Research Creation

How do you make a class operate like a work of art?

The following are reviews I wrote about the thesis work of four students at the European Graduate School, Arts, Health, and Society Division. This division offers programs in Expressive Arts Therapy, Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding, and Coaching and Consulting. My co-supervisor is Bobbie Rasmussen-Merz, and we coordinate research and writing for the students we supervise. Our students have won institutional prizes.

I demonstrate how new materialism, posthumanism and other emerging research theories do in fact relate to conventional phenomenological methodologies. In doing this I challenge the popular assertion that qualitative and post-qualitative are incommensurable.

An art teacher took a/r/tography and reinterpreted it as artist-researcher-teacher-therapist/ographer in her literature review and did amazing work with grade school children. Another student found herself seriously ill doing Ashram-based work outside a small First Nations in an amazing story of returning to the world. A colleague of David Diamond and long-time member of the Theatre for Living team, explored the impact and legacy of black slavery and the Jewish Holocaust as she travelled the world in discovery of her family story. And the fourth is a student who worked in the Downtown Eastside describing her experiences as an arts-based researcher within the opioid crisis, focussing on her time supporting the front line workers.

Guattari on school, curriculum and matters of class

“Something is detached and starts to work for itself, just as it can work for you if you can "agglomerate" yourself to such a process. Such requestioning concerns every institutional domain, for example, the school. How do you make a class operate like a work of art? What are the possible paths to its singularisation, the source of a "purchase on existence" for the children who compose it?” (1995)

“Performance art delivers the instant to the vertigo of the emergence of Universes that are simultaneously strange and familiar. It has the advantage of drawing out the full implications of this extraction of intensive, atemporal, aspatial, asignifying dimensions from the semiotic net of quotidianity. It shoves our noses up against the genesis of being and forms, before they get a foothold in dominant redundancies - of styles, schools and traditions of modernity.” (1995, p. 89)

“Of course, it's not at all clear how one can claim to hold creative singularity and potential social mutations together. And it has to be admitted that the contemporary Socius hardly lends itself to experimentation with this kind of aesthetic and ethico-political transversality. It nonetheless remains the case that the immense crisis sweeping the planet - chronic unemployment, ecological devastation, deregulation of modes of valorisation, uniquely based on profit or State assistance - open the field up to a different deployment of aesthetic components. It doesn't simply involve occupying the free time of the unemployed and "marginalised" in community centres! In fact it is the very production of science, technology and social relations which will drift towards aesthetic paradigms. (1995)

"Today our societies have their backs up against the wall; to survive they will have to develop research, innovation and creation still further - the very dimensions which imply an awareness of the strictly aesthetic techniques of rupture and suture." (1995)

Machinic Arts-Based Research

Patricia Leavy (2017) lists arts-based researche’s various formats:

Arts-based practices may draw on any art form and representational forms that include but are not limited to literary forms (essays, short stories, novellas, novels, experimental writing, scripts, screenplays, poetry, parables); performative forms (music, songs, dance, creative movement, theatre); visual art (photography, drawing, painting, collage, installation art, three-dimensional (3-D) art, sculpture, comics, quilts, needlework); audiovisual forms (film, video); multimedia forms (graphic novels), and multimethod forms (combining two or more art forms). (p. 4)

I see my curiosities as a response to and against conventional methodologies in an attempt to bring the edginess of sampling, remix, mashup and appropriation into the works, the hope being to create research encounters which disrupt our habitual ways of living.

This section is an in-review of Alex Tegart’s thesis, The Role of Silence in Nature-Based Expressive Arts Practice (2018) and her article “The Art of Silence, published in Art Research International” (2019). Her writing is themed around her work with clients and caregivers living in the Downtown-Eastside of Vancouver British Columbia during this prolonged opioid crisis:

A resident pounds on the office door.

“Quick. We need Narcan!”

