[A few words from me, and then Ben below, and Lauren after that… – DGB]
Our opening conversation today ended up taking a relatively extensive turn through the consideration of a question I might sum up as follows: “what, exactly, are we doing in this class?”
I am being sort of funny here—but there is also a barb in the humor. Which is to say, I think in a very genuine way there was a desire to feel around a little bit for the “thread” or “through-line” or even “objective” of the course. I want you all to keep pushing on this, and I do not in any way mean to evade such questioning—not even when my efforts to reply include anecdotes about art projects like Fia Backström’s Studies in Leadership.
One part of the ensuing conversation did take up the (pretty concrete) question of what it would mean for history as a “discipline” to be more “humanistic” and less “social-scientific”—and that pivoted us into the exchange between Judith Butler’s dissent from the AAUP statement on the function of the university and the purpose of education. Chandler expressed a strong feeling of distaste for the way the AAUP statement privileged the discourse of “expertise,” and the way it also seemed to double down on the idea that education amounted to the transmission (inculcation?) of knowledge—knowledge certified by people who claim to “know better.” In this sense, Chandler (and others, too, I think) felt greater sympathy for Butler’s critique: it is critical inquiry, not merely “knowledge production/transmission” that lies at the center of the humanities (at least) and quite possibly university enterprise as a whole.
This felt right, and I believe there was pretty broad consensus in the group (am I right about this?) that we were more on Butler’s side than on that of the formal statement. (Lauren, to be fair, seemed to feel that it ought to be possible to reconcile these positions, and that the energy of dissent and polemic were perhaps overblown.)
We didn’t really have much time to play this conversation all the way out (our guests arrived), but we did take a moment to think through just what “critical inquiry” was supposed to achieve. The answer, basically, was something like “emancipation from our prejudices,” or perhaps “heightened awareness of the way our prejudices are canalizing or delimiting our range and access.” All of this is obviously incredibly important (Who wants to be prejudiced? Who doesn’t want a wider view?). Nevertheless, I did try, by way of closing provocation, to ask what I think of as a difficult question that does not seem to me to be answered in the program of critical inquiry as Butler outlines it (or, to be clear, as the program of critique is generally defended—since I wish to stipulate here that I enormously admire the Butler piece).
And perhaps the best way to articulate that concern would simply be to ask whether our “prejudices” are only ever an “impediment” to our thinking? Are they not also a condition of possibility of our thought? ESPECIALLY where humanistic work is concerned? Or, to put a finer point on it, what would it be like to “think” once we had eliminated all the things we thought we knew in advance (all our “pre-judgements,” all our “baggage”)? It would be, in a way, to think quite outside of time and place, body and tradition, language and history. Wouldn’t it? Is that what we WANT? Or, wait… DON’T WE ALREADY HAVE THAT KIND OF THINKING PRETTY WELL WORKED OUT? Isn’t it called…SCIENCE? Needless to say, it is hardly as if science has entirely escaped from its prejudices but it presents a pretty rigorous program for “thinking without ourselves” in all those messy ways.
Or no?
At any rate, we were left with that question—and with the braid of mane of now lost horse, which sat in its beautiful little box. A memeno mori? Perhaps. And also a reminder of life and bodies and memory and… traditions?
-DGB
———–
[And now Ben… -DGB]
Beginning our seminar was a moment on confusion. Admittedly, I expressed some concern at my own inability to “grip” the prior week’s discussion and wondered if the opening segment of our seminars might provide an apt moment to reflect and consider the unfolding narrative thus far. Graham, however, offered a much needed reminder. Interdisciplinarity is, in many ways, tied up with unravelling the disciplinary assumptions we inherit; a figurative pile of accepted norms, practices, and customs, which we sit upon in order to make our disciplinary work, work. And in digging away at what’s under our feet, in questioning the basis for our disciplines, the ground begins to slip, and the platforms for acceptable speech soon become disrupted. There’s a long way down to the bottom of the mountain, and we might get a few scrapes and bruises along the way.
These questions about the seminar’s direction was joined by Navjit who asked: where are we going? Towards big questions of knowledge and experience, or towards the weedy pragmatic questions of institutional/disciplinary emergence? Denise, too, in offering her own perspective, noticed our recurring interest in the transgression of defined boundaries: text, non-text; knowledge, non-knowledge; experience, non-experience. And perhaps in an ironic mishearing/reading Denise’s thoughts, I added the notion of an “outside”, a “dark side of the moon” to our inquiries; what Graham more helpfully described as “negative capabilities”. That is, disciplines represent practices of inclusion and exclusion, and that our work – as students of the interdisciplinary – has an obligation to understand the disciplinary periphery and what’s beyond it.
One of our visitors too, Mitra Abbaspour, equally touched on these concerns through the practice of artistic curation. Art@Bainbridge, the temporary home of the Princeton University Museum is, she described, hardly a stereotype for the gallery as a “whitebox”. Rather than cut off from the world in a quiet, sanitised space for silent artistic contemplation, Art@Bainbridge – and the art presented therein – is informed by the living space around it: a colonial-era building having housed slaves, historic societies, and university students alike through its tumultuous history. A history, which, inevitably raises questions regarding space, positioning, and placement for works of art such as Martha Friedman’s. All of these spatial questions are intimately related to how we read texts anew in light of their context. Straining one’s neck to view one of the several glass busts mounted on tall concrete columns, one can only faintly imagine the kind of physical pain endured by Silas Riener, Friedman’s muse, during the creation of the busts themselves – a point perceptively raised by Chandler.
