Embodying Art and Art History: An Experiment with a Class Video Happening for the Series 'Access Denied'

A book written in a foreign language and migrated to the US along with its author, an art historian, finds a new communicative dimension by becoming a ready-made for art making purposes. Starting with an introduction explaining the genesis of the collaborative project Access Denied, this article focuses on one of the series’ artworks, namely a video-happening, by exploring its genesis, development, and outcomes. Staged during the day of finals in an advanced art history seminar, the experiment provided an embodied artistic experience and some reflections on art history course content in the debate that followed. The video happening became a basis for further reflection in this essay on the role of performance in stimulating arts-based research at the interstices between biography and scholarly inquiry, between art and art history, between modernism and postmodernism, between object and action, and between creation and destruction as the two opposite poles in modern creativity.  The severe negative criticism and fast dismissal of this topic, made as early as 1972-73 by eminent scholars Giulio Carlo Argan and Gillo Dorfles (Carli, 2003; Mercurio, 2003), created barriers that discouraged major attempts towards deeper understanding of this artistic phenomenon in Italy. The existing superficial and negatively biased dismissal of photorealist artists situated them as incompetent in life drawing, photography plagiarizers, revitalists of the XIX century realism, and as promoting forms of capitalistic imperialism. My more favorable scholarly approach framed and justified Photorealism as a mature modernist development within the wider context of other artistic manifestations between the sixties and seventies. Two books came out of this dissertation: in 2000 a monograph on artist Don Eddy, and in 2004 the first book-length scholarship on American Photorealism in Italy, L’Iperrealismo ‘Fotografico’ Americano in Pittura. Risonanze Storiche nella East e nella West Coast. 1 This self-sponsored book had a relatively modest circulation and was not able to find an appropriate unprejudiced context, in Italy, to be promoted at the academic level. In 2005, not long after completing my Doctoral dissertation, an interdisciplinary study reconstructing the reception of American Photorealism at Documenta 5 in Kassel, I decided to migrate to the United States. My scholarship moved with me: however, once in a new country, its language became another barrier to overcome, as I would not be able to teach my students from a book they were not able to read. For all these reasons, this book on Photorealism came to embody a sense of permanent displacement and in-between-ness that later on I found perfect for arts-based explorations. As post-Pop legacy, Photorealism is situated at the edge between mature modernism and postmodernism, therefore connecting the timeline of our course on late modernism and our postmodern context. During a class experiment envisioned by one of the two Italian nontraditional students for Access Denied, my students unknowingly came to embody a ritual to metaphorically address art history’s fallacies towards this misunderstood artistic style. 1 The only exception is Italo Mussa’s Il Vero più Vero del Vero, a monograph published in 1974. Preceded by a general introduction, the monograph focused on the translation of the interviews to some Photorealist artists appeared in the November-December 1972 issue of Art in America.  Embodying Art and Art History 3 The Access Denied, from Conference Abstract to Class Project On January 16, 2009, I received communication that my paper proposal, submitted earlier in Fall 2008, was accepted at the 4 International Conference on the Arts in Society under the section “Teaching and Learning the Arts.” The abstract I submitted, with the title The Access Denied Series: Restrictions as Liberating Forms of Communication, succinctly recalled the problematic origins of this book and the author’s scholarly displacement, wishing for a transformation of the book into: (...) a series of mixed-media conceptual works, which should creatively redesign a new role for this book, as well as a new educative dimension for art history itself. Indeed, I intend to involve my students into the artistic realization of this concept, in parallel to their art history studies, and have them virtually “dialoguing” with some of the great masters of XX century art. In this way, the project becomes the occasion for exploring mine, my art students’ and the audience’s own artistic and intellectual identities. Paradoxically, a denied access to the reading and handling of this book would allow it to acquire a new and rich communicative dimension. 2 The uncertainty on the outcome of my proposal prevented me from inserting the project in any spring course syllabus. However, as soon as I received notice of acceptance, I immediately talked with my advanced visual arts students, enrolled in an art history special topics seminar to check if we could explore this idea together. I introduced this as an alternative, experimental project, to the more traditional intensive-writing art history paper, and allowed students to choose between the two. A little less than half of the class opted to try the Access Denied project. The upper-division art history classes, including this seminar, address studio arts, art education and graphic design students, who use art history as a complement to their education in the visual arts. Due to the modest size of the art history program, it is not unusual that students come to the advanced seminar after taking only an art appreciation course and the two-part survey, both at lower-division level. Often, students come to the upper-level art history courses with little understanding and appreciation of art history contents and methods; however, the solid studio background accumulated in their respective majors makes them 2 The integral text of my submission is found in the web: http://a09.cgpublisher.com/proposals/503/index_html 3 The seminar in question was Pop Art (and Beyond), Spring 2009. The course started from the antecedents to Pop Art (Cubism, Duchamp, the Neodadaism of Rauschenberg and Johns, the Nouveau Réalisme) and expanded on British and American Pop Art.  4 open to new ideas, especially if involving an art-making component. The project became partially local and partially dispersed to address that I was going to engage both art making and art history. I teamed with ceramics Professor Mary Harden, a member of the art faculty from my previous affiliation in Oregon and two non-traditional art students from Italy, Marco Pascarella and Marco Martelli. This provided an additional layer of displacement, once again reflecting my biography: Italy, Oregon, and South Dakota, where the participants live, are all places I have lived or I am currently living. Any extension of my biographical component in the series’ general concept allowed me to become a conceptual artist. In my newly acquired role, I was able to establish a deeper dialogue with my art and design students. Students were allowed to expand the paradox denying/releasing of the general concept (=an art history book not meant to be read acquired a new communicative dimension by being incorporated into art making) through an idea of their own choice and in their own language, whether English or Italian. In a recent study linking arts-based research and curricular practices, James Haywood Rolling (2010) warned against the excessive academic structuring as hampering the development of “unpredictable thought, the kinds of metaphorical leaps that charter innovation” (pp.110-111). Similarly, I am convinced that when an opportunity with great potential surfaces and is agreed upon by students, the faculty should, to reasonable extent, welcome and try to accommodate it in the course. Teaching art history through arts-based research requires the art historian to explore the interstices between the claimed “objectivity” of art history and the “subjectivity” of art making. As Rita L. Irwin and Stephanie Springgay (2008) claim, a/r/tographic inquiry finds realization especially when “hybrid communities of artists, educators, and researchers locate themselves in the space of the in-between to create self-sustaining interrelating identities that inform, enhance, evoke, and/or provoke one another” (p.112). Each student participant was given a copy of the book. The student was required to choose a theme, ranging from very personal to more general, and try to give it concrete visual form in any chosen medium, by incorporating the book in whole, in part, or in fragments into his/her own project. In order to tie his or her work to the general concept of the series Access Denied, the student would need to find a way to make the book inaccessible, in answer to the general question: “by making the book untouchable and unreadable, what do you want to communicate?” The inspiration for the students’ projects originated from their study of a 4 The two Italian non-traditional art students were invited to engage the project on a more mature level, so that their work would become a role model to the undergraduate students.  Embodying Art and Art History 5 major artist, or a combination of artists, within the chronological span of the course. Students’ ideas, as well as their techniques and process, were described in a development paper that combined artistic self-reflection of the chosen theme and meditation on art history. By making an artwork and a development paper connected to each other, they were asked to cross boundaries between st