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An exhibition in fieldwork form

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 2021FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11 (3): 1070–1084

SPECIAL SECTION: ANTHRO-ARTISTS:

ANTHROPOLOGISTS AS MAKERS AND CREATIVES

An exhibition in fieldwork form

Susan Marie O S S M A N , University of California–Riverside

This is an exhibition of fieldwork art adapted to the page. It is set out following the typical stages of an anthropological research
project and presents works that were both made through fieldwork and exhibited as art. The strategy is one of “blending” and
playful displacement by way of objects that highlight the dual identity and practice of the anthropologist/artist. Working with
artworks that were made with spoken, written, or printed words and texts extends this approach of practical rapprochement be-
tween the fields to explore how decisions about genre and material are related to the variable configurations of the field of publics
and of the two spheres of activity.

Keywords: art, fieldwork, design, multimodal, method, style

This is an exhibition of art made in the field adapted
to the page. It is set out following the typical stages of
an anthropological research project. I made the artworks
I present for different projects. I have abstracted them
from those particular contexts to explore what they might
reveal about the variety of confluences, complementari-
ties, and contrasts of anthropology and contemporary
art—the aim of this special section. Thus, instead of be-
ginning with abstract definitions of art or anthropology,
I attend to how practices associated with each sphere of
activity mingle in the making of these particular works.
In this way I take an ethnographic approach to exploring
these diverse and evolving fields as they have shaped my
own practices of research and making. Faithful to the
discipline and practice of classic fieldwork, this will be
a solo show.
Gallery exhibitions allow the viewer to wander. They
invite one to pause to lose oneself in one work while ig-
noring another. Art can be viewed and associated in se-
quences set by the visitor. An exception to this is when
artists or curators stage a “walk-through” to explain the
work and the curatorial concept or when the viewer ad-
heres to exhibition brochures and audio guides to trace a
path. With this in mind, I take the artist’s walk-through
as a model for this exercise of fitting an exhibition to the
page, the text. In print, I cannot answer the questions of
readers/viewers, but I can anticipate some questions that
anthropologist reader/viewers might ask. I will give the
endnotes a role akin to the textual and audio exhibition
guide that provides further information about the spe-
cific works and other art and scholarly debates pertinent
to the exhibition. Fitting art into a fieldwork form that
itself corresponds to linear exhibition with some awk-
wardness, I set up a playful movement to investigate the
potential of the possible associations and complementar-
ities of these practices.1
Sociologist of art Natalie Heinich has suggested that
for contemporary art, the “work of art no longer resides
in the object proposed by the artist” but rather in how it
points beyond itself toward the artist’s oeuvre and the
1. Cultural theorist Caroline Levine draws attention to how
genre theory in literary studies “could benefit from more
attention to the portability of forms. For many critics, the
terms form and genre are synonymous or near synony-
mous” (Levine 2015: 13). As will become clear in the com-
ing pages, the kind of “portable shifting” of form she
writes about is both one that I have drawn into field-
work as a productive venture and one that I have had
to figure out as I have experienced being a shifting and
evolving kind of subject in the world. Also see Ossman
(2013) and the use of White (1999) for a less “playful”
and art-based approach to form with regard to processes
of subject formation.

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, volume 11, number 3, winter 2021. © 2021 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Published by The
University of Chicago Press for the Society for Ethnographic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1086/718335
1071 AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM

world beyond the artwork (Heinich 2014: 89).2 In this
experiment, I focus on artworks as they diversely engage
and associate ethnographic and artistic practices rather
than on their place in my “oeuvre.” Whether they possess
the qualities of “punctum” that Roland Barthes (1980)
says connect what is in the image to what is beyond
the frame when an image affects the viewer, I cannot
know. But I can suggest that art making in the field, as
elsewhere, aspires to the kind of affects and critical ef-
fects he ascribes to a photograph, with that quality of
drawing in while also reaching out to the wider world.
The punctum is, he writes, often created by a detail or
gesture that opens such possibilities for emotion and dis-
covery.3 One might say it punctures, or sets side, the nor-
malized ways of envisioning and recording what he calls
“stadium,” the kind of recording typical of “data.”4 For
Barthes, taking a photograph with punctum is uninten-
tional. Yet, there are ways of fostering situations and
techniques of making images that can create conditions
for making images or art objects with this quality more
likely. Artists select media and set out the workspace
or exhibition site following specific practices and pro-
cesses and lines of research to do so. Anthropologists de-
sign field sites to get at particular lines of questioning,
terrains that encourage particular kinds of encounters
and ways of rendering them (Rabinow, Marcus, Faubion
and Reese 2008). Devising fields that include art making,
one might thus nurture possibilities for drawing in the
world that elude even the most varied, sophisticated,
multisensory devices and media (Sansi 2015; Schneider
and Wright 2013). In what follows, I present works from
my portfolio that bear witness to some different ways of
doing this.
References
The first stage of any research project usually involves
many hours of reading, of piecing together what others
have discovered or hypothesized. Bibliography is an ac-
tual record of such work (see fig. 1). It is made of a half-
mile-long record of every book borrowed from the li-
brary of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin from August
2016 to February 2017 by the forty fellows who spent the
2016–17 academic year in residence at the institute. The
artwork presents data about the languages and disciplines

