Art

Pop Cultural Pop

December 1, 2011 By Ben Spatz 2 Comments

Doing pop culture analysis is like trying to carve a tunnel through a mountainside with a spoon. But as a daily rider of public transportation, I can’t help but notice the images that barrage us as we travel from one point to another. It amazes me that we have sold this space to advertisers rather than using it for art, news, or public dialogue.

Here’s one that I noticed recently:

Advertisement for "The Big Bang Theory"

What strikes me about this ad is that it seems to un-self-consciously demonstrate mainstream America’s imaginary world of neatly defined identity categories and their associated hierarchies of power and influence.

I have never watched “The Big Bang Theory,” so I don’t know anything about these characters beyond what’s shown here. But when I look at the poster, what I basically see is a central white man surrounded by four other, less central people. The central guy is taller than the others and, in the poster I see most often, he is the only one looking directly out at the viewer.

Then there are the “others.” From left to right: the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s effeminate and/or retro and/or gay (as indicated by tight purple pants); the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s not white; the man who isn’t in the middle because he’s nerdy and/or intellectual and/or Jewish (as indicated by glasses); and the woman. Whether or not these descriptions are true of the characters in the show, they are clearly marked this way in the poster.

If you think I’m being reductive, note that these ads for “The Big Bang Theory” (produced by CBS) are in every case — as far as I’ve seen, on the subway — bundled with ads for “30 Rock” (produced by NBC). I’m not sure if I would have thought to read these ads as such an obvious statement of mainstream television’s understanding of identity politics if the two ads weren’t so bizarrely, strikingly similar to each other.

Advertisement for "30 Rock"

I have actually seen “30 Rock,” so I do know something about the characters. All the same, the line-up in the poster is identical to the one I’ve described above, with a single, possible significant difference: the nerdy / intellectual / Jewish role (the one marked with glasses) is now being played by a woman.

So we have again, from left to right and top to bottom: the guy marked as effeminate, emotional, possibly gay; the racial other; the silly, blond woman; the intellectual (now female); and finally, of course, the white guy. No markings on him!

There’s nothing new about this analysis. We all know that white men and women dominate mainstream television, and that identity politics gets absorbed into pop culture — for better and for worse — through the addition of secondary characters, more or less stereotypical, marked as different kinds of “other” in relation to the central white male.

Even given all that, I am struck by the juxtaposition of these two ads — plastered side by side all over New York City’s public transportation system — and by the fact that whoever put them together either did not notice their eerily parallel composition, or else accepted it as a statement about what counts as “prime time” in today’s world.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, Marketing, Media, New York, Politics, Style

Rite of Myself

November 1, 2011 By Ben Spatz 4 Comments

“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This Saturday I will perform a solo work called Rite of the Butcher at the United Solo Festival at Theatre Row near Times Square. I want to take this opportunity not just to plug the performance but to write briefly about it from a perspective I do not usually share: not the aesthetics of the work, not its relationship to other forms of theatrical and embodied research, not the technique that underlies it or the poetic language that structures it — but its meaning for me personally. Why do I do it?

Creating a work like this not only doesn’t pay but costs money. I have paid the festival to produce me and several studios to house my rehearsals over the past year, not to mention videography and a few other purchases here and there: things like a carving knife, a pair of round blue glasses, and a hem on the cuffs of a pair of black pants. And beyond the monetary cost there is a huge number of hours spent mostly in the studio developing and rehearsing the score. Plus the administrative work of applying for venues like this festival and of doing publicity for the show.

I no longer think of myself as an actor because I have not performed in a work directed by someone else since 2005. I have no interest in auditioning or being shaped and directed as actors and dancers usually are. Even in collaborative ensembles I always found myself unsatisfied on an intellectual and artistic level. I simply don’t like embodying performance scores unless I feel that I have been in on their development since the beginning. That’s why I’ve never trained in yoga or martial arts for more than a few months at a time. It’s not mine.

This sense of “mine-ness” could seem greedy or controlling, except that the thing that is mine does not exist, it is not an object, it cannot be possessed. In fact it’s not really “mine-ness” so much as “me-ness”. I want to do what I am; to be what I do; to know what I’m doing; to understand how and why I am doing it. In other words, I want to be the creator and the doer simultaneously. That’s why I can’t be an actor or a director, and why I don’t think of myself as a theater person even though I spend most of my time either creating or writing about theatrical performance. That’s also why for the past six years I have worked either alone or with a single other person in a long-term collaborative partnership.

From 2002 to 2010, I didn’t like to think of what I was doing as “theater” because I associated theater with the moment of spectacle and with a relationship to a public sphere that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in. These days, perhaps due to my academic work, I have a much stronger but more complicated sense of the public sphere. It no longer feels ridiculous or absurd to want to appear “in public” as doing something: writing a book, making a presentation, or giving a performance. I no longer dismiss the public sphere as entirely dominated by consumerism, even if mainstream entertainment and advertising remain omnipresent and nearly omnipotent.

But still I do not like to think of this performance as a “show”. That word for me remains stuck in too many dangerous connotations: above all, the passiveness or at least separateness of the spectator, as if what I am doing onstage is categorically different from what each of us does in our daily lives. It is not. My movements are just movements. My songs are just songs. My words are just words. Do not look at what I am doing for its strangeness. Do not admire it as a decorative object. Do not ask what I mean to say but what it means that I am doing it. Ask why I am doing it and look in it for what you recognize as your own. I do this because the details of this practice are me; they are what I am. But we all have practices, we all entwine ourselves in the details of specific field, and this is what makes the world go round.

More and more I think it is fundamental to remember how much of our world is created and sustained by human activity. The more artificial our world becomes, the easier it is to forget this and to think that the world sustains itself. But the family, the city, the institution, the social movement, the corporation, the bank, the court of law, the country, the tribe — each of these is created through embodied practices. Each is sustained through human work, and each can be dismantled or transformed in the same way. What would happen if, when we looked at things, we saw the work that went into them? Not the performance, but the performer — not the building, but the builders — not the institution, but the people.

