“Behind all things are reasons. Reasons can even explain the absurd. Do we have the time to learn the reasons behind the human being’s varied behaviour? I think not. Some take the time. Are they called detectives? Watch. And see what life teaches.” – The Log Lady, Twin Peaks episode 11

From reality TV and YouTube to collaborative and socially-engaged art practices, opportunities to observe others pervade contemporary culture. On screens and in galleries, “real people” are ever-present, in turns mundane and fantastical, optimistic and dark. While such representations offer a platform for connectedness and familiarity, the reality on offer is often typified and hard to grasp. Distances between authors, subjects and viewers, combined with shifting context and mediation, render notions of authenticity defunct. Yet the spark of the real remains compelling and deeply rooted in the desire to see and know people beyond daily experience.

In “The Artist as Ethnographer,” Hal Foster identified the “turn to context and identity” and a “longing for the referent” as a dominant model in contemporary art and criticism, one that the proliferation of collaborative practices continues to evidence. [2] It makes sense that video has emerged as a dominant medium for collaborative output; by emphasizing the artist’s proximity to and direct interaction with the subject, video appeals to that longing in a persuasive way. Likewise, ethnographic accounts often consist of visually rich first-person narratives that the author presents as veritable accounts of the real. [3] Anthropological theorist Paul Atkinson describes that ethnographic realism produces a mirroring effect, placing the reader or viewer at the scene of observation and implicating them in a “complex process of reality construction and deconstruction.” [4] This transfer of experience depends on the author’s status as a participant observer – engaging in their subjects’ world while maintaining analytical distance – a position that aptly describes many artists’ working method. [5]

To Be Real features Althea Thauberger, Helen Reed and Lars Laumann, artists whose video works proffer encounters with distinctive individuals and communities: remote Ladin villagers, dedicated Twin Peaks fans and objectùmsexual women. Each of these subjects is defined through a strong relationship to site (a familiar indication of authenticity), be it a geographically isolated region, a fictional town or an iconic landmark. In many respects, the approach taken by the artists is highly structured, grounded in genre and based on performances of found texts: a fable, TV script and web page autobiography. Methods including online research, interviews and indexical media give the works a non-fictional tone, while inexpensive costumes and sets, unpolished performances and grainy video offer the unprocessed, at times clumsy, appeal of folk culture. The straightforward, investigative approach taken by these artists suggests the pursuit of the real, and though ethnographic practice may not be a literal influence, their strategies and aesthetics mark it as a point of reference. [6]

Many parallels can be drawn across these disciplines, however. For the artworks in To Be Real, the analytical device of ethnographic realism is most constructive through discrepancy. While it is used to represent subjects with clarity and coherence, these artworks purposefully call attention to their subjects’ contradictions and illusiveness. Representations by Thauberger, Reed and Laumann hold up an incoherent real, balanced between indexicality and theatricality. This sense emerges across the disparate approaches used to examine oral tradition, fan fiction and documentary, as each artist elucidates how different realities are crafted, performed and maintained, using video to highlight the gaps between perception and experience.

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[1] Twin Peaks episode 1, written by Mark Frost and David Lynch, directed by Duwayne Dunham. Twin Peaks Definitive Gold Box Edition (New York: CBS DVD, 2007). Originally broadcast on April 12, 1990.

[2] Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real: The Avantgarde at the End of the Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 182.

[3] First-person narratives are often used in a specific genre of ethnographic writing referred to as ethnographic realism, or realist ethnography, and is one of many ways an author can convey intimacy with (and authority on) their subjects.

[4] Paul Atkinson, The Ethnographic Imagination: Textual Constructions of Reality (New York: Routledge, 1990), 2. In the chapter “Ethnography and the Representation of Reality,” Atkins explains that beyond signalling the writer’s authority, realist ethnography conveys authenticity through vraisemblance and the mimetic contract. Atkinson expands on these concepts by comparing passages from realist ethnography (The Cocktail Waitress by Spradley and Mann, 1975) to realist fiction (Ernest Hemingway “The Killers,” 1927). Atkinson also draws on Roland Barthes’ “l’effet de réel” – the reality effect – which Barthes used to describe the role of entirely inconsequential details in literature, which “function to establish the ‘narrative contract’ whereby the reader is, at least provisionally, guaranteed that the narrative refers to a recognizable world of shared everyday reality” (70).

[5] As anthropologist Paul Rock breaks down the term, “participant because it is only by attempting to enter the symbolic life world of others that one can ascertain the subjective logic on which it is built…observer because one’s purposes are always ultimately distinct and objectifying.” “Symbolic Interactionism and Ethnography,” in Handbook of Ethnography. Eds. Paul Atkinson, Amanda Coffey, Sara Delamont, John Lofland, and Lyn Lofland (London: SAGE publications, 2002), 29.

[6] Many theorists and critics have used this disciplinary comparison as an analytical tool. Besides Foster, see Miwon Kwon, “Experience v. Interpretation: Traces of Ethnography in the works of Lan Tuazon and Nikki S. Lee,” in Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, Alex Coles, ed. (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2000): 74-93, and Anthony Downey, “An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer,” Third Text 23, no. 5 (September 2009): 593-603. Downey’s text effectively explores the different ways that ethnography and contemporary collaborative art practices both “reify a reality” (595).