Zugänglichkeit – what's next?

Maurice Blanchot’s Critique of the Everyday: A Challenge for Art Education

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:17:15 +0000

Although it is fair to say that the everyday has served as one of the central conceptual frames in the implementation of visual culture theory in art education throughout the past decade,¹ it seems that the everydayness of the everyday has remained vaguely theorized, and, more recently, nearly disappeared from art edu-cation literature. In Visual Culture Art Education (VCAE), the everyday has been associated with objects and practices of popular culture that (symptomatically) represent the existing structures of societal power in students’ lives. However, I see that understanding the everyday merely through practices that assumedly -unfold students’ relationship with ideological superstructures reproduces the very logic of power that VCAE’s critique of art education has tried to subvert. To challenge this logic, I turn to Maurice Blanchot’s -conceptualization of the everyday as a radically ambi-valent state of non-production that, I claim, offers tools to rethink the sociopolitical function of art education. After all, for Blanchot, the everyday is something that escapes; it evades the endless production of its own meaning.
In this text, I take a short excursion into “everyday aesthetics” as discussed by art educator Paul Duncum,² and show that by framing the everyday as a question of curricular contents (that is, positioning the “everyday aesthetics” against the aesthetics of institutionalized art), art education itself remains beyond a politico-philosophical critique. Contra Duncum, I explain how Blanchot’s conceptualization of the everyday might open a language of critique that corrodes rather than replaces the existing characterizations of our profession.
From the late 1990s to the 2000s, the advocates of VCAE attempted to turn popular culture from a demonized realm of ideological indoctrination into a contested site of socio-subjective practices that are more complex than binaries such as high art/low art, intellectual/idiotic, or authentic/copied might suggest. Despite the efforts to keep VCAE as an inclusive category where various forms of visual practices are examined, discussed, and created, it has been often understood as synonymous with the study of popular culture in the cost of rejecting various forms of art-making or artistic thinking.³ This critique did not emerge ex nihilo, since the discourse around VCAE in its early phase was explicitly critical toward fine arts. For example, Duncum argued in 1999 that “everyday aesthetic experiences are more significant than experiences of high art in forming and informing one’s identity and view of the world beyond personal experience.”⁴ For him, such experiences are a “backdrop to life.”⁵As visible, Duncum’s critical stance toward fine arts is directly linked to the everyday. By favoring the “everyday aesthetics” over “high art,” one ends up with a binary where the two opposing ends (popular culture and institutionalized art) are assessed through their relation to the everyday as the central realm of human experience of the self and the society. Such characterization of the political potential of the everyday relies heavily on the idea of popular culture qua everyday aesthetics as a tool that disrupt pedagogical thinking that reproduces the existing dynamics of societal power by excluding students’ real life from the art curriculum.⁶ In this respect, the everyday is seen first and foremost as a site of relevancy that connects students’ self to the art curriculum (and vice versa). For Duncum, “everyday aesthetic sites are more influential in structuring thought, feelings and actions than the fine arts precisely because they are everyday. It is because they are so ordinary that they are so significant.”⁷What, then, constitutes this significance? It seems that it is the tangible ordinariness of the everyday that makes popular culture relevant to the students, and such relevancy is associated directly with subject formation in contemporary societies. This view is based on two assumptions. Firstly, it requires that the everyday and its ordinariness are both accessible and that they grant an access to ideological subject formation. Such accessibility treats the everyday as an embodiment of ideological superstructures that can be analyzed and critiqued (i. e. accessed) through art education. Secondly, the idea of accessibility makes one approach ideology as a collection of representations that can be analyzed through critical art education, which means that the political project of art education is dependent on the endless production of representations that, for different reasons, students identify themselves with. For the theorization of the everyday, these two assumptions mean that the everyday is never more than what is already accessible: like an empty vessel, it carries its own ideology that merely waits to be deciphered by its subjects.
In this respect, to claim that the everyday aesthetic experiences are relevant and thus more important to the construction of students’ identities and subjectivities than non-everyday activities makes the everyday an overdetermined site of pedagogical interventions. Although the introduction of popular culture qua everyday aesthetics in the art curricula might have served as an important critique of institutionalized art, the presumed relevancy of everydayness reproduces a similar scene of subjectification as what one can find from transcendental characterizations of art. Indeed, the fetishization of the immediate seems to be symptomatic to the tradition of art education that bases its societal need on the dialectics between knowledge and non-knowledge; a dialectics where art education serves as the ultimate completion of an educated subjectivity. This is why seeing the everyday as a question of a curricular content, manifested in the division between the familiar (e. g. popular culture) and the unfamiliar (e. g. institutionalized art), makes it merely a reversed image of the institutions that VCAE has attempted to critique.⁸Despite the fact that the relationship between the everyday and art education has been a rather unfashionable topic of discussion after the heydays of VCAE in the mid 2000s, I see that it is worth to reexamine its possible radical characteristics for art education theory. This turns me to Blanchot, a thinker who rejects dialectical structures in his writings and offers a radical alternative to a critical thinking that exhausts itself in its own negativity. For him, the tension between concepts is neither based on either/or dichotomy nor reduced into a pluralistic both, but unfolds the very corrosiveness of language itself. His emphasis on the corrosion rather than in the production of language means that he engages the reader in a thought that puts itself in peril. In terms of my argument here, Blanchot helps to relocate the theorization of the everyday in art education from curricular contents to the ontology of its politics and opens the everyday outside of its predetermined characterizations.
In his essay Everyday Speech, Blanchot makes a repetitive claim that the everyday “escapes.”⁹ In order to understand what does this mean, it is worth quoting the essay at length: “The everyday is no longer the average, statistically established existence of a given society at a given moment; it is a category, a utopia and an Idea, without which one would not know how to get at either hidden present or the discoverable future of manifest beings. Man (the individual of today, of our modern societies) is at once engulfed within and deprived of the everyday. And a third definition: the everyday is also the ambiguity of these two movements, the one and the other hardly graspable.”¹⁰Here, Blanchot acknowledges that the everyday bears the characteristics of a silent backdrop of the society as well as an idealistic frame for a societal change; two characterizations that fit well with the idea of accessibility discussed above. However, his third definition -disrupts such logic: the “ambiguity of these two movements” pushes the everyday away from clear traits of predetermination. As he continues, “the everyday is the inaccessible to which we have always already had access; the everyday is inaccessible, but only insofar as every mode acceding is foreign to it.”¹¹ Thus, Blanchot does not try to position the everyday as a dialectical pair for the non-everyday (like the dichotomy familiar/unfamiliar suggests), since it always escapes the attention that it receives. The everyday is not, then, an empty or idealistic frame for life, but rather a collapse of such framing: “What is proper to the everyday is that it designates us a region or a level of speech where the determinations true and false, like the opposition of yes and no, do not apply – the everyday being always before what affirms it and yet incessantly reconstituting itself beyond all that negates it.”¹² In other words, not merely a vessel that contains the ordinary stuff that people are surrounded by, Blanchot’s everyday unfolds a radical ambiguity at the very center of the ordinary.
Due to this ambiguous characteristic, Blanchot sees that experience of the everyday is not manifested in excitement or familiarity (as Duncum’s “everyday aesthetics” seems to suggest), but in boredom, which, for him, is the closest we can get to the everyday experience. He writes: “Boredom is the everyday become manifest: consequently, the everyday after it has lost its essential – constitutive – trait of being unperceived. Thus the everyday always sends us back to that inapparent and nonetheless unconcealed part of existence that is insignificant because it remains always to the hither side of what signifies it.”¹³If boredom is the “everyday become manifest” (not fully, as Blanchot points out), the everyday loses its operativeness in relation to forms of educational subjectification that equate human life with a clearly defined actualization of one’s existence. The “inapparent and nonetheless unconcealed part of existence” that Blanchot refers to denotes a life that is capable of its own passivity; a life that distracts the logic of recognition that keeps its dialectics running through an endless production of representations. Contra the significance that Duncum relates to the “everyday aesthetics,” it is precisely the insignificance (embodied in boredom) that opens the pedagogy of the Blanchotian everyday to its political potential: it denotes an unknown that, as Blanchot writes, “supposes a relation that is foreign to every exigency of identity, of unity, even of presence.”¹⁴ For Blanchot, working from this unknown is the central task of writing; I see that it could also inform political theorization in art education.
Notably, it would be problematic to see the Blanchotian everyday simply as a liberatory space of politics. As he states, it contains a “dangerous essence” and he agrees with Henri Lefebvre that it is “the medium in which … alienations, fetishisms, and reifications produce their effects.”¹⁵ Nevertheless, he also states that the everyday “is in the street” and that “the man in the street is always on the verge of becoming political man.”¹⁶ By withholding any exhaustive description, Blanchot forces to rethink how the relation between the everyday and its politics becomes constituted. Whereas Duncum seems to base the political potential of the “everyday aesthetics” in familiarity, Blanchot locates this potential in the ambiguity that the state of being “on the verge” of politics entails. To get an idea what such radical ambiguity would mean for political theorization, Blanchot’s response to a questionnaire on committed literature offers a hint: “How to respond to your questionnaire when the writer is always in search of a question that is not asked of him in advance and which obliges him, whenever he believes he can be content with a question, slowly and patiently to put himself into question, faced with the lost question which is no longer the same and makes him turn aside from himself?”¹⁷Following this remark, I suggest that the everyday should be approached as a “lost question;” a question that does not merely challenge the content of art curriculum as a strategy of subjectification, but disrupts the very function of art education itself. As Blanchot writes elsewhere: “how can man – he the universal, the eternal, always accomplishing himself, always accomplished and repeating himself in a Discourse that does no more than endlessly speak itself – not hold to this sufficiency, and go on put himself, as such, in question? Properly speaking, he cannot.”¹⁸For me, the radicalness of Blanchot’s thought stems precisely from this observation. The critique of art education through the everyday in VCAE has not put art education as such in question, but, on the contrary, secured its position as the central element of the completion of one’s subjectivity through the content of art curriculum. Through Blanchot and his conceptualization of the everyday, this endless self-affirmation is rendered inoperative and thrust into the radical unknown that makes art education “turn aside” from itself. For the political theorization in our field, this allows an ontological critique of the sociopolitical projects of art education to emerge, which, I claim, offers more tools to tackle not only the existing order, but also to question the possible futures that art education qua political action tries to promise. While VCAE has helped to develop the sociopolitical theorization in art education, it has also sustained some old boundaries for our thought. Thus, it is important to approach the limits of our language(s) of critique; limits that denote the overdetermined relations between art, education, and the societal context in which they emerge. Blanchotian thought does not offer an easy way out from this problematic, but it does offer ways to put us, as such, in question.