2. I do not ascribe to Heinich’s argument that this is one of

the qualities that distinguishes “contemporary” from mod-
ern art or, indeed, feel the need to tightly define these. All
translations from French are mine.
3. For further thoughts on anthropological data see Luhr-
man (2010).
4. Barthes wrote specifically about photography, distin-
guishing those photographs that depart from the banal
“stadium” of images that register the world in normative
and predictable ways: “move from the scene, like an ar-
row, coming to pierce me” (Barthes 1980: 48–49). I take
liberties with his terms of “punctum,” adopting it to sug-
gest a more general definition of what art seeks to do.
This seems more productive to me than attempting to de-
velop tight definitions of art; the difficulties and draw-
backs of such attempts are well known to philosophers
of aesthetics. I also seek to focus on the work of art itself,
rather than adopting sociological approaches that reduce
the disciplines to “fields” of activity. Not only the specifics
of works but also the way the “discipline” is tied to modes
of discovery and ways of making things is obscured in
Bourdieusian work that fails to attend to form and tech-
nique and genre as they relate to disciplines, even as other
fundamental work on the sociology of the arts, like Beck- Figure 1: “Bibliography,” 2017, 5"  1/2 mile. Velum, ink and
er’s (2002), shows how the sociology of art worlds might scotch tape. Photograph by the author at Gallery 825,
itself be inspired by artistic practices. Los Angeles, 2019.
 Susan Marie OSSMAN
of those particular scholars who explored the immense
work of research in general. Reading it, one might imag-
ine the sheer weight of all of the books, journals, and
conference proceedings and the hours of dedicated study.
Yet, the installation is as light and portable as a concept.
The piece is composed of two parallel ribbons printed
with the references. These are connected with three-
inch-long lengths of tape at six-inch intervals. The lec-
tures by the biologists are what led me to imagine this
form. When I hang the piece, I twist it gently, loosely
referencing a double helix, thinking about how refer-
ences generate new knowledge. As my hand folds a refer-
ence to a book on the sexual habits of songbirds into a ti-
tle by Cicero, I think of how two books or articles can
meet on a scholar’s desk to spark previously unthinkable
questions or confer long-sought understanding. I con-
template how disciplines are shaped by regular mind-
movements among these associations and how fieldwork,
like art, can set up occasions for felicitous encounters of
people, things, and ideas that serendipity would usually
separate.
And then there are coincidences that lead to conceiv-
ing new projects, like the fieldwork that led me to study
knowledge making by making works of art like Bibliog-
raphy. I arrived in Berlin in late August 2016 on the trail
of my then-partner, who was a research fellow at the in-
stitute. My plan was to develop a project with the artist/
scholar collective the Moving Matters Traveling Work-
shop at the Berlin Wall monument.5 I had no intention
of studying the life of the institute or scholarly habits,
but once plunged into the immersive academic life of
the kolleg, I realized I was being offered a unique occa-
sion for a new research project. Entirely immersed in an
academic world I knew so well, I considered the critical
potential of turning to art to develop an ethnography of
the relationship of “Wissen” (knowledge) to “Schaffen”
(making).
Approaching the process of research in this way
awoke a new fascination in scholarly materials, ma-
chines, habits, and forms. I became alert to the color of
lines traced across paper or index cards. I explored what
paper clips could become and thought about how lap-
tops and copiers are taken for granted by us academics,
until supplies run out or machines break down. In the of-
5. For more on the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop
(MMTW) see the series about the project at https://
allegralaboratory.net/?spMMTW, the MMTW website,
https://movingmattersworkshops.ucr.edu/, and chapter 6
of Ossman (2021).
1072
fice and studio, I set to work with these materials and
machines while I also studied how sharing knowledge
to make new knowledge relied on specific forms and
ways of associating them, on the page, and in the mind.
Thus, even as I took field notes at lectures and debates
and dinner parties, I began to study the forms for re-
questing books and articles in the library—and the swift-
ness with which any request was filled. I became ever
more attentive to bibliographic conventions and what
they meant for the “anonymous” procedures of science.
I thought about encyclopedic dreams and ideals and what
gets left out by search engines composed to gather infor-
mation in particular ways. And I began to see changes
in how I was making art as a result of this research and
these reflections.6 My work and sensibility have been
called lyrical by artists and anthropologists and critics. I
am readily convinced by arguments that art can register
fleeting sensations, emotions of a situation or site, or is-
sues or information that difficult to present in preposi-
tional form.7 I am at ease with the idea that art made in
the field can thus witness the “excess” of ethnography
that texts cannot include or understandings that the cur-
rent state of a discipline can countenance.8 Yet, to work
on the materials and ways of employing them in the in-
stitute, I needed to find distance from some of the ges-
tures I found “natural,” not only due to academic habits
but also ingrained in my artistic practices (Ossman 2014).
For the Wissen/Schaffen project I did make a few typ-
ically colorful, textured, scented, or interactive pieces
that showed the mark of my hands or elbows or my
handwriting. But in many instances, research suggested
that other avenues would lead me to better grasp and
convey what I was learning from fieldwork. Rather than
