Finding Art's Place

Experiments in Contemporary Education and Culture

Nicholas Paley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136040061
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Art

Finding Art's Place showcases three artistic/educational experiments located outside of school settings. Nicholas Paley presents the texts, voices and the teaching and learning practices of Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival); the video work of Sadie Benning, the adolescent filmmaker who has won critical acclaim for her sensitive self-explorations of her lesbian sexuality; and the photographic efforts of Jim Hubbard, who shares his expertise with homeless and urban children in Washington, D.C.

Finding Art's Place explores the many ways education occurs in each of these experiments. Allowing the children and young adults, their mentors and their work to speak for themselves about their educational experiences, Paley brings forward multiple standpoints on educational methodologies and materials, identity, literacy, and the configurations of art in the lives of urban youth.

1 Positionings

There have to be disciplines, yes, and a growing acquaintance with the structures of knowledge; but, at once, there have to be the kinds of grounded interpretations possible only for those willing to abandon “already constituted reason,” willing to feel and to imagine, to open the windows and go in search.

—Maxine Greene
Reflections from the Heart of Educational Inquiry, 1991

QUESTIONS OF WHETHER CHILDREN AND YOUTH HAVE ANYTHING to contribute to a society’s cultural capital are customarily so self-answering that any other view of the issue seems startling. Familiar educational notions have traditionally identified young people as “students” or “pupils,” locating them in passive cultural roles where—under varying conditions of supervision—they are expected to serve a kind of apprenticeship, gaining the skills, dispositions, and knowledge that the adults of a given society deem important for them to possess. It is only at some later chronological point, after they have demonstrated a certain level of accomplishment, that youngsters are permitted to engage (albeit differently on the basis of ability, appearance, gender, color, and class) in the various tasks of cultural practice. During their early years, however, those domains of culture associated with the making of discourses, histories, and systems of representation are, for the most part, a closed case. In the economies of cultural production, the years of childhood are only a bridge to a future time.

Such essentialized ideas about the construction of cultural meanings, the agency of children and youth, and the politics of imagination are currently being challenged by a small number of unrelated, non-school projects asymmetrically located across the contemporary social landscape. It is precisely at these sites—situated primarily in what are thought to be the shadowed zones of metropolitan areas—that a number of children and youth, working independently or in collaboration with adults and/or each other, are struggling with the realities of imaginative and cultural production through the varied energies of the arts. On the basis of conventional assessment procedures, many of the young people involved in these projects would be assigned to the lowest groups in their classrooms. Outside the academy, their work provides alternate indices of their capacities.

I came across what may be the longest-lived of these projects unexpectedly in January, 1987, reading a review in Artforum about an exhibition in New York of the artistic/cultural/educational work of Tim Rollins (an artist and former South Bronx junior-high-school teacher) and K.O.S., or Kids of Survival (a group of teenagers from that part of the city).¹ From this review, I learned that Rollins and K.O.S. worked together in an after-school project called the Art and Knowledge Workshop, where they collaborated to explore the various connections between literature/art and their daily lives in the South Bronx. A key part of this collaboration was reading classic works of world literature and then transforming them into visual works of art. Using texts as widely divergent as Franz Kafka’s Amerika, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass as a starting point, Rollins and K.O.S. would read these books together, discuss their various meanings, then literally tear them apart, using their pages as a base upon which they would then paint a series of images that related the books’ meanings to their own lives. I later learned that one of the results of this collaboration was an ongoing series of paintings which were regularly shown in gallery spaces and major exhibitions nationwide.

I recall being immediately attracted to their work. As a teacher educator exploring links between education and the arts in areas beyond those Cameron McCarthy has identified as “the current privileged theoretical and political concerns of the imperial center”² (or, first-world, school-based studies), I particularly liked how their project brought forward “peripheral” experiences and voices, articulating them into artworks of unusual impact and power. Even though the review in Artforum only hinted at the paintings’ visual complexity, I found their presentation deeply compelling, and active with urgent, complex meaning. I was also struck by how Rollins and K.O.S.’s collaboration seemed to forge connections across a plurality of forces not generally addressed by formal pedagogy: impulses related to the political and the poetic, the ideal and the intuitive, the canonic and the contemporary, making and breaking—“learning and burning” (Rollins’s expression).

It was during this time that I also became aware of other sites where similar individual and group projects were taking place. Because it is in the city where I work, I learned about Jim Hubbard and his efforts in photography with homeless and “at risk” children in Washington, D.C. at the Shooting Back Education and Media Center. I also heard about “Voices From the Streets,” an acting troupe of inner-city children and adults in Washington, D.C. whose performances were linked to a socially active agenda. The staff at Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago told me about the complex, diaristic video productions of Sadie Benning, a high-school dropout from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who used a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy video camera to explore her emerging sexual identity and the visual possibilities of self-definition. It was at the Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute also in Chicago that I came across the work of Branda Miller (a video artist, curator, and editor), video projects that engage city youth in actively examining issues such as drug use, teenage pregnancy, and school attendance. On a less defined terrain, I also encountered the cultural interruptions and fugitive iconographies of the graffiti artists. Most recently, I heard of Wendy Ewald’s work in teaching children from low-income backgrounds to use photography to document their lives, families, and neighborhoods.

Perhaps it was the very peripherality of these projects that made them stand out so insistently. Provisional in terms of life-span, generally unconnected to the disciplined specificities of conventional school knowledge and practice, and located in the shifting interstices of contemporary urban life, their existence placed into abrupt relief many of the mainstream objectives prescribed for children and youth by official educational representatives: notions like performance-based learning, isolated subject mastery, attaining an economic edge, finding a competitive niche, meeting Goals 2000. Measured against the contours of this “high-end” talk were the energies of languages that seemed, educationally speaking, overlooked, ignored, left out.

