positioning/ art
These rubbings are a map. Dropping the red-balled pin onto the satellite image of Bronx Humanities; charting the angles of Betty’s classroom like a 19th century cartographer tracing the shoreline; and plotting my own contours, relationships to the teacher participants and school spaces, inserting myself (as if a scaled referent) into the frame of my dissertation. Part of this work was a site-specific performance piece—a way of seeing, being, and making in a particular place—being in the school (on the last day of the year), wrangling with these huge sheets of strange paper, fielding curious questions from teachers. A certain absurdity to it all, because why do it? And how to square it with the very real and obvious, heart-breaking and too-taxing work of teaching at a transfer school? At some point, Betty looked up at me and said, “I want to be doing what you’re doing right now.” Then she turned to Aquiles and repeated, “don’t you want to be doing what Victoria is doing? Making drawings?”
This project in all its parts—the preparatory pilot rubbings in my kitchen, visits to the school and art supply store, tossing the idea out to Betty and finding words to explain it to her principal, the physicality (dirty knees, sore arms, blister on my index finger) of making the rubbings and carrying them home in large rolls on the train—located me as an artist. The veil of “artist,” offered other (than teacher or researcher) ways to be in the space. To see Betty’s room in terms of objects, and the objects in terms of textures. To ask questions like, “which corner should I affix the painter’s tape to? How to match the dimensions of a stack of chairs to those of my paper?” To notice the flat and raised planes and to imagine the marks that each surface would yield. This way of seeing and being in the school was both highly visible (loud paper, big sheets, strange intentions) as it offered a sort of cloak—the teachers could feel that I was trained on the space and things as opposed to them. I got to shrug off some of the baggage of being a “researcher” (hoighty-toighty, critical) and the closeness of being a fellow teacher. Claiming “artist,” was a form of release, an acceptable excuse for my odd objectives. When Betty commented longingly on how much she wanted to be making drawings, it was as if to say, “making drawings is fun, is light, is easy, is far away from here.” Or perhaps as to say, “making drawings allows for more authorship, control, or creativity.” A yearning for the work of “making”—the expressive rather than the ever-evaluative lens of schooling.
I visited Bronx Humanities and made the rubbings driven by the twin aims of art and ethnography towards experience, experimentation, and open structure—overlapping objectives that Coles, an art critic who works ethnographically, locates in the notion of “site-specificity” (2000). The impetus—as true for anthropology as for art-making—to mingle and relocate strangeness and familiarity. As Clifford (2000, p.56) writes, “a willingness to look at common sense everyday practices – with extended, critical and self-critical attention, with a curiosity about particularity and a willingness to be decentred in acts of translation.” Being an artist in this work offered an opportunity to loop threads through my identities as artist, researcher, and teacher-educator. I was never not also a teacher, never not also a researcher.
Locating myself as an artist-teacher-researcher in this work provided a certain entrée with the faculty at Bronx Humanities, but it was as much about positioning myself for myself than for them. It offered license or what Charles Rosen (2011) calls “elbow room” the extra rope to play and imagine, to hang rulers over scissors, and to lay closet supplies across the stack of chairs. It elbowed new space (for me) into the project and made way for a series of subsequent multimodal interventions including layered drawings, videos, and audio works.
(positioning the work)
The rubbings served to position my research, to ground the work in a series of known quantities and relationships: the shape and scale of Betty’s bookcase in her room; her room along the length of the hallway; the hallway on the top floor of the 5-story school (that shares space with three other high schools); the school on the corner of Fleet Street in the Foxhurst neighborhood of the Bronx. Haraway (1991), a feminist scholar of science and technology studies, writes of the importance of such positioning, arguing for the,
These rubbings quite literally locate the work somewhere—in Betty’s classroom on the 5th floor, on the right hand side, down the hall from the main staircase. They also located the teachers in that space and me—our bodies moving among the surfaces of the room. There is a physicality in the work—impressions that match (more or less) to the things themselves. And those things in relationship to bodies—a chalk board that runs 5 wide-stretched arm-lengths; in the crinkles of the paper which trace a process, a thin flat membrane trying to take the shape of something in three dimensions. The work functions in part like an anchor or tether, grounding the theorizing I will do/ have done/ am doing to a place and to body(ies). A reminder about the scale and space and lives implicated in my claims and the responsibility of “seeing all of this” as Michelle expressed.Politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims. These are claims on people's lives. I am arguing for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity. Only the god trick is forbidden (589).