[Photos by Ian Douglas. Rite of the Butcher created and performed by Ben Spatz. For more information and other projects please visit Urban Research Theater.]

Filed Under: Art, Culture, Media, Music, New York, Politics, Presentations, Process, Writing

Finding #ds106radio

October 20, 2011 By Luke

I really dug the DIY Radio for Teaching and Learning session that Mikhail Gershovich organized last night at Baruch College. I’ve been following the evolution of the community that’s emerged around the digital storytelling courses (named ds106) begun at University of Mary Washington and joined by folks all over the world, and have watched with interest as that community has explored the integration of web radio over the past year. But I’ve refrained from jumping in for a number of reasons. First, I’m not much of a joiner. Second, I saw that ds106 radio seemed to have taken over the lives of many of the folks involved, and I simply don’t have time. Third, as a self-diagnosed enthusiasthmatic, I didn’t feel I have the stamina to participate in a movement whose mood generally puts the good vibes in the digital humanities community to shame. Fourth, when confronted with evangelism, which I often find boring, my instinct is to turn the other way. And fifth and by far the most important, I’m not particularly interested in punk, and ds106radio plays a lot of punk.

These reservations aside, I did know from the get that ds106 was on to something interesting and that radio is just a part of that, and last night’s presentation gave me a firmer sense of just what that is. I was reminded last night of the emergence of Found Magazine, which was created by Davy Rothbart, who I attended college (and played a lot of hoop) with. Found collects “found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles– anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life. Anything goes.” Found’s finds reveal the poetry and humanity in the quotidian detritus of every day life. When my wife and I got our first issue of Found, it immediately changed the way we related to our lived environment. Random pieces of paper blowing across the sidewalk had real stories and real life behind. Binding them into a collection made a space for readers to creatively explore and imagine the voids left by the individual artifact’s isolation and abandonment.

I was similarly struck by the way ds106radio has altered the way that Grant Potter, GNA Garcia, Jim Groom, Michael Branson Smith and Mikhail – as well as several others – have integrated the possibilities of web radio into their interactions with the spaces around them. They seem absorbed by the experience of ds106radio, always imagining how to make use of it, constantly thinking of ways to bring what’s around them to the network, and doing so in deeply personalized ways. Grant is focused on creating, expanding, and simplifying the technical capabilities of the experience, drawing upon his ability as a technologist interested in telephony. GNA is an educational psychologist, and her interest in the space seems to revolve around mindfulness and nurturing a sense of community. Mikhail has embraced the role of deejay for its own sake, but has also shown the promise of the medium for capturing oral history and begun to imagine curricular integration around a set of tools like these. Michael has taken the first difficult stab at bringing the ds106 world into the curriculum of a CUNY college over at York, and while he’s made amazing artistic contributions (and to the ds106 ecosystem, he’s also made use of his connections to expand the set of tools ds106ers can draw upon in their audio production and brought #ows on air. And Jim, whose work with ds106 inspired this whole thing, has started to imagine the range of ways that a web radio station might be integrated across the curriculum at UMW.

As much as Jim might recoil in horror at the term, he’s an academic through and through, and in and only in the best sense of the word. After his presentation with Mike Neary and Joss Winn last week, I felt that the MOOCification of ds106 and the attention to the community beyond UWM embedded a implicit critique of the institutional limitations of the university. While I think these awesome projects suggest a dynamic about the nature of change and innovation within higher ed that we would benefit from teasing out better understanding, Jim’s presentations these past two weeks have reiterated to me yet again that more than anything he’s deeply committed to the idea of curricular innovation and evolution using free, open, powerful tools in a way that specifically and systematically fosters digital and networked literacies. Jim wants you to think he’s crazy and unpredictable and unbound, so he references heroin and porn in his presentations. But his work can’t help but reveal that he is in fact something much more radical and profound: an intensely committed educator. (Not that I ever doubted that. But I don’t think I’ve ever written it, and it’s only fair given the millions of keys he’s struck professing his love for me).

Rock on #ds106radio. I’ll likely call mic check at some point. And much more importantly, I’ll be rolling the possibilites of web radio into my thinking about ways educators can stretch, invigorate, and revolutionize the classroom.

If you missed it, here’s the presentation, which lays out with much more passion and clarity than I can what ds106 and ds106radio are:

DIY Web Radio, Part 1 of 2

DIY Web Radio, Part 2 of 2

Filed Under: Art, cac, EdTech, Education

Playing with Communication

October 19, 2011 By Debra Leave a Comment

I came across the work of Kate Hartman while watching a whole bunch of TED talks in preparation for a semester of teaching communication studies to both college students and high-schoolers. I was hoping to find presentations that would get my classes excited about the possibilities of oral presentations, both through their content and the quality of the speakers’ delivery. Ideally, these would be examples of innovative, critical thinking, presented to an audience in a creative way, with enthusiasm and well-utilized visuals aids.

That Kate Hartman’s work is all about communication—with oneself, with others, with nature, with inanimate objects—was so much the better. Hartman creates what she calls “wearable communications” and is a Professor of Wearable and Mobile Technology at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Here’s an example of one of her designs, the Muttering Hat, which externalizes the process of thinking and also enables you share it with a friend:

http://www.katehartman.com/projects/mutteringhat/

Kate Hartman's Muttering Hat

I was first struck by the way that her objects make concrete and a little strange (in a Formalist way—as in making us suddenly aware, making visible) the possibilities and challenges of communication and relationship in various contexts. I like how her designs experiment at the interface of body and communication device, sometimes seeking to fit the device a little more easily to the flesh by making electronics more cushy and comfortable to wear (see her work on “soft and flexible” circuits) and sometimes acknowledging a huge gulf that needs traversing between our bodies and the natural world. Her sweet, almost tender design for an interface for communicating with glaciers is an example of the later. She describes the suits she has designed for this project as “intended for awkward introductory glacier encounters…enabling a person to lie prone on the surface of the glacier and give it a hug.” (See “Initial Investigatory Research for Glacier-Human Communication Techniques.”) Here are some views of her glacier communication device:

http://www.boulderpavement.ca/issue001/glacier-human-communication-techniques/

Hartman's Glacier Communication Suit

All of her designs highlight awkwardness is some way, as she brings into view the weirdness and circuitousness of our attempts to listen to/communicate with other beings and natural things, but also the beauty and the vulnerability of those attempts. But these works are also tapping into some big issues swirling around right now, like the uneasy integration of technology with nature, or how some scholars are engaged in rethinking the position of the human being in relation to the technological and natural worlds—a project driven by urgent ecological and ethical imperatives. The more I look at and think about her work, the more I notice how it attempts to facilitate communication between humans and the non-human other by utilizing the newer communication tools, like Twitter, that we’ve become so accustomed to—thus throwing the limits and the possibilities of these tools into relief. (Three of her works are featured in the current exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, “Talk to Me,” which is all about the ways people and things communicate. You can read here, for example, about the “Botanicalls” project she co-created, in which houseplants can send tweets to their owners when they need to be watered.)

Because of how resonant and current I found the ideas behind her designs, I was fairly surprised, during a leisurely scan of the viewer comments under her TED talk, to find so many viewers dismissing her work as childish, frivolous, and unworthy of the platform the producers had given her. Yes, she is kind of a funny, irreverent speaker, but her creations clearly are engaging on multiples levels with contemporary concerns. So I was left with a few questions, which spurned some further musings about how I teach communications.

Maybe what I was reading in the comments speaks to the difficulty of getting different disciplines talk to each other, and to what happens when someone decides to work through a variety of disciplines—between art and design, technology, and teaching as well. And perhaps because Hartman is playing around with her concepts, as in really being playful and having a good time about it, it might be harder for some to see the heavier intellectual work behind her explorations. Hartman herself has spoken about the need to balance enthusiasm and criticalness. She said in an interview: “I think we need both. It’s really important to lower the barrier for entry to get people involved but that shouldn’t subsume maintaining a sense of criticality in the ways in which we use technology and the ways we view art and design.” So I’m left wondering: is there a way to create spaces in my Comm. 1010 classroom for both play and critical thought? I often struggle with wanting to encourage my students to become inquisitive, receptive listeners, to be able to let down some of their filters and be open to radically new or different perspectives. At the same time, I want to give them the tools to be critical listeners, sharp and adept at evaluating claims and assessing evidence. Because honestly, I think they need help becoming both (as do I). But don’t students have to master the forms before they can play with them, push at their edges? I plan to show Hartman’s talk to both my classes, and not just to mine it for examples of good delivery, or strong argumentation, but also to begin a conversation about how to approach novel concepts with both an open and a discerning mind.

Filed Under: Art, Technology

The Politics of Specialized Knowledge

October 17, 2011 By Ben Spatz 1 Comment

What are the possible relations between knowledge and power?

On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust divisions of class, race, and gender, among others. On the other hand, as someone dedicated to the preservation and development of certain fields of knowledge both academic and artistic, I cannot accept any simple equation between power and knowledge.

The idea that power and knowledge are two sides of the same coin has been powerfully articulated by Michel Foucault. Another way to say this, using the language of Pierre Bourdieu, would be that specialized knowledge is a kind of cultural capital, a form of power distinct from but analogous to money. Many of the contributors of Hacking the Academy seem to subscribe to this idea: Understand the political uses of knowledge, and you’ve understood knowledge itself.

Cartoon by Mark Stivers

I don’t agree with this.

Knowledge is political, but it is more than an incarnation of politics. This goes not only for dominant fields of knowledge but also for subjugated knowledge of every kind: neither can be reduced to the power relations that surround them. What then is knowledge, besides power? What is the internal structure of subjugated knowledge? Can such knowledge also be highly specialized and refined? And, on the other hand, can institutionally supported knowledges be extricated from the power that supports them?

In this post, I want to ask about the relationship between areas of knowledge and categories of political identity. In other words, I want to bring together some thoughts on democracy and social justice with some thoughts on epistemology. In doing so, it seems to me that there is an immediate problem: The structure inherently leads to specialization. This is a fundamental characteristic of knowledge and one that works against any easy integration between the impulse to research and the impulse to democratize.

What I mean by specialization is that knowledge is differentially accessible. Knowledge is structured in branching pathways because it is a confrontation with a reality that is not purely invented. Whether this reality is the abstract patterning of mathematics, the detailed records of historical archives, or the physiology of human anatomy, knowledge is exploration and discovery as well as creativity and invention. If you go down one path, you cannot go as far down another.

Drawing by Laura Lee

This means that fields of knowledge have depth. In order to understand advanced algebra, one should know how to count from zero to ten. In order to grasp advanced theoretical arguments, one must learn the vocabulary used in that field. Knowledge makes possible further, more specific, more specialized knowledge. While all knowledge is potentially available, it is not all equally accessible. Knowledge is not like a menu from which you can order any item. It is rather like a territory in which some places are easier to get to than others, given any particular starting point.

If this is true, then we cannot hope to make knowledge democratic in the same way that a society can be democratic. Even as we fight to make education available to everyone, the structure of education entails some degree of specialization. A society can argue in the public sphere over which areas of knowledge should constitute its basic curriculum. But in doing so, it presupposes a “public” built on certain knowledges rather than others. There will always remain areas of specialized knowledge that are not common. Some will be aligned with the powerful and others with the powerless. So the relationship between power and knowledge will always be complex.

At a time when social protest and democracy are receiving new energy and attention through the chain of events that now extends from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, I want to ask about the intersection of political categories and specialized knowledges. A lot of excellent work has been done on intersectionality in politics, for example at the difficult but crucial intersection of feminist and anti-racist mobilization. It seems to me that specialized knowledge is another important piece of this puzzle.

