The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art

Embodied Research and Practice

Charles R. Garoian

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438445489
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Enseñanza del arte

By beginning each chapter of The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art with an autobiographical assemblage of personal memory and cultural history, Charles R. Garoian creates a differential, prosthetic space. Within these spaces are the particularities of his own lived experiences as an artist and educator, as well as those of the artists, educators, critics, historians, and theorists whose research and creative scholarship he invokes—coexisting and coextending in manifold ways. Garoian suggests that a contiguous positioning of differential narratives within the space of art research and practice constitutes prosthetic pedagogy, enabling learners to explore, experiment, and improvise multiple correspondences between and among their own lived experiences and understandings, and those of others. Such robust relationality of cultural differences and peculiarities brings about interminable newness to learners' understanding of the other, which challenges the intellectual closure, reductionism, and immutability of academic, institutional, and corporate power.

FOUR

PRECARIOUS LEANINGS

The Prosthetic Research of Play in Art

Play is the supreme bricoleur of frail transient constructions.

—Victor Turner, “Body, Brain, and Culture”

The tool kit of any culture can be described as a set of prosthetic devices by which human beings can exceed or even redefine the “natural limits” of human functioning.

—Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

A PLAYING

… disasters, Disasters of War, war paintings, the poster read outside the gallery door, the open door through which I walked in, into the gallery where, except for the several large-scale paintings exhibited on the walls, no one else was in sight, no other bodies in the gallery, I walked in, a place unlike I'd ever been before, now, all by myself, never seen such dark, imposing, difficult compositions, never such abstraction, dark nonobjective abstractions, images composed of raw, forceful brushstrokes, raw, jagged shapes, jagged, gritty, protruding textures, somber tones of color … the push and pull of their profound, compelling forms … on the one hand, prostheses appearing to jut from the canvas, leaning toward me, while, on the other hand, their gravitational fields, black holes engulfing and pulling my anxious body into their vortices … these paintings' raw images, their dismembered, amputated imagery playing with disaster … something, something about them seemed familiar, something, even though I'd never experienced abstract art, art that was unrecognizable as art, art that was not concrete and realistic, art that didn't do all that I expected it to do, all that I knew and already understood … daring misunderstanding their unfamiliarity complicated perception yet drew me closer … these strange paintings' forceful brushstrokes, their precarious provocations intimidating yet liberating, evoking a compulsion in me to run, to escape from their forceful abstractions … maintaining composure, I observed, explored, and wondered about their significance … avoiding hasty interpretations, imprudent judgments, I found delight in the strange familiarity of my experience … I had crossed a threshold into a zone, an interstitial zone, a liminal in-between space, not the gallery per se, but not-not a gallery, between knowing and not knowing and not-not knowing, where seeing and not seeing and not-not seeing were playing simultaneously … my hyper-mediated, hyper-academic, hyper-rational cultural history, my personal understandings about disasters of war, the horrors of forgotten genocide, the familiar “i-a-n” in the artist's Armenian surname being played by ludic disruptions and dislocations, a play among the ruins of memory and the disasters of these paintings' raw fragmentations … how unusual such uncertainties representing such gruesome realities, suggesting such dismembered bodies, amputated limbs, pictorial abstractions, being played back-and-forth, to-and-fro, between what is comfortable and risky, chance worth taking, leaping into Kristeva's (1982) horrific realm of the abject, where crisis of knowledge enables the power to create and augment new understandings as the ambiguity and incompleteness of these gritty paintings intersect with memories of historical pain and suffering, sensing a necessity for survival, with nothing to lose, the freedom of play, the freedom to play, to move on, with nothing to lose and everything to gain, projecting myself into these abstractions empathically, to expose and experience complexities and contradictions in my own life, the prosthetic play, slippage between my memories and those of these images, being played by them as Gadamer (2006) would have it, constituting a reflexive, ontological investigation, seeing and understanding one's self through the sensibilities of the Other as in the permeable economy of Lyotard's (2004) libidinal body and Merleau-Ponty's (1968) chiasm, corporeal materiality interconnecting the body's interior architecture with the materiality of the external world, technology with the body, machine and meat, how, how else the unusual connections in how the crises of these paintings' abstractions played my passions, a playing that years later I was re-minded, re-played by Arnheim's¹ playful telling of Rubinstein's piano virtuosity, the excess of his improvisational transgressions, his e-lusive playing with the notes, compared with the banal precision of technical musicianship dispassionately playing the notes, the latter seeking synthetic closure, fearful intimacy with the indeterminacy of play and being played … undecidable characters at play, ideas, images, words, these words like those paintings' images befuddling yet compelling participation, knowing nothing more than what they inform me … the freedom of Huizinga's (1955) play, an emancipation that disrupts, transgresses, transforms understandings by way of a pre-rational playing along with play in order to be played by play wherein the undecidable, in-between to-and-fro ontology of play plays the body … the prosthesis of play corresponds with the play of prosthesis … the ontology of play constitutes the body's prosthetic augmentation, it is both not the body and not-not the body … as of this writing, I'm not-not in the gallery, yet I may always be …

