Form: Lecture Performance
Blended live lecture performance
Equipment:
WiFi connection
Headset for two people
Bio:
Artistic Essaying Research and Pedagogy Group is part of the Society of Artistic Research, Special Interest Groups (SAR SIG).
The aim of this research group is to develop an international collective of artistic researchers concerned with the potentiality of creative critical essaying, and how these hybrid and experimental forms of essaying may exist as practice-led artistic research and praxis. Then, how these praxes may inform pedagogical approaches.
At its core the group is intended to be inclusive, accessible, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and even off-disciplinary to encourage tangential and lateral associations and pathways through individual and collaborative praxis.
ARIA METHOD/ART (BE)
skill_DEskill_REskill
https://www.methodartseminar.com/
Keynote lecture performance:
an essayistics of de-/re-skilling.
Names:
Emily Huurdeman (PD candidate, Fontys, NL) she/her
Jo O'Brien (PhD Candidate, University of Applied Arts, Vienna // Lecturer, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver) they/them
Peter Thomas (PhD candidate, Middlesex University, London, UK)
Ana Cristina Pansera de Araujo (PhD Candidate, University of Basque Country)
Abstract:
Our contribution to METHOD/ART 2025 is a lecture performance that essays on an essayistics of de-/re-skilling.
Technology often redistributes how, where, and what type of skill is needed for a particular form of labour. Rather than erasing the need for skill, changing technologies instead hide, outsource, or shuffle labour from the moment and location of production to other times and places. This redistribution of skill invisibilises the uncertainty and complexity that are essential to many forms of labour and production – including artistic production. Simultaneously, the capacity to engage uncertainty and complexity is also a vital research skill, so the problems created through technologically invisibilising skill are felt doubly in artistic research. As artistic researchers, we need methodologies that engage uncertainty and complexity, and we offer essaying as one such methodology.
Historically speaking the essay has evolved as a genre of writing, but the essay has also been adopted by many different artistic disciplines, giving rise to video, audio, somatic, and performative essays. This adaptation across multiple disciplines has turned the essay from a discreet production into a practice (and methodology) of essaying.
The essay has a long legacy of contradiction. On the one hand it is a highly conventionalised educational form, (apparently) unambiguous and objective, and built on formalised skills which can be assessed. On the other hand, the essay is a means of experimentation used to explore subjectivities, doubt, intellectual conviction, and personal expression – it is born of practices and knowledges gathered from our surroundings, a deskilled, patched together methodology attuned to uncertainty and complexity
To essay is to accept flaws, ambiguity, and happenstance. Essaying looks for cracks, paradoxes, and frictions – essaying does not strive for a uniform or aesthetic outcome, it is fragmented and open ended. Essaying breaks with teachings, skills, and acquired conventions, but also draws on them, in subversion. At its core essaying de-skills, un-skills, and re-skills the way we engage with the world.
In this lecture performance the participants of the research group will engage essayistically though a live and blended desktop screening.
"The way in which the essay appropriates concepts is most easily comparable to the behavior of a man who is obliged, in a foreign country, to speak that country's language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dictionary."
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Emily Huudeman says:
[VIDEO01] Pagina_1_van_0_woorden
If we look at the topic of the de-skilling, re-skilling, would you have any personal experiences or anecdotes about this? It would really be uh, and I think I told you already last time, that I have had such uh, I did, so many courses, and I've had so many conversations, and like uhm, talks with uhm professors and with bosses of mine about you know uh becoming better at writing and developing that skill uhm. I mean, I had five high schools in five different ways that I could get around my dyslexia. Like there there I've i've gone through so many of these uh programs and stuff that actually now I'm at the point where I feel like I'm starting to resist it.
[VIDEO2] Word_spelling_correct
And I make my work ocuments now without being correct, to actually do the opposite, to to to try to de-skill a skill I'm not even actually able to fully master. And that feels super liberating. But there is also, of course, this stigma of being dumb, and especially in the academic world, if you make a typo.
Because I can focus now more on what I want, and gain some pleasure in what I want to, how I can shape this and how it can become my own, and not uhm become something that everybody expects.
[VIDEO3] C_Video_On_Essaying_no sound
Essay or assai has been used during the time of Montaigne. And one was the first to put the essay to shift the earth from the past to the mantle. (2:01) And that was the attempt to break free from this trial of masteries to break free from teaching such a master.
It's at the same period of time as Montaigne one time. And one was the first to put the essay to shift the earth from the past to the mantle (fair son coup de essay son chef de euvre pour passer maitre). And that was the attempt to break free from uhmyour masters teachings. That is the trial of masteries to break free from teachings of your master.
Jo O'Brien says:
Uhm but but the uhm the short essay by Audro Lorde, the masters tools will bever destroy the masters house.
