{"id":276,"date":"2022-10-01T19:20:08","date_gmt":"2022-10-01T23:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/?p=276"},"modified":"2022-10-02T10:21:31","modified_gmt":"2022-10-02T14:21:31","slug":"session-four-with-martha-friedman-visual-arts-and-mitra-abbaspour-art-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/hum583-f22\/2022\/10\/01\/session-four-with-martha-friedman-visual-arts-and-mitra-abbaspour-art-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Session FOUR – with Martha Friedman (Visual Arts) and Mitra Abbaspour (Art Museum)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

[A few words from me, and then Ben below, and Lauren after that… – DGB]<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Our opening conversation today ended up taking a relatively extensive turn through the consideration of a question I might sum up as follows: \u201cwhat, exactly, are we doing in this class?\u201d<\/p>\n

I am being sort of funny here\u2014but 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 \u201cthread\u201d or \u201cthrough-line\u201d or even \u201cobjective\u201d of the course. I want you all to keep pushing on this, and I do not in any way mean to evade such questioning\u2014not even when my efforts to reply include anecdotes about art projects like Fia Backstr\u00f6m\u2019s Studies in Leadership<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

One part of the ensuing conversation did take up the (pretty concrete) question of what it would mean for history as a \u201cdiscipline\u201d to be more \u201chumanistic\u201d and less \u201csocial-scientific\u201d\u2014and that pivoted us into the exchange between Judith Butler\u2019s 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 \u201cexpertise,\u201d and the way it also seemed to double down on the idea that education amounted to the transmission (inculcation?) of knowledge\u2014knowledge certified by people who claim to \u201cknow better.\u201d In this sense, Chandler (and others, too, I think) felt greater sympathy for Butler\u2019s critique: it is critical inquiry<\/em>, not merely \u201cknowledge production\/transmission\u201d that lies at the center of the humanities (at least) and quite possibly university enterprise as a whole.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t 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 \u201ccritical inquiry\u201d was supposed to achieve. The answer, basically, was something like \u201cemancipation from our prejudices,\u201d or perhaps \u201cheightened awareness of the way our prejudices are canalizing or delimiting our range and access.\u201d All of this is obviously incredibly important (Who wants to be prejudiced? Who doesn\u2019t 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\u2014since I wish to stipulate here that I enormously admire the Butler piece).<\/p>\n

And perhaps the best way to articulate that concern would simply be to ask whether our \u201cprejudices\u201d are only ever <\/em>an \u201cimpediment\u201d to our thinking? Are they not also a condition of possibility of our thought<\/em>? ESPECIALLY where humanistic work is concerned? Or, to put a finer point on it, what would it be like to \u201cthink\u201d once we had eliminated all the things we thought we knew in advance (all our \u201cpre-judgements,\u201d all our \u201cbaggage\u201d)? It would be, in a way, to think quite outside of time and place, body and tradition, language and history. Wouldn\u2019t it? Is that what we WANT? Or, wait\u2026 DON\u2019T WE ALREADY HAVE THAT KIND OF THINKING PRETTY WELL WORKED OUT?<\/em> Isn\u2019t it called\u2026SCIENCE? Needless to say, it is hardly as if science has entirely escaped from its prejudices but it presents a pretty rigorous program for \u201cthinking without ourselves\u201d in all those messy ways.<\/p>\n

Or no?<\/p>\n

At any rate, we were left with that question\u2014and with the braid of mane of now lost horse, which sat in its beautiful little box.\u00a0 A memeno mori? <\/em>Perhaps.\u00a0 And also a reminder of life and bodies and memory and\u2026 traditions?<\/p>\n

-DGB<\/p>\n

———–<\/p>\n

[And now Ben… -DGB]<\/p>\n

\n

Beginning our seminar was a moment on<\/em> confusion. Admittedly, I expressed some concern at my own inability to \u201cgrip\u201d the prior week\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a long way down to the bottom of the mountain, and we might get a few scrapes and bruises along the way.<\/p>\n

