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BFA Fine Art Exhibition 2012 | May 4 June 2, 2012

subimago noun the stage of development in an insect in which the insect is winged and capable of flight but not yet sexually mature. Occurs only in Mayflies (Ephemeroptera). With sexual maturity, the insect becomes an imago (Entz).

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ART EDUCATION IS TRAUMATIC. Undergraduates struggle to develop a practice creating objects that may be of questionable value to their society. This is especially true for the current generation of american students who face an unprecedented climate of economic and political anxiety. For the graduating class of 2012 at Columbia College Chicago, their final semester is pushed forward due to the close proximity in time and space of the NaTO summit. In this environment, it can be easy to question how the creative practice one has spent years fostering can impact the world in a meaningful way.

ON MULTIPLYING POSSIBILITIES THROUGH SUBJUGATED KNOWLEDGES

BY DOUGLAS GABRIEL

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Mike Kelleys Educational Complex, a set of foam core,

fiberglass and wooden models referencing architectural

components of every school the artist ever attended,

was first shown at Metro Pictures in New York in 1995.

Originally, Kelley intended to use a series of drawings of

the infrastructures made from memory as blueprints, but

concluded that they did not contain enough information

to produce three-dimensional models. Photographs were

used to accurately recreate the exteriors of the buildings,

but for the interiors, Kelley used only his inconclusive

drawings as guides, replacing any spaces he could not

remember with solid, obstructing blocks. The project was

part of the artists commentary on Repressed Memory

Syndrome, a topic generating hysteria in the media at the

time. In cases like the McMartin Preschool Trial, evidence

was asserted that abuse occurred in locations of which the

victim had inadequate or no memories. Kelley responded

to his own inability to remember certain areas within his

school with Abuse Report (1995), in which he filled out a

child abuse report indicting his former teacher, abstract

expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann, for institutional

abuse of formalist training.

Kelleys act of turning educational trauma into physical

barricades imagines a situation where the conflicts and

struggles of art education become physical barriers that

limit the possibilities available for a subject to move

through and act in a space. His impenetrable blocks

impose a deadening, restrictive presence. Discussing

limitations, the theorist Michel de Certeau writes in

his book The Practice of Everyday Life that, despite the

organizing function of barriers, a walker also moves them

about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting

away, or improvisation of walking privilege[s], transform[s]

or abandon[s] spatial elements (De Certeau, 98). De

Certeau goes on to cite Charlie Chaplins choreography

as an example of such creative modification of the world,

in that the actor multiplies the possibilities of his cane,

assigning new meanings and purpose to the object (De

Certeau, 98). This example shows us how the function of

objects and signifiers can be revised through creative lived

experience. Subjects who recognize the transformative

power they exert as agents moving through the world are

able to multiply possibilities for being and acting in multiple

environments, rather than submitting to normative modes.

In this essay I will show how these artists develop what

philosopher Michel Foucault calls naive knowledges.

These operate apart from official hierarchies, leading to

new knowledges of the self that diverge from fixed and

established categories. I will then show how this creative

tactic functions to produce what De Certeau calls poetic

geography, space that is liberated and transformed by

subjects who actively assign new meanings to otherwise

fixed signs in the world.

Foucaults postulation of naive knowledges began with

his book Madness and Civilization, in which he discussed

how the Renaissance Madman was not subjected

to confinement or regarded as suffering from disease.

Rather, this subject was considered to exhibit a potentially

revelatory mode of thought apart from the norm (Foucault,

66). The madman was allowed to produce other forms of

knowledge that could coexist with normative modes of

being. For Foucault, the eventual great confinement of the

mad is evidence of the ways in which official hierarchies of

knowledge began to disable alternate modes of thought.

He identified the use of terms like pathological and

delinquent as strategies that divide and limit other

modes of thought through a process of total normalization.

The goal is to continuously produce subjects who think

and act only in accord with correct and functional modes

of being. The term artist can signify a contemporary madman, as this nomenclature gives license to violate

social codes and behaviors in ways that are not available

to other roles in society. While the artist might occupy a

high social standing, the knowledge he produces is almost

always relegated to a lowly position in the hierarchy of

ideas, and is rarely taken seriously as official knowledges.

In addition to demonizing terminology, another strategy

Foucault recognized was the tendency to turn self-

knowledge into pure data. an example is the way in

which medical practice uses a persons performative

but insufficient knowledge of his own body as raw data

from which to make a clinical diagnosis. artists generate

phenomenological knowledge through lived experience,

but hierarchies of ideas insist on the subservient

relationship this discourse has to official knowledges,

like a patient to a doctor. In identifying these strategies of

subjection, Foucault became interested in the knowledges

that have been marginalized throughout history by official

hierarchies of ideas. He called these naive knowledges

What characterizes the class of 2012 fine art students

at Columbia College Chicago is their perception

of economic, political and personal barriers as

instruments that propel and multiply the possibilities

of their practices and self knowledge.

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Douglas Gabriel is an artist and critic based in Seoul, South Korea. He is a 2010 graduate of Columbia College Chicago.

De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.

Entz, Chuck. Subimago. BugGuide.com. Iowa State University Entomology. 19 Feb. 2009. Web. (26 Jan. 2012).

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans. Richard Howard. United Kingdom: Routledge, 1967. Print.

. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 19771984. Trans. alan Sheridan. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Print.

. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977. Trans. C. Gordon. Brighton. London: Harvester Press, 1980. Print.

Miller, Toby. The Well Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture and the Postmodern Subject. Baltimore: St. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Print.

How then do alternative knowledges function to impose

transformation apart from official discourses? De Certeau

describes a transformative tactic evidenced by subjects

who, walking through a city, give new meanings and

associations to street names: Saints-Peres, Corentin

Celton, Red Square these names make themselves

available to the diverse meanings given them by

passersby. These spaces are liberated by the creative

subject who, in reassigning meaning, forces the signs to

detach themselves from the places they were supposed

to define and serve (De Certeau, 104). De Certeau depicts

liberated space as a poetic geography on top of the

geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning.

The liberating element is the creative act of ascribing new

meanings to signs, which insinuate other routes into

the functionalist and historical order of movement (De

Certeau, 105). Like the street signs that become detached

from their original signification, or like Charlie Chaplins

cane, official knowledges are always open to modification.

This is the effect of unruly subjects. Though the knowledge

production of artists occupies a lowly position, it can be a

very effective force. artists, like subjects walking through

the city, covertly alter meanings in significant ways. Through

the production of naive knowledges, they dismount

signifiers from fixed definitions and reassign meanings

in the spaces around them. as world leaders gather to

reproduce normative ways of thinking and relating to the

world, the artists in Subimago demonstrate alternatives

available to us through creative, lived experience.

The impervious blocks of traumatic space in Educational

Complex extend from Mike Kelleys map drawings. Maps,

according to De Certeau, assume an all-seeing birds-eye-

view, similar to Renaissance painters who represented

the city as seen in a perspective that no eye had yet

enjoyed.