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katiewattsart · 4 years

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21/01/20 : TELLING STORIES

AIMS OF THE LECTURE

- To introduce and discuss theories around narratives and stories

- To practise the ability to critique images and artefacts

- To develop the ability to make links between culture and arts practice

- To develop the ability to communicate a response to material shown

We are surrounded by stories in day to day life

Linking towards social media - says something about you and how you communicate

If today you post a Facebook or Instagram update, you are telling a story. The story you want the world to know. Instagram and Facebook both have a platform called Stories, where snippets of our day represent the narrative action we want to share with our followers and friends.

Storytelling is the thing of today. Brands tell stories. Politicians want us to know their stories. Artists live their stories in their art

‘Texts’ that could hold a narrative?

…novels, comics, films, tv series, plays, films, children’s books, animation, games, photographs, news stories, magazine covers, folktales and myths, book covers, paintings, editorial illustrations, window displays, packaging, logos…

poetry

Songs - music videos

Social media

Visual image can be ready as text

Each and every individual could be a narrative constructing our own narrative

Plato mentions old women going down to the harbour to comfort the victims bound for the Minotaur’s table by telling them stories… This is partly a point about social history: people told stories before mass literacy; but it is also about desire: what is loved in stories is often an imagined link to a long, living lineage.

Marina Warner, Once upon a Time

Athenian Girls Drawing Lots to Determine which among them Shall Be Sent to Crete for Sacrifice to the Minotaur

Jean-François-Pierre Peyron (1744–1814)

- Every individual can view a different narrative/story

- blue was the most expensive colour to be worn

- semiotic understanding

- immediate emotional response

- each generation can hold and change the narrative to fit them

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

Edward Reynolds Price

Questions that we were asked within the lecture:

What’s the first story you remember being told?

My grandmother used to tell me the myth that if I ate apple seeds that an apple tree would begin to grow in my belly.

What’s your favourite story?

I believe the my favourite stories stemmed from my childhood as I trust that is when stories are most impactful on yourself as an individual

Stories that we wish to tell over and over again

- an element of nostalgia

- possibly about morals and values

- passing down messages using universal metaphors

- being re told though many different dynamics

William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595)

Warm Bodies 2013

West side story 1961

Gnomeo and Juliet (2011)

Private Romeo (2012)

Same Old Story

The Taming of the Shrew (1967)

10 Things I hate about you (1999

CULTURAL STORIES

Cultural narratives are stories that help a community structure and assign meaning to its history and existence. Cultural narratives include creation stories, which tell a story about the community's origins, and fables, which help teach moral values and ethical behavior. Cultural narratives help a community reinforce societal norms, preserve its history and strengthen its identity through shared knowledge and experience.

Juha and his Donkey

Juha first appeared in an Arabic book of the ninth century, though this was likely adapted from an older oral tradition. From there, Juha quickly splintered to the far ends of the Mediterranean world. He followed the Arabs to Sicily, where he became known as Giufà. In Turkey, his legend merged with a Sufi mystic called Nasruddin, while the Ottomans exported him to the Balkans. Some even claim that Juha inspired Cervantes’s “Don Quixote”

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STORIES AND NARRATIVES

- What is the difference between ‘story’ and ‘narrative’?

- Story = a sequence of events (plot)

- Narrative = the way those events are put together to be presented to an audience.

narrative

/ˈnarətɪv/

noun

a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.

"a gripping narrative"

story

/ˈstɔːri/

noun

noun: story; plural noun: stories

an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

"an adventure story"

NEWS STORY

- all telling the same story

- however, the narrative changes within each one

- narrative changes depending on values and political values

Narrative Theory

“Narrative theory starts from the assumption that narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental elements of our experience, such as time, process, and change, and it proceeds from this assumption to study the distinctive nature of narrative and its various structures, elements, uses, and effects….More specifically, narrative theorists study what is distinctive about narrative (how it is different from other kinds of discourse, such as lyric poems, arguments, lists, descriptions, statistical analyses, and so on), and how accounts of what happened to particular people in particular circumstances with particular consequences can be at once so common and so powerful... ....Narrative theorists, in short, study how stories help people make sense of the world, while also studying how people make sense of stories”.

The Ohio State University

If you re-shuffled a story’s events you would essentially have the same story, with a new narrative – a new way of representing the storyTherefore, Narrative Theory explores the construction of the story ie. the way it has been put together, not the story itself.

Matt Madden,

99 ways to tell a story

(the basic/ template story)

Matt Madden,

99 ways to tell a story

(fixed moment in time)

Matt Madden,

99 ways to tell a story

(single image)

Matt Madden,

99 ways to tell a story

(style and genre)

Nathan Pyle

Narrative of the Image

Dorothea Lange

1936, California, US Lange’s most famous photograph was taken in a pea-picker camp in Nipomo, California. The woman’s name was Florence Thompson. She is the mythical mother, the unshakable fortress-refuge of our childhood fantasies, the one to whom we can turn when there is no one else.

Photograph: Dorothea Lange/Hulton Archive/Getty

The picture of revellers in Manchester, captured by Joel Goodman in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2016, became a viral sensation, retweeted 29,000 times, after the BBC’s Roland Hughes noted on Twitter that it resembled a beautiful painting.

The Fibonacci sequence

Renaissance artists would use the ratio with the visual aid of the Fibonacci spiral, which is created by drawing circular arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Golden Rectangle. It was devised by mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci in the year 1202.

Pictures like this are often described as "accidental Renaissance", indicating that they inadvertently conform to traditional Renaissance ideas of beauty and symmetry. They often seem to fit the principle of the Golden Rectangle – a rectangle (shown below in pink) used by Renaissance artists where the longer side (a) plus the shorter side (b) divided by the longer side (a) is equal to the longer side (a) divided by the shorter side (b).

