Disrupting the Canon, (Re)-Claiming the South

Sep 172013
 
 September 17, 2013

By Michaela Dwyer

Take A): a lot of what’s talked about regarding the American South is a function of what’s not talked about.

There’s an unspoken tension that carries throughout the 2005 film Junebug, directed by North Carolina native Phil Morrison. Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), a Chicago-based art dealer specializing in “outsider art,” has journeyed south with her husband George (Alessandro Nivola) to the area around Pinnacle, North Carolina, where he grew up. The trip’s purpose is ostensibly to woo a particular self-taught “outsider” artist for Madeleine’s gallery. On the other hand, and as the film gradually leads us to believe, George and Madeleine’s complicated homecoming and reunion with George’s sprawling Southern family are precisely the point of the trip.

Frank Hoyt Taylor and Embeth Davidtz in 'Junebug.'

Frank Hoyt Taylor and Embeth Davidtz in ‘Junebug.’

This is the first time I’ve been able to say, with pleasurably full seriousness, that I’m “curating a film series.” Indeed—one of the many hats Nathan and I wear as Bear Fellows is film series curator, responsible for planning the annual Ethics Film Series, which will span four films over four months in the spring of 2014. Nathan and I have tossed around thematic ideas for the festival that reflect our shared humanities background and that run the gamut from “family” to “the ethics of artistic revision.” But we kept returning to another background we share, and one that continues to compel us: the American South. Nathan and I both grew up in North Carolina, and obviously have chosen to continue living here. My decision to stay in the Triangle after graduation was intentional and long-coming, motivated by my love of this community, which I’d defend any day for its accessibility, diversity, and engagement—whether it be political, cultural and artistic, or intellectual. Living here also means being familiar with the term “the New South.” More often than not, it’s attached to entrepreneurial or artistic ventures—a hip new tapas bar or an alt-country band—that celebrate the American South as politically progressive and economically vibrant. The “New South” is almost aspirational, staked in Antebellum roots, but without the baggage of racism and segregation.

Ironically, the “New South” isn’t a new term. It’s been used in multiple iterations since the Reconstruction Era, in opposition to the idea of the “Old South”—one defined by a plantation and slave-based economy—and, on a more micro-level, a social standard of reticence, genteel civility, and defense of the status quo. These cultural mores are traditional insofar as they reinforce tradition. The basic premise of Junebug throws the contemporary and traditional together in a way that’s impossible to tidy up—especially in the film’s 106 minutes, and especially through the framing device of Madeleine’s relationship with the fictional outsider artist David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor). The genre of “outsider art” was conceptualized by 20th century French artist Jean Dubuffet to refer to artwork produced outside of official culture and/or institutions as well as the traditional artistic canon. While Dubuffet used the term largely to describe art produced by children and by mental asylum patients (the opening scenes of Junebug depict an auction of an autistic artist’s work), “outsider art” has expanded to refer to the work of self-taught artists, people who carve creative space outside of the mainstream. The American South has long been considered a regional hotbed for these artists who exist and work apart from a creative economy largely dictated by the ‘art world’ (based in Durham, Outsiders Art and Collectibles is devoted to this type of work). The self-sustaining ‘art world,’ that is, represented in Junebug by the NYC gallerist to whom Madeleine fears losing David Wark’s muralesque paintings.

Thornton Dial's 2003 work 'Don't Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together'

Thornton Dial’s 2003 work ‘Don’t Matter How Raggly the Flag, It Still Got to Tie Us Together’

A recent New Yorker article profiles the unique relationship between Alabama-born outsider artist Thornton Dial and collector/art historian Bill Arnett. Arnett fervently defends work by the likes of Dial, calling it art that “wasn’t created to entertain people or to sell to rich people…it was created to commemorate the culture itself, so that it could last, so that grandmamma could tell grandson, ‘This is what we’re about, child.’” Detractors consider Arnett’s patronage ethically problematic, even a form of “colonialism,” similar to midcentury white male music producers who became rich “by exploiting black songwriters.” Likewise, Madeleine’s worldliness—she is the daughter of diplomats, having lived and been educated around the globe—and stature in the art world stands in direct contrast to George’s sprawling Southern family, and to Wark’s creative context. As the film unfolds over several days of George and Madeleine’s visit, we watch the global and the local rub up against each other in unexpected ways, at times traumatic and other times connective, even reparative. In the space of the film’s narrative, all become outsiders in some dimension. All assumptions, all relationships are destabilized—and all of this happens, crucially, in a rural North Carolina town.