1.) This text, originally presented as a conference paper at the National Art Education Association’s National Convention (Forth Worth, TX) in March 2013, is situated specifically in the North American academic context. For summaries of Visual Culture Art Education in this context, see T. Anderson, ”Roots, reason, and structure: framing visual culture art education”, International Journal of Arts Education, 1 (3), 2003, pp. 5–26; P. Duncum, ”Visual culture art education: why, what and how”, Journal of Art & Design Education, 21 (3), 2002, pp. 14–23; K. Tavin, ”Wrestling with angels, searching for ghosts: toward a critical pedagogy of visual culture”, Studies in Art Education, 44 (3), 2002, pp. 197–213.
2.) Besides that Duncum has been one of the early proponents of art curriculum that deals with popular culture, he consistently used the term everyday in his critique of Discipline-Based Art Education (DBAE).
3.) See A. Efland, ”Problems confronting visual culture”, Art Education 58 (6), 2005, pp. 35–40; J. C. Van Camp, ”Visual culture and aesthetics: everything old is new again … or is it?”, Arts Education Policy Review, 106 (1), 2006, pp. 33–37.
4.) P. Duncum, “A case for an art education of everyday aesthetic experiences”, Studies in Art Education 40 (4), 1999, p. 296.
5.) P. Duncum, “Theorising everyday aesthetic experiences with contemporary visual culture”, Visual Arts Research, 28 (2), 2002, p. 5.
6.) Similar ideas about the importance of close relationship between student’s life and school were expressed throughout the 20th century, most importantly by John Dewey. See J. Dewey, The school and the society and the child and the curriculum. Chicago, IL 1990.
7.) Duncum 1999, p. 299.
8.) It is notable that Duncum and other VCAE advocates have later taken a critical stance towards the early developments of VCAE. However, these critiques have not addressed the question of the everyday. For this critique, see P. Duncum, ”Thinking critically about critical thinking: towards a post-critical, dialogic pedagogy of popular visual culture”, International Journal of Education through Art, 4 (3), 2008, pp. 247–257.
9.) M. Blanchot, The infinite conversation. Minneapolis, MN 1993.
10.) Op. cit., p. 239.
11.) Op. cit., p. 245.
12.) Op. cit., p. 242.
13.) Op. cit., p. 242.
14.) Op. cit., p. 300, original emphasis.
15.) Op. cit., p. 244.
16.) Op. cit., p. 240–242.
17.) M. Blanchot, “Refuse the established order”, Paragraph, 30 (3), 2007, p. 20.
18.) Blanchot 1993, p. 207.