an organic, expressive process, I made Bibliography de-
liberately, by conceiving an intentionally distanced, con-
ceptual, and dispassionate procedure.
6. Compare to Pusetti (2018).
7. The literature in anthropology on this topic is vast. Stoller
(1997) was a particular reference for me as I developed
my art/ethnographic practice. Also see Howes (1991),
Classen (1993), and Taussig (1993) and the debate be-
tween Pink and Howes (2010) and Ingold (2011).
8. On excess and fieldwork see, e.g., Gandolfo and Ochoa
(2020: 185). I have also discussed this with respect to
broader considerations of modernity, the body, and En-
lightenment ideals in my work in a comparative study of
beauty salons in Casablanca, Paris, and Cairo (Ossman
2002).
1073
First came the idea. Then I made a tiny version of what
the larger piece would look like using references from the
bibliographies of my own publications. I printed them
on vellum paper using my office printer and taped them
together. Once I was satisfied with the model, I met with
the librarians and showed them the prototype. They
kindly agreed to provide me with the lists of books that
had been borrowed; it would be “anonymized” by them
to ensure the privacy of the borrowers. A computer tech-
nician helped me find a program with which to position
the long lines of text in the proper order. Once I could
work with all of the information on my screen, I tried
to correct the accents in various languages that went
awry. I made forays out of the office to find a print shop
with presses large enough to print the huge sheets of ve-
lum I would then cut into strips and tape together to
make the installation. A first shop did it wrong, probably
because of my limited German. A second printer to
whom I showed my prototype got it exactly right.
Next, I conceived a method to cut the stretches of
vellum, then built a simple machine with paper towel
rollers to tape them together, neatly rolling the long rib-
bons like long strands of hair on curlers so they would
not get tangled. I worked more in the image of the dispas-
sionate scientist or resourceful inventor than the expres-
sionist artist or romantic ethnographic writer. The satis-
faction of making was perhaps like an engineer might feel
coming up with a new production process. The result
was suggestive of the ideal of frictionless, impersonal
scholarship and the regularity and anonymity of refer-
encing practices, which present entries in ways that take
account of the influence of certain ideas or individuals
only numerically.
For the on-site exhibition I organized with fellow
artist and coresident Claire Lambe, we had limited wall
space. So I strung the strands across a window, creating a
lacy, peekaboo curtain like those that are so common in
central European homes. The street scene beyond the
work drew attention to the way that working with refer-
ences is simultaneously a process of framing, naming,
focusing, and veiling aspects of the world.9
After all of the difficulties encountered in trying to
make the entries anonymous, it was fascinating that the
first thing many of the researchers did at the exhibition
opening was to seek out “their” books on the list and
9. For additional images of the exhibition see Ossman (2018)
and the commented catalogue by Lambe, Ossman, and
Puzon (2018).
AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM
guess who had read this or that title. When this work that
spread like a web of meaning across the window to point
to and draw in the world beyond could have punctum, as
a photograph might, it did clearly create a spontaneous
performance among the viewers that resonated with
the reflection on the anonymity and objectivity of sci-
ence I had sought to encourage with this work.10 Some
people also noted that books whose titles were charac-
ters in scripts other than roman were absent; was the list
truly comprehensive? What of the “complete” bibliogra-
phy professors ask graduate students to develop for a
dissertation? What of the limits of any language?
A couple of years later, I hung Bibliography against a
high white wall for a group show called Applied Science at
the Los Angeles Art Association 825 Gallery.11 At that
exhibition, there was no street scene beyond the art. I
strung the ribbons of references on a test tube–like plas-
tic rod placed high against a white wall; the gallery lights
made some entries glow and shaded others, creating
shadow play. As I installed the piece, reading a reference
entry here or there, the voices of the people I knew who
read those particular books came back to me. But to
the viewers in the California gallery, the work was a more
general reflection on knowledge accumulation and issues
of perspective and spectral images—much like when an
anthropologist reads the work of a colleague who works
on a site or a subject with which they have little familiar-
ity.12 Some viewers did read the names of books aloud:
“Yes, I know that book!” one woman exclaimed, while
another showed off her ability to read off a title in Latin
or Dutch. But many more commented on the use of crisp
vellum and the lacelike play on light. Only a few noticed
the twist suggestive of genetic codes; more saw sugges-
tions of scanners and microscopes—and in a city domi-
nated by the film industry, everyone saw reels and reels of
celluloid film in my Bibliography. Significantly, whereas I
felt a shift in my practice when I made the piece, fellow
artists and critics were struck by its aesthetic continuity
10. See Shapin (2010). Indeed, it was perhaps the opportu-
nity to dialogue with luminaries in the history of science,
like Gianna Pomata, who was in residence at the Wis-
senschaftskolleg during my fieldwork that influenced
this work.
11. Marisa Caichiolo, an artist and curator with PhDs in
both psychology and art history, curated the exhibition.
12. See Degarrod (2009) and Laine (2018) for further thoughts
about exhibiting field-made art in galleries and museums.
 Susan Marie OSSMAN 1074