Marya Wethers at Movement Research (photo: Ian Douglas)

This issue came up for me recently when Iele Paloumpis wrote about an evening of Movement Research at Judson Church. Paloumpis writes of being moved by Marya Wethers piece then goes on to criticize the rest of the evening (and the organization in general) for its apparent whiteness. I was reminded of this again when I sat at a meeting of the Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute and found myself internally critiquing its whiteness along the same vein. Yet I also found that could not put the Schwartz Institute and Movement Research into quite the same category when it came to this politicized critique.

Failure to diversify is a serious charge that can be applied to countless institutions ranging from Hollywood to the United States Senate. My goal here is not to interrogate either the Schwartz Institute or Movement Research on their particular successes, failures, or histories, but to draw attention to the politics of knowledge as it plays out in certain contexts of which these are two examples close to me personally. To begin with, I want to acknowledge that every successful contemporary institution has its own unique history necessarily tied to institutional power and that none can escape being more or less imbricated in the racist history of the United States.

What interests me here is that these two institutions are explicitly defined by their support of a particular field of knowledge: “movement” in one case and “communications” in the other. The Schwartz Institute draws its fellows from the CUNY doctoral pool, which means it reflects the demographics of doctoral students rather than undergraduates. And Movement Research, with its unique and in many ways politically radical history linked to avant-garde dance, likewise represents a specific community. Both communities tend strongly towards leftist politics while also depending on a significant degree of economic privilege to sustain themselves.

Ben Spatz at Movement Research (photo by Ian Douglas)

I am part of both communities and both organizations. I was one of the artists included in what Paloumpis called the “list of white choreographers” that made up the rest of that evening of Movement Research. And while I don’t mind being pointed to as an example of racial privilege, what was missing for me in Paloumpis’s analysis was the mission of Movement Research and what exactly it successfully represents. This is what brings me to the question of specialized knowledge.

At this point I can only offer a series of questions:

How should we think about the intersectionality between what are commonly called “identity” categories (race, gender, class — but also size, age, religion…) and what are more often thought of as fields of knowledge or craft (dance, movement, writing, communications — but also math, science, literature…)?
Is it possible to bring something to the ongoing and always controversial discussion of curriculum and pedagogy by approaching areas of knowledge as political (or politicizable) communities that intersect with those of “identity”?
For example, could the conversation about English literature — how to define the field coherently while working against the legacies of imperialism — benefit from some of the critical tools put forth by the analysis of political intersectionality?

I do not mean to suggest that we should simply equate having specialized knowledge with being part of an identity group or social class. That would be as wrong-headed as trying to develop equivalencies between different axes of oppression. The value of intersectionality is that it views such axes as a distinct dimension, each adding an irreducible layer of complexity to any given issue. It is difficult enough to analyze any given event (or book, or advertisement) in terms of its intersecting politics of gender, race, and class. What happens if we add the question of specialized knowledges to this analysis?

Map of intersecting identities from CALCASA

If I feel that Movement Research deserves less censure than the Schwartz Institute for its visible whiteness, this is because I believe the field of dance/movement (and especially experimental dance/movement) is far more marginal and endangered in our society than that of communications, especially when the latter is tied to business education. In fact, there is some common ground between them, as both focus on embodiment as a medium of communication. But there is also a difference between the two fields: one that has much to do with power but which is not simply reducible to any other political category. In this case, the axis of power I am talking about is not one of gender, race, class, or any conventional category of politicized identity. It is about different kinds of knowledge and which knowledges are considered important or unimportant in a given society.

Again, this is not to deny the importance of bringing to bear on such organizations a critique that examines injustice across the categories of political identity. Obviously, the question of which fields of knowledge are subsidized is profoundly linked to the question of which communities hold power. But the two questions are not identical.

It is difficult to speak about knowledge and politics in the same breath. From the perspective of politics, specialized knowledge can look like an elitist ruse; while from the perspective of research, politics can look like a distraction. This is the case not only for established academic disciplines of specialized knowledges, like particle physics or medieval history, but also for marginalized knowledges of all kinds. Even if one has no institutional support to pursue one’s research, by framing it as research one already takes a step away from a purely political mobilization that would demand more resources for reasons of social justice. Indeed, this may be one way to complicate the dilemma faced by political movements in defining their constituencies without relying on an essentialism that is ultimately counter-productive.

Boondocks cartoon by Aaron McGruder

To conclude: Although institutions that support fields of knowledge should be called out on their social politics, it seems to me that such critiques might also benefit from a more complex politics of knowledge, one that understands knowledge and power as interwoven but distinct. After all, even an utterly tyrannical power structure can harbor valuable knowledge, including some that may one day prove essential precisely to those people who are mobilized against the tyrannical or unjust institutions that helped to develop it. An obvious example is the use of social media and cellphones to organize democratic protests — but can’t the same thing be said about knowledge in other areas, including movement and communication?

If nothing else, I hope that I have shown here that knowledge is not equivalent to power, even if the question of which knowledges receive institutional support is always a political one. It seems to me that working on this paradox is a crucial and defining task for many institutions both within and beyond academia.

Filed Under: Art, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Education, edupunk, Gender, Higher Education, New York, Non-verbal Communication, Pedagogy, Politics, Social Media, To Ponder

At Home in the City

September 20, 2011 By Ben Spatz Leave a Comment

Finding a place to live is a complicated, essential, bittersweet, sometimes unexpectedly profound part of living in a big city. Having spent the past two weeks touring Brooklyn in an apartment search, I feel newly connected and newly aware of the patchwork fabric of diversity and interconnectedness that is our shared urban world.

apartment (noun): a suite of rooms forming one residence; a flat. ORIGIN: from Fr. appartement, from Ital. appartamento, from appartare ‘to separate’.