auxiliary constructions

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:51 +0000

nach einem Gespräch mit Vera Bühlmann¹

Certainly, I never learned anything unless I left, nor taught -someone else without inviting him to leave his nest.
Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge²

Die Situation: Das Kompendium als solches gibt es nicht mehr – nun sollte zumindest das Alphabet noch verbindlich bleiben. Wir hatten Referenzpunkte. Sie sind explodiert. Wir sind explodiert.

Michel Serres vergleicht das mit dem Urknall.
Das Bild dieses Urknalls lässt sich gut auch auf die aktuelle kulturell-mediale Situation beziehen: auf das Internet und die damit verbundene entgrenzte Zugänglichkeit alles Gedachten.

Literacy – ein Begriff, der im Umfeld der Bildungsdiskussion in aller Munde ist und dort oft als Stabilisator dienen soll.
Literacy – ein Begriff aus dem Englischen, für den es im Deutschen nicht einmal eine adäquate Übersetzung gibt.

Seltsam.

Literacy kann auf mindestens zwei Arten verstanden werden:
Du musst das/unser/mein Alphabet erlernen und dann wirst du mündig (mature) in dessen Gebrauch
– oder –
Du musst dir aus dem je dich Umgebenden so etwas wie Strukturen bauen, zu denen du dich dann bewusst verhalten kannst. Diese Strukturen sind jeweils provisorisch, temporal, unterschiedlich dimensioniert, nicht modular.
Das scheint mir eine grundlegende Unterscheidung.

2000 Jahre lang hiess es: Da hast du die reinen Konstellationen, diese sind seit Platon rein und ewig. Unsere Seele ist vor unserer Geburt durch diese geprägt – und nachher hat sie nur noch die Erinnerungen. Da geht es also darum, wie nahe man wieder an diese transzendenten Formen gelangen kann.
Und hier nun ist der Begriff der Literacy friedvoller und differenzierter gemeint: Wie man eine Welt beschreiben kann. Also eine radikale auf-die-Welt-Bezogenheit und nicht auf ein Jenseits.
Und dies in aller Endlichkeit und in aller Konflikthaftigkeit.

An „being literate“/„literacy“ (in dem Sinne, dass man selber seinen Namen (darunter) schreibt/schreiben kann) interessiert mich, dass diese Sicht ein Verständnis von Autorschaft, von politischer Subjektivität und Verantwortung wieder einfügt.
Heute, wo der Begriff der Identität in dem Sinne -verstanden wird, wie Sachen zusammen gehören -(also nicht mehr, dass es einmal eine Ordnung gegeben hätte, die wieder herzustellen sei), ist Identität etwas, das erarbeitet werden muss. Da ist es im Zusammenhang mit Literacy zentral, die Abstraktionsebenen immer -mitzunehmen. So weiss ich: Wenn ich von -Geschirr rede, bin ich nicht auf der gleichen Abstrak-tionsebene, wie wenn ich von einem spezifischen Glas Wasser rede. Diese Literacy hat viel damit zu tun, dass man die entsprechenden Abstraktionslevels kennt/-kennen kann, auf denen man Aussagen und Vorschläge macht.
Abstraktion soll hier aber als Gegensatz zu Generalisierung verstanden werden. Generalisierung versucht, Dinge deskriptiv in einer gemeinsamen Klasse mit einem Kriterienkatalog abzubilden.
Abstraktion erfindet selber Kriterien, unter denen sich Gemeinsamkeiten finden lassen könnten.

auxiliary constructions – also, und nicht ins Universum projizierte Ordnungssysteme mit einem Ewigkeitsanspruch.

