welcome, double agent

Statement of Pedagogy

One of the most mysterious of semi-speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind imagining another.
John Keats – note on his copy of Paradise Lost, 1.59-94

Cognition as Specter: Towards Pedagogy

I break a sweat attempting to articulate the praxis/making of the collective classroom mind. Yet, everything I do within the territory of the classroom is a conscious effort towards these felt moments of cognition. I want to see established ideas break down under the pressures of a shared analysis and in their remains, an immediate forging of something that integrates remnant philosophies and hard-won facts with present meditations and experience. These felt experiences of cognition are a phenomenon of sorts, specters that float between mouth and mind, between teacher and taught.

How can one instigate this act of knowing anew? There are a number of ways. One is to make ‘unholy unions’ of intra and extra disciplinary texts, that is, to create a syllabus that combines science, history, aesthetics, performance, literature, and the material objects that surround us. Another tactic is to vary students’ means of production: spoken discourse will give way to a speculative written response which will give way to a visual reinterpretation which will transform itself into a critical analysis. An alternating but strenuous process has the potential to push the mind into both unexpected and lovely places.

Yet it is not enough to employ clever assignments, intellectually engaging lectures, and in-class exercises. An ecology of risk and trust must be developed within the classroom. The student must be willing to expose their ideas to the scrutiny of both fellow students and the teacher. This should ultimately manifest itself in the student’s increased ability to take intellectual and aesthetic chances within the form pursued and intellectual risks during the spoken discussion. Complex and inventive thought is dependent on multi-party dialogue and generosity of spirit, that is not hierarchical but shared.

A bookmobile is approached by boat in the swamps of Louisiana.

School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Cross-Listed: Visual Critical Studies/ Writing Department
4000 level course / Summer 2008 First session

The Taxonomy of Resurrection: Writing the Site Specific

Together we shall generate a body of site-specific texts that are written both on and off site and begin to catalog and classify various sites of extreme eradication and radical resurrection, ranging from the revolutionary and architectural to small and humble gestures of reconstruction. Every other class shall convene at physical sites (IE: first nuclear chain reaction dumping ground, Black Panther Party People’s Clinic, Des Plaines Disturbance). Our complete writings will negotiate and illuminate the gap between writing on-site and generating theory from a distance.

School for the Art Institute of Chicago/ Ox-Bow Residency
Studio. Winter 2008
Instructor: Mary Walling Blackburn

Course Description:
Winter’s Darker Iconography: It’s Horror, Its Humor

This interdisciplinary studio course will explore winter’s darker iconography: the mechanized, the frost-bitten, the storm bound, the avalanche, the denuded ski slope, the snow-bound cannibal, the snowmobile drag race accident, the ice-bound ship, the popular demand for the frozen sperm of a newly discovered Ice Man. Students will build objects, write texts, and perform works, as well as design and build snow caves, and rethink the aesthetics and ornamentation surrounding such winter kitsch as the seasonal ornaments, the gingerbread house, the Mexican Santa Claus horror genre of cinema. Readings, writings, and films will explore winter as building material, site-specific space, and will conceptualize themes that have culturally accumulated around winter.

School for the Art Institute of Chicago
Visual Critical Studies. Fall 2007, Fall 2006
Instructor: Mary Walling Blackburn

Course Description:

Visualizing Aggression: Documenting America at War

Notions about victor/victim, enemy and aftermath, pleasurable violence and necessary tortures are generated, maintained, and disseminated through artistic practices. We will examine the visual trajectory of US war-making- from the Revolutionary war to the present; ultimately producing our own visual documentations of how we experience war, distant or near, with loyal support or fierce resistance.

Some representative works: Nguyen Hatsushiba’s underwater videos, anonymous portraits of African-American revolutionary war seaman, Pacific Islander WWII ballads, American GI underground radio broadcasts, DJ Spooky’s revision of Birth of a Nation, trips to local military reenactments and war monuments.

Texts will touch upon the acoustics of war, the history of camouflage painting, the development of aerial photography, the aesthetics of torture and the philosophy of defeat.

Syllabus may be downloaded here: visualizing-aggression_syllabus

School for the Art Institute of Chicago
Studio Research Course. FYP, Spring 2005
Instructor: Mary Walling Blackburn

Course Description:

Dropping Out: The Aesthetics of Disappearance
“We can’t build an aesthetics of Disappearance on the simple act of never coming back…” _Hakim Bey.

But we could begin to produce work that investigates this will to break with the past, to begin anew. We will take on the burden of disappearance – plum its revolutionary and psychological dimensions and generate ideas and images that unpack the properties of disappearance. The strategies used to do this will include using the body as a source of research, investigating artist’s visions of new paradises, and creating one’s own. We will investigate patterns of disappearance-whether it is escape or eradication-and translate these into work. Our source materials will include escape routes (the Underground Railroad, the Labyrinth, map-making, flight patterns…), texts (African Muslim dream journals, star charts, historical accounts of Roanoke…) and other artists’ literal and conceptual dependence on disappearance ranging from Vietnamese water puppetry to Jean Panleve’s “Love Life of the Octopus”, from 19th century “spirit” photography to Francesca Woodman, from Harry Houdini to Alfredo Jaar.

Syllabus: syllabus-for-dropping-out

School for the Art Institute of Chicago
BFA Writing Department, Fall 2007
Instructor: Mary Walling Blackburn

Course Description:
The Library is Burning: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Producing, Disseminating, and Receiving Text

Let us begin to rethink writing’s relationship to aural and visual production and make valiant attempts at an interdisciplinary practice. Together, we will consider writing as object (from ancient clay tablets to library as sculpture) and closely observe writing as it transforms into and out of sound (from the loudspeakers of a van to radio transmission, from seismic vibration to the deafening speech of dictators). Moreover, the class will begin to convert this critical speculation into writing methods that will compromise the borders between sound and words and things. Consequently, we will wrangle with Jacques Attali’s claim: “The world is not for the beholding. It is for the hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” As well as Deligny’s threat: “Sometimes language is more problem than tool.”

Examples of interdisciplinary text? In the late 19th century, Joseph Pujol, French “Fartiste” sang his songs by literally forcing air out of his anus. In 20th century Italy, Ezra Pound eschewed the physical page for the ether–broadcasting fascist plays in exile. Today, Jamaican Dance Hall “versioning” consists of replacing the lyrics of a song but retaining the tune; consequently, one text inhabits the remains of another. All of these disparate methods of producing, disseminating, and receiving text will begin to map out our own potential resistance to old forms and conventions.

We will look at the work of Ezra Pound, Fernand Deligny, Saliou Traoré, Kajsa Dahlberg, Gary Simmons, Alan Weiss, Claudia Rankine, Adolf Wolffli, Nina Katchedorian, Suzan Lori Parks, Jacqueline Goss, Joseph Grigely, Sister Gertrude Morgan, Catherine Clement, Meredith Monk, Janet Cardiff, La Monte Young, Mladen Dolar, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Carolinian navigation methods and castrati songs, amongst others.

Syllabus: syllabus_library