What We Can Knot We What What We Can Knot Shifter 20 Shifter 20 Shifter Number 20. May, 2013. © 2013 Shifter Printed and bound in Canada Editors’ Note . 1 All previous issues of Shifter are available for purchase at www .shifter-magazine .com Ashley Hunt & Malene Dam . 2 SHIFTER 19 : PROPOSALS Sreshta Rit Premnath, Matthew Metzger eds, 2013 Marjetica Potrč & Amanda Eicher with Ryo Yonami, SHIFTER 18 : INTENTION Nuriye Tohermes & Mai Shirato . 8 Sreshta Rit Premnath, Matthew Metzger eds, 2012 Andreas Fischer & Hannah B . Higgins . 14 SHIFTER17 : RE___ING Sreshta Rit Premnath, Matthew Metzger eds, 2011 Corin Hewitt & Riley Duncan . 22 SHIFTER16 : PLURIPOTENTIAL Richard Kostelanetz with Frederick Young, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Warren Neidich eds, 2010 Michael Peters & Bob Grumman . 30 SHIFTER15 : WILL Michelle Grabner with Philip Vanderhyden, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Abhishek Hazra eds, 2009 Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Andrew Falkowski, Elijah Burgher, SHIFTER14 : ON CERTAINTY Julie Weitz, Christopher Mcnulty, Michael Velliquette, Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2009 Barry Underwood, Joey Farueso, Gil Riley & Adam Scott . 36 SHIFTER13 : INDIRA SYLVIA BELISSOP Sreshta Rit Premnath, Avi Alpert eds, 2008 Abhishek Hazra . 42 SHIFTER12 : UNASSIGNED Zachary Cahill feat . Cassandra Troyan . 44 Sreshta Rit Premnath, Kajsa Dahlberg, Jane Jin Kaisen eds, 2008 Andrew Falkowski . 48 SHIFTER11 : INTIMATE Sreshta Rit Premnath, Steven Lam eds, 2007 Jesal Kapadia & Brian McCarthy . 52 SHIFTER10 : TRANSPARENT WHITE Adelita Husni Bey & Janna Graham . 62 Sreshta Rit Premnath, Pieter DeHeijde eds, 2007 Tyler Coburn & A .L . Steiner . 68 SHIFTER9 : RUIN|MONUMENT Sreshta Rit Premnath, Pieter DeHeijde eds, 2006 Abdullah Awad & Sreshta Rit Premnath . 74 SHIFTER8 : RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS Sreshta Rit Premnath, Pieter DeHeijde eds, 2006 Allan deSouza & Jeannene Przyblyski . 82 SHIFTER7 : SCIENCE SEANCE Steven Lam & Daniel Joseph Martinez . 90 Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2006 SHIFTER6 : SURFACE TENSION Juan William Chávez & Anya Liao . 98 Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2006 Valerio Rocco Orlando & Mónica Ríos . 104 SHIFTER5 : DESIRE & THE OTHER Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2005 Deborah Stratman & James Benning . 108 SHIFTER4 : ON TRANSLATION Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2005 A .K . Burns & Alexandro Segade . 116 SHIFTER3 : KOSMOPOLITES Dan Paz & Tania Bruguera . 124 Sreshta Rit Premnath, Jason Yoh eds, 2004 Kelly Kaczynski . 132 SHIFTER2 : POST-MORTEM Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2004 Ayisha Abraham & Smriti Mehra . 138 SHIFTER1 : JETLAG Sreshta Rit Premnath ed, 2004 Maria Rosa Sossai . 144 Editors’ Note Shifter’s 20th issue, What We Can Knot draws from George Bernard Shaw’s quip “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches ”. In this issue we would like to parse out and challenge what we see to be Shaw’s false binary, and to explore the value of negotiation and collaboration as important elements both in the studio and in the classroom . To this end we have invited several individuals who are both artist and educator, to consider the active relation between art practice and teaching in their life . We have invited them to do this through a conversation or correspondence with either a mentor or a student who continues to play an intimate part in their understanding of the intertwined roles as artist and educator . We, the editors of Shifter, like so many artists we know, substantially support our artistic practice by teaching in art colleges and universities . While we find that our engagement with students is fraught with negotiations of power, intimacy and control; debate and dissensus in the classroom rarely remains there, always and already molding our thinking and practice as artists . Is our role as educator, as Gayatri Spivak posits, to non-coercively rearrange the desires of our students? Or is our only responsibility, as Jacques Rancière suggests, creating the conditions of possibility within which students can teach themselves? As artists we often find ourselves already skeptical of how institutional frameworks overdetermine our relationships with each other and our work . Certainly this distrust is carried into our relationship with students in the classroom . Whatever our intentions as educators may be, what ceaselessly continues is our negotiation with such institutional frameworks, which provide and simultaneously circumscribe our freedoms . At best it is a reciprocal formulation as student and teacher work collaboratively within and upon the architecture of institutional “givens” as a subversive means by which the teacher/student binary may loosen and transform . The ethical considerations of a pedagogue are further amplified for a studio artist . The artist-educator sometimes problematically sees the student as material to be manipulated, and as a means through which to speak . So, how may we, as teacher and student, student and teacher, artist and artist, draw a relation between these two intertwined professions? How do we conduct ourselves between such distinct fields in an effort to get more from our practice and offer even more to our students? Editor . Sreshta Rit Premnath Editor . Matthew Metzger Designer . Dan Levenson Copy editor . Becky Bivens Fundraising Advisor . Hong-An Truong ------------------------------- Spread throughout this issue of Shifter, nested in the fold of the journal, is a Lexicon of Contested Terms by Allan deSouza that in his Shifter is a topical publication that aims to illuminate and broaden our words, “examines concepts, words and phrases that are commonly used within the critique process and commonly encountered within understanding of the intersections between contemporary art, politics other art arenas, such as artist statements, gallery press releases, published reviews, etc ”. and philosophy . Shifter remains malleable and responsive in its form and activities, and represents a diversity of positions and backgrounds in its “The intention of the list,” he states, “is to clarify the shared language through which we conduct critical discussion and generate contributors . as in, “my work is about home; about beauty; about unicorns (actual …” examples from critiques) discourse around artworks . It is not intended as a censorial catalogue of “banned” words, but to draw attention to their effects and functions, their uses to bring forth and/or to conceal meanings ”. shifter-magazine .com shiftermail@gmail .com ABOUT Should viewers be told what the work is “about,” or is that an evaluation that they should arriveMaking at themselves? Is art the artist might already a reliable informant be an example of that on what which the it work is supposedly is “about”? about; in other words, art is a cultural practice, with the artwork a manifestation and function of culture rather than it being “about” culture. If we apply one lesson from Minimalism, an artwork is the “thingDuchamp’s prior itself,” example rather of the readymade than being suggests “about” something that an artwork else. It mayspace direct is of more the than gallery). the viewer just the in Duchamp’s thing different Fountain, itself, ways and but then,to thatother the isreferences, “about” thing its own but objecthoodit “about” becomesis itself. an artwork plus the However, historicized when it enters into discourse artistic that discourse constitutes (and not simply it as not just when a urinal it enters into but the also as art.NB: The different terms–much like other aspects of art–should be read as cumulative and relational rather than as isolated categories . 1 Malene Dam What Goes into the World: & Ashley Hunt Treacherous Teachery and Arting in Art School AH: Are you here? MD: Yes . AH: What do you think of the prompt from the editors of Shifter? MD: Well, they are getting at questions that feel familiar and central to conversations we have had in many classroom situations . AH: They are familiar to me too, and importantly so . They are questions that many of the people I teach with ask one another, primarily through a rejection of the binary that the editors note, via George Bernard Shaw–between teaching and doing–which in this particular case might refer to teaching and making, or “arting,” if I can make up that word . We don’t only share a disagreement with Shaw, but we require a shifting of terms, a reformulation that asks, instead, whether we see teaching as a part of our practice as artists. MD: The prompt also talks about negotiation and collaboration as core notions, which for me seem to get at teaching and learning as a part of one’s practice—being colleagues, as different from a teacher teaching student . Perhaps the “arting” and making in this sense come about fundamentally through conversations: it is through our conversations with other people that we practice our practice so to speak . So to get back to the teacher-student relationship, how do we (and I use “we” consciously because the responsibility is both on teacher and student) bring about this conversation together? AH: So on one hand we have the question of this very negotiation: Am I a teacher at one moment and an artist at another, or do those two activities have a relationship? On the other hand, while this negotiation might take place within oneself—when I teach, or as a part of my practice—we’re also talking about what this means to a “we”: between the student and teacher, or within a class . There seems to be a problem where the overlaps between one’s teaching and art-making are understood in default categories of material and conventions belonging to the discipline itself (are the students then “my medium,” or is what’s done in the classroom “my art”); as opposed considering the practice to which one is committed, whose nature might not be discipline or medium specific, but is driven instead by a set of values or a vision of the world . For example, many of the things you and I have studied together, whether the subject at hand was art, pedagogy, or both, have circled around questions of liberation and justice . Values of liberation and justice don’t necessarily privilege the classroom, as an academic might, nor do they privilege objects or “works,” as an artist might .