Honey vs. Oil: On Pedagogy in Art

While last week’s three-parter on The Big Picture Revisited revealed time and again that Hamilton sorely lacks a granting body for artists, that fact doesn’t save me from pending grant deadlines for both the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council. And yes, both anecdotal and statistical evidence from that forum showed quite plainly the competitive disadvantage of applying as a Hamilton-based artist, but sitting on my ass isn’t going to get me any funding either.

So: drafting up those proposals will be taking priority this week, though I’ll still attempt to throw content this way when I get the chance.

For today, though, I’m going to borrow quite explicitly from two bloggers far better equipped than I to bring something thought-provoking to the table. For the first, I’ll refer not necessarily to Karen Archey’s home at Art Fag City but rather to her current article for MAP Magazine. Besides proving that I’m not the only person this side of the pond contributing to MAP, her commentary-by-chronology highlights some of the developments - and critically, lack thereof - in the use of performative art as a form of pedagogy.

Marina Abramović performing Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Nov. 13, 2005 (image from artnet.com). Because it’s even more meta that way.

In examining works with problematic relationships to education, insofar as excessive pedagogy can simultaneously obscure and provide a crutch for the meaning of the work itself, Archey asks some difficult questions:

What is more, Beuys opened a proverbial can of self-reflexive worms for the forthcoming postmodern era. Do lectures simply function to create meaning around a given artwork? What is their intersection with performance? How does the lecture as-performance intertwine with pedagogy, and how can the medium inform professional artistic practice?

Her incisive survey of artists addressing these issues up into the present day provide no clear answers, and just as well, but I think Tyler Green at MAN might have stumbled coincidentally on an alternative point of view in his recent discussions of Edward Burtynsky’s ‘Oil’ at the Corcoran - or more properly, in his assessment of William E. Rees’ catalogue essay. Buying the catalogue myself isn’t exactly within my grant-writing means (though Christmas is coming…) but I do appreciate what Green has to say about Dr. Rees’ assessment of Burtynsky’s work as legitimate environmental scholarship on the impact of the oil industry on the planet:

It indirectly makes a powerful case for including artists among the ranks of our most significant public intellectuals. It aggressively pushes art out of the contemporary art ghetto and places it in the mainstream of discourse on the future of our planet.

That Burtynsky achieves that measure of scholarship through a photography that never yields so much as an inch of its aesthetic integrity seems to put the ham-fisted performance/lecture of Archey’s article to shame. Burtynsky’s survival outside the ‘contemporary art ghetto’ is also admirable given the efforts and travels that have kept him very much engaged in the world at large - if you only click one link in this post, make it this story of Burtynsky’s first exposure to oil on a temporary job at St. Catharine’s GM plant.

Of course, not all art has any business being engaged in academia at all. But for art that honestly values scholarship and not the critique thereof, visual balance and deep engagement based in labour are far more effective weapons than the pantomime of performance.

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