Day eighteen and nineteen: Fluxus!

With the Fluxus project I have found that the students have a better idea of what is going on if we spend a day or so talking about this kind of work before the projects are due. There are projects that I really do want them to go into blind and execute as best they can and then reflect on readings afterward. This, like the master narratives project, tends to work better the other way around. LaMonte Young’s randomized lecture always raises a number of good questions. Drawing a straight line, releasing a butterfly, building a fire all presented as “musical” ideas begs a number of interesting questions about sound. Beyond this it raises questions about the role of the “artist” or “composer” or “author.” Traditional artistic forms seem to want to clamp down on meaning in ways that the Fluxus stuff destroys. It really is right in line with what we have been discussing – more a refinement of ideas than new ideas. The role that indeterminacy has played in most of what we have discussed has been there, just not brought out until now. I am sure I made too big a deal out of it, but his straight line composition really is a foundational “drone” element in western music. Hard to imagine the last 50 some odd years without it.

I love the simplicity of the Fluxus stuff – and yet the pieces can be profoundly moving – it all depends on how they are interpreted. So – we looked at a few examples of pieces drawn from the fluxusworkbook. They all suggest a range of interpretive possibilities. The rest of the class period was left to talk about the implications of these pieces. What is the role of the “originator” of the piece? What is the role of the “interpreter”? Who ultimately “owns” it? Since the pieces are often designed to blur these boundaries you end up not asking these questions. This also allows for the question of concept art – ideas VS things. The fact of the matter is that just about every student on campus is trained to interpret texts in the same manner that the Fluxus pieces demand an interpretive approach. Rather than a play or screenplay, piece of music or choreography you have an idea. It is a genesis – a starting point – that can go in any number of directions. The difference is the level of control exerted by the starting point.

This is the whole point in having students create their own pieces. I typically don’t tell them that they won’t be performing them. So I have them write out three pieces – one sculptural, one musical, and one performative – without specifying which one – then we pool them and draw cards. In creating the piece students have an idea, an intention, a direction but that may or may not be seen by the person who now has the card. It is a simple way of giving up control. The students present/perform the pieces one at a time and only after the presentation do they read the card. The object is to create in the “composer” the role of watcher – of not knowing what will come next. For students trained to be specific in their choices this is often a different experience. But, it leaves room for surprises – for watching in a way that artists typically don’t watch their own work.

The last project was to be presented as an object or image – away from the creator – so they could reflect on it as others do. With these Fluxus pieces the work is taken completely away from the creator. The results are always interesting. The hard part is to make connections to arts training that is based in deliberate choices. I find the indeterminate quality liberating in that it often takes me to places I would not go otherwise. The same impulse behind using generative sound programs to create music. I need to follow this up with more examples so that the Fluxus state of mind doesn’t seem totally isolated. We will probably deal more specifically with generative art in the next class so that the examples of indeterminacy can be widened to include just about every artform. I suspect Eno will play a large role in that conversation. Having used this sequence last year it feels very different in this class primarily because of the timing – later in the term – as well as the growing list of terminology with which to address the ideas. Its hard to see what each project will become in advance. But that is the fun part. I get to watch along side of the students. 

Day Sixteen and Seventeen: The built in contradiction

It makes sense to discuss these tow days together – basically a continuation of the ideas. We were able to have a good chat about the museum projects in presentation class period so we used Tuesday as a kind of catch all day. I love these open discussion days in the syllabus. They are useful if we need more time to discuss the projects. If not, we can expand on ideas in that space. So – a couple of things were covered. As a project students drew terms out of a bag and then grouped up to define them and provide examples from readings, discussion, projects, or new examples. We then moved to the word cloud created from all of the definitions of postmodernism. I love these things as a quick read on a large amount of info. We then discussed what terms caught their eye.

The rest of the class was used to discuss a few more ideas from the Lyotard reading –namely the ideas of aesthetics, beauty, rules, and change. It was an opportunity to bring in a handful of examples to discuss. Serrano’s Piss Christ was very useful. It is such a wonderful picture – works according to all the standards for “good” composition. But then it’s a picture of a crucifix in urine. So a useful picture to talk about what ideas have lasted and what has changed. This was grounded in a brief discussion of Eco’s Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. The question is what we replace “godliness” with in the aesthetic criteria to evaluate works from today. We ended exploring some of Rachael Whiteread’s casting pieces with the question “Is there an objective criteria with which to judge ‘good’ postmodernism.”?

Thursday was dedicated to discussing postmodern architecture and so I brought the Legos out again. This time students could work alone or in groups to create a representation of the idea of “absence.” Some great answers. I was also pleased that when asked each student had clear and perceptive ideas about the reading. Unlike last year where I felt we had peeked at the break and then couldn’t get the energy back I feel like we are still moving forward. The goal is to do enough exercises, enough projects, pack as many postmodern ideas into the students heads that when we form groups for the final projects they can just go. I feel like we have been prepping the ground for those projects all term. It will be interesting to see what happens. Especially since the students ability to produce some thoughtful and interesting pieces in 10-15 minutes has been refined over the past 10 weeks or so. Given 3 hours of class time my hope is they can produce some amazing stuff.