Was als Wissen zählte, musste bis anhin eine allgemeine Basis haben, wo nicht ein einzelner daran rütteln kann. Aus diesem Grunde fragte man und fragt immer noch nach den Ordnungshütern im Bildungskontext.

Die Bildungsgrundsätze, die bei uns in der Regel noch gelebt werden, sind geprägt von der Moderne.
Der Grundgestus: Ich situiere mich nicht mehr in der Folge der Generationen, sondern lebe nach einem absoluten Modell, das rational bestimmt ist. Die Setzungsmacht wird in der Regel in politischen Institu-tionen oder auf der Ebene der Fachcommunities verortet.
Sollte dieses „Selbst“ nicht auf der Ebene einer einzelnen Person sein, wenn diese mature, literate werden soll?³Das wird dann superheikel: Nicht mehr ein Ideal von „Gleichheit“ mit einer in Bildungsinstitutionen verorteten Verantwortung?
Eine Differenzierung, eine Aufspreizung, ein Affirmieren, ein Sich-Identifizieren, vielleicht eine Meisterschaft?

Klar – der Konstruktivismus hat bereits Einzug gefunden in die Curricula. Es wird gesagt, dass Lernende im Lernprozess jeweils eine individuelle Repräsentation der Welt schaffen. Der Konstruktivismus geht aber nach wie vor von bestimmen Elementen aus, die grundlegend sein sollen, weil wir alle mit diesen Elementen arbeiten.

Ein Alphabet also.

Damit sollten wir dann unterschiedliche Dinge entwerfen.
Müsste es nicht umgekehrt heissen: nicht auf „Elemente“ zurückgehen, wo man dann Kombinatoriken entwickeln kann, sondern auf einen Horizont hin, wo alles integrierbar werden soll?
Also: Wir sind in einer Welt und da können wir Logiken und Alphabete entwickeln, um das, was wir in der Welt als wichtig empfinden, auszuhandeln?

Bildung ist ein gefährliches Terrain.

Bei Literacy, wie ich sie hier verstehen möchte, geht es nicht darum, dass du weisst, was ein Wort oder Bild bedeutet. Die Literacy entwickelt sich daraus, dass du eben nie weißt, was es bedeutet, dass du eben nie zufrieden bist mit einer Bedeutung. Deswegen stellst du sie immer wieder aufs Spiel und lässt dich treiben von Faszination. Eben nicht, weil du weisst: Ich will nachher dies und jenes bekommen. Aber: dass du postulierst, dass es einen Zusammenhang gibt, ohne diesen zu explizieren oder explizieren zu können.
Etwas weitertreiben wollen, getrieben sein. Niemand weiss ja, woher man kommt, wenn man geboren wird, und wohin man geht, wenn man stirbt. Wir können also nicht im Griff haben, was das Leben ist.

I will never again know what I am, where I am, from where I’m from, where I’m going, through where to pass. I am exposed to others, to foreign things.⁴

Literacy lebt vom Lernen – nicht vom Wissen, vom -Ausgesetzt-Sein, vom Neuland-Betreten, von Expedi-tionen.
Du kannst nur lernen, wenn du dich besessen machen lässt. Lernen hat mit Besessenheit zu tun, mit Sich-hineinfallen-lassen, Sich-faszinieren-lassen, Sich-transformieren-lassen, mit Ausgesetzt-Sein. Lernen braucht Mut – leicht fällt man aus den Heilsversprechen von Gewohnheiten und Traditionen.

Michel Serres verwendet für Lernen das Bild des zu überquerenden Flusses mit all seinen Kräften und Strömungen. Alle Referenzpunkte gehen dabei verloren – nicht mehr Position, nicht mehr Opposition, sondern Exposition.
Alles andere wäre vielleicht ein Üben oder bloss Kombinieren von Stereotypen.

Du lässt also Zeug in deinen Kopf, das dich umorganisiert.
Man weiss nicht, ob man das gewollt haben werden will.

Immer wieder geht es um die Momente des Seinen-Namen-darunter-Schreibens, nicht um die Signatur an sich.

Die Institution „Bildung“ hat da einen schwachen Stand, wenn sie lediglich reaktiv versucht, ihr zu recht vertraut und lieb gewonnenes Selbstverständnis gegenüber den Entwicklungen mit institutioneller Macht einzufordern.⁵

Wie wäre es, wenn man als Pädagoge erstmal eine Zurückhaltung kultivieren würde, eine Haltung, die aber nicht aus Scheue und Angst an sich hält, sondern um einen Humor zu entwickeln (im Bauen von auxiliary constructions) gegenüber des fortreissenden Zerströmens von Aufmerksamkeit einerseits und der starren Gesetztheit andererseits?

1.) Dr. phil. Vera Bühlmann, ETH Zürich, Faculty of Architecture, Computer-Aided Architectural Design
2.) Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge. Michigan 1997.
3.) „Turning Learning Upside Down“: dieser Slogan von Seymour Papert, dem Mitbegründer des Media Lab des Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mag zwar verführerisch ähnlich klingen, meint aber wohl etwas ganz anderes als in diesem Text intendiert. Dort geht es – um es diplomatisch auszudrücken – möglicherweise eher um Funktionieren als um Literacy, wie sie hier gemeint ist.
4.) Michel Serres, 1997, a. a. O.
5.) … zum Beispiel im unendlichen Regress, der jeder Erklärung innewohnt (vor allem die Implikationen dieses Regresses auf Menschen, die lernen wollen): die Erklärung der Erklärung etc.: Jacques Rancière, Der unwissende Lehrmeister, Fünf Lektionen über die intellektuelle Emanzipation. Wien 2007, S. 14ff.