To separate. Our shared need for distance allows us to remain together. In cities we pack closely together, our buildings made of boxes inside boxes. Apartments inside buildings, rooms inside apartments. This one is mine, that one is yours. This is the bedroom, that is the kitchen. So we keep things organized. I’ve also lived in more communal spaces, in squats and lofts and cabins. But it’s true, what they say: The older I get, the more glad I am to have my personal life boxed and protected in the confines of an apart-ment. This isn’t because I want to isolate myself from the world. On the contrary, it’s because I want my engagements in the world to extend beyond the level of neighbor and neighborhood. As a teacher, artist, and academic, I spend most of my time and energy cultivating a public existence through those larger institutional channels. At the same time, I also need a private life, an intimate life, the kind of life that can unfold within an apartment. This leaves precious little time or energy for neighbors and the neighborhood.

I’ve always romanticized cities, even though I’ve almost always lived in one. My childhood dreams and fantasies were brimming with golden and silver cityscapes inspired by films and books like The Fifth Element and Imajica. As I grew up I became more interested in actual cities, which are sometimes golden and sometimes silver but always also real and mundane and frustrating and specific and impossible to capture or describe or comprehend. During this apartment search I don’t think about the cities of my childhood imagination. I’m fixated on the realities of rent stabilization, demographics, transportation, and square footage. But afterwards, looking back, it’s clear that I have been walking through one of those cities about which I used to dream. The force of New York City no longer hits me with a single impact like the fantastic cities of literature and film. I’ve never been up into a helicopter to see it from that distance as a single glimmering artifact. But this city has something else going for it that my dream-cities never had: It’s real.

Next to the east side of Prospect Park my partner and I visit a large, high-ceilinged apartment in a vast old mansion of a building. Apparently this building is the best if you have dogs. Everyone there has dogs, and there is the botanical garden across the street where you can walk your dogs. But we don’t have a dog, and the apartment feels cold to me. It makes me think of a nineteenth century novel full of strange illnesses and ongoing, unspoken suffering in the drawing room. Even the neighborhood feels cold to me: no shops, no cafes, no restaurants. Each person alone in their apartment with their dogs. But it’s also raining that day, which makes a difference.

Close to the heart of downtown Brooklyn we discover a gem of an apartment with a small stained-glass window and old, decorative, perfectly maintained wooden doorframes. Someone has put a lot of love into this apartment and it shows. It’s priced below market rate because the bedroom is in between the living room and the kitchen and bathroom. This means that if one person is up and about, the other can have no guarantee of peace or privacy. Even so, we can’t afford it. The market has changed since we looked two years ago, and not in our favor. Now, if we want to have cafes and fresh produce nearby, we’ll have to find them the edge of the gentrification wave.

In Crown Heights, we find ourselves walking along that thin edge. In a way it seems inevitable that we will end up living along a border area like this, where class, race, and cultural history collide before our eyes. Here we can have our cafes and groceries, if we don’t mind living on a somewhat desolate street where half the block is taken up by an enormous parking garage. The apartment itself is beautiful, but is it worth pushing our budget when the subways nearby are not quite the ones that we want? As New Yorkers we are reconciled to the fact that we will spend a good portion of every day on the subway, in those moving boxes that bring us all together and carry us on our separate ways. Transportation by subway is another complex calculus to be applied to the apartment hunt: Which subways exactly, and just how far away?

We even look at one of those ridiculous new luxury buildings that claim to offer “a high-quality living experience” with gym, lounge, and optional valet parking. The cheapest studio, its price brought down to within our range by the economic travails of the past few years, is luxurious but tiny. Far worse is the feeling that living here would be equivalent to selling one’s soul, aligning oneself with all that is wrong in the world. Culturally we are as out of place here as we are in the housing projects that are hidden in plain sight, two blocks away, next to the highway. There we feel like invaders, threatening and threatened, simultaneously guilty of privilege and anxious to protect it. Here we feel something different but equally painful: This is not what buildings and apartments should look like. This is not what we — I mean all of us — should be doing with our money. This is not what we should be doing with New York City.

Differences in culture and differences in privilege map onto each other in complex and not always obvious ways. In south Williamsburg we find ourselves in a Latino neighborhood where music and advertising and signage in Spanish mark a distinct community. Two years ago we looked at an apartment in the Hasidic neighborhood next door. In both places we still feel out of place. Differences in language, clothing, and food are both personal and political. For us as a couple they are simply preferences that have emerged organically from our lives and backgrounds and interests. But we cannot pretend that in living here we would not also be part of a much larger wave of change in this area. And if it’s really a question of (white) “hipsters” vs. Latinos then we are inescapably in the category of the former. That’s how privilege works: You have to own it even if you don’t identify with it. White, male, “hipster” — I am none of these and yet I am all of them. It depends what each term means. It depends who you ask. It depends if we are talking about privilege or identification.

A few blocks away, but across the highway and a few blocks closer to Bedford Ave — the fount of this gentrification wave — we find the first apartment on which we are moved to put down a deposit. It’s smaller than the other but we have our cafes and our restaurants and our groceries. Once again we have landed right on the edge on this wave, this pattern that is beyond our control. One block away is a coffee shop dominated by famously entrepreneurial laptops. Half a block in the opposite direction, kids play basketball in the street under a string of Puerto Rican flags. So the city puts us in our place. This is the kind of neighborhood we want. And we can afford to live here, as long as we don’t mind that the kitchen floor is peeling up and there is no sink in the bathroom. From this apartment we can stage our own projects and journeys and battles with and through the city. Perhaps this is why it already feels like our home, and why my sweetheart starts kissing me when the realty agent isn’t looking. This hasn’t happened in any other apartment so far: The kissing test.

I am glad to be a new Writing Fellow at Baruch College, itself a towering vision of the contemporary city, hundreds more boxes within boxes organized to bring us together and keep us part according to the organizational system we call higher education. The architecture of the vertical campus reminds me of the towering luxury condominium in Fort Greene, but the student body is the most ethnically diverse in the nation. My first impression of the Bernard Schwartz Communication Institute is that it is much less diverse than the rest of Baruch, a subject I hope to explore in a future blog post. Nor do I feel at home in a world focused on “business” as distinct from culture, ecology, and social justice. But I do see the potential here for a new generation of thinking about communication, education, and how we choose to build our collective future. I see that this school, and CUNY in general, is the future of this city, dirty and golden and real.