As professor, historian, and activist Tim Tyson warned my South in Black and White class this past spring, there is a danger in fetishizing the South’s—and especially the “New South’s”— complexity. There’s a danger in thinking about it as an “imagined space” onto which our collective desires and prejudices can be projected. This is part of the reason why Nathan and I are interested in showing films like this one as a way to open up discussion about the seductiveness and tensions of terminology like the “New South.” We want to disrupt the canon before it forms, to claim a space informed by, but outside of, mainstream discourse. Our collective intention, even our moral obligation, is to be intentional—about the art we consume and make, about the cities we live in, about the standard of culture we create and promote (this past spring, I wrote an editor’s note for the Duke Chronicle that treats similar themes). Your voice is an instrumental part of this process, and we invite your feedback as we move toward a film festival this spring centered in a contemporary American South that’s very much still under revision.

This Is Your Brain on Science…and Justice

Sep 132013
 
 September 13, 2013

By Nathan Nye

KIE Prof Walter Sinnot Armstrong sits on a panel discussing the PBS series, Brains on Trial

KIE Prof Walter Sinnot Armstrong sits on a panel discussing the PBS series, Brains on Trial

When I told my friends that I was watching a PBS documentary called Brains on Trial, the reaction I consistently got was, “What does that mean?”

“Are the brains on trial?”

“So it’s a courtroom full of brains?”

These were of course jokes, but they reveal an interesting truth—ironically, most of us don’t think about our brains very often.

As a disclaimer, I am not a scientist. My understanding of neurology is as vast as my knowledge of astrophysics, which is to say, infinitesimal. However, it’s impossible not to absorb a few basic facts if you’ve been in the education system for 17 years and have access to the Internet­—the brain is the unit of the body that creates both function, and the idea of self (this is as far as my knowledge goes). However, we only rarely consciously consider this intersection of anatomy, neurology, and chemistry when creating our idea of our own and other’s personhood.

Which brings me back to Brains on Trial, a two part series, which began last night on PBS. I was excited to watch not only because it’s hosted by Alan Alda (Arnie Vinick is the only Republican I’ve considered voting for), but because KIE professor Walter Sinnott-Armstrong had a significant hand in helping shape the content of the program. The basic idea is that each part will explore ways in which MRI technology could be used to determine guilt or innocence in a courtroom.

What struck me watching Alan Alda exploring the ways in which MRI could be used in the criminal justice system was the cautious approach all of the researchers took. No one posited this technology was always accurate or appropriate for court proceedings. Why? Because as one expert said early on, when we lend scientific weight to something, juries can accept it as the only version of the truth, when the process behind the science is often more complicated. Which got me thinking: How do we think about guilt, science, and our brains?

Scientific evidence isn’t always available or reliable. Since the dawn of forensic evidence (accelerated by the ever-popular police procedural TV drama), we’ve considered those admissions to be hard and fast, when really; there is room for error as proven by many stories and documentaries. We’re more comfortable with what is generally considered to be objective evidence than eyewitness accounts and police reports.

However, this kind of thinking is the same thing that keeps researchers from introducing MRI into the courtroom. They’re afraid that people will cling to this evidence when, as the documentary shows, it’s nowhere near 100% accurate. The entire documentary is fascinating and led me to the conclusion that justice is often more art than science, but that doesn’t mean science shouldn’t have a role in the system.

Check your local listings to find out when Brains on Trial is on and sit down for a stimulating ride.

 

 

Spinning the Great World: On Failure, Empathy, and the Life of the Humanities

Sep 122013
 
 September 12, 2013

By Michaela Dwyer

“There was a dip before the laughter, a second before it sank in among the watchers, a reverence for the man’s irreverence, because secretly that’s what so many of them felt–Do it, for chrissake! Do it!–and then a torrent of chatter was released, a call and response, and it seemed to ripple all the way from the windowsill down to the sidewalk and along the cracked pavement to the corner of Fulton, down the block along Broadway, where it zigzagged down John, hooked around to Nassau, and went on, a domino of laughter, but with an edge to it, a longing, an awe, and many of the watchers realized with a shiver that no matter what they said, they really wanted to witness a great fall, see someone arc downward all that distance, to disappear from the sight line, flail, smash to the ground, and give the Wednesday an electricity, a meaning, that all they needed to become a family was one millisecond of slippage, while the others–those who wanted him to stay, to hold the line, to become the brink, but no farther–felt viable now with disgust for the shouters: they wanted the man to save himself, step backward into the arms of the cops instead of the sky. 

