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

A column for Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly: The Thing

While living in New Mexico, I came across a glass display case at the university’s medical library that contained ephemera from the Tuberculosis retreats located in the surrounding desert in the teens and 1920’s. One panel documented a longer history of TB treatments within the greater US and included a fragile drawing made by a Kentucky TB patient, uncannily similar to the creature in question.

Prepared for the Speleological Oral History Record in April of 1912 by Phineas Hamil of the Kentucky State Cave` Society

In a more southernly county of Kentucky- and before the Civil War- Stephen Bishop, a slave speleologist, of African and white descent, dunked his hands in a sluggish and warm underground stream located within the cave that he regularly described as “grand, gloomy, and peculiar” to the tour groups he led for his master; when his hands emerged from the stream, he held within them a small, blind, luminescent creature from the phylum arthropoda. This freshwater troglodyte was the size of his fingernail. Stephen Bishop knew everything about these caverns –the fugitive slaves that took shelter underground before they continued northward, the paleo-indian mummies, the slender glass lizards, the pistolgrip mussels, the black gypsum deposits. However, he was not familiar with this animal. It was laterally compressed – not unlike whale lice or skeleton shrimp- and when he cracked open its legs they were hollow; its body cavity was an open space where tissue, sinuses and blood loosely floated.

Several years later, Dr. John Croghin, the new owner of the cave and of Stephen Bishop, had twelve wood and stone huts built within the cavern because he believed that the perpetually cool and humid air would heal the botched lungs of tuberculosis patients. Several died, the rest fled to drier climes, but one remained long enough to draw the only extant drawing of Stephen Bishop’s Troglodyte. The last specimen was found that year of experimental cavern treatment, in a silty pond not far from the huts. The creature was hardly breathing and it could not stand the weakest light, averting its so-called face, (which was translucent and smooth, save an orifice for eating) from the candle’s flame. Underneath the drawing, the artist cum tubercular patient inscribed in careful cursive: Croghin’s Troglodyte. Despite Stephen Bishop’s eventual manumission and the departure of other freed slaves in the township to Liberia, he stayed behind and died there. * * *

“The Thing”, a column in Cabinet: an Arts and Culture Quarterly, invites writers to conjure an imaginary history for an object that appears to have no easily locatable proviniance or use. Mary Walling Blackburn wrote the above description of an unidentified organic form for the magazine issue that focused on the Average.

Although this Cabinet column is supposed to give license to fantasy, certain aspects were lifted from the historical record. For example, tuberculosis (TB) was often treated in arid desert climes and Albuquerque was one of the “White Plague” (as it was then referred to) destinations. Another fact cited is that Dr. John Croghin owned and operated an unsuccesful TB sanitarium in Mammoth Cave. Finally, Stephen Bishop, was a flesh and blood slave speliologist who, according to some sources, declined manumission and a second life in Liberia. Contrary to some reader’s perceptions, the quote within the article’s guesswork, is in fact Bishop’s. He often gave tours to New England litterati (as Emerson and Thoreau’s constituents were known to trek here) and lectured with a similar erudition. Bishop was adept at discovering parts of the cave previously unknown to 19th century Kentuckians and locating signs of ancient Native American exploration. The cave was originally a saltpeter mine operated by slaves. (Saltpeter is a nitrate-rich soil used in gunpowder production).

Today, the cave is situated within a National Park and offers an artist residency.

The residency is not situated within the cave. The image above appears to be documentation of a performance in Mammoth Cave where young bearded men enjoy re-enactment drag (AKA Allison Smith). It isn’t. Kleitman, the “Father of Sleep“, the first sleep researcher and author of the seminal text, “Sleep and Wakefulness”, is investigating circadian rhythms. It is 1938. They have set up a bed on the gunpowder floor of the cave. The milky water pitcher, the flowered coverlet, the manner in which he kneels beside his patient communicate a sort of tenderness generally not associated with scientific research.

In regards to the parts where Albuquerque and tuberculosis are cited: The back alleys of Albuquerque often provide a clear view into the backyards of many houses. Situated at the backend of many lots are small inhabitable shacks that were originally built to house TB patients who had travled to New Mexico for treatment. In 1913, 50% of ABQ households contained a TB patient. 90% of these patients had traveled from out of state for treatment in New Mexico.Most of the sanitariums have been demolished. But another telltale remain of TB architecture are back porches with awnings, where patients with blood-filled lungs inhaled cool night air. Conversely, the stone huts in Mammoth Cave was filled with moist air and its patients died within a year.

