John Cage, La Monte Young, and Fluxus:

One of the things I have been struggling with teaching this course is engaging the students. Their work on the projects is wonderful, but once we turn our attention to discussion things seem to fall flat. So, in anticipation of the Fluxus project I opted to shift things a bit by going back to the physical warm-up that was developed for this class ages ago. I’ll admit I feel a little silly doing it, but I do think it helps transition us from where we are coming from to where we are headed. I’ve also tried to structure more performative exercises at the top of the class. I really do love the John Cage inspired indeterminate sound piece in which students are given a chart with blocks of time to fill with sound. It always produces some lively and creative results. Given the horrible HVAC sound that dominates the gym space we have taken to retreating to the stage area for discussion in a more conventional seminar set up. Not my favorite choice, but it does seem to generate better interaction. We discussed the Cage material complete with some examples of his work. I’m trying to get students to see the idea of indeterminacy not as a simple approach, but one that can be developed in a number of different ways. It does seem to be a hallmark of postmodernism. The next class was an introduction to La Monte Young’s work and Fluxus. Some of Young’s simple compositional devices (like a line on a piece of paper) do seem baffling, but allows for a conversation about what we expect from a composer or author. Here indeterminacy can be seen as a direction, but not necessarily as a final goal. All of this leads toward the Fluxus project and the best way I have found of approaching this is to share examples of this type of work before the assignment. The student generated Fluxus pieces were quite nice, but largely remained on the level of small, quiet, Zen-like work. Which is fine. I have seen this approach before – specifically in the postmodernism class. Its interesting to me that this project can generate smaller more intimate gestures, but also huge, sprawling, loud work too. It all really depends on the make-up of students in the class. This time around I do not have any Drama students enrolled – so I wonder if that has some impact. At the half-way point of the term we established a good list of terms and ideas, but. Do feel like I have been leading them toward these rather than them discovering them. I do need to explore patience more fulling in allowing students to figure this out on their own. This was made clear by the student responses to what is going well and what could be improved in the course. More open ended question, more patience, don’t lead or fish for ideas, allow them to develop organically. It has been some time since I taught one of these project-based courses and I need to remind myself that it takes a good 6-7-8 weeks for these ideas to begin to gel. The plan now is to review the material from the first half with a specific focus on the shift from modernism to postmodernism and connections to Self, Society, and Cosmos ideas. I’m toying with the idea of attacking Hassan’s modern/postmodern list and exploring the ideas from multiple sides – where is the value in these ideas? Where is there no value? And then it’s on to the generative art machine projects.

Surrealism, Artaud, and Baraka:

The juxtaposition or surrealistic object project is one of my favorites. A fairly simple process – combine things that don’t go together – but yields quite a bit to discuss. I think this project works best when it is the first one, but the way this course is set up it comes in second. Some really wonderful work – a lot of food related projects – which adds that interesting dimension of decay. Perhaps we will revisit this with the auto-destruct projects. Rather than send students around for Surrealistic museum I opted to move from project to project with the “what do you see” questions. This, of course, means we don’t get all the way through the projects in one day – but it’s worth spending the time on this early in the term. As always, we often see things in the projects that were either not intended or not on the radar of the maker. Particularly with juxtaposed pieces we could spin out endlessly. We paired the discussion with Breton’s Surrealistic Manifesto. We discussed how in creating short circuits to the brain we still struggle with “meaning.” That’s the fun part. But even with this discussion I feel like I am trying to pull observations out of them. Even simple questions like “what do you see in front of you” somehow baffle or cause students to lock up. On impulse I asked my first section – what do I need to change to lead a more vibrant discussion? Is it the questions, location, material – what? Ironically – we had a great discussion about discussion. Same in my second section. So, I’ll work on changing the dynamic. The follow up to this discussion was about Artaud and Baraka’s work. I returned to the roots of the class and started with a physical warm up. We then did an exercise with an audience inside and activity. I had indented to break them up into groups to do this, but felt we might not get too far into the process. So – we discussed what was on their minds, what is most pressing. No suppose that it is the workload of the school and the never ending treadmill – very similar reactions in both sections. So we created apiece with half the class on the outside and half inside a circle – with movement around the outside. Both section responded to movement that got faster and harder to execute until collapsing. We assessed the first round, made some adjustments, and then swapped inside for outside. Once we discussed this I felt it was a good example of some of Artaud’s ideas about the spectator in the center of the action. We discussed Artaud’s No More Masterpieces essay, his First manifesto, Baraka’s Revolutionary Theatre essay and Slave Ship play. The pieces fit nicely together. Part of what I want them to see is how connected these ideas are to what we have been discussing and also how they have been evolving. Went into the quieter and more intimate kitchen for the conversation – which felt a bit better – but I have yet to have a class where I feel like all cylinders are firing. On to Cage and Fluxus next.