with the larger body of my art. Finally, attending to the

oeuvre, I, too, saw the flowing forms of Bibliography
and the persistence of my style even in this fieldwork-
driven artwork.13 I keep these thoughts in mind as I move
on to consider the next work of this exhibition-text.

Conceiving the field site

To think about the field site, I turn to a second work I
made at the Wissenschaftskolleg. Fallen Leaves is com-
posed of a painting, an easel, and leaves of paper died
in autumn colors clustered around the easel/tree trunk
that reflect the rich hues of the painting (see fig. 2). The
pages can be picked up and read: each one is a project a
scholar in residence submitted to earn their fellowship.
Indeed, by the fall, these projects, like the autumn leaves,
had been discarded or altered, sloughed off to head into
a winter that would initiate a cycle of change and renewal.
The title reiterates a parallel between the cycles of nature
and those of academic research and also leads to ques-
tions about the particular year the research fellows spent
at the institute.
As I myself was altering my research projects and
starting to work on this assemblage, I inquired into the
processes by which the institution shaped each incoming
class of fellows for each new year. Having a chance to fol-
low a “class” through the four seasons, I felt for the first
time that I was working in the footsteps of the classical
ethnographers who made anthropology a field discipline Figure 2: “Fallen Leaves,” 2016, Oil on Canvas and dyed
at the turn of the last century, as I listened to how the re- paper. Photograph by Claudia Egholm-Castrone.
searchers’ voices rose to stress how their own projects
had changed since they sent in their applications, as well easel for Fallen Leaves. In contrast, the walls of the con-
as their plans for reconsidering or changing their re- ference room and dining room were stark white. Neither
search goals over the year ahead. I noticed how the “cam- of these rooms had paintings or posters, only endless
pus” of the Wissenschaftskolleg in the leafy Grunewald rows of bookshelves.14 As I contemplated the bright re-
quarter was set up to nourish and frame these plans. flections of fall leaves on the windows of the conference
And I set about investigating the site, focusing special at- room and reading rooms of the main building, I realized
tention to the turn-of-the-twentieth-century mansion I needed to reflect on the lack of color inside to get at the
that is the central gathering point for the kolleg. The con- cyclical community-building project of the institute.
ference room, dining rooms, reading rooms, and main What kind of art would have graced the walls in the past,
offices are located there. when the grand edifice was a family home? I read up on
The walls of the elegant, spacious, and light-filled liv- the history of the house and the neighborhood. I looked
ing and sitting areas of the main building were paneled in back at Berlin’s art history and visited its museums: spe-
elegantly carved precious wood, the color I stained the cifically, those sections dedicated to early 1900s design
and home décor. As I sketched plans and took detailed

