pliability of the impossible:a manual for institution as material

[written in less than 90 minutes by the attendees of the *Occupying Space: Critical Coalitions in Art Education* event, held on April 19, 2024 at the University of North Texas]
This writing is meant to be gifted to others.

You learn a lot about what a material can do by keeping your hand in it. Even an impossible, resistant, unspectacular material begins to reveal its pliability the longer you stay/play with it.

It is true that institutions repeatedly reveal themselves to be especially unpliable and that’s why we, more often than not, yield to them with an “it is what it is” posture. We pull our hand away from the material and give away our agency. The thing is that even if the material appears like it’s not changing or “doing” anything, it is (and someone, somewhere has their hand in/on it).

Art offers an approach to re-familiarize ourselves and—even—become fluent in the institution as material.

Since institutions [meaning to establish, to make still, even if just for a moment] are the primary material through which we think about and form the world (for ill and for good), it is offered to us—the principle occupiers of this material realm—to get to know it in its spectrum of resistances and potentialities. What will it do or not do? What appears undoable or doable… but can be rethought, if we’re wiling? (think John & Yoko here, or even just Yoko).

With an expanded understanding of what art does/is, we may realize that:

[POINTING] Art is a means by which we point at stuff. John Baldessari repeated Al Held’s phrase that, “all conceptual art is just pointing at things”. Conceptual or otherwise, this is not different than what every artists has done for millennia. Sometimes we fancy-it-up by calling it “learning”, but learning is various versions of pointing. When we point, we name, articulate, bracket, highlight, call out, discover, and contemplate moments of temporary stillness (institutions) by which we begin to know and re-know the world.
[SPECUTLATE] Simultaneously with our pointing, we speculate, or what we have conventionally come to know as Art (with a capital A). This is where we add to our pointing dreaming; we begin to reimagine, reconfigure, synthesize, play with, propose, and rupture the status quos (the institutions/stillnesses) and their apparent impossibilities. This is where we make and remake the world, and where we bring others along to do it with us (teaching). It is important to note here, that the 100+ year record of conceptual art practices proposes that these speculations need not exist in the physical world for long, or at all. [see this lecture I gave at UTK for examples]
[TESTIFY] With the dual gesture of pointing and speculating, we also teach, meaning—in its most base form—we begin to pass stuff along, share, co-create, recount, and collectivize from our expertises (answers, however fickle) and ignorances (questions, however unanswerable) into the ignorances and expertises of others. We do this mostly by telling our story, speaking from our positionally (in whatever form that takes).
[PERMISSIONS] Once in a while, in this whole process, we leave something behind that others can interpret and use as they see fit. This can take the form of any of the previous gestures (pointing, speculating, testifying), but it can also be much less guided. It can be a mere pile that someone else has to sift through.

Below you will find five opportunities to point, speculate, testify, and give permissions from your expertise and ignorances, for others who find their hand on/in the impossible materiality of the institution. We’re going to make this book together today, in less than 90 minutes. You are encouraged to contribute to every prompt, however you are not required to write to every prompt. All of your contributions are going into a collective google doc, which will then be edited and published as a bookwork soon after our time together.

A speculative note about authorship: Each contribution that you make will be printed as a discrete vignette, juxtaposed and intermixed along the contributions of your fellow co-authors. What you won’t see in the bookwork is your name associated with any single contribution. The eventual reader of this manual will know that all the material comes from a collective of contributors who are actively familiarizing themselves with the materiality of the institution, but they won’t know which segment comes from who. This gives us the opportunity to write openly, and through an act of horizontality—maybe—eventually find ourselves in the words of others. By not attributing specific pieces of writing to specific individuals, we present ourselves with the future possibility that we wrote this whole thing, or none of it.

Please respond to any or all of the prompts below.

Submit any pertinent images here.

Part 1: POINTING

What are we witnessing? How would you describe the institution(s) you are near? In this section provide descriptions. What is happening? What needs to be called out or named? Be all over the spectrum. Tell the extremes and nuance.

Part 2: SPECULATIONS

Institutions are notoriously unpliable. They can be sedimented, prickly, and capricious. At the same time, they're precarious and dynamic (meaning not-static). If we could bring ourselves to see the materiality of these characteristics (not neutral, but also not polarized to the point of inutility), how could we test the pliability of the institution's materiality in order to rethink our roles as gatekeepers/stewards who have the power to provide passage in AND out of the institution?

Part 3: TESTIMONY

As a form of encouragement or contemplation for the eventual readers of our bookwork, tell a story of staying. If we think of LOVE, not as something we feel, but more as something we do: How DO we love our institutions?

Part 4: PERMISSIONS

Who gives us "permission" to test the pliability and rethink our reality? In this space, name practitioners, resources, subjects for further research, etc. that can potentially open new lines of thought in our collective project to work with the materiality of the institution. These can be mere lists/piles, but you can also annotate them as you see fit.

If you would like, please provide an email in case there are any editorial questions about what you have written. This email will only be used for matters concerning the creation of this book. If you choose to not provide an email, we will do our best to interpret and present what you have submitted with fidelity.

Mailing Address

If you would like, please provide a mailing address where we can send you copies of the book when it is printed. Although we will not attribute specific writings within the book to any one author, we do need a name/place here to send the books to the contributors.

IMAGE SUBMISSIONS

If you have images that go with any part of your contribution (or if your entire contribution is images), please upload them to the link near the top of this page. If it is important, in the space below, please tell us where--approximately--you would like us to place the images. For example, say that the image should be near a specific response of yours (e.g. "my contribution to Part 3"). You can also free us to put the images wherever we think would work best in the bookwork. Because the layout and design of the bookwork is yet unknown, all we can say is that we'll try our best to make your directions a reality. Our apologies in advance, in case that doesn't happen.

Name

Please provide a name as you would like it to appear in the bookwork. If you wish to use a pseudonym, you may. You may also write "anonymous/anonymous" if you wish. Although your name will not appear to indicate which parts of the bookwork you've authored, the name you provide will appear as part of the collective who created this thing.

First Name

Last Name