These questions about the seminar\u2019s 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.\u00a0 And perhaps in an ironic mishearing\/reading Denise\u2019s thoughts, I added the notion of an \u201coutside\u201d, a \u201cdark side of the moon\u201d to our inquiries; what Graham more helpfully described as \u201cnegative capabilities\u201d. That is, disciplines represent practices of inclusion and exclusion, and that our work \u2013 as students of the interdisciplinary \u2013 has an obligation to understand the disciplinary periphery and what\u2019s beyond it.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwhitebox\u201d. Rather than cut off from the world in a quiet, sanitised space for silent artistic contemplation, Art@Bainbridge \u2013 and the art presented therein \u2013 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\u2019s. All of these spatial questions are intimately related to how we read texts anew in light of their context. Straining one\u2019s 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\u2019s muse, during the creation of the busts themselves \u2013 a point perceptively raised by Chandler.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cCastoffs\u201d, an \u2018open matrix that viewers continually enter\u2019 where \u2018cohesion and distillation into a unified whole [is] impossible\u2019 (Bozicnik, 2019), Abbaspour resists an ordered presentation of Friedman\u2019s work, a familiar \u201cwhiteboxing\u201d of the gallery. Instead, confusion and miscommunication arises in a maze of torn concrete body parts, where gallery viewers inevitably \u201cread\u201d Friedman\u2019s work in a wider hermeneutic space. Perhaps the intended meaning of the work sometimes gets lost in that space, or perhaps that\u2019s the point, yet in any case, Abbaspour and Friedman refuse to treat art as just <\/em>art; a linear, viewing experience of an artist\u2019s completed efforts. Instead, the completed exhibition presents the artwork in negotiation with its environment and thus what is necessarily beyond the artist\u2019s immediate control. The fruits of their collaborative efforts, in many ways, appears to \u201cdig away\u201d 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 \u201cdigging\u201d 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<\/em>, new kinds of \u201creading\u201d are made possible.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

-Ben<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
———–<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
[And Lauren… – DGB]<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
9\/28: Emoting in a room<\/strong>
\n<\/b>
\nWe 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 Backstr\u00f6m. Later, I Googled and found her project \u201cWoe men \u2014 keep going\u201d, 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\u2019m feeling something strikingly Container Store from them, especially when populated with visually disconnected photographic works. As a brief aside, I\u2019ll 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 \u2014 or really screws of any kind \u2014 I\u2019d be happy to advise.<\/div>\n
*<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Back to our class, Navjit asked if the [subject? goal?] of this course is to examine the more pragmatic structure of the university as an\u00a0entity comprised of disciplines bounded by categories or are we more focused on unpacking the content that lives inside of these\u00a0structures, such as knowledge \u2194 experience, dialog \u2194 dissemination, text (or symbol, for those of us who deal in math) \u2194 object.\u00a0Here I list the terms in pairs, which might put one term against another, enforcing a dualism that may artificially limit the scope of our\u00a0inquiry. On the other hand, a dualistic view might provide a legible structure for which we can more easily communicate our ideas. Ben\u00a0suggested a \u201cdark side of the moon\u201d metaphor, where some things are seen clearly in the light of day and some are dark, behind,\u00a0murky, or buried. Our task in this course might be a type of unearthing of other forms of [knowledge?]. I attempted to respond to Navjit\u2019s question (and also to Ben\u2019s comment though we ran out of\u00a0time) in suggesting that perhaps our approach is more a of a parallel or entangled (this term has been used a lot at the SoA lately),\u00a0gray venture than a dualistic, potentially disjointed one.<\/span><\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n