INTRODUCTION: THE PLAY OF PROSTHESIS

In the previous narrative, the one that you the reader just read, the one that precedes this sentence, in this paragraph, the one that you are now reading, there is a playing with words, images, and ideas that I constructed from the fragments of memory about an incident, prior to my becoming an art student many years ago, where I found myself awestricken by a stunning exhibition of pictorial abstractions representing disasters, disasters of war, during my first visit to an art gallery in my youth. I recall that the only thing that I had in common with those paintings was that the artist who painted them, Varaz Samuelian, was Armenian, like me, and that we shared a tragic cultural history. As the first-born son of emigrants, refugees who had survived the Armenian Genocide, I identified with the artist's ethnicity and with the horrific theme of the exhibition. Those two links, the “prosthetic devices of my cultural toolkit,”² compelled me to remain, to take a stand in the gallery. As the intersections of ethnicity, Genocide, disaster, and the abstract paintings played me, I felt a compulsion to risk everything, to go beyond what I already understood about art and my life. It was the difficulty of those images, the crisis of knowledge invoked by their visual and conceptual abstractions that compelled me to challenge myself, my ignorance and to lean on them in order to research, to learn more about them, learn through them, about myself, who I was, where I had come from, and where I was going in my life. In actuality, the ontological play of those paintings aroused my raison d'être, which is why I'm not-not in the gallery, and I may always be …

What is play? What is prosthesis? What do they have in common and how do they represent art research? What are the performative correspondences between play and art, play and prosthesis, prosthesis and art? How are creative research and the practice of art making constituted by the ontology of play? What does the play of art have in common with the play of prosthesis? How does the indeterminacy of these processes affect subjectivity, and creative and political agency? How is critical pedagogy in art education constituted by prosthetic epistemology? In addressing these and other questions throughout this chapter, I will invoke the play theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer (2006), Victor Turner (1990), Richard Schechner (1985), Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), Jerome Bruner (1986; 1990); the prosthetic theories of David Wills (1995), Gray, Figueroa-Sarriera, and Mentor (1995), Celia Lury (1998); and the conceptual play in the research and creative work of artists Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Nico Muhly, and Francis Alÿs.

Considering my ongoing fascination with being played by art, I began this chapter with a narrative entitled “A Playing” to take into account my personal memory and cultural history, and to affirm such performances of subjectivity as significant content for research in art education, which I will elaborate on later. In the next section of the chapter, entitled “Theorizing Prosthesis as Research Metaphor,” I will use the prosthesis trope to conceptualize the play of art, its slippage and indeterminacy, as prosthetic cognition and prosthetic epistemology, emergent research processes that resist intellectual closure to supplement and interconnect the interiority of the body with the exteriority of cultural knowledge that is other than its own.³ I will further argue that the creative and intellectual supplementations and interconnections enabled through the prosthesis of play represent a critical pedagogy of possibility in art education.

In the section entitled “The Prosthetic Play of Exquisite Corpse,” I will again disrupt the flow of my text like I did after my personal narrative at the beginning of the chapter, and interject a curricular approach that introduces and enables graduate students in art education to play in-between personal memory and cultural history, art, theory, and pedagogy in conceptualizing research metaphors based on the 1920s Surrealists' parlor game, Exquisite Corpse (Cadavre Exquis). The visual and conceptual disjunctions and conjunctions that constitute the Exquisite Corpse process, like the play of prosthesis, open gaps, spaces of liminality where a multitude, an excess of meanings and understandings can be speculated and extended. Finally, by disrupting my text yet again and interjecting the third section of this chapter, “Researching Pedagogy Through Art and Theory,” I will provide examples of how the separate yet permeable boundaries in-between personal memory and cultural history, art, theory, and pedagogy enable a playing and intersecting of ideas and images in constituting art-based research. Hence, the four contiguous parts of the chapter are composed in a metonymic relationship similar to Exquisite Corpse with overlapping concepts while maintaining their separate characteristics. The purpose in doing so is to show correspondences between the Exquisite Corpse research processes that I have conceptualized in section three and how I have constructed this chapter as a whole.

THEORIZING PROSTHESIS AS RESEARCH METAPHOR

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer suggests prosthetic slippage in his conceptualization of play as the ontology of art: “When we speak of play in reference to the experience of art, this means neither the orientation nor even the state of mind of the creator or of those enjoying the work of art, nor the freedom of subjectivity engaged in play, but the mode of being of the work of art” (Gadamer 2006, 102). Given that the ontology of art is paradoxically determined by the indeterminacy of play, independent of the subjectivity of the artist, suggests art as prosthesis and the play of art as prosthetic slippage. In arguing the independent subjectivity of art play, Gadamer writes:

The work of art is not an object that stands over against a subject for itself. Instead the work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it. The “subject” of the experience of art, that which remains and endures, is not the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself … play [like art] has its own essence, independent of the consciousness of those who play. (103)

While conventional wisdom assumes that the play of art is constituted by the artist's subjectivity, namely, that the play of art is performed by the artist, in actuality the assumptions that encompass the artist's subjectivity hinder the contingency and indeterminacy of play by affecting or predetermining its outcome. Gadamer claims that “play is not to be understood as something a person does” (104); it is the subjectivity of the work of art that plays and “changes the person who experiences it.”

The surrealist-biologist Roger Caillois's theory of play corresponds with and confirms Gadamer's ontological characterization of play and art. Caillois writes: “In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the inference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature” (Caillois 2001, 43). What Caillois is suggesting about the contamination of play by ordinary life is consistent with the artist's subjectivity, her/his cultural history, impeding the indeterminate, undecidable being of play. Play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith agrees with Gadamer and Caillois regarding subjectivity. He writes that the pleasure of playing resides in the fact that it frees the player from her/his subjectivity to be played by the subjectivity of play; “It frees you from one self by binding you [prosthetically] to another … [the] ‘being’ of play … is outside oneself rather than inside oneself” (Sutton-Smith 1997, 183). Hence, by being played by the ontology of play in art the interiority and exteriority of the body, the body and other, coexist and are coextensive.

Moreover, the indeterminacy of art is constituted by play through a precarious “to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end … rather, it renews itself in constant repetition” (Gadamer 2006, 105). This emergent, repetitive renewal of the to-and-fro movement of play corresponds with the slippages and indeterminate research logic of prosthesis, which I am here arguing as the propositional adjunction of the He...