1 Introduction
An epithet that is attributable to no one
… one of the most frustrating moments in the contemporary learning sphere, when it comes to ART, EDUCATION and PRACTICE, is to be at your wits end and not really know what exactly it is that you’re doing; what exactly it is you’re supposed to be doing or what it is exactly you even did in the past … OMG!
As has been hinted already, this so-called epithet is attributed to no one in particular. The author however, would perhaps, like to take the credit for it[?] wink, wink … then again, why would an epithet appear somewhere inside the text and not right before it? All these make up valid and fascinating positions for enquiry.
2 The Anecdote about the Unplanned Route
I recall having started my presentation in Berlin with a rather worn-out critique of orthodox classroom process. It is one that I usually make of the so-called lesson plan in a typical pedagogic situation. Flicking back my rather huge Shuka
This critique, I believe, is not totally novel. What I wish to propose with this initial critical evaluation of one of the fundamental moments in conventional teaching and learning, is its futility. The futility of the idea that one is ever capable of predicting the totality of the outcome of the lesson before it actually transpires, should really be common knowledge by now. There is no real denying the fact that the intended lesson plan would always remain an intent, a potentiality, a desire. Because at the start of the lesson—in real time, in real space, with all possible configurations of concessions, conditions, and contexts—the entire pedagogic situation is thrown into chaotic conflict! And then what do we do?
Isn’t it curious that almost every film, narrative or story begins with a conflict? It is this similar situation I tend to take students through. To facilitate certain frustrations within them that ultimately yield unexpected treasures. Imagine for instance, that you have been invited to attend an art exhibition. Given standard art educational practices of the late 20th century, you would expect to be ushered into a presumptively neutral venue with autonomous art objects that would be encountered by your disembodied eye, for your rational contemplation. Doesn’t this sound all too familiar? So now, imagine that this exhibition you are thrust into is one that is quite impossible, if not literally impassable. It presents work, (a disturbed piece), by the contemporary Ghanaian artist Bernard Akoi-Jackson, whose general oeuvre has been described in his bio as: [work that is] “drawn to the politics of such vestiges of colonialist encounter as overtly bureaucratic rituals that lead to procedural stalemate in society. His multi-disciplinary, audience-implicating installations and performative pseudo-rituals have featured in exhibitions across the world” (Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum [MSU Broad], 2015).
The work’s title is presented thus: Untitled … How to Usher the [an] African fully into [His]tory, like a sheep to the slaughter, as though s/h[e] (wasn’t aware of) it all along and that his/her grin was not informed by a sly knowingness, but rather by a dumbfounded bewilderment and an eternal gratefulness to kin totally privileged by woes inflicted so long ago in antiquity, it is no use “mulling” over them in such contemporaneity, even though time continues to be cyclic … (MSU Broad, 2015). As complicated as the non-title goes, there’s not much time to soak it all in before you are nudged on to navigate all the possible frustration so lavishly laid out before you (see Figure 12.1). And as if the ambiguities were not enough, you have a milling set of very busy-looking uniformed staff, who
Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Video stills from the performance Untitled … How to Usher the [an] African fully into [His]tory, like a sheep to the slaughter, as though s/h[e] (wasn’t aware of) it all along and that his/her grin was not informed by a sly knowingness, but rather by a dumbfounded bewilderment and an eternal gratefulness to kin totally privileged by woes inflicted so long ago in antiquity, it is no use “mulling” over them in such contemporaneity, even though time continues to be cyclic … (2015). Performed at Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Sweden, in May 2015, the work staged a fictitious bureaucratic ritual where participants were hemmed into a system of absurd tasks, reflecting on postcolonial identities. Courtesy of Lilith Performance Studio and the artist
There is music playing at a decibel too loud and the heating has also been upped a notch, so that your entire orientation is put in slight disarray. And to be fair, there is also always room to exit it all, if you’re not too settled in place. If you are able to survive the initial onslaught of complex and complicated instructions, you only graduate to another section of the process, where much more obscure hurdles must be surmounted, whilst also keeping some earlier instructions in mind, since you’ve been foretold, they will be needed later on in the process. Upon reaching the eventual end, if there is any such site we can designate as an end, you receive some kinds of rewards. You are presented, in Christian eucharistic style, with Ghanaian chocolate, brutally sawn through by an uncanny character, who also offers you Dutch Schnapps and a certificate. What oddities, right?