We grab the crash kit and oxygen tank and run to the elevator where the resident is waiting for us. I dial 911. We follow them upstairs to their bedroom, where the partner, a much-loved DTES 'old timer', Joe, is on his back, eyes rolled back. He is blue-faced and his jaw is locked in place. I check the pulse oximeter and I can see that the oxygen level is dropping as is his heart rate. My co-worker pries open his jaw to clear the airway and finally manages to do so. Meanwhile, I am preparing the first shot of Narcan and locating a fleshy area to syringe into. (Tegart, 2018, p. 14)

My colleague Bobbie Rasmussen-Merz and I were selected to work with Tegart in 2015 because we both expressed interest in the synergistic relationship between ecology and nature-based therapies, particularly within the context of Vancouver's opioid epidemic. Tegart’s experience working at Portland Housing Society gave her insight into the harrowing conditions caused by the spike in opioid related deaths. “Pre-first responders" are those who arrive on the scene before the first EMS responder and are often desk clerks, caretakers, and even cleaners; some administer Narcan and perform CPR. These pre-first responders receive less training, little support onsite, and rarely get counseling benefits that would typically be available to police, firefighters, or ambulance personnel.

In the years before the crisis, she said that the staff were able to take the rest of the day off after being involved in an overdose event, but as they became increasingly frequent, they were forced to just work the rest of the day. Sometimes, the first responders would deprioritize calls to their locations because they knew the staff were more skilled, putting additional pressure on them to fill health care gaps. In early drafts of her work, she described a bulletin board with photos of those who had succumbed as a kind of death collage. Not only as a memorial but also as a place people could locate their friends, as many are known only by their street-names, making formal queries about the well-being of others quite difficult. Her arts-based research intervention was simple: silence. She used concepts such as deep ecology, poetic ecology, and eco-aesthetics.

Without limiting her work to simply achieving a strong aesthetic response, we were able to get her research into the hands of a colleague from restorative justice who was chairing The Provincial Overdose Mobile Response Team Symposium (2020) in an effort to get the pre-first responder’s voice into the formal policy making process. Tegart’s article, “The Art of Silence”, was published in Art Research International (2019). As a non-medical frontline worker during death and despair, she found beauty and tenderness in relationships as she mapped-out methods of healing.

Rather than merely addressing the pathology of addiction and its potential redemption through art, Tegart continuously posits that there are unavoidable links to environmental, psychological, and social factors, refusing to accept the narrative of the addict as an 'other'. By rejecting reductionist explanations, she instead complexifies them by taking the reader through webs of ecology that place addiction within discussions of architecture, green spaces, and social conditions, while at the same time reminding the reader that sometimes the screams are dead silent.

Embodiment

Artful Awareness: Towards a Spiritual Practice of Mindfulness and Attunement

This section is an in-review of Michelle Grace’s thesis, Artful Awareness: Towards a Spiritual Practice of Mindfulness and Attunement (2019). She starts by explaining,

My own introduction to EXA was spontaneous and occurred at a time when I was struggling with stage 4 lymphoma; it had been over two years since my diagnosis, and I wasn’t having much success in overcoming the illness. Life felt uninspiring, and I knew I had to restore my excitement for life, otherwise there was little chance I would recover. (Grace, 2019, p. 8)

Her studies included a two-week art retreat at an ashram in Terrace, BC, where she spent several weeks providing a mix of artistic training and meditation. She struggled with the spiritual and secular basis of her practice and how to incorporate Eastern spiritual practices into Western systems of care. She trained her co-researchers using techniques that included photography, "textural sensing", nature theatre, clay, music, painting, dance, group painting, "fairy tales in the forest," and open studio. All of this was done through daily practices of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga.

Manning and Massumi (2016) proposed we “design enabling constraints” of two kinds: “techniques to set in place propitious initial conditions, and techniques to modulate the event as it moved through its phases” (p. 93). Following my previous description of formation and in-formation, I recall a dance and movement seminar I attended with Mary Reich (LitVakDance), where exercises demonstrated the temporality, spatiality, and materiality of her art. When slowed down enough, all movements become a series of pauses, of equal importance as the series of movements. With any improvisational setting, restrictions can affect the creative potential of the space, and sometimes the constraints of smaller spaces can encourage more creativity. It is possible to shape chaos by narrowing the aesthetic frame. The potential of a space is altered whenever material changes are introduced, whether by humans or non-humans. By introducing a yoga block into an otherwise ordinary movement workshop, a facilitator injects potential into the session, demonstrating how even the smallest gesture can influence real change.

