Category Archives: Commentary

Democratic Vistas

August 4, 2017 admin

In his 1872 essay “Democratic Vistas” the poet Walt Whitman writes that “democracy is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.” This course tests Whitman’s supposition through diverse cultural practices, with a special focus on the relationship between art and democracy.

We will read and consider the formative ideas about democratic culture that emerged in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. We will then trace the literary aspirations and social contradictions of American democracy in a series of case studies, including debates in the twentieth century about art and public engagement that arose in response to John Dewey’s ideas about what he called “creative democracy,” and the singular cultural work of Adrienne Rich, focusing primarily on her essays published in the collection Blood, Bread and Poetry and her poems from the late 1980s in An Atlas of the Difficult World.

Terry Tempest Williams’ appeal to democratic engagement in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001 will offer a conceptual framework for the second half of the course. “In the open space of democracy,” Williams writes in a commencement address she presented at the University of Utah, “we are listening–ears alert–we are watching–eyes open–registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement” (76). In the spirit of commencement, we will consider more contemporary cultural projects that challenge formal conventions and unsettle institutionalized practices, and that enlarge our understanding of art as social and communicative action.

During the final weeks of the course students will contribute to a collaborative project in the Keene State College archives and will design and pursue an individual research project. Student projects will draw on primary materials, in library-based and digital archives, to further develop research experience and methods in defining, organizing, and elaborating the significance of these materials in the public domain.

Required Reading A good deal of the reading in this course is accessible through the Schedule page. The Reading page is the reading list for the course. In addition to the digital materials, we will be reading three books that you are required to purchase.

Robert A. Dahl. On Democracy. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. ISBN 978-0-300-084559

Adrienne Rich. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991. New York, Norton, 1991. ISBN 0-393-30831-6

Doris Sommer. The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8223-5586-1

Commentary, Method

Following Through

April 16, 2017 admin

I accept this idea of democracy. I am all for trying it out. It must be a good thing if everybody praises it like that. If our government has been willing to go to war and sacrifice billions of dollars and millions of men for the idea I think that I ought to give the thing a trial. The only thing that keeps me from pitching head long into this thing is the presence of numerous Jim Crow laws on the statute books of the nation. I am crazy about the idea of Democracy. I want to see how it feels.

-Zora Neale Hurston, “Crazy for This Democracy” Negro Digest (December 1945).

You have your project. You have your materials. You have key terms. You have questions. And you have two classroom sessions this week in which to work.

On Tuesday and Thursday we will use both classrooms. The big classroom will be the workspace for everyone and the small seminar room will be for the meetings. See the Schedule page for details.

Processed with Rookie Cam

The most effective way to prepare for the meetings is to make progress on your project. We will prepare by reading all of your “Field Work” posts. At this point, you should know what you are doing—even if you do not yet know exactly where you are going to end up. We will ask about your primary materials as well as the secondary writings you are using, whether from our reading list, other classes, or your research. We are interested in the questions you have and the challenges you are facing as you work on your project. We are interested to hear from you, too, about your plan for getting the work done before the project charrettes on Tuesday April 25^th and Thursday April 27^th.

The second way to move your project forward, and get the most out of this week, is to think about how you are doing your work. Are you mapping empirical changes in culture and society on to how individuals and groups live through and make sense of change? Are you looking at how individuals are reflecting on how they live through and make sense of an experience? Are you focusing your attention on the processes of making cultural products in cultural industries, and/or of the process of consuming and assimilating these products by audiences and fans?

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Last week you talked about questions and we listed some of those questions on the board. there were other questions, too, some of which were explicit and some of which were implicit.

What is the text? A set of material objects, verbal texts, digital artifacts, a set of social relations, a life, lived experience? Everyday practices, whether past and /or present?

If I take a social practice as my text, for example a festival, then how do I “read” the text—that is, identify discrete practices, structural agencies, institutional features, that constitute the individual and/or collective social practice?

How do stories help us make sense of individual and collective experience? How does narrative stich together the present and the past using recognizable features such as action, characters, plot, complicating actions, resolutions?

How do narratives circulate in a culture? How are they reproduced? How are they changed?

Am I studying the social effects of the text? If so, how do I go about examining and offering commentary on the individual or cultural forms a text makes available—such as narrative, ideology, subject position?