IMAGE CREDITS: City from The Fifth Element (see also City and The City). “Gentrification… Just say NO” from southside rants. Gentrification diagram from Geosimulation. Avalon Fort Greene from Rent.com (see also “Suddenly, a Brooklyn Skyline”, New York Times). Cafe photograph from Atlas Cafe. “Puerto Rican flags strung across a street in South Williamsburg” from City Limits. Baruch College Vertical Campus from Architectural Record.

Filed Under: Art, Audience, BLSCI, Cross-Cultural Communication, Culture, CUNY, Media, New York, Politics

On ArtSpeak

May 25, 2011 By Stamatina 1 Comment

This past weekend I was able to attend one day of the two-day symposium “Art Speech” at MoMA, organized by Pablo Helguera, MoMA’s Director of Adult Education, and art historian and critic James Elkins. Billed as “A Symposium on Symposia” it promised to “anatomize art historians’ and artists’ habits at the podium,” presenting possible models by which lectures, gallery talks, slide presentations, and other conventions of communication in the field (such as museum audio tours and multimedia presentations) might be analyzed and their effectiveness assessed.

Sounds pretty basic—at least to the WAC-oriented among us—but it generated plenty of excitement across the field from the moment it was announced, and the sold-out auditorium held a pretty diverse range of people across the field: from academics, journalists, and bloggers to artists, museum directors and curators. Since accusations of impenetrability and obscurantism are leveled at so-called “artspeak” from within and without its many and varied institutions, and have been for some time—at least since the dawn of postmodernism—an interrogation of its forms seems well overdue at this point. (Of course, there may well have been such investigations that I’m just not aware of, but not by a preeminent institution like MoMA. Somewhat embarrassingly, the only one that comes to mind was featured in the one-off parody rag November, a spoof of the entrenched art history journal October: it featured the transcript of a roundtable on the perks that roundtables afford neo-Marxist intellectuals.) As the organizers pointed out in their opening remarks, the catchall concept of “performativity,” to which discussions on the conventions of art speech are usually relegated, has thus far not been tremendously useful.

Philosopher and critic Jonathan Gilmore, in a brief historical survey of the slide lecture, read a quote attributed to a student of legendary Swiss critic and “master of extemporaneous speaking” Heinrich Wölfflin: “[He]… places himself in the dark and together with his students at their side. He thus unites all concerned and becomes the ideal beholder, his words distilling the experiences common to everyone… Wölfflin’s speech never gives the impression of being prepared, something completed that is projected onto the art work. Rather it seems to be produced on the spot by the picture itself. The art work thus retains its preeminent status throughout. His words do not overwhelm the art but embellish it like pearls.” As anyone on the receiving end of the average art history survey course cam attest, this is one nineteenth-century straw man that may, in fact, still need a bit of demolishing.

This question of audience, and the pitfalls and practicalities of imagining such an “ideal beholder” was a problem to which speakers and the audience would continually return. In dishing out interpretation to an artificially “unified,” authoritative voice to an equally constructed recipient, what happens to the cacophony of argument that comprises the field in actuality—and how do those conversations move forward, rather than being preemptively shut down? Writer, curator, and editor Monika Szewczyk, whose ongoing “Art of Conversation” series centers on the interruptions of speech in and around art, focused on this problem in the context of a prosaic form: the museum audio guide. Deconstructing MoMA’s audio text for Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (by its chief curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Temkin), she pointed out that it “fails to ask a single question” or “provide more than one perspective.” To avoid perpetuating both the common disdain for the guide format and the dismissive, unproductive notion that one cannot pack any nuance at all into two minutes of speech, she took a stab at producing an alternate entry. Briefly, it pointed out that the work was an interpretive battleground, and touched on the Cubist struggle to present multiple points of view on a single picture plane and the picture’s confusion of feminine, masculine, and supernatural signifiers. It ended with a reference to Serge Guilbaut’s now-canonical assessment of New York’s replacement of Paris at the hotbed of the modernist avant-garde. In a discussion that followed, an audience member fantasized about furthering audio guide options to include brief examinations by other methodologies: ie, “Press “2” for a feminist interpretation of this work; press “3” for a psychoanalytic interpretation..” I, for one, love this idea—at least for some of the museum’s most iconic works.

Artist Carey Young presented the most original examination of “art speech” by inverting its context completely: instead of interrogating the speech practices of art experts, her Speechcraft project asked non-experts to engage in object analysis through the organization Toastmasters. (Toastmasters is an international club in which members, striving for greater success as “leaders” in what seems to be a primarily business context, learn to communicate authoritatively and charismatically by means of regular meetings and peer critique.) Among the objects Young had members interpret: a red candle in the shape of Lenin, a clear rubber ball encasing MoMA’s logo, and “Wall Street” brand cigarettes. Would lay persons produce more interesting critique around these objects than the artist herself might have? From the limited video I watched, sometimes yes and sometimes no. The real potential to the project, for me, is the affective explication of the values associated with the speech of a “successful” leader in “business:” clear, authoritative, and well-rehearsed—but with the impression of being absolutely extemporaneous. Laid bare in the context of an artwork, the efforts of Toastmasters members, even when wholly and charismatically competent, seem unusually, surprisingly poignant.

Much of the rest of the symposium day involved an analysis, through a sort of de-construction and re-construction, of a snippet of a talk by famed Marxist art historian TJ Clark. Swiss economics and management professor Claus Noppeney attempted to strip away Clark’s rhetorical flourishes and present his main arguments (on Paul Cezanne’s critique of his teacher Camille Pissarro’s changing style) in Powerpoint, resulting in laughably banal bullet points like: “History is Valuable; Great apprentices find unique ways to learn; and Imitation can lead to Innovation.” A fun diversion, but an unnecessary one: I’m not sure anyone present would have argued for the respective absolute autonomy of style and content. Happily, English scholar Ellen Levy followed with an insightful analysis of Clark’s style: his liberal use of value judgments in his speech (things are “wonderful” or “brilliant” and historic predecessors “surely wrong” in their analysis) as appealing to a primal desire in listeners; his use of the first person, building the impression of the art historian as primal excavator of meaning; and his denigration and characterization of the idea of artworks as harboring a single, unified idea as “lyric.” (The latter, though not meant as an actual dismission of poetry, irked at least one poet in the audience.) Levy gave a really convincing assessment of the agonism inherent to Clark’s speaking style, in which he conjures, by inference, the polyphony of debate and political superstructures that comprise the construction of meaning.