[we like to share it all]

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:39 +0000

1) WE LIKE TO SHARE IT ALL.
Wir sind Tramper auf den Straßen der Heterarchie. Der Zugang ist frei und die Organisation der Teilnehmer erfolgt dezentral. Das Herz unserer Generation pumpt durch seine Venen Beteiligung. Denn in Zukunft ist klar: Wir werden Teilhaber sein.

2) I HAVE IT. AND YOU CAN HAVE IT TOO. THEN WE BOTH MADE IT.
Wir leben häufig in bewussten Prozessen. Das System unserer Bewegungen ist der maßgebende Wert im Leben und seine fortlaufende Schöpfung ist immer das nächste Trittbrett. Die Mitfahrt ist stets erlaubt. Ein Mitwirken des Einzelnen im Getriebe kann gezielt dafür sorgen dass wir schneller, sicherer und vollständiger am Ziel angelangen.

3) EVERY MOMENT AN ANNIVERSARY (UNTIL WE SAY STOP).
Standorte sind zum Wechseln da. Es braucht keine Eile, da Zeit genossen; keine Gedanken über sekundengenaue Taktung und mehr Flexibilität im Countdown bitte. Jede Halbwertszeit verliert ihre Bedeutung durch das Makroskop der Gegenwart. Wir nutzen, was wir brauchen.

4) NO MATTER WHAT: NOW.
Es gibt keine lebenslange Garantie auf bedingungslose Zielsicherheit. Wir leben online und brauchen frische Updates. Jeder hat Zugang. Es braucht kein Zurück, weil alles im Begriff ist, ständig im Kontinuum verfügbar zu sein. Wofür wir und alles (mit-)bestimmt ist, kann sich zeigen (muss aber nicht).

5) FREQUENTLY ASK QUESTIONS.
Wir wollen einbezogen sein, was uns und diese Welt betrifft. Wir müssen keine Fragen stellen, deren Antworten bekannt sind. Aber wir könnten. Früher oder später folgt natürlich einem Impuls eine Resonanz. Wir wissen jedenfalls, wann/wenn es laut und gut war.

6) RECYCLE IF POSSIBLE.
Tradition darf keine Dauerbaustelle im Netzwerk sein – weder ihre Renovierung noch ihr Abriss. Sie kann dauerhaft den Motor schmieren und damit das Übersetzen der Energien medialisieren. Blinde Konformität erzeugt scheinbar einen antiquierten Klang, der konsumiert werden kann. Wir setzen uns damit auseinander und finden heraus, wohin wir damit gelangen können.

7) THE OCCUPY WALL STREETS AGENCY.
Oder besser: Das Ganze ist mehr als die Summe seiner Teile. Wenn es eine globale Parade gibt, werden wir tanzen. Die Quelle ist jedem zugänglich. Jedem sein Aggregat. Der Basar ist eröffnet.

8) JUST CLICKED IT.
Es kann sein, dass sich jemand nur verklickt hat.

Fragen:
1) Wer nimmt Teil an meinem zukünftigen Kunstunterricht?
2) Wieviel Beweglichkeit brauche ich für meinen Kunstunterricht? Wie viel Beweglichkeit brauchen meine KollegInnen? Wie viel Beweglichkeit braucht das Fach?
3) Wie gegenwärtig ist aktuelle Kunstpädagogik?
4) Wie lehre ich beständig Wandel?
5) Wer stellt die Fragen?
6)
7) Wo sind die open art educational ressources?
8) Ist das Kunst oder Junk-Mail/Spam/Trash?

What Art Educators Should Know About Participatory Culture

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:38 +0000

In 2006, I led a team of MIT researchers who wrote a white paper for the MacArthur Foundation, Confronting the Challenges of a Participatory Culture, which sought to define what literacy might mean in the 21st century.¹ We argued that the emergence of networked computing was paving the way for an expansion of the communicative capacities of everyday people, including much greater access to the means of cultural production and circulation than ever before. At the core of that report was what we were calling participatory culture, which we defined as “a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another (at least they care what other people think about what they have created)”². We saw the new media literacies as those skills required for meaningful participation.

There were a number of distinctive features of our conception of the new media literacies:
– We were pushing beyond text-based notions of literacy to include the full range of different ways that people could express their thinking to the world – from drawing to digital modeling, from making music to recording videos.
– The New Media Literacies were shared capacities that existed within a “community”, rather than individual competencies. Strengthening our new media literacies involved strengthening our connections with each other, fostering an ethos where we are producing and sharing knowledge together on an ongoing basis and creating a system that supports individual and collective expression.
– They are “social skills and cultural competencies” (such as play as a form of experimentation, appropriation and remixing, negotiating across cultural differences, shaping the circulation of our materials, visualization and simulation, etc.) and not simply technical skills. We have found ways to teach these habits of mind in low tech as well as high tech contexts.
– The skills we valued are not simply defined as 21st century skills focused on economic productivity, as has often been the case with other formulations, but also stress means of cultural and civic expression.

