Session Information
29 SES 02 A, MP 4 Site Specific Creation Critical Thinking Tool to Articulate Action and Writing in the Context of Art Education Practice
Research Workshop
Contribution
Located within Network 29 – Research on Arts Education, this Research Workshop is raised from the awareness of the urgency to question contemporary practices of arts education and research in order to configure a transgressive view of these. It is being proposed as a site specific (Preston-Dunlop,1995), work in progress by a group of people coming from distinctive areas – dance, drama,painting, history –, who share a common interest in arts education, and who are committed to alternative ways of furthering their understanding of the world, as potentially afforded by artistic practice (Sullivan, 2011).
In the basis of this proposal is the conviction that theory and practice are not separate areas of cognition, and thus to treat them holistically enforces the frame of a contemporary networked knowledge.
Modernist bequest is still paradigmatic in the wider European conception of education, and particularly visible in the artistic field along with the exacerbation of Romantic reveries, where preconceived ideas of subjectivism, self-expression, authorship, genius and Byronism, among others, have been accepted uncritically for too long. As a result, the political meaning of ‘contemporaneity’ is being ignored.
In order to challenge naturalized ways of accessing and producing knowledge within the domain of education, mostly procedures derived from scientific models, the authors propose a moment of entangled practice and theory, merging action and thought and going from body movement to writing to body movement. They engage in practice as “knowing bodies” (Danvers, 2006) participating in the world. Also as ‘knowing bodies’, participants will be confronted with body exercises focused on movement and performativity, this happening with great aware of the space of the event, assuming the action as a site-specific creation. "Writing: touching upon extremity. How, then, are we to touch upon the body, rather than signify it or make it signify? It's tempting to reply, rashly, either that it's impossible, that the body'suninscribable, or that it's a question of mimicking or merging the body with writing (dancing, bleeding ... ). Unavoidable answers, no doubt, but hasty, conventional, and inadequate: in fact, answers end up, directly or indirectly, signifying the body as absence or presence. Writing isn't signifying. We ask: How are we to touch upon the body ? Perhaps we can't answer this "How?" as we'd answer a technical question. But, finally, it has to be said that touching upon the body, touching the body, touching-happens in writing all the time." (Nancy, 2000:9)
Critical reflection will then enlarge the experience, occurring not at the end of it but simultaneously, as participants are invited to register their observations through writing. Writing is brought into here with plural meaning: the authors contest its hegemony by entangling practice and theory, but also recognize the communicable condition implied in the sharing of knowledge, which is enabled by writing. And then from writing to new body exercises, reversing the process. What is the impact of these exercises in the writings of these ‘knowing bodies’? How do they construct knowledge through this experience?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Danvers, J. (2006), “The Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge” in Hardy, T. (org) (2006), Art education a postmodern world: collected essays. Bristol: Intellect. Pp. 77-90. Maharaj, S. (2006), “Nick Stanley and Sarat Maharaj” in Hardy, T. (org) (2006), Art education a postmodern world: collected essays. Bristol: Intellect. Pp. 27-32. Nancy, Jean Luc (2008), Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press. (Rand. A. Richard, trad.) Preston-Dunlop, V. (1995), Dance Words , Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH) Sullivan, G. (2011). “The Artist as Researcher – New Roles for New Realities” in WESSELING, Janneke (ed.) (2011). See it Again, Say it Again – The Artist as Researcher. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011, pp. 79-101.
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