Points of Intersection: Martha Rosler and the Center for Urban Pedagogy Julie Niemi Thesis Practicum in Art

History

Artists have long been considered in a position of pedagogical authority. However, it is the recent progression within the field of art education and contemporary art that traditional performative roles of student-to-teacher, or artisan-to-artist, has caused an impulsive turn towards the practice of artist as teacher. In result, current projects have embraced a post-hierarchical learning method where the teachers role is broken down to only a collaboration of coparticipants. 1 This action has created the public space as a medium of poststudio production, or the creation of artwork outside of the studio, for the educator as a field of work and research. A structural observation embraced by artist Martha Rosler in the 1989 exhibition If You Lived Here...realized the transmission of ideas and exchange of shared experience, in turn, intended the exhibition as an activation space for the passive audience. With the incorporation of on-site lectures, seminars, and reading material, the intuitive practice of alternative education found in this exhibition, by default, critiqued how the use of collaborative material defined the artist as the most autonomous, authorless educator. In the essay titled Exhibition as School as a Work of Art, writer Anton Vidokle discusses alternative models of education by inserting the learning experience in the temporal environment of the exhibition space. Using this text as a lens to investigate Roslers project If You Lived Here and the didactic work produced by New York-based non-profit, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), this paper will argue that the attempt to activate audience to activist-participant

initially recognized in the socially-engaged work of Rosler, didnt quite succeed in the activation of audience. Rather, by assuming identity on its initial subject, Roslers exhibition isolated its intended audience. On the contrary, the projects realized by Center for Urban Pedagogy create a more successful platform for collaborative audience-driven work by not necessarily assuming a targeted identity, but rather constructing a toolkit of collateral research material for creative activism. Participatory project describes the artistic practice imagined outside of conventional galleries and museums, intersecting the arena of art and cultural activism, participants and collaborators. Often times, this method of artistic work is anchored in the field of arts-based research, which, in the cases of these projects, uses public space and artist as teacher as a means of educational and collaborative investigation. For the sake of clarification and consistency, participatory art will be used to describe the field of socially engaged artwork throughout the duration of this paper. Although there is an impulse to analyze the depth of participatory projects, it is unnecessary for the scope of this paper to define such a vast, ambiguous genre of art. The focus, instead, will be placed on participatory project as an educational space, in which artists and collaborators work outside of the traditional notion of a school. Through this practice, emphasis is placed on the creation of visually and socially engaged material as a method of research and, in the case of the projects discussed, activism.

To achieve this objective, the paper will be structured into three parts: the first will dedicate an introduction to Vidokles recent essay Exhibition as School as Work of Art, providing a contemporary framework for both Rosler and CUPs practice. Next, it is necessary to offer an introduction to Roslers exhibition structure and its influence on the recent discourse of pedagogy in visual art and design. Furthermore, a discussion dedicated to the problems found in Roslers project including its failure to connect to the intended audience as a platform for social activism. Additionally, the temporal duration of the exhibition becomes a burden to harness any lasting research. The latter half of the paper will focus on the analysis, and likewise, the inclusion of multi-professional fields, found in the projects produced by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP). It should be noted that while Roslers exhibition is in tandem with a recent conversation of pedagogy in contemporary practice, it is necessary to point out that radical forms of education as art practice characterizes a broad trajectory in 20th century art. That being said, the decision to include projects from both a historical past and a present example is to provide two differing, yet extremely similar models in approach and content. It is important to discuss these roles in tandem with one another in order to offer a perspective of both an exhibition as an educational space and the current structure of the non-profit as an educational space as both alternative means of learning and participating. Between the years 2007-2010, critical contemporary discourse surrounding participatory projects within the educational space was introduced,

described as the pedagogical turn in art. 2 Speaking to this particular dialogue, writer Anton Vidokle discusses the exhibition-as-school model through a specific project titled unitednationsplaza. Vidokle, with collaboration of other artists, opened 3unitednationsplaza in Berlin after the failure of the Manifesa 6 biennial. The intention of unitednationsplaza was to offer a critique of the institution of art school and artistic agency as a mediator between discourse of object and education. 4 Vidokle saw exhibition-as-school as a quixotic space for education, away from institutionalized aesthetics and selective admission policies of private institutions. In the article, Vidokle describes the idea of a temporary school:
Unlike exhibitions, schools are most often closed to the public, with much of their programming and content available only to the body of admitted students. Furthermore, the academic structure of educational institutions, with their insistence on the necessity to comply with previously established rules and standards, often guarantees that for all the promise of experimentation and innovation, each successive generation of students evolves into a replica of the preceding generationsomething that could be bypassed if a school was temporary. If the two models are combined, perhaps a new, radically open temporary school could be a viable alternative to exhibitions of contemporary art and could recuperate the agency of art by creating and educating 5 a new public.

In its most idealistic state, exhibition-as-school appears to be a progressive path towards a utopian example of the new arts education. Yet it begs a number of questions from the standpoint of an activist trajectory, a motive strongly found in Rosler and CUPs projects. With Vidokles attention to radical education in contemporary art, there is no better time to ask critical questions of Roslers intentions with If You Lived Here and its relation to private exhibition space as a public platform and the inclusion of public audience. How does the refiguring of the traditional usage of exhibition space engage an entirely different audience, different than those typically considered of the art crowd? And furthermore,

does this model instead become a space of privilege and hierarchical advantages when distanced from the space of free but bureaucratized public education? And finally, does the access of information for these projects differ based on institutional structures, such as private gallery versus non-profit? During the late-1980s, New York City experienced antagonistic social and public dichotomies in the environment of social space. In the city alone, the homeless housing crisis and a surge in real estate development created a wealth of separation between the rich and poor.6 Using this as a source of inspiration and agitation, Rosler created If You Lived Hereat New Yorks Dia Foundation. Using the exhibition space as a reflecting site for these social implications, the intention was to involve the general public on raising awareness of the New York homeless population, while directly involving them in the exhibition as well. In its entirety, the content and execution of If You Lived Here was a group project on housing, homelessness and the systems and conditions underlying them such as gentrification, bureaucratic complicity and the increasing privatization of the public sector. (Fig. 1) The exhibition honed in on a significant psychological and personal disruption of the homeless population by specifically framing the content around the impact on the individual. What this particular group lacks is the private space, which creates a level of individual discontent and in result, a psychological void of intimate privacy. Such a state of psychological disruption can cause the constant rearing of existential jeopardy. The space of the Dia Art Foundation created a

symbolic gesture towards the individual, offering an equally, yet simultaneously derisible, symbolic notion of private space to the homeless community. The actual material featured in the space considered work by fifty other artists, including separate areas of working and sleeping spaces, as well as a reading library.7 (Fig. 2) Clippings from magazine and newspaper articles, handwritten introduction and interpretive text contributed to a rather unpretentious and almost disheveled aesthetic, achieved by the curatorial vision of Rosler. The inclusion of the informal material heightened the formal space of the Dia, located in the gentrified neighborhood of New Yorks SoHo District, critiquing the conventions of the object-based art world and the institution as well. Originally, the Dia Art Foundation propositioned Rosler to create a retrospective exhibition displaying two decades of her work. Sometimes, established artists have the benefit of institutional leverage towards galleries and museums, and in this case, worked in favor of Rosler. In the essay (Under)Privileged Spaces, published by writer and critic Nina Mntmanns, she states Rosler avoided the role of the curator to de-professionalize the exhibition, although it is obvious in retrospect that Rosler did in fact operate as a curator and liaison between professional fields and content. 8 The intention was to retract the focus of individual artistic agency and instead, invite a group of artists to participate in the creation of a participatory social project. The objective was to heighten social awareness by ignoring sole-artistic agency, but years later, the

discourse surrounding Roslers exhibition is only the artists intention and selflessness to the deny the notion of sole authorship. 9 Although the aspiration of the piece was to raise awareness of the homeless population of New York, no documentation towards the exhibitions impact on the targeted audience was actually recorded until a revisit to the exhibition in 2009, titled If You Lived Here Still(Fig. 3) Opening at e-fluxs gallery in New York, If You Lived Here Still served as a site-specific, temporal archive of the social impact and research provided by If You Lived HereThe research material was highly visualized including publications and hand-made posters, unique to this style of participatory projects. However, If You Lived Here Still resides in the private Martha Rosler Library (Fig. 4), which occasionally travels to galleries, where it serves more appropriately as an archive by artists, for artists. A similar strategy of participatory projects is found in The Brooklyn, New York non-profit, Center for Urban Pedagogy, which uses collaborative approaches to art and design in order to improve civic engagement. 10 Through a process of defining what founder Damon Rich refers to as Intersecting points of interest in communities, the projects seek to determine stakeholders surrounding all points of the civic engagement projects in communities, 11 an example being the series Making Policy Public. Working with advocacy groups and designers, the structure of Making Policy Public calls for a juried submission process around a topic, choosing teams to collaborate with CUP in the production of educational

ephemera. (Fig. 5) The topics explored range within the realm of public policy, such as urban land use and public housing, with the purpose of making complicated political initiatives transparent for activists, educators, organizers and the general public. Revisiting this notion of points of interest, it is this underlying methodology that is most successful, and completely unique, to CUP in the realm of participatory practice and non-profits. This strategy bridges together outside audiences of an issue by juxtaposing the opposition through visual design, video and archival documentation. (Fig. 6) Rooted heavily in the methodology of early twentieth century labor organizing, the process of points of interest can be attributed the practice of Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky. The research team at CUP delves into organizing methodologies similar to Alinksy by discovering the self-interest of the stakeholders involved, and creates material bridging oppositional forces. For Alinskys method of organizing to discover the self-interest, the point was not to dwell on the morals people should hold, but to understand the morals, which guide people in practice. Similar to CUPs project structure, Alinsky intrinsically believed in the importance of self-interest when organizing Chicagos Back-of-the-Yards12 community in the 1930s. It is precisely this creative process, looking outside of internal critique and internal debate, that doesnt box CUP into a category of social activist art. CUP succeeds in this by not providing a necessarily arts-driven service and nourished by identity-based projects. Rather, they provide a collection of visual educational

aids and services on various topics that surround the everyday life in which we live and work in, but are often times misunderstood. With participatory projects it is important to consider the post-project implications. Since both projects heavily rely on collaboration across multiplefields, such implications to consider include the access the general public has to project material for research purposes. When speaking of CUP in relation to Roslers exhibition, the materiality of design-based tools is what separates the two, and furthermore, what is rather successful in the organizational materials of CUP. Perhaps a part of the structural comparison can be attributed to difference in the institutional differences of these two projects. Returning to Vidokles essay, the mention of Roslers exhibition is in lieu of the temporary school model. Both Vidokle and Rosler define their work as a temporary learning space. Rosler, like Vidokles unitednationsplaza, defend the idea of dialogue as object and consequently, as an artistic practice. Although CUP fits into this compartment, the separation between is found in CUPs compulsion with documentation and Roslers relationship to the art market. It is simply not allowed for a non-profit to produce a purely ephemeral, dialogue and process-based project, where Roslers project fits quaintly into the idea of the autonomous artist. On the contrary, it is unfair to ignore the bureaucratic component of the nonprofit. While in this case, the space of the nonprofit serves the advantage of a more successful platform for participatory practice, the structure demands not

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only documentation, but annual reporting and project evaluation for the interest of stakeholders, board members, public school students, and collaborators. Both projects aim to provide an egalitarian space for social research and social activism through participatory projects. When the social is discussed with the intention of providing a platform for the activation of audience to activist, the temporary nature of the project must be considered. With the case of Rosler, situated in a gallery as educational space, lightly considered the short-term duration of programming for If You Lived Herebut fell short when connecting the public lectures, town hall meetings, and in-house lectures to any housing accessible research. On the other hand, perhaps it is built within the non-profit structure that social implications be considered because of the accountability from the institution to the non-profit.

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End Notes.

Kristina Lee Podesva, A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art, Fillip #6. 2007
2

Refer to Irit Rogoffs essay, Turning:

Irit Rogoff in Curating and the Educational Turn, edited by Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson, (Open Editions/de Appel, 2010), 32.
3

unitednationsplaza is a project by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Boris Groys, Jalal Toufic, Liam Gillick, Martha Rosler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nikolaus Hirsch, Tirdad Zolghadr and Walid Raad. Anton Vidokle unitednationsplaza last modified in 2011. http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/event/7/
4

unitednationsplaza was originally intended for Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus in 2006, but due to the cancellation of the biennale, relocated to Berlin. This project places an emphasis on not only the temporal nature of the exhibition as school, but also its ability to be a traveling school. Unitednationsplaza also temporarily hosted the Martha Rosler Library. For more information on the school, please refer to: Anton Vidoke, Exhibition as School: unitednationsplaza in Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson. (Open Editions/de Appel, 2010),148.
5

Anton Vidokle. Exhibition as School as a Work of Art, Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal, 2008. http://www.artlies.org/issue.php?issue=59&s=1&p=statement
6

Nina Mntmann. (Under) Privileged Spaces: On Martha Roslers If You Lived Here e-flux Journal #9. October 2010. http://www.eflux.com/journal/underprivileged-spaces-on-martha-roslers-if-you-lived-here-/

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Anton Vidokle. Exhibition as School as a Work of Art, Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal, 2008. http://www.artlies.org/issue.php?issue=59&s=1&p=statement
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In If You Lived Here, Rosler, who avoided the title of curator, tied the locally oriented, deliberately deprofessionalized practice of self-organized alternative spaces of the late 1960s and 1970s together with curatorial approaches that were to be later considered within the scope of new institutionalism.26 Her tension-packed project in an established institution and her choice of formats anticipated curatorial approaches that would only later become broader curatorial practices. While those who ran alternative spaces deliberately shunned exhibiting in institutions and galleries, positioning themselves as an alternative on the periphery of the art world, new institutionalism builds on an internalized critique within the institutions themselves. This critique is no longer seen as analbeit ultimately desirableactivity conducted solely by artists against an institution (and limited to the exhibition format), but is instead deployed at the level of institutional administration and programming by curators themselves, who initiate a drive for critique and structural change together with artists. Nina Mntmann. (Under)Priviledged Spaces: On Martha Rosler's If you lived here... e-flux Journal #9 (2009). Accessed February 2, 2012. http://www.eflux.com/journal/underprivileged-spaces-on-martha-roslers-if-you-lived-here-/
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Mntmann states:

In considering the processual structure of If You Lived Here alongside its open forums, reading rooms, publication conceived as both component and further platform for the project (and not just as a catalogue or documentation), its multipart, thematically focused exhibitions, its local participation going beyond the art public, the collaboration of architects and theorists from other disciplines, as well as the artists dissolution of her authorship and the inclusion of the public in communicative processesone discovers the very elements and intentions with which curators strove to restructure institutions around 2000. Here, one might cite the Rooseum in Malm under Charles Esche, or the Kunstverein in Munich under Maria Linds directorship. While in order to realize this multi-layered project, Rosler had to hijack an institution as an artist playing the role of a freelance curator, the approaches twenty years later are now institutionally legitimized through collaborations between an institutional agent, the curator, and artists. Nina Mntmann. (Under)Priviledged Spaces: On Martha Rosler's If you lived here... e-flux Journal #9 (2009). Accessed February 2, 2012. http://www.eflux.com/journal/underprivileged-spaces-on-martha-roslers-if-you-lived-here-/

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Center for Urban Pedagogy mission statement: The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to improve civic engagement. Center for Urban Pedagogy Mission Statement. Last modified in 2012. http://welcometocup.org/
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Interview with Damon Rich and Rosten Woo by Nato Thompson. Creative Times Presents: Center for Urban Pedagogy. Creative Times: Interrogating Public Spaces. August 2010. http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/publicspace/interrogating/2010/11/ center-for-urban-pedagogy-august-2010-2/
12

Saul Alinksy was a community organizer, activst, and founder of Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago. His most influential work was in 1930s in the Backof-the-Yards south side Chicago community, where a large majority of the nations meat-packing industry was housed. Mike Seal, Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals, the encyclopaedia of informal education. Accessed April 15,2012

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Illustrations.

Fig 1. Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here, 1989; Public installation. Dia Art Foundation, Art Lies: Contemporary Art Journal

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Fig 2. Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here.1989; installation in exhibition space. Dia Art Foundation, Art Lies: Contemporary Art Journal

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Fig. 3. Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here Still.2009-2011. Exhibition poster for traveling installation. Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, Spain. e-flux website.

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Fig. 4. Martha Rosler Library, 2010. Interior image of the library. E-flux Gallery, New York. e-flux website.

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Fig. 5. Center for Urban Pedagogy, Collaboration Diagram. 2010. Visual Diagram. Center for Urban Pedagogy website.

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Fig. 6. Center for Urban Pedagogy, Vendor Power, 2010. Photograph, Vendor Power pamphlet, offset lithograph. New York, New York, Good Magazine.

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Bibliography. Podesva, Kristina Lee, A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art, Fillip #6. 2007 Rogoff, Irit. Turning, in Curating and the Educational Turn, edited by Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson, 32-46. Open Editions/de Appel, 2010 Anton Vidokle. unitednationsplaza. Accessed March 17, 2012. http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/ Vidokle, Anton. Exhibition as School as a Work of Art, Art Lies: A Contemporary Art Journal, (2008). Accessed February 20, 2012. http://www.artlies.org/issue.php?issue=59&s=1&p=statement Mntmann, Nina. (Under)Priviledged Spaces: On Martha Rosler's If you lived here... e-flux Journal #9 (2009). Accessed February 2, 2012. http://www.eflux.com/journal/underprivileged-spaces-on-martha-roslers-if-you-lived-here-/ Thompson, Nato Interview: Woo, Rosten and Rich, Damon. . Creative Times Presents: Center for Urban Pedagogy. Creative Times: Interrogating Public Spaces, August 2010. http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2010/publicspace/interrogating/2010/11/ center-for-urban-pedagogy-august-2010-2/ Seal, Mike, Saul Alinsky, community organizing and rules for radicals, the encyclopaedia of informal education. Accessed April 15,2012

Other Sources. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Trade, 2005 Jacobs, Mary Jane. Reciprocal Generosity in What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art, edited by Ted Purves, 1-9. State University of New York, 2004 Fletcher, Sampson, Steen, Steel, Smith, Kalin, Kurtz, Asher and Christopher. It can Change as we go Along: Social Practice in the Academy and the Community. Art Journal, Vol. 67, No. 4 (2008), pp. 92-112

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Thompson, Nato. Contraction of Time: On Social Practice from a Temporal Perspective. e-flux Journal #20 (2010). Accessed February 12, 2012. http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contractions-of-time-on-social-practice-from-atemporal-perspective/

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