So after explaining why I use architecture to discuss ideas, plays, structure, etc we took a look at some of the terms and ideas in the Jencks and Venturi articles. The ideas that they develop are right in line with what we have been discussing all term – disharmonious harmony, difficulty whole, asymmetrical symmetry. The built in contradiction. The difference here is that it is generally easier to see. One look at Ghery’s House and the idea of a difficult whole becomes clear. It looks like a jumble, but beyond that has a wonderful sense of structure. Angles, materials, open space, contained space were all chosen for a reason. Amidst the seeming disjunction is a kind of order.

The notion of the difficult whole was countered with the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk – or the master art work. Wagner’s ideas are built on a unity of exclusion – things that don’t fit a re jettisoned. Reaching for a more contemporary metaphor we discussed Chorus Line. In order to fit into the chorus line each dancer needs to be unique, but give up a little of that uniqueness to form a unit. Whereas this idea requires elements in the structure to give up something in order to be included in the whole the idea of the difficult whole is built on tension. It is also build on showing the seems – like some kind of Frankenstein monster, but without the pitchforks and torches.

Al in all two sort of gathering days. Students were given their next assignment – the Fluxus assignment – with the understanding that we will be talking about Fluxus next week before their project is due. The goal with this, as with watching the Holy Grail and reading “Lost in the Funhouse” prior to the master narratives project, is to give the students a bit of a background in the subject before the project is due. We are inexorably heading toward the Postdramatic Theatre project, which draws on all of the other projects – objects, movement, text, space, etc. 

Day Fourteen: The rules of what will have been done

In teaching the dissonance class last year I felt like the class peeked with the Fluxus projects. The energy and ideas where there and we were moving forward. Then spring break came and I didn’t feel like we ever recaptured the momentum. So, with this class I decided to slow the pace down a bit and hold off on the Fluxus project until about the three quarter mark of the term. That has meant that a few days felt like we were kind of treading water, but I did feel that this past week after the break it was worth it. Two excellent classes with two completely different trajectories. On Tuesday we started by talking about fixing issues with the class. We discussed more feedback on the portfolios. One thing I tried to make clear is that I have deliberately not commented on projects in class or on the portfolio entries. The point was to do them, get comfortable sharing these ideas, and then build on them. At that point I can offer more specific feedback.

Working toward a discussion of the Lyotard reading I had each student identify one thing that struck them about the article. I find it frustrating that in the first section about 1/3^rd did not complete the 9 page reading. This always puts more of a burden on those that did read it. The second section had nearly 100% of the students doing the reading and more than ready to discuss this. It is almost impossible to describe how different these two sections have become. There is good work going on in both sections – some amazing work actually, but the level of engagement with the ideas and the level of conversation is not the same. It may be a combination of the hour the class is offered, the students, or possibly my approach to one section after having taught another. For classes like this I really need to find a way to only have one section.

So we started the class with an exercise building on Lyotard’s idea of impossible ideas made visible by the avant-garde. So I broke the students up into four groups, told them to decide on an abstract idea or concept and the build that concept in Legos. What I love about Legos is the nostalgia factor – plus they are just incredibly fun to play with. But beyond this students are forced to encounter the limitations of the medium for representing ideas. The solutions need to be clever – there is just no way around it. In assigning this exercise I really hadn’t seen the implications for the Lyotard reading beyond the point made above. As the first section was working on the project it dawned on me that Lyotard faced a similar issue in discussing postmodernism. Here is was trying to articulate a complex, double coded, non-settling down idea with the language of philosophy. A straight forward reading is impossible due to the limitations of the medium. As a number of the students pointed out – his language is dense, confusing, loopy, etc. The project gave us a way to discuss why he would choose to write that way.

What I like about  Lyotard is his point near the end of the essay that “the rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.” This provided ample opportunity to discuss the avant-garde (Duchamp, Cage, Malevich) and to talk about the “rules of art.” On the one hand it is easy to say that there are no rules to art, and yet to say that at an arts conservatory is another thing. What are the students here to learn if not the rules of artmaking? Some of this progressed with a discussion of whether a work of art (or a work of philosophy) should make sense. Sensemaking in and of itself becomes a defining rule-like characteristic. The hard part is what you do when your predecessors have broken all of the rules. This question has become a much larger part of this class than I had intended, but it is a necessary one. We can never understand the postmodern unless we discuss what came before it.

The final gesture of this day was to ask the students to reflect on the ideas generated by their fall term class Self, Society, and Cosmos and to think about what has changed in the modern era and what has remained the same. Generally the response matched the one from last year, that the search for meaning or humanity or whatever has remained the same, but the forms used in that search have changed.  There is still much left to explore with that response.