Week 8 Reading - In the Making: Choosing A Mission - Creating A Life - Alix Lambert (pp. 342-350)

The first thought I had while reading this essay and which kept repeating in my head as I made my way through it was that Alix Lambert is very much like an ethnographer, an anthropologist who is studying the way of life of a certain culture.  Often, ethnographers must immerse themselves in the culture they are studying, sometimes taking part in the culture's daily activities, rituals, responsibilities, simultaneously observing and recording every observance.  It is common to think that anthropologists only study "primitive" or foreign cultures, but actually, it is more common for anthropologists to study subcultures within their own cultures; for example, I read an ethnography in my anthropology class that was the result of an American anthropologist studying the drug culture in Spanish Harlem in New York city.  Lambert is doing very much the same thing; identifying a subculture, in a sense, and then studying it.  She chooses an experience that other people have had but that she herself has not had as the result of the way --in a sense the subculture--in which she was brought up, and decides to learn more about it by immersing herself in the subculture.  Each of these things had been, to a degree, foreign to her, and in recording and, more importantly, communicating what she learned, she is very much taking on the role of anthropologist.  I think the only things that might distinguish her activities from ethnographic works as works of art are a) the fact that she declares it to be art, and b) the way in which she documents her studies and presents her documentation.  For example, the way in which she chose to represent her experiences with boxing: mounting cameras on the gloves, presenting the viewer with an unprecedented perspective, but also with the disorientation of the activity and the metaphorical deterioration one experiences over a three minute round as the cameras themselves became damaged--this is a hugely creative and artistic method of representation.  The wedding photos are blown to human scale for their display, and this was an artistic choice.  In a way, the parameters she sets for herself are also artistic choices, but the time in between the proposal for each study and the presentation of the documentation of each study is more anthropology than art, not that it can't be both.
My interest in anthropology is less first hand, but I do have an interest in anthropology, and I definitely would like to bring that more into my art once I figure out other ways I can do that. I would rather use traditional art making techniques than the kind of experiential performance art Lambert incorporates into her life, but I would still like those art pieces to be a product or a result of a study of cultures with which I am not familiar.