Talking Whiteboards – week 1

For three weeks, I am inviting visitors to my studio, to talk out loud what any one (or several) of seven diagrams  inspire them to consider. I am posting this at the end of the first week. The diagrams are presented on rolling Whiteboard easels. They can be annotated, and wheeled into any desired configuration. The seven boards are:

• Creativity (after Duchamp and Torrance);
• Hairy Blob (notations about time);
• a summary of Benjamin’s Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that focuses not on the aura, but on political aesthetics;
• Flexible Art Worlds (also a course I teach during this same, three week period);
• Flusser’s Exile and Creativity (from Writings),
• a Studio Critique Template, and
• The Braid (discussed earlier in this blog)

Mostly, The Braid was engaged, at times supplemented by Studio Critique, Creativity (after Duchamp and Torrance) and Flusser’s Exile and Creativity. Thanks go to all who have already participated and are still scheduled to join me, to Asha Veal Brisebois, who is facilitating this project, to Jared Larson for recording, and to DCASE for contributing funds.

Video excerpts are posted as they become available.

Week 1

Day 1

Erik Brown and Gibran Villalobos: The Braid

Having not met before, Gibran and Erik visited on Monday. This led to a reading of The Braid that alternated between Arts Administration and Art Making perspectives, determining considerable overlap, noting blind spots in each approach, and provoking thoughts if and how it might be desirable to open those up. 

Day 2

Mike Nourse, Gerald Brown, Michelle Jacobsen, Mi-yeon Kwon: The Braid, Studio Critique, and Creativity (Duchamp/Torrance).

Two art students, two arts administrators, non-profit and for-profit.  Michelle stayed over after class, Mike arrive from the Hyde Park Art Center with Gerald, and Mi-yeon joined their ongoing conversation after about 45 minutes. Diving first into making and related metaphor, the conversation moved from The Braid to the Creativity board, explored positions  performed in mediating through the Critique Template, and then back to The Braid and aspects of managing. Mi-yeon shared art fair experience from her perspective as a gallerist.

Day 3

Nell Taylor and Allison Yasukawa: The Braid

Like Erik and Gibran on Monday, Nell and Allison had not previously met. Accidental pairings appear to be a powerful facilitation setting, as the participants explore each others interests and  adjust focus on their own knowledge. As Nell used The Braid to think through organizational development of the non-profit she leads, including struggles around the demand for measurement, Allison reciprocated with thoughts about her early proximity to scientific process, her art practice and her work in education.

Day 4 Part 1

Alessia Petrolito and Asha Veal Brisebois: The Braid

A few weeks ago, just before she moved back to Italy, Alessia had come to my studio and spoken about Exile and Creativity, a text we had talked about when she was a student. Now she returned by Skype, to share thoughts about the Braid she had prepared. Asha volunteered to take notes, as her Chicago surrogate, but the two pretty quickly moved toward a conversation. It culminated in Alessia proposing a funnel, both into and from the managing area of the braid, as the receptor and focussing device of  the language and meaning  created in the corresponding areas.

Day 4 Part 2

Kirsten Leenaars: Exile and Creativity and The Braid

A visual artist, Kirsten arranged a stage with two boards, Flusser’s Exile and Creativity and The Braid, moving from left to right. Kirsten’s most recent art project was to engage American and recently immigrated youth in a summer camp around the meanings of home. She considered the impact it had on the youth to be tacitly aware of her European origin. Situating the growth of this particular project in The Braid, she noted the primacy of her artistic intent that can come to fruition with the valued support of curators’ trust, and is her guidance in negotiations with institutional representatives to access and shape appropriate settings.

Day 4 Part 3

Olivia Junell and Asha Veal Brisebois: The Braid

Asha introduced Olivia to The Braid board. A consummate Arts Administrator, Olivia spoke about her journey to embrace development as her calling, and spoke about ‘riding the braid together’ with artists in the implementation of the projects she chooses to be part of.

Day 5

Sade Ragsdale and Dorota Biczel: Exile and Creativity

I met Sade in 2014, when she walked into my residency at the Cultural Center and read The Hairy Blob board cold, requesting no introduction. I asked her then to be part of this project, which I was beginning to envision. She was paired with Dorota, who just arrived from the airport for a short stay in Chicago to teach a workshop in the Flexible Art Worlds class. Sade selected Flusser’s Exile and Creativity to engage, and Dorota, knowing the underlying text well, joined into the conversation. Sade spoke of her own development, from a young adult to an emerging professional, linking the questions she asks and choices she makes to the stages Flusser indicates. Dorota then proposed not a linear reading, but the creation of a Venn diagram, in which stages are no longer successive, but states are thought to coexist. This  session concluded with a discussion of individual thought scapes, or personal epistemic models, a theme I am exploring through the 3-Line Matrix. Sade envisioned a cloud and the movement of droplets, and Dorota discussed her proclivity for molecular structures.

week 2