Critically Transforming Chicago's Older Public Art
I presented my findings, below, at a day-long symposium addressing pertinent issues regarding the arts, including: the future of museum curatorship; social justice in the arts-based classroom; maintining rights of special needs students in the arts; incorporating social media in today's art museum; and performance art as a phenomenological, transformative pedagogical approach to art making and art education.
Other presenters included Josh Derbas, Guest Connection Supervisor or the Play and Learning Center at Chicago Children's Museum; Gabriella Rosales, Art Instructor at Southwest Texas Junior College; Bora Shin, Educator at Chicago's High Jump, College Preparatory Program; and Raphaelle Ziemba (Pictured, Right), Rehearsal Director and Coreographer for Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre.
Walter Benjamin noted "...film furthers insight into the necessities governing our lives by its use of close-ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera." My video and photo analysis attempts to capture these nuances, the details, the movement, the stasis of the art objects with which my research participants interacted.
Benjamin added, "we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking, we have no idea at all what happens during the split second when a person actually takes a step....This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing, a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious." I produced the following video/photo montage, capturing the "disrupting and isolating" components of my research participants as they interacted with public art and with one another in the participatory, democratic educational space created by Chicago's older works of art.
The video presented, above, was derived from my longer, full-feature article, below.
Part One: http://vimeo.com/61306360
Part Two: https://vimeo.com/65014553
- Project Rationale: Chicago’s 2012 Cultural Plan suggested that educators look toward local art in public spaces as a means of cultural education. The “Cultural Plan” designated between $250,000 to 1 million, proposing that educators take students into their own neighborhoods, relying upon the “showcases of culture…that are located within walking distance of the school,” thereby optimizing “affordability” (City of Chicago: Supplemental, 2012, p. 4). However, Benjamin noted that an image, a work of art as an historical document, may “attain to legibility only at a particular time;” they stand, therefore, as potentially monumental historical artifacts relevant only to the historical epoch in which they were created, and nothing more (Arcades, p. 462). Do the older public sculptures become living documents from which we may learn new lessons, or are they archaic monuments merely filling valuable real estate space at the busiest intersections in Chicago? Benjamin argued that at the intersection between older images and present analysis, historical works of art may serve either as “monumental” obstacles to progress, or through “the task of…interpretation,” they may become crucial tools of transformative, “critical” history (ibid, p. 464).
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