0:00

[Music] [Applause]

0:05

[Music] [Applause]

0:10

[Music] [Applause] well here we are

0:17

here we are happy first lecture conversation of the feminist art field school

0:23

it is a pleasure to be in your company likewise uh in service of our method which is

0:30

making explicit conversations between practitioners and makers and curators

0:35

and artists and activists i’m so looking forward to getting to

0:41

know you better and differently through this conversation because up until this point i think we would both say that we’ve

0:47

been in the bureaucratic side of field school preparation how do we pay for

0:52

things how do we invite people how do we involve our institutions and hoping that this conversation can serve

0:58

as a little bit more of a personal in-point to our work and our interests and our

1:04

obsessions perhaps i could throw to you the same question that we have

1:09

offered to others which is would you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do

1:16

uh sure um uh this is probably redundant but my name

1:23

is michelle jakes and i guess first and foremost i’m a curator

1:30

i am somebody who came to curating through art history so

1:36

sometimes i call myself an art historian too which

1:42

often raises eyebrows i’m not sure why art history has such a bad rap

1:48

i find it a fun fun space to flounder around in and

1:54

maybe that’s maybe that’s uh a key thing that i’m i’m a bit of a

1:59

dilatant when it comes to art history i don’t you know i’m probably really badly

2:05

trained uh and therefore it’s fun for me um

2:11

but after studying art history many many years ago um i started working at the

2:17

art gallery of ontario almost immediately and

2:23

it was a bit of a a long slow climb into curatorial

2:30

these days people do curatorial studies degrees and get a

2:36

lot of experience and end up in curating jobs um

2:42

[Music] on a much shorter timeline than than i did i have worked in fundraising and

2:51

human resources and the volunteer divisions of public

2:58

museums and have basically fulfilled every role that

3:04

one can fulfill in a curatorial department from secretary as i was called

3:12

back in the day at the ago to now

3:17

chief curator and head of collections exhibitions and collections at raymie mater

3:24

so um i am a quite devoted

3:30

public museum curator i should say i’ve certainly dabbled in um

3:37

a lot of artist-run centers working at the center for art tapes and

3:42

halifax for a couple of years but also doing a lot of

3:48

board and committee work at other artist run centers i’m still on the board of

3:56

v-tape for instance um so

4:02

i think that uh if i was going to describe what i do in museums

4:10

i would say that i try to understand their structure

4:18

um and figure out how to um

4:24

sort of disrupt scenes like i don’t know if i can claim that word

4:29

given that given some of the people that we are speaking to in the feminist art field school series i’m not sure if i’m

4:36

a disrupter i’m like a a subtle

4:41

nag that tries to make the institution do things that it

4:48

doesn’t really want to do i don’t know why that metaphor just came

4:54

to me but it is seeming very apt that’s what i do

5:01

um which has been really fun for me because i think that there’s

5:07

a lot of potential in museums and

5:12

as long as uh you know we can move away from this tendency to sort of say well that’s not

5:19

how things are done here museums can do great things and

5:25

be wonderful spaces for all kinds of people

5:33

i love this and the idea that you have self-identified as a

5:39

subtle nag i think belongs on a t-shirt somewhere maybe

5:44

that is you know part of our feminist art field school merch

5:50

uh i would love a merch arm of this enterprise

5:58

and of course one of the things that i love so much is that we are connected through a network of artists and we actually

6:05

only came to know each other upon my arrival at the university of victoria two years ago

6:12

and one of the things that i did immediately upon finding an apartment was find the art

6:19

institutions and it strikes me that you know there’s a way in which i tend to lead with my

6:27

artist filmmaker identity much more so than i lead with my professor identity

6:32

and if you identify as a as a subtle nag i identify as

6:40

someone who is

6:45

only ever strategically aligning with institutions and trying to think of ways

6:51

to move artistic and activist practice in and out of academia and so for me the

6:58

field school is a really exciting opportunity to think across institutions and you know just as you say i think

7:05

that there’s so much good that can come of a museum if you ask a different set of questions i feel the same way about

7:10

academia and i completely recognize the structures and limitations and also

7:17

what might be possible when we shift the terms of what a classroom space could feel like or what collective

7:23

collaborative learning can do and so one of the things that i feel so excited about doing together throughout these

7:29

next 12 weeks is to be thinking out loud with artists who are actively engaged

7:35

with pushing the boundaries of institutions broadly defined and thinking about art and aesthetic

7:42

practice more broadly as one of the ways in which to promote produce

7:49

problematize social change well it’s it’s so interesting to hear

7:56

your response to my introduction of myself and understand how how much sense

8:02

this collaboration makes because i do i do think it’s it’s quite funny um

8:10

to think about how we came together around this project um

8:16

you got your appointment to uvic like a year before you actually started

8:22

so there was a year of our mutual acquaintances saying chase is moving to

8:27

victoria you have to connect with chase and um

8:32

when we finally connected it was as though we almost went directly into

8:38

planning mode and you are

8:44

easier to um you know know in a way because of your

8:50

work than perhaps i am so um

8:55

i know about what you have made i know you’re your artist self

9:02

but um i’m just realizing i have i don’t even know what you what you have

9:08

been teaching before teaching the feminist art field school ah what an

9:14

unusual question that i was not prepared for uh so before arriving to the university

9:20

of victoria i was on a post-doctoral fellowship at the university of chicago and part of that fellowship allowed me

9:26

to teach these wild practice-based experimental classes where students put

9:31

on large-scale installation style exhibitions when i was in graduate school i taught many

9:38

courses in the cinema and media studies department where i got my degree and then upon my arrival here i teach the

9:44

core gender power and difference class i teach a social media and pop culture class some queer film some queer and

9:52

trans cultural production and in some ways i could make an argument for the relationship between all of those

9:57

courses of course but i am motivated to think across the lines of cinema and

10:02

media studies and gender and sexuality studies and you know depending on how you organize those disciplines you get

10:08

very different outcomes and so i’m very enduringly curious about the role media

10:15

plays in our lives and the ways in which media can

10:21

control rights discourses and the ways in which media produces new identities

10:26

and new community formations and i came to thinking about feminism and

10:32

feminist art critically in graduate school and was

10:38

able to learn from many people who identify as scholar practitioners so artists who have active

10:45

practices but who are also teaching and for me that was a real light bulb opportunity which was to say we don’t

10:52

have to be only thinking about work and reading about work but rather we can be making work that does a kind of

10:59

theoretical lifting that people only tend to assume is happening on the page

11:04

and i think that kind of practice-based relationship to theory into reading is

11:10

really exciting and so i am thrilled to be learning from other

11:16

artists with you in this field school about tips and tools and strategies for how to

11:23

make that work and so one of the things that i really enjoyed in our preparation and planning is that you know we’re

11:28

co-curating the readings and offerings with the artists alongside their work which is to

11:36

say we get to read with them the work that inspires the things that

11:41

they’re thinking about and the things that they’re making and i’m wondering from a curatorial standpoint what role

11:47

does reading play in your practice

11:54

and there’s a question that i didn’t expect um and

12:00

well to tie a bunch of things together um thinking back to my graduate school

12:07

experience uh it was in the early 1990s york was sort of in the throes of

12:15

um a struggle between kind of um

12:21

the old school and the professors who were trying to introduce theoretical discourses

12:28

to their teaching and one of the things that happened out of

12:36

that struggle was that it seemed that everybody every professor

12:41

no matter how resistant they were to the idea um tacked two weeks of

12:47

feminism onto the end of every syllabus

12:54

and the amazing thing was that

13:01

feminism was so much more practical the tact on feminism was so much more

13:07

practical and understandable and relatable than the

13:12

the sort of true theory courses that we were taking

13:17

um because we wanted to be uh cutting edge and

13:22

on the forefront so i can remember sitting in a class with a

13:28

a derrida specialist and um one of the artists in the class i was

13:35

studying art history but this course was taken by um

13:41

people doing their mfa’s as well one of the artists just like threw down

13:47

her books and said but what does this have to do with real life and um

13:53

you know the interesting thing is that that professor could not come up with any

13:59

proper articulation of why we had to study daradat in the way that we were

14:06

studying darida like there was no attempt to make it relatable

14:14

so i think that uh reading does play a really important role in

14:22

curatorial work um but it has been such a relief to

14:28

sort of move into a space and i’m not saying that all curators work in this way but many do

14:35

um you know if if you work in a way where you’re um

14:41

trying to relate to communities whether it’s the communities of artists that you work with or the communities that can

14:49

compose the audiences that come to the museum you have to understand uh

14:56

basically um how to translate all different kinds of

15:02

ideas amongst people with different world views

15:07

and um so there’s a lot of reading around um

15:14

uh those world views but also

15:19

reading that is about musiology i suppose and um uh

15:27

sort of understanding learning how to how to make those translations

15:32

in the museum space

15:38

i love your derrida anecdote because one of the things that you said

15:44

was in the way that we were studying so there’s a way in which one could read

15:51

and there could be explosive and incredible connections to people’s archival pursuits theoretical thinking

15:58

etc but the way in which one approaches those texts is so key to their uptake

16:04

and their translation and you know i think that there’s something very interesting to me about the fact

16:10

that our original brainstorming about this field school was going to be an

16:15

in-person incubator in a very condensed period of time and i recognized the ways

16:21

that that would have produced a different experience to what we are now collaboratively curating and organizing

16:28

together which extends and i feel so excited because i think one of the things that’s come out of our

16:35

need to pivot online and our need to think safely

16:40

together considering the geographic location of many of our

16:46

guests is the fact that we get to have so many more conversations across a more extended time

16:53

and you know i wonder one of the things that we have spent time talking about i think off the page

17:00

and and out of side of recorded zooms is the role of institutional critique

17:06

as a kind of through line in our thinking and i’d be curious

17:12

what does institutional critique mean to you in your everyday

17:18

um it has it has

17:24

meant many things over the many years that i’ve been working in institutions

17:29

working and going to school in institutions you know

17:34

as a university student i was

17:41

[Music] often a person sitting in the corner like being annoyed because

17:49

what was being taught to me was being so poorly taught

17:56

i don’t know if that was early institutional critique it was it was a you know a growing awareness that

18:04

things could be better and

18:09

uh when i started when i first started curating i was a curatorial assistant at

18:15

the art gallery of ontario that was my first curating job so for the most part i

18:23

was in a support role on other people’s projects and the first time

18:30

i was given the chance to curate something the artist that i

18:36

worked with uh is named sally mackay and she teaches at mcmaster

18:43

university now and sally

18:48

made absolutely brilliant artists books and multiples

18:54

that you could buy at art metropol for as little as a dollar um

18:59

and we transformed this little gallery

19:05

at the ago into a artist’s multiple shop

19:13

um and i’m not even sure if we really did it

19:19

kind of consciously sally was an artist whose work i liked

19:26

we liked each other we did this project together but um

19:31

we made the museum do things that it wasn’t used to doing

19:37

you know selling work in a gallery space

19:42

showing work that was made on a photocopier

19:48

like when some of sally’s flyers or little brochures ran out

19:54

i would make them on the photocopier upstairs

20:01

so um you know i think i think that was um

20:08

certainly an early sort of intuitive reaction to

20:15

where i was working and what i was seeing in the museum and knowing that i wanted things to

20:20

to shift a little and and as i have

20:26

grown and aged and sort of learned more about how the museum is

20:32

complicit in much larger inequities and oppressions

20:38

um the kinds of critiques that i’m interested in and this is not to say

20:45

that sally mackay is not a voice of profound critique of institutions

20:51

because she is but um i think the the the

20:56

kinds of critique that i have um aimed to um

21:03

engage with and infuse in the museum um are are really in line with

21:11

you know inequities that i feel personally and within the communities that i i belong to so

21:18

hence uh um you know a greater alignment with um

21:24

feminist issues with anti-racist movements with

21:31

you know all all kinds of uh conversations that we have to have to

21:36

to really welcome everybody into the museum if that’s what we say we’re doing

21:46

and um it’s interesting to me that you

21:51

started out by um talking about you know maybe your your

21:58

clearer alignment with your role as an artist and um

22:04

the the kind of more tenuous relationship to academia

22:10

um because in our conversations um you know thinking about my

22:17

my early recognition of bad teaching i have come to realize

22:22

how deeply you think about how people learn

22:28

in the space of a university classroom and and how you

22:35

you can structure things differently to create um a more

22:40

active and full of potential learning experience for people

22:46

i wonder if you could talk about how you think about teaching a little bit

22:52

sure i think that my

22:58

investment in teaching is really a product of learning from

23:04

those who have taught me which is to say i think that the only reason i’ve remained

23:10

in academia is because i have had the opportunity to work with those who are

23:16

really deeply invested in a choice and b

23:23

cross-disciplinary pursuits and i think if i could isolate those two as anchoring methods in my teaching i

23:30

could probably speak for more than a minute which is to say you know choice is such a key and fundamental part of

23:38

learning i think that it is a missed opportunity to over direct students

23:44

collaborators interlocutors to predetermine what an assignment outcome

23:49

should be i think that we have all been products of school systems that have been

23:56

you know structured as racist and homophobic and transphobic environments

24:01

that are committed to producing certain kinds of knowledge and expertise and

24:08

thinking with those who are trying to decolonize institutions and modes of learning i think that opening toward

