Pondering and Perspectives (Asynchronous)
Artistic Biography as Field Theory: The Case of Ithell Colquhoun - Magician, Surrealist, Feminist? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Grenfell
Biographies of artists normally produce either externalist or internalist accounts: that is, the artist is interpreted in their own terms or fitted in to pre-existing narratives. This study uses Field Theory of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu to go beyond both approaches. It examines artistic biography and work in terms of habitus and cultural capital and the field of cultural reproduction. I use the life and work of the British Surrealist Ithell Colquhoun to offer a field analysis of her activities within artistic and esoteric communities. The paper presents synchronic accounts of Colquhoun at ‘critical moments’ in her life trajectories, detailing the breadth and focus of her influence with respect to the capitals they involved: social, cultural and economic. Such analyses are set against exemplars from her painting as a way to compare the development of esoteric aesthetic with her biographical experience. In particular, I am interested in the provenance and destiny of avant-gardes, especially those apparently at their margins. The account challenges conventional narratives of her work and explores the surrealist, feminist and esoteric elements within it. It seeks to demonstrate the relationship between personal creative aesthetics and the social conditions of their production in order to develop a reflexive understanding of the expressive impulse as it is manifested in trans-historic fields and the necessity of human creativity immanent within them.
Socializing Sculpture: Navigating Commemorative Public Art as a Pedagogical Tool to Redress Historical Injustices View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Piper Prolago
As protestors across the world call for the toppling of statues celebrating racist figures, cities must consider what new narratives and designs for public art can most appropriately and inclusively engage communities in conversations about the past. While many studies center on finding anti-racist figures to instead celebrate, I propose a method for evaluating projects that centers upon critical pedagogy and community involvement rather than emulating the monumental hero model with new heroes. Creators must consider the potential of public spaces to communicate to a wider audience and the historic asymmetries that continue to favor white, male perspectives within these spaces. Public art serves as a potential tool to reshape cityscapes and address historic injustices. This paper investigates projects’ abilities to meet this potential by combining scholarship in critical pedagogy and memory studies, interviews with arts organizers, and analysis of existing projects in terms of their educational and interactive qualities. I conclude that public art projects addressing historical injustices must incorporate inclusive pedagogical models like those of Paulo Friere and bell hooks. Tulsa’s Greenwood Art Project, which commemorates the 1921 Race Massacre, might serve as a model for this. Head artist Rick Lowe, informed by the theory of social sculpture, is able to address community members’ various perspectives, not just in the realization of the project but in all levels of its conception. By rethinking the relationship between artist and audience, public art projects have the potential to incorporate previously erased perspectives without positing a single, universal truth.
Art-based Methodologies for Transformative Learning: A New-materialist Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elmarie Costandius
The physical landscape of higher education institutions must be seen as an important aspect if transformation is to occur. Universities, and particularly historically white universities in South Africa, often take their culture and their visual landscapes for granted – viewing them as neutral and natural. Decolonisation of spaces gained much attention during the last few years and in various countries, and specifically in previously colonised countries people reflect on the misrecognition of indigenous knowledges and engage in processes to move on from the colonised approach. In this paper I elaborate on art-based projects that took place during 2019-2020 as a potential transformative methodology. From the new materialism perspective, things or matter, human and non-human, can be social agents and possess agency – they affect us in an embodied and embrained way. New materialism is based on non-dualist perspectives, such as body-mind, human-nature, object-subject. Things are not separate or in a binary opposition, but rather entangled. Matter can be social agents and possess agency. The spaces around us has the potential to shape us, naturalising our behaviour or privileging certain modes of being over others. Embodied/material/discursive engagements are also important in a teaching and research environment and therefore the turn to include material is welcomed alongside the discursive dimensions of teaching and research. In this paper I explain through examples of practice the value of art-based methodologies for transformative learning.
