Days, my business in LA, is an example of the principles of inclusivity and accessibility in action: it was action research.
It grew from me noticing how strictly defined boundaries were hurting (inhibiting creative potential) people at a work level. I created a project that sought to address these issues and empower/educate/open people who came in contact with it.
In this university structure, I’m noticing many similar patterns replicated. So, I’ve been distracted because I want to understand how and why this is happening within this structure too. The university system is structurally situated “before” the work-life in many ways.
Which led me to wonder: if I take a step back, can these concepts born of noticing and questioning some particular structures be combined into a more extensive unified theory?
At the core, maybe it’s something investigating the dangers of “siloing” and the importance of cross-disciplinary thinking and holistic support.
If we look at this “core” concept, it explains why I’m interested in different projects and divisions at CSM/UAL that seem to find their way through some of the thick silo walls; why I’m interested in community, translation, and multi-layered vs. singular voices in this course. But, I keep coming around to how muddled I feel in university because there’s still so much focus on the individual, which can feel like a form of hyper-specialization rather than engaged transdisciplinary efforts. Maybe that has to happen before people can collaborate. As we have experienced, collaboration can be challenging within rigid, forced settings, with language barriers, and without holistic, structured support about what it means to collaborate inside of facilitated conversations and feedback mechanisms. There is much talk of dialogical processes and yet are we trying to move past the rigid teacher/student dynamics and hierarchies? Why does it feel like we still lack an established cross-disciplinary/course exchange?
Outcomes
What is lost in this emphasis on the individual is precisely what I have long critiqued about art schools—the vacuum that can be created. Solipsistic thinking will only take you so far, as ideas and interests are sparked and cultivated through wider, consistent exposure to more types of ideas. If this unit is imagination, what have we been doing? Perhaps that’s why I got so excited by the glimmer of possibility in RR’s slide about “Desire and Research” because that, perhaps, is an entry point to explaining some of these things to him: he is not unaware of the body’s role in this. Psychogeography, a common theme in his lectures, is also about the physical/subjectivities etched into the landscape. Yet the course often eschews this connection in favor of something both more abstract and more traditional.
My proposal would be this: with the proven popularity of the course, let’s push more now. Acknowledging the work it took to get to this place, of course. In a self-selecting fashion, even if people have returned to enforce the “positive reviews” of the curriculum, it doesn’t mean it’s the best way forward. Can I prove that my experience and observations will move this course toward better-serving people’s growth? This is moving into concepts of creativity, learning, education, self-awareness, communication, and somatics.
Perhaps it’s more natural to think of these ideas within the context of a university system than in a retail environment. However, I also feel navigating changes within the Byzantine system seems nearly impossible. Hence my lack of interest after undergrad of engaging it and choosing instead to work with these concepts in an outsider way. But now that I find myself inside, I see the potential for change here, along with many of the same axes I have enacted embodied critique elsewhere.