13. For more on ethnography and style see Sharman (2007).

As new kinds of of art-ethnography emerge, the question 14. I study this lack of bright color and art in rooms in
of style is likely to reemerge in discussions of fieldwork. Ossman (2021).
1075
notes about the house, I found myself making up stories
about the people who lived in the grand house when it
was first built. There was Lisa, a student of history who
frequented avant-garde art circles. Her sister studied at
a gymnasium for girls, her father was a law professor
from a prominent family, and her mother, Margarethe,
focused her efforts on making the home comfortable.
I was, of course, familiar with the use of fictionaliza-
tion in ethnography and of ethnography for fiction.15
Working with methods I’d learned in the studio as well
as in the field, I was also mindful of George Marcus’s
(2012) call to expand the critical turn beyond text. As
I developed the story about Lisa and her family, I re-
called Vincent Crapanzano’s writing on imaginative ho-
rizons and considered how I might come to know the
field site and its obvious influence on scholarly work
in the present by developing a retrospective imaginative
strategy (Crapanzano 2004).16 What kinds of art would
have hung on the walls of the building when it was a fam-
ily home? What might making art that might have hung
on the walls when Lisa lived there teach me about this
site and the cycles of nature and scholarship generally?
Lisa’s choices of art for the living room would have
to pass muster with her mother, whose tastes, like her
politics, were progressive but not revolutionary. I imag-
ined midsized oil paintings, abstractions, painted in the
jewellike colors then in fashion for home interiors. The
theme of the four seasons suited my interest in explor-
15. See, e.g., Ghosh (1992) and Narayan (1994) and a fiction
with commentary on the necessity of fictionalization in
ethnography in Faubion (1993). Among the many sub-
sequent reflections on this topic, see, e.g., Narayan (1999)
and McLean (2017).
16. At the time, I could not have read Pandian and McLean’s
then soon to be published book with its compendium of
ethnographic writing, but the way I worked could be said
to be in
a spirit of textual adventure that took writing as a
practice immanent to the world, rather than as a de-
tached reflection upon the world and itself. Imagine
the novel possibilities for thought and action that
might come with a deferral of critical distance, in pur-
suit of a less guarded, even reckless contamination by
circumstance. Imagine ways of writing that might put
ourselves more deeply at risk than what we have tried
till now. What could such experiments look like, and
what, if anything, might they achieve? (Pandian and
McLean 2017: 3).
AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM
ing the seasons of environment. It likewise corresponded
to a classic theme in painting that was especially popular
in art nouveau. In the studio I would paint four works of
oil on canvas, one for each season; the first would be in
vibrant autumn hues.
I worked through art to thus find distance from the
environment I was immersed in. Like everyone who
lived at the institute for a year, I knew that the building
and staff and project transcended my own experience,
and yet the world these created together was so seduc-
tively “natural” for a scholar that I needed this more
“permanent,” fictional version of the house as home to
reflect on this community construction. This process
produced work that shifted my way of working in the
studio in ways that were inherently critical of the pro-
gressive time-sense of artistic and academic worlds that
favor innovation perhaps more than truth. The result is
a painting that is something of a landscape but that, in
the image of Monet’s water lily paintings, presents no
scene. Without a horizon, it offers an immersive experi-
ence of color and form. Yet, unlike the great impres-
sionist’s enormous, engulfing canvases, my paintings
were calculated to hang on a dining room wall. Making
the piece involved a restriction of my brush that kept the
work constrained in a way that felt appropriate to the
subject matter; its movements were guided by the pro-
cess I have described—at least until I added the projects
as “fallen leaves” as they were transformed by discus-
sions with the present-day, temporary occupants of
the house. It is time now to move on to the next artwork
in order to delve further into art as a medium of encoun-
ter between the anthropologist and the interlocutor.
Encounters
Matrice is a piece in an ongoing project I call “Life-
works” for which I develop art for a particular individual
based on extended encounters and fieldwork (see fig. 3).
I made it not by selecting a site and going there to meet
people but instead to repay a favor my colleague and
friend Juliann Allison had done for me. I asked her, “How
can I pay you back?” She knew exactly. She said, “By
painting.” She arrived on my doorstep a few days later
with a large plaster mold of her belly, made when she
was pregnant with the last of her four children. Could I
make it into art?17
17. Although I had previously worked to develop site spe-
cific projects, this was the first time I received an “or-
der” for an artwork or an anthropological study.
 Susan Marie OSSMAN
Figure 3: “Matrice,” 2013, Latex, oil on canvas and burlap
ribbon. Photograph by the author.
This was how I learned that making a plaster of Paris
belly mold in the last stages of a woman’s pregnancy is a
very widespread practice in the United States. Once the
baby is born, people often paint the baby’s name on it
and put on the wall or turn it into a fruit bowl: these op-
tions were not to Juliann’s taste. She wondered whether
I might be able to make something interesting of “the
belly.” We started to meet weekly, mostly at my home
but also on campus and in various coffee shops and res-
taurants around town. I did not record the interviews,
but I took copious notes, made sketches, and shared
thoughts about what I might make of the mold. Juliann
is a creative writer as well as a scholar, so she also gave
me lengthy self-reflexive texts to jump-start our ex-
changes about her life as an academic mother with four
children. Usually, it is the anthropologist who deter-
mines the themes of fieldwork. Attentive to our collab-
orators, we are still the ones who develop the questions
(Cerwonka and Maaliki 2007). Responding to Juliann’s
interests and the belly, we developed a critical approach
to this inversed, collaborative research process. How I
1076
would work with the belly and the stories together
emerged through the research process, which led beyond
the study of other “belly art” to the contemporary work
of artists on pregnancy and motherhood and the study of
American suburban life and academic institutions.
We discussed how Juliann felt others perceived her as
“overabundant” as an academic mother. The very traits,
emotions, and activities that she felt defined her were
ones her profession judged negatively. I listened closely
to the words she used, the pace of her talk, and her ex-
pression. I was quickly convinced I would not alter the
cast itself. Which media would I use to render her words
in ways that responded to the deeply embodied experi-
ences she expressed about maternity? How could I honor
and include the cast that had actually been molded
on her pregnant body? While my method of making
something of our talk was similar to other ethnographies
based on life stories, with individuals, the plaster belly
was always with us as we exchanged stories of mother-
hood, childcare problems, our large birth families, and
academic life. The transformation of the problem-object
was not just psychic, not simply a matter of transference;
it was practical. It was Juliann who had commissioned
me to make art by way of her words. She was enthusias-
tic about writing together about our collaboration.18 But
she was not interested in developing a therapeutic rela-