I have been gratified to see that this report has stimulated discussion around the globe about what media -education needs to look like in order to foster a more participatory culture. Note the shift in terminology. I do not today write about Participatory Culture as if it was one unified thing or as if we had fully achieved the qualities our definition described.³ Today, we need to be skeptical about claims regarding participatory culture: first, many different groups – especially Web 2.0 – have embraced a rhetoric of participation designed to capture and commodify the desires of the public for more meaningful participation and second, while the report spoke about the participation gap (those factors which block people from meaningful participation), it is much clearer today how many obstacles would need to be overcome before we can achieve the ideal of a fully participatory society.
As I reflect today on what I would want arts educators to know about participatory culture, I am drawn back to some ideas proposed in the 1970s by Seymour Papert, who I was privileged to know at MIT.⁴ Papert was describing the Samba Schools in Rio, a remarkable site of collective creative expression, where working class and low income people gather regularly to eat, dance, and prepare for the carnival. The elaborate performances for which Rio is known emerge through an ongoing process of improvisation which is open to anyone who wants to participate, and as Papert notes, this includes young and adult, but especially people at various levels of accomplishment, in a context where there are many different mechanisms fostering participation, many different ways of participating, and many opportunities for people to learn from each other. I’ve often described participatory culture as what happens when we apply the logics of folk culture to the materials of mass culture in the context of a networked society, so as we think about the ways that the online realm might foster creativity, we should be looking for the ways that these communities might come to look more like the samba schools Papert described in the 1970s.
Yes, all cultures are participatory, to some degree, but we have been taught not to expect that same level of robust and democratized participation, we’ve been told we can’t sing⁵, can’t dance, can’t draw, let aside make and share videos with each other. We need to help students to unlearn those lessons, to see the materials and practices of our culture as open to all. As someone trained in the cultural studies tradition, I tend to think of culture, much as Raymond Williams suggested, in terms of both the most accomplished and cherished works of our best creative talents and a set of practices and norms that constitute the everyday lives of the entire population.⁶ My notion of culture encompasses both the high and the low.
Some art critics bemoan the emergence of a more -participatory culture because it is generating so much “bad art” and “bad writing,” yet for me, this is its beauty. We teach children how to make pots not because the world needs many more great potters, but -because they learn something through the process of molding clay about themselves and the world around them. A realm where art is only professionalized is one that makes creating something unimaginable for most people. But, a world where we can see people struggling to master their craft, where artists can be bad, get feedback, and improve over time, is one which is much more open to entry for a diverse set of creators.
In my most recent book, Reading in a Participatory Culture, my co-authors and I share the story of Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, an African-American actor, playwright, director, and educator, who went into the prisons of Rhode Island to work with incarcerated youth.⁷ His goal was to get them to read Moby-Dick, one of the more difficult works in the American literary tradition. He challenged them to rewrite, reimagine, and remix the world that Herman Melville described, speculating on who these characters would be in the 21st century. These young men were almost all in prison because as a consequence of the war on drugs, so they rethought the story not as about the whaling trade but as about the drug trade. Pitts-Wiley, in turn, was inspired by their insights to create a stage play which combined an adult cast performing Melville’s original narrative and juxtaposed it with the story of a female gang leader, hell bent on vengeance for harm done to her family, and the men and women in her gang who need to decide how far they are willing to follow her down a path that insures everyone’s destruction. Pitts-Wiley models for us what it might look like to empower our students to remix core elements of their culture in the name of making meaning of their lives and the world around them.
My team of researchers at the University of Southern California have been tracing the paths through which American youth are becoming more politically engaged, research which has left us with a deeper appreciation of how creative expression may be an early stepping stone towards civic engagement.⁸ Again and again, looking at a range of different political movements and networks, we see that these groups have become enormously successful at tapping core stories in our culture as a set of shared frameworks for motivating social change. We are observing the capacity to produce and circulate video as a key means of spreading the word about shared concerns and we are witnessing the ways that the civic imagination – the capacity to imagine new and alternative worlds – can enable young activists to envision the change they hope to make. We are seeing feminists using yarn to lay claim to more public space, undocumented youth tap into the mythology of superheroes to retell their stories in ways that open people’s eyes, and youth produce videos that use Hunger Games to call out inequalities in economic opportunities.
A vision for a more participatory culture offers an alternative role for thinking about 21st century skills, one which is not about building the creative economy alone, but is really focused on creating a more expressive society. Arts educators have a vital role to play in that process.

1.) Henry Jenkins, with Katie Clinton, Ravi Purushotma, Alice J. Robison, and Margaret Weigel, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Chicago 2006.
2.) Op. cit., p. xi.
3.) For more on the challenges of fully theorizing participatory culture, see Henry Jenkins, Nico Carpentier, “Theorizing Participatory Intensities: A Conversation About Participation and Politics,” Convergence, 19 (3), 2013, pp. 265–286.
4.) Seymour Papert, “Some Poetic and Social Criteria for Education Design,” talk delivered at the HUMRRO Conference, Sept 16–18, 1975, www.papert.org/articles/SomePoeticAndSocialCriteriaForEducationDesign.html [30.9.2014]
5.) For a useful discussion of how our culture teaches us we can’t express ourselves, see Robert Drew, “‘Anyone Can Do It’: Forging a Participatory Culture in Karaoki Bars,” in: Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Eds.), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, Durham, NC 2003, pp. 254–269.
6.) Raymond Williams, “Culture is Ordinary,” Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, London 1958, pp. 3–14.
7.) Henry Jenkins and Wyn Kelley, with Katie Clinton, Jenna McWilliams, Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, and Erin Reilly, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick for the Literature Classroom. New York 2013.
8.) Henry Jenkins, Liana Gamber-Thompson, Neta Kligler-Vilenchik, Sangita Shresthova, Arely Zimmerman, By Any Media Necessary: Mapping Youth and Participatory Politics. (forthcoming)