The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before. 

Out he went.”

(Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin, 5-7)

Two weeks ago, the writer Colum McCann perched at a podium in the renovated Baldwin Auditorium and invoked an audience of about 200. The bulk of the crowd were members of Duke’s Class of 2017, for whom McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin was chosen as their summer reading book. The other contingent was a hodgepodge: community members, older students, interlopers like me who either read the book and liked it or wanted to hear a good speaker or both.

McCann's 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin.

McCann’s 2009 novel Let the Great World Spin.

McCann commanded the room with an essence that slowly unfurled itself in the same way his writing does. His arrangement of words—as in the excerpt above, which preludes Let the Great World Spin—has a movement unlike any other I know. This quality makes it difficult to adequately excerpt sections of his text: each word, phrase, and sentence is both syntactically and semantically reliant on every other one. Descriptions and sentiments don’t end; they tumble together in the spin of his great [literary] world, in a way that feels at once magical and so natural as to be obvious, even mundane.

It makes sense, then, that McCann would incorporate a word game— Hangman—into his talk (“it’s four letters, it begins with an ‘F,’ and it’s not what you’re thinking,” he said as the students snickered). The word was “fail,” an especially uncomfortable term for Duke students. And especially for incoming Duke students, who barely know what life looks like, or could look like, at this university, but who are already attuned to the ways in which their efforts toward that end could “fail.”

Ironically, every aspect of this event felt successful. McCann established just the right rapport with his audience. The students had faithfully read and dog-eared the novel. They dialogued thoughtfully both with McCann and with each other, asking questions that often reflected complex considerations of his characters: What if so-and-so hadn’t died? Would he have taken his interest in social justice to South America, to advocate for others there? Why write the novel through multiple protagonists in the first place?

Irrespective of the specific text, the summer reading book is an institutional practice. It’s designed as a “shared intellectual experience” outside of, and in fact preceding, curricular learning. It’s strategically placed alongside other Orientation Week events like Southern-style dinners, wellness advice, and pre-X-future-career open houses. The hoopla surrounding a summer reading book is emblematic of what a Duke education could—even, perhaps, should—look like, before students slide into normative behaviors and patterned ways of engaging in university culture both in and outside the classroom.

McCann precautioned that he wasn’t there “to make grand pronouncements,” but went on to enumerate the three components of what, for him, make a “good” education: vision, justice, and charity. And…failure? I’ve noticed that Duke students often conceptualize failure in terms of performance outcomes: a poor grade on a test, a rejection from a summer internship, an unextended party invitation. In the opening lines of Let the Great World Spin, McCann posits failure in a similar way: the crowd gathered below the man on wire wants to witness a “great fall,” an action they’ve already determined to be “wrong.” When reading, we feel as though we’re there, on the streets, in the sweaty human hodgepodge of late-summer New York City circa 1974. We’re trapped, along with everyone else, within the immense tension between desire and action: we want the walker to fail, to fall, because that’s a very concrete and easily imaginable physical possibility. Little do they (we) realize, McCann implies, that the crowd’s collective imagination of failure—of the walker falling—has already bonded them (us). There’s still the imagined action of the walker, but now there’s also the action of us, together, breathing, watching, on the precipice of continuing the rest of our lives. “Out he went”; out we went, out we go.

McCann. Image courtesy of Irish Writing Blog.

McCann. Image courtesy of Irish Writing Blog.

There’s a lot of discussion (emphasis on “discussion”) right now about the humanities existing on a similar precipice. The humanities are in “crisis,” life-or-death mode. Does literature make us better people? Does teaching the humanities make us better people? Does assigning a summer reading book—Let the Great World Spin, to be specific—make us better people?

These are enormous ethical questions, steeped in abstracted assumptions of what is “good” and “bad,” what is “better” or “worse,” what is “success” and what is “failure.” To begin to answer them requires a complex moral imagination, the same one we begin to reach when we read a book like McCann’s, feel the characters as real people and empathize with them, and sit with each other on the edge of plush seats in a swanky college auditorium as an Irish writer tells us we all need to fail more. When we are able to “inhabit new geographies,” as McCann said in his talk, we expand our notion of what’s possible. Expansion is action, and, as in all matters of life, we have to act—perhaps with the intention, or assumption, of failure—in order to survive. Similarly, today more than ever, the humanities must act, and must be treated as actionable—in order for them to survive. Treating literature as “equipment for living,” as a great English professor at this university once said. This fall, as Kenan embarks on Duke-wide initiatives explicitly targeting ethics and the humanities, I’m excited to put this approach into play. The university campus is our space to experiment, act, and, yes, fail—and keep going. Besides, there’s a reason McCann’s book isn’t called “Let the Great World Rest in Perfect Order.” Life doesn’t look like that—whether within or outside the university—and I’ll dare to make the ethical leap and demand that it should not.

A Different Kind of Attention Deficit: Selective Attention and Syria

Sep 052013
 
 September 5, 2013

By Nathan Nye

Protest Outside the White House, June 2012 by Nathan Nye

Protest Outside the White House, June 2012 by Nathan Nye

Last weekend I was in Washington, DC. It was a hot day, and the heaviness in the air drove home the point that the District really is a swamp town. As I was walking toward my Metro station I heard shouts ringing through the thick air. I was nearing the White House, and those shouts could only be one thing—a protest.

I crossed the street to the brick-paved way in front of the White House and realized I had only been half-right. It was two protests—one pro-intervention in Syria, and one against.

I weaved in and out of the people of many ethnicities with many beliefs holding signs, waving fists, shouting chants, and clutching Syrian flags. There were probably around 200 people there actively protesting or who had been sucked up into the fervor. Since then numbers have grown, and the anti-intervention protest alone is up to 500 people.

This wasn’t a new thing. On my first day living in D.C. as an intern last summer, I took a route for shopping that took me past the White House in order to soak up the grandeur of living in America’s political Mecca.  There I witnessed a crowd of maybe a dozen, again, holding Syrian flags (picture above).  While it hasn’t been consistently in our newsfeeds for very long, the civil war in Syria is no longer young.

The Syrian conflict has lasted almost two and half years. But, the United States is now considering involvement publicly for the first time, because last week it was reported that Assad-government forces were using chemical weapons. Both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry have made impassioned pleas to disrupt military capabilities in the country in retaliation for killing non-combatants and using chemical weapons that killed over 1400 civilians including 426 children. This is horrific and absolutely a war crime. Rightfully, it’s getting a lot of attention.

What’s not getting a lot of attention is that those deaths represent less than 2% of the total casualties in Syria’s tumultuous war. On all sides there are ethical dilemmas to be weighed, which are informed by often competing interests. The conversation about intervention or non-action have been the central debate in the media over the past few days, and will continue to be, but what’s not getting talked about is our reason for this debate—chemical weapons.

The pro-intervention argument hinges on the belief that chemical attacks as an internationally outlawed weapon are a red line that requires action. There are different arguments and combinations of arguments supporting this.

  1. They are internationally banned, and so it gives the international community a right to intervene.
  2. They are more likely to be used against or accidently kill civilians, which is a moral imperative to act against the perpetrators.
  3. They pose a security threat to the United States and the utilitarian thing to do is destroy Syria’s capability to use chemical weapons.

My question is if these arguments are a strong enough to eclipse the one that earlier proponents of action were making—Over 100,000 people have died in this conflict from damage inflicted by both the Assad regime and rebels.

I think it’s important to break down the “why” of intervention. Is it because lives are at stake? The answer would seemingly be no. Is it because we care about international treaties? Maybe.

It’s a lot more complicated than that. As Kenan faculty council member and Professor of Philosophy David Wong says in an essay, “Decisive action, especially when it takes the form of violence against others, can be easier to undertake when we are willing to exercise selective attention to support the rightness of what we are doing and at the same time deny that we are exercising selective attention.” We’re using the evidence of chemical weapons as an absolute red line while eschewing the recent events in this conflict that might also merit action.