So, this is how the anecdote has played out. I intended, as with a ‘lesson plan’, to talk about one particular event, only to have embarked on this un-planned route, which has had me touch on quite a lot of stuff. My offering is in memory of Bisi Silva, founder of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Lagos, and the itinerant Asiko Art School Project, a roving, non-traditional art school program.
In a similar manner, imagine you signed up to study at an art school (where myself and a host of similar-minded colleagues offer our services as lecturers, instructors, facilitators, etc.). You expect to be taken through tried and tested techniques, or to be introduced to set ways of working and knowing what art is, only to be met with rather unexpected instructions, examples and models (or, maybe added to what you expect, these other baffling examples are added to your already long list of references). The examples you see have never really appeared in the canons that your initial training almost always referred to (Figure 12.2). Imagine that in your first week, you are asked to try dreaming, which involves the remembering of the recent past and re-construction of possible futures. The course outline, if there is any, suggest that the work is to be based on ideas of play, humor and criticality. You will Re-visit the recent past;
Installation view of Orderly Disorderly (2017), the end-of-year exhibition of graduating BFA students from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). Organized by blaxTARLINES KUMASI, the exhibition was held at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra. Courtesy of blaxTARLINES Kumasi
Va-Bene Eliken Fiatsi, exhibition poster for Orderly Disorderly, 2017. The poster announces the end-of-year exhibition for graduating BFA students, organized by blaxTARLINES Kumasi at the Museum of Science and Technology, Accra. Courtesy of blaxTARLINES Kumasi
After dreaming, you will then begin Waking, which involves your Searching through the debris of recent and future times with a series of participatory activities, which will have you engage in an analysis of some of the observations that arise from your reviews. They will also have you Re-read of your course proposal and Re-cap on the ideas that were broached. Then you will Re-view the proposal collectively, so as to determine the feasibility of projected ideas. For research, you are invited to “bump” into people, sites, spaces and ideas. You’re encouraged to ethically eavesdrop on conversations in public transport or go out to town, visiting makers who may not necessarily refer to themselves as “artists.” They must simply inspire conversations and encounters that become worthwhile for you and the general society. These activities are intentionally non-extractive, and they go on and on whilst doing them, your studio, if there is any such space available, starts filling up with tangible and intangible stuff. In a likewise manner, your mind is also filling up and you are wondering what to do with all this stuff that is accumulating. After a couple of weeks, you’re almost breathless. Why does one have to go through all this?
The revolutionary, according to Fanon, inserts himself among his people, without noise. This formulation is pivotal, but because it is so casually understated, its myriad implications escape casual readers. Cabral adds that in the revolutionary process, the desire for visibility is a teething disease, and that massive crowds, gathered together to make insurrectionary yearnings before the oppressor, make no sense. Quiet, selective, effective, efficient initiatives do make sense. (Armah, 2010)
So, let’s imagine an art school in which not only faculty, but learners, technicians or facilitators operate as Fanonian revolutionaries. They all insert themselves deeply in their peculiar contexts, whilst being conscious of prevailing conditions and acting conscientiously, responsibly, and ultimately exuding a high sense of generosity. By being so politically alive to one’s surroundings, inspiration is tapped from all round, not in an extractionist attitude, but rather in one that recognizes the interconnectedness of all and sundry. And being thus aware, the types of texts that inform this expanded and heavily disturbed approach to knowledge engagement, point to an acknowledgement of art as politics, and not as merely a reflection of political positions.
Knowing this, learners are encouraged to embark on historical and theoretical investigations of notions of contemporaneity via critically looking at ideas of rupture, disruption and disturbance within the field of contemporary art (Osborne, 2013). In these types of encounters, we are able to discuss some of the crises that have bedeviled the field of art. We then proceed retroactively towards a reading of Peter Osborne’s assertion that contemporary art is “post-conceptual” (2013).