What social dynamics and struggles are fundamental to the social text—for instance, power asymmetries between and among people, the circulation of racial categories, class formations, and relations?

How are hierarchies and power relations reproduced or replicated or modified within particular cultural texts or practices?

Who are the cultural producers? Who are the consumers? What social and cultural systems mediate and distribute in an economy or ecology of culture?

What is the relationship between narratives of experience and the field of possibilities within the structure of a discourse?

How does one talk about the subjective dimension of experience when we recognize that what we call an “experience” is something that mediates what happens to us?

What, exactly, makes our perceptions, feelings, and actions (the ones we abstract from the stream of experience) meaningful?

What is the relationship between experience and knowing?

How is an experience described? In what ways are individual experiences always already situated in and mediated through specific historical and cultural contexts?

How do we think about experience as product and process? How we understand and talk about experience as transactional?

In what ways is experience structured by prior experience and cultural frameworks of understanding?

Commentary, Metacommentary, Uncategorized

Culture | Art | Engagement

April 6, 2017 admin

Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas”

We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy. This word Culture, or what it has come to represent, involves, by contrast, our whole theme, and has been, indeed, the spur, urging us to engagement

“Carlyle from American Points of View” (1881)

My utmost pretension is probably but to offset that old claim of the exclusively curative power of first-class individual men, as leaders and rulers, by the claims and general movement and result of ideas. Something of the latter kind seems to me to be the distinctive theory of America, of democracy, and of the modern—or rather, I should say, it is democracy, and is the modern.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

“This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground.”

(Emergence of democratic culture as alternative to a hierarchical and exclusive (Whitman called it “feudal”) definition of culture)

James Baldwin, “The Creative Process”

This continent now is conquered, but our habits and our fears remain. And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self. This is also true of nations. We know how a person, in such a paralysis, is unable to assess either his weaknesses or his strengths, and how frequently indeed he mistakes the one for the other.

Doris Sommer, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and the Public Humanities

“Constitutional democracies are themselves collective works of art accountable for their constructions. And constitutions remain open to performative interventions, obliging citizens to cultivate their creativity and criticism” (104).

(Metaphor of the state as a work of art)

Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Report on a Work in Progress.”

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

Pablo Helguera, “Interview”

These are works that are designed to address social or political issues only in an allegorical, metaphorical, or symbolic level (for example, a painting about social issues is not very different than a public art project that claims to offer a social experience but only does so in a symbolic way such as the ones just described above). The work does not control a social situation in an instrumental and strategic way in order to achieve a specific end. This distinction is partially based on Jurgen Habermas’s work The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In it Habermas argues that social action (an act constructed by the relations between individuals) is more than a mere manipulation of circumstances by an individual to obtain a desired goal (that is, more than just the use of strategic and instrumental reason. He instead favors what he describes as communicative action, a type of social action geared to communication and understanding between individuals that can have a lasting effect on the spheres of politics and culture as a true emancipatory force. (6-7)

(Production and reception of culture and cultural performance: socially engaged art as less confined to the distinctions between creative and critical cultural work, making and thinking, producer and consumer)

Terry Tempest Williams, “Commenement”

When minds close, democracy begins to close. Fear creeps in; silence overtakes speech

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between The World and Me

The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing (50).

Key Questions: Call and Response

What is democratic culture? How is it (or how might it be) different from other forms of culture?

What opportunities, roles, responsibilities and/or obligations are associated with life in a democratically organized society?

In what forms do we find expression of democratic ideals, values, and practice?

How do individuals come to organize their lives around a belief in the ideals of democracy?

How do we live with the ideal and the fact—the possibilities, for example, of the logic of equality and the persistent fact of inequality?

