I really enjoyed reading through your posts about Maya since I did not meet her. I found her work quite interesting, especially thinking about the connection between literacy and art as pedagogy of inquiry. I’m thinking about the social movements in Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, the southern United States, and so many other places across the world. As I mentioned earlier, Paulo Freire is one of the educators I’m influenced by; he too asked similar questions to Maya. How can the limitations that arise from oppression be confronted and transcended by pedagogy? The community research team Freire worked with that included community members and university professors confronted this dis-identification with reading by starting with images that affirmed the importance of the daily lives of people. I understood Maya to be doing this by recognizing that conscious or not, we all start with a dynamic relationship to a piece of paper. It’s loaded. In a culture where people facing oppression in school might be taught that the piece of paper is separate from them, not them, I see Maya trying to bring the piece of paper into an intimate relationship with the student-writer-human. It’s the rupture caused by oppression I see her seeking to transcend. It would be interesting to ask that as an organizing question looking at literacy campaigns- how did transcendence happen? And what kind of relationship between paper, pencils, people, land, community, etc was supported to grow? Gene, didn’t you do work with the Sandinistas? I’d love to hear about your experiences and the pedagogy you learned there and how that might relate to this discussion.
In terms of my project, a major question on my mind this week is how I’ll connect different elements i’m working with. I have my rubbings, audio recordings of our class and memos I did on my own, I have drawings I worked on of maps of my walks, and I also have pieces of fabric I want to write questions of reflections from my walk on and place beneath those drawings. I think it’s interesting to think about the space between these different elements and how I want to use that space because I’ve mostly been focusing on the elements themselves.
As I think I commented on briefly in one of the other posts, some of the theorists that Maya referenced, like Karan Barad, write of the dynamic relationship between all things. As you point out Amanda, that relationship does not facilely pierce consciousness for most people, and so explicit pedagogy and reflective analysis is also needed to at least open the pathway to that type of co-existence with things. Even Freire, building on Marx, was very much centered on human beings as distinct from everything else and as uniquely possessed of consciousness though his praxis definitely open up the possibilities of a wider understanding of connectedness. Still, the images Freire used were very literally related to the experience of the peasants he engaged with, almost as illustration, as something utilitarian. I don’t know that he really thought about the materials themselves (so if you have any insight into this that would be enlightening). Yet your point about how human beings regard paper as being culturally loaded certainly sounds right to me.
We probably have not concentrated enough in this class on our relationship to the materials we’ve been using, something I will try to focus on more if I have the opportunity to teach the class again. What is the relationship between the materials you’ve chosen, what you’ve done, and the directions that have emerged. What happens between those materials and between them and you as you engage in the work, what possibilities have emerged that could not be foreseen? I still think about how you began your journey by discussing the frontier between before and after your mother dying; I wonder how you and your materials together have traversed that frontier or how you still hover over it; what has changed because of the process you’ve undertaken? Maybe the frontier itself has changed its definition or character. The same questions could be posed for all the members of this class though the nature of the border/frontier would be different.
The dynamic relationship between material and artist relate in some ways to my experience in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas. I went there on an Artists’ Brigade, North American artists who were supporting the Sandinista Revolution (which has sadly been totally sabotaged by its own leaders). The Committee in Defense of the Revolution paired us up with Sandinista artists and assigned us walls on which to paint murals. Most of the imagery on the murals was following in the spirit of Soviet social realism – Strong beautiful muscular men and buxom women waving red flags and declaring that the revolution will never surrender. Many were quite beautiful, and their purpose was to support the slogans and ideals of the Central Committee. Art was supposed to be very explicit and literal, it’s what the leadership thought was needed, and maybe they were right. I wonder how that aligns with Maya’s reference to a theorist (whose name I can’t remember) who said something like, “Art that is too directed to how people understand it fails; it is reduced to a lesson.” For the Sandinista leadership, then, the relationship with the mural wall was utilitarian, a surface for propaganda (the propagation of specific ideas), or maybe heuristicall as a tool for reflection. I do not think the relationship was dynamic in the sense you write about and Maya talked about. In any case, the Sandinista leadership was not happy with the mural my comrades and I painted. They, disapprovingly, called it an example of “New York expressionism.” But for us, it was exciting that many children from the community came on their own volition to help us paint, and drew their own fish in the sea and flowers on the land; for them the wall was a surface on which they could create change of sorts, on which they could literally make their mark, and they became part of a little informal arts collective with us that joined art with beauty, politics, joy and community. I don’t know that the wall became alive for them, or stayed alive once the mural was complete, but at least for a moment we and the wall were all alive together. We had to work around the wholes and peeling, we had to work with the wall. Our mural, along with most of the ones that were painted at that time, have been painted over. It all brings up the question of what it means to have art serve revolutionary objectives, and what it means for art when the objectives are clearly pre-determined, when the objectives are fixed rather than the process being celebrated.
How do all the ideas that Amanda raises, that I’ve commented on, and that were inspired in part by Maya’s presentation relate to the idea that Maya expressed about art as curiosity (rather than personal expression)?