate school for Library and Information Science because I wanted to be an archivist. I realized then that the library privileges those who already know how to use it, which significantly informs my librarianship practice now. After a year of being in my position and significant staff changes, the library finally had a full-blown information literacy program. All the librarians lead information literacy classes and we see every first year class in art history at least once.
One of our challenges as librarians working with artists is our different use of language. We are, after all, one community working with another. The way we produce and discuss our work is different. We were saying “research” and students more often than not associated this with their Art History and Humanistic Studies classes, not with their studio classes. They associated research as spending hours in the library looking specifically at books, a lot of which is a result of the K-12 education.
After a couple years, most of the librarians share a common way of discussing research in our sessions. We generally tell students two key things to research:
- Research starts with what you know.
- You do research everyday, you just might not call it that.
But this still presents challenges. To the artist “research” is more closely aligned with “inspiration.” It’s probably why our library is highly used for browsing, a place known for serendipitous discovery, and a low amount of questions at the Research Help desk.
Returning to the idea that art is information, I feel this is a culmination of my experience as artist and librarian. Even if the artist is working solely from their own identity, that identity is within our world, therefore inspired by what’s around them. There is meaning embedded within our artistic decisions. For example, when our students attend MICA, unless enrolled in one of our distance programs, they become Baltimore residents, a city that is 60% Black, a statistic not reflected in our student population. The city is probably most known nationally for violence as depicted in TV and movies. Does this impact their work and if so, how? How does environment influence artwork?
Continuing with art is information: books as resources are great, but not everything is in a book, especially considering how few artists and authors of color actually have books dedicated to their work. What other ways of knowing outside of books or archives are there? Seeking and using “scholarly” works means other works are sacrificed or even devalued.
“The concept of discipline is even more interesting when we think about it not simply as a way of organizing systems of knowledge but also as a way of organizing people or bodies.”
— Linda Tuhiwai Smith.
The way in which fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner develops work was particularly influential to my work as a librarian. I first read about her work in a 2018 article on Grailed, a high-end menswear online marketplace. I always mention my source when including it in library instruction because I want students to know that while library resources are great, there are many outlets for credible information relevant to their work. The article, “Grace Wales Bonner’s Unapologetic Intellectualization of Menswear,” by Jacob Victorine (2018), describes the fact that Wales Bonner wrote a 10,000 word dissertation to accompany her fashion line in her last year of school even though there was no requirement to do so. How much richer would have all the lines produced in Wales Bonner’s cohort been if there was such a requirement?
These thoughts may seem contradictory… “wait I thought you were saying we shouldn’t box art making into a discipline that worships the written word?” Yup, exactly. But these other disciplines do exist and there are concepts and ideas we can take from them to better serve our communities. The underlying point isn’t to move one way or another, but in order to make research, and therefore the library and archive more equitable and accessible, we must think critically about how research has dominated and marginalized populations, works, etc. and how our preconceptions about research impact our work.
For example, Wales Bonner curates Further Reading lists for her clothing lines and they typically include references such as photography, sound, poetry, books, video, fiction, and more. In my discussions of art is information with students, I ask them, “What would be on your further reading list for a project you’re working on?” It’s not just our students who are limited by the connotations associated with research. They are merely working within how the world of art making views research.
The soundscape you might have clicked on from earlier in this story goes on for 20 minutes and was something I produced during a three-week residency in Oaxaca, México in February, just before COVID-19 became a pandemic. Because I returned very close to when the US went on lockdown, I associate time to be either “before Oaxaca” or “after Oaxaca.”
We had a showcase in the artist residency program’s (Pocoapoco) main residency house and my work, Sonidos de Oaxaca, played on a loop in the kitchen I shared with the incredible artist Delphine Desane. The loop consisted of sounds of various markets, a textile maker using a loom, recordings of service trucks, and other environmental sounds. The kitchen was completely dark except for the main high-top table, where a Oaxacan textile laid with candles burning herbs and copal.
I applied for the residency shortly after getting back from my first trip to Oaxaca. What drew me there the first time was the history, Indigenous communities and traditions that continue today, art, food, and this being the place known for mezcal production. I’ve claimed mezcal as my spirit of choice, so I booked a trip. I didn’t want to just say I liked mezcal, I wanted to know everything about it and how it made its way into my copita. The incredible labor, skill, and social history is what interests me most. Additionally, rum (another favorite) and mezcal have a deep history with Black and Brown folks.