“The Bull Rider and the Ballerina: Towards a Taxonomy of Falling”, by Mary Walling Blackburn, was published in the Flight issue of Cabinet: An Arts and Culture Quarterly.

Cabinet requested a photograph of my grandfather, a bull-rider and bronc-buster, to accompany the text below. However, the picture album of his rodeo wins and the winner’s belts disappeared with an old British girlfriend decades ago. She was untrackable. And because, ultimately, he had treated her so poorly, it was uncertain as to whether the album even existed anymore. Consequentially, he was represented by a photo that could be any cowboy mannequin read through various heterosexual and homosexual range life mythologies. The generic cowboy hardly communicated my grandfather’s lone dog rage or his ruinous sorrow- because this photo was a stand in- a performing cowboy.

And me, I perform class as well, multiple classes and sometimes many at once. That is what is at core to this text. How is class perfomed and who takes the fall for its inequities, its graceless dismount? How does class warp the form that gravity’s struggle takes?

The article originated in a course entitled, “Falling”, taught by Andre Lepecki in the Performance Studies Department at NYU. Professor Lepecki provided Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” but he also spoke of Monk crawling on his hands and knees from his piano to the bar and how that was somehow in correlation to the devastating space between the ecstasy of playing and the depths of the return to “this”, a world after the last note resolves itself. And unforgettably, rising from the remains of syncope- white spectatorship looms. Given this power imbalance, it becomes not unreasonable to ask, who does Monk fall for? Are his falls and resurrections repossessed by the Great White Other? And I wondered about my grandfather’s body, dragged from under a bull, drugged with drink, breaking the beast over and over again. For whose pleasure and whose salvation?

This article had a second life outside of the magazine. The board that administers the Canadian version of the SAT’s include a passage in the essay section. Callow, stressed, teenage Albertans are forced to analyze my class anxieties in Calgary gymnasiums. Is it fair? Do they remember?

This introduction will fold with the image below-a geometry of Basque sheepherders in Idaho [look closely]… perhaps its the loaner picture I would have liked to accompany the published text. Although his heart exploded, while walking down the street in Houston, my grandfather started here, in Idaho, in a town surrounded by ranches and their sheep, and a town eventually irradiated by Montsano’s chemical operations . I visited long after this article was published.

A geyser was located behind the town hotel; it discharged its spume by a timer installed by engineers. We ate in the hotel’s lunch hall and learned that my cousin, a rancher, had just sold the last of her sheep and she said it was a relief. While we ate, we learned that my Grandfather’s brother was beaten to death by local cops and maybe illogically, we felt new grief for old grievances. I know I imagined his brother’s body flying through the air from the force of their boots and finally, his falling to the ground, which is so green there.

To read the Bullrider and the Ballerina open this file: the-bull-rider-and-the-ballerina.doc

The Brooklyn Rail published the “Fire Manifesto” by M.W.Blackburn (November 2004).

Because I was teaching NYU art students how to write about art, the Fire Manifesto’s original purpose was to provide a quick, rough example of how a manifesto can be light, exploratory, and hopefully, a little bit off kilter- persuading its artist-reader to make her way towards weirder climes. Essentially, the “Fire Manifesto” claims that all art is improved if one simply adds flames. It is obviously one-dimensional and fails to include any real analysis of fire and its relationship to illuminated souls or revolutionary destruction.

Pictured below is the baby of evangelist Billy Sunday, lying naked on a pillow on a table in a room. The baby’s papa has a fire sermon in him we could just as easily call a secular manifesto.

The photograph was taken in Chicago in 1917. The exposure itself plays at sermon- referancing an old faith that made mangers of tenements and hay of newspaper copy. Each object appears to be degrading at the edges- whether it is swollen with a stain, breaking away at the edge or finely glowing. I find myself focusing on the hand raised to the air- a clean human claw testing the temperature. I find my eye floating upward to a pale rag hung on the door and then it just continues to circulate as if the gaze, too, could be a divine presence.

(The photograph remains in the Library of Congress.)

At the same time that I was writing the “Fire Manifesto”, I was working on an autobiographical essay, “C or F”, about a fire I had witnessed as a child in the desert and a preliminary exploration of the summers I spent with my biological father, a fundamentalist Christian, and his family. Somehow, each text careens close to fire without immolation. This is a problem.