tionship that involved her working with materials asso-
ciated with the arts.19 She came to me because of my spe-
cific skills with working with words and paint. As it
turned out, the duration and intensity of the project ex-
ceeded both of our expectations.
The belly remained with me when Juliann departed.
As I contemplated materials I might use, I considered
Juliann’s energy and athleticism. Besides being a profes-
sor, she is a climber, a runner, and a yoga teacher. I be-
gan to think of the relationship of the skin and under-
lying shapes, of the mold to the abdomen. Now her
tummy was perfectly flat, even as the breasts remained
as full as the mold had registered them near the end of
what would be her last pregnancy. She spoke readily and
easily about her body and its transformations, including
the breast implants she decided to get after nursing her
youngest child. The newly rounded breasts were not for
appearance’s sake, she said, but a way of maintaining
the feeling of fullness of the nourishing mother. Juliann’s
18. See Allison and Ossman (2014).
19. Contrast to Hogan and Pink (2010).
1077
actions and words made it clear that the new breasts
inside and the plaster shell needed to be present in some
way in the object I would make for her. I began to work
on ideas of molds and cyborgs, on questions of body im-
age in relation to models.
I was already wary of marking the belly directly: in-
terviews led me to reflect increasingly on the process
by which it had been made and, more generally, on re-
production. The life stories I was recording in my notes
suggested it was precisely the ability to produce, and
produce once more, that was one of Juliann’s most
self-valued characteristics. So I decided to use the plaster
cast to make another new belly. Much as Juliann had
added new breasts, I used latex in a months-long process
of painting layer after layer of the rubber on the mold to
make a new belly in the mold of the existing one. Once
completed, I added burlap ribbons the color of Juliann’s
hair. I tied them at the “shoulders” like apron strings.
Now Juliann can take the art off the wall and tie it
around her slender frame (which she actually reported
doing when it was completed and she took it home).
The four small abstract paintings aligned top to bottom
are for her four children. Although I know them, I stuck
to the one-on-one creation of a space of exchange medi-
ated by the belly: In the artwork, their differences arise
from combinations of the same lines and colors rather
than any notion of individual portraiture. It was Juli-
ann and her belly; the Matrice was the subject.
Artist-ethnographer Zoe Bray has written about how
the mise-en-scène of painting a classical portrait estab-
lishes a deeper connection between the ethnographer
and her subject (Bray 2015). In the case of Matrice,
Juliann was not present when I worked in the studio.
And the belly also added a material intermediary to
the process. Matrice is not a likeness, but an actual im-
print of Juliann’s body at a significant moment, related
to the themes she wanted to address.20 I did explore with
Juliann what the materials I imagined working with
evoked for her. Making art a goal, we had discussions
of color, texture, shapes, and the sensation of skin
stretching during pregnancy, or when new breasts are
implanted, that would not have occurred had I set out
to write a text based on our sessions. It seems to me that
20. The process might be compared to how Lydia Naka-
shima Degarrod developed art through exchanges with
fellow Chileans exiles. The difference was that she worked
with several individuals who shared that experience of ex-
ile, which she named as the aim of the project (Degarrod
2009: 2017).
AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM
the artwork presents important truths and perspectives
that would have been missed had I employed other
means and materials.21 The article that Juliann and I
wrote together about the research process adds to its
meaning for others who might seek to collaborate as
we did (Allison and Ossman 2014).
Up until now, I have only alluded to the importance
of field notes in the making of art in the field. The next
work in the exhibition, which I made in 1991 while I
was finishing my PhD dissertation in Casablanca, leads
me to ask what might happen when a field note escapes
the notebook.
Field notes
It was a warm spring afternoon. I was tired of sitting at
the desk, tapping on the keyboard and staring at the
golden letters on the screen of my Leading Edge PC. I
gathered some pastels and different sizes and colors of
paper and sat on the living room floor and tore a swatch
of textured, translucent paper, something like the voile
curtain on the window. I glued to the smooth surface
of the piece Rives BFK print paper. Strokes of chalk pas-
tel came to suggest a breeze coming through the clearly
traced top of a window frame. An opaque bit of sharp-
cut rosy paper might be read as a synecdoche for the
hard lines of the frame as a whole, the edges of which
expand to the edges of the paper, or beyond. It is this
solid intimation of the window as a divider between in-
side and out, the street and my home, that seems to pro-
duce or introduce a flow of words, letters, and letterlike
marks. Those burst from the place you might reach to
open or close the window as though the window was
open just a crack, just enough to let the sounds of the
street flow into the room.
I scribbled in Latin and Arabic scripts, perhaps to
evoke the Casablanca soundscape, which liberally min-
gles Moroccan derija and Tamazight and French with
21. Charles Briggs (2007) has written about how the perva-
siveness of interviews, surveys, and other methods typ-
ical of ethnographic research have become common-
place in Western settings and how critical fieldworkers
must take this into account. Making exchanges not just
“open-ended” but setting out the project, following
Juliann’s intension, and the way that the materiality of
the belly, body, and art making entered into our ex-
changes contributed to such a critical shift not simply
in the end product of the art but throughout the research
process.
 Susan Marie OSSMAN
snippets of classical Arabic broadcasts and random
words of Spanish and English or Italian. There are words
and phrases like those one might write in a notebook.
The phrases that initiate the movement of the words
are in English, my native language and the one in which
I was writing my dissertation. From left to right I read,
“Disappear and arise there,” “living like,” and “way to
write”; from the left hna (“here”) meets “here,” and
minin (“Where from?”) follows Assrar (“secrets”). These
legible words weave a veil over other phrases behind
them, then flow down until they dissolve, blend, and dis-
band as recognizable letters. Should I vocalize the word
sabr (“patience”) in standard Arabic or in the short ac-
cents of Moroccan pronunciation that seem to bypass
vowels altogether, sbr? Deborah Kapchan (2017) has
pointed to this selectivity with respect to listening and
sound.
I hear a voice I know whispering “sabr ya benti” (pa-
tience my daughter) with a Casablancan accent. As the
voice fades, I let my eye follow the marks I made around
the clearly formed letters. Those marks differ from the
stripes and pools of color and shadow around them.
The word “Zenqa,” Arabic for “street,” emerges from
the comingled scripts and scriptlike marks for those
who know the language. This might suggest the way
the sounds of the city and its languages enact an imag-
inary city, in the steps of those who traverse the street by
walking. For those who do not, the lines might appear as
a response to the well-aligned lines of the notebook.22
Yet they are also a reference to my own previous work,
inspired early on by the white writing of the painter Cy
Twombley.23 Later, I would come to call what would be-
come a characteristic play on the edge of mark and letter