Adrienne Rich, An Atlas of the Difficult World

I don’t want to know

wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials

and so are the slow lift of the moon’s belly

over wreckage, dreck and waste, wild treefrogs calling in

another season, light and music still pouring over

our fissured and cracked terrain”(4)

I promised to show you a map you say but this is a mural

Then yes let it be these are small distinctions

Where do we see it from is the question (6)

“using the poems to talk to each other” (9)

Waste. Waste. The watcher’s eye put out, hands of the

builder severed, rain of the maker starved

those who could bind, join, reweave, cohere, replenish

now at risk in this segregate republic

locked away out of sight and hearing, out of mind, shunted aside

those needed to teach, advise, persuade, weigh arguments

those urgently needed for the work of perception

work of the poet, the astronomer, the historian, the architect of

New streets

work of the speaker who also listens

meticulous delicate work of reaching the heart of the desperate

Woman, the desperate man

—never-to-be-finished, still unbegun work of repair—it cannot

be done without them

and where are they now? (11)

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin (12)

There are roads to take she wrote

when you think of your country driving south

To West Virginia Gauley Bridge silicon mines the flakes of it

heaped like snow, death-angel white

—poet journalist pioneer mother

uncovering her country: there are roads to take (13)

I honor your truth and refuse to leave it at that (19)

Commentary, Metacommentary, Method

What’s the Story?

April 3, 2017 admin

-Doris Sommer

The idea that a constitutional democracy is a cultural artifact has a history that the cultural historian Eric Slauter shares in the Introduction to The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (2009). Sommer’s adds that a constitutional democracy remains open to performative intervention—a reminder of the essential lesson of Emerson’s comment on political institutions, that “they all are imitable, all alterable; we may make as good; we may make better.” For Sommer, though, the point is the inherent obligation for “citizens to cultivate their creativity and criticism” in the open space of a democratic culture.

This week we continue reading of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and the Public Humanities, specifically chapter five, “Play Drive in the Hard Drive: Schiller’s Poetics of Politics.” In chapter four, you will recall, Sommer advocates an “integrated approach to literacy, art, and civics” to develop “personal faculties and collective disposition for democratic life” (112). A productive way to consider the cultural activity you have taken as the subject of your project is to think about it in these terms: That is, what might happen when you think about the cultural activity as pedagogical—as a method of engaging the creative and critical faculties, stimulating the imagination, promoting the freedom to speculate?

Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sommer argues, provides a way of seeing the labor of creative work as engaging individuals in making judgments, speculating, exploring, and testing possibilities, “disarming hierarchies through cultural interventions” (149). These interventions, by reformers, artists, educators, citizens, as we talked about last week, disconnect us from routine habits, preconceptions, and expectations.

Another way to think about the cultural activity you have chosen is to think about it as a story or narrative. What’s the story? As the psychologist Jerome Bruner points out in The The Narrative Construction of Reality (1991), narratives are a form of describing and a form of constructing and understanding reality. As Kerrin might remind us, Bruner is a “constructivist,” and indeed his thinking about education may be useful.

Brunner’s thinking is useful for the study of lived experience, as well as for examining ways of being in and ways of knowing the world. Here is Brunner explaining the importance of narrative:

Another domain that must be widely (though roughly) shared for a culture to operate with requisite effectiveness is the domain of social beliefs and procedures—what we think people are like and how they must get on with each other. . . . These are domains that are, in the main, organized narratively. What I have tried to do in this paper is to describe some of the properties of a world of “reality” constructed according to narrative principles. In doing so, I have gone back and forth between describing narrative mental “powers” and the symbolic systems of narrative discourse that make the expression of these powers possible.

To make experience and to describe the world we subjectively construct a story of that experience and the world—both in terms of what it is, and what we think it ought to be. As Paulo Freire explains in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “To deny the importance of subjectivity in the process of transforming the world and history is naïve and simplistic” (qtd. in Sommer 139). At the same time, cultural narratives determine through discourse stories that help us make sense of our experience. For Sommer, however, creative activities and interpretation must engage individual citizens. “No enlightened masterpiece of the legislation can move people to identify with the state, unless each participant is already educated in the spirit of freedom that the state presumably represents.” This statement echoes Emerson, in the 1844 essay “New England Reformers,”

The criticism and attack on institutions which we have witnessed, has made one thing plain, that society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and vanity are often the disgusting result.

The call to cultivate creativity, and criticism, is a call for “self-renovation.”

What is the story? What is the cultural practice or performance or engagement and how does it make possible creativity and criticism?

Commentary, Metacommentary, Method

Creativity and Critique

March 28, 2017 admin

Patrick and I were in the archive this morning looking at the papers of the Reverend John Crocker. Rodney printed out Bryan Marquand’s 2012 obituary of Reverend Crocker that was published in the January 6^th edition of The Boston Globe. The obituary includes a comment Crocker made to a Globe reporter in 1976. “We are responsible for what happens in this world,” he says. “It is possible for people to change, and there is time to change.”

