Art+Worlds+of+Atlanta+for+Trans+conference

The Pedagogy of Cultural Systems: "Art Worlds of Atlanta" by Alan W. Moore awm13579@yahoo.com re. the website:

http://artworldsofatlanta.wikispaces.com/ For a year visiting at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta in Georgia (2005-06), I ran a class called "Art Worlds of Atlanta." We built a Wiki website charting the systemic components of the landscape of visual art production – both institutional and market, mainstream and eccentric. The name of the course was derived from the book by the same name by cultural sociologist Howard Becker. The theoretical lodestar in the background is Pierre Bourdieu. My understandings of the function of visual art worlds is informed first by my life as an artist and critic, and then by my work as an art historian researching artists’ neighborhoods (especially New York’s Lower East Side), and artists’ collectives. The idea for this came to me from a suggestion by the chair of the department, Linda Hightower. In conversation to me bare weeks before the semester began, she said I would enjoy the lively art scene in Atlanta. Well, thought I, why not combine that exploration with the work of teaching? As a last-minute hire, this scheme appealed as a course that required less prep than execution.

Running a Strange Course My syllabus billed it as a //practicum// in research techniques and web publishing. We undertook brief training sessions in online research, archival work, and video interviewing techniques in order to gather the information required to flesh out a website. Communications professor Leonard Witte, who worked for years as a journalist at the //Atlanta Journal-Constitution// newspaper, had recently run a class to build a website for an oral history project, the __www.Mariettaexperience.com__. He suggested I use a Wiki website. He spoke of collective intelligence and invoked the model of the Wikipedia. "The Wiki is an open source model that reproduces itself," he said. "Your class primes the pump." Just over a year later, this reasoning almost seems like a truism. It was also utopian, optimistic, and tending perhaps to valorize the use value of pure information… So the mold was set. "Art Worlds" was to be a disciplinary hybrid, an "umbrella" not a stick – which in unfolding would lead to multiple other areas of study – not only art history, but journalism, media studies, cultural policy and arts administration. It was also to be product-oriented. Not unexpectedly, the problems were legion. The college’s technical support department was not prepared for something like this, and hours were consumed in inconclusive meetings. One problem in the background was that undergraduate students publishing to the web is a vexed issue for many colleges and universities. Attitudes and initiatives often run at cross purposes as there is a strong impulse among administrators to close off and "impound" content on student-authored websites, so that it is not addressable by anyone outside the school community. Fortunately there were no serious problems with inappropriate postings by students or the public, and the course ran the year without any strait jackets besides the natural limitations of teacher and students Which were considerable. My social skills were strained as I tried to follow up the leads I was given by faculty and staff and arrange meetings for the class. I sought to enlist students to help in this, and initiate meetings for us as well. But despite my ideological commitment to classroom democracy, this level of intimacy, or horizontality in course management between student and professor was a hard barrier for both of us to jump. Moreover the students were used to lecture courses. A "studio"-type course in art history was extremely novel… First semester student evaluations ranged from sharply critical to blandly sympathetic. Many were dismayed by the lack of structure and clear deadlines. For the second semester I soft-pedaled my research interests and concentrated on imparting a systematic overview of the art world as it is conventionally constructed (e.g., galleries, museums, schools, critics, etc.). Strangely enough, I found a real scarcity of basic readings on these questions. I also had to address what the students wanted to know about. That was, not surprisingly, how were they supposed to make a living? How could they sell their art? At a state university, these are mostly working and middle class kids. They have not had elite educations and the sense of entitlement they give rise to, and they will not have trust funds to play around with in the artworld. Modernist movements were often driven by well-to-do people who could open galleries, publish magazines, and make art in the absence of a market. While artists drive change in the artworld, most of my students did not feel empowered. The class began with a discussion, with students naming to the blackboard the components they understood made up the system of visual art production. The job of the class then became to fill in description of these components, attending to their relationship to other parts of the system, and especially to artists in Atlanta. The default answer to questions like "What are we looking for?" was, "Attend to how this matters to artists and their working life." The students then were put into the position of acting like artists, and inquiring after information artists would need. As I processed and represented the information generated by the continuous maelstrom of art activity in a "small world city" (as one website describes Atlanta), I strived to keep focus, categorize and devise assignments based upon what I was seeing, and always to find that which would pique students’ interest. I think some of my students were really rather frightened by the radical complexity and contingency of all these varied situations. Finally, for building some sense of esprit and common purpose, we had the product itself, the website. Everyone could see if it was good or not. Naturally the course was redeemed by the small cadre of students who were most serious, who engaged the issues and wanted the course to succeed. Each semester a key number realized that by studying the artworlds of their city they would be injecting themselves directly into it. They were on the verge of moving from the role of observers and reporters to protagonists. There is such a difference thinking about this course -- what I wanted for it, what resulted from it – and running the classes. In reviewing the boxes of notes from two semesters before coming to this conference, I realized just how hard it had all been doing this while teaching my first year of a full time load. (As a visiting professor, of course, it was my last.) I would very much like to propose this course as some kind of model that could be repeated around the country. The curricular refining process, however, has not been completed, that is, this course has not been boiled down from a monster to a beast. Regardless of the problems – or more probably because of them – I was able to see or sense in the information I processed for the students the outlines of a discursive field, that is the relationships between promotion (the alluring slurry of slick, glossy art advertising), more or less regulated reportage (//aka// "art criticism"), scuttlebutt on blogs, list-serves and in interviews, and historical texts. The question remains, how to get students to see systemically? This kind of vision is rather difficult to come by. This way of thinking about art – as a system of cultural production, requiring actors discharging multiple interrelated functions – is not what the academy is set up to teach.