Narrative in a Digital Age

“The computer and the screen have revolutionised book production, but the prophet in me sees another more radical revolution, and it has to do with the nature of language itself. With the predominance of textual language we forget that language was first meant to be spoken not written and read. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was spoken. Stories were told. Instructions were given. Then the stories and instructions were memorised and passed down not in scrolls and scriptures, but by word of mouth. Stories were dramatised and then became dramas that were acted out. The actors memorised and passed the text on to the next generations through the formal traditions of drama, storytelling, teaching and memorisation.”

Longenecker (2018)

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Accidental storytelling… Never, ever read the comments!

“There are multiple belief patterns in our society and many different types of narratives; however, the majority of these are repressed. The dominant classes have created a norm, a standard that is passed off as “natural” instead of as a social construction. This standard is reinforced by institutions, such as the church, schools, and government. However, this dominant ideology excludes many peoples, their culture, and their ideas. Outsider art and subjugated narratives have been continually produced as a response to the dominant ideology. What are some of these subjugated narratives and what forms do they take?”

Outsider Art

ART THERAPY PROCESS

The Palestinian Trail of Fish: Artist's Graffiti Dives Into Heart of Refugee Struggle.

Albaba leaves behind familiar Palestinian symbols, opting instead for his 'trail of fish,' a metaphor for refugees as fish out of water. “Keep in a dry and cool place far from the sun’s rays,” and below it is a comment in smaller letters: “Date of manufacture – 1948.” Alaa, The work is part of a series called the “Route of the Fish,” which depicts the tragedy of the Palestinian people in this country not through the traditional association with the land, but rather via the experience of being cut off from the sea. The Palestinian refugees who long to return are represented as fish out of water, hung up to dry, or squeezed into a can of sardines like those that were distributed by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees after 1948. It deals directly with the Palestinian Nakba (or “catastrophe,” when more than 700,000 Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1947-49 Israeli War of Independence) and the refugee experience.

Alaa Albaba (image taken 2015)

Prison Tattoos

Graffiti

Narrative - Jason S Polley

“My tattoos, or, rather, my single narrative tattoo, essentially charts the Eastward migration of Buddhism from its Hindu sources in India through its multiple manifestations / incarnations / influences in Tibet, Myanmar, Thailand, Indochina, China, and, finally Japan. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Parolles, from the ironically (at least from Parolles’ point of view) titled All’s Well that Ends Well, before I put my once-discrete tattoos into dialogue, into the development of classical narrative arcing, I was a “man of shreds and patches.” A tattoo here, a tattoo there. I found my nine scattered tattoos aesthetically unsightly. So over an 18-year period I worked (with the help of tattooists from Canada, Thailand, Colombia, India, Israel, Vietnam, and Hong Kong) on establishing an interconnected narrative. A story. But a postmodern story: one that includes, among other things, fragmentation, flashback, back story, interruption, and openendedness. There’s no single reading of my story of Buddhist passage.”

The nesting place of the storyteller, Walter Benjamin pointed out, are in the loom shed and at the spinning wheel, in the fulling barn and the kitchen when doing tedious tasks - shelling peas in readiness for storing, sorting pulses for bagging, bottling and preserving. Stories were told to alleviate harsh labour and endless drudgery - and they were passed between generations - by the voice of experience, filled with the laughter of defiance, and the hope of just deserts.

Marina Warner, Once upon a Time

Narrative Fashion

- The art of creating the blouse passed from generation to generation. Women kept the tradition of sewing from mother to daughter.

- Embroidery designs can identify a region of the country or contain a special meaning - while decorative, they are also symbols of cultural beliefs and heritage.

- Narrative in Clothing

- Traditional Romanian Peasant Blouse

“EVERYONE tells stories. Narratives powerful like ancient Greek myths and the Bible have taught us how to relate to certain values and how the impact of stories shape our lives. When fashion designers and brands use these very same narratives, they become the storyteller, the expert of storytelling and apparel comes alive.”

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Crafting Narrative

Exploring how makers and designers are using objects and making ,to tell stories.

CRAFTING NARRATIVE AT PITZHAN

MANOR GALLERY (2014)

Swedish graduate Hilda Hellström contacted the last person still living inside the evacuation zone, Naoto Matsumura, and collected soil from his rice fields that can't be farmed due to contamination.

Hellström hopes the vessels - as unsuitable for food storage as the fields are for growing - will act as symbolic objects to help people understand the enormity of the disaster.

Craftsmen usually imitate antique vases in a batch and highly standardized way. I was anxious to criticize the current situation of imitation and even plagiarize and compare it with the situation in Chinese feudal period and the situation in other countries. However, a graduate work from Hao zhen-han (2013) called ‘Imitation, imitation’ made me have a critical thinking about Chinese imitation culture. It is a video documented different people work on ceramic industry and view it in a historical context. This work uncovers the social, political and economic implications of Chinese imitation culture. Hao's unique idea that has a positive attitude toward imitation made me reflect on the ceramic industry in Jingdezhen from an object and historical view.

IMITATION IMITATION, ZHENHAN HAO, 2013. PART OF CRAFTING NARRATIVE AT LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL 2014

Task

Based on today's lecture, find examples of relevant work in your discipline and apply this to your reflection; consider how you would explore some of these themes in your own work.

References:

http://livedoor.blogimg.jp/mement_mori_6/imgs/1/e/1ebc1252-s.jpg

http://dujye7n3e5wjl.cloudfront.net/photographs/1080-tall/time-100-influential-photos-dorothea-lange-migrant-mother-23.jpg

https://www.shwrm.com/themagazine/five-beautiful-fashion-narratives/

https://blouseroumaine-shop.com/en

#gcop200

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