This investment in the possibility of change not only animates the idea of democratic culture but is implied in what I am calling democratic literacy. What is it? How do we cultivate it?

9780813343297-400x600 Reading Doris Sommer we are reminded of a Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire, who took these questions seriously. His wonderful little book Teachers as Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach makes a case that teachers, and the institutions in which they work, are responsible for cultivating democracy. One of the most inspiring dimensions of Freire’s pedagogy was his suspicion of “the pedagogical populism that prefers easier engagements, because full citizenship requires high-order literacy” (112).

But how do we cultivate creativity and criticism in the open space of democracy?

One working answer is to explore the relationship between art and democracy, between creativity and criticism. I’m going to read ahead to the chapter in Sommer we will consider on Thursday where she addresses the relationship:

. . . .democratic life depends upon the dynamic between art-making and humanistic interpretation. This is no exaggeration. A disposition toward creativity and critique resists authoritarian single-mindedness; it acknowledges different points of view and multiple ways to arrange available material. Constitutional democracies are themselves collective works of art accountable for their constructions. And constitutions remain open to performative interventions, obliging citizens to cultivate their creativity and criticism (104).

The idea that a constitutional democracy is itself is a collective work of art, accountable to its making, calls attention to participatory and performative cultural activities—the “venture into the multifarious practices that make up culture, the range of cultures.

Whether in archives or outside of them, or whether in museums or in the streets, our cultural activities are constitutive of our democratic life. These activities made possible by an open cultural space and a spirit of creative interventions, critical conversations, and communicative actions. A vibrant democratic culture requires a continual effort to cultivate democratic literacy—the civic arts of creativity and criticism.

However, any conversation about democratic literacy raises fundamental questions about what we mean by learning, by education. Richard Rorty’s essay Education as Socialization and as Individuation, from his book Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), talks about the institutions that do this work, secondary schools and colleges. He talks about the cultural debates over cultural literacy and the confusion about a word “education” that refers to “two entirely distinct, and equally necessary, processes— socialization and individualization. Rorty then puts his cards on the table:

I think that the conservatives are wrong in thinking that we have either a truth-tracking faculty called ‘reason’ or a true self that education brings to consciousness. I think that the radicals are right in saying that if you take care of political, economic, cultural and academic freedom, then truth will take care of itself. But I think the radicals are wrong in believing that there is a true self that will emerge once the repressive influence of society is removed. There is no such thing as human nature, in the deep sense in which Plato and Strauss used this term. Nor is there such a thing as alienation from one’s essential humanity due to societal repression, in the deep sense made familiar by Rousseau and the Marxists. There is only the shaping of an animal into a human being by a process of socialization, followed (with luck) by the self-individualization and self-creation of that human being through his or her own later revolt against that very process.

He then draws out an interpretation of John Dewey’s contribution to our understanding of what education is, what it is for:

Dewey’s great contribution to the theory of education was to help us get rid of the idea that education is a matter of either inducing or educing truth. Primary and secondary education will always be a matter of familiarizing the young with what their elders take to be true, whether it is true or not. It is not, and never will be, the function of lower-level education to challenge the prevailing consensus about what is true. Socialization has to come before individuation, and education for freedom cannot begin before some constraints have been imposed.

We Deweyans think that the social function of American colleges is to help the students see that the national narrative around which their socialization has centred is an open-ended one. It is to tempt the students to take themselves into people who can stand to their own pasts as Emerson and Anthony, Debs and Baldwin, stood to their pasts. This is done by helping the students realize that, despite the progress that the present has made over the past, the good has once again become the enemy of the better. With a bit of help, the students will start noticing everything that is paltry and mean and unfree in their surroundings.

The challenge for us is to describe how creative cultural practices—let’s say art on a wall of the American University in Cairo, music festivals, urban architecture and design, identity formation in sport, social justice movements, writers collectives, body art, and so on—enact, intervene, construct, reveal, reframe the experience and the possibilities of democratic life.

Commentary, Metacommentary, Method

One Two Three

March 24, 2017 admin

One

Begin with the idea that creativity and aesthetic experience constitute what we have been calling democratic culture—an idea that emerges in the United States during the nineteenth century and that remains a vital element in our cultural life today.

