1040 Metropolitan (Third Space)

-Very much a first attempt at connecting Education Theory for Social Justice, some of the artists we spoke to at the open studios, Understanding Comics, and my own work (writing and linoleum print-making).

• Kelly Lycan (Video Instillations):  The video I watched displayed only text, asking questions and giving instructions to the viewer, centered on perceptions and emotional connections to color.  The first questions focused on the immediate surroundings, color we could see and touch.  The questions began moving from seeing to visualizing or imagining.  We were asked to imagine a color we could not see.  I tried to imagine purple.  (This discussion of her work is really lacking without being able to quote the film.  These instillations are new works, and are not posted on her website.)

! The experience of the video relied heavily on the participation of the viewer, and my efforts to imagine, for example, the color of my favorite cup, and how the color affects the taste of my drink.

! I thought of the poem Cloud Piece from Grapefruit, Yoko Ono's book of poetry in the form of instructions.

This particular poem was the inspiration for John Lennon's song Imagine.  Like the questions and statements appearing in Lycan's video, the viewer is asked to imagine objects and the immaterial, and then perform some mental work with it.  (Lycan's video asked us to drink from our favorite cup, and note the change in color as the drink is consumed.)

Last spring I taught a lesson on Lennon's Imagine to my class of adult ESOL students.  Almost every student was at least familiar with the song, and the class was generally excited to be reading the lyrics and listening to the music.  In researching for the lesson, I read about the connection to Ono's poem (Cloud Piece).  I had been unsure how I would address the themes of Lennon's song, namely the suggestion that conditions for peace depend on the erasure of religion and national identity:

Imagine there's no Heaven 

It's easy if you try 

No hell below us 

Above us only sky 

Imagine all the people 

Living for today 

Imagine there's no countries 

It isn't hard to do 

Nothing to kill or die for 

And no religion too 

Imagine all the people 

Living life in peace

This song has been performed by numerous popular singers at international events (such as the Nobel Peace prize award ceremony.)  For my lesson, I didn't want to minimize the controversial elements, which often seem to be lost in the bitter-sweet melody, presented with sentimental optimism.  After reading Ono's poem, it seemed clear to me that Lennon's lyrics were in fact instructions.

So I asked my students to imagine.  I asked them to imagine a word with 1) No heaven and hell, 2) No countries, 3) No religion, 4) No possessions.  This, I felt was the most fair way for students to accept or reject his claims.  A student with a deep personal connection to his faith or her national origin, could describe a troubled world in the absence of these identities.  

This discussion failed utterly.  It didn't matter how I rephrased the instructions, the students did not engage.  I failed to recognize the difficulty of imagining.  My lesson depended on the students' ability to imagine different worlds, before I confirmed that they could at least imagine different weather.  I think the greatest strength of Lycan's video was in her scaffolding: discussing color first concretely with the objects around us, before we were asked to imagine a color we have never seen.

 

The success of Chrisostomou's work also seems to depend on the participation of the viewer.  He described his interactions with Richard Serra's sculpture.  Before moving to NYC, Chrisostomou had only seen Serra's sculpture from photographs.  Of course, viewers' engagement with Serra's massive iron sculptures depends entirely on their presence; they must stand dwarfed before the sculpture's impossibly heavy facade, and walking through the impossibly graceful curving of the walls.

 

When I look at a photograph of Serra's sculpture, I can't engage with it as I typically would with an image.  The giftshop postcard in my hand can only offer me the promise of a future experience, just like a travel ad.  The image of cascading hills and valleys under the bluest skies invites no sense of calm or reflection.  The image invites me to imagine my presence there, drawing me into an imagined world, drawing attention to everything that is around me,  discovering knew dissatisfaction with every corner of my kitchen--how cluttered the table and how tacky the tiles.  

This is the space that Chrisostomou seems to be working in.  