\"\ud83d\udc49\"\u00a0Hanging on the notion of dualism and our tendency to dualize, and thinking of the possible anthropomorphic origins of this\u00a0tendency, I am now wondering how we would digest and order this material if we had seven arms and legs as opposed to two.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cinculcation\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This statement still balances precariously at the top of my mind\u2026 I\u2019m not sure if science, or rather the humans that operate in\u00a0designated scientific disciplines, are focused entirely on answer seeking. Perhaps we need a more specific vocabulary to distinguish between\u00a0different modes of research practice that I think are inherent to all disciplines. Coming back to dualism, I can\u2019t help but be curious\u00a0about such clean bifurcations when my own lived experience seems to suggest otherwise. Per Navjit\u2019s earlier question: are we talking\u00a0about content or structure? By naming scholars of science disciplines as rote fact-finders and those of the humanities as question askers, the\u00a0critical inquirers<\/i>, we not only set up a power differential or elitism of the reverse sort, but also potentially conflate a textual understanding of these terms \u2014 i.e. basic labels necessary to distinguish certain subject matter from others \u2014 with the activities that are carried out within. For example, when I go the the lab to do experiments, my advisor encourages me to \u201cturn off my brain\u201d. Physical phenomena will present themselves and our job is to be open to seeing them. In science, we usually don\u2019t know the questions we are allegedly answering, just as in art \u2014 as creators or those on the receiving end \u2014 we often don\u2019t \u201cknow\u201d our own pain (this is a reference to our first readings on knowledge). In which back office of the knowledge production factory do these practices reside? [The applied phenomenology office?]<\/div>\n
\n

 <\/p>\n

In the second part of the seminar, we were joined by visual artist Martha Friedman and curator Mitra Abbaspour. Martha opened her\u00a0presentation with two videos. One video was a science experiment showing capillary adhesion in water and subsequent breakup into\u00a0droplets when perturbed by a disc. The other showed some kind of questionable food product (was it liquid cheese?) dripping out of a\u00a0broken dispenser forming a viscous mound. Note: both images show different manifestations of the Rayleigh-Plateau instability. She\u00a0said that her practice lies somewhere between this image of pristine clarity of science and the disgusting yet seductive appeal\u00a0of the cheese.<\/p>\n

In her work, Martha has collaborated extensively with dancer Silas Riener. Together they challenge his body, one that is known for its\u00a0\u201cvirtuosic\u201d capabilities, in various castings and at least one performance inside of giant rubber bands. She describes her practice as\u00a0working in collaboration with materials as well as with bodies, finding meaning in certain anxieties, contradictions, and possibilities for\u00a0reversal in bodies and their various parts. Martha is interested in \u201cthe liquid inside of the solid\u201d, 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\u00a0question, or big reveal, is the liquid-turned solid object that comes out. Martha\u2019s material of choice, rubber or \u2018soft matter\u2019 to some, is\u00a0delightfully ambiguous in this sense.<\/p>\n

Martha\u2019s presentation was followed by Mitra Abbaspour, the curator of Martha\u2019s recent show \u201cBody Matters\u201d 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, \u201conce the object is read, it can be experienced.\u201d The exhibition thus becomes \u201can argument in space\u201d (I can\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

The conversation between artist and curator \u2014 maker and receiver \u2014 is an interesting one to me. As the creator of these works,\u00a0Martha must reserve space for mysterious leaps, spontaneous growth, and unchartered potentials to manifest. One might suggest\u00a0that anticipating the curator\u2019s reading during the process of creating adds an ounce of restraint and determinism that can stifle\u00a0(though not extinguish) experience. As an MFA-trained artist well established in elite academic circles, she asks openly during the\u00a0seminar \u201cwhat am I doing and for whom?\u201d. She admits she is \u201cnot interested in historical replication\u201d yet also \u201cnot just emoting in a\u00a0room\u201d.<\/p>\n

The question of accessibility of art via experience comes to the surface for me here. What are the prerequisites in order to\u00a0understand, to \u2018get it\u2019? At one point Ben asks \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of using pedestals with different heights? Martha responds with\u00a0emphasis on \u201cthe point is\u2026\u201d. When we are left wondering \u2018what\u2019s the point?\u2019 then I think our communication channel has encountered\u00a0a glitch. This glitch could be rooted in the fact that we weren\u2019t able to experience Martha\u2019s work and Mitra\u2019s exhibition in situ. If only!<\/p>\n

-Lauren<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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: \u201cwhat, exactly, are we doing in this class?\u201d I am being sort of funny here\u2014but there is … <\/p>\n

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