Mead and Bateson on Art and Documentary

Read­ing the tran­script of a con­ver­sa­tion between Mar­gret Mead and Gre­gory Bate­son, I came across this amus­ing pas­sage of them argu­ing about art and doc­u­men­ta­tion. It started with Bate­son stat­ing that he doesn’t like using a tri­pod.  I have pasted the por­tion of the con­ver­sa­tion below. You can read the entire con­ver­sa­tion here. I sym­pa­thize with Mead’s rea­son­ing and with Bateson’s pro­cliv­ity. The con­ver­sa­tion is inter­est­ing to read in the same way that We Make the Road by Walk­ing is; the peo­ple in con­ver­sa­tion prove to be engag­ing in an entirely dif­fer­ent way than monologing by gen­er­at­ing spon­ta­neous and ener­getic out­comes (much in line with Bateson’s the­o­ries on cyber­net­ics). See­ing this tran­scribed is like read­ing a good play. Mead and Bate­son have an ener­getic ban­ter thanks to their for­mer mar­riage. Freire and Hor­ton lacked this through Freire’s rather con­trolled aca­d­e­mic style, though the two did end up bring­ing the con­ver­sa­tion to inter­est­ing places.

B: Yes. By the way, I don’t like cam­eras on tripods, just grind­ing. In the lat­ter part of the schiz­o­phrenic project, we had cam­eras on tripods just grinding.

M: And you don’t like that?

B: Dis­as­trous.

M: Why?

B: Because I think the pho­to­graphic record should be an art form.

M: Oh why? Why shouldn’t you have some records that aren’t art forms? Because if it’s an art form, it has been altered.

B: It’s undoubt­edly been altered. I don’t think it exists unaltered.

M: I think it’s very impor­tant, if you’re going to be sci­en­tific about behav­ior, to give other peo­ple access to the mate­r­ial, as com­pa­ra­ble as pos­si­ble to the access you had. You don’t, then, alter the mate­r­ial. There’s a bunch of film mak­ers now that are say­ing, ‘It should be art,’ and wreck­ing every­thing that we’re try­ing to do. Why the hell should it be art?

B: Well, it should be off the tripod.

M: So you run around.

B: Yes.

M: And there­fore you’ve intro­duced a vari­a­tion into it that is unnecessary.

B: I there­fore got the infor­ma­tion out that I thought was rel­e­vant at the time.

M: That’s right. And there­fore what do you see later?

B: If you put the damn thing on a tri­pod, you don’t get any relevance.

M: No, you get what happened

B: It isn’t what happened.

M: I don’t want peo­ple leap­ing around think­ing that a pro­file at this moment would be beautiful.

B: I wouldn’t want beautiful.

M: Well, what’s the leap­ing around for?

B: To get what’s happening.

M: What you think is happening.

B: If Stew­art reached behind his back to scratch him­self, I would like to be over there at that moment.

M: If you were over there at that moment you wouldn’t see him kick­ing the cat under the table. So that just doesn’t hold as an argument.

B: Of the things that hap­pen the cam­era is only going to record one per­cent anyway.

M: That’s right.

B: I want one per­cent on the whole to tell.

M: Look, I’ve worked with these things that were done by artis­tic film mak­ers, and the result is you can’t do any­thing with them.

B: They’re bad artists, then.

M: No, they’re not. I mean an artis­tic film maker can make a beau­ti­ful notion of what he thinks is there, and you can’t do any sub­se­quent analy­sis with it of any kind. That’s been the trou­ble with anthro­pol­ogy, because they had to trust us. If we were good enough instru­ments, and we said the peo­ple in this cul­ture did some­thing more than the ones in that, if they trusted us, they used it. But there was no way of prob­ing fur­ther mate­r­ial. So we grad­u­ally devel­oped the idea of film and tapes.

B: There’s never going to be any way of prob­ing fur­ther into the material.

M: What are you talk­ing about, Gre­gory? I don’t know what you’re talk­ing about. Cer­tainly, when we showed that Bali­nese stuff that first sum­mer there were dif­fer­ent things iden­ti­fied — the limp­ness that Mar­ion Strana­han iden­ti­fied, the place on the chest and its point in child devel­op­ment that Erik Erik­son iden­ti­fied. I can go back over it, and show you what they got out of those films. They didn’t get it out of your head, and they didn’t get it out of the way you were point­ing the cam­era. They got it because it was a long enough run so they could see what was happening.

SB: What about some­thing like that Navajo film, ‘Intre­pid Shad­ows?’ 10

M: Well, that is a beau­ti­ful, an artis­tic pro­duc­tion that tells you some­thing about a Navajo artist.

B: This is dif­fer­ent, it’s a native work of art.

M: Yes, and a beau­ti­ful native work of art. But the only thing you can do more with that is ana­lyze the film maker, which I did. I fig­ured out how he got the ani­ma­tion into the trees.

B: Oh yes? What do you get out of that one?

M: He picked windy days, he walked as he pho­tographed, and he moved the cam­era inde­pen­dently of the move­ment of his own body. And that gives you that effect. Well, are you going to say, fol­low­ing what all those other peo­ple have been able to get out of those films of yours, that you should have just been artistic?

SB: He’s say­ing he was artistic.

M: No, he wasn’t. I mean, he’s a good film maker, and Bali­nese can pose very nicely, but his effort was to hold the cam­era steady enough long enough to get a sequence of behavior.

B: To find out what’s hap­pen­ing, yes.

M: When you’re jump­ing around tak­ing pictures …

B: Nobody’s talk­ing about that, Mar­garet, for God’s sake.

M: Well.

B: I’m talk­ing about hav­ing con­trol of a cam­era. You’re talk­ing about putting a dead cam­era on top of a bloody tri­pod. It sees nothing.

M: Well, I think it sees a great deal. I’ve worked with these pic­tures taken by artists, and really good ones…

B: I’m sorry I said artists; all I meant was artists. I mean, artist is not a term of abuse in my vocabulary.

M: It isn’t in mine either, but I …

B: Well, in this con­ver­sa­tion, it’s become one.