On Friday evening, June 13, 2014 the Internet said that the sun would rise at 5:15AM the next day. On the edge of a borrowed bed in my mother-in-law’s house I set my alarm for 4:15 since I wanted to be out the door and on my way to Hyde Park by 4:30am the next morning.
4:30AM | It is dawn and I am leaving the house.
5:55AM | I am having a spinach and feta omelet, pancakes, cheesy potatoes, orange wedge, and coffee at Clarks on 53rd Street.
7:15AM | I am now walking, looking for places to read and review documents before the hotline starts ringing. I take a pre-study picture in front of the Robie House on Woodlawn.
9AM | After showing my credentials from the University of Illinois, I’m finally allowed to use a table at the University of Chicago’s library. They had to call someone to see if it was okay for me to get a temporary pass. I have printed out every article Dr. Kalin cites in her work, and I have brought every book that I own related to the article. It’s overkill, but then again, this is a performance.
9:15AM | I begin by re-reading Dr. Kalin’s piece.
10AM | I occasionally stop to take these staged pictures of the studying that I’m doing. I am by myself, but my camera has a timer.
12PM | After reading Dr. Kalin’s piece several times I have a bunch of pages full of questions and ideas. My thoughts about Dr. Kalin’s piece, alongside some of the texts she has cited, begin to give me a wider picture. I agree with Dr. Kalin, mostly, however I feel that what I know about Jim Duignan and the Stockyard Institute is not reflected in the paper.
12:34PM | Calls are coming in from all over the country. I advertised the performance and the hotline on Facebook so people are calling. Having to recount what I’m doing helps me to organize my thoughts, particularly since the slow-deep-study is leading to a more nuanced understanding of the article in question, Dr. Kalin’s argument, and what Jim Duignan does in his work. The un-documentability of Jim Duignan’s work with the Stockyard Institute begins to become more apparent. Dr. Kalin’s misstep in using Stockyard Institute to make her point about the commodification of the pedagogical turn begins to appear like it was made—more than anything—because Jim’s work became a symbol (rather than communicating its lived complexity through images and narrative).
1:15PM | I have pizza and coffee at Medici on 57th Street. I write “SLOW DEEP STUDY” on the table with a Sharpie.
3:00PM | Now at the Hyde Park Art Center, the exhibition site of the Pedagogical Factory (which is Duignan’s work that Dr. Kalin questioned). At the time of my performance, the HPAC was hosting John Preus’ The Beast, a piece that shared some echos with Duignan’s Pedagogical Factory and once again shone a light on what Dr. Kalin argues in her piece.
3:10 PM | While at the HPAC I received a call from Dr. Kalin herself. I asked her why she didn’t call Jim Duignan to run her speculation about his work by him. Amongst other things, she admitted that she didn’t want that part of her argument to be dismantled. Dr. Kalin and I had a great conversation that day.
3:45PM | Albert Stabler, who wrote one of the pieces Dr. Kalin used to develop a picture of what the Stockyard Institute does, calls me. Bert and I have known each other since 2001.
5:20 PM | After many phone calls and much re-treading of the texts under question, I’m having my third coffee of the day with a slice of key-lime pie. I watch a portion of a World Cup match between England and Italy on my laptop. Italy wins 2 to 1. Neither Italy or England make it out of the group stage that year; Costa Rica and Uruguay do.
7:45 PM | I talk to Jim Duignan.
8:15 PM | At Powell’s books on 57th I decompress from a long day of slow, deep, study. I buy a few books.
8:30 PM | The sun sets and the phone stops ringing. I go back to my mother-in-law’s house.
Fifteen hours and twelve minutes
Slow Deep Study was a fifteen hour and twelve minute research-gesture that doubled as a durational art performance. I performed this research gesture all over the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago as part of my participation in an exhibition I was curated into called Public Expeditions: The Artist is Present.[1] The triggering material for this research-performance gesture stemmed from a paper I read in the Spring 2014 issue of Studies in Art Education authored by Dr. Nadine Kalin, Art’s Pedagogical Paