LITERATURE REVIEW (Excerpt from Thesis Project)

Transformative Art & Art As Pedagogy

Paulo Freire described language as a tool for people to describe and therefore construct and deconstruct the worlds around them. Literacy for Freire therefore was the most liberating form of education. Language was a method by which to engage in a critical understanding of the ways people were described and described themselves as being in the world. Freire also understood language, and access to language as political. Literacy as “an instrument of men in their orientation in the world is not neutral” (Freire, 1982 p. 22). Although Freire shifted educational paradigms towards a dialogic learner-focused discourse which challenged tabula rasa assumptions about learners, educational practice today, nearly 50 years after Freire, remains a top-down system for banking information (quite literally). The role of art in this system has been theorized as only having a pedagogical effect when facilitated through technical or art-historical curriculum by a teacher. “The point is that simply being in the presence of art forms is not sufficient to occasion an aesthetic experience or to change a life” (Greene, 1995 p.125).

While educators wrote about art and language as a tool that needed to be activated by a teacher or learning institution, art historians and art critics were grappling with ways to describe and institutionalize new art forms. Although Agosto Boal reminds us in his seminal book, Theater of The Oppressed (1979), that dialogic interaction as art has been the nature of artistic storytelling for centuries, art discourse around socially engaged art, most widely labeled “social practice art” involves a collective theoretical hand-wringing about its classification. The discourse involves art critics, art historians and art institutionalists in search of a way to categorize this practice into the capital “A” art world’s monetary aesthetic canon (Bourriaud, 1998), (Bishop, 2004), (Thompson, 2012), (Groys, 2014). This thesis is less interested with the ways to measure art’s efficacy or level of aesthetic achievement, rather it is interested in a relational understanding of the work in regards to the people who create it. For Black nationalist movements historically, women have played a critical role in artivist practice catalyzed as a tool self-determination (Smethurst, 2005), (Phelps, 2013). In this study, I am interested in understanding socially engaged art as essential in social transformation and self-determination where art provides opportunities for creative and at times seemingly irrational pockets of amelioration to social problems (Lambert-Beatty, 2008). If we understand art practice, not as an aesthetic product for monetary evaluation, but rather as a visual language, social practice art becomes a way to critically construct and deconstruct worlds (Freire, 1982). This power in art-activism work is best captured by writers who highlight the role of art for communities of color and queer communities of color. José Esteban Muñoz writes a theory of “disidentifications” where new formations of agency and identity are forged from performance as having the potential to form “counterpublics that contest the hegemonic supremacy of the majoritarian public sphere. Spectacles such as those... offer the minoritarian subject a space to situate itself in history and thus seize social agency” (Muñoz, 2013 pg.1). Literacy has been understood as a tool through which people can conscientiously understand themselves in contexts of power, and create their own worlds. Ronak K. Kapadia describes the establishment of a “Queer Calculus” which reorients affect away from oppressive individualistic systems dictated by the state towards an alternative and necessary affect of collectivity (2016). Through art as visual literacy, queer people of color construct counterpublics which stimulate a queer calculus in order to reestablish space for social agency on their own terms. In the landscape of this study, social agency is situated both in art and activism. Judith Butler delineates public collective action as performative resistance that redefines public space as one for collectivity (2011). The use of art as a socially engaged tool for activist practice, in the hands of people of color, creates a testimonial counterpublic. “In everyday community activism for racial justice, the relational quality of public pedagogies can be demonstrative and experimental of our efforts to encounter each other in our histories and plurality and to enact different, less oppressive, ways of being public together” (Villenas, 2019 p. 164).” In reframing the space created by women of color and queer folks of color through art activist work as a pedagogical performative counterpublic, we can expand our understanding of educational spaces, towards spaces that can be exploratory, political, and healing for the people that are traditionally pushed aside in educational and artistic institutions.

Queer Studies & Feminist Chicanas & Black Feminism

Patriarchy teaches us to divide our traits and emotions as humans into a binary distinction, one masculine, one feminine. This divide, far from neutral, benefits masculine traits creating a society in which “we idealize love in principle, but we devalue it in fact. A culture that devalues love and connection is not built for intimacy. It is built for production, consumption and war” (Real, 2011 p.106). By centering women’s voices I seek to develop a landscape that does not shy away from the complexity of these women’s lived experiences. I seek to establish a landscape built for connection, understanding the context of patriarchy we exist in without using it as a comparative backdrop of normalcy. Audre Lorde tells us that art gives language to what is “already felt” she tells us that breaking silence for black women is particularly powerful, for the internal reserves of knowing within black women from which “true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes” (Lorde, 2007 p.36). Gloria Anzaldua calls this internal reserve of what is already known, facultad. She describes it as “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities... it is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings that are behind which feelings reside” (Anzaldua, 1987 p.60). For women of color who create at some intersection of art activism, there is a process that queer feminist literature, Chicana and black feminist literature sees as an ungrounding of deep expressive knowledge that becomes unearthed to create a new social space. The visual expression of facultad opens a space for understanding, learning, meaningful discussion, resistance, and “being with” (Butler, 2011), (Hooks, 2015), (Villenas, 2019). The only way for me to compose these experiences in their truth without faltering to identity politics is to sit with their complexities (Lorde, 2007), (Crenshaw, 1991). In order to dive into the complexities and pluralistic nature of “women of color” as a cohort of people, I need to set forth a decolonial practice of listening so that I can genuinely hear the testimonies in front of me.

Witnessing & Decoloniality

The participants in this study work in a variety of mediums, none of them have expressed their mediums to be “social practice.” The categorization of social practice art is mostly a label of the ivory tower and the white-cube. The participants here are photographers, actresses, directors, painters, videographers, illustrators who use their experiences to speak truth to power.

They use their passions to relate to social injustice and express that outwards thus creating space for witnessing (Villenas, 2019). Sofia Villenas describes witnessing as such, “I experienced the act of witnessing and being called to witness as the difficult teaching and learning of relationality and coalition leveraged toward visions for justice” (2019, pg. 152). She describes witnessing as learning about finding common ground and finding empathy for collectivity in order to reimagine possibilities for a more just future. When it is not our role to play the advocate, noticing the effects of systemic violence against people and denouncing them as a spectator contributes to a discourse that acknowledges something meant to be rendered invisible (Taylor, 1997). In this paper, the participant artivists play roles that range from advocate to spectator. In our interviews, in the context of this study my participants are advocates for voices rooted within their own lived experiences. Here, I serve as a spectator, I look to the voices of woman-identifying art activists of color who are currently working to make visible the experiences of their lives and the experiences of their communities.

The voices from bodies who have been historically systemically marginalized in near-all aspects of American society, are brought to the forefront here, to be spectated upon, to be listened to, to be made visible. Most significant in this practice of witnessing will be my use of radical listening. Radical listening is a project set forward by Carol Gilligan, through her listening guide to psychological inquiry. Gilligan describes listening as “...a radical endeavor [through which] The associative logic of the psyche can undo dissociations, including those that are culturally sanctioned and socially upheld. Thus in the best tradition of empirical research, psychological inquiry can challenge hegemonic assumptions about how things are or how they are said to be” (Gilligan, 2015, p. 75). Listening to women of color and queer women of color, as a decolonial academic practice challenges forms of Eurocentric and colonial knowing. The women I have interviewed have been generous with me in their vulnerability, in their honesty and in inviting me into their inner worlds. As a complimentary practice in decolonizing this research, I need to remove myself from the position of the all-knowing objective researcher and instead write from a space of vulnerability. Tiffany Page delineates writing as feminist practice in vulnerable authorship. This is writing that is not afraid to express authorial positionality and potential unknowing (Page, 2017). Finally, in decolonizing my practice my relationship with my participant’s work needs to leave these pages and extend into the real world. In this way I hope to answer the call set forth by Picq et.al. (2017) to combine academic theory and praxis as “complimentary dynamics that allow us to re-signify the world” “Son dinámicas complementarias que nos permiten resignificar el mundo” (p. 416).

A glossary of academic terms curated and taught by Professors Maria Belausteguigotia and Josie Saladaña

Disobedience – Vulnerability –  Representation – Violence – Activism

La Facúltad (Gloria Anzaldua)

Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of la facúltaddescribes a knowledge that is embodied, that is felt, that goes beyond something developed through schooling. La facúltad is an intelligence gained through experience, it is an individual’s sensibility to the subtleties communicated through body language, power dynamics, and tone. It is also the inherent and varied forms of intelligence that people acquire throughout life, which are not explicitly taught. Anzaldua describes la facúltad as “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities… it is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak, that communicates in images and symbols which are the faces of feelings that is behind which feelings reside” (Anzaldua, 1987 p.60). 

When I think of la facúltad, the first thing I think of is “street smarts,” this thing that I learned and adapted to as a part of being raised in what academics would term an “at risk” neighborhood, something I took for granted most of my life. Facúltad is being able to intuit a person’s character beyond their initial self-presentations, it is the gut feeling of "maybe I should walk down this street, instead of that one." When I thought of la facúltad, I thought about the women in my family who though barely literate, have an audacious ability to survive and thrive, and endlessly provide for their children. I think of la facúltad, not only as academically non-traditional forms of knowledge, but as an intuition and a drive nott  measurable, but latent within people. I consider it a socio-emotional intelligence oftentimes contrived through struggle, through failure, and proximity to oppression. 

(State) Violence & Pedagogies of suffering

(Sate) Violence refers to significant physical harm inflicted upon individuals throughout a society carried out by states or non-state organizations. 

Pedagogies of suffering alludes to the mobilization of said violence as a disciplinary tool for social manipulation. Pedagogies of suffering, in effect, use violence and suffering to teach fear, silence and control. (Rivera 2015), (Ruiz 2017).

States use pedagogies of violence employing murders, disappearances, tortures, and massacres which attempt to dehumanize, control, erase, and silence societies. Through pedagogies of fear, states and violent organizations seek to create social atmospheres of paranoia, and distrust, but have yet to successfully create an environment of complete silence. Throughout the semester violence has been a prominent theme, state violence, symbolic violence, and institutional violence have been spoken about as social problems, where visual arts serve as their reactionary lenses. (Examples include tthe play described by Diana Taylor in Taylor: Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” Los Siluetazos from Las Madres de La Plaza de Mayo, and Nuestras Presas Fanzine).  

Cristina Rivera Garza, in Dolerse: Textos de un Paíz Herido describes public displays of violence in Mexico, as “dolor como un proyecto político social” (Rivera 2015).  Pain, as a social-political project is illustrated in the examples of public violence set forward by Rivera and Iván Ruiz in Docufricción: prácticas artísticas en un México convulso (2017). In both texts, perpetrators use public violence as a tool serving a pedagogy of fear, of horror, of suffering. Rivera describes a dead man hanging from a bridge in broad daylight. Cars continue to drive under this bridge, families walk past on the streets below. The public corpse serves as a warning, an almost ironic method of silencing through an extremely public introduction of horror onto spectators (2015). Ruiz describes a horrifying scene of a corpse, wrapped in black plastic dragged from the back of a car cruising down a busy street, with a warning reading, “esto me paso por sapo”(Ruiz, 2017 p.48). Both instances describe narcotraficante violence in México which lives between dichotomies of people being disallowed to denounce the violence of narcos, while this violence is being put on public display as a threat. Speaking on what is put out for everyone to see becomes forbidden.  

Pedagogies of suffering move beyond the physical pain inflicted on victims of violence. It also moves beyond the individual experiences of those who are forced to be spectators of this violence. Pedagogies of suffering are also systemically inter-generational through the process of historical memory and forgetting. After mass atrocities, school curricula, national holidays, and institutional censorship are set up to remember and oftentimes forget those who disappeared, contributing to the silencing practices of violence. Art and activism, serves to counteract historical dis-memory. Art and activism disobey silence and remember- speak on- and render visible, that which is there, but is not meant to be seen. 

Activist and artistic reactions to the silence, to the paranoia, of making apparent what is not meant to be seen stands in defiance to violence, and the powers that inflict it. The refusal to remain a passive spectator, makes artists and activists (and journalists, liberation theologists, etc..) the agents of resistance necessary to breathe life into societies paralyzed by fear.

Representation & Active Silence

Politics of representation are always present in matters of representation involving unequal power relations. We began the semester talking about Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. The dynamic of Cuarón’s representation of Cleo was highlighted as a point of contestation particularly regarding Cleo’s lack of speech. While some regarded her silence as a form of misrepresentation by Cuarón, others noted the power in Cleo’s silence. For me, Cleo’s silence was something agentive, something selective. Because I know many women reminiscent of Cloe, many women in my family, including my mother, I saw in Cleo’s silence flickers of these women. These women, like Cloe are purposefully selective in who they share their experiences with, when, and why. It is a choice for Cleo to open up to the family in the climactic scene when she admits to not wanting her child, after the strenuous relationship development between her and her boss. She holds her silence not only from the family within the movie, but from the audience! Most of the people in the audience are more like the family who employs Cleo than like Cleo and her sister. My mother has not seen Roma, my family in a rancho de México who have to go to a cyber café to access the internet have not signed into their Netflix account to watch Roma. Roma was not made for “Cleo(s)” (or is doubtfully accessible to “Cleo(s)”) it was made for people with a certain amount of power, and for that reason, Cleo’s silence is powerful. We as a relatively elite audience are not entitled to explanations from Cleo, but we see her emotion, we see her power we see it, but it does not belong to us, it remains hers. 

It is interesting for me in context of this class to explore loud activism, alongside the potential of agentive silence. These two do seem to be in contention with one another, yet they both have a role to play in resistance and navigating forms of violence. I placed active silence with representation, because I think of it as a form of self-representation, the manipulation of self-representation through withholding voice. In week six, we spoke about the complexities of “subversion through the acts of everyday life” (Week 6 notes). We discussed the ways this can be problematically coopted in the space of complacency, while at the same time, learning bureaucracy, and following the expectations and steps of bureaucracy can be agentive when seeking a means to an end. Silence as disobedience, silence as following the rules- to entremeterse al sistema para conseguir poder entre ese sistema -seems to me like an effective way to utilize agency. The way Taylor describes active spectatorship (1997), as a tool to utilize when it is not our role to be the protagonist in social battles, I see agentive or active silence, as something people can utilize to manipulate the system by moving through it, knowingly and using it to benefit oneself. Although I do agree with the saying, that “you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools,” sometimes, you still have to live in that house, and deal with the house rules, practically, sometimes you have to use those tools, until you have enough power within the house to make a difference. Sometimes, you have to prioritize survival before dismantling the house. And I don’t blame people for doing that, after all through continuing my education, I’ve been doing that all my life. 

Spectatorship 

I think about this concept a lot and I worry that spectatorship generally aligns with complicity. The way there is a politics of representation there certainly is a politics of looking. In week four, we took a look at instances of state violence, responses to violence, and its spectators. Diana Taylor, in Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War,” “suggests methods for analyzing artistic resistance, being a resistant spectator, and being involved in speech acts. She mentions that although we cannot always play protagonistic roles in dramas, the position of spectator is a significant one. Through the politics of looking, we can “make visible that which is clearly there, but not allowed to be seen” (1997 p.27)” (Stewart, 2019). Here, Taylor highlights significance of looking, of selective sight. The significance of looking at something that is minimized through relationships of power is action, it is response. Acknowledging the homeless person, who asks for change as you walk down the street is a moment of spectatorship. This moment, in its minimal gesture, contributes to a change in that person’s social invisibility. Noticing the effects of violence against people and denouncing them as a spectator, though it does little, it still contributes to a discourse that acknowledges something meant to be rendered invisible. In the moments where we cannot, or should not be the protagonists in representation, showing up as spectators contributes to the dynamic of rendering the invisible visible. 

Ileana Diéguez, in Imaginar La Forma de Aucencia, analyzes the spectacle of violence as the politics of looking. Through Diéguez, we encounter the ways that spectatorship becomes socially traumatic when the public absence of a private presence disrupts the social sphere. In consideration of social trauma, I wonder, who is forced to look at violence? who has the privilege to decide not to look? and why has public violence become a political and economic tool for manipulation? These questions also makes me think of family separation by the trump administration as both something very private and concealed (journalists having none -to minimal access to camps) and public at  the same time (public outrage), as a politically manipulative act and tool to distract, to leverage power. 

