What we know is that we will discuss all student projects but as they pass through the lens of another text, as discussed in the MNN conference room. Another way of saying this is that we will draw from what transpired when we parsed the Deleuze text with Natasha and the works we had just seen were mentioned, referred to, incorporated into our reading of the text. Let us keep that in mind as we go forward.

Let us return to the Jalal Toufik essay, our first read, returning to the gaze (the animal, the lazy, the robot)  again for the first hour.Let us reverse the terms of his bizarre claims as an exercise in testing the authors’ argument. Our student works will touch these.

Then, we can return to the Jean-Luc Nancy’s Love and Community, a text that was posted but that we never discussed as a class.  Find it here.  Let us return to the audiences created by and for television broadcast (do we dare call them communities?). We spoke of Public Access and our relationship to the network. Did we ever even have one? We once spoke of the “gutter”, of cultural workers that produce outside of the art realm and that are external to mainstream media. Did we brush against that kind of making or is it an “impossible relation”? Here is another fraught relation, James Brown at “Playboy After Dark”. The broadcast of this work does exactly what sort of work? What sort of community work? What sort of sexual work? What sort of entertainment?

It is not beyond reason, to trail this James Brown broadcast with an art work developed in the same era by Adrian Piper (“Funk Lessons”); where similar materials (white people, the co-option of African-American cultural production), are transfigured to create what some might call a proto-social practice piece, if they were constructing a geneology of Social Practice. A comparison of Piper and Brown’s relationship to audience, industry, and distribution might prove productive against our experience/ non-experience at MNN.

Until then.

MWB

I have included three to begin with that are purposefully simple because of the limitations at the end of the semester.

1. A stranger to this art school and the field of art will sit down with you. They will act as inquisitor and demand that you recount every detail of the performance (smell, sight, sound, touch, location, room, air quality, light, bodies in the room, interruptions, internal distractions, time, words said, gestures made, responses, releases, function, emotion…). They will not let you off the hook. You will hand the recording over to Priscilla,  Julie or Moriah or Tyler.

2. You will settle down to watch student x.’s broadcast on MNN. You will have found x by email or by body and asked him/her to describe which sort of people she/he leans towards and leans into (the way a big dog leans into your legs when there is affection) and what qualities they possess that engender this. Perhaps you will take the opposite approach and you will ask her/him about the negative contour- the encounters where alienation reigns and difference is an object between them. Now that you have your criteria, locate one or two that meet this criteria and watch x.’s piece with them. Interview them in detail as to its effect. Send recording to x.

3. Find student X. Schedule 15 minutes to talk about her piece. Bring a monitor with you. Inform the monitor ahead of time when you wish the monitor to prompt either of you to attend to the topic in a manner that has been decided ahead of time. You and x will have determined together or separately what constitutes a meaningful critique. The monitor insures that these requests are kept at the fore. Determine whether the monitor should be operating in accordance with the criteria determined by artist, viewer, or both. Determine whether more than one monitor is needed.

Please note that you must propose three options and that you must select one and follow through with it.  The one you select may be any of the proposed options (yours or another’s). Post the critique options by Friday. Complete the action by Monday, our last class.

Will the fact that you selected one of your classmates possibly mean that not everyone will receive equal number of critiques? Yes.  How do we account for what it appears unfair? Yarminiah communicated, in her post regarding ‘fantasy critique, something to the effect, that she wanted something closer to an honest approach–where we refuse to even bear witness to the work of fellow classmates that does not speak to us. She acknowledges that this is framed and felt to be ‘rude’. But is it? Do you offer false reassurances or hide behind the critiques of others in various studio situations? Let’s think about this, about a ven diagram with two circles overlapping. One circle is labeled brutality and another is labeled generative response. Is this impossible?

-MWB

Below are videos I filed under “Art Criticism” Amongst Peers… They offer buried lessons in how we can attend to the work of others. I am employing a pedagogy that banks on pleasure in the absurd and then soldiering through ridiculousness to reveal an approach. Enjoy

Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark: Dolly Parton (Comforting the Artist, Comforting the Object)

Nancy Ajram (Attending to the Process)

Wild Plants of Japan (Slowness and Observation and Soundtrak)

1. Some suggested a home. Which home? a student’s? My studio/basement? Another?

2. Some suggested the school. It offers what we need.

3. Some hoped to think of something that resonated with the course work.

These folks use the mountain.

The institution requires a grade and the teacher is required to dispense a mark.  How shall we calculate?  Do we award perfect attendance (he was always physically present/ she was always mentally present)? Are we able to calculate the number of hours a student worked for this specific course  and her/his gross product? Is this assessment born of capitalism? Has each student worked together for the group as a whole and this nascent tribe receives one grade that applies to all? Is the electric student (whose investigation was rigorous and vulnerable; whose feedback to fellow students was generative, timely, and considered; whose presence in class was awake, aware, and in dialogue with others) willing to accept a median grade because they are sharing a grade with a student who was flooded with sadness, boredom, laziness, and self-absorption? Can one student be both the electric and flooded student, depending on the day or the hour or the minute?   Do we believe in the communal- a communal where we are simultaneously single and plural?

Did you come to this class stripped bare of previous classes? No. And yet the cultural premise is that each work that you turned in reflects this class, my teaching, this moment, this institution. The cognitive delay inherent to complex visual and philosophical reckonings cannot operate within the time frame of a singular class. These works are in debt to the past and the works informed by this course are yet to come. Perhaps. You will receive a grade from the future for this course. You will receive a grade in December and you will it attach it to which work and which self and you will do what with it?

Maybe these questions make you relieved there is a system that brushes away all of these questions and simply decides it for you. Maybe you just want me to grade you and get it over with. I cannot. This core of this class is to inspect the structure and determine our participation within that structure. This is no different.  How will we determine this form or do us traditionalists love the way it determines us? (The sunken grammar in the past sentence is intentional here.)

Suggest a grade, a mark, a result, a letter, an end.

NOTE TO CLASS: Read Aloud or It Breaks Down.  Read aloud until it breaks down. 

If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso

BY GERTRUDE STEIN