How do you morally weigh methods of killing? How many deaths are too many deaths? Is there a moral way to even engage in this ultimately crude and insensitive thought process? These are the thoughts that have been blazing through my head since walking past those protests days ago, and I’m still grappling with them.

If you’re interested in exploring questions like this, check out the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics for other complicated international human rights quandaries. The essay mentioned can be found in Naming Evil, Judging Evil a book on the concept of evil in modern society edited by Kenan Faculty Professor Ruth Grant.

“How is leadership possible when you have no idea what you’re doing?”

Sep 032013
 
 September 3, 2013

By Michaela Dwyer

This summer, several weeks before Project Change, I stood on one side of a wide room and made eye contact with a dancer standing on the opposite side. Twelve dance students—high-schoolers attending the Governor’s School of North Carolina—lined the unoccupied walls, waiting for something to happen. They were holistically tired: tired of forcing their bodies into unfamiliar dance phrases in a studio with all the mirrors covered (for dancers trained to measure their success by the height of their leg kick, obscured mirrors can feel like cruel and unusual punishment); tired from the type of summer-camp marathon socializing that comes naturally to teenagers.

Their only instructions were to “pay attention,” and to “begin” when they thought they had “figured out what was going on.” Gradually, my instructor and I moved toward one another. We took turns making sequences of three shapes: I would contribute, carving lines around his lines, and he would respond accordingly. To the dancers, it probably looked like a very abstract union of Simon Says and Twister. By the time they “began,” he and I were ten minutes in, intertwined inches apart, sweating profusely, and poking limbs through the open spaces created by our two bodies.

Many improvisation-based movement and dance classes incorporate “games” like this one, where verbal instructions are sparse and students are expected to [literally] jump in when they feel they have something productive to contribute to the overall structure, the overall theme—even if, as often happens, the theme isn’t obvious from the get-go.

Last week I participated in my first Project Change, the eight-day “immersive leadership experience in which participants live, learn, and work in Durham.” The task? “Competing with a team of peers to find ways to solve the city’s critical problems.” As Nathan hinted in his last post, details about the experience are intentionally few. And as any of this year’s 21 students or the generations of alumni could tell you, details remain few as the week progresses.

I occupied a unique position throughout those eight days: as one of the leaders, I had access to the schedules outlining each day’s frenzied sequence of activities and knowledge of the community partners we’d be working with in Durham. Like the students, though, I had never participated in Project Change. I felt a certain solidarity in this regard, an obligation to go through it with them—to revel in their eagerness as they navigated their teams throughout the city and interviewed Durham citizens about the Duke-Durham relationship; to tour and then work with three different organizations that serve, internally and externally, as models for community engagement in Durham; to account for and analyze my privilege as a Duke student and alumna that allows me to engage with Durham on a daily basis in specific ways that many of its residents do not and often cannot.

During the week, as the students’ (and my) exhaustion began to feel uncannily similar to that of the young dancers I worked with this summer, we kept returning to the idea of leadership. Project Change is, at its core, a program that examines and aims to embody engaged, ethical leadership. But I could hear a question reverberating amongst the cohort as they shuffled between blindfolded team-building activities and on-site work, always unaware of what was coming next: “How is leadership possible when you have no idea what you’re doing?”

It’s essentially the same question the young dancers asked, nonverbally, for the first ten minutes of our improvisation as they observed their two dance instructors work out a task, a theme, to which only we seemed to know the answer—or at least the “right” way of approaching it. In fact, we did not. Our objective was simply to relate to each other, whether inches away or across the room, via filling in empty spaces—the “negative space”—of our joint physical architecture. Our only intention was to make clear choices. This allows for a lot of creativity that can only unwind and take shape in the moment. This allows for new goals to form as old ones are discarded. And this requires whole-body thinking, whole-body immersion. To think and do simultaneously. And, crucially, to do so with a community that approaches the same task with different backgrounds, experiences, and understandings that inform and alter not only how to achieve the task but what the task is in the first place.

Though we never took on a movement exercise quite like the one I helped lead this summer, Project Change felt—at least to me—very much like a week of structured improvisation. It’s preorientation as disorientation, intentionally disruptive of the ways we plod through the day-to-day. And, for eight days, it doesn’t stop.

