Monday was the beginning of cultivating a classroom culture centered in mutual respect and support. We were led directly into a warm up that gave us the opportunity to touch base with our bodies, engage with collaboration, and think critically about power. It seems inevitable given the themes we discussed, social movement, improvisation, and feminist practices that this course is and will continue to be about working together. Collaborative understanding exists not only within the texts we have discussed throughout the week, but has been actively weaved into our classroom interactions.
Tuesday, we explored collaboration between artists and spectators through the concept of socially engaged art. The Columbian hypnosis warm up activity allowed us to work with each other, and consider how SEA can be applied to power dynamics and agency.The first two chapters of Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art, invoked a discussion about authorship and agency, and bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice” from Teaching to Transgress, gave us a way in to thinking critically about theory. Jeremy came to talk to us about volunteering at the Squamish Youth Centre, where our class will work collaboratively with the youth to develop our installations there.
Wednesday we opened with the balance/strength warm up. This prompted us to think about both our own and our partner’s strengths in working together to achieve a particular goal, in this case balance. We further explored collaboration through concepts in Helguera’s work: accountability and expertise. We discussed how in Poetics of the Oppressed, art is positioned as a language, and a method of rehearsal for the revolution. We also discussed how different knowledge bases are not ranked in a hierarchy. The main goal is to move the audience from passive spectators to active subjects. The directed projects allowed us to put into practice many of these concepts and gain deeper understandings of them.
We had expressed through our introductory class blog that we wanted to “break barriers” this month. We did break barriers in class on Thursday by exposing ways in which art world structures and conventions can limit our creative capacity. Premises of Autonomy and neutrality in art have discouraged certain types of artistic expression and inclusion in the art community (Wark 5). Writing grapefruits then helped us reconsider and break past the clean boxes separating author/reader, the poem form/physical action, while Augusto Boal’s Poetics of the Oppressed gave us tools to dismantle the fourth wall.
Friday’s warm up, Chris Corrigan’s Trust Circle, exercised the potential of our class to trust each other, be accountable and collaborate in achieving a common goal. This week we have learned, as a class, how to take these lessons from warmups and embody them in the way we discuss with each other, or apply them to bigger ideas like power and agency, which are themes that have reappeared over the course of the week. A community united under a common goal, whether in warmup, class, or the practice of feminist art in the 1960s and 1970s, is essential for the “disruptive usurping” of masculine power (Wark 43). This week showed us that uniting under our common goals requires us to engage constantly with critique, and that collaboration means drawing from a multiplicity of voices and experiences.
Wark, Jayne. Radical Gestures: Feminism and Performance Art in North America. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2006. Print.
Siobhan, Jenn, Jasmine, Bianca & Elise