Here is “C or F” (June 2004):

C or F
(Corrupted Hearts) (Fire) (A Memoir in Minor)

We stood in our yard while the desert burned. We stood in dirty bathing suits. The fire came down the hills towards us, my brother, my sister and I, and we watched. We looked straight through the dark to the bright sky directly above the smoke.

There were no trees to obstruct the view. There was endless sunshine. There was a hose in my hand. My brother and I had been flooding good water into every available ant hole. On the hills, helicopters flew in place over the burning houses; they treaded air. And my siblings beside me, small and sun burnt and strong, their hair blew around and it was the color of fire.

The yards flamed. Wild rabbits ran through burning creosote and cholla cacti. Their rabbit ears were singed and they were separated from father and mother.

Later, walking on the blackened earth, our eye stopped at the fine soot line where the flames had ended and the yellow grasses began again. Our house, followed soon after- never touched.

My stepmother warned us that the devil had made those shirtless boy children set fire to the desert that day. But it seemed to me that the boys who were burning their parents’ homes weren’t so much moved by the devil, as it was that the hands of god were moving through them- their parents were paying for taking what wasn’t theirs.

But how come the fire stopped short, I wondered? Why weren’t we subsumed?
We, too, had stolen land from an unnamed Native American tribe; to be precise, just enough land to build a three-bedroom track-housing unit surrounded by ant holes.

At eight years old, whether I looked at the burnt earth or highway wreckage or silky television footage of explosions and massacres, it simply seemed like some humans weren’t going to wait for hell to punish us; god’s will would move through us like lightening and we’d figure out ways to punish ourselves right here on earth – in this lifetime.

In this lifetime, we lived on Micmac Street in the Mojave Desert. The Micmacs were nowhere to be seen. This was because they are a Native American tribe that lives in the Northeastern Maritime. Their name emblazoned on a Californian signpost was part of my education in dislocation and appropriation. But the tribe wasn’t haunting the space by name alone- it was an emptier transaction than that. The tribal signage was a home school lesson in subtraction that bordered on the conceptual; a simple set of diminishing numerals were swapped for bodies separated from language.

Yet I knew white property, including our property, was suspect and I came to this early. My biological father was the sort of born-again Christian who also adored a sort of property-less and holy pseudo “Super Indian” he had single-handedly conjured. His “Super Indian” combined all the traits of all Native American tribes in one; “Super Indian” was a kind of companion Jesus- his bonus.

My father encouraged us to be like the “Super Indian”. We were to embody “Super Indian’s” love of wilderness, his relationship to animals, and his suspicion of ownership and outsiders. At the same time that we indulged our father’s redface minstrelsy, we felt tremendous guilt for what had been done onto the Super Indian/Jesus in order to ensure our own spiritual and material survival. But when we hiked through fenced properties, we continued to make up pseudo Super Indian names and suck on stones to distract ourselves from dehydration. The signs we ducked under read, “Trespassers will be shot”, and my father always recycled the same gesture, raising his fingers to his lips in the universal sign for silence. Later, we would thank God for our safe passage.

My born-again Christian family spent years, and I spent the summers I lived with them, navigating, this Fundamentalist Christian Imaginary –and in that burning desert, we voiced our fantasies in the form of prayer. Sure we praised piecemeal deliverance but we also prayed for a punishment that swept us clean of sin; a safe passage through a valley of death; a desert void of gunmen and pornographers. But these fantasies, masochistic and unrealistic, were unrequited.

And other visions rose in their deficit: when we hiked, my tall, pretty father always tucked a revolver into the back of his pants, between back and belt. Once he pointed to a concrete fortress in the distance and told us that he was dead sure that pornography was shot there. I imagined porn stars pressing their breasts and penis’ into the newly poured wet concrete driveway, the way we children pressed our hands into a fresh sidewalk.

The Final Fantasy is the Imaginary Fire: my family ‘s house exploding in flames and the blaze stopping short of our very old white Volkswagen bug. All would pile into the car – biological father, step-mother, half-sister, half-brother, foster brother, foster-sister, self, dogs and cat – and because my father had set his racing pigeons loose at the last moment, hundreds would fly in circles above where our home had been. Steam from the earth would rise up to meet them. The heat would touch their wings and they would fly higher. Underneath their formation, we would drive to Lotta Burger – the cheapest fast food burger joint in town – and before we began eating – we would- as always- link hands around the plastic table – bow our heads, shut our eyes – and say grace. Dear Lord thank you for this burger and fries…. and this time we would add And Lord, thank you for saving us from the flames that swallowed our home. We are eternally grateful.