0:00

Chase: Okay, hi. This is Work in Progress.
We are your co-hosts for the day.

0:06

My name is Chase Joynt. I’m an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Victoria.

0:11

Michelle: And I’m Michelle Jacques, the Head of Exhibitions and Collections and Chief Curator at Remai Modern in Saskatoon.

0:18

Chase: This podcast series is programed through the Art Gallery

0:21

of Greater Victoria and is generously supported by a Canada Council
for the Arts Digital Now Grant.

0:26

The AGGV is located on the unceded traditional territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən speaking peoples, today known as the Esquimalt and Songhees Nations.

0:35

Michelle: Work In Progress is a podcast that offers some insight from behind the scenes to curatorial projects that could be seen as process based.

0:44

Highlighting some of the experimental work
that is taking shape inside and outside

0:49

of the AGGV’s physical gallery spaces,
such as the Feminist Art Field School.

0:55

Chase: The Feminist Art Field School, or FAFS
as some of our students like to call it, was an online course

1:02

that took place during the fall semester of 2021
and was geared towards students, artists, curators

1:07

and community members interested in gender, feminism
and the porous boundaries between art, activism and academic practice.

1:16

Michelle: Our hope is that this podcast episode will help extend
the conversations that began in the Feminist Art Field School

1:23

and will be a way to share some insights from behind the scenes
more broadly with family, friends and communities

1:28

who might want to learn more.

1:30

Chase: And so perhaps we should start by briefly summarizing the field school for listeners who might not know anything about it.

1:36

And it strikes me that your recent anecdote talking about
our participation in this podcast might be a useful place to begin.

1:45

Michelle: Yeah, it’s interesting because I was

1:48

telling a colleague here

1:50

that I was doing this podcast with you iand the AGGV today.

1:56

I said it was a podcast about the Feminist Art Field School.

2:00

I had always thought that we had so didacticly

2:02

named the course that it was really obvious to everybody
what it was all about.

2:08

But the first two questions were, What is a field school?
And what was feminist about it?

2:17

So I wonder if you want to take

2:19

the first question. What is a field school?

2:22

It is something that UVic actually offers
quite a bit in different departments.

2:30

Chase: Yeah, I love those questions.

2:32

And in some ways if the people listening had access to our syllabus,

2:36

they would see that we from the beginning
are troubling the terms of the engagement.

2:41

What is feminism?

2:43

What is field? What is land? What is territory?

2:46

What is school? What is pedagogy? What is teaching?

2:49

These are the sort of central questions
and obsessions of of our time together.

2:56

And the field school for the purposes
of course booking at the University of Victoria, not to get too in

3:01

the weeds, is a way to signal an opportunity for students
to be outside of traditional classroom space.

3:06

So this can look like leaving and studying
in a different geographic location, but for the purposes of our work

3:15

it was about an institutional collaboration
between arts sectors and academic institutions.

3:22

And, you know, one of the things that I loved about my time with you
is that we realized through our various

3:30

disciplinary access points and positions,
that we were both troubling over the same questions

3:36

and thinking about the role of institutions and the role of teaching
and how art moves in and out of those spaces.

3:42

And so for me, field school is an opportunity
to think about expanding the terms of our learning

3:49

and leaving the bounds of traditional academic space. What about you?

3:55

Michelle: It’s interesting that when we first started talking about the field school,

4:02

it was going to be a learning opportunity
in a different geographic space, at least different

4:09

from the university campus,
because we started the planning before the pandemic hit.

4:15

We had imagined that we would be bringing people to Victoria
and that a lot of the work would happen,

4:20

I guess around the physical space of the AGGV
and other spaces outside of the classroom.

4:28

And then what it transformed into was a sort of…
it was a virtual space,

4:34

obviously the program was delivered online,

4:40

but for me it always maintained
a real sort of connection to the idea of being a field school,

4:47

because our weekly guests were always talking about the larger world
and a larger experience and connecting

4:55

what the students were learning to real life experience.

5:00

I think we even started calling my little presentations
every week, notes from the field.

5:08

So it also, for me connected,

5:12

the term connected, to the

5:14

way we were bringing together the experience of the museum world,
of the art world, hopefully in a kind of radical interpretation

5:24

of what those fields could be into the virtual classroom

5:29

and giving students a taste of art beyond the textbook.

5:35

Chase: I think it’s also about the classroom beyond the lecture.

5:39

I think one of the things
that I was so inspired to think about with you

5:42

is how to really democratize the various platforms of our engagement.

5:48

And so part of the structure of the class inviting conversation
based modules with artists and cultural producers

5:56

to think with us out loud about their practice meant that students
were arriving to continue a conversation that was already in process.

6:04

And I loved the notes from the field, because in part
you were able to offer to many students who had less experience

6:11

in more traditional formal arts institutions
some of the ways in which we come to recognize collecting

6:18

or labeling or these processes that go often under interrogated
by those who are less frequently a part of those spaces.

6:26

And I think it’s through our ability to spend time with you
that we were able to re interrogate some of the structures of academia

6:34

and institutional learning,
which are also formalized and serve as exclusive spaces

6:40

that are about certain kinds of learning
and certain kinds of histories.

6:43

And so there was a kind of organic way
in which disrupting the traditional classroom space

6:50

opened up new possibilities for learning and creative
institutional critique and decolonial practice and thinking.

6:57

Michelle: Absolutly, and I’m not sure if it’s too soon
to move off of our discussion about

7:03

the idea of the field school

7:06

towards a discussion of what was feminist about it,

7:10

but one of the other sort of threads that I feel ran
through the course for me was that I was always thinking back

7:20

to my experience of being in the post-secondary classroom.

7:26

And I did my graduate work in the early nineties

7:31

at a time when, at least at York University, a lot of professors

7:37

were being encouraged to introduce feminist practice to the syllabus,

7:43

and it most often appeared as the last week or two on the syllabus.

7:50

It was like very awkwardly presented and always seemed sort of…

7:56

It was presented
as though it was this kind of thing that was happening elsewhere.

8:02

It wasn’t integrated into everything else that we were doing.

8:07

And then the other, post-secondary experience that I think of is when I was a sessional teaching Canadian art history at OCAD in the mid

8:19

2000, and I was completely perplexed
by the idea of a three hour lecture course in Canadian art history.

8:30

And I always thought that I was cheating the institution of what
they were paying me to do because I would go into the classroom

8:40

and ask questions and see how long I could get the students talking
before I actually had to deliver

8:47

any content myself.

8:52

Chase: I love this admission.

8:54

Michelle: And now I understand that that’s actually a feminist practice to

9:00

not take up all of the space.

9:04

So shoot. How did I get there?

9:06

Where was I going with that?

9:08

I guess just thinking about how the course was feminist.

9:13

I feel like it was feminist in

9:15

so many ways, in the structure of the course, in the way
the students were engaged, in the way opportunities to contribute

9:23

were democratized and in the way that feminist art, feminist

9:29

thinking, feminist activism was central to the discussions
every week, through the readings

9:37

and through our contributions,
and especially through the selection of the guest speakers.

9:44

Chase: Yeah, you know, feminism is such an unstable and contested term, and one of the things that I loved

9:50

so much about our conversations was to think
with our various interlocutors and participants about its use value.

9:57

What are the ways in which feminism serves
as useful as an analytic tool, as a space of activist grounding?

10:04

And what are the ways in which we need to discard
feminism and feminist practice or feminist history

10:10

in service of other,
more usable ways of thinking and being in the world?

10:15

And I really love your anecdote about showing up to a classroom
and trying to suspend

10:21

for as long as possible
the need to lecture or the need to bring in your own opinion.

10:26

And there’s something really exciting about the field school model,
which I think charges every participant in the room

10:33

to actively curate and create their learning.

10:38

And that’s not to say there aren’t guides and support systems in place
along the way to support students,

10:44

but rather to say that the field school is only ever going to be

10:49

about its participants. And so one of the things that I love is
we can use the same material, we could offer

10:56

the same lecture pods to a different room, and the field school
would have a totally different tone and a totally different shape.

11:02

And through our collaboration with the AGGV,
one of the things that I’m left to think about as well is the way in

11:08

which the field school endures
long after our formal classroom space is come to a close.

11:14

What does it mean to have a kind of public living pedagogical arm
where the lecture pods are available

11:21

for ongoing use, and where there can be a kind of passive site
and engagement for those who might want to sync up with us?

11:28

To me too, that’s an exciting moment of feminist practice,
which is, again, to think about how these institutions

11:35

of which we are a part in arts and academic spaces, are exclusive
and are boundaried and are controlled.

11:42

And how can we break down some of those barriers to access?

11:48

Yeah, I have to admit that when I entered into the conversation
about

11:54

working on this with you, I was assuming a much more kind of didactic,

12:01

what’s the word I’m looking for,

12:04

obvious definition of feminism or feminist art

12:09

then we ended up working with. I think by virtue of my age,
I was a child during second wave feminism

12:18

and that period of grad school that I talk about was a moment
when people were

12:25

working so hard to achieve gender parity in academia

12:34

that I do tend to revert to a very kind of obvious definition
and understanding of feminism.

12:44

And one of the things that

12:46

had been in my head when we started talking, was
what was happening in museums and what really came into high focus

12:56

during the pandemic and particularly during the Black Lives Matter

13:03

movement and uprising after George Floyd’s death.
There was a demand that museums behave differently.

13:16

We finally saw hiring practices changing in museums. People were questioning choices about leadership.

13:25

People were questioning inequities, in what voices were heard in curatorial departments and museums.

13:33

And also the people inside museums were making it really clear

13:39

how things have to change, why things have to change,
what kinds of oppressive practices were still taking place in museums.

13:47

So I had this sort of very kind of I don’t know, maybe it was a little

13:52

simplistic or something, but this idea that museums were in the process

13:59

of shifting from their

14:05

old white male

14:11

persona

14:13

to a new kind of way of being.

14:17

And that’s what was at the back of my mind
as we were working through this course. Sort of not that everything

14:25

was necessarily moving towards a new gendered identity,
but that we were very much trying to shake that old gendered identity.

14:35

Chase: Right, and so I have a question.

14:36

It’s a little bit off topic, but it’s related to a discussion
that I was having with people in the entertainment industry

14:43

around diversity and the momentum coming out of the movement
for Black Lives and the demand for structural change

14:52

and the ways in which, at least in some circuits of film and TV, the

14:58

momentum and energy of the commitments of those empowered to change their ways has waned.

15:04

And I’m curious to know in sort of arts and museum sectors, how you are thinking about those very same ideas and themes now

15:13

a few years in and frankly, actually almost a year
after the field school. Has the conversation changed?

15:20

Has it taken on new shape?

15:21

Where are those momentums?

15:23

What’s most exciting or interesting or concerning to you these days?

15:27

Michelle: I feel very lucky to be in an institution,
and there are others like it,

15:36

that is being led by

15:39

directors who are very committed to the idea of change.
And this institution has

15:48

been quite successful in ensuring that the governance body
is on board, up to speed, capable of overseeing that kind of change.

15:58

So the conversation is ramping up here in terms of the issues and the

16:09

kind of movement toward change being incorporated into governance
documents, business documents, all of our policies and procedures,

16:20

as well as our ways of working from day to day
and decisions that we make about what we share with our communities.

16:27

That said, every once in a while it sort of comes back that somebodys been at some meeting somewhere

16:36

where some other leader or individual from inside a museum has said,

16:44

isn’t that over yet?

16:46

When are things going to swing back?

16:49

So I think much like politics,
the museum sector has operated on this idea of a pendulum.

16:59

And the hope was that this swing had been so far in one direction
that change would really take hold.

17:07

I guess it still remains to be seen whether the

17:11

institutions that are really, really committed to that change
can become the norm or the model.

17:22

Chase: Right, and I mean, it’s relevant to some of the broader questions that we were asking in the field school,

17:27

which is to say, you know, are institutions actually capable

17:32

of sustaining this kind of change
while remaining the institutions that they are?

17:38

And I’m really challenged and compelled by that question
and it’s ongoing irresolvability.

17:46

And I think it’s really relevant to students
who are also thinking about the bounds of academic practice.

17:52

And I think so much about even the structure of the syllabus itself
as a form of power and control over certain kinds of knowledge

18:00

and the organization and patterns
with which we come to approach ideas and people.

18:07

And, you know, perhaps we can share a little bit…

18:11

I mean, I won’t bring you into this with a “we” statement,

18:14

I’ll use an “I” statement and you can choose your own adventure.

18:16

But I’m really left thinking a lot about the final session
that we had where we laid the grading rubric out

18:26

for critical examination with our students and allowed them

18:33

opportunity and space without critique or judgment
to think about what it means to get an A, to get a B, to get a C.

18:42

And what emerged from that conversation
were all of the limits of our frame,

18:48

the ways in which we are beholden to a University Victoria
structure of evaluation, all of the ways in which that actually

18:58

exists as antithetical to the Feminist

19:02

Art Field School’s commitments
that we had been building together over the course of the 12 weeks,

19:07

and to really sit in the murkiness and discomfort of that space
with our students and in reading the evaluations

19:15

that came in after,
I was really compelled by the ways in which that exercise for students

19:23

served as a striking capstone
to think about all of the work that is left to be done

19:32

and how the field school is just one way
in which we’re trying to approach these questions and these systems.

19:38

And, you know, I’m curious, as we’ve had some time to pause and reflect, if you were to do the field school again

19:46

or we were to do the field school again together,
are there things that you would immediately be excited to do over

19:52

or things you would immediately
seek to change or amend based on your experience?

20:00

Michelle: In a way that’s a really complicated question, but it does tweak something in my brain that I’ve been thinking about earlier in the conversation,

20:11

which is how specific the time
in which we delivered the school was.

20:17

It was the fall of 2021.

20:22

So we’d all been at home for a year and a half when we started.

20:27

And I feel as though we offered the students a space
that maybe they really needed at that time.

20:37

I mean, we all needed it.

20:39

I do wonder if it was to be offered in two years with a little bit
of distance from the pandemic, whether there would be,

20:47

whether there would be as much immediate acceptance
for that sort of distance from the norm of the institution?

21:01

Chase: I love the phrase “that distance from the norm”.

21:04

It’s true, that’s the subtitle of our class.

21:10

Michelle: I think what I’m trying to say is that there’s not a lot
that I would do differently,

21:16

or I would hope that almost everything we did,
I could have an opportunity to do again.

21:23

And what I’m questioning is whether it would be received
in the same way at a different time.

21:30

Chase: Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would not. I think that the ways in which that information and that work… that’s one of the reasons

21:37

why I love art and cultural production is because the context
in which one encounters it continually changes its meaning.

21:46

That’s why we can pull things out of collections and re-imagine
and restage in different contexts through a radical juxtaposition

21:53

with other work and other artists and other sociopolitical context,
and all of a sudden see something new or see something again.

22:00

And one of the things that I’ve been thinking

22:03

a lot about is making more space
for the opportunity for students to encounter each other’s work.

22:09

So one of the foundational commitments of the field school,
were various structured opportunities for students to engage

22:16

in creative practice and creative institutional critique,
and I know that many of the students took risks

22:21

to try different forms and genres and techniques

22:26

in the structure of the class.

22:27

And I think an opportunity to bear witness and be present
and to engage, perhaps in person, would be such a welcome opportunity.

22:35

I remember in our early conversations about the field school,
we had talked about a kind of final exhibition,

22:41

a way in which to share space, a way in which to have an opening.

22:45

And I think that there’s a kind of witnessing and audience
and spectatorship

22:50

that is difficult to maneuver and replicate in online formats.

22:56

Though I know some people are doing it well,
but I would be curious to know what would happen if we were in person

23:02

and able to take up space in a gallery setting in a different way.

23:09

Michelle: It’s interesting because as you were talking about the conversation

23:14

around the marking rubric and the implications of that in terms
of what it means for helping students

23:23

recognize that there’s a system
imposed on their experience of post-secondary education.

23:32

I was thinking through what the parallel is in the museum field,
and the interesting thing is that nobody’s marking anybody here.

23:42

If coming to the gallery or the museum, experiencing the exhibitions,
is the equivalent of participating in the Feminist Art Field School,

23:52

then the limitation is, what opportunities for engagement
we’re offering. And this has been

23:59

sort of the ongoing struggle,
particularly in art museums and contemporary art museums

24:06

and other kinds of spaces as opposed to history museums
or science museums, which are very good at engagement

24:13

that we tend to present exhibitions in a kind of old school
art history way

24:20

where the student is supposed to come into the museum
and recognize things immediately and get very little help to engage.

24:27

So our challenge is more about creating a space that is comparable

24:33

to the opportunities for participating
in a conversation around content that we offered in the field school.

24:40

And I think where the parallel does exist to that kind of issue
around a marking system in a university

24:48

is that we haven’t been very transparent
about the message that you can come to the museum

24:55

and leave the museum with your own opinions about what you’ve seen.
That if you didn’t like it, it’s not a failure.

25:03

If you didn’t understand it, that’s our fault, not your fault.

25:07

So I think the field school as a collaboration between academia

25:14

and the museum world offers a really interesting opportunity
for creating these comparisons that have been really useful

25:22

for me in thinking through how people engage,
how people learn, how people find enjoyment in art.

25:31

Chase: I love this. Anything else we want to…
I mean, I feel like that’s wonderful.

25:35

Is there anything that we should sort of touch on that we haven’t?

25:38

I’m trying to think, you know, the goal of the podcast
would hopefully be that they would hear our voices and then maybe

25:44

want to hop over to the Feminist Art Field School project page

25:49

on the AGGV website and click through the ten public facing lectures

25:57

that are hosted on the gallery YouTube channel and engage
in a little bit of choose your own adventure.

26:04

Michelle: Yeah, so I wonder maybe if one last question could be…

26:11

now I don’t know how to articulate this
because we had so many great guests

26:18

and I can recall that every week
I said, Oh, I think this was my favorite guest. So…

26:29

Chase: Were you going to ask me to pick a favorite?

26:31

Yeah and then I realized I can’t ask that. They were…

26:34

We loved all of our children equally.

26:37

Chase: Yeah, exactly.

26:41

You know, the one thing that is notable to me
as we wrap up our conversation

26:47

is that a missing representation from our field school
archive are the extraordinary students

26:54

who were in our room each week. That in fact the trace of the field
school is without its core collaborators.

27:02

And there’s something quite striking to me about that realization
and something that I’m going to think about long after we log off is

27:10

I wonder if in a future iteration,
there is opportunity to make present more of the dynamic engagement,

27:17

because the conversations had in that room,
and in those rooms, were so dynamic and so nimble and ever changing.

27:26

And maybe there’s something there for us to consider
about how to further connect what’s happening in the Zoom

27:34

room of the field school through the institution and the public
facing classroom of the gallery, and to further those connections?

27:45

Michelle: Well, tying that back to what I was just saying about museums engaging

27:50

with audiences, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a so-called audience,
if that’s what we want to call that group

27:59

of remarkable students, engaged so willingly and actively and honestly.

28:06

We were meeting with people
every week who were dealing with the pandemic, dealing

28:11

with being displaced from the experience that they thought
they were going to be having as university students.

28:19

And they listened to commentary
from some really senior and important artists and curators

28:29

and had their own opinions
and were willing to say things that challenged what they heard.

28:36

They were really sort of the ideal art engagers to me.

28:41

Chase: I couldn’t agree more, I couldn’t agree more.

28:42

And I really could not be more grateful for the opportunity
to continue journeying with you in these conversations.

28:48

Michelle: Me too. I am hopefully going to be teaching feminist art again, but it won’t be the same without you.

28:56

Chase: Oh, well, sign me up for that class. Sounds awesome.

29:01

Well, Michelle, it is always a pleasure to be in conversation with you.

29:04

And thanks to everyone who joined us
for another episode of the Work In Progress Podcast.

29:10

Michelle: And thank you, Chase. I miss speaking to you every week,
so it was a pleasure to get together again.

29:17

For those of you who want to learn more about the field,
school visit aggv.ca and head over to the Feminist Art Field School

29:26

project page. Or check out the gallery’s YouTube channel to rewatch
all ten of the public facing lectures in this exciting series.

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