When Al-Diaz Confronts Our Reality View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Léa Fournier Bouvet
Art has been used to express reality from the beginning, portraying landscapes or our inner emotions. But no other artistic movement is more connected to everyday life than graffiti. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, American cities, especially New York, were crawling under graffiti. Young teenagers, mostly African-Americans and Latinos, were tagging the walls of cities to have a voice in the American society. Al-Diaz started his graffiti career at this exact time in New York under the name of BOMB1. However, he is known for his work with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat when they created SAMO. The fictional character was about delivering messages, making people think about the state of the world. In fact, a lot of SAMO's graffiti end with the word THINK. However, in 1981 the duo ended and SAMO died. But after President Trump's election, Al-Diaz decided to bring back SAMO to confront the American society with its reality. He proceeded to tag the walls of New York with phrases about sexism, the environment or the current pandemic. Al-Diaz, nowadays, uses more his WET PAINT character than SAMO. WET PAINT is primarily present in the New York subways, therefore, at the views of thousands of people an hour. Just like graffiti in the 1980s, WET PAINT uses the subways to be seen but also to have an impact and make people think about their condition.
A Multiplicity of Voices Disrupting Polyphony View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tom Baker
This paper examines a new approach to music pedagogy that disrupts the traditional lines of genre, history, and style in an effort to reimagine typical academic topics like Counterpoint and Harmony as taught to undergraduate music majors. The study takes as its starting point the design of a new course (designed and taught by the author at Cornish College of the Arts) called A Multiplicity of Voices: Polyphony in Composition. This course eschews the traditional approaches to teaching sixteenth- or eighteenth-century counterpoint as style and instead takes as its central tenet a focus on musical textures, or states. The students explore emergent polyphonic states, utilizing the techniques and tools of polyphony and counterpoint, across multiple art-forms and historical eras. As an advanced theory topic, the course posits that polyphony is not the exclusive domain (through birthright and privilege) of western civilization and classical music, but is instead a musical “state” that emerges from contrapuntal techniques in a variety of musics across cultures and genres. This approach creates space for creative and critical thinking, disrupts traditional lines of inquiry, and reveals transdisciplinary possibilities for new pedagogical methods.
Illuminating the Gaslight: Tracing the Material Origins of Psychological Violence Through Neo-Victorian Melodrama View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lee Conderacci
Though the term "gaslighting" has only risen in popular usage over the last several years, its origins can be traced back to Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 neo-Victorian melodrama Gaslight. The play vividly depicts psychological manipulation within a marriage, all of which revolves around a central object: the gaslight. In contemporary conversation, those who use the term “gaslighting” may not consciously think of the gaslight itself, especially since the object and its technology have become obsolete. However, a closer consideration of the gaslight in its materiality, function, and affect can contribute to current discussions about gaslighting as a social and psychological behavior. This project examines the role of the gaslight as object: in Hamilton’s play, in practical usage throughout the Victorian era, and in the popular imagination. Applying new materialist theories and the concept of “vibrant matter,” I will consider the particular qualities and behaviors of the gaslight that make it an especially active player within these different spheres. What is it about the gaslight that has the affective power to captivate and enchant, as well as to create an air of danger? Specifically, how does the gaslight’s presence within the domestic sphere connect with the female Gothic tradition that presents the home as a site of violence and terror? A meditation on the vital materiality of the gaslight through a critical feminist reading of Hamilton’s play can contribute to a deeper understanding of “gaslighting” as a contemporary social and psychological term, adding more layers of significance to an already powerful concept.
Is “Academic Freedom” Possible? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michiko Aramaki
As McDaid and McGlynn state, “[u]niversities are… key sites of contestation in the contemporary culture wars and have faced robust critique from both the left and right” (2020: 157). What is more, with “often unsubstantiated” (ibid.) allegations by certain student groups, the boundaries of controversial subjects are expanding and the teaching stuff — including all positions in the academic ranks — are under self-surveillance. Is the classroom discursively monitored to curb “critical” thinking — as Nazi Germany curbed unwanted speech (Cf. Mintcheva 2016)? Or is this culture war in the university actually a healthy and ‘just’ movement as it, for one thing, discourages ‘intellectualizing’ the hurt feelings of the historically victimized populations and eliminates hate speech? Under the current contestation, to teach ‘freedom of speech’ freely and without restraint itself became a matter of constraint (Whickman 2020). Is this a matter of a contradiction between intellectual freedom and social responsibility? Or does framing the matter into dichotomy, instead of complements, signal a particular political position in the contestation? Using two cases in an academic setting, the purpose of this paper is to deepen the thoughts on the link and tension between the need of diversity in social science university education on the one hand, and the academic freedom acutely voiced in a separate setting. Although these two subjects are seemingly independent, in the classroom setting, these two issues are increasingly intersected. The paper delves into the nature of the tension and propose some potential solutions to ease the tensions.
