Making sense of exhibitions, latently
I have been auditing a course this semester on pedagogy and social difference, led by Aparna Mishra Tarc, that examines how theories about the psychic experiences of learning might help us to understand how people make sense of others’ (often traumatic) experiences. Central to the course have been questions about what it means to try and sympathize with others’ testimonies and experiences of difference, and why it seems that humans are not capable of learning from—and therefore not repeating—the conflicts of the past. The texts we have focused on in the course have been a mix of theoretical, self-reflexive scholarship about the psychic and ethical implications of teaching or learning from others, alongside fictional and autobiographical representations of the psychic difficulties that accompany learning and identification (J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural, Todd Haynes’ Dottie Gets Spanked and Eve Kosofsky Sedwick’s A Dialogue on Love, for instance, have each been important case studies).
Though the course has explicit connections to my own academic research into the critical pedagogical potential of colonial-era photographs, it’s also prompted me to reconsider how I think of exhibitions and public programming in the visual arts as a form of public pedagogy. In particular, Deborah Britzman’s concept of “difficult knowledge”—the idea that learning from social trauma is always a psychically difficult task that involves the learner vacillating between love and hate—seems useful in analyzing how viewers make sense of their interactions with art. Throughout her work, Britzman underscores that learning is not only a difficult task that involves being psychically vulnerable, but one that often disrupts our sense of linear time. Difficult knowledge upsets our assumptions about the cause (in this case learning about a social trauma) and effect (conducting oneself in a more ethical manner) relationship that happens for learners who approach representations of social trauma. For Britzman, knowledge is often latent: it comes much later than the moment of learning, at a point that is difficult, or even impossible, to pinpoint or represent. Learning is therefore not only a difficult process to engage in, it is equally difficult to represent.
Britzman’s emphasis on the latency of difficult knowledge seems to help to explain why some exhibitions or public programming about social trauma or experiences of difference don’t seem to immediately generate fruitful discussions. This is something my friends and fellow curators cheyanne turions and Kim Simon have both raised in their own writing and programming and is something I think many of us have experienced at the end of a screening or panel discussion: the awkward silence that ensues that might seem to represent a refusal to or anxiety about engaging in the discussion about social trauma, ethics and difference. But I know that I am sometimes one of those silent people, and that that silence does not necessarily mean I have not engaged in or tried to learn from the text, film or discussion at hand. Oftentimes, I think deeply or even obsessively about the learning object after the event, making sense of it in my own interior monologue and in my discussions with others. And it is often only much much later that I think I have made some sense of that original encounter with the object, only to have to reevaluate it again upon new encounters with representations of social trauma.
So the question for me then becomes how to facilitate this latent sense-making or knowledge that art and its public discourses might prompt for people, especially when the economic and temporal practicalities of creating exhibitions and public programming sometimes make one-off events a necessity. Kristina Lee Podesva has suggested that one way that art criticism might tackle this temporal lag is by revisiting exhibitions through critical texts several months or even years after their original presentation to see what sense can be made about them with more historical distance. But I’m curious about how else we might engage with the latent knowledge that exhibitions and contemporary art can help spark and foster.
As curators, we have the privilege of prolonged engagement with works before we present them, which means that this extended process of absorption is already well underway when they are exhibited. I think it is part of our responsibility to represent these latent conversations as much as the ostensible ones, which can be as simple as raising points of consideration for the audience to take away (and I think this is what Kim is getting at with her blog post). This also means being willing to speak positions that are not necessarily our own. The risk is that people will equate articulation with belief; the hope is that we will be allowed to hone our opinions or readings in public without punishment. “I’m putting out this idea! It might be a bad one! But let’s see how it breaks down! And what rises up out of its failure!”
Yes, for sure. In this way, curators are also similar to teachers in the traditional learning model: they are familiar with the object or content well before-hand and can rehearse the possible questions or responses that the object will solicit. They (or we) are definitely charged with being prepared to solicit a variety of positions or responses, to play devil’s advocate at times and to be willing to fail or change our minds in public. What Britzman says, though, and what I think of as one of her most interesting arguments, is that no matter how prepared you are as the curator/teacher, no matter how much time you’ve had to make sense of your latent knowledge or realizations, you can never predict what will happen in the psychic exchange between the audience and the text. Something unpredictable, and often unrepresentable (at least at first) is bound to occur. She says that moment that we cannot anticipate and that is problematic to represent is the real learning moment or opportunity, and how we handle it as mediators is super important (and also often super difficult).
Thanks for the post Gabby. Nice to see Britzman invoked for this community. At one point actually, the current exhibition at TPW (Decisive Moments, UncertainTimes) was called “Difficult Knowledge” trying to draw back to Britzman’s thinking (and her colleagues that have riffed off it, such as Aparna and others in the critical pedagogy community, like, well, Roger Simon). For me, the great potential for this recent trickle down from academe to exhibition making is the postential for curators to pose questions that they don’t know the answers to. As you noted years ago, albeit somewhat in jest, pedagogy is the new relational aesthetics (relational aesethics is the new pedagogy, really). What we do need to spend more time on, collectively as curators together with our audiences, is how the gesture of presenting difficult works (that is works with difficulties, or questions, to be grappled with) can generate substantive engagement (both affective and intellectual) and not just be left as the “open work” or a work whose interpretation will always be subjective. How do we advocate for the engagement and development of new questions through the experience of visuals arts without being either too didactic or too abstract? Particularly when we’re talking about images and narratives that are risky, tricky, potentially problematic… I’m working on developing a little workshop/symposium at TPW to push at this.
What about slowness? Is there a way to introduce room–temporal and affective–into exhibitions and public discussions? There’s the simple gesture of not filling the space or silence, but what else?
Kim, your comment about the potential for curators to present questions they don’t know the answer to reminds me of Castillo/Corrales, a small gallery in Paris. Their exhibitions are archived not by the name they bore when alive, but through the lessons learned of exposing them. So, the gallery’s first exhibition, Doomsday Celebration, is archived as We Are Going Into Business. Maybe we (curators) need to be more explicit about those unpredictable paradigm shifts, to present ourselves as surprised or challenged. Here’s a concrete tactic: asking questions to our audiences. In this way, we admit we don’t have the answers, we reach out, we invite collaboration, we wear vulnerability on our sleeves.
I think slowness is one strategy that might work: the holding open of the space of interpretation, or the process between encountering a work and making sense of it. Of course, it’s way easier to say you want to do this than to do it, oftentimes, because we humans are usually pretty desperate to come to conclusions, to symbolize and categorize our experiences, as quickly as possible.
But I also like the idea of asking questions we don’t know the answers to, but that others might help us to think out-loud about. I guess the problem I always have is how to ask those questions in a way that they seem meaningful to others over a long period of time, so they can be revisited after the immediate encounter with the text.
Great post, Gabby. And really interesting discussion.
I think the idea of coming back to an exhibition years later is really brilliant. Usually we leave that job to critics, and it rarely happens because media wants current events. But I think ruminative writing about exhibitions seen years ago can have a really great, galvanising effect. Maybe this is something curators could instigate. Call for audiences to come in and dialogue about a exhibition that they saw years ago.
Great discussion! This blog is certainly one way in which we can keep these conversations and the experience of art alive and open.
The slowing down of required response time is a fantastic idea, though logistically difficult. I always find that I come up with the best questions for panels and conferences at least a day later. The same is often true with exhibitions, although – depending on their duration – they more easily allow for a physical revisiting. With so much going on, though, who has the time?
With regards to enabling a more forgiving environment for curators (and artists and writers) to take risks and ask/propose difficult questions, we need to more openly embrace and demand this from the powers that be. We are not politicians. We should wear our honesty and ignorance with pride on our sleeves (beside our hearts?). We shouldn’t have to pretend to have all of the answers. Know how to find them, and if the questions are relevant, is more important.
We all have limitations. Being aware of them and confronting them is how we change them. This is what art and education are for.