PERMISSIONS (a collaboratively authored book)

Watch the video tutorial or simply scroll down and follow the directions.

Welcome to the PERMISSIONS participation page. We will work through and from this page today. If you are here it is probably because you attended the lecture I gave at the University of New Mexico or some other version of this lecture. If you didn’t see the lecture, please feel free to go back to it after this workshop. It is not essential that the lecture was watched in order to participate fully in today’s activities.

PERMISSIONS is a means of looking for the sake of new postures. The simple premise of the PERMISSIONS exercise is that we can learn from the postures of artists and from the things they make. This exercise can be done with any type of creative practice, but for this exercise I will be guiding us towards conceptual art and conceptualist practices in order to make connections to teaching postures, teaching practice, and educational encounters/events.

SO here’s an example. This is a work by the Taiwanese artist Lee Mingwei. It is called The Dinner Project (1997-present). You can read about it or you can look at it and make an educated guess. How is thing made? [FORM] What is this thing about? [CONTENT]

Your answers will guide you to the Permissions that the work opens up for your posture as a teacher, a creative practitioner, a citizen, and a member of various social groups.

Original_16679_Eat-Me-Lee-Mingwei-The-Dining-Project-TP.jpg

Here’s an additional step you can take in teasing out the permissions to your simple FORM and CONTENT analysis of the Lee Mingwei (or any other “thing” you’re garnering permissions from). You can also think about this curricularly if you’re a teacher of— yourself or—others through this DENSE, but useful exercise.

Let’s say that you determine that “how this piece was made” [FORM] was by:

“the artist sets up a very strict rule”

or

“the artist uses a collaborator, could be friend could be a stranger”

or

“the artist works with the materiality of the institution”.

You then determine that “what this work is about” [CONTENT] is:

“how people related to art and the artist”

or

“closeness”

or

“the ephemerality (or cosmicness) of an art gesture”.

Whatever you decide is fine; you need not worry about how correct you are in your observations since even your mis-readings will produce results. Now that you have your ideas about what the form and content might be, formulate those observations into two types of permissions, one addressing the form (F) and the other the content (C).

Your permission (which are intended to open up the imagination to new possibilities for behavior) might then read like this:

We/I have permission to work within very tight parameters(F).

We/I have permission to invite others into our work(F).

We/I have permission to think of the institution as a partner (F).

OR

We/I have permission to initiate work that can only be completed by others? (C).

We/I have permission to need closeness and have that produce the meaning of our gestures (C).

We/I have permission to let a work mean more because it is undocumentable or fleeting. (C)

Use this form to contribute your “Permissions” for our jointly-constructed book:

Permissions from conceptual art:

What is your NAME?

You don't have to give your name, but if you do, you will be given credit for authoring this particular permission.

First Name

Last Name

What is your EMAIL?

Nothing will be done with your email. I'm only asking for it in case I have a question about what you've sent me. In that case I (or my assistant) will use this email to communicate with you.

What is your AFFILIATION?

This is not required, but if you'd like you can tell us what school you work at or where you're studying? If neither of those descriptors fit you or you would like us to affiliate you with another project or organization, feel free to tell us that here.

What ARTIST or ARTWORK did you look at?

What is the name of the artist and artwork that you looked at? The more exact information you can give us here the better. We will use this information to go back and look at the image you used to garner your permissions.

LINKS

If there are any links you think are relevant, please place them in this box.

What PERMISSIONS does this work open up for us?

After looking at a specific work of conceptual art: What PERMISSIONS emerge for teacher as conceptual artist? These permissions can be ways of making, ways of thinking, or even ways of being? These permissions can focus on the teacher's posture, the students' posture, or any combination of both. The aim here is to be as generative and as generous as possible.

What is your MAILING ADDRESS?

The activity of collecting permissions from examining artists' postures and their artworks is an act of creating seedlings. The intention is never to dictate or prescribe how a teacher should behave or what should be taught in any particular educational encounter. All we want to do here is amass seedlings (for later use) that we can all benefit from whenever we wish. Conceptual Art & Teaching will collate all the seedlings in a book form. We will then make it available as a PDF (downloadable for FREE) and also in print (which we will sell at cost). You will not have to pay for a hard copy though. If you give us your mailing address, we will send you one for FREE as soon as they're printed. If you gave us your name and affiliation, we will credit you.