Arts for Change

Teaching Outside the Frame

Beverly Naidus

• Editore: New Village Press
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781613320051
• Argomento: Arte
• Categoria: Insegnamento dell'arte

A provocative, personal look at the motivations and challenges of teaching socially engaged arts, Arts for Change overturns conventional arts pedagogy with an activist's passion for creating art that matters.How can polarized groups work together to solve social and environmental problems? How can art be used to raise consciousness? Using candid examination of her own university teaching career as well as broader social and historical perspectives, Beverly Naidus answers these questions, guiding the reader through a progression of steps to help students observe the world around them and craft artistic responses to what they see. Interviews with over 30 arts education colleagues provide additional strategies for successfully engaging students in what, to them, is most meaningful.

1

Words as a Compass

Words have become my compass in this chapter of my journey, to help me expose a complex field, a practice, sometimes called “art for social change,” and look at how it is shared with students.

I have battled with a discursive, formal voice that wanted to dictate lists of what to think about and explain every detail. That voice, at one point, turned into something predictable, unlike the practice I want the reader to embrace. So I will bring out the sweet ball of a girl to help the energy when it lags. She is holding the compass.

In part, this book was written to counter the fear-based attitude that all movements for social change will inevitably result in a totalitarian state. Seeing that there are other possibilities beyond the corrupt model of the Stalinist dictatorship requires a capacity to see and critique the evidence, retrieve other more positive examples, and imagine new ways of community and society self-organizing. Cultural work can be a significant part of developing fresh approaches to social change.

Just as importantly, I have written to confront another attitude that I have encountered numerous times over the years: Art that intends to provoke social change is informed by some dogmatic approach and will “beat people over the head” with its point of view. I have heard this perspective so frequently, especially from artists, that I wanted to look at the roots of this opinion.

What really makes me curious about this moment in history is how so many artists say that they are not fueled by any ideological position in their work. At different points this book will examine more carefully how privilege creates an ideology of “not having an ideology.”

Socially engaged art, as my peers and I have experienced it, is created in an expansive place that awakens peoples’ voices, minds and spirits in various ways. As for the clubs beating people over the heads, I am more concerned about the real ones that might hit my compañeros when they demonstrate for peace and equal rights, than ones that might emerge from a sincere heart.

These pages offer a multifaceted view of an art practice that is not as common as it could be. It is a practice of many threads each needing encouragement and support so that wary neophytes might find a thread of their own to follow. Some versions are gentler than others, and there is no shaming involved in choosing one strategy versus another. There are mural makers, songwriters and cartoonists, collaborative groups of puppeteers, dancers and clowns; communities revealing their stories through photo-documentaries, cookbooks, cyber art, tapestries and theater; there’s eco-art, interventionist art, and people doing site-specific, audience-participatory installations; there are poster artists, filmmakers, culture jammers, weavers and community animateurs. There is no one way to transform our society into a non-oppressive, egalitarian place, but there is a multitude of ways to meet our human craving for poetry in a socially engaged way.

On the morning that I write this paragraph, the headline from a British newspaper shouts “Earth Is Reaching the Point of No Return Says Major UN Environment Report.” The alarm in this headline is not new, but most of us are less prepared to respond to it in useful ways. Humanity has come to many crisis points in its history, but perhaps never to one that has threatened the future of the species as gravely as now. That so many people seem to still be so ignorant to this fact, or perhaps unmoved by it, is disquieting. Also truly disturbing, is the common belief that most folks are just plain apathetic.

Those of us who are engaged with social change can get easily discouraged when we see how many seemingly insurmountable problems get added to our list everyday. But there are reasons to take heart. Paul Hawken stated in his address at the 2007 Bioneers conference,

It is my belief that we are part of a movement that is greater and deeper and broader than we ourselves know or can know. It flies under the radar of the media, by and large. It is nonviolent. It is grassroots. It has no cluster bombs, no armies, and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge. This unnamed movement is the most diverse movement the world has ever seen. The very word “movement,” I think, is too small to describe it. No one started this worldview. No one is in charge of it. There is no orthodoxy. It is global, classless, unquenchable and tireless. This shared understanding is arising, spontaneous, from different economic sectors, cultures, regions and cohorts. It is growing and spreading worldwide with no exception. It has many roots, but primarily the origins are indigenous culture, the environment and social justice movements. Those three sectors, and their sub-sectors, are intertwining, morphing, enlarging. This is no longer simply about resources or infractions or injustice. This is fundamentally a civil rights—a human rights—movement. This is a democracy movement. It is the coming world. It may be 500,000 groups. We don’t know how big this movement is. It is marked by kinship, community and symbiosis. It is Pachamama. It is the earth waking up.