Why Was it so Weird? The //habitus// of present day arts administration is largely about gatekeeping and personnel management, techniques that best serve – maybe even only serve – those kinds of art like big theatres, orchestras and museums which most resemble their patrons, governments and corporations, like dogs come to resemble their masters. In this case, the cats go hungry. This is maybe something like the bureau of indigenous affairs in a settler government. Teaching arts administration is teaching how to govern, when in fact there is already in the arts an internal "governance," rhythms of relation and economy and execution which is not really part of the institutional administrative picture. Governance is rule-based and can be taught. The relationships between the parts of the formal and informal economy of art must be discovered. At one faculty review the artist Robert Sherer asked, "Who is your audience?" While this question did not make sense to me, it is typically asked of media projects, which of course the "Art Worlds" website is. I asked rather, what is the intention here? For me it was clear. The intention was academic: first pedagogic, and secondarily research-oriented. If it were conceived as a service – as some similar sites in other cities have been – the "Art Worlds" site would have been designed differently. Nor did I feel that our job in this class was to gather data that would be of use in cultural policy decisions. Rather the intention of the course was to socialize prospective artists into the system. The students would ideally realize some of the issues they might face and prepare to meet them. A few might understand the lever points of the system, and scheme up ways to make effects of their own. (One logical extension of the class might include devising such "interventions" into the system.)

What Was Learned? I learned a great deal in this course about Atlanta, and about artworlds in general. Most of it was not well confirmed, in the kind of detail and fine grain necessary for solid research. Still, I learned first that the European and northeastern models of a centralized metropolitan culture as the basis for an artworld are not a fit template for reading artworld function in the suburbanized city of Atlanta, and by extension in the other cities of the car-centric United States. Further, the models of artist-centered exhibition practices derived from the alternative space movement of the 1970s have mutated very considerably. A number of the mainline contemporary art institutions in Atlanta are outcomes of the Atlanta Art Workers Coalition and feminist groups of the 1970s and ‘80s. These include the magazine //Art Papers// and the Contemporary exhibition space and studio center. Some of those activists work in institutions today. More recent exhibition spaces and studio complexes are a promiscuous blend of public and private. Many artist-driven exhibition spaces are conjoined with studio complexes. Some are cooperatives. Some are artist-owned, others are developer-driven, "prequels" to more lucrative uses such as luxury housing or high-end mini-malls. The relationships between art exhibition and studio work space and the revaluation and development of derelict industrial real estate is complex and various – artists and developers are both allies and antagonists in the great "sprawl" city of Atlanta. As a research tool, the "Art Worlds" site joined with a host of other historically-based and information-based websites in a veritable underground city of online archives. The website could mobilize these resources to enhance the picture of Atlanta art worlds gone by, to specify and thereby valorize the social worlds of the past instead of simply venerating the real estate through historic preservation. I suggested to the class – after we sketch in the outlines of today’s system, we can put in the shading, sketch the art world in historical depth using primarily these online resources. (We didn’t get that far.) Similarly, a wealth of "nostalgia" sites could be mobilized to provide a picture of the milieu, or creative environment of the recent past. Nightclubs, poetry venues, small presses and societies made up the "scene" of past days. The precondition for all kinds of creative work – the artists’ neighborhood -- is what is continuously exploited and disrupted by gentrifying development. This is among the most difficult components of an art world to articulate. Outside class, with other artists I explored one of these neighborhoods in a networked //dérive// organized online from Philadelphia and London. Within the class, however, I was unable to point clearly to the grounds of the traditional humanist interaction between the arts – music, painting, sculpture, poetry. The dimensions of artistic culture begin to become clear only through studying its life.

Afterword I came to the conference intending to proselytize the "artworlds" online course concept. Upon reviewing the actual website after some months away from it, however, a diffident and apologetic tone overcame me… One respondent remarked that the story of failure was more interesting than success. It was not at all my intention to showcase failure; the course, however, is insufficiently refined. I was trying to convert my field research agenda directly into a class, to enact the same methods in Atlanta as I had in New York using students who, not surprisingly, found the work as difficult as I do. Moreover, in describing the fields of visual arts production I was trying to teach what I know without texts to back it up, that is, teaching from experience only. I have now only a rather partial and specific body of writing, incompletely describing the system we all know. Finally, the overall intention of such a class – to deliver an information resource to an artistic community that has an indisputable use value as an organizing tool – was not realized. I feel that this could in fact only develop in partnership with existing institutions like museum and service organizations, partnerships the building of which would have to be an integral component of the course.