In progress...
The book project in progress addresses a history of pedagogical art since the 1960s, contextualizing selected practices from Fluxus to Arte Ùtil in relation to shifting epistemologies and theories and practices of teaching. I define “pedagogical art” as art that uses teaching and learning as its format, usually related to other important time-based contemporary (post-1960) art formats such as: performance art, social practice, and/or institutional critique. My project particularly addresses forms like: performative workshops, performance lectures, and alternative schools. It investigates the roots of these recent practices and the cultural context that has prompted their current popularity. I am interested in how development of pedagogical art aligns with shifts in whose knowledge matters and critiques of hegemonic culture. The case studies I propose to include the book survey a wide range of activities, always with a focus on how and why learning happens. The first set of case studies principally concerns who gets to learn; second examines developments in art related to public pedagogies; and the third focuses on changes to knowledge-making through expanded art practices. Two key research questions guide my study. First, what is it about structures of teaching and learning as art that changes audience receptivity to new ideas and worldviews? Second, how have artists used pedagogical practices to challenge normative thinking about race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and science and climate justice. I expect to contribute to performance histories, audience/reception studies in art history, as well as broader scholarship about critical and/or political contemporary art histories.
While several scholars have recently raised the issue of pedagogical art in recent monographs (including chapters in: Rounthwaite, Asking the Audience, 2017; and Bishop, Artificial Hells, 2011), there is considerable room for a somewhat more comprehensive study on this form. Following Bishop’s call to analyze recent case studies alongside theories of critical pedagogy and other critiques of neoliberalism in contemporary art practice, I aim with this research to dive more deeply than the most well-known actors and authors in these fields, to illuminate other narratives (e.g. the role of feminist pedagogy in discussion-based pedagogical social practice works, as discussed in my recent article in RACAR). In its concluding chapter, this book will also make a valuable contribution to scholarship on teaching, asking: how can analysis of pedagogical art not only illuminate current attitudes towards teaching and shifts in what counts as knowledge, but also inform teaching practice today?
Research plan 2022-23 (tentative)
Gathering Information (Fall 2022 primarily)
building archive of pedagogical art
locating relevant academic texts - art historical, education/pedagogy, other theory/history [Jessica: reading!]
further investigation of selected case studies, including identifying archives and/or artist contact info (late Fall, possibly Winter/Spring instead)
Organizing Information (Spring 2023 primarily)
selecting case studies [Jessica's task primarily] (late Fall or early Winter)
sorting texts into bibliography with full citations and coherent categories related to chapter organization
Drafting Texts (ongoing) [Jessica's tasks only]
UAAC conference paper (October 2022)
revision of UAAC conference paper into possible article for review (November-December 2022)
book chapter organization (December 2022-January 2023)
CAA conference paper (January 2023)
collaborative (?) essay on Art-Science collaboration and/or data visualization and/or data publics (February-March 2023)
sample book chapter from revised conference paper/s (February-April 2023)
COBS, curatorial and/or teach-in documents for ADE/s activities in Lincoln (February-April 2023)
book proposal draft (April-June 2023)
Reporting/Feedback (ongoing) [RA tasks only]
feedback on research development (October, November; Jade: also, January, February)
report of learning from research and/or methods (Anthony: December; Jade: March)
Initial dissemination of research includes:
Refereed scholarly articles:
“The Feminist Consciousness Raising Circle as Pedagogical Form in Suzanne Lacy and Julia London’s Freeze Frame (1982).” RACAR: Revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 44-58.
Refereed conference presentations:
[forthcoming] “Centering Indigenous Knowledges and Fostering Intimate Learning as Strategies for Climate Justice Art,” CAA Annual Conference, New York, February 2023.
abstract: In 2019-21, Melbourne-based, Métis-Scottish Canadian artist Jen Rae produced Portage, a multi-platform project related to survival skills for evacuation and shelter amidst climate catastrophe. She collaborated with Indigenous elders to organize skill-sharing workshops, installations, and community walks for participant-audiences to learn about raft-building, weaving, and shelter-assembly. Project documentation emphasizes both the impact of social ties formed between participants and a healing effect for collaborators, whose traditional knowledges were valued and celebrated in the project. Rae’s project can be situated alongside the work of Praba Pilar, Lynn Peemoller, the Futurefarmers collective, and many others who address food and climate justice through pedagogical forms, including workshops, skill-shares, schools (institutional or otherwise), and instructional walks/tours. This paper examines why artists addressing food and climate justice in particular have so frequently turned to such pedagogical forms, and, crucially, often in ways that exceed or resist the kind of straightforward knowledge-transfer to publics one might expect of projects with scientific or technical subject matter. While experimental pedagogies in art practices like these challenge neoliberalism through emphasizing the value of public goods and community engagement, they also meaningfully aim to disrupt hegemonic knowledge production and hierarchies of knowledges. In the process of centering Indigenous elders and ancestral knowledges that have been marginalized, these art practices insist on the intimacy (Springgay 2022) and sociality of learning, the benefits of which go well beyond knowledge-acquisition. Importantly, they also invite us to consider the nonscalability (Tsing 2012) of potential climate-resilient societal transformations, in resistance to capitalism’s demands.
[forthcoming] "Gardening as Education and Healing in San Francisco," University Art Association of Canada, Toronto, October 2022.
abstract: This paper compares two garden initiatives conceptualized in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s: Bonnie Ora Sherk’s A Living Library™ (A.L.L.) and Cathrine Sneed’s The Garden Project. Both share a concern for environmental justice through connecting community members to the land and caring for neglected watersheds. Both primarily focus on young people learning in gardens and have education as a central core of their work. But they differ substantially in their histories and strategies. A.L.L. developed out of Sherk’s earlier environmental performance Crossroad Community (The Farm) (1974-80), which reclaimed abandoned land below a freeway as a community space. It was conceptually related to the artist’s strategy of “Life Frames,” an approach to viewing local communities and ecosystems holistically as art in order to learn from and appreciate them more fully. A.L.L. gardens were initially planned near public libraries and later schools, where they were incorporated into existing curricula as integrative education. The Garden Project developed out of Sneed’s earlier work, the San Francisco County Jail Horticulture Project (1982-92), a program for prisoner rehabilitation started after Sneed left her position in legal services there. The Garden Project principally aims to provide job training and education, now additionally serving “at-risk” youth; it also harvests food donated to the local community. Comparing these two projects offers insights on both potentials and limitations of art-life community projects. I argue that Sherk’s and Sneed’s ecological education projects propose and, to a large extent, deliver on healing both land and people through their mutual interaction.
"Choreographing the Pedagogical Situation: Suzanne Lacy’s Performances of the 1980s," University Art Association of Canada, Québec, October 2019.
“On a Beneficial (Útil) Art History to Come: Art History as the Future Not the Past.” College Art Association, Los Angeles, February 2018.
“The Impromptu Classroom as Refuge and Space of Emergence in Time of Crisis.” University Art Association of Canada, Banff, October 2017.
“Cycles of Teaching Collaborative Creativity: RSVP Cycles and Le Poïpoïdrome.” Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, Atlanta, November 2016.
“Learner-Participants in Pedagogical Socially Engaged Art.” University Art Association of Canada, Montreal, October 2016.