From the list below (OE Ground Report - 1), I forgot:
- I was tagged with this lovely photo fragment from Berit Noergaard of Denmark. My selection of this tag from about 8 options suggested an affinity with others who made the same choice. That ended up being my host, Loretta Paolli and I don't know who else.
Intervened upon by childhood
The art discussed and the interventions staged at Open Engagement made many direct references to childhood. Here are a few of them:
- Darren O'Donnell's Haircuts by Children was mentioned in his presentation during the panel Art & Everyday Experience
- At the same panel, Blair Fornwald showed images from her project of sticking gum in the recesses of a poured concrete wall some where.
- Also at this panel, Lynn Marie Kirby showed the videos that resulted from the disruptions that her young son made in her daily life.
- Barbara Meneley deposited a large stash of sidewalk chalk in a large concrete bowl in the centre of campus, with the sign 'HAVE ONE' (last month's offering was bubble making supplies). The bowl and its table support resembles for me a baptism font used for infant baptism in many protestant churches.
- the ongoing cheer leading project with the obligatory POM POMs certainly brought up memories of high school for many participants. Most of us thought hard about which small children would want our POM POMs after the weekend.
- The book club led by keynote speaker, Harrel Fletcher dealt with the 1974 book Escape from Childhood by John Holt. The discussion included many personal reflections on the participant's childhood learning experiences.
- As I look back on the five names listed for the final panel, 'The Luckiest Dreamers Who Never Quit Dreaming: Emerging Social Practices Across America', what I remember most from their talks is their childhood and family of origin stories which appear to inform much of their current work.
One mechanism at work in this attention to life before adulthood is the use of children as subjects in an analysis of social interaction. Since the building block of socialization is imprinted long before we find ourselves in art school, artists use interventions staged with children or interventions that position adults in the activities of childhood to understand or at least remember the formation of our social habits. The intervention that Darren O'Donnell staged in which children were given the task of moderating adults in a large scale 'ball room dance' (i.e. a gymnasium filled with colourful inflated balls), seems to have functioned this way. At Open Engagement, O'Donnell was able to discuss the way his works function to demonstrate the crossover of social behaviours between children and adults. Perhaps the notion of childhood is more arbitrary than institutions like schools and the nuclear family want to believe. Of course this was the theme of the John Holt book club. Unfortunately it did not have an open, hospitable attitude to the privilege inherent in our current concept of childhood. Fletcher was determined in his debate to abolish school since he saw it functioning as nothing more than incarceration. (I can't help but thinking of all of the respondents to Steven Lewis' search for input from those affected by AIDS in Africa who chose school over food and clothing as a destination for monetary aid, but that is forcing more rigidity and oppositional thinking which is unhelpful in what could have been a good debate.)
The other mechanism at work in the attention to childhood in these artworks could also be avoidance. Just yesterday, I came across this in the conclusion to Rozika Parker's The Subversive Stitch (1984). She is discussing the embroidery taken up by men in the midst of 60's and 70's hippie culture.
For men, long hair and embroidered clothing constituted a rebellious gesture against a hierarchical, puritanical, masculine establishment. However, this was less a subversion of sex roles than a longing for the freedom of an idealized image of childhood - mother-loved, anarchic and untouched by daddy's world. (204)
It seems that amongst the work of many OE artists, an experience that mimics an anarchic, unfettered world might be a goal in the work. The personal family of origin stories shared included situations like a brother serving in Iraq, parental split-up, uncovering of slave-ownership family legacy... The combination of this public disclosure, participation in child-like activities, and an avoidance of analysis over how these childhood interventions and institutions actually function made me think that something serious was being avoided here. The book panel, in particular, belied the fatalism of what might bee seen as a radical, liberal group about existing social structures. American participants described the current social and political structures as being irredeemably flawed; that there was no point in reform or revolutionary acts. The euphemism of 'doing good works' or being a 'do good-er' was frequently offered as the antithesis of their motive. In Fletcher's final comments he said that doing good was OK but so was doing bad. What seemed important to him was an awareness of ones personal investment in the work: 'I do this for me. It is selfish.' That may be honest, but the honesty does not do enough to eliminate social responsibility. In fact, it exposes the artist's antagonism to social responsibilities. That, in the end is what much of that work does: it suggests that social responsibility is no longer relevant. I want to suggest that playing a gambling game of 'rock, paper, scissors' with audience members in a gallery could be read to say that gambling is all that is left; the artist's career (though no longer based on material items) will reign as the primary motive in this work.
I am left with the contrast between this work and the social interventions that are staged with intentional effort to both understand social mechanisms and to stage some kind of reform. Darren O'Donnell and Linda Duvall seem to be artists who take great pains to both understand the social structures upon which they are intervening and then to learn from them as part of the works' legacy. Though O'Donnell reported that his motive is selfishness: he wants to make friends, he seemed more interested in shifting social environments (his own community in Toronto) to be more open to economic, age, and ethnic diversities. One could assess his work to see if in fact these outcomes were achieved. Similarly, Linda Duvall spoke eloquently about the divisiveness in areas of Saskatoon. Her work suggests that galleries, themselves privileged in many ways, have a responsibility to be aware of these issues and to take some kind of long term action. She stages tea parties between volunteers from various regions of the city.
That is all that I can write about the conference, Open Engagement, here. Please feel free to leave comments. If you are interested in what happened in Vancouver at Art of Engagement , take a look at this blog - 2007 LIVE BIENNALE . Scroll down to see the entries by Lori Weidenhammer and Margaret Dragu.
