Artist talks?

This week at senior seminar, an artist came to speak who made work a lot like mine- out of accumulations of waste products- paper, plastic, tires, ceramics. Mostly paper.

His work was beautiful. Knowing his materials so intmately, I felt deeply moved by the slides of his work, by his simple, elegant execution of a process much like mine. He visited my studio, gave me some good tips on stacking paper safely, and asked me a lot of hard questions. I was puzzled by why exactly he'd do this, but liked the opportunity to practice talking.

However, he was an asshole. His artist talk was painful- he was rude to the students and self-righteous. He fell in to all of the pitfalls of talking about ecological art that I am working very hard to try to avoid. He sited half-relevant statistics, included images meant to illustrate how appalled he was by today's crisis. To his credit, in my eyes, he did not claim his art to be a solution, he acknowledged his complicity in waste. However, this pissed most people in the room off. By using his artist's talk as a platform to discuss ecological issues outside of his work, he primed his audience to look at him as 'part of the solution'. When inconsistencies between his work and talk became apparent, most notably that he also makes work out of store-bought materials and sometimes cuts down smal trees to use in sculptures, people got angry. They saw him as a hypocrite. He responded dismissively and defensively, which made it much worse. I cringed, knowing that his terrible handling of the subject matter we share could well predispose my peers to see all ecologically oriented artwork more cynically, and to be more judgemental of my work.

Since his lecture, I've had a couple of really interesting exchanges about what was wrong with the talk. Our shared frustration leads us to talk about his content, and I end up sharing a lot of my opinions about consumption, waste, and my art's engagement with these issues. This result is exciting.

This situation brings up interesting pedagogical questions for me. By pissing us all off, the artist inspired us all to dwell on his talk a lot more than we would have if he were pleasant. Mostly, I think of agressive or confrontational teaching approaches as counterproductive and fundamentally bad, but some of the anti-racist workshops I've attended in the past few years have made me rethink this. These workshops consistently make me feel terrible by asking me to confront all of the unjust benefits of being white, all of my latent racism. I feel strongly that this is the right approach, because I am not, should not think of myself as capable of combatting structural racism, because the delusional over-empowerment of liberal white folks is part of the problem...thus it is honest for an anti-racist workshop to leave me feeling powerless, guilty, confused, bad. The agressive pedagogy evokes an appropriately difficult emotional response.

I think ecological self-reflection should also make people feel bad, because it is a just sadness. However, I don't think ecological teaching has the right to preach, because what human can claim the moral high ground? We are all suffering from and contributing to planet trash soup. I am trying to find a way to talk about my art work and life choices non-judgementally, non-condescendingly as a way to talk about ecology compassionately, and I think I'm getting good and gauging the appropriate tone. This visiting artist, though, made me more concious of my choices, though, because in a strange way his work was also effective, in that it provoked an oppositional response that called for conversation.