What does it mean to reify an idea, to give it weight and meaning? To justify it? To take something not valued and re-frame the issue to make it more important.
Can that be done in writing? How do ideas spread in the world? If this project is a sort of feminist campaign to promote an expanded idea of the self as not only an individual but in concert with others. It’s ecological, it’s about the many, it’s learning how to work in concert with others instead of only alone, and validating that as valuable. What does that mean? The conversation I had yesterday with Jonathan Carson, CSM Associate Dean of Student Experience & Enhancement, made it clear that there is a crisis happening in the realm of collaboration, even the idea that collaboration is a skill that needs teaching, like foundational drawing.
He said that the social parameters of the school are the purview of the Arts SU, so I’m looking forward to another meeting with them scheduled on the 19th with a group of people in the SU. It’s a good deadline to compile and present my findings to date. Because if this issue keeps getting pointed to as one that they are most well-situated to address, I’d like to work with them more.
Getting organized is a good step now. It was helpful to meet with Poojitha and see her visual mapping of the issue and her ideas for addressing it. There are many tentacles in motion. But this issue of the lone artist-genius embedded in the culture of the university might be part of the lynchpin. All the attendant ideas of individuality that stem from that, of a certain kind of artistic genius being promoted above all else.
This relates back to expanded notions of what art/creativity is and can be as well, which was part of the project that my hybrid retail space Days in Los Angeles (2016-2020) embodied. I need to return to thinkers like Grant Kester whose books Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context I have read pieces of but not connected to this current project. He is writing about community and collaborative art traditions in opposition to entrenched modernist ideas of avant-garde art as being purposefully removed and difficult to understand.
Because why are community and collaboration important? Why is the social-emotional important? The idea of calling in instead of calling out, building rather than tearing down, ecologically minded rather than artificially separated. These things seem self-evident to me, but I may need to further explicitly justify them to build a strong argument. I’m planning to come back to Etienne Wenger’s book Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity because it tackles just these issues.
I have also been contemplating form and am curious about what other forms this critique can take. There’s an emphasis on the written in the course and I love words. But I don’t think traditional writing structures are my strength. I’d like to try to work through it in some other form as well, beginning with a more poetic reflection, and response. Can these concepts be better represented in poetry?
with mouth and palms stretched wide
It’s like that idea
where you enter into a specific place
thinking you’ll know the experience
but once you’re there it’s a distorted landscape
the wrong side of the looking glass
instead of clarity
it’s wavey rigidity
proclaiming itself holistic
from a megaphone by a charlatan
it’s isolation
rooms and departments
aquariums locked
because money is water
and opening will upset the balance
getting us all wet
it’s avoidance hidden behind the word parity
when each person brings unequally
with their very presence
it’s each administrator in turn
throwing up their hands
saying “we’re doing our best”
“it’s not our purview”
“we know it’s an issue”
“we’ve been trying to change”
“it’s so good to hear from a student”
It’s a chart so full of lines stretching
dotted lines crossing
power lines weaving
that it most resembles a forest
ecosystems are not straight lines
and this place is a jungle
without the rationality of nature
it’s protecting its own interests
the bottom line
reputation
but the world needs creativity it cries
with mouth and palms stretched wide
before stuffing pockets
and zipping them shut
perhaps it’s folly, as I was warned
to look at this blind giant
wrapped in his own charm