I was nervous about diving into my own art practice again, unsure of what to focus on. I knew I loved my first experience in Oaxaca and felt inspired to create, but I wasn’t sure how exactly to use that as a first step toward making something. I was in the seat our students are typically in, which is exactly what I wanted to experience again. The difference was this would be the first time I embarked on a creative project as a librarian.
Before leaving for this residency, I worked it into what I call my ‘Hello’ sessions, where I introduce myself and what I do to students in my liaison programs. We are big fans of the concept map at my library because it helps us develop what I call ‘research roadmaps’ with our students. Again, repeating ‘research starts with what you know,’ we usually begin our maps with the ‘who, what, when, why, where,’ of what it is they are mapping. What do you already know about your topic and what do you want to know about it? It helps organize thoughts from the perspective of the personal, making knowledge creation more accessible.
It was in the classroom that I found myself connecting with my students in a way that wasn’t possible before I applied for the residency program. In discussions of my upcoming trip, I shared my own concept map with theoretical and visual ideas.
When explaining it to classes, I would stop at the “participatory research,” and “ethical tourism,” bubbles and explain my identity to the students as a first generation American Latina/Mestiza. While I’m culturally similar to Mexicans, I am not Mexican. I’m not from Mexico and anyone can be a colonizer. I will be a tourist, so how does one practice ethical tourism? How do I give as much or more than what I take while I’m there? A concept beautifully framed by artist and fellow residency member Kimmy Quillin.
I went to Oaxaca with a sense of what I was going to produce — photographs and maybe some sound. I ended up mostly making sound recordings because photography made me feel like I was in fact taking more than I was giving. Whether or not the people of Oaxaca felt it — and I feel strongly that some did — I felt it was a tool for the ethnographic gaze and I didn’t like it. This of course was a personal choice and not one I feel everyone should make. One of the beautiful things about my decision to focus on sound was hearing from my fellow cohort members when they were in a place where the sound was beautiful — “Jenny I wish you were with me so you could’ve recorded it.”
While I found myself in the position of student once again, I also found myself as librarian while in Oaxaca. The residency program folks asked me to lead a discussion for them and my cohort members on research, information, and art. Here I found myself doing exactly what I always seek to do — bridge the gap between artist and information professional.
The cohort included painters, sculptors, photographers, curators, and community organizers. They were vastly different from the artist community I work with Monday through Friday, but articulated the same needs and anxieties about “research,” and some explained they don’t use this word when preparing for a project or work. Hearing this repeated in this context for some reason made me think even harder about how we present the idea of “research” to our community. This is what led me to pick up Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book again. I wanted to learn more about how non-Western, non-European societies viewed research and knowledge as a way to interrogate my own ideas.
If you work within these traditional disciplines what’s the take away from all this? While what I’ve shared is specific to art making, it serves as an example of the need for a critical review of “research,” more generally.
I’m sure every academic institution in this country has in some form or another attempted to tackle diversity, equity, and inclusion, three well-worn words that are typically embodied in committees, offices, task forces, etc. In libraries they could also include diversity librarian positions, for example. Racial diversity, equity, inclusion, is definitely a very worthy goal, but it shouldn’t be the only goal, as the results can be interpreted as performative and does not cover areas such as retention. Critically examining research and recognizing the power and domination it stirs up is a step toward making our libraries and archives more ethical and equitable and helps embed equity into our work. It’s how we build a critical culture within our workplace, helping with the retention of folks who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in these professions.
The MICA library is open to the public and again, we are located in Baltimore City, on Piscataway Land. We do not inhabit a sovereign MICALand. Interrogating traditional discipline knowledge might help us connect more genuinely with the larger communities we’re part of.
Another set of questions I ask myself when discussing my art, librarianship, archive, and curation practice is: What gets remembered? What gets exhibited? What gets archived? What gets explained? Additionally, what gets the benefit of being recognized as knowledge and what happens to the knowledge that gets left out? And how has this excluded and marginalized communities? Even here I’ve only spoken on art and Indigenous knowledge, but what about those working outside those frames? Are we critically engaged with research and knowledge and if we aren’t, how is that impacting our collections and who has access to them?
Let’s make these questions part of our “research” conversations.
“…the archive conceals, distorts, and silences as much as it reveals.”
— Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.
References
[1] Honma, Todd. 2005. Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, Volume 1, Issue 2.