One wonders, too, if artistic curation and the spatial orientation of artistic objects helps speak to much of the interdisciplinary questions we have discussed thus far. In arranging distorted concrete body-parts into four-by-seven grid in Friedman’s “Castoffs”, an ‘open matrix that viewers continually enter’ where ‘cohesion and distillation into a unified whole [is] impossible’ (Bozicnik, 2019), Abbaspour resists an ordered presentation of Friedman’s work, a familiar “whiteboxing” of the gallery. Instead, confusion and miscommunication arises in a maze of torn concrete body parts, where gallery viewers inevitably “read” Friedman’s work in a wider hermeneutic space. Perhaps the intended meaning of the work sometimes gets lost in that space, or perhaps that’s the point, yet in any case, Abbaspour and Friedman refuse to treat art as just art; a linear, viewing experience of an artist’s completed efforts. Instead, the completed exhibition presents the artwork in negotiation with its environment and thus what is necessarily beyond the artist’s immediate control. The fruits of their collaborative efforts, in many ways, appears to “dig away” at the assumptions of traditional artistic practice and seems to relish at exploration of the moments of confusion and uncertainty therein. And in returning to the metaphor of “digging” then, it is not only the case that in doing so our disciplinary modes of speech are disrupted, but that in looking around the gallery space in a moment of disciplinary self-awareness, in setting our (art)work into relief with what it is not, new kinds of “reading” are made possible.
We began the seminar with a discussion of the general themes of the class. In particular, we were wondering how these topics and our conversations surrounding them might begin to synthesize into content for our final project. At one point, Graham suggested we look at the work of Fia Backström. Later, I Googled and found her project “Woe men — keep going”, where images hang on architected display trees in white cube galleries. Looking at these structures, I cannot help being reminded of retail display apparati. I’m feeling something strikingly Container Store from them, especially when populated with visually disconnected photographic works. As a brief aside, I’ll mention that I used to design and engineer these sorts of things for money when I worked for a metal fabrication company in northeast Philadelphia. If our final project entails machine screws — or really screws of any kind — I’d be happy to advise.
Hanging on the notion of dualism and our tendency to dualize, and thinking of the possible anthropomorphic origins of this tendency, I am now wondering how we would digest and order this material if we had seven arms and legs as opposed to two.
Our discussion then turned to our readings: first, the AAUP 2019 statement responding to the political climate at the time, where the validity of expert knowledge, truth, and basic facts put forward by such experts had become heavily politicized. We also read Judith Butler’s response to this response. The AAUP argued that to sustain American democracy, universities must be able to act outside of market and political forces. Butler finds the AAUP argument problematic in the way it casts knowledge production as a unidirectional action of “inculcation” rather than one of critical inquiry. Butler suggests the latter is representative of humanities disciplines, and therefore the importance of knowledge produced in the humanities has been undercut. I attempted to question whether pitching the humanities against the sciences in this way is wholly true or productive. Jeremy helped point out that critical inquiry occurs often in the sciences via constant collaborative work and peer review. Graham then put forth the notion that humanities are focused on the logic of the question and sciences are focused on the logic of the answer.
In the second part of the seminar, we were joined by visual artist Martha Friedman and curator Mitra Abbaspour. Martha opened her presentation with two videos. One video was a science experiment showing capillary adhesion in water and subsequent breakup into droplets when perturbed by a disc. The other showed some kind of questionable food product (was it liquid cheese?) dripping out of a broken dispenser forming a viscous mound. Note: both images show different manifestations of the Rayleigh-Plateau instability. She said that her practice lies somewhere between this image of pristine clarity of science and the disgusting yet seductive appeal of the cheese.
In her work, Martha has collaborated extensively with dancer Silas Riener. Together they challenge his body, one that is known for its “virtuosic” capabilities, in various castings and at least one performance inside of giant rubber bands. She describes her practice as working in collaboration with materials as well as with bodies, finding meaning in certain anxieties, contradictions, and possibilities for reversal in bodies and their various parts. Martha is interested in “the liquid inside of the solid”, which links bodies with materially-charged casting processes, where there is usually some sort of rigid vessel that gives form to a liquid held inside. In casting, the major question, or big reveal, is the liquid-turned solid object that comes out. Martha’s material of choice, rubber or ‘soft matter’ to some, is delightfully ambiguous in this sense.
Martha’s presentation was followed by Mitra Abbaspour, the curator of Martha’s recent show “Body Matters” at the Bainbridge House in Princeton. Mitra described the job of the art curator as finding points of entry to make the work accessible to a wide audience. She said, “once the object is read, it can be experienced.” The exhibition thus becomes “an argument in space” (I can’t remember if this last quote came from Mitra or Graham). To this I wonder if this argument is built of text or experience? In insisting that all art is read before it is experienced, is experience inevitably subservient to text? Does the formation of an argument at all sort of confirm this?
The conversation between artist and curator — maker and receiver — is an interesting one to me. As the creator of these works, Martha must reserve space for mysterious leaps, spontaneous growth, and unchartered potentials to manifest. One might suggest that anticipating the curator’s reading during the process of creating adds an ounce of restraint and determinism that can stifle (though not extinguish) experience. As an MFA-trained artist well established in elite academic circles, she asks openly during the seminar “what am I doing and for whom?”. She admits she is “not interested in historical replication” yet also “not just emoting in a room”.
The question of accessibility of art via experience comes to the surface for me here. What are the prerequisites in order to understand, to ‘get it’? At one point Ben asks “What’s the point of using pedestals with different heights? Martha responds with emphasis on “the point is…”. When we are left wondering ‘what’s the point?’ then I think our communication channel has encountered a glitch. This glitch could be rooted in the fact that we weren’t able to experience Martha’s work and Mitra’s exhibition in situ. If only!
-Lauren