Stellungnahme im Rahmen der Intervention im Deutschen Theater am 9.1.2014

admin — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 13:16:15 +0000

Im Deutschen Theater Berlin fand am 9. und 10. Januar 2014 eine Fachtagung mit dem Titel „MIND THE GAP! – Zugangsbarrieren zu kulturellen Angeboten und Konzeptionen niedrigschwelliger Kulturvermittlung“ statt, deren Ziel es ist, durch Kulturvermittlung „Schwellen […] bei jungen Menschen, Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund aus nicht westlichen Herkunftsländern, Menschen mit Behinderung und viele[n] Menschen mit geringen Einkünften“ abzubauen und sie für „klassische Kultureinrichtungen“ zu gewinnen. Nicht nur kommt hier ein sowohl eurozentristisches als auch äußerst eingeschränktes Verständnis von Kultur („Hochkultur“ versus „kulturfernes“ Publikum) zum Ausdruck. Die Diskussion wird darüber hinaus von weißen Wissenschaftler_innen, Künstler_innen und Kulturschaffenden unter dem weitestgehenden Ausschluss von Repräsentant_innen der aufgelisteten „Gruppen“ durchgeführt.

Liebes Publikum,
herzlich willkommen zu MIND THE TRAP!. Als wir Menschen mit den Labels „junge Menschen, Menschen mit Migrationshintergrund aus nicht westlichen Ländern, Menschen mit Behinderung und Menschen mit geringen Einkünften“ den Flyer, ich meine das Faltblatt, von MIND THE GAP! angeschaut haben, fanden wir es sehr rührend und niedlich, dass die Veranstalter_innen darauf gekommen sind, dass es Zugangsbarrieren gibt. Ein ambitionierter Versuch, etwas zu verändern. Uns sind jedoch einige erhebliche Traps aufgefallen. Deswegen wollten wir, ein Bündnis von kritischen Kulturschaffenden, es uns nicht nehmen lassen und dazukommen. Sie haben uns nicht nur nicht eingeladen, wir sind trotzdem gekommen. Wir sind gekommen, um euch eine helfende Hand zu reichen und kostenlos Nachhilfe zu geben, man könnte es auch Entwicklungshilfe nennen.
Wir haben uns gewundert, dass es den Begriff Hochkultur noch gibt. Anscheinend sind einige Menschen, mit Ressourcen der sogenannten Hochkultur ausgestattet, so hoch geklettert, dass sie mittlerweile mit einem großen Abstand von oben herabblicken und dadurch in eine Kulturferne gerückt sind, aus der sie alleine nicht mehr zurückfinden. Wir haben uns gefragt, warum hier keine Menschen of Color referieren, keine Menschen, die aus der Praxis kommen, keine Menschen, die in der Praxis mit wenig Einkommen leben müssen, keine Expert_in-nen mit Behinderung etc. Schlichtweg sind hier keine Betroffenen als Expert_innen eingeladen. Das monokulturelle Biotop redet mal wieder über uns, um sich am Leben zu erhalten. Wir haben uns gefragt, warum eine Tagung, in der es um Zugangsbarrieren geht, 40 Euro kostet, keine Gebärdendolmetscher_innen bereitstellt, nicht in andere Sprachen übersetzt und keine Kinderbetreuung anbietet. Wir haben uns gefragt, warum Jugendliche, um die es hier auch geht, nicht teilnehmen können, da diese Tagung zu einer Uhrzeit stattfindet, in der Jugendliche meistens in der Schule sind.
Und wir haben uns gefragt, warum die Diskriminierung von Menschen an Kulturinstitutionen aufgrund von Rassismus, Sexismus, Klassismus, Ableismus etc. nicht beim Namen genannt wird. Fallen über Fallen, die Schwellen sind hoch, wie sie sehen, meine Damen und Herren und alle, die sich anders definieren.
Um es ihnen einfacher zu machen, an der Gesellschaft im 21. Jahrhundert zu partizipieren, haben wir uns überlegt, wie wir ihnen ein niedrigschwelliges Angebot machen können und haben eine alternative Fachtagung mit dem Titel MIND THE TRAP! konzipiert. An dieser Veranstaltung werden Expert_innen, die hier -leider fehlen und zuhauf vorhanden sind, teilnehmen. Wir haben uns sogar die Zeit genommen, für Sie eine Liste mit Referent_in-nen zu erstellen, die man einladen hätte können.
Wer mehr über diese Intervention erfahren möchte, ist morgen um 14 Uhr herzlich eingeladen, vor das Deutsche Theater zu kommen und uns bei unserer Stellungnahme bzw. Pressekonferenz zu besuchen.
Sie haben uns nicht nur nicht eingeladen, wir gehen jetzt auch wieder und wünschen euch viel Spaß dabei, über uns zu reden und nicht mit uns. Wir lassen Euch nun in eurer Parallelgesellschaft alleine.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Das Bündnis MIND THE TRAP!

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst unter: http://mindthetrapberlin.wordpress.com/intervention-im-dt

Ready For Upgrade! Netart in the commercial artmarket?