Bakunin and Danto and Dada – oh my!:

So to prep the students for chatting about authority and power I changed the class dynamic by making them sit in assigned seats on a traditional classroom arrangement. Sometimes this backfires and there is a great sense of relief that they can just be told what to do. And, it does make me feel uncomfortable, which I guess is part of the point. Actually a bit more lively a conversation than we have previously had – may be due to the deafening heating/AC system being dampened by our distance – or a sense of familiarity at being in a “real” classroom.” In either case, I felt that we covered the material quite well and got to the major points of all the reading. I do like to raise questions about agency and how they can tell if someone is telling them something useful. The question of why they would trust me, or any of their instructors, always rankles a bit – as it should. The Bakunin and Danto conversation leads into discussing dada – through some of Ball and Tzara’s writings and Duchamp. We started creating simultaneous poems – three groups creating a minute of sound - which was fun and works as a good example of the dada stuff we will discuss. But, after the fun its back to struggling to get any response from the students about any of the questions. So, part of what I’m wondering about is not just engagement, but ideology. Are they disengaged because they don’t like the material , didn’t read it, don’t want to discuss it? I’m just finding it difficult to turn the corner on this class and have what I would consider a good conversation. Perhaps that will happen with the surrealist projects – or not.

Project 1 to Futurism to Dadaday:

So, having lost a day to the snow and ice we compressed the discussion of the projects into the material on Bergson and then into the Futurists. I don’t think we went as deeply into the projects as we have in past classes, but there were some good observations and connections. Some of this is about pulling ideas and techniques out of the projects – which we did, but I feel like I was perhaps offering the bulk of these ideas. This lead us into discussion Bergson’s notions of duration and simultaneity. I’ve also added palimpsest and defamiliarization as terms. This all led to discussing cause and effect and the relationship of the part to the whole. Not sure I have gotten to those things at this point in the term, but they are proving useful. The addition this time was Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – which worked quite well. While I recognize that Lorde is discussing race and gender, I see her essay as universal (not to take away from its power) and the same observations can be applied to religion, law, education, aesthetics – any system of value. This offered a great way in to the Futurists. I do think that was the clearest I have ever discussed them. Finding new ways to articulate familiar things can open up a lot. This carried over into the next class when we discussed Russolo and sound. The main point here is that as a painter Russolo’s pallet was wide open – why then would it be closed to certain sounds in music? Not a huge revelation, but an opening up of the idea of what can and can’t be used artistically. We may or may not see this pushed on in the surrealistic projects. This gave way to a truncated Dadaday – with three activities – dada poem, exquisite corpse text, exquisite corpse image. Three groups rotating between the stations. Some fun appeared to be had and we posted results to discuss. This is where things are not quite gelling. I’m really struggling to get students engaged in the discussion part. Not sure why. It does feel like we have a long way to go to establish a working dynamic for this class. My hope is that as we move to the next project students will become more engaged and more vocal. Well – chatting about authority and Danto and dada tomorrow – so we shall see.

