Steps Towards the Plateau

'Steps Towards the Plateau' has developed out of my fascination with the relationship between art and documentary practices, in particular those found within visual anthropology. The starting point for the project is the fieldwork undertaken by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali in 1936/39, perhaps the first major utilisation of film and photography within anthropological practice (totalling some 25,000 photographs and 20,000ft of film), and certainly one of the most influential. In part this fieldwork was funded by the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox, as schizophrenia was then known, which was concerned with the high levels of diagnosis in America (in the mid-1930s, 25% of hospital beds were occupied by patients so diagnosed) and sought to initiate new forms of child-rearing in order to reduce the number of people developing the condition. As Balinese culture was considered to be 'schizoid', in Bateson's words, it was thought a study of how the Balinese coped with this 'condition' would help develop child-rearing methods that could be adopted in America, reducing the incidents of schizophrenia. One might suggest that this was more an attempt to bolster American self-identity than to understand the identity of another culture.
This project takes the historical fieldwork of Mead and Bateson as a starting point from which to consider a number of broader questions, perhaps most importantly, how do different cultures interact, or attempt to understand one another? The often troubled relationship between America's sense of itself, and its sense of others, is obviously of great contemporary relevance, in relation to the 'War of Terror'; this is particularly the case with regards to Bali / an increasingly 'Westernized' but predominantly Hindu state within the largest Muslim country in the world, and victim of a number of terrorist bombings in recent years. Bali finds itself at the intersection between sometimes violently divergent cultures and beliefs, and in attempting to engage with this country, I hope that this project will suggest some new means of cultural interaction based upon mutual respect rather than forceful imposition.
The work of Mead and Bateson shows us some possibilities of cultural understanding, but makes us aware of the difficulties also, difficulties that will be made explicit within the project itself. The outcome will be a series of related artworks / perhaps consisting of an artist's film, photographs, writings, and a re-display of part of the collection at the Pitt Rivers Musuem / and a publication that will be founded upon actual anthropological research, albeit a research that will be led by my own artistic practice rather than by the more usual demands of the discipline. Of course, certain methods will be adopted from anthropological research / such as fieldwork, and interviews / not only to revisit (to some extent) Mead's and Bateson's original research, but also to examine the influence that it has had subsequently in a number of fields, in particular philosophy; however, these methods will be examined self-critically, with careful consideration to what it is that they conceal, as much as reveal. This is an approach that I have developed successfully in recent years, using comparable episodes in art history, and philosophy, as a starting point to create works which combine intellectual / even scholarly / enquiry within a fictional, and often poetic, framework and sensibility. This allows me to create a space within another discipline in which I can situate and then develop my own practice, to the mutual benefit of both.