The impregnation of processes does not necessarily result in a just outcome. Braidotti (2006) explains that “the sacralisation of life in Christian ethics is challenged by Deleuze’s theory of the becoming-animal/insect/imperceptible: Zoe carries on, relentlessly generative; cells multiply in cancer as in pregnancy” (p. 145). In Michelle's research, she shuns Thanatos as the protagonist, instead focusing on the art as a means of taking part in her surroundings and merging with them, thus seeing chaos as a means of participation, as opposed to something to resolve. In relation to the DeleuzoGuattarian theme of "becoming-imperceptible", Braidotti, (2013) explains:

What we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into this generative flow of becoming, the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance, and disruption of the atomized, individual self. The ideal would be to take only memories and to leave behind only footsteps. What we most truly desire is to surrender the self, preferably in the agony of ecstasy, thus choosing our own way of disappearing (p. xxx)

The Anuttara Ashram, with its off-grid campus, and Shivoham tradition may seem strange bedfellows to some, especially considering the local indigenous (and non-indigenous) communities of North of Gitwinskihkw and New Aiyansh, where territorial disputes and environmental encroachments remain central concerns. It is in the context of ‘walking softly’ that Grace shares a journal entry:

As the days go on, I’m noticing shifts in the participants. There is more openness, confidence in sharing, and willingness to take risks. And even though the week has posed some challenges, people are present. I noticed that I was less present today. Not only am I sick, I feel ungrounded due to having to move rooms after my partner left. Re-settling into a new room with a new roommate adds more adjustments to the daily unknowns. I see how inconsistency can be challenging for me, yet I am learning how to better meet the challenges. There are also added challenges with the arrival of the frost; water can no longer be pumped into the hall. This meant that today I had to carry buckets of water from the creek for painting and cleanup. Despite this, I didn’t ask for help and wore myself out. I got used to having my partner’s help, and with him gone I realize I’ll have to adjust to asking for what I need.

I feel uneasy when I read her compositions and write about them. As I have placed my own interpretation of her text over hers, there is a mutation that occurs in the process of review (as I discuss with reference to Deleuze's Letter to a Harsh Critic). Second, she only mentioned her health condition twice in her thesis. The journey into Braidotti's Zoe (xxx) and Guattari's Chaosmosis (1995) is a digression from how she articulated herself throughout the reading and writing of her work. Torn by its enunciatory potentials, I tangentially revise even basic concepts making them relevant to my work.

As I consider Grace’s writing, I find myself contemplating Guattari's rejection of transcendental meditation which he characterizes as a retreat into oneself (1995, p. 120). I now wonder about the thought-images that reflexively declare measures of incommensurability, especially as I consider Manning’s spin on Spinoza when she explains that “we begin to think not the order of causes (and effects) but the play of compositions and decompositions at work. We compose with bodies. Bodies emerge not only as what they are but what they expressively can become” (2007. p. 143). Simon O'Sullivan argues similarly, suggesting that meditation can be seen as a state of listening, waiting, excitement, and even trembling (2001, p. 117). In regard to the creative process, he notes that meditation can be used both as a way to become aware of habitual reactions (2008, p. 99) and as a means of confronting reality through stillness (2008, p. 100).

Education

Minds, Hearts and Arts: Uniting the Expressive Arts and Education

This section is an in-review of Brenna Willis’, Minds, Hearts and Arts: Uniting the Expressive Arts and Education (2019).

Brenna explains,

I did not come to teaching through my love of English, math, science, history, or even art, just as I did not come to the expressive arts for my skills in any one artistic discipline. My path has always been carved by my interest in the conditions, environments, and experiences that shape who we are and how we learn” (Willis, xxx, p. 7).

University professors endeavor to bridge some of the gaps but still defend their own disciplinary boundaries, thereby creating the illusion that areas of learning can be organized by alphabet and subject heading. Higher education has normalized the idea that there are natural and defined scholarly divisions with terms such as "interdisciplinary" and "cross-disciplinary". Willis' first challenge came when faculty members at the European Graduate School insisted on distinguishing between her roles as an artist, researcher, teacher and therapist,--despite her complex classroom composition and practice orientation. It was noted that curricular pursuits may not always be aligned with the goals of expressive arts therapy. Their belief was that she should handle her therapeutic and teaching tasks in separate physical and conceptual spaces, and pragmatically this makes sense. In discussing supervision, Bobbie and I came to the conclusion that rather than view this as a paradigm conflict, that Brenna could direct her arts-based interventions to organizational practices, (a very Guattarian strategy) rather than to any symptoms children may present.

