Interposing on the Collective Culture through the Arts: A Case Study of One University Course

In these works I am concerned with where the artists position themselves, what commitments have they made and to whom, what positions have they taken in the public arena, how they function as artists, designers, public intellectuals, and citizens who are able to raise the questions and lead communities into complex conversations, not necessarily by their physical presence, but in their role as mobilizers of social change and transformation. In a sense these are all conceptual projects that have physical manifestations, they are physical projects that have deep conceptual roots. They challenge the nature of what is art and what is design, what are social commentary, activism, and community rehabilitation. How do these all come together in the public sphere activated by hybrid creativity? —Carol Becker, "Civil Dialog and the Social Project Context"

More Questions Than Answers

Art in the era succeeding postmodernism stretches beyond common boundaries into nontraditional venues that are collaborative, interdisciplinary and propelled by issues of social justice. These modes of art making have serious implications within the academy for the study of art and art education. In writing the syllabus for 07s:367: Seminar for Research in Art Education, I considered the following questions. What if art embodied values and practices inherent to activism beyond the mere production of an object? What if artists worked to connect to other people’s everyday experiences in the hope of shaping social policy? What if artists merged discussions about formal aesthetics and the elements and principles of art/design with discussions about moral growth and public good? What would a new vision of art supporting cultural change through the participation of others in meaningful art practices embedded with productive discussions of issues look like? These are not original questions; for nearly 30 years, these questions have been in the collective consciousness of artists, critics, historians and activists.

In the February 2006 edition of Artforum, Claire Bishop shook up the community art world by suggesting aesthetics are sacrificed in the service of artwork aimed to change social policy and practice. Grant Kester disputes her claims by making the argument that relational aesthetics are at the heart of such endeavors. Bishop also questioned whether there was a patch of safe territory between traditional gallery/museum-driven artists and collaborative anti-establishment artists. In addition, she compares different models of collaboration ranging on the spectrum from inclusive to exploitative. She states,

The discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian "good soul." In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should renounce authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her. This self-sacrifice is accompanied by the idea that art should extract itself from the "useless" domain of the aesthetic and be fused with social praxis (183).

Her critical article brings forward the question: Can there be an authentic art making that is skillful, collaborative, visionary and generative of social change without removing or disregarding an artist’s aesthetic principles? Suzi Gablik’s work reinforces this tension felt by artists who are making socially engaged work, maintaining a sense of control, being recognized as legitimate by the art world, and contributing to the betterment of society:

When I first began to write “Has Modernism Failed?” more than twenty years ago, what I wanted to explore was the relevance of spiritual and moral values in a society oriented around manic production, maximum energy flow, and a fixation with commodities. Since then, the art world of today appears to have bifurcated into two completely different aesthetic paradigms, each one differing sharply in their view about the meaning and purpose of art. In the first instance are artists who continue to proclaim and support the self-sufficiency of art in defiance of the social good and any form of moral earnestness — autonomy implying social separateness as the basic premise of art-making. In the second instance are artists who want art to have some worthy agenda outside of itself, and a socially redeeming purpose (Gablik).

This tension was at the core of questions, actions, and readings a group of graduate students and I explored in the spring of 2006.

Moving Outside the Ivory Tower

In the seminar, we studied a variety of texts, but spent the most time reading and discussing Grant Kester’s “Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.” After much discussion about the nature of art that is connected to social justice and intervention I asked my students to construct a project based on the idea that they would act as an agent of social change through their work. Students responded in a variety of ways.

This paper focuses on the experience of three students. Lou* is a bisexual artist who was moved after an incident within the community of Iowa City to create and distribute stickers, which read, “Homophobia is Gay.” Karen* and April* are both young mothers amazed by the transformation their status as new mothers had on the public perception of their bodies as objects of curiosity, disdain and unwelcome familiarity. They collaborated to create a series of maternity shirts and nursing tents that acted as props to use during the act of performing the roles of motherhood in public settings. Finally, Ben* is a secondary-school art teacher who was disturbed by how segregated his students were because of their socioeconomic status, culture, geography and the classes they were taking. He worked with a cross-section of secondary students after school to create a series of art works to address and reframe these issues. These included posters, billboards and a converted canned-drink machine that dispensed messages.