Like Kenan’s TK: Challenge events, which will continue this fall, Project Change discards the theoretical root of “walk[ing] a mile in [someone else’s] shoes” and replaces it with lived experience. Project Change requires its participants to be vulnerable and confident at the same time, to improvise through the uncomfortable until a new, shared, comfortable conclusion seems possible. If you couldn’t tell, I’m still reeling from it­—and that’s only because I can proudly say I was there. And part of the dance, too.

Leading Change, Being Changed

Aug 082013
 
 August 8, 2013

Next week will be one of the busiest and most exhausting of my entire year. It will also certainly be one of the best. Monday marks the sixth year of Project Change, KIE’s pre-orientation program and my fifth year with the program. Co-sponsored with the Women’s Center, Project Change takes 21 Duke students and teaches them about community engagement and ethical leadership in their new home, Durham.

If you do a Google search on Project Change, affectionately called PChange, you will find few details. Our official description is less than 150 words. And yet, every year we have students willing to jump off the cliff of uncertainty in order to learn something about themselves. So I can’t tell you the nitty gritty of my experience, but I can tell you about the way it’s impacted me.

I arrived with 20 other Duke students on West Campus, and I was scared out of my mind. I come from rural North Carolina, and while most people have the realization that high school hadn’t prepared them for college at some point, I knew that before I even arrived. Was I not going to know about a current event that everyone would be talking about? Would they all love the same author I had never heard of? What if they were all super accomplished, and I was just a fluke? Those questions all plagued me, but my real fear was that I just wasn’t ‘smart’ enough. I got out of the car, grabbed my bags, hugged my mom goodbye, and walked into the Women’s Center knees knocking. Then suddenly things started, and I didn’t have time to worry about the questions that had raced through my mind only moments ago. Like I said, I can’t give you details, but I can tell you that Project Change is challenging; mentally, socially, physically, emotionally, ethically and intellectually challenging.

I worked with incredible people, many of whom are still my closest friends. I learned about teamwork, communication, community engagement, leadership, and myself. I came out of the experience more sure of myself. I came out of the experience less sure of the assumptions I had always held about the world around me. PChange was truly the bedrock on which my entire Duke experience was built.

After that first year, I was involved with every following year of PChange, and no two have been alike. Now I’m headed into my fifth consecutive experience with Project Change, and I couldn’t be more excited. Coming from a religious, Southern background, Project Change can be likened to a revival for me. At the beginning of the year I get to spend a week thinking about things like privilege, leadership, justice, and community engagement and I leave ready to be a bright light for progress. Then school starts and the work I want to get done is covered up by projects. I’m able to get some things done and certainly the mentality of PChange goes with me everywhere, but I always want to do more.

I’m hoping that this year will be different. This year I have the opportunity to become engaged and passionate and ready to do good work, and for the first time I’m not going back to student life. I’m helping administer this program as part of my position, and I’ll still be in the same position after PChange ends. My imperative as a fellow is to think critically about the world around me and make strides for a more ethically engaged world–after next week I’ll still have the chance to do that.  So, I’m going to have a busy next week, but it’s just the harbinger of a busy, productive year.

-Nathan

Hello from Another New Insider

Aug 072013
 
 August 7, 2013

Michaela in front of Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Photo by Brianna Nofil.

“Only connect!…Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

-E.M. Forster, Howards End

For a year or so now I’ve delighted in devising my email signature. Below my name and position—the latter of which has changed to reflect my transition from undergraduate to postgraduate (!)—are the words “only connect” (from Forster’s novel), a colon, and my phone number. The pairing serves as both resource and metaphor: You only have to call this number to get in touch with me. But it’s also an ethical invocation: What happens when connection—people to people, ideas to ideas, people to ideas—becomes the only option, when it feels intrinsically mandatory? How might we broaden and deepen our lives in turn? What implications does connection have on our social, cultural, and political behavior? And (without being too presumptuous) how might connecting with me alter your own life?

These are things I think about when I’m walking down Ninth Street with friends, sitting at my desk, or exploring movement in a contact improvisation dance class. And these are things I’ll think about through this blog and through my position as a Stephen and Janet Bear Postgraduate Fellow at Kenan this year. But, before I jump into things, I should do some connective work of my own and share a little more of me with you.

