Making concordance : encounters with oral history and narrative research in the visual arts

• Main Author: Sandino, Linda G.
• Published: University of East London 2010
• Subjects: 700
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.533015

This thesis brings together the contiguous but distinct fields of oral history and narrative research focusing on interviews conducted for three research projects: the National Life Stories collection at The British Library Sound Archive, VIVA (Voices in the Visual Arts) at Camberwell College of Arts and for the Victoria and Albert Museum. The thesis draws principally on the work of Paul Ricoeur in order to examine the production and interpretation of oral life histories, demonstrating that as well as oral history they are identity narratives. By investigating the distinction between form and content in oral history, this enquiry challenges the assumption that video provides a 'truer' representation and access to the interview. I show how these two recording technologies produce historically contingent senses of the self, and therefore construct narratives specific to their methods of production and reception. The thesis reveals how artists' oral life histories about their professional practices are subject to Ricoeur's dialectic of sedimentation and innovation. This enquiry redefines the problematic concept of artistic influence by showing how it is reframed in narrative as relational and social. It contributes to understanding how artists' identity (and others') is created as and in narrative. A final chapter on curators examines a supposedly stable, 'coherent' identity. It contributes to the analysis of professional identities by examining the curator as a civil servant committed to an ethos of public service, and showing how this contributed to a specific type of scholarly expertise. It continues to draw on Ricoeur's concept of narrative identity but also confronts the problem of interpretation in first-person narratives. The thesis expands the interpretative repertoire of oral history by showing how personal accounts function as self and community identity narratives as well as historical data, but problematises oral history as principally content-led research.