Peter Thomas says:
I was in Paris about a year ago and I found Rue de l'Essai, which is uhm a a road, or a route, I think there's also unpassed de l'Essai, and they were near the horse market and there were routes that they would take horses on to uhm kind of demonstrate, so the horse owner, the seller, would demonstrate the I dont know, power, elegance, beauty of the horse to the potential buyers using this route.
And they had, uhm yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Huudeman says:
[VIDEO04] VLC_REC Three_Recover2
Can I also bounce off of the reference? Because there I really felt like the essaying uhm you know starts. Because I saw while you were doing this, there was this. Okay, wait, I'm going to look it up okay and share it with you.
And I saw Anita say, it sounds like horses. Horses. And it immediately made me think of of this one.
Peter Thomas says:
So we should play the… Open the YouTube, right?
Pattie Smith says:
The movie kept moving as planned, the boy took Johnny he pushed him against the locker
He drove it and he drove it deep in Johnny.The boy dissapeard,Johnny is on his feet. Started crashing his head against the locker Started laughing hysterically When suddenly Johnny gets a feeling He's been surrounded by Horses, horses, horses, horses, horses Coming in all directions White, shining, silver Studs with the nose in flames He saw. Horses, horses, horses, horses, horses Horses, horses, horses
Nownow now ne hawww
Emily Huudeman says:
So yeah, obviously Patti Smith is epic, but also this movie really has always stayed with me in relationship to essaying because of the very fragmented associative. You see just these different fragments and suddenly the horse comes in. And yeah, anyway.
Jo O'Brien says:
Definetley
Peter Thomas says:
Definitely. That's going to be great.
Peter Thomas says:
It should reflect the fragmented nature of reality and thought, rather than imposing a force. Sense of order.
And they had, uhm yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
(Getranscribeerd door TurboScribe.ai. Upgrade naar Onbeperkt om dit bericht te verwijderen.)
Like most of us here, I first encountered the essay when I was a student. I grew up in the US, during a time when there was a heavy emphasis on standardized testing. When it came to writing, the most common testing strategy was to have students write a five-paragraph argumentative essay. I was taught to essay in this way, formulaically and exhaustively, for 10 years. It wasn’t until I started studying in university that an “essay” was possibilized as anything else.
Now, many years after I wrote my last five paragraph essay, I am a lecturer at an art and design university in Western Canada, where I often teach a first-year writing course. For almost all the students, it is their first time in a post-secondary writing course. When I started teaching that course, I was given standardized assignments to work from. Most of those assignments focused on developing new writing skills or expanding on ones that students were expected to already have.
A lot of the students I work with come into university trained in the five-paragraph argumentative essay – much like I was. Many have been taught that it is that specific form which demarcates the boundaries of essaying. And so for some of them their ability to craft a technically excellent five paragraph essay is a mark that their evolution as a writer is complete. For others they come to that course having been taught that their writing is limited by their command of syntax and grammar, or that their voice is too “foreign”, too disorganised, too personal, or that they are, simply, a “bad writer”.
So over time the way I teach that first year writing course has changed. Rather than trying to immediately pile on more essayistic skills, we begin by deskilling the essay. We work against the anxious, perfected form, and try out different approaches. It’s not an easy process, and it requires that I ask the students for a great deal of trust – trust that I will support them in taking risks with how they essay, trust that I won’t turn and suddenly mark their work against some secret standard of essaying that I hold, and trust that I will still help them gain the skills they need for future courses. It’s an ongoing process that takes time.
Essaying is something I work with in my own artistic research practice as well. My work is focused on confusion, and how a queer-crip understanding of confusion can be used to build relationships that center access. For all my focus on confusion though, I don’t aim to be confusing – but at the same time, I am not trying to resolve confusion either. It’s a sort of double bind that leads to a need for methods which don’t promise resolution, which allow for staying stuck, and which can help me think confusion across time.
Right now, I am exploring how essaying –as a textual, visual, and performative practice – can speak the languages of queer and crip time. Time that is anything but linearly oriented or consistently flowing.
I am wondering, trying, and working to see if essaying might offer a way to pause.
To be still, and have a moment to think.
Or whether essaying might also offer the chance to loop back on itself, to recall earlier thoughts about staying with confusion, or what I’ve learned from teaching, or how a particular kind of academic excellence is understood as desirable, or what narratives I hold about my own and others writing.
Or whether essaying might also offer the chance to be still and have a moment to think.
I wonder if essaying publicly might also offer the chance to practice trust. Trust with you all here, trust with the students I work with, trust with my own practice.
For me, It’s an ongoing process that takes time.
But I wonder if essaying – collectively like this, or otherwise – might also offer the chance to figure out different ways of working together.
Ways of gathering and sensing that are unconcerned with outcomes or imperatives.
Because it’s tempting here to bring everything back to the start. It’s what I’ve been trained to do, to pull all these threads together now and offer a clear take away, or a poignant question.
Something that makes sense.
A neat summary.
A moment to be still and think.
A conclusion.