Pedagogy of the Hot Tub
SPACE: San Francisco
GROUP: Institute for Social Research - Pedagogy of the Hot Tub: Notes on the Institute for Social Research in the SF Bay Area
DATES: Fall 2007
REVIEWER: Marisa Jahn & Joseph Del Pesco
From radical groups like the Black Panthers and Diggers to the more quotidian co-op housing and worker-owned grocery stores, the San Francisco Bay Area boasts a long history of social pioneering. Despite their sustained influence on cultural practices and organizational methods today, the study of collective experiments in the Bay Area and beyond has generally been under-emphasized in academia. Seeking to redress this oversight and to encourage alternative methods of learning, Brian Conley, then chair of the MFA program at the California College of Arts (CCA), scheduled a semester-long course investigating the history of California communes through text, films, and biographies. For its instructor, he invited German artist Christian Jankowski, whose predominately video-based work has probed the relationship between art and various institutions from the museum to the church. Together, Conley and Jankowki conspired to transform the passive process of education into a self-reflexive social experiment and living laboratory.
[caption id="attachment_215" align="alignright" width="298" caption="Final Installation for Institute for Social Research"]
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For the duration of the fall semester, an ocean-facing house on San Francisco’s Great Highway was rented and occupied by an expanding and contracting group of up to 27 students with diverse origins – Korea, Bosnia, the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Canada, Poland, Lithuania, and the US. Half were students from CCA’s MFA program, and the other half were Jankowski’s students, imported from Stuttgart’s Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Named the “Institute for Social Research” by the students, the class’ curriculum was comprised of periodic travels across the peninsula to CCA’s campus for meetings and lectures, evening presentations at the house, and – as the title promises – a series of social experiments. Throughout the semester, students collaboratively tested an array of hypotheses, most often in the form of art actions and performances, and assiduously documented along the way. As a group, they also decided upon basic household management, including the disbursement of funds and sleeping arrangements. The course culminated in the “Art God” party that took place on December 7, 2007 at the beach-house, followed several months later by an exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, and a subsequent exhibition at the Württembergischer Kunstverin in Stuttgart. Accompanying both exhibitions was an extensive 447 page catalogue.
The close collaboration of the participants and the dissolved distinction between teacher and students was conveyed in the ISR’s exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, which consisted of a large-scale installation loosely narrated by photo documentation. Cohering the exhibition was a pervasive sense of disorder and material polyphony. An umbrella converted into a satellite dish, and pedestals and household objects (pots and pans, a toaster, etc.) were stacked atop one another to form makeshift forts and exhibition armatures, suggesting the ISR’s insistent blur between art and life. A secret passageway lined with snapshots and email printouts echoed the catalogue’s scrapbook aesthetic. Two monitors tossed on a long couch showed a pair of eyes, wide open and vulnerable, that searched the room. A circular carpet of sleeping bags with heads towards the center was arranged on the floor, providing a viewing surface for a ceiling projection and invoking the group’s inclination to, as the project description purports, “share each others’ dreams.”
In a student video entitled Teach Me Something, artist Jana Jacob asked every member of the group to teach her a new skill and vice versa. Facing each other in a bathtub, Helena Rempel taught Jacob a Russian children’s song through repetition; Dina Danish patiently taught Jacob an Arabic tongue twister; and Cristina Rodrigo taught Jacob the hand motions for flamenco dancing. Teach Me Something communicates the group’s embrace of difference through exchange and their emphasis on peer-directed pedagogy. Other projects, such as Byung Chul’s video Dear Jumper, look to San Francisco histories – in this case, one that involves the accidental undulation of the Golden Gate Bridge caused by a large mass of people congregating at its center. Chul invited people to meet him on the bridge for a collective jump, but neither the ISR group nor the strangers who received his flyer showed up. The video shows Chul walking on the Golden Gate bridge, alone except for the cameraman, with a large hand-painted sign ‘calling all jumpers.’ He was promptly scolded off the bridge, the officials undoubtedly interpreting his signage in relation to the hundreds of suicide jumps committed on the bridge each year. Like Abbie Hoffman’s event in 1967 that involved encircling the Pentagon with a chain of hands in a pagan ritual of levitation, Dear Jumper was intended to involve the collective efforts of individuals as a large scale gesture. Yet, unlike Hoffman’s event, designed to creatively protest the Vietnam war, Dear Jumper offers no explicit social or political perspective.
In addition to the student projects that populated the exhibition, both the Art God Party and the Richmond Art Center’s opening reception featured music and activity punctuated by a large hot tub assembled from couches, straps, and plastic sheeting. Animated by the students and Jankowski, beers and arms in suggestive tangles, the vignette draws associations to a frat-house jacuzzi party or possibly, looking to the thematic of the Art God party, a baptismal pool. In this and many other aspects of the exhibition, the viewer is cast as a passive spectator to the self-conscious staging of group rites. Instead of being included in the spectacle, the viewer remains an alienated witness to the re-enactment of one of the groups’ previous social experiments.