There was much touched on that was valuable and potentially useful that day. However, after Levy’s beautifully nuanced model, the conversation devolved somewhat into a discussion of the “best” art talks that the audience and remaining panel members had ever experienced: a conversation which ultimately, and somewhat uncritically, began to privilege an art-speech model of narrative surprise-fact-unearthing and case-making: art history as detective novel with a surprise twist ending. This slide from modes of analysis to modes of experience was, for me, premature and disappointing: I had hoped for more and further revealing insights on the constructions of language around art; for example, the many rhetorical crutches we all (sometimes detrimentally) rely on in the field. Levy’s insights come from the study of language and poetry; perhaps more people outside the field were needed: a linguistic anthropologist, maybe? Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to follow up on Saturday’s discussions: I’ll have to wait til the symposium shows up on MoMA’s website (or until someone enlightens me in comments).

Filed Under: Art, Conferences, Uncategorized

Art Thoughtz

May 11, 2011 By Stamatina Leave a Comment

It’s the very end of the semester, and although I haven’t had to administer exams or do any grading, through several colleagues I’ve been privy to some of the creative answers to questions that crop up on final essays in my field (art history).

I won’t re-post (at least not verbatim) some of the unique, hilarious, or just plain sad interpretations on, say, definitions of the Counter-Reformation or of institutional critique. But, as a past adjunct, I remember attempting to read more into the particular sort of irreverent artlessness that characterizes these answers. Some just demonstrate an utter lack of knowledge on the topic (like the student who claimed that Jasper Johns’ Three Flags was made to communicate that America was three times as great as any other nation).

But others seem to hold an implicit challenge to the complexity of a theory or idea. When a student tells me something along the lines of, “Institutional critique is when an artist goes into the museum and says that the museum is racist,” that claim is much more loaded (at least to me) with a challenge to teaching practice—making me think about how I’ve managed to convey (or not) the complexity of a watershed idea. It’s the kind of naivite that engages with critique in a way that’s a whole lot more troubling—to me as an educator, anyway.

The Philadelphia-based artist Hennessy Youngman (aka Jayson Musson) takes this kind of pointed naivite and brandishes it in the direction of the contemporary art world, in an attack on its recent histories, power structures, and proprietary approach to theory. Taking a resolutely vernacular approach in both character (his name is a combined reference to cognac brand Hennessy, beloved of hip-hop stars, and to old-school comedian Henny Youngman (of “Take my wife – no really, take my wife” fame). Adopting an Ali-G-esque low-rent gansta persona, he stars in a series of instructional videos entitled “Art Thoughtz” posted on YouTube, breaking down topics including relational aesthetics, post-structuralism, and “How to Be a Successful Black Artist.”

As a conceptual project, Musson’s videos are an interesting critique of the art world’s entrenched race and class issues. While his ramblings could use some editing, his one-liners are occasionally and hilariously spot-on. For example, his interrogation of the trendy, yet problematic concept of “post-black:” “Did someone from the future come back with that term, and niggas is, like, pink in the future?” and of dinner parties held in galleries under the rubric of relational aesthetics, “We all know that the gallery is an ideologically neutral environment that has nothing to do with the accumulation of wealth or the advancement of global capitalism.. that’s why the walls are white. White is neutral.”

It’s not exactly made to order for a survey course, but in any exam question involving a critique of modernism, I will happily accept, “Mother #$%er, you can’t step outside of history.”

Filed Under: Art, teaching

Creativity as Wager?

April 20, 2011 By Erica Leave a Comment

This semester, in the spirit of Joan Retallack’s ideas of “essay as wager” and “poethics,” I decided to make the first high stakes paper assignment of the semester (for my Composition II courses) something fun. Something a little “creative.” I asked my students to write a manifesto—to think about this first paper as a piece of writing they can have fun with, a piece of writing that would express their own unique and specific argument about “happiness” (the course’s theme), a piece of writing meant to be read out loud.

A handful of students really explored the form. But, the majority of the class were delighted when their second paper assignment was to do a (fairly straightforward) close reading. I was pretty surprised. It seemed strange to me that my students would choose a prescribed assignment over one that leaves the door wide open. And, in a lot of ways, this student bias goes against my general theory of essay writing—one that tips its hat to essay’s French ancestry— essayer (to try). Joan Retallack frames this approach by positing, “the source of vitality for the essay is its engagement in conversational invention rather than ordinal accounts of things (including thoughts) that have already taken place” (“Essay as Wager”). In other words, to write an essay is to explore, to follow thought in motion and then see what shape it takes, and to engage with the world around us. As Lex Runciman writes, “to write is to think, or to try to think.” But, then again, I occasionally call myself a writer, I don’t mind writing essays, and I might be a tiny bit naïve.

I attended the Conference on College Composition and Communication a week or so ago. I heard Richard E. Miller give a talk in which he spoke about standards and standardization and said something like (and I am paraphrasing here), one of the failures of our system is “the eradication of ambiguity—we train people to create arguments that bear no relation to the complexity of lived reality.” This felt like a big (to borrow the age old adage) “aha moment” to me. Of course, how could I expect my students to feel comfortable being “creative,” imagining and owning their own manifestos, when they were probably taught to do just the opposite.

I left the session, sought out some WIFI and immediately blogged on our course site. My post included the following questions: “How often do you feel that you are able to be creative? How does that manifest itself? What does it look like? And, how comfortable do you feel “living with ambiguity”? Do you feel okay not understanding something from time to time? Is it exciting to be confused? Why?”

