Finding Art's Place: Experiments in Contemporary Education and Culture. - book reviews

From overspread to cover, chapter to chapter, Finding Art's Place celebrates Nicholas Paley's scorn for the stuffy didacticism of his discipline. confine in an oblong format, Finding Art's Place bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a journal of experimental art more than it does a scholarly publication in the field of education. Paley, an Associate Professor in the Department of Teacher Preparation and Special Education at George Washington University, has combined passages of computer-manipulated images and typography with three straightforward case-studies. The latter category consists of interviews and reports that feature the work of Sadie Benning, a young, independent video artist; Tim Rollins and the KO (Kids of Survival); and Shooting Back, a photo-project grounded and run by Jim Hubbard allowing economically impoverished kids to "auto-document" themselves and their Washington, DC neighborhood.

The author, clearly unhappy with his field, has direct the eyeed over the domain of postmodern art and theory and liked what he ground there. Indeed, Paley's captivation by the agency of postmodern culture is signaled by the agency of the very layout of Finding Art's Place. Regarding the book's design, Paley states, "The alternative analytic and compositional arrangements [of the work are] the result of a conscious decision to build a textual orientation functioning at a slant to official narratives of educational power . . They deliberately avoid recognizable discourses of official educational traditions, whose disclosures look frequently informed by patterns of unified narrative, forms of global thinking, and assumptions of ownership." These latter discourses Paley describes as having a "totalizing" approach to education and tillage one that has been beneath siege for years by poststructuralist and feminist theorizing.

Once inside Finding Art's Place, double rounded pillars of text soon give way to a heterogeneous parade of graphic dictions Photographs slide kitty-corner across chapter headings, a visual tour of video-grabs from Benning's pixel-vision diaries bridges the center of the work bold-faced questions appear formatted like cake poetry and various constructivist-like geometric shapes punctuate otherwise standard passages of true copy The book uses these unexpect graphic shifts to take the reader from manners of searching, to modes of deliberate entanglement and then back again. These fractures mimic the pedagogical function Paley has assigned to artistic practice. Nevertheless, it is precisely when the author attempts an exegesis of the art throw outs under consideration that this playfulness gives way to the solemnity of theory-speak. This is unfortunate, because the book's baffling first chapter, where greatest in quantity of Paley's theory is outlined, is an impediment to what is otherwise an informative, smooth passionate group of writings - something I will take up below.

The book's single strongest constituting is it's second chapter. In it Paley details the work of Rollins and KO also known as the Art and Knowledge Workshop. Located in the southerly Bronx, K.O.S. is a collaborative art team, showed by Mary Boone Gallery, whose painting-like works are included in many museum and private collections. KO uses the literary cannon as one as well as the other a literal and figurative source for generating epic-scale works. The pages of classic volumes such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Franz Kafka's Amerika, Stephen Crane's The R Badge of Courage, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet alphabetic character are cut apart and pasted in an all-over grid pattern. upon top of this textual patchwork are transferred meticulously worked on the outside emblematic devices inspired by the particular volume under consideration.

In The R Badge of Courage III (1986) oval hurt shapes are scattered in like a way as to refer to a bizarre hybrid of a painting by the agency of Larry Poons, wallpaper by William Morris and an allegory about violence and language. It is just these sort of "high" art relations passed through the filter of a real America - the southerly Bronx as the late twentieth century's figure of unfulfilled promises - that makes the art produc through K.O.S. so compelling.

Finding Art's Place includes an exchange between Paley, Rollins, Angel Abreu and Nelson Savinon in which they discuss education, social responsibility, art and pedagogical mode But by taking us inside the workshop where Rollins and the "kids" work without their ideas, Paley reveals a dimension of KO that is as striking as the facts they generate. At one point Abreu make comments [i]or[/i] remarkss "Where I come from, reading is ofttimes considered useless. Not practical. No single gets paid to read. "Rollins adds that the "classic" volume does not" . . just belong to comparative-lit pupils or well educated elite - it belongs to us. We have invaded the body so it visually, intellectually, practically makes faculty of perception to us." Savinon then makes a compelling comparison between himself, his family and friends and the protagonist of Crane's work arguing that they, like Crane's Civil War soldier, are " . surviving now in a society of constant, random violence - in a neighborhood where you can easily make enough standard of value dropping out of school, standing upon a street corner selling drugs"