Artistically, several of these projects had, like Rollins and K.O.S., gained considerable critical attention. The photographs by homeless children in Jim Hubbard’s “Shooting Back” were shown in a major exhibition in Washington, D.C, then as a national and international traveling exhibition. Wendy Ewald was a recipient of a MacArthur Award in 1992. And Sadie Benning’s videotapes were screened at numerous national and international film festivals, with one of her latest works also selected for the 1993 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The more I learned about these forces emerging outside the academy, the more their existence seemed to complicate customary definitions of children’s capacity within and across knowledge relations. In time, the complex associations related to several of these projects’ forms, textures, and occasions provoked demands in me beyond mere interest. Since little was written about them, at least from an educational perspective, I began to imagine a small collection of writings addressing their individual existence—but also speaking to issues that might be connected in ways perhaps as asymmetrically un/related as the projects themselves. At the time, I speculated that some of these issues might include, but not be limited to, the following: the engagement of children in the construction of social and cultural materials; the kinds of representation that counted in culture and why; the place of art in children’s lives; the role of children as artists in society; and the dynamics of what the artist Elizam Escobar has thoughtfully called “the power of the imagination’s struggle.”³ It was along these lines that an idea for a book tentatively emerged, one that I began to see could work on differential terrain simultaneously, unevenly—even ambiguously—and one that I felt might connect many of the issues related to art and education, children and imagination, culture and politics in noncompartmentalized ways. It was from these preliminary speculations that, in late 1991, the research and writing for this book began.

From the outset, the more fundamental but perhaps less visible characteristics of this effort involved working through a paradox: How to write about these artistic interruptions without stereotyping thinking about the artistic? By this I mean, how to explore—but simultaneously maintain—the complex nature of these projects’ potential range of meanings, associations, and understandings without collapsing their energies into a closed system by consolidating them within any single language, style, or theory?

Since the reality of this question is also central to much debate in contemporary educational criticism (here I refer to the different efforts of a growing number of educators whose work resists analytic structures grounded in unified theoretical systems by targeting the ways such structures repress contradictory articulations and experiences and/or by displacing the idea of a unified analytic with critical strategies that are multiply sited and shifting⁴), I want to key here its importance for this project, emphasizing in the next several pages the theoretical reroutings that were central to the structuring of the writing in this book. The alternative analytic and compositional arrangements to be found here are the result of a conscious decision to construct a textual orientation functioning at a slant to official narratives of educational power.

Beyond the tactical nature of these reroutings, such a move also points to important metacritical issues in educational study: namely, concerns related to the kinds of forms considered legitimate for representing knowledge (why restrict analytic expression to forms of “already constituted reason”?); the character of these forms’ terms and propositions (why certain inscriptions and language systems instead of others?); the struggle to bring forward issues of spectator-ship and educator identity (why continue the fiction of writer invisibility by repressing the articulation and formulation of subjectivity as a fundamental component of analytic inquiry?); and the process by which one goes about making the mechanics of such deliberations explicit and clear. In what follows, I intend to show how writing about these projects presented an opportunity for working through such issues concretely, but from perspectives that left their naming provisional. It is to an explanation of this opportunity and these interests that I now turn.

The writing in this book is constructed along the lines of several various and variously related modes of address. Broadly speaking, these multiple lines of address explore indirections. They deliberately avoid recognizable discourses of official educational traditions, whose disclosures seem frequently informed by patterns of unified narrative, forms of global thinking, and assumptions of ownership (of history and time, experience and identity, personal value and cultural development). Such totalizing approaches—characterized in a broader critical context as “the classic attempts to see everything steadily and see it whole…[from] a vertical view downward”⁵—have been compellingly challenged across a variety of disciplinary areas by more than a decade of important, sustained work in the different modes of poststructuralist and feminist thinking.⁶ Drawing support from and sympathetic to this rich body of work, I saw an opportunity to construct an analysis that would bring forward “diverse, hidden, necessary points of view”⁷—gestures not normally admitted in authoritative educational narratives—by accomodating critical engagements like those Nancy Miller has offered: “a process of reading through [a series of multiply positioned intertextualities], rather than towards [a sequence of serially arranged arguments leading to a fixed ideological point].…”⁸

More specifically, these intertextualities are constructed through the following modes of address: nonobjective artistic practice, bricolage, polyphonous voice, and the rhizomatic (this order is not hierarchical). Distinct but connected, separate but intersecting, these modes frequently interpenetrate each other’s territory, venture across each other’s boundaries, and resist analytic compartmentalization. Despite their fugitive tendencies and the dangers and difficulties inherent in specifying or containing them by definition, each of these modes of address is discussed further and separately below.

Nonobjective Artistic Practice

“How is educational study an issue for art?” is a question that, during the past several decades, has been differently taken up with increasing interest by a growing number of educators dissatisfied with positivist ways of talking about educational study and practice.⁹ Over the years, one of the most thoughtful of these individuals has been Maxine Greene, who, in many of her writings on education, has explored the power of artistic stances and their relation to educational work. Drawing on her deep engagements with the varied energies of the arts, she has repeatedly argued their importance to pedagogic theorizing and practice, perceiving such approaches as similar to “shifts of attention [which] make it possible to see from different standpoints; they stimulate the ‘wide-awakeness’ so essential to critical awareness, most particularly when they involve a move to the imaginary—away f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1. Positionings
• 2. Tim Rollins and K.O.S.
• 3. Sadie Benning
• 4. Shooting Back
• 5. Partitives