24:15

choice and change as necessary parts of the learning experience it has to be a foundational commitment and you

24:23

know so often people will say ah but you have to evaluate but you have to grade you have to do all these things i don’t love grading i don’t love evaluating

24:30

and i also think there can be choice there so what does it mean to create opportunities for students to

24:36

evaluate themselves and i think that what’s really exciting about a self-evaluative process is the chance to

24:43

reckon with your own efforts and to say yeah sometimes it’s just a b like it’s

24:50

just not always gonna be an a plus effort and i feel the same way as a teacher in no way do i imagine a world

24:56

where i am an a plus lecturer every day of the week it doesn’t take into account my life it doesn’t take into account the

25:03

ebbs and flows of one’s process of learning and so i think

25:08

choice for me is also deeply related to a kind of cross-disciplinary investment

25:14

which is to say you know disciplines are like identity categories modes of

25:21

categorization and any mode of categorization is a mode of boundary making and exclusion and so when we stay

25:28

too neatly packaged within a lane or within a discipline or an identity we’re making choices to close off other modes

25:36

of thinking and other modes of inquiry and other modes of disruption which is to say the way in which you approach

25:42

those questions is not the same depending on who you are and where you’re coming from and so trying to foreground and make visible all of those

25:48

choices i think opens up new pathways but i very much identify as a new teacher and someone who’s still

25:54

continuing to learn and trying to pivot within an institutional context that i’m still learning

26:00

and i think that moving outside of the classroom space moving on and off of screens moving into cultural production

26:08

and welcoming different forms of engagement are some of the strategies that feel most exciting to me at this

26:13

stage um i feel like

26:21

i should make reference to i’m sitting in my office at rainey modern

26:26

in saskatoon but um i’d like to talk a little bit about the art gallery of greater victoria in response to

26:35

to what you’ve you’ve just said because i i found it to be

26:41

quite a remarkable space for a public museum and i can remember when

26:48

i um i did my interview the director saying to me you know this is this is a

26:55

museum where we welcome failure and then he like second guessed himself

27:01

and he and he said not that we want to fail but it’s okay if you do

27:07

um and uh

27:12

i don’t think that the art gallery of greater victoria fails at a lot of things but

27:19

there is um a remarkable willingness to enter into

27:25

projects that actually make no sense within the context of an art museum

27:32

um you know they will do things because they’re good for artists or they’re good

27:38

for communities or they allow them to explore interesting

27:44

questions and somehow the institution has

27:49

um sort of separated it itself from this sort of hamster wheel that museums

27:56

can get on as just producers of cultural product

28:01

um so i’m really interested to see how this

28:08

program the feminist art field school translates into the space of

28:13

the art gallery of greater victoria’s website and you know what

28:20

what happens when the space

28:25

and procedures of museum education intersect with

28:31

university education particularly when we’re working with somebody who’s

28:36

thinking through the potentials and challenges of of education in the way that you are

28:44

i love that and it feels to me related to a conversation that we had with sean lee

28:51

in service of the field school when he said that tangled arts has a

28:57

clause in their contract called a care clause and it makes me wonder what something

29:03

like that in the context of a field school could be you know how can we take care of each

29:10

other differently what does a relationship across institutions and across contexts allow

29:17

us to imagine and you know perhaps it’s not a care clause we won’t borrow it so directly

29:23

but maybe there’s something that we can think about together over the next 12 weeks and and and return

29:30

to to the possibility that there’s something else that’s going to happen

29:36

here that we can not yet predict

29:41

amazing and i that makes me think all the way back to my first year of undergrad when

29:47

i was a biochemistry major with uh

29:53

sites set on going to medical school and i ended up in

29:59

you know this this class of people who were so competitive somebody um

30:06

somebody sabotaged my chemistry experiment

30:12

in the second semester of first year and i thought this is not for me at all

30:20

and uh not not that there was anything as explicit

30:25

as a care clause and first i transferred into psychology and

30:30

then art history but um it was subtly there that people

30:36

interacted in a very different way than they they did in those pre-med spaces

30:44

i love it and i think you know there is something to be said for

30:52

imagining a world together and a container of the field school and looking back on it and realizing that

31:00

something different occurred there and i think part of that is because we are only two bodies in what

31:08

will be a room of 50 plus who can co-create the contours of the

31:16

next 12 weeks fantastic

31:21

thanks for joining me on the journey it is my absolute pleasure to be here

No results found