Category: Teaching and Writing
Teaching and Writing
Some of the teaching I have done are in semi-circles, seminars to discuss and think through art, architecture, criticism and theory. Some of the teaching I have done are in full circles, scattered or parallel lines, workshops to develop pieces of writing, use writing as a tool, and play with new relations to written and spoken language. I teach or have taught in NYU’s studio art program and at Pratt in the architecture, fine arts, and humanities and media studies departments.
Maybe part of teaching is writing a score where half of the notes are missing; creating an unfamiliar context, an environment of constraints where each person has to reinvent their own will within that structure. — Leashing, cultivating? — Maybe another part of teaching is about forfeiting control, sacrificing something, giving up authorship and asking others to embody that void. — Or not a void. Setting up the room and staying in it. Laying something out to see if others animate it with meaning. — Throwing around masks so that unlikely participants end up in unknown roles. So that masks end up landing not only on faces but on all kinds of limbs from shoulders to body parts of speech. — Maybe a part of teaching is ventriloquizing. Or being ventriloquized. — Oscillating between speaking with the authority of a triangle and listening with the fracture of a circle. — Oscillating between listening with the authority of a triangle and leading with the hollowness of a circle. — Oscillating between leading with the fracture of a triangle and speaking with the authority of a circle. — centrifugal, centripetal?
Below are some projects created by my students in response to exercises I developed in response to them. Also below are some performances that I consider an extension of my teaching, and some pieces of writing that explore ideas related to how I think about teaching and how I see teaching as reflective of other social relationships and relationships to the environment—correctness in the built environment, moral relationships to food, precarious forms of altruism, and language as a corporeal thing.