Willis, a generalist teacher at School District 41 in Burnaby, British Columbia, completed Minds, Hearts and Arts: Uniting the Expressive Arts and Education in 2019. Brenna’s research centered on the new (at the time) BC Curriculum, competency-based learning, and how expressive arts theory may contribute to this process and its goals. In her work she revisioned a/r/tography as a/r/t/tography, blending her roles as artist/researcher, teacher and therapist. She asked “when poiesis is placed at the center of pedagogy, how does the low-skill/high-sensitivity nature of expressive arts contribute to children's increased awareness of themselves, others in their communities, and learning? Referring to Guattari’s undated transcript, Modelisation de l’enfant par le monde adulte Genosko states;

[Guattari] once suggested that micropolitical struggle begins in the daycare, with infants labouring on games and toys, videos, gender and race relations, hierarchies and codes by means of which they may be translated into the socioeconomic system (2002, p. 220)

Each of our first social relationships are formed with caregivers, family members, other species of animals, and organic and inorganic matter. It is the process of play that opens up the possibility of micro-political struggle. Is there a connection between the act of play and the act of creating reality? Psychiatrist and play theorist DW Winnicott (1971) suggests that “there is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing and from this to cultural experiences” (p. 69). The way we play is inextricably linked to the way we live.

Willis shared with her students the true story of young Pakistani boy, Iqbal Masih, who was sold into slavery to pay family debts. “He was an expert carpet weaver, but after escaping several times found his voice as an advocate for child labourers” (2019, p. 76). Winnicott (1971) says, “It is in the space between inner and outer world, which is also the space between people - the transitional space - that intimate relationships and creativity occur” (p.xx ). It is not just the object's temporal significance that determines how it develops, but also how it is positioned within relational spaces. Subjectivity is relational; a missing blanket or teddy bear can be frightening to a child. Located in between space, Iqbal found himself reaffirming himself as a person seeking freedom from debt-bondage.

Iqbal later joined the Bonded Labor Liberation Front to raise awareness about child slavery. Iqbal assumed a caregiver-like role in providing physical safety to children while at the same time, like Willis, extending democratic social practices. By building complex and creative engagements with the world, territories build resilience to whatever disruptions arise. Thus, the folding of the inner and outer lives of the child is an experiment in recombinatatoriality of increasingly complex and chaotic relational contexts.

Using simple cardboard looms they made together, the students learned how to weave while reading this story. The use of weaving apparatus became an act of peacebuilding and cooperation. Items and tasks were constructed in relation to each other, and actions were socially interconnected. The weavings they created are all unique and thoughtful, as Willis illustrates in her photographs. These are social objects, the result of collaborative effort.

Willis enabled participants to enact Iqbal's sweatshop experiences without acting like any of the characters from the novel. Guattari carried out research similar at La Borde in France, where staff and patients swapped functions in order to disrupt their habitual ways of experiencing their places in society. "The central intention is to abrogate various roles and stereotypes: to behave like a madman, a doctor or a nurse, to promote human relationships that no longer lead automatically to lesser roles and stereotypes" (Guattari in Dosse, 2011, p. 47). Willis explains,

I was finding it increasingly difficult [as] the behaviour was so disruptive, and the social/emotional needs were so acute. The morning after we had begun our weaving, I rushed to get to the classroom after a meeting that went right to the morning bell. I let them into the class at 9 am, then needed to leave the room to quickly get the laptop cart out of the tech room. Leaving the class unattended was always a risk. It usually meant I’d return, and someone would be either fighting or in tears, but this time I took the risk. As I rushed back down the hall and got closer to the classroom, I could tell something was different. When I entered the class, I encountered something I had never seen from this group of students. They were quiet and intensely focused on their weaving. No one was fighting, no one was crying. Everyone was engaged and calm. I stood in the doorway savouring the moment. So different was this scene, that I sent a message to my principal to come see what was happening. We continued using our weaving time as an opportunity for self-regulation - usually when arriving in the morning, and after unstructured times like recess and lunch when many different problems would arise. Some of my students took the simplicity of the weaving and built upon it with contraptions that helped them work more quickly and prevented the thread from tangling. Some had researched how to weave stuffed animals and decorative touches like fringes or patterns. There was something about both the simplicity, and the tactile nature of this ancient skill that resonated with this group.

