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12-2013 Charles R. Garoian: Exploring the In-Between Leda Cempellin South Dakota State University

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Recommended Citation Cempellin, Leda. "Charles R. Garoian: Exploring the in-Between." Juliet Art Magazine, no. 165, December 2013-January 2014: 83. Print.

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011October 1o'',2013, I conducted a Skype of Annenians dispersed throughout the interview with Dr. Charles R. Garoian, Professor world and continuesto this day. And I ofArt Education at The Pennsylvania State happen to be just one person, a particlein University.Dr. Garoian has authored three all of that: my body and my personal history books on pe1forma11ce andpedagogy: the most withinthe larger context of that body and recent, TheProsthetic Pedagogy ofArt: Embodied that history. In his graphic novel Maus, Research and Practice, was published this year by Art Spiegelman wiitesand illustrates his The State University ofNew York (SUNY)Press. experience of the Holocaust as a "received history" fromhis father who actually swvived You have been a artist the concentration camps. Mine was received and teacher for more than fortyyears. history as well: I was born in the U.S., but How was your earliest work different eA-periencedthe Genocide vicariously through fromthat of other major contemporary my parents'testimonies; their pain filled performance artists of that time? memories of the horrors they witnessed, their I have been involved in perfonnance since 1970-71. narrow escape, and thefragmentation of their I started off as a mixed-media painter then moved lives. They had to reconstmct their lives. My into peiformance. TI1e influences in my early career parents' vineyard in Fresno, Californiawas were , , Ch1is Burden, small, but forthem Tom Marioni, , , Judy it was Armenia reclaimed, re-membered. Chicago's , , just to name As an immigrant familywe made do with a few. what we had. My first "art teacliers"were But your performance looks different, my parents. They taught me to explore, being also an extension into pedagogy. experiment, and improvise.Life on the How did you move there? vineyard and in the Garoian household Actually, Beuys, the artist closest to my work, spoke was like an assemblage: fragments of this, about peifonnanceart as social pedagogy.In 1969 fragments of that, puttingthem next to each I graduated with a Master's degree in studio art and other, to make sense, to make meaning began experimental work. In the beginning I was in-between, and to heal the wounds of the attaching mechanical and industrial materials and Genocide. objects to my paintings. Eventually, as th came off What is your ultimategoa1 as a ey Chor/es R.Coroion performing in "Reisin Debt" 2005, the canvas, offthe wall, and onto the floor, I became courtesy Stephanie Ayonion performance artist,as a theorist,and aware of my body as a correspondent culturally as an educator? constructed rather than illustration and representation. My aim as teacher and aitist has been to contribute, material and object peiforming in space. I was Academic representationswill always constitute even if in a minuscule way, to changing the world by a practicing artist when I started to teach at the schooling, but what emerges fromcreative activity engaging with others that are differentbiologically, high school. It was fromthe perspective of my in the classroom is thesource fromwhich culhirally, racially, religiously in compassionate, exploratory,experimental and improvisational transformationand agency are made possible. caring, and respectful ways. I believe that the work in the studio that I started reflectingand Wow! You were ex'Ploringthese ideas power of art practice enables seeing, thinking, questioning how to teach as compared withhow I back in theSeventies, were you? And and performing differently than what we assume was taught in college. I fell in love with teaching: in these most recentyears a debate has about ourselves and others. Given its characteristic there was something incredibly engaging and alive been spreading all over the US about ambiguityand about thespace of the art classroom; about teaching activeand engaged learning, flipping incompleteness, art enables the creation of open and learning frommy students. I discovered the classroom, using socia1 media for spaces and systems of possibility as it resists multiple associations betweenwhat was going on instruction, etc.! intellectual and ideological closure. As such, I in my studio practice and what was going on in my No one that I was aware of was writingabout this continue to find the immersivespaces of art-making classroom. Pe1fonning in that in-between space back then. and teaching-making transformativeinsofar as they with my students became extremely significant and Inthe introductionof your book constih1te the making of the Self as a process of meaningful. The Prosthetic Pedagogy ofArt, becoming-other rather than becoming the same. With theexception of Beuys, to my you mention your parents' forced knowledge was intmigrationto the US to survive the unheard of as pedagogicalstrategy Armenian genocide. How did such in the Seventies.You were breaking biographical experience and your gronnd in the US at that time. What bicultura1 heritage affectyour own did you find when you matriculated performance work? Did performance at Stanford for your PhD? What was help you to heal your wounds, or to CHARLES R. already known, and what was new? overcome cultura1 barriers like a form I felt like a fishout of water at Stanford because of "prosthesis"? muchof my sh1dies there were based exclusively I would say both. I view perpetratinggenocide as in academic models of pedagogyand cuniculmn. diabolical performance. The Armenian Genocide GAROIAN While at the University, I was also devouring in the early XXcentury became a model forthe theoretical writings about contemporary art in Holocaust. In justifyingthe exterminationof six Artforum.It was theheyday of , asin million Jews, Hitler asked: "Who, after all, speaks the works of , Bruce Nauman, and today of the annihilation of theArmenians?" He . Their art was peiformative.It was about assumed that his decision about the Jews would be EXPLORING THE doing, not about representation.In in history like the'forgotten genocide' of the my estimationthe best teaching occurs when you Armenians.So, I see the Genocide as a slaughtering IN-BETWEEN are engaged with your studentsin exploratory, and dispersion of the Armenian cultural body. My expe1imental, and improvisationalprocesses; in the parents were part of a vast migration that resulted Interview by LED A CE� PELLIN Associate Professor of Art History at liveness of what art does, its conceptual operations, fromthe Genocide; that constitutes the diaspora South Do,oto Stote University.