Hawken’s video of this talk is so moving that I routinely show it to my students when what they are learning about the world depresses them. His words work magic among those of us who are burnt out and discouraged. Still it is important to say that the movements that Hawken refers to are part of a long river of people rising up against oppression. The river has been flowing for centuries, for millennia, forever. As part of the work we do as educators, we not only need to inspire and create more momentum for the cultural aspects of these movements, we need to contextualize and critique what we do, as well.

The late C. L. R. James, the Afro-Trinidadian intellectual, writer, organizer, and revolutionary, put it this way back in 1968:

The whole world today lives in the shadow of state power.... this state power, by whatever names it is called, one-party state or welfare state, destroys all pretense of government by the people, of the people. All that remains is government FOR the people. Against this monster, people all over the world, and particularly ordinary working people in factories, mines, fields and offices, are rebelling every day in ways of their own invention. Sometimes their struggles are on a small, personal scale. More effectively they are the actions of groups, formal or informal, but always unofficial, organized around their work and their place of work. Always the aim is to regain control over their own conditions of life and their relations with one another. Their strivings, their struggles, their methods, have few chroniclers. They themselves are constantly attempting various forms of organization, uncertain of where the struggle is going to end. Nevertheless, they are imbued with one fundamental certainty, that they have to destroy the continuously mounting bureaucratic mass or be themselves destroyed by it.¹

There have been choruses of people writing about social change and ways to achieve it, and while this book mentions some of their writings and ideas, it is not intended to be a compendium of these. Like an annotated road map, I will be sharing a few key places I have traveled, like the inns of my pilgrimage, that readers might visit to fertilize their own thinking on these issues.

Knowing that we have a multitude of challenges and a long row to hoe, we need communities that are grounded, imaginative, open-hearted, questioning and well-informed. Bringing a socially engaged art practice to communities in a way that can be non-threatening and inviting might be one of the most crucial pieces necessary for social change.

Perhaps this project we are engaged in is the ultimate act of faith.

I am trying to imagine a wonderful dream called the future, where people use art every day to orient themselves, to process their dreams, to think about their next move, to strategize, to focus, to deliberate, and to pull strands of history together into an elaborate weaving. Like the utopias so gorgeously depicted by Starhawk and Marge Piercy, the people dance when they are moved to, they sing of their pain and their glories, they create performance to highlight the contradictions, the foolishness, and the hypocrisy in their lives. They paint for joy and celebration and to honor the suffering of those who went before them. They make artifacts that are used in rituals that create meaning. This is the world I am imagining, the dream behind the dream, a world we have to imagine if we are going to continue.

An Expansive View

Before I get too far ahead of myself, the girl holding the compass has asked me to define socially engaged art. At the roots of its meaning, engagement means connection, so we can first understand this kind of art as one that is about connecting the pieces, connecting people with their feelings, their pasts, their dreams, and each other. One of my standard definitions has been that such art talks about social issues that affect the lives of individuals and communities. The real distinction between socially engaged and activist art can be understood as one of alignment. Socially engaged work can be done in isolation or within community but usually activist art explicitly or implicitly aligns itself with a social movement of some sort.

Some of my colleagues differ with me on this issue, saying that the words are interchangeable, and a few believe that spending too much time defining the field may distract us from our real task, doing the work. It has been suggested that the terms used to describe this practice change, just like fashions change. In the end, it is what the work means to the communities in which it is made that is most important.

Socially engaged art can be made with many intentions, including:

• to process or document something that the artist has experienced or witnessed,

• to offer questions about—or solutions to—particular problems,

• to foster dialogue between polarized groups,

• to awaken those who are numb or in denial,

• to compensate for social amnesia,

• to heal the maker,

• to make the invisible visible,

• to express outrage, alert and alarm,

• to stretch the mind,

• to develop positive images of the future and to envision a different reality,

• to find others of like minds,

• to make what is most compelling and beautiful in image, object, word, motion and sound.