As you work on your project statements and work plans for the next seven weeks it is important that you think with the awesome archive of reading you have completed this semester. Our class yesterday helped surface a range of project ideas that have potential. But it is imperative that you begin and then proceed with the idea of democratic culture that we have been defining and elaborating together for seven weeks.

Two weeks ago I posted For splendor, for extent, that begins with two epigraphs. The first, from which I take the title of the post, Emerson’s “The American Scholar.” The second is from Michel Foucault’s “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Report on a Work in Progress.” Both Emerson and Foucault are questioning cultural institutions and the horizons those institutions set for human life. Here is Foucault:

One of the challenges you are having is precisely this: wriggling out from under the domain of art as an exclusive place, of artists and experts. You will remember Whitman’s enacting precisely the answer to Foucault’s questions. Not that this is easy! Recall how Whitman framed the challenge of defining democratic culture. “We find ourselves abruptly in close quarters with the enemy,” he writes in “Democratic Vistas.” “This word Culture, or what it has come to represent, involves, by contrast, our whole theme, and has been, indeed, the spur, urging us to engagement.”

The word engagement has surfaced again and again in our reading—in the words of the philosopher John Dewey, in the essay and poems of Adrienne Rich, and in the commencement address Terry Tempest Williams delivered to the graduating class at the University of Utah in May of 2003.

Two

In the “Prologue” to the book you are now reading, The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities, Doris Sommer refers to what she calls “a long tradition of democracy that develops side by side with aesthetics” (1). In a footnote to refers to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010). One of the arguments in that book is that democracy becomes tenuous when education is designed merely to produce economically productive workers. What is lost is the cultivation of those critical and creative capacities that make possible a democratic culture—the capacity to be active and thoughtful, or engaged.

Sommer’s thinking (alongside Pablo Helguera’s thinking) will help you think as you write your project statement. Consider these statements from the “Prologue”:

Through art we reframe experience, offset prejudice and refresh our perception of what exists so that it seems new and worthy of attention

Critical thinking is both a condition of and a compliment to art-making—world making in Dewey’s pragmatic and democratizing sense of art as experience—that sparks more exploration and more experience

Every project in this class will describe how something (object, practice, project, performance) does something, “reframe,” “offset,” “refresh,” to use a few of the many words we will use to describe the impact of creative social practice. Public art, food, music, wall murals, social movements, body art, artist collectives, art or cultural projects, built environments, natural landscapes, performances—in every case the question is the same: what it is the creative practice? What is the impact of the creative social practice?

Sommer is helpful for you in another way as well. In the context of Fredrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794) and Viktor Shklovsky’s Shklovsky Art as Technique (1913) her case study of Antanas Mockus and his “por amor al arte” (For the Love of Art) platform in Colombia offers a way of thinking about creative social practice. The idea here is that art is a way of intervening in normative practices or habits (perhaps think of the pantsuit flash mob) and so that people are thinking adaptively and creatively. In the chapter on Mockus and relational art Sommer elaborates on the idea of “defamiliarization”:

This is why bilingual and bicultural games are a source of endless fun and wisdom as they track the artful failures of language. Misunderstanding, intentional or not, is also why foreigners help keep democracy dynamic, by asking unlikely questions that stimulate justification or reform (27)

Are you tracking? Can you explain this insight? Social and cultural change is not here defined as a cause and effect, an instrumental solution to a discrete and definable problem. Rather the fun, in this case, or the stimulation, is precisely the point. Another way of talking about this is to hear the echo here of Dewey and his more capacious definition of art as a critical and creative activity. “Art thrives on nonconformity, exploration, expression, and the development of individuality” (48), with the qualification here (back to Foucault, Baldwin, Dewey, Whitman, Emerson, etc) that “art” is an experience available to all.

Three

What you proposed to do in class is in no way binding. Your project proposal for next Tuesday, however, is going to set your course.

Your project is as easy (and as difficult) as one two three.

One: the idea of democratic culture. We have been circulating in this line of thinking since January.

Two: creative social practice. You have been wrestling with this idea for weeks and we now have dozens of examples that can help us to explain the places of art of interpretation in the public sphere.

