written by Matthew Rana © 2008 all rights reserved
Dual MA/MFA Graduate Program in Fine Arts and Visual & Critical Studies
~Social Practice
THE GARAGE
As MFA students in the Social Practice program at CCA, we could consider saying that we choose to work in a garage.1 But what exactly would we mean by this? And why would we say garage when it could generate so much confusion with who we are and what we do? In order to start answering questions such as these, perhaps we could say that we don’t work in a garage. Ours is not a place where cars were once parked. It is a garage because we like the metaphor. We like it because the garage is the home for everything that doesn’t have a place inside the house. Generally speaking, it is a place for the things that are to be kept at a distance and out of sight. The garage is also the threshold to the outside world, where things from outside come in and where things from inside go out. Indeed, we are very fortunate to have a garage. It means something to have this kind of threshold.
The garage is where we can work, where we can keep our things and also find them. It is where, amid musty smells, we come across strings of lights, flowerpots and flags. A brown sectional couch sits near a box full of books and old records. A basketball rolls in to the corner, past a bin full of old newspapers and magazines, plastic bottles, aluminum cans. There are bicycles where one would expect to find a car. One finds many things that are to be expected: paint buckets, a flashlight and gallons of drinking water; a refrigerator filled with beer. There are shelves full of jars of canned fruit, marmalades, fig preserves and pickled lemons, all meticulously labeled.2 There is a pegboard wall, a workbench and a toolbox. There is the armature of a computer and even a small Hammond organ.
We work in a space of amateur musicians, model-makers, hot-rod enthusiasts, CB-radio hobbyists and Sunday painters;3 a space for home-brewing4 and informal science…a place for tinkering, soldering and dabbling in several ideas at once. We’ve chosen to situate ourselves here because we know that art is part of a broader field of discourses and meanings, that it is part of a larger field of cultural production. Art is a way to reconfigure/recombine the symbols, signs and practices of cultural, economic and social interaction. We meet in the garage because we know that all politics begin with the negotiations between us. Because ultimately we are local, situated and contingent beings that see, speak and act within both specific contexts and a common world. And so, in order to talk about ourselves, we must talk about our experiences and the places and contexts in which we live. We are interested animals, who have stories to tell and who ask of art that it have a social function, that it have a politics; that it reconfigure and rename life’s practices, its objects, signs and symbols. We ask that art teach us ways to talk with each other about our exchanges, our desires and our needs.
NAME OF THE WORLD
When considering dialogue as a process that shapes the world, it is not enough to simply say that conversations occur. Rather, we must ask what these conversations are for and how they are directed. Why is it that we need to speak with each other? What sustains our conversations?
According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Dialogical Principle, meaning is generated between people, rather than exclusively within them; that is to say, meaning(s) are established inter-subjectively. The ‘word’ is contingent and socially constructed, in a constant process of emergence and becoming: “in reality, the relations between A and B are in a state of permanent formation and transformation; they continue to alter in the very process of communication.”5
To be in dialogue with others is to find meaning in one’s experience. This way of meeting envisions speech as a recognition that the world is comprised of subjects rather than objects. Furthermore, it is a recognition that that these subjects are co-creative, equally capable of making meaning. An example of this can be found in the Friends Meetings of the Quaker faith, where one is invited to sit in silence until ‘moved’ to speak to the group. These meetings can be organized around a series of questions or queries, but are not restricted to them.6 In fact, there are no requirements except the will to speak (one doesn’t even have to be Quaker): one talks of what one knows and also of what one doesn’t know. It is our need to understand, to find meaning, which moves us. Thus, when we speak, we open ourselves to a common experience and indeed, we change our way of speaking. To speak is to negotiate meanings with each other.
To frame this in another way, we can understand our conversations to have socio-political demands. For Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire, dialogue serves as the foundation for building critical frameworks in which change can take place. Humans encounter the world by first experiencing and naming it. “To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it.”7 However, it is through discourse, verifying those names, disputing them, renaming them and making new names that critical thinking is built. Naming something acts on it, it complicates it and gives it visibility, requiring that we further analyze the problem. Indeed, it is this recognition that lies at the center of Freire’s pedagogical program; knowledge is not given, it is produced.
In this way, criticality through discourse becomes praxis (informed action) and a means toward self-determination. Yet, this discourse cannot happen without horizontality, the recognition that you are talking with someone rather than to (or at) them. In other words, it cannot happen without reciprocity and the recognition of mutuality. One does not speak with, without first extending one’s subjectivity outward, making oneself available to the interlocutor with whom we take up discourse. It is in this way that praxis can be thought of as human potential, a process of opening, of transformation and self-actualization and mutual reinforcement.
If we accept this, then how do we, as discursive beings, ask art to become a part of this process? What happens when our practices seek to rename the space of relations, when they root themselves in a collective production or operate within already existing and meaningful social forms? How is it that we talk about art when we choose, for example, to call a meeting a building,8 or when we choose to call every song that’s written a “hit”? 9
THIS IS HOW WE DO
“ALL LIFE IS ENCOUNTER - Martin Buber,” thus spoke the crude profile drawn by architect Alfredo Brillembourg of the Urban Think Tank on a chalkboard in the Haudenschild garage in La Jolla, CA.10 This was in 2007, as part of a presentation delivered by the Yale-trained architects on their work in the favelas of Caracas.11 The quote came from Buber’s book, first published in 1923, I-Thou in which the Austrian philosopher, educator and theologian outlined a theory of existence consisting of the constant negotiation between the ‘word-pairs’ I-It and I-Thou. The world of the I-It is cognitive, formed by the functioning of the mind. Never gaining entry into lived experience,this world is external, uninhabited, except for a collection of objects which one observes at a distance. The world of the I-It pairing is one of solipsism and monologue, a world in which beings exist in isolation, unable to meet each other in shared experience.
The world of the I-Thou pairing is an actual world of encounter: a process of holistic subjectivization in which the individual exists in relation with others and the world around her. Rooted in lived experience, to speak the I-Thou pair is to recognize the other as an active agent with whom we can speak. Encounter implies both mutuality and reciprocity; it is a process of extending one’s subjectivity to others and thereby opening oneself to a multitude of possibilities. So, why would Brillembourg write these words on the board as an introduction to his presentation? With respect to the Urban Think Tank — and more generally, socially based art practices — Buber’s message has a political significance. It is nothing short of commitment to others; it is a choice about how to live in the world. In encounter we emerge, de-alienated, into human potential. 12 When speaking the I-Thou pair we extend ourselves in an unspoken relation and expectation: the mutual recognition that the world is shared.
In terms of what we do, as much as it is a matter of how we come to know each other and the things that surround us, it is also about how we can extend our practices in ways that can reinforce and perpetuate our learning. In this way, encounter is a process of becoming, characterized by a series of differentiations, identifications and openings. We achieve understanding only when we enter first into relation, that is to say, an act of recognition, capable of equality.
Art above all is a relationship with life. And so, we ask that it become part of the process of living in the world, of naming it and thereby reconfiguring it as part of our discourse. It is in this way that our encounters can be thought of as a practice, activities that critically engage our social formations, while simultaneously containing the potential for new relationships: new names for what we do. Instead of talk say change. Instead of art say living. Instead of studio, say garage.