in my work “almost writing.” At the time, I didn’t have
a name for it, but it was developing as I trained my hand
and eye to be attentive to sound and the shadow of dis-
sertation analytics on that sunny afternoon. Following
what I was writing, about images and their circulation,
power, and the politics of national images, I was acutely
aware of the specific properties of pictures: how they
can present a layered commentary in ways that writing
cannot (Ossman 1994). I was grappling with how the
multiplicity of sounds might be best recorded in such
a polysemic form.
22. See Ingold (2009) and my reflection from the perspec-
tive of a number 2 pencil in Ossman (2020).
23. This has led me to develop a technique of drawing/writ-
ing/painting I call “almost writing” (Ossman 2010).
1078
Stephen Foster has written that “listening not only
implies self-reflection but also an opening into an un-
derstanding of representation as mobile and evanescent,
contrary to the deadly normalizations of codified repre-
sentation that is our cultural style and habitual bias”
(Foster 2019: 248). Sally Ness has drawn attention to
some of the more specific ways this “bias” has been
shaped by theories of the sign. She argues that most se-
miological and structuralist ideas have “stilled” our abil-
ity to attend to the liveliness of things but that Charles
Sanders Pierce’s work opens new potential for a more
fluid understanding of signs because his work draws at-
tention to how “sign phenomena must be understood as
always already and continually transforming in charac-
ter. It foregrounds the ways in which all signs are works-
in-progress, demonstrating with especial clarity the un-
folding, ‘passing-on-ness’ or temporal ‘forward-ness’ of
semiosis as it gives shape to new kinds of sign perfor-
mance and performers” (Ness 2016: 12). Contemplating
this possibility, I must also remember that art historian
and sociologist Pierre Francastel insisted long ago that
art is always a movement of thought (Francastel 1983:
29). His work deeply influenced me from the time I
was a student studying the relationship of image to the
movements of the city of Casablanca. Perhaps it was on
the wings of his words that these notes became an artwork.
Artist and critic Natalia Zagorska-Thomas would later
write about this work and others I made in Morocco:
The work has a strong sense of place, but at the same
time, the depictions of fabric produce a feeling of im-
permanence and shape-shifting evocative of transient
lives where landscape, language and a sense of self
are forever being renegotiated. . . . The inclusion of
text in several languages leads us to perceive it primar-
ily as a visual and conceptual cipher for language itself
with its potential for creating parallel universes and
shifts of meaning in translation. For this artist/aca-
demic, the process of painting takes place at any point
(often quite early) in her academic research and per-
forms the function of visual field notes. (Zagorska-
Thomas 2013: 139–41).
Yet, Windows #1 is not exactly a “field note” of the kind
that one collects in a notebook or a computer file.24 Or
24. See Hendrickson (2019) on “visual field notes.” Andrew
Causey suggests how the practice of drawing can help
anyone to “see” better and provides guidance for any-
one who would like to try it (Causey 2017). Taussig
1079
Figure 4: “Window # 1,” 1991, Paper, pastel and ink,
17"  25". Photograph by Nigel Tribbeck.
if it might function as a “note,” it was also a work of art
that was intended to hang on a wall for all to see (see
fig. 4).
In 1991, formerly hidden aspects of the field note-
book were being brought out into the open and inte-
grated into reflexive writing. In a way, Window #1 fol-
lows this trend, in that it includes many subjective,
sensuous clues to my relationship to a specific day, to
an environment, and to who I was as a researching sub-
ject. However, what it displays is not something that
was ever meant for private use alone. It was a reflexive
work meant for public display from the moment I chose
the large piece of paper, with no intention to place it in a
notebook, or adding it to other similar “notes” to come
(2011) offers epistemological reflections on fieldwork,
drawing, events, and truth through a book-length anal-
ysis of a single field sketch.
AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM
up with generalizations or a story line. Still, like certain
field notes, or poems, it asks questions more than it
seeks to answer them. It seems more descriptive than
analytic. This brings me to another quite different art-
work and moment of the ethnographic process illus-
trated by a painting I made in that same Casablanca liv-
ing room a few months later.
Analysis
Extensive anthological literature on the Middle East
and Muslim world addresses the meaning, uses, and
implications of the hijab, a word that sits on the edge
of a fundamental conundrum. The word is formed
from the consonants “hjb,” which connotes protection.
If the hijab, or “veil,” that covers women’s hair or bod-
ies in multifarious styles is oppressive for some, for
others, it is comforting: a sign of belief, of being a part
of a community, of being cared for.25 In a relationship,
a family, or a polity, overprotection can suffocate, while
lack of cover leaves people in the cold, literally as well
as figuratively. These different meanings spread out
from the scarf itself to issues of the gendering of space;
in Morocco, where having completed my dissertation, I
was preparing for new research in the feminine, public,
yet intimate space of beauty salons.
I made Covering or Crushing in the wake of Window
#1, with a view and an ear to the world beyond (see fig. 5).
But in this instance, there is no longer any suggestion that
this is a description of a scene or soundscape. The broad
black brushstrokes paint a menacing horizon. The flowing
curtain has given way to sharply traced angles and shapes
that seem to pile up within them. Two larger triangles meet
to suggest frames that rotate and enclose smaller shapes:
perhaps a shadowy figure, two stones, or two purple hearts.
Light gray brushstrokes create a wash that suggests the ac-
tion of covering with a blanket or with one’s arms. A cor-
ner of a triangle tears the surface of the wash, releasing blue
light, or perhaps a thought that escapes the conundrum.
There is no question mark in the title. It is unnecessary.
The letters sit atop the finished painting, suggesting a dual
action, perhaps a conflict. Perhaps a necessary comple-
mentarity. They frame the dramatic abstraction, adding
to their specificity. I do not use the word “hijab” or “voile”
25. The literature on the hijab is expansive. It has grown
considerably since I made “Covering or Crushing?” in
1992. For the ways I was exploring hair, scarves and no-
tions of hijab at the time see Ossman 2002.
 Susan Marie OSSMAN
Figure 5: “Covering or Crushing,” 1992, Acrylic and ink on paper. Photograph by Nigel Tribbeck.
or “veil.” I write in English, a language few people in
Morocco spoke at the time. It was a language I used
to talk to myself or other anthropologists who also gen-
eralized from the process of fieldwork research, most of
them in far-off lands. So soon after the first Gulf War, I
was certainly mindful that it might be worth attending
to generalities, given the assumptions even among crit-
ical academics about North Africa and the Middle
East.26
The use of text in contemporary art is not unusual.
In art classes at Berkeley in the late 1970s, we experi-
mented with writing and printed texts in homework
exercises. But unlike the fledgling ethnographer in the
“field,” the art instructor not only grades students’ pa-
pers but also observes them in action. Fieldwork may
have instruction manuals, but one must find one’s
own way through sharing field notes or conversations
or in the course of editing a dissertation draft. When I
recall my colleagues’ and professors’ voices, they con-
verse. Sometimes they cry out at an injustice recounted