Three: you are in the position of feeling the excitement of defining the social practice—whatever it is, a group of texts, the enactment of an idea, an urban space, a human practice such as eating together—and discovering the creative elements that promote the democratic arts of exchange, communication, and understanding.

For Tuesday, March 28, read Richard Rorty, Education as Socialization and as Individuation, from Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) and Sommer, Chapter Two: “Press Here: Cultural Acupuncture and Civic Stimulation,” 49-79, and Chapter Three: “Art and Accountability,” 81-105. These readings suggest the pedagogical element of creative social practice. Also remember your assignment: you will hand in a one-paragraph project description and a work plan for each of the weeks 11-16.

Do send ideas and thoughts my way. I’m here to help you move from where you are to where you are trying to be. I can also meet with anyone who would like to talk more about your project ideas.

Commentary, Metacommentary, Method

Method Imagination Inquiry

March 20, 2017 admin

Over the next few weeks our work will be defining and pursuing a project that will represent and discuss the impact of creative social practices in the open space of democracy. We will also be reading and discussing your work with theorists and practitioners who have thought about these questions, including Doris Sommer and Pablo Helguera, to refine the method we are using to conduct our intellectual work.

On Tuesday of this week we need to get to work on outlining our work and setting up the relationship between individual and collective responsibilities. And by Thursday (or Friday) we want to have in place a concept and an outline for completing our work.

Our reading in Sommer and Helguera provides a stimulating context for what you decide you are going to do. Your efforts, as I have explained on a number of occasions, is to bring to light the practice of democratic culture. A focus on the “work of art” in the world should not trip you up, as we are moving to find examples of what Sommer calls Schiller’s “daring proposition” that “creativity and aesthetic judgment are foundations for democracy” (9). Over the next few weeks we will be apprentices to this idea that Sommers connects to Fredrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794).

Among the reasons we are reading Sommer is that she is really clear about the contribution of the kind of critical work we are practicing as students of culture. She quotes Dewey, in fact, the memorable last words from a book we sampled, Art as Experience,

We lay hold of the full import of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic’s privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it

The other thing we are doing, of course, is American Studies. This work is examining subjects and problems that normally belong to other disciplines. Helguera elegantly, and for me convincingly, explains how art as social practice involves community engagement, dialogue, and conversation. Examples of this kind of practice involve pedagogy (Paulo Friere, in this case), performance and performance studies, sociology, ethnography, literary studies, cultural studies, women’s studies, linguistics, art and art history, political science, and the public humanities.

The work of criticism depends on thinking–creative, critical, however you want to describe it. For Sommer, critical thinking “is both a condition of and a complement to art making-world making in Dewey’s pragmatic and democratizing sense of art as experience-that sparks more exploration and more experience” (10). This is helpful information. It is one way around the debilitating arrest of thought that leaves us where we are. It is a reminder that all of us are creative artists and citizens, if we choose to be, in that creative democracy Dewey imagined, and that we continue to struggle to enact every day.

Commentary, Metacommentary, Method, Reading

Helguera: Process & Product

March 20, 2017 admin

In the Introduction to Art and Citizenship, a special issue of artpractical, the editor Kara Q. Smith writes that the seven contributors “consider how citizenship relates to cultural and political systems as they intersect with artistic practices, institutions, and diverse publics.” This statement is useful as we move into the second half of the semester: it brings into focus the relation between social institutions (such as politics), institutions (such as art), practice (making), and audiences (the public).

Before class on Tuesday you will have read two brief pieces, the Blog Entry “Education for Socially Engaged Art” by Pablo Helguera and Interview with Pablo Helguera. In the excerpt from Education for Socially Engaged Art, he gives examples of art that is politically or socially motivated but that acts through the representation of ideas or issues. A useful distinction for us is between actual vs. symbolic practice. His interest is in works that are not about social change but rather embody social change. He is creating space to describe cultural activity that, in his words, “exists somewhere between art and non-art.”