Urgency & Disobedience & Visibility

I think of art and activism as loud and/or visible forms of disobedience as responding to the urgency of invisibility, violence, or social paralysis. Artists make the bold and brave move in a moment of violence, to draw attention to injustice. Urgency refers to the need for visibility when there are lives at risk, urgency in art and activism refers to the urgency for voice, for visibility. I see this most prominently for those usually forgotten. In this course, we have returned time and time again to the topic of prisoners. Prisoners face a particular urgency, as people in nebulous time. Prisoners, like Antigone(s), are a population that are meant to be socially forgotten, locked away, and out of sight. Because prisoners are is in such a vulnerable position, their visibility is significantly urgent. To notice, and focus on those who are meant to be forgotten in the first place is an act of disobedience. 

Playing along a border of visibility and invisibility is represented strategically in Haizea Barcenilla García’s piece, Rompe la Ventana. Exposición y Ocultación en Exhibition 19 de Señora Polaroiska. Barcenilla explores the strategy of (in)visibility which simultaneously highlights and hides aspects of that which is being represented in order to retain its integrity. This technique is a disobedience in representation which can be used as an urgent response. Barcenilla describes the technique as follows, “estrategia translúcida en el trabajo Exhibition 19 como forma de visibilización y ocultación simultánea, como un modo de luchar contra regímenes de visibilización totalizadores y controlados por sociedades patriarcales, mediante formas de narrarse y construirse visibles, al mismo tiempo que veladas y cargadas de misterio” (2016 p.511).

Vulnerability/Sensibility 

Vulnerability and sensibility are concepts what I have seen as united thus far in this course. Vulnerability and sensibility push at the boundaries of acceptable forms of knowing in academia. They are essential elements to facúltad. To feel, has been something I have always been taught to put aside when reading, writing, and analyzing. In order to be objective and unbiased (as though this were ever really possible), throughout primary school I was told that one had to suppress and ignore all human emotions;, I was taught that rationality was the only path through which high learning could be established. I am excited to see such a canon of academics, throwing away these notions of objectivity, and “strict scientific thought” in the humanities and social sciences- where those things never have been truly attainable, and the attempt to attain them has proven toxic to these fields. “In trying to become ‘objective’ western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence” (Anzaldua, 1987 p.59).

Tiffany Page, in Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice spends some time grappling with the idea of vulnerability, especially for the researcher. “what is at the heart of vulnerable methods and writing are ongoing questions about what unsettles and relations to the unfamiliar and strange, and how this might start to be addressed through the slow examination of the varying and multi-layered modalities of vulnerability involved in research practices” (Page, 2017 p.15). You need to be vulnerable in order to really feel. In order to representpeople or practices of social urgency, we should feel. “Pensar es ser sensible a una tierra y su gente… reúne dimensiones intelectuales y afectivas” (Kohan, 2016 p.82) I think that this is the essential intersection between Art activism and academia, an emotive learning, sensitive representation, and vulnerable research. Art as active academia should strive for—reaffirming/ establishing legitimacy for alternative forms of knowledge and knowing, and representation for the socially urgent. “Being vulnerable within research places unexpected affective and sensorial demands upon researchers in representing the lives of others, and involves being receptive to the limits of knowing” (Paige, 2017 p.18). Vulnerability in research and in writing allows space for incompletion, for not knowing. And to reach and acknowledge limits of what can be understood through academic research. There will always be knowing in the subjects of academic insight that will know more through experience, and there is agency and power in the ways that knowledge is acquired- that cannot ever be fully grasped by academia. 

Bodies/ Presente
Diana Taylor’s piece ¡Presente! (2018) describes a phenomenon which calls into question “the space of appearance itself.” The term ¡Presente! is one which is deployed when we refer to ourselves as present in a space of resistance, but also those who we have seen passed. Calling out ¡Presente! in rememberanceremembrance of the dead, is to negate their absence, is to call upon the work they have contribnuted. It is a call to legacy. “Dar presencia a algo, hacerlo visible es un primer paso necesario para introducirlo en el sistema de legitimación correspondiente” (Barcenilla, 2016 p.498). To legitimate is to make visible role of power to make something presente- the disobedience in making something presente that is meant to be silenced. Presente is important to the body, the performance of living, is presente, the bodily experience of facúltad is presente. The actions of artists and activists to resist social amnesia is presente. To be vulnerable and sensible is presente. To be an active spectator is presente. To be actively silent is presente.