Being thus equipped, we also attempt to review notions of equality within aesthetics as politics as developed by Jacques Rancière in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010), as the necessary conditions for a truly political art. That which can claim to be emancipatory, thus democratic. A salient argument of Rancière’s is that contemporary art need necessarily operate in the ‘aesthetic regime’ to be adequately democratic. These ideas are further explored by the historian Grant H. Kester in The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (2011), where, on the contrary, a so-called “third way” is approached when it comes to politics in art practice. For Kester, “consensus” is the keyword. What we critique in this is his reliance once again, on what Rancière calls the “ethical regime” in the “distribution of the sensible” (2010). For I continue to insist that the work cannot be consensual as Kester proposes.
Due to the multifarious interests of my artistic and pedagogic projects, the practitioners from whom I receive gifts of inspiration are not only limited to the field of art but spill out further to the lived public sphere. Of course, there are certain staples of disruptive praxis that cannot be left out of our engagements. We therefore discuss the work of practitioners of pedagogy as transformative artistic practice like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Irit Rogoff, a practitioner from theatre Agyeman Ossei, who transforms the words and thoughts of one who believes in the healing and awakening of the spirit of a slumbering people (Ayi Kwei Armah), into innovative theatrical experiments, and artists Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Thomas Hirschorn, Francis Alÿs, Santiago Sierra, Superflex, Jonas Staal, Paul Chan, whose forms cause us to rethink our presumptions about art and Kąrî’kạchä Seid’ou, who gave up art making to make artists as art, as Seid’ou proclaimed in 2013, making reference to the beginnings of his artistic, pedagogical project in 2003.
Bambolse and Kente-inspired mural, executed with students at the Main Administration building of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. Courtesy of the artist
Notes
From November 10 to December 8, 2018, I was invited by the DDSKS, to teach in the context of a project called TKU a set of activities that introduces students of Theatre, Music and Dance to innovative approaches to Artistic Research. I proposed the course: “Point(s) of Ellipses” (How to do stuff with the stuff we have and stuff we don’t have). A crash course in “Disturbing the Piece” This experimental course presented several moments of challenge to the participants, who at the very end, became extremely delighted by the unexpected outcomes that eventually panned out. For the presentation in Berlin however, even though I had sought to share this particular project as a microcosm of my work, I decided eventually, to deviate slightly from presenting just this project in detail, rather, I offered general takes on my artistic and pedagogic approaches, via a series of anecdotal interventions.
The Shuka or so-called Maasai cloth, also known as the “African Blanket,” is not necessarily indigenous to the Maasai people of East Africa, even though they are the ones known to wear it predominantly. Before colonization, the Maasai would have worn mainly leather clothes. The Shuka then, is said to have become more popular with the Maasai from the 1960s. One of the possible origins of Shuka cloth stems from Scottish missionaries during the early colonization of Africa. It goes to give therefore, that the cloth may have well been produce somewhere in Manchester and sold in East Africa, as another means of capitalist exploitation of culture.
References
Akbank Sanat. (2018). Guest, ghost, host: machine! Akbank Sanat. https://www.akbanksanat.com/en/exhibition/guest-ghost-host-machine
Armah, A. K. (2010). Remembering the dismembered continent: Seedtime essays. Per Ankh.
Bishop, C. (2012). Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. Verso.
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. (2015). Material effects: Contemporary art from West Africa and the diaspora [Exhibition brochure]. Michigan State University.
Kester, G. (2011). The one and the many: Contemporary collaborative art in a global context. Duke University Press.
Osborne, P. (2013). Anywhere or not at all: The philosophy of contemporary art. Verso.
Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On politics and aesthetics. Continuum International Publishing Group.
Seid’ou, K. (2013). Untitled (making artists as art) [Public lecture]. Ofkob Artists’ Residency, Ofoase Kokobeng, Ghana.