My name is Michaela Dwyer, and I’m from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I graduated from Duke in May and studied English, Art History, Documentary Studies, and Dance. I was heavily involved with journalism throughout my time at Duke: In 2011 I got to know Kenan through participating in DukeEngage-Dublin and writing for Metro Éireann, a newspaper serving migrant and refugee communities in Ireland. For the past two years I was arts editor and then editor-in-chief of Recess, the Duke Chronicle’s arts and culture section. There I worked to bolster the arts community at Duke while growing into one of my own. I’m helplessly curious about almost everything, but especially politics and culture in the American South, nonfiction writing, gender, and postmodern dance and performance art.

As you probably inferred, my personal and intellectual interests often spring from and center around the arts, and I’m especially fueled by the intersection of art and ethics (or, as a friend recently called it, “aesthethics”), as well as documentary ethics. What about art, and creating art, attracts, forms, and/or repels community? Should we, and how do we, prioritize ethical representation of artistic ‘subjects’? What does “ethical representation” mean in the first place, in art and in life? And are art and life necessarily separate?

As a Kenan Insider, I’ll surely delve into some of these questions. My role is twofold and unique: On the one hand, I aim to plant myself as far as possible inside contemporary issues in ethics and work (write) my way toward my own experiences and interests. On the other, I will start very much inside myself, following my inclinations until they run up against ethical issues in the larger world. My colleague Nathan Nye and I will be writing about these stories as they emerge from our home base—the Kenan Institute, and Duke University—and elsewhere, in the national and international context. My goal, no matter the topic, will be breadth and depth of connection: prose and passion on equal footing, exploring the world as it changes and changes us.

And on the subject of change—look out for my next post after I immerse myself in Project Change for the first time next week.

I’m glad to have you along for the ride!

Not All Critics Are Being Critical Enough

Aug 022013
 
 August 2, 2013

Jay Z and Marina at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea

I’ve been thinking a lot about art this summer. With fabulous live music all around Durham, several massive summer album releases, and a renewed interest in performance art, my brain has been awash with thoughts and questions about the role of art in my life and my role in art. I’ve been thinking more and more about the responsibility that viewers have when viewing art and how our perceptions inhibit or enable us as an audience.

All of these questions went from backburner to full boil last month when mega-rapper Jay-Z created a six-hour performance piece in New York which featured iconic performance artist Marina Abramović.

This is what happened when these two forces collided-

In a six-hour piece  it was a small ode to the woman who was foundational to modern performance art. So why did it get this response?

This is in addition to an article an article on art blog Hyperallergic called, “Jay-Z Raps at Marina Abramović, or the Day Performance Art Died.”

This struck me as odd because, as artists Abramovic and Jay are more similar artists than they would first appear to be.  If like myself, you have ever rapidly vacillated between listening to a Jay Z album and watching the Abramović documentary The Artist is Present similar themes become very apparent. Coming from hard lives, working hard to perfect their craft, they both consciously engage with their own success. Abramović opens the documentary by talking about striving for recognition and yes, fame. Jay raps about trying to become a king. Abramović and her gallerist created an entirely new market for purchasing pieces or photographs of performance art, which has made Abramović wealthy. Jay Z disrupts the hip-hop game with unconventional release schedules that have catapulted him to the Forbes’ most powerful list. They both constantly talk about ego and what it means to be an artist and how the ego helps and hinders their process. They both use the ego as their main mode of connection. Marina’s body is her art; Jay’s life is his.  These are two individuals who are constantly in contact with their views of the world and their role in it.

What’s interesting is that the audience, which seemed to scoff at the combination presented, was not doing the same thing. The questions I had been asking myself about an audience’s responsibility was right in front of me- in order to accept and receive a work we have to combat the cultural biases around art. Because we’re more comfortable with hip-hop and artists like Jay on the radio and at the Grammys, we become disconcerted when he steps into a gallery space. We are more comfortable when Abramović collaborates with other high artists and keeps her work reserved for the audiences who are fortunate enough to be in her presence, not when she is commercialized and recorded.