I have tended to use the term “socially engaged” throughout the book. The reasoning behind this choice is that my students find the term more inclusive than “activist,” and many of them have negative associations with activism (the causes of which we will look at shortly).

Relaxing into Theory

I write this book with daily ambivalence. An internalized judge sits worrying that my examination of the issues will be perceived as being too parochial, too self-absorbed and will, at its core, disappoint readers. Knowing as much as I do about the perils of creating a new work of art, I am developing compassion for that inner judge as she lurks, taking me to task and away from task, waiting for the passion to overcome the self-doubts. Mindfully and persistently wrestling with that voice is helping me develop the compassion necessary to teach others—and to teach myself.

Ultimately I have given myself the space to be carried by the words and the shapes of the stories, knowing that they need to be expressed in the world. If the gait of my language is unconventional, in its shifts from formal sobriety to a casual patter, imagine that we are sitting in a classroom together. I am working toward this rhythm. If you are expecting a more rigorous theoretical work, please open your mind to a less coded way of theorizing experience.

My good friend and mentor Charles Frederick, a cultural activist and theorist, reminds me that over two decades ago, I told him I didn’t like theory and then admitted that I was afraid of it. I frankly didn’t know what theory was then, except that I would fall asleep reading it, getting lost in countless cryptic turns of phrase. When I attempted yet another foray, I would spend half my time looking up the latest trendy words and I would lose patience with the process. It made me feel intellectually inept, without the muscles to compete. Thankfully, over the years, I have been offered new definitions of theory from reading people like bell hooks² and from working with Chaia Heller³ at the Institute for Social Ecology in Vermont.

Theory is not necessarily stuff that is unreadable, incomprehensible, and elitist. It can be an articulation of an understanding that comes from lived experiences. Without that comprehension, people would continually live with a fragmented misunderstanding of what surrounds them daily. Movements of resistance against dominant culture, artistic or otherwise, have either consciously or unconsciously embodied a theory that pushes their ideas forward.

The artist and teacher S. A. Bachman describes theory in this way: “Both art and theory are transformative cultural practices. Artists are often creating and illuminating new theories in the process of making. We are all engaged with theory—we negotiate theoretical models constantly in our daily lives—some are simply more invisible than others.”

So here I am, twenty-five years since my claim that theory didn’t work for me, combining polemics with lived experience, putting together theories about all of it. It is up to you the reader to find out where it makes sense and where it is useful.

“They Sing, Therefore They Will Pay”

When I was in graduate school I read an essay by ethnopsychiatrist George Devereux that included a description of a conversation between seventeenth-century French cardinal Jules Mazarin and Louis XIII. Cardinal Mazarin and Louis XIII were in the palace, listening to a wandering minstrel singing in the street far below them. The song complained bitterly about the rising taxes and loudly critiqued the corruption of the monarchy and the church. The king was dismayed upon hearing these lyrics, and asked Mazarin whether he should jail the singer. Mazarin smiled and said, “They sing, therefore they will pay.” Devereux used this story to illustrate how art can be “a harmless safety valve,” and then added, “when the press or art is truly influential, it is made unfree. The American press and the American artist are free only because they have either muzzled themselves or they have nothing upsetting to say.” Devereux went on to suggest that defining art as outside ordinary reality allows it to make statements not ordinarily permitted. Quoting Devereux, Mari Womack says in her book Symbols and Meaning⁴ that art can provide an impetus for change, while preserving the status quo, but at the same time, because it takes place in a symbolic world, it allows for the taboo to be spoken, and that taboo might rise to the surface in public eventually. In other words, it is very possible that the song of our wandering minstrel may eventually encourage the people to rise up and demand change.

Over the years, I have thought about this story and the complex questions it raises. Whenever I lose faith in the work that I do as an artist, and wonder whether it will really make a deep impression, I think about steam rising out of the pressure cooker and wonder if it would be better to give up my art for the direct action of street activism. Many of the artists in this book face this question as well, and have had chapters in their lives where their roles as artists takes have taken a back seat to their roles as activists, or have found different ways of merging these roles. Others believe that the work of social change is necessa...