Ben, one of the students in our Seminar for Research in Art Education, is a secondary-school art teacher who was disturbed by how segregated his students were because of their socioeconomic status, culture, geography and the classes they were taking. He worked with a cross-section of secondary students after school to create a series of art works to address and reframe these issues. These included posters, billboards and a converted canned-drink machine that dispensed messages. Above, one of the posters. Click here to enlarge

While the work of these students was localized, it was a daring and exciting way to make art. The students were motivated by the changes they saw and the responses they received from others. The pedagogy involved in teaching this kind of art making is slippery. Work of this kind is not object- or image-driven; it is often collaborative; and the ideas behind such work are based on issues in the community that may be fleeting, enduring or growing. The end result of such work is not predictable, but it is transformative for makers, participants and viewers. Finally the work is outside of the art grid; it is not made for museums or galleries, but instead is made for public consumption. Oftentimes artists must extend themselves beyond the studio and work in interdisciplinary ways that may require them to be makers, facilitators, mediators and scholars.

Transgression and Critical Pedagogy

According to bell hooks, the notion of pleasure and real excitement in the classroom is transgressive.

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process. To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement was to transgress (hooks 7).

All of us in the seminar were very excited by the dialog and debate that was generated. We also enjoyed listening to the adventures of our colleagues each week. One week Lenny*, a graduate student in Language, Literacy and Culture thrilled us with ninja-like tales of secretly papering a building on campus with posters and wheat paste. Another week Lou* told us about an idea to make secret messages to leave on exercise equipment at her gym. Mina* was extremely interested in issues related to sustainability. She created a series of art works to encourage people in the community to recycle their newspapers. Early one morning, she positioned her work, a print piece, in the centerfold of local newspapers for sale in vending machines around town; it was a Sunday she would never forget. Karen* stirred all of the mothers in our class with tales of breastfeeding in public under duress and unwelcome stares from strangers. Her story occurred at the same time a woman was thrown out of a local eating establishment for breastfeeding, setting off a round of protests and nurse-ins. Each of these experiences spurred the students to dig deeper and pursue their work as artists with a new vigor. This is not to say that at times we were not puzzled by questions related to boundaries, the legitimacy of creative research, legal issues and meaning. For example, we all wondered to some degree, how guerilla actions fit into an appropriate pedagogy for the ivory tower.

As a teacher, I felt for the first time that I was able to enact a model of critical pedagogy. In the words of Peter McLaren,

Critical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society, and the nation state (7).

This has had serious implications for my approach to teaching and my students’ approach to learning, teaching and making. As a group, we decided what knowledge was important, we picked our ideas apart and tried to discover how power and privilege might shape those ideas. We stepped outside of the boundaries of classic academic pedagogy by engaging the community, using our practice to inform our understanding and deconstruction of theory. We also presented our knowledge through writing, telling and making and sought to form a collaborative discourse that could inform our actions and thoughts.

Case Studies

* The names of students and places have been changed to protect their privacy

This paper is based on my recollection and record of events, the final papers of my students, and informal conversations about their experience. I shared my paper with students to make sure that I was accurate in my depiction of events and their experiences. In writing these case studies, I sought students who struggled with the experience as well as students who embraced it. What I have presented, I hope, is a series of different approaches to using art as an agent of social change and empowerment.

Homophobia is Gay

Lou* is a graduate student in Art Education who happened to take my course at the same time she was “coming out.” I have known Lou for almost ten years. She has always had the heart of an activist. As long as I have known her she has also been a practicing artist. During the semester she took my course, she slowly joined a number of GLBTA groups including a listserv called graddykes. One afternoon she was reading a number of posts on the listserv that alluded to an incident at a local gym to which Lou belonged. Allegedly, two women, who were partners, hugged each other after a workout and were later intimidated by the management and told that their behavior was unwelcome and inappropriate. The women felt as though there were discriminated against because of their sexual preference. Lou, inspired by the artists we had studied, decided to instigate a guerilla protest at the gym. First, she wanted to get all of her friends together, screen print tee-shirts that said something about equal rights and have everyone come to the gym for a long workout session wearing their tee-shirts. After some thought she changed her mind and wanted to create a series of fortune-cookie-sized messages bearing phrases such as “A homosexual was just here” and “If you support gay rights please tell the management.” Her original plan was to leave these small messages on machines after she finished working out. She had a number of other women who also agreed to do the same thing.

After thinking it over for a week or so and learning more details about the incident, she decided that her original intervention was not necessary. But she was still motivated to explore the homophobia that she felt plagued our small college town in some venues. Lou, inspired by the stickers offered through the 1000 journals project that state, “This is an experiment and you are part of it,” decided stickers would be an ideal way to spread the word. Her new project consisted of printing a series of small stickers that read, “Homophobia is Gay,” a phrase she overheard at a gay bar. She then placed these all over town, on the doors of bars, on mail boxes, in rest rooms, on newspaper machines, even on automatic teller machines. She spent a weekend documenting her placement of the stickers through a series of black-and-white photographs. She also created stickers for all of the members of our class and we placed them in various locations as well.