Week Two into three:

Well we lost Tuesday to the snow and ice storm that was way worse than expected. Even digging out by Wednesday was tough. So, projects were pushed to Thursday. One of the things I will remind the students is that they need to trust the process. It may seem like we are just fucking around or aimlessly wandering in ideas, but it will begin to cohere as the term progresses. I need to remind myself that also. I went into the first project day apprehensive – with all the standard worries – will the projects be interesting, will we have enough to discuss, will they establish ideas that we can work with during the term. And, of course, the work was wonderful. Although we only got through 2/3rd of the projects we could see variety of presentation mode, and, perhaps more importantly, so many wonderful different ways to think about time. This will give us quite a bit to work with – but already I can see ideas like: compressed time, layered time, elongated time, personal relations to time, progression, degeneration, frame or ground, implied spectator, anticipation (of evolution), the cyclical nature of time, intentional VS random composition, Bergson’s notion of duration, time capsule – projection into future/relation to past, where pieces begin and end, palimpsest, useful time, waisted time, the everyday or mundane, is “present” really present?, do. We see or create meaning?, perpetual evolution, erosion, how we use time, actions shaping action in time. Ans, we still have about 5 presentations in each section. The second round of projects were as engaging as the first. Really good work – and lots to think about. In discussing them I tried to make connections between the pieces with the above list – which I think may have set a tone I need to shift. I’m not sure why I am spending more time explaining and projecting ahead in the term than focusing on the present and asking questions. I seem to be doing the same thing in my MWF classes (which is compounded by not yet finding the rhythm of teaching 50 minute classes after not teaching them for 15 years). When I do pose questions the energy level seems quite low – so I need to start each class with some project or exercise to wake folks up. I also need to remind myself to be more patient to wait for answers – both Joe and Bob are way better at that than I. We have good information to work with so far, but I need to find a way to have the conversations gel better. Ais this always how these classes are in the first few weeks? Maybe.

First week – Day one and day two:

It is really fantastic to be back in the WW5 gym for this class – where I taught it last in 2015 (7 years ago?) Some things about the space have changed, but it’s great to have an open room to work in. The first class was largely dedicated to going over the syllabus, requirements, etc – and with this class trying to sort out those that want to play with this material and those that don’t. I’m trying to avoid any surprises about the structure. The icebreaker game this time round was based on the surrealist idea of question and answer – where the two don’t have to match. My initial intent was to have students writs down a question and an answer on separate index cards and then shuffle and distribute them, but in covid-times that didn’t seem like a great idea. I hope we can resolve this before Fluxus day. Students wrote them down and we circled the room posing questions with indeterminate answers. Then on to the Self, Society, and Cosmos ideas – good list of what students remembered from this class with the 8:30 section being a bit more awake than the 10 – which always seems to happen. This is why last time we started with stretching and whatnot – I may lean back into that as the term progresses. Then I assigned the first project due next week – I love this project which has students presenting three different types of time. Always interesting to see what they come up with. I’ve reminded them that the question is deliberately vague since I am not looking for any specific answers, just how they respond to the prompt. Day two was about discussing traditional aesthetics and so we started with each person showing/discussing something they find “beautiful.” It was interesting to see the difference in the sections with 8:30 leaning a bit more into process – complexity, layers, catharsis, formal elements and 10:00 a bit more on effect – mood, environment, impact. I always feel like benefit from this conversation in ways the students don’t so shared a bit of the 8:30 with the 10 and will do the inverse on Tuesday. The rest of the class was about discussing aesthetics, rules, patterns, cultural ideas, etc with regards to art-making and art-viewing. The examples students provided offer great detail for this conversation. I’ve tried to give them a glimpse of where we are headed – mainly as an extension of figuring out who wants to play with these ideas and who doesn’t. The first week can never really be more than exposition, but we’ve already played a game and students presented ideas – so we are in good shape. I’m looking forward to the first projects on Tuesday.

Aesthetics of Dissonance 2022

Coming soon - ramblings and thoughts on teaching two sections of a revamped Aesthetics of Dissonance in the age of COVID and American fragmentation. Should be fun.