Content provided in partnership with
Performance Art as Progressive Education - Performing Pedagogy: Toword an Art of Politics - Review
Art Journal, Spring, 2001 by Jenny S. Spencer
Charles R. Garoian. Performing Pedagogy: Toword an Art of Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 248 pp., 33 b/w ills. $62.50; $20.95 paper.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
In November 1996, Charles Garoian held an impressive symposium called "Performance Art, Culture, Pedagogy" at Penn State University to celebrate activist performance art and to explore its pedagogical significance as an emerging discipline within the academy. [1] The conference embodied Garoian's utopian desire for a performative event where shared learning and transformative conversations would actually take place between the invited performance artists, who also consider themselves teachers, and students of performance art that included undergraduates (mostly from Penn State), graduate students (mostly from NYU), and scholars affiliated with performance studies as currently taught in the academy. A combination of lectures, panel presentations, workshops, and informal discussions, the symposium was the brainchild of Garoian, whose passionate belief in performance art as a liberatory practice provided the impetus for this unique and inspiring event. The message of both the symposium and the subsequent book ar e virtually identical: that given current postmodern theories of the self and society, performance art that emerges from personal, cultural, and historical exploration has a unique and important role to play in modern educational settings.
Like the "live" event that shadows the writing, Performing Pedagogy is extremely ambitious in its attempt to engage a number of different audiences at once. The book addresses K-12 and postsecondary arts educators, performance theorists, arts activists, professional practitioners, and performance studies students, as well as past and future audiences of the book's featured performance artists Suzanne Lacy, Goat Island, Robbie McCauley, and Garoian himself. While the symposium served to showcase (and thus "teach about") the work of particular performance artists whose innovative work is primarily recognized within politically progressive artistic circles, the selection of participants and their presentations also implicitly staked out a definition of performance art at a time when the history of performance studies (or the story we tell of its genealogy) is the hotly contested foundation for a new academic discipline. [2] Although hardly comprehensive or survey-like in intention, the book makes similarly ambi tious claims about the history and nature of performance art: its "radical" and disruptive qualities, its civic character, interdisciplinary methods, and emancipatory goals. But Garoian's most important claim is that performance art is inherently both pedagogical and postmodern: "in providing a reflexive pedagogy ... performance art enables students to learn the curriculum of academic culture from the perspective of their personal memories and cultural histories. In doing so, performance art represents the praxis of postmodern theories in art and education" (1).
Garoian bolsters his claim with references to postmodern philosophers (e.g., Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari), performance scholars (e.g., Diamond, Conquergood, Schechner, Barba, Boal), and educational theorists (e.g., Giroux, McClaren, Felman. Aronowitz, Ulmer), not to mention Freud, Lacan, Bahktin, Merleau-Ponty, J. L. Austin, and Artaud among others. Given Garoian's commitment to an historically specific, counterhegemonic "art of politics," the lack of any reference to Brecht within this otherwise heavily contextualized discussion is somewhat surprising.
In Perfoming Pedagogy, Garoian not only promotes a particular kind of performance art training, one that runs counter to mainstream art instruction in the schools, but sees performance work as central to the goals of critical educators in all fields. Like earlier calls from composition studies for "writing across the curriculum," Garoian's focus here is on an embodied practice that would help collapse the difference between academic and creative work and could promote critical thinking in any discipline. Indeed, Garoian advocates performance art as a curriculum--a method of study that begins in the body with personal exploration, moves out into the world to encounter new ideas, and returns to the body through the making of original performance art (8). Defining performance as learned and reproduced behavior of all kinds, including artistic creation, Garoian also includes as performance the "audience members' embodiment of aesthetic experiences, their absorption while viewing, listening, and participating in works of art". The "performing pedagogy" of the book's title thus refers simultaneously to making, teaching, viewing, and responding to performance art.
Like performance art itself, Garoian's project attempts to break down what he views as unnecessary and outdated binaries of all kinds: between artists and audiences, students and teachers, theorists and practitioners, professional educators and the general public. Given this intentional (and thoroughly postmodern) collapse between the subject and object of knowledge, the book's key term--"performance art pedagogy"--at times seems overdefined and at others difficult to grasp (54). While circular definitions can be exasperating ("Performance art pedagogy represents the embodied expression of culture as aesthetic experience--that is pedagogy as performance art and performance art as pedagogy" [45]) so, too, can utopian claims like the following: "As spectators/students attain agency through performance art pedagogy, their critical citizenship and collective production will manifest democracy in action". Using Austin's speech-act-theory, Garoian defines teaching itself as a performative act, thus begging the que stion of a distinctly "performative pedagogy." Likewise, with questions such as "could performance art pedagogy make agency for students possible?" (2), Garoian tends to conflate a potential for political activism with the kind of individual agency necessary for creating and performing a work based on personal experience. Throughout the book, performance (in general) is theorized as a "site of intervention" in which the empowerment (of individual performer/creators) is understood as a product of an inherently emancipatory "critical practice" (performance art) that both produces knowledge and prepares the performer/spectator for "critical citizenship" within a radically democratic society. Garoian's thinking is political insofar as he challenges mainstream educational practices, strives toward democratic practices, and encourages "resistance to cultural domination" in the work of his students. For students, however, such an "art of politics" (the book's subtitle) may encourage political activism in the public sphere without necessarily producing it.