Photo documentation and ephemera collected during the ninety days of the course peppered the exhibition, offering a convincing record of an immersive education process. Like Maria Montessori’s emphasis on the epistemological value of a well-considered environment and the Reggio Emelio aphorism that “the environment is the third teacher,” the ISR presented the combination of beach-house and communal living as the catalytic conditions for education.
Another historical reference point for the ISR experiment is “Groundcourse,” led by Roy Ascott at the Ealing and Ipswich Art Schools (UK) in the 1960s. The Groundcourse’s curriculum was focused on the “stimulation of consciousness” involving “behavioral exercises” that were intended to “shake up preconceptions and established patterns.” The students were placed in disorienting environments and “faced with problems that seemed absurd, aimless or terrifying.”[1] With alumni such as Pete Townsend (guitarist for The Who), Brian Eno and artist Stephen Willats, one might argue that immersive self-directed approaches to education within the larger framework of academia might prove to be an indispensable feature of the education process rather than an anomalous exception. However, because the outcomes and measurable benefits of the models employed by the Groundcourse and the ISR are unclear – and therefore problematic in the eyes of academic institutions that privilege quantification and reproducibility – they remain rare in the landscape of education.
Despite the possible merits of prototyping an alternative education model, the curricular decision to present a process-based endeavor in the form of a final exhibition presented conflicts. For example, the mandate to document every moment for a future spectator surfaces in the exhibition and catalogue in the form of self-conscious posturing. One student expressed malaise with the group’s lapse into auto-ethnographic narcissism: “at some point we turn into an MTV soap opera.”[2] This same concern for disingenuousness appears in Byung-Chul’s prayers to an Art God, which included a request for “guidance, support and authenticity.” While the pseudo-sacralized conceit of the Art God was initially rejected by some of the students, this invocation of a contrived higher-power was eventually adopted as a unifying mechanism, appearing throughout the succeeding projects.
Cultural theorists Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette critically point out that the search for transcendence pervades the history of collectives: “. . .to experience oneself as the glorious, all-encompassing body of Christ or Alah or King or Leviathan or Nation or State or Public is to experience collectivism as redemption, to experience the imagined community as an end to alienation . . .” [3] Hiding behind irony, the ISR fails to either locate and confront the source of their alienation or make evident their values.
One is left wondering whether this political reluctance is a due to an assumption that through adopting the form and spirit of the commune a group might produce a set of shared values, as opposed to historic examples where a saturation of shared values and ideals come first and then lead to collective organizational forms. This kind of procedural inversion is coupled with a mismatch between the process-based art practice of the ISR and the rarified and static exhibition. Rather than defaulting to the myopic exhibition logic of a mainstream art world, perhaps the Institution for Social Research – whose very name suggests an emphasis of process over product – might have engaged directly in existing social movements or invented new structures, after taking positions of their own.
[/caption]
For the duration of the fall semester, an ocean-facing house on San Francisco’s Great Highway was rented and occupied by an expanding and contracting group of up to 27 students with diverse origins – Korea, Bosnia, the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Canada, Poland, Lithuania, and the US. Half were students from CCA’s MFA program, and the other half were Jankowski’s students, imported from Stuttgart’s Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste. Named the “Institute for Social Research” by the students, the class’ curriculum was comprised of periodic travels across the peninsula to CCA’s campus for meetings and lectures, evening presentations at the house, and – as the title promises – a series of social experiments. Throughout the semester, students collaboratively tested an array of hypotheses, most often in the form of art actions and performances, and assiduously documented along the way. As a group, they also decided upon basic household management, including the disbursement of funds and sleeping arrangements. The course culminated in the “Art God” party that took place on December 7, 2007 at the beach-house, followed several months later by an exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, and a subsequent exhibition at the Württembergischer Kunstverin in Stuttgart. Accompanying both exhibitions was an extensive 447 page catalogue.
The close collaboration of the participants and the dissolved distinction between teacher and students was conveyed in the ISR’s exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, which consisted of a large-scale installation loosely narrated by photo documentation. Cohering the exhibition was a pervasive sense of disorder and material polyphony. An umbrella converted into a satellite dish, and pedestals and household objects (pots and pans, a toaster, etc.) were stacked atop one another to form makeshift forts and exhibition armatures, suggesting the ISR’s insistent blur between art and life. A secret passageway lined with snapshots and email printouts echoed the catalogue’s scrapbook aesthetic. Two monitors tossed on a long couch showed a pair of eyes, wide open and vulnerable, that searched the room. A circular carpet of sleeping bags with heads towards the center was arranged on the floor, providing a viewing surface for a ceiling projection and invoking the group’s inclination to, as the project description purports, “share each others’ dreams.”