When we bring ourselves to this work, we have to confront what makes us uncomfortable. Is it the removal of a vocabulary with which we’re contextually familiar? Is it the merging of seemingly separate worlds? Is it sense of superiority that many art critics and enthusiasts feel in regards to low culture? The reaction to the collaboration showed a classist discomfort with a unique combination of luminaries. These are reactions which we have to question in both others and ourselves in order to be responsible audiences. We reflect ourselves in our perceptions of art. Though not a universal opinion, I would argue that perception and reception are what make all art possible. As viewers and listeners and participants we have a responsibility to constantly examine how we engage with what’s being presented to us. Because it isn’t as simple as we would like to believe. There is a personal ethic to viewing art. How we see and why we see are inextricable from our experience of art. We bring our own prejudices and thoughts to this process, and to the aes/ethics of that are integral to living a life that understands what is being put in front of us. While this is necessary for art, this lesson is also imperative elsewhere. At Kenan, I’ve learned and tried to process what it means to live a good life, and often it means being reflective of the things we’re told to accept outright, even if it’s just a man rapping for six hours in Chelsea.

Hello From One of Your New Insiders

Jul 192013
 
 July 19, 2013

Photo Credit: Miatta Echetebu

Insider(n)- One in an organization who has information that others are not privy to.

My name is Nathan, and I’m one of your new writers for the Kenan Insider, though I don’t know that the above describes me at all, and particularly not my role. Really, my job is to make all of you the Insiders. I’m going to give you the dish, the scoop, and the skinny on some of the myriad of ethical dimensions in the world around us. I promise I’ll do my best to provide analysis and insight into the goings-on of Kenan, Duke, and elsewhere.

If you’re going to trust me as your guide, it’s only fair you get to know a little about me.  I was born in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, and according to family lore, my birth is the reason they put visitor limitations on deliveries at Bladen County Hospital. Due to health complications I was, in a moment of foretelling, flown to Duke Hospital. From my birth, my life has been filled with people and chaos and it’s made me a person of life and color and yes, sometimes insanity.

I was raised in my small, Southern town, and then returned to Duke for school, though thankfully not in a helicopter this time. Again, my first moments were chaotic. I was one of the 21 participants in Project Change, Kenan and the Women’s Center’s pre-orientation program. I was bundled up into a white van and driven off into the unknown. Since then, I’ve worked for Team Kenan, the student programming initiative at the Institute, and I’ve traveled with the Institute to Dublin for DukeEngage (photo above). Through Duke and the Institute I developed my interests in gender theory, human rights, and journalism (all of which this blog will surely discuss). Now, after four years of working and growing with Kenan, I’m excited to say I’ll be here for another year as the Bear Postgraduate Fellow, and I couldn’t be happier to continue my journey with Kenan.
Metaphorically, that ride in the mysterious white van in my first experience with Kenan hasn’t stopped. Four years later I’m still here. Four years later I’m still on the same adventure, and I’m excited to bring you along with me.

Synthesis and Creation

Jun 072013
 
 June 7, 2013

I have a new favorite website. Brain Pickings has been capturing my attention, luring me daily to investigate what inspiration, motivation, resonance, challenge I may find. If I sometimes use it as a procrastination, I’m inclined to think it is a healthy one. From the About page:

Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, a subjective lens on what matters in the world and why, bringing you things you didn’t know you were interested in — until you are.

Because creativity, after all, is a combinatorial force. It’s our ability to tap into the mental pool of resources — ideas, insights, knowledge, inspiration — that we’ve accumulated over the years just by being present and alive and awake to the world, and to combine them in extraordinary new ways. In order for us to truly create and contribute to culture, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these ideas and build new ideas — like LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our creations will become.

Think about the vast quantity of information available on the internet.  How do you choose what to follow?  What to share? How to share? Having a few trusted synthesizers can reduce anxiety about these things. Brain Pickings is now one of mine. It is creatively about creation, in many different forms. I must remember, though, that the cross-pollination of ideas, the synthesis of creativity should also lead to new creations. Feeling inspired, what then shall I creat with my building blocks? It might be conversation, or written work, or even a state of mind. But hopefully synthesis leads to generation.

We also do a lot of cross-pollination of ideas at Kenan as an interdisciplinary institute. I hope that we succeed at both synthesis and creation, both being important to the life of the mind and the world around us.

 Older Entries