This could be the end of the story, but art has a life of its own beyond the maker. A year later I was talking to a doctoral student in the English department about Frank Shepard Fairey’s sticker campaign from 1986. He printed and posted a number of stickers that said, “Andre the Giant has a Posse.” These later were copied and posted by others all over the United States. She told me about a group of students who were seriously studying a similar sticker campaign in Iowa City, the “Homophobia is Gay” sticker phenomena. I almost danced with secret glee. Later that afternoon I called Lou and relayed the message. She was giddy with the knowledge that people had noticed. I believe this experience was transformative for Lou as an artist and GLBT community member and advocate.

According to Shirley Hayes Yokely, an associate professor of art education at Middle Tennessee State University,

Questioning and conversational encounters become political acts as they open possibilities for change through self- and societal introspection and reflection. All the while, these cognitive understandings extend insights into more meaningful ideational, expressive, and instrumental components for personal artmaking. The outcomes seek to provide students with sagacity and opportunity for making choices that can contribute to social, hence global welfare (20).

I believe that when Lou identified herself with other GLBT members of the community and began to live openly as a lesbian she began to understand how others could be cruel. She also found that her art was a way to approach difficult issues and instigate awareness. She has continued to make stickers and post them anonymously around town. Her current research is about how art can help members of the GLBT community to come to terms with the challenges they may face in coming out and living in a mostly straight and sometimes narrow world.

Pregnancy=Power=Privacy Issues: Induction into the Community of Motherhood

Karen* and April* are young mothers who each, in 2006, experienced the pregnancy and birth of her first child. April’s daughter was born in October and Karen’s son was born in April. My second child had been born the summer before, so the three of us were knee-deep in maternity. Our class was very close as a group. Many of the students had taken coursework together for at least two years. During our class discussions we would occasionally become sidetracked by stories related to breastfeeding, birth and pregnancy. Our class was mostly women, some of whom were already seasoned mothers. The two men in our class were also interested in these discussions. One was a young father and the other was soon to be married and hopeful about the possibility of a family in the future.

Both April and Karen told stories about the surprises that had come with motherhood. April was amazed that her body no longer felt like her own or was treated as though it belonged to an autonomous individual who had the right to decide who, how and when her body was touched and discussed in public. She created a series of maternity shirts with humorous and political phrases such as “look up” and “This is My Body.” When she became pregnant, she was unprepared for the politics surrounding her body that she would endure. She felt as though there was a constant sense of surveillance by others. For example, if she was eating at a restaurant she felt as though there was a possibility that other women were observing what she ordered and ate. Another thing that surprised her was the fact that suddenly her body was public property. Complete strangers felt at liberty to stroke her growing belly. In her final artist’s statement she writes:

Feminist theorist Susan Bordo poses the question “Are Mother’s Persons?” allowing her audience to contemplate the views society places on the female body, specifically the contradictions often associated with pregnancy as both a private and yet very public experience. Often we think of the voyeurism involved with the female body as object versus subject promulgated through such things as advertising. For a pregnant woman, voyeurism takes on a whole new set of meanings. The gaze of others often explicitly ignores the mother-to-be as subject viewing the woman as a “vessel” for the child. (Excerpt from April’s final paper)

Through a series of ideas and art projects April sought to answer the following questions:

If one examines the identity of a pregnant woman one might consider the following questions: Is she an individual subject? Who governs her body when she also carries a child? Is the woman simply a vessel carrying another life? How does the medical profession deem her as an individual? What are the moral and ethical considerations if a woman refuses medical treatment for various reasons but may in turn harm the baby or herself? What rights does she have? (Excerpt from April’s final paper)

April’s process as an artist involves collecting the stories of others to gain a larger and more faceted picture of a phenomenon. Her approach is deeply influenced by her scholarship in the area of Hermeneutics, especially the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. She is also deeply influenced by ideas connected to Michel Foucault and John Dewey. April constantly strives to understand how others might view a situation and how their experience adds to the cultural interpretation of an idea or event as well as her interpretation. She began her project by asking mothers she knew to write a letter about the experience of motherhood. She placed these impressions side-by-side with her own impressions of motherhood. Finally, she landed on creating the shirts. She also created a jewelry box/book in which each of the letters is transcribed and stored. All three works, the correspondence, shirts and book were equally important in helping her understand how mothers are perceived and how these perceptions affect them. The shirts project was a concept trial; April imagined an entire line of maternity shirts that examine and force others to reexamine their ideas related to the concept of pregnancy and motherhood.