In a student video entitled Teach Me Something, artist Jana Jacob asked every member of the group to teach her a new skill and vice versa. Facing each other in a bathtub, Helena Rempel taught Jacob a Russian children’s song through repetition; Dina Danish patiently taught Jacob an Arabic tongue twister; and Cristina Rodrigo taught Jacob the hand motions for flamenco dancing. Teach Me Something communicates the group’s embrace of difference through exchange and their emphasis on peer-directed pedagogy. Other projects, such as Byung Chul’s video Dear Jumper, look to San Francisco histories – in this case, one that involves the accidental undulation of the Golden Gate Bridge caused by a large mass of people congregating at its center. Chul invited people to meet him on the bridge for a collective jump, but neither the ISR group nor the strangers who received his flyer showed up. The video shows Chul walking on the Golden Gate bridge, alone except for the cameraman, with a large hand-painted sign ‘calling all jumpers.’ He was promptly scolded off the bridge, the officials undoubtedly interpreting his signage in relation to the hundreds of suicide jumps committed on the bridge each year. Like Abbie Hoffman’s event in 1967 that involved encircling the Pentagon with a chain of hands in a pagan ritual of levitation, Dear Jumper was intended to involve the collective efforts of individuals as a large scale gesture. Yet, unlike Hoffman’s event, designed to creatively protest the Vietnam war, Dear Jumper offers no explicit social or political perspective.
In addition to the student projects that populated the exhibition, both the Art God Party and the Richmond Art Center’s opening reception featured music and activity punctuated by a large hot tub assembled from couches, straps, and plastic sheeting. Animated by the students and Jankowski, beers and arms in suggestive tangles, the vignette draws associations to a frat-house jacuzzi party or possibly, looking to the thematic of the Art God party, a baptismal pool. In this and many other aspects of the exhibition, the viewer is cast as a passive spectator to the self-conscious staging of group rites. Instead of being included in the spectacle, the viewer remains an alienated witness to the re-enactment of one of the groups’ previous social experiments.
Photo documentation and ephemera collected during the ninety days of the course peppered the exhibition, offering a convincing record of an immersive education process. Like Maria Montessori’s emphasis on the epistemological value of a well-considered environment and the Reggio Emelio aphorism that “the environment is the third teacher,” the ISR presented the combination of beach-house and communal living as the catalytic conditions for education.
Another historical reference point for the ISR experiment is “Groundcourse,” led by Roy Ascott at the Ealing and Ipswich Art Schools (UK) in the 1960s. The Groundcourse’s curriculum was focused on the “stimulation of consciousness” involving “behavioral exercises” that were intended to “shake up preconceptions and established patterns.” The students were placed in disorienting environments and “faced with problems that seemed absurd, aimless or terrifying.”[1] With alumni such as Pete Townsend (guitarist for The Who), Brian Eno and artist Stephen Willats, one might argue that immersive self-directed approaches to education within the larger framework of academia might prove to be an indispensable feature of the education process rather than an anomalous exception. However, because the outcomes and measurable benefits of the models employed by the Groundcourse and the ISR are unclear – and therefore problematic in the eyes of academic institutions that privilege quantification and reproducibility – they remain rare in the landscape of education.
Despite the possible merits of prototyping an alternative education model, the curricular decision to present a process-based endeavor in the form of a final exhibition presented conflicts. For example, the mandate to document every moment for a future spectator surfaces in the exhibition and catalogue in the form of self-conscious posturing. One student expressed malaise with the group’s lapse into auto-ethnographic narcissism: “at some point we turn into an MTV soap opera.”[2] This same concern for disingenuousness appears in Byung-Chul’s prayers to an Art God, which included a request for “guidance, support and authenticity.” While the pseudo-sacralized conceit of the Art God was initially rejected by some of the students, this invocation of a contrived higher-power was eventually adopted as a unifying mechanism, appearing throughout the succeeding projects.
Cultural theorists Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette critically point out that the search for transcendence pervades the history of collectives: “. . .to experience oneself as the glorious, all-encompassing body of Christ or Alah or King or Leviathan or Nation or State or Public is to experience collectivism as redemption, to experience the imagined community as an end to alienation . . .” [3] Hiding behind irony, the ISR fails to either locate and confront the source of their alienation or make evident their values.
One is left wondering whether this political reluctance is a due to an assumption that through adopting the form and spirit of the commune a group might produce a set of shared values, as opposed to historic examples where a saturation of shared values and ideals come first and then lead to collective organizational forms. This kind of procedural inversion is coupled with a mismatch between the process-based art practice of the ISR and the rarified and static exhibition. Rather than defaulting to the myopic exhibition logic of a mainstream art world, perhaps the Institution for Social Research – whose very name suggests an emphasis of process over product – might have engaged directly in existing social movements or invented new structures, after taking positions of their own.
ENDNOTES [1] “Degree Zero” Emily Pethick, Frieze, September 2006 [2] ISR catalogue, Designed and produced by students at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Stuttgart, 2008 [3] Stimson, Blake, and Sholette, Gregory. Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