Wasted Youth

The scenes he constructs invite me in with the sense of familiarity, achieved by his painstaking attention to detail.  And at the moment I that I enter, I'm confronted with the unreality, pushed back out.  I see the soft light reflecting from the cabinets.  The kitchen of my childhood looks nothing like this, but that light draws me in to early evenings in the summer, helping my mother prepare dinner.  And then I see the giant eggs that threaten to break through the counter, discolored and spotted, maybe rotten, stamped with the cage number where that giant hen must be held.

The result of this is not quite fantasy.  Fantasy authors, directors, or artists make every effort to remove the mediation.  Tolkien created new languages to the reader for the express purpose of immediacy, every aspect of Middle Earth carefully constructed for readers to lose themselves.  But the more I look at Wasted Youth, I begin to find new disconnections.  That's not a tiled floor; it's a plastic simulation warping and lifting from the base.  

It seems to me the success of Lycan's and Chrisostomou's work lies in the dissonance and the unfulfilled.  Chrisostomou's kitchen reveals it's unreality, and Lycan's instructions grow increasingly impossible.  Works like these depend entirely on the viewer.  The product lies in the thoughts and imagination of the viewer, suspended and unresolved.  These works demand a lot from the viewers; they must construct their own experience.  Serra and Tolkien has done all the work for us.  With Wasted Youth, the viewer can't just show up and stand before the photograph and be overcome.  However, this increase in expectation of the viewer, also indicates to me a profound level of trust and faith the public's intelligence and creativity.

Notes for future edits:

1. How does this "third space" connect to my beliefs about education?
2. How can Lycan's and Chrisostomou's approach be applied in the classroom?
3. How does their work connect to my own?
4. 
   

Learning to Listen

I am currently student teaching after a year of taking courses.  I feel an intense pressure to apply the theory I've steeped my head in for the last 12 months, and frustratingly, the personal principles I drawn from all that pedagogy often feel at odds with the "realities" of the classroom.

I am not making excuses, though.  This post will be an attempt to connect theory to the real concerns voiced by my supervising teacher, my cooperating teacher, and other staff at the middle school where I'm observing and teaching.

At the most recent staff meeting for 7th grade teachers and administrators, nearly everyone voiced the necessity of developing listening skills among the students.  This fits well with my personal goals of learning how to develop community in the classroom.  I believe that in order for students to truly learn, knowledge must be constructed in the classroom, achieved through the participation and contributions of every student (as apposed to what Paulo Fiere would describe as the "banking" system, where teachers "deposit" or transfer their knowledge to the students, only requiring students to be able to recall that information, making it available for "withdrawal" at the time of the test.)  

For a student to build on the ideas of their classmates, they must be able to truly hear them.  They must develop their ability to listen.  

When I am teaching reading skills, I first determine that the individual student can decode the words.  Students cannot be asked to consider thematic content of their independent reading, when they are still developing their phonemic awareness, their ability to recognize the specific sounds dictated by the grouping of letters.  Additionally, from my experience with the practice of visual culture, I understand that interpreting images depends upon an individual's ability to read images closely.

I believe that if we expect our students to listen to others, and respond with interpretations, we must help them to develop their ability to hear.  I first discovered the notion of listening exercises from Jon Mueller, through his work with the Haggerty Museum of Art.  On his blog, he writes: "Oftentimes, when people hear something they are unfamiliar with, a natural tendency is to disassociate oneself from it."  Here, he is discussing how people typically react to experimental music, especially when the sounds are harsh and abrasive.  However, I think it's easy to see the connection to dialogue, and our potential to disengage when we disagree with the ideas of a speaker, or don't understand, or don't believe we can actually participate in the conversation.  

My goals in developing lessons on listening:

1. Identify recordings that will challenge modern listeners (experimental compositions, field recordings, radio shows, etc.), while still offering students some point of access (probably won't start out with Merzbow)
2. Identify a measurable skill set
3. Identify connections between the listening skill set and the skills expected of students in Humanities curricula