It is easy to understand how someone may misquote the same translated version of Guattari's famous question “How do you make a class operate like a work of art?” (1995, p. 133), and reproduce it as “how do you make a classroom operate like a work of art?”. The distinction between a classroom as a physical or electronic place, and the nuances of the word class are easy to confuse in English. Work of art functions as a noun describing the finished product such as a sculpture or painting. But what work does art do, and what is the machinic work that art compels? Guattari would argue that the work of art is transgressive and subversive, making the aesthetic inseparable from the ethical. The work of weaving then isn’t simply a matter of the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and technical skills, but rather is an act of ontological play. Art isn’t taught off a cart, it is a describing feature of social practices that create alternatives and difference propelled throughout the school and into the world.

Guattari asks,

how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity [...] a sense of responsibility, not only for its own survival, but equally for the future of all life on the planet, for animal and vegetal species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos? (1995, pp. 119–120)

Cartography

Our Bodies, Our Skins are Maps

This section is an in-review of Dafne Blanco-Sarlay’s Our Bodies, Our Skins are Maps: This History Moves Through my Body (2018).

Dafne Blanco-Sarlay describes herself as the descendant of black slaves that fled Cuba in the late 19th century and of Jewish-Hungarians who immigrated to Mexico during the 1930s. Her remaining family members died in Nazi extermination camps. Tracing the genealogy of her family, she traveled to Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Cuba, and Nigeria. Her pilgrimage is a cartography of her family's history, their movement, and their travels. After completing her thesis, she published her memoir, Estado de Ausencia (The State of Absence) (2019).

Initial impressions of Blanco-Sarlay's proposed work led me to expect a travel memoir involving historical events of terrible consequence and magnitude. When we met, her memoir was nearly complete, and she planned to incorporate it into her thesis. In the beginning, Bobbie and I were hesitant to supervise Blanco-Sarlay's thesis because we thought it would be macabre and thanatouristic, and we wondered how we could maintain her well-being while she worked on such difficult topics.

Additionally, there was a theoretical aspect to consider. She intended to explore trauma from the perspective of epigenetics, DNA and neurobiology, all of which have been points of contention among faculty, the primary concern being the reduction of aesthetic experiences to those which can be explained biologically, reducible to blips on an MRI and the types of determinisms which limit expressive capacities.

We were worried that ethnographic approaches would be limiting as well, not because the methodology was incompatible with an arts-based approach, but because it originally wasn’t focused on the intermodal approaches of the European Graduate School. Through intermodality, one can traverse the sensations of a variety of different forms of artistic expression. We expanded the scope of the project by taking into consideration not only the beautifully written text, but also the movements and gestures of non-human and human bodies. DNA and epigenetics have prompted us to rethink the autopoietic function of our bodies and to recognize that aesthetic expression can assist in reprogramming embodied trauma.

Viktor Frankl's search for meaning (1946) is never mentioned by Blanco-Sarlay, and while she doesn't explain it as such, it is evident that her epistemic quest was long abandoned. Yet her work is anything but nihilistic. Dafne quotes trauma expert Peter Levine's rejection of meaning making and interpretation of trauma:

Most contemporary psychotherapies live in the long shadow cast by Freud and his descendants or have been guided by various cognitive behavioral approaches. However, these avenues of alleviating human suffering are of limited value in work with trauma and its underlying memory imprints. While both of these therapeutic traditions do address certain dysfunctions related to trauma, they are unable to reach its primal core. They do not sufficiently address the essential body and brain mechanisms that are impacted by trauma. (2015, p. 37)

Like Deligny, she is "situated within the space of now, now being a historical moment" (2015, p. 151). For Blanco-Sarlay, the “space of now” became clear when she travelled to the where her Jewish grandfather was forced to flee:

In 2002 I went to Timişoara, arriving alone by train at midnight from Budapest. The train stopped. I got off. The impoverished eastern European country offered a rundown train station full of marginalized people: homeless, prostitutes, beggars, Roma people [...]. I was a magnet; everybody on the platform was looking at me. The brown man was following me. No public transit at this time. The brown man was now joined by a second brown man. He said in English, you need help to get to your hotel? We’ll take you. (p. 82 ). And take you, like the ‘whole body of the slave [...] like that of cows, pigs or lamb. Like cattle trains countless human beings that would be transformed into smoke” (Blanco-Sarly, 2018, p. 98). These huddled Roma, prostitutes, beggars and brown men are described in the context of fear and assume the language of the other that would startle many.

It becomes evident that she is actually sketching a broader worldly and machinic unconscious, as Guattari explains: “inscribing them in a genealogy of subjective locations” :

In a more general way, one will have to admit that each individual, each social group, conveys its own system of modelling unconscious subjectivity, that is, a certain cartography made up of reference points that are cognitive, but also mythic, ritualistic, and symptomatological, and on the basis of which it positions itself in relation to its affects, its anxieties, and attempts to manage its various inhibitions and drives. (Guattari, 1996 pp. 193)

It is the historically unprecedented movement of human bodies into extermination camps and slave ships that inevitably intersects with present day modes of transportation such as trains, buses, planes, and their physical locations. It is her mapping-out that provides an aesthetic representation of subjectivity that extends concrete meaning and points to location coordinates. There are wander-lines that breach the formal expected trajectory that create tension, fear, rupture. From Timişoara, Blanco-Sarlay continues:

[The brown man] took my arm to direct me to the back seat. He got in after me sitting to my right, while his companion boarded through the left door. I was trapped between the two. Suddenly, a strange calm invaded me. I could only pray for my grandpa Josef [who fled the Nazis] to help make it quick. I kept thinking about the irony of coming all the way to his hometown to die. We were all silent. And then, the driver stopped. The first brown man opened the door and helped me out. Here, he said, this is the only hotel we could think of that is safe enough for you. It was $50 per night. Shaking, I walked to my room, sat down on the bed, and turned on the TV. A Mexican soap opera welcomed me. I started to cry hysterically.

Psychoanalytically, Blanco-Sarlay's movements can be considered perseverative, dissociative, anxious, even paranoid, but when reconsidered in light of the formation of subjectivity, they become cartographic. The following is Deleuze's explanation of Deligny:

A cartography is suggested today by Deligny when he follows the course of autistic children: the lines of custom, and also the supple lines where the child produces a loop, finds something, claps his hands, hums a ritornello, retraces his steps, and then the 'lines of wandering' mixed up in the two others. All these lines are tangled. Deligny produces a geoanalysis, an analysis of lines which takes his path far from psychoanalysis, and which relates not only to autistic children, but to all children, to all adults (watch someone walking down the street and see what little inventions he introduces into it, if he is not too caught up in his rigid segmentarity, what little inventions he puts there), and not only their walk, but their gestures, their affects, their language, their style. (Deleuze, 2007, 128-129)

For Blanco-Sarlay, the territory of the mapping is shaped by its complex locationality, which is influenced by genetics, trauma, and the bodies of individuals. Woven and webbed, people’s movements on boats, trains and plans can be mundane or sinister. Throughout her research on epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, she emphasizes the human body's functioning, DNA flowing through the body in the same way that a traveler's body travels through the world. Haraway explains, “the knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.” (Haraway 1998, p. 586).

Used with permission.

Blanco-Sarlay, D. L., (2018). Our bodies, our skins are maps: This history moves through my body. [Master's thesis, European Graduate School, Art, Health and Society].

Grace, M. (2019). Artful awareness: Towards a spiritual practice of mindfulness and attunement. [Master's thesis, European Graduate School, Art, Health and Society].

Tegart, A. (2018). The art of silence: The role of silence in nature-based expressive arts practice. [Master's thesis, European Graduate School, Art, Health and Society]

Willis, B. (2019) Minds, hearts and arts: Uniting the expressive arts and education. [Master's thesis, European Graduate School, Art, Health and Society].