Karen's experiences started on campus. She said she really was surprised by how few pregnant women were on campus; she said her pregnancy was something of a curiosity in the classes that she taught. These classes were filled with female elementary-education students who all hoped to work with children. They were very curious about Karen's experience.

Shortly after a harrowing birth experience, she attended an academic conference with her husband, also an art teacher, and her infant son. At the conference she felt ostracized because of their child. As though others perceived her as less of a legitimate academic because she was so obviously a young mother as well. At times she also felt like people thought that her husband was actually the one attending the conference and she was just a wife and mother who was “tagging along.” She felt as though she had temporarily lost her membership within a community of academics because of her physical need to be close to her nursing child.

On that same trip she had a wonderful exchange with an experienced mother in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art:

This woman knew that I was breastfeeding my child and told me to “do that as long as you can.” She continued to explain that she had breastfed her son so long that people told her she was crazy. She didn’t say a specific amount of time, but I am sure that even if it was only up to a year, people may have told her she was crazy, but that is beside the point. As we exchanged pleasant goodbyes she apologized for giving us unsolicited advice and then framed it by saying, “I always felt like I needed someone to say it was ok.” I thanked her and we all continued on our separate ways through the museum (Excerpt from Karen’s final paper)

This exchange made Karen realize that she had become part of a community of women who were mothers. Both of these instances made her realize how important it is to offer support to other mothers. Because breastfeeding had stirred up such a local controversy she felt that topic would be an appropriate social issue on which to focus. She created a series of breast-feeding shirts with a frame that made them almost appear to be a tent of sorts. Inside the shirts were mobiles and toys. They were equipped with a small covered peephole in the front so the mother can actually see her child. On the back she sewed upside-down triangles with messages such as “Caution: Breast-feeding”.

These shirts both served to shield the mother’s breasts but also made the act of breast-feeding into a large-scale spectacle. They were a metaphor for all of the messages you receive as a mother from the healthcare community that if you are a good mother then you must breastfeed because it is best for the baby. Society embraces this message but duplicity is clear, the other message is that you must be ashamed to do this in public so you have to be very discreet, if it is necessary, so as not to offend others. In the United States, once breasts are for the nourishment of children and not for sexual pleasure they become objects that must be covered at all costs and that can show no outward signs of their biological function. When they are for sexual pleasure they do not need to be shielded from public view in the same way.

This was perhaps the first piece Karen had made that was deeply connected to a somewhat political issue. She stated that while she had considered wearing the shirts in a performance of sorts, in the end she felt more comfortable simply making them and exhibiting them with mock advertisements that explained the meaning behind the garments. Her hope was that the display would make other women in the same situation feel as though they were not alone; they were part of a larger community of women who were mothers.

Both Karen and April discussed the difficult transition from nulligravida to primagravida. Anyone who has had a child knows that nothing can prepare a woman for the physical experience; there is also very little to prepare women for the social experience of motherhood. It is bittersweet. Publicly it is depicted as a wonderful time of love and expectation that women should handle with little or no trouble because it is a “natural” part of life that we are biologically predestined to experience; the subtext is that all women will naturally enjoy and become good mothers. In reality, it is grueling and unexpectedly fraught with moments of despair for many women. Both April and Karen hoped to use humor to temper their experiences and also to unveil and cope with the difficulties that arise during this transition.

A Vision for Unity and Empathy: The “D” Wingers, Emos, Jocks and Preps

Ben* is a secondary-school art teacher and a graduate student in the Art Education program. He took my course during his first semester of graduate school. Ben was intent on sharing what he learned in his graduate work at the University of Iowa with his students in Dubuque at Winstead High School*. He began an afterschool art club and was amazed when 26 students signed up. In the end there were 14, still a fairly large number for an afterschool club devoted entirely to visual art.

Ben was heavily influenced by the work of Krzysztof Wodicziko, William Cochran and Adrian Piper. He shared Wodicziko’s work with his students, particularly his latest work that involves video projections on large public landmarks of people telling stories related to deep wounds within specific communities. For example he worked with Japanese who survived the dropping of the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima.

After watching the documentary the students became really excited about the project and they immediately started sharing ideas. “What are some of the problem in our (name of school) community,” one student asked. The students then began to write down possible themes for the project. Drugs, alcohol abuse, peer pressure, harassment, stress, teen pregnancy, the war on Iraq, and discrimination in the school were just a few of the issues the students discussed. I continued the meeting asking the students to think of a relationship among all the themes they shared. What is the general theme? What is a common problem or relationship that everyone in the school shares? One student commented, “Pain. These are all related to different types of pain within our (name of school) community.” (Excerpt from Ben’s final paper)

Ben’s students began to focus on the community of their school and were interested in discovering what the experiences of different students were with regard to pain. They surveyed students at the school about types of pain they experienced (psychological and/or physical) and asked them whether it was self-inflicted, caused by another person or accidental. For their first piece, they created a vending machine with different buttons that related to the question of pain. They decided to call it the pain reliever. If a person pressed one of the buttons related to the kind of pain they experienced out would come a slip of paper that had statistics about the issue, ways to cope and professionals and organizations to contact for help.

Students in the art club also decided to make billboards that would stand over the three entrances to the school and would ask viewers to consider how people experience and cause pain. Ben switched hats from teacher to artist and helped to spearhead a project with students involving photography and text. He transcribed discussions around the idea of pain and belonging that took place during the art club meetings between students. From these discussions he extracted quotes. He took these quotes and imposed the text over close-ups of students’ eyes, lips, and noses in a row of striking large-format photographs. These photos would be posted all over the school to raise awareness of how students experience pain and to elevate the empathy level of students at Winstead High School* for their fellow peers. At the end of the semester I believe Ben felt empowered as an artist and a teacher and was excited by his active group of students who embraced the ideas related to dialogical art making with zeal and action. His project took on a life of its own and continues to flourish and impact the students at his high school.

Outcomes, Pedagogy, Theory and Praxis Related to Teaching and Learning about Art as a Social Intervention

I often know a class has been successful when students are left wanting more and formulating their own questions about an issue or idea. All of us were transformed by our time together in 7s: 367 because of the issues that we faced as a group of artists and scholars. It was like sitting down to a meal of many courses, some delicious and infinite, others short and sweet, and others a serious goulash of murky this and that. Many of us unpacked for the first time what it means to try and elicit social change through the arts. It is fraught with issues related to aesthetics, control, identity and community. It is exhilarating and sometimes deliciously scary. Each student became more critical and also more awed by the role of visual artists in society; they courageously pushed their personal and artistic boundaries of comfort. My boundaries also migrated and at times seemed to disappear entirely. A few students decided that while they enjoyed the ideas we discussed that as artists, they were not as comfortable or as skilled at making work constructed around social issues that pushed for change through confrontation, however mild the confrontation might be.

Each student that I presented in this paper represents a different approach to the idea of artist as an agent of social change. Lou was drawn to the idea of guerilla tactics and the power of words. Her work was spontaneous, collaborative and generative. Intimate issues drove Lou, April and Karen. They worked in isolation but with input from others, weaving stories together into a series of objects that were meant to spark further dialog and a sense of recognition and community. Their work, cathartic in nature at times, also helped them make meaning from their own experiences. Ben saw his role as that of a catalyst. He orchestrated the conditions and provided support for young people in his community to come together recognize an issue and work to change the attitudes and experiences of others through the arts.

In academia, activism and academics are not commonly linked. Professors are fearful of bringing radical content into their classroom, hoping instead to create a “neutral” place of learning where everyone can feel comfortable. Traditionally students write papers instead of acting out their ideas. While an action-oriented approach may make us uncomfortable and in some ways liable for the actions of our students, discomfort is an inherent part of any learning process or change. It is important to help students discover social agency by empowering them to employ the tools and talents they possess to create change through reflection, dialog or even action.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art. The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Ph.D., is an associate professor of art education at the University of Iowa, where she has taught since 1999. Currently she is working to build sustainable visual arts programming at the juvenile-justice correctional facilities in Iowa.

References

Becker, C. “Civil Dialog and the Social Project Context.” Paper. Future of Creativity Symposium. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, Ill. 1-3 November 2001.

--- Zones Of Contention: Essays on Arts, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety. New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.

--- The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society, and Social Responsibility. London: Routledge, 1994.

Bishop, C. “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents.” ArtforumInternational 44.6 (2006): 178-83.

Gablik, S. “Beyond the Disciplines, Art Without Borders.” Paper. Monongahela Conference on Post-Industrial Community Development. STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Pa. , 23-25 October 2004. 25 September 2006 <http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/gablik1.html>.

hooks, b. Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge, 1994

Kester, G. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004.

Kwon, M. One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge: MIT press, 2004.

McLaren, P. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Pedagogy of the Revolution. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2000.

Original CAN/API publication: June 2008