in a text or rail at currents of thought they do not agree
26. See Deeb and Winegar’s (2016) study about how work-
ing on this region impacts the reception of anthropolo-
gists’ work and careers.
1080
with. But they do not ask me why I used text to render
my work. They may inquire into choices of genre but
do not ask why someone chose to write, or to write in
a particular language. Diverse languages might be in-
cluded in field notes, but to be part of “the discipline”
these need to be analyzed and written up in a language
one’s peers can read.
If Window #1 was a kind of public field note that ref-
erenced my research milieu with its many tongues,
Covering or Crushing reflects on some of those “notes”
to explore a more general problem in a way akin to an ac-
ademic article. However, it draws attention to the media
chosen by the artist, and rather than pointing to some
single “conclusion,” it suggests a movement that points
to possible horizons and further exchanges (Cox, Irving
and Wright 2016). Today, some anthropologists suggest
that ethnographic research generally produces works in
this way (Biehl and Locke 2017).
All of the pieces we have explored so far were intended
to be viewed by others even as they contributed to the
ongoing flow of research. Covering or Crushing ends the
cycle with a statement that sets out a disciplined move-
ment that can incite further debate or projects, rather as
an article or a book might do. This in turn might lead
the anthropologist to further reflections on the process
1081
Figure 6: “What Goes Unsaid,” 2013, Organza, paper, silk, 5 panels, 60"  80" each. Photograph by Rayed Khedher.
of fieldwork. Early fieldworkers often wrote memoirs
about what didn’t “fit” into their monographs. Now, I
turn in conclusion to art made with such remnants.
Reflections
I made What Goes Unsaid for the first stage of On the
Line, a project that focused on clotheslines and laundry
practices to study gendered work, ecology, social life,
and notions of intimacy from 2008 to 2016 (see fig. 6).27
The scribbles and texts that I cut up into ribbons and
remnants to fill the organza envelopes contain a mélange
of my field notes and never completed articles, emails,
and letters. There are ribbons of the pages from pub-
lished texts cut lengthwise, mixed with small petals of
pink silk. There is no hierarchy, no categorization: the
efforts to inscribe an idea or a feeling are gathered up
not as publishable remnants but as an assertion of their
dependence on one another. Some of these words have
been circulated in books; most were never intended to
be read by strangers.
The installation invites the viewer to approach, to
become a reader, perhaps to read aloud the words that
27. See Ossman (2013, 2016, 2020).
AN EXHIBITION IN FIELDWORK FORM
I wrote but never before shared. The viewer-turned-
reader might imagine piecing the bits in the bags back
together to follow the events they describe or their incho-
ate arguments.28 As they pass through the sheets and
make them rustle, they might consider the objects they
themselves collect or the precious archives of libraries
and museums. They might whisper the unsaid words
they might like to express to themselves. Much like ar-
guments or observations printed in a book, placing
What Goes Unsaid in the public realm of the exhibition
gave what I never said or published a certain stability. It
became a “work” that can serve as a reference for other
works.
The On the Line program used my works in an exhi-
bition as a call for a critical reaction by other anthro-
pologists and artists, whom I invited to react to my work
with their own work and present it in a new exhibition.
This in turn led to a collaborative program of field-
work and art, performance, and participatory events
28. This piece can be compared to some of the work of the
“Ethnographic Terminalia” project; see Brodine, Maria
et al. (2011). See, in particular, Fiamma Montezemolo’s
work that invites the audience to interact with her field
notes (http://www.fiammamontezemolo.com/#exit-only).
 Susan Marie OSSMAN
Figure 7: Dancing with “What Goes Unsaid,” for “On the
Line,” April 2016 in Riverside, CA. Installation by the author,
choreography by Sue Roginskiand Casey Auvant.
in different venues in Riverside, California, over a three-
year period. The soft forms of What Goes Unsaid rustled
as it was draped in different configurations in galleries
or outdoors or followed the movements of dancers
who worked with words and gestures gleaned through
fieldwork on “hanging out one’s dirty laundry,” inspired
by the installation.
What Goes Unsaid thus became a prompt for art by
others and also for a new rendition of the project I de-
vised (see fig. 7). As we moved from gallery to mall, to
spaces outside of public libraries, I asked members of
the public to anonymously contribute their unsaid
words and stories to make a new art project. I collected
and wrote the words and phrases in my own hand, on
long swaths of organza. Then I hung them for all to see
at each new event, becoming a kind of public scribe. To
delve into that project would lead beyond the scope of
the present exhibition. It would lead me to engage with
more “relational” work that foregrounds collective in-
vention and strategies for using fieldwork design to
produce proactive collective experiments. That is an
important undertaking, one that has perhaps more im-
mediately obvious social and cultural and collective
ramifications than this focused exhibition. And yet, like
the intricacies of contemplating the specifics of media
and materiality, of words and sound and sensed vibra-
tions in any fieldwork, there is an importance in paus-
1082
ing to notice particulars and details that can be blurred
in the excitement of larger endeavors. Pointing to the
collective, and to the wider world in ways that are affec-
tively moving and important, can be achieved even un-
intentionally in photography, at least according to Barthes
(1980). I hope that this small exhibition has suggested
how art and ethnography might be brought together in
several different ways to shape the conditions for such
“coincidence.”
As this walk-through of this exhibition-article draws
to a close, I feel nothing of the physical exhaustion of
hanging an exhibition; instead, my eyes are tired from
staring at the computer screen. I sense a missed oppor-
tunity to “open” the show with a party; to meet the eye
of a viewer and the posture of a visitor face to face, body
to body; to feel the delight when a line I drew some time
ago reignites the expressions of joy or confusion of an-
other person—that is, until I exit the making of this
exhibition-article about past work to think about present
realities that have made all exhibition experiences much
more like reading a text. In a time of pandemic, art has
gone online, circulating in much the same way as the
text, to readers we rarely know and will hardly ever meet
face to face. Who knows—perhaps the genre of the
exhibition-article will catch on.29
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Susan OSSMAN’s research focuses on images and mediation, gender, globalization, and migration. Her career and
fieldwork have taken her to Morocco, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where she is professor
of anthropology and global studies at the University of California Riverside. Her books include Picturing Casa-
blanca: Portraits of power in a modern city (California 1994), Three faces of beauty: Casablanca, Cairo, Paris (Duke
2002), Moving matters: Paths of serial migration (Stanford 2013), and Shifting worlds, shaping fieldwork: A memoir of
anthropology and art (London Routledge 2021). Her art has been exhibited in galleries, museums, and public places
across Europe and North America. She founded and directs the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop, a global
scholar-artist project on migration.
Susan Marie Ossman
sossman@ucr.edu

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