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:36 +0000

The art world goes Internet
The classic art market, made up of big fairs, auction houses and collectors works very well, especially given that the “traditional” art field is made up of mostly physical pieces like paintings, prints, sculptures and installations, among others. Certainly, there has been a lot of immaterial and purely conceptual art in the last century, but the framed piece on the wall still has a very strong place within the commercial field. Everyone knows that. Nevertheless, we live in an era in which the full effect of the digital revolution that began a couple decades ago is unfolding. A profound change in several of society’s long established systems is going on, and there are currently many questions regarding how concepts like open-closed, private-public, and censored-unfiltered will affect the net in the future.
In recent years, different art world players entered the Internet and introduced a variety of online art platforms. Artnet.com, Paddle8.com, VIP Art Fair and Art.sy are just a few examples of sites that have sought to become the main Google-like entry point to the art world online, often backed by well-established galleries. They range from very exclusive sites to the openly accessible, thus experimenting with different models. The art world goes digital! But does this also mean that the commercial field and Internet art approach one another?

Internet art goes commercial
Internet art from all generations can be found online at the same time. Beginning in the 90s, there has been an extensive growth in Internet-based art over the last decade. Freed from physical constraints, all kinds of pictures, gifs, clips, animation and websites flash over the screen every day. New works are published, mixed, remixed and altered in order to be made new once again in increasingly fast cycles. The amount of sheer creativity is awesome! This is the Internet, and it seems like the current young scene of net.artists is partially shifting towards more traditional art institutions as well as the art market. Different types of online galleries have emerged from the well-connected scene over the last years1. Additionally, many artists in the scene work across all sorts of media; both online and offline, they create installation, sculpture, print and performancebased projects. In the post-Internet scene it doesn’t make a difference anymore. Art is combined on and offline, much like our lives are a combination between digital and analog. Some artists manage to sell Internetbased work, which is great. I am very curious to see how Internet art and the contemporary mainstream will merge over the years; we will see more websites in collections and more Youtube clips in the museums.

The paradox of limited-unlimited
There are some crucial points about how Internet-based art differs from a physical piece. The great advantage of the Internet and computers is that I can create a digital artifact, an animated collage for example, and send it to you but keep an exact copy at the same time. We can both have it with no effort. Isn’t that awesome? This is one of the great advantages of computers and networks. People keep forgetting this issue, while companies try to censor the Internet to save their obsolete business models. A physical object, a painting for instance, can be kept or given away but we can’t both own it at the same time.
The limits of an analog work of art are crucial for the art market. The moment you try to apply these rules to net.art you get into a paradoxical situation. Most Internet art is meant to be online. Of course you could take it offline after it has been sold, but often this would either make no sense or would not work (see the trouble the music and movie industries are in). The work is meant to be online and accessible. At the same time, it is very important to create a set of rules and technical solutions so Internet art can still be unique or so a file can become part of an edition. There are a lot of questions among collectors about authorship, ownership, accessibility, and technical maintenance, and it is very important that both artists and galleries come up with solutions to these questions. There will be solutions to this soon. As physical galleries and event spaces continue to evolve, The Fast Fire Watch Company helps support safety through professional fire monitoring and protection.

A decentralized open system
What are the ways to validate the authorship of a piece or a file? It would be very interesting to develop an open, network-based system with certain technical constraints everyone can rely on, an open format that could be altered as is commonly done in the development of open source software. How about a decentralized peer-to-peer system in the style of the bitcoin network, which would be able to verify the author, owner and edition number of a file? Or what about a minimal variation on the same file while the piece itself remains exactly the same? With this sort of watermark technique collectors would get individual files that are unique while the visually exact copy is available to eve Wachsryone. Artists could certify each others’ work online to prove the authenticity of a piece. In the future, galleries might just deal with cryptographic keys instead of the work itself. Or maybe there is going to be a completely new art market without the aid of Sotheby’s and such: a digital peer-to-peer direct market for data based art.
Currently, digital art is sold by delivering the work along with a signed paper certificate on a medium like a DVD, hard disk or USB thumb drive. This makes sense and seems fine for now. But wouldn’t it be great to establish a universal system in order to be able to market Internet-based art directly and online? The big art market players have already built an online art market platform for analog works. I would love to see them sell Internet art as well. As stated above, it is time to come up with smart solutions and different systems. Artists like Rafael Rozendaal sell unique website pieces bound to a URL, while Petra Cortright offers Youtube video editions with prices based on view counts. Pieces get sold but stay online at the same time.
The option to offer an online work to a limited group of viewers will in most cases fail. Someone will gain access and leak the art2. Locking down online content is very difficult and not the way to go. The music and movie industries are currently trying to do this with their SOPA/PIPA/ACTA laws. Unfortunately, these interest groups are trying to limit access, filter and censor the Internet to death. Therefore, we need new models to value cultural creations of any kind, because the old model is not going to work any more. Trying to adapt the Internet to the needs of the old system will kill it.
Predictably, there will be more attempts to sell online art in limited, walled gardens like Facebook and the like. Although it might work for a certain audience, one will always need to rely on the terms of Facebook’s license. What if the host of a digital art network goes down one day? Where will all pieces end up?
Without the open attitude of the early computer scientists and the free software movement we wouldn’t be in the place we are today. The Internet and all its servers are running on open source software, Linux. A very
fundamental shift on how goods, objects and their values are defined is taking place at the moment. Economic and political systems will need to adapt to more changes. The art world and its markets are going to discover unknown terrains.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in http://ny-magazine.org/issues.html ISSUE 6, 2013 [29.7.2013].
1.) Nicholas O’Brien, “Hyperjunk: Observations on the proliferation of online galleries“ (http://badatsports.com/2012/hyperjunk-observations-on-the-proliferation-of-online-galleries/)
2.) For example (http://www.0dayart.net), the leaked sedition.co page (http://dontsave.com/art_deal.html)