I also offered them links to the following videos:

Daniel Pink: Education and the Changing World of Work

Teaching the Action Horizon

Ken Robinson Says \”Schools Kill Creativity\”

I felt certain that my students would respond. As we all know, blogging is very different from paper writing. My students occupy this space fairly comfortably. I do not think they would describe blogging in the same way that they described their experiences writing the paper one manifesto. However, it is rare that I give them a specific prompt to blog about. In this medium, the ambiguous is somehow okay.

A sampling of responses: “classes that support creativity are usually joke classes”; “before college we were always taught to pass standardized tests”; “I keep everything within certain acceptable boundaries”; “I always perceived creativity as being something worthless”; and “I am not that creative at all (or at the very least, a person whose creative instincts were not nurtured and was left to wither and die in a small, desolate place in my mind).” The students who (reluctantly) admitted to being creative said that it manifested itself in “doodling and daydreaming.”

My students’ writing about not being “creative” was overwhelmingly creative. They used images and media, they “showed” instead of “telling.” I am tempted to attribute all of these things to the medium that they were composing in, but at the same time, I wonder how often we take a step back and ask ourselves and our students how often we/they are creative? Or, perhaps the real question is…what does creativity look like today, particularly in a space where so much of what we do exists in “virtual”? Do our students even connect the words “creative” and “writing” anymore?

For me, the composition classroom represents a rare opportunity for students to re-engage with “the composing process…as a continuum of making meaning” (Berthoff, “Learning the Uses of Chaos”), and to rediscover or discover the real “pleasure of the text,” always keeping in mind Roland Barthes’ definition of “pleasure,” “there will always be a margin of indecision…the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete.” And, for me, this rare opportunity is creative and demands creativity from its participants. But, am I the only one in my proverbial classroom subscribing to that definition?

A few wagers in the form of quotes:

from Joan Retallack’s “The Woman in the Chinese Room”

She-1.
now that we think we know that the world is not all that is the case the case in question the space of the case sad but fierce with light upholds the dark it seems to utter itself must there be subtitles must there be translation she thinks she knows but doesn’t want to accept that in order to write or read or speak there must be a division between light and dark

from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

NOTHING ELEGANT.

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.

Filed Under: Art, Asides, Baruch College, Blogs and Blogging

Gagarin and Limahl walk into a bar…and talk about school curriculum

April 18, 2011 By Agnieszka Leave a Comment

April 12th was the 50th anniversary of Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin’s first flight into space in the Vostoc 1 space ship, when he Orbited the earth.

No doubt, the man deserved the Hero of the Soviet Union medal awarded to him, and the glory and fame that came with it.

I learned about Gagarin during a class called “ Knowledge About Society”. The curriculum was build around several themes such as Polish patriotism, building a close relationship with the Soviet brothers, and self defense in case of impending attack form imperialists (yes, that means you!).

From http://www.aerospaceguide.net/spacehistory/yurigagarin.html

It is there that we learned he was Brave, Patriotic and Handsome. A true Soviet Man.

This reminiscing took me down memory lane. What else did I learn in the 1980’s Poland?

The “Knowlegde About Society” class was a catch-all for propaganda and weird pieces of information that did not fit neatly into other subjects. We did not take it very seriously but some of the class trips were rather fun.

We learned how to shoot during a single trip to a shooting range, where we also practiced cleaning and assembling a Kalashnikov. When I arrived in America I was the only teenager in my class with this special skill set.
There were many class exercises when we were told to wear old, decommissioned gas masks and run around the soccer field with them on because it was supposed to help us react in case of a gas attack. The theme of some sort of a danger coming from the USA was common, not surprising given that we were in the middle of the Cold War.

This poster reads: “Be Cautious of the Enemy of the Nation”

From http://c.wrzuta.pl/wi13542/99fc9a1d001fcdc84745f002/Plakaty%20PRL%27u?type=i&key=maM14bouGD&ft=f

For a common image of the America-the land- of -social- inequalities, check this poster titled: “The American Advertisement for Shoes.”

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/41.jpg

This is a uniform worn by all school children in the 1980s: easily improvised to more or less resemble the basic design, it was customized by different collars, and for the rebels among us, making a statement meant opening up the buttons on the front to reveal some more individualized clothing item, likely made by your grandmother, but still, cooler then the synthetic, clingy, navy blue tent.

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/szkola/2.jpg

The school was decorated with few old posters, praising the Communist Party and the Friendship with the Soviet Union, much like this:

From http://www.polskaprl.rejtravel.pl/pp/3.jpg

The letters on this poster: “ ZSSR” is Polish for “the USSR”, and the signs means: “Defender of peace and a friend of children.”

Another theme was the pride in the accomplishments of the nation and socialism.

In this image, the dude walking away from the construction site, hands in his pockets, is described as “a bum”: “ The bum, a deserter from the front of the fight for peace and strong Poland.”

From http://niepoprawni.pl/grafika/bumelant-plakat-propagandowy-prl

The economic situation of Poland was often explained to be partly due to the effects of rampant capitalism elsewhere: we in the Soviet block had to manage and help each other in the face of the rest of the world.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te2/w03sl%5B1%5D.jpeg

The stores really did look like this.

And the real economy was taking place on the black market, which the state never attempted to regulate or banish, because it really was central to any survival in the economic system of constant shortages of necessities and all consumer goods.

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

Yummy meat. And here is sugar:

From http://republika.pl/printo/warszawa/80te1.htm

If, walking to school, you happen to see that a delivery truck has arrived at a store, bringing a product, whatever it may be, you would skip class, stand in a long line, and hopefully triumphantly secure some much desired product, like… toilet paper.

From http://m.onet.pl/_m/f81b3974c3f210496819cd5891fcffd2,14,1.jpg

Industrializing the country was a point of pride for the Polish Communist Party and a popular topic of propaganda:

“The buildings of socialism are our pride.”
Or:
“1971- 1980: From those years of toil and creativity comes the strength and well being of the fatherland.”