Another way to describe this distinction is between process (the actual practice) and product (symbolic practice). He goes on to say,

Helguera then elaborates an intellectual genealogy for this distinction:

This distinction is partially based on Jurgen Habermas’s work The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). In it Habermas argues that social action (an act constructed by the relations between individuals) is more than a mere manipulation of circumstances by an individual to obtain a desired goal (that is, more than just the use of strategic and instrumental reason. He instead favors what he describes as communicative action, a type of social action geared to communication and understanding between individuals that can have a lasting effect on the spheres of politics and culture as a true emancipatory force. (6-7)

It may also be useful to reference an interview with Helen Reed, A Bad Education, in which Helguera explains further the problem with creating a restrictive definition of art:

Art, for better or for worse, continues to be this playing field that is defined by its capacity to redefine itself. You cannot say, “This is not art!” because tomorrow it could be, or “It can be art,” because I say it is. Art is a space, which we have created, where we can cease to subscribe to the demands and the rules of society; it is a space where we can pretend. We can play, we can rethink things, we can think about them backwards.

Instead of critiquing the current system, you have to make a new system that will render the previous system superfluous or irrelevant. So as artists we need to build institutions, we need to be institutional.

One of the most useful ways to think with Helguera is to discover his productive relationship to institutions and systems. So much of our language and discourse about art and social practice assumes an oppositional stance. You will hear people talking about critiquing and “blowing up” institutions or whatever. (By the way, as readers of what Emerson says about institutions you have an intellectual context for these thoughts.) In an Interview with curator Yulia Tikhonova published in Idiom, Helguera is asked whether it is possible to work in an institution such as a museum and at the same time be engaged in institutional critique. Here is his response:

I believe that institutions are nothing but collections of individuals. If you would agree with that, then you would need to agree that because one can be critical with oneself, of course there could be criticality within institutions too. It’s true that one lacks perspective, but at the same time internal debate is key to informing our decisions–which also applies to individuals and institutions. Otherwise we would just behave erratically being told what to do by a wide random group of opinions.

Furthermore, I would argue that inasmuch as we are implicated in a system–in this case the art system–we all belong to the larger institution of art. To behave like an absolute outsider is an illusion. Just think about what we say to people who hate contemporary art who have absolute no background or knowledge: we simply dismiss them as ignorant. I believe that complete outsider-ness in the field of art is an illusion. Finally, the notion of institution is relative: some major artists are institutions, and in fact their staff in their studios is larger than the staff of a small museum. Yet we maintain the myth that artists are lone rangers and museums are monolithic, faceless and powerful forces.

Before we gather on Tuesday please do the reading, give these ideas some thought, and fold these ideas into your thinking about a final project.

Fascinated by this conversation, and want to read more? Have a look at the Blog Posts by Helguera on the Inside/Out Blog at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) that he wrote as Director of Adult and Academic Programs.

Commentary, Metacommentary

for splendor, for extent

March 8, 2017 admin

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar”

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”

–Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: Report on a Work in Progress”

The open space of democracy is a busy place. I created a Reading page that lists all of the reading you have completed in the course. After you pat yourself on the back, and consider the formidable power of your democratic literacy having read this material, I would like you to keep this network of ideas alive as we move into the second part of the course.

In the weeks following our spring break, we will talks about the relation between government and art, particularly the question of government-sponsored creativity. We will be throwing around (and learning to use) terms like”socially engaged art,” “relational aesthetics,” “cultural acupuncture,” and “civic stimulation” with the help of Pablo Helguera and Doris Sommer, among others.

More importantly, you will be descending into (designing) a proposal for a project that will celebrate, and investigate, examples of cultural production in which art and interpretation find a form. Your project will involve, in every case, either an object (or collection of objects) or a project or performance or social interaction of some kind. Can life, as Foucault suggests, or living, take form in public experiences that we might call art?It is a challenging and fascinating question. As your creative process unfolds, you will be defining the form of art-making or social practice, gathering materials or examples, describing the materials and/or practice, interpreting, and curating, perhaps in an open exhibit of some kind. More on the final product will come into view as our discussions unfold, and we determine together where we want to end up.

As you begin thinking about your project, some of the materials we have close to home may spark your interest. If you are drawn to the idea of a project that involves primary materials in the Keene State College collections, here are some of the materials you will have the opportunity to consider.

Ed Hogan Small Press Collection Includes small press publication and literary magazines from the 1960s-1970s

Charter Weeks Photography Collection Documentary photographer work include documenting social and political life in New Hampshire; photographed African American tenant farmers in the South in the late 1960s.

Rev. John Crocker, Jr. Papers Papers of the Civil Rights and Peace Activists and Episcopal Minister; he participated with the Freedom Riders and was arrested in the South for his civil rights work.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock Papers Papers of the political activist who at age 89-90 walked across the U.S. in support of campaign finance reform; ran also for U.S. Senate.

Christine Sweeney Papers Papers of Dr. Christine Sweeney who sued Keene State College for discrimination in awarding tenure based on gender; the case went to the Supreme Court where Sweeney prevailed.

Louis de Rochemont Collection Papers and films relating to the academy award winning NH film director whose work included the March of Times and a number of films like, Lost Boundaries, that address race and class.

Here I Am, Send Me: The Story of Jonathan Daniels Collection Records related to the PBS documentary film about Jonathan Daniels, the civil rights activist and Episcopal seminarian; includes several raw footage interviews and transcripts with Stokely Carimichel, John Lewis, among others.

Barry Faulkner Portfolios Barry Faulkner (July 12, 1881 – October 27, 1966) was an American artist (from Keene, New Hampshire) who was primarily known for his murals. His murals depicted scenes of everyday life in America (there is a mural in Eliot Hall and Cheshire County Historical Society) and of historical scenes. During World War I, he and sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry organized artists for training as camouflage specialists (called camoufleurs), an effort that contributed to the founding of the American Camouflage Corps in 1917.

George and Florence Stoff Letters Collection of WWII era love letters that offer an insight into the life of Jewish American family at the home and warfront.

We will visit the archives again after spring break and have a look at these materials.

Commentary

The Real Work

March 2, 2017 admin

“Know what you are doing and do it well”

–Ed Hogan

What are you Doing?

Today (Thursday)

In the first case you did: You worked in the Mason Library Archive with your issue of Aspect magazine. The goal for the class session was to describe (not to interpret) the issue—both its material elements (layout, color, etc.) and contents (editor(s)), authors, sections, titles, book review, editorial matter. You are creating metadata for the issue.(You might glance back at the Welcome to the Archive: The Dublin Core on the Ephemera page to really (no really) know what you are doing

Contributing Editors at work on the Aspect Magazine project

Sunday

You are writing a “Research Installment” on you blog. An interesting post describing what you are doing, what you are learning, in the KSC archives
You are annotating eleven blogs and offering constructive commentary, using the social annotation tool Hypothes.is. Make the comments using the Open Space of Democracy group. Your annotations for the writer will generate a reader’s-eye view of her or his blog. Is the blog not merely writer- but also reader-centered? Does the blog have a point of view, or standpoint, that binds the commentaries together to give the writer authority, that gives the blog integrity

You are writing and rewriting Approach your writing as an editor. What is at stake? Are the stakes clear? Does the blog post take the reader from one place to another? Also read your writing as a copy editor, pruning and trimming, expanding only when necessary, getting it right. Curate your blog. Does your blog suggest a point of view (can you name that vantage point or suggest it in your title and subtitle), is there a standpoint that aligns the commentaries as a whole, that grants you authority as a writer, and that gives the blog itself integrity. Reread the earlier posts in the category Digital Tools

Gentlemen, Scholars, Archivists: Rodney and Zach in their domain

Tuesday

You are posting your Aspect issue metadata on your blog by 10 AM. You can put it on a drafts page or just make it a post. This deadline is, well, a deadline. Thank you. Come to class at 2 ready to participate in an editing workshop
You are coming to class and you are ready to dive into a freewheeling blog charrette

Thursday

You are reading the short essays in democracy and art (links posted on the schedule) before class, thinking about what you read, and coming to class ready to talk about these readings on democracy and art
You are checking the Reading page on this blog and congratulating yourself on the materials you have read so far in the course! (You are then thinking that this is the archive you are writing about on your blogs)
You are wondering about what we will be doing as we outline and write (together) the description and parameters of the projects you will be doing during the eight weeks we have left in the course
Issues of Aspect ready for scanning

Friday

You are invited to reread the excerpt from Walt Whitman’s “Preface” to the 1855 edition of his book of poems Leaves of Grass posted on the schedule page:

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

And you are taking a moment to consider another interesting moment of creative democratic practice in your satchel of cultural history: the performance of the song “America” in September 1981 by Simon and Garfunkel, performed as part of the free benefit concert on the Great Lawn in New York’s Central Park that brought out 500,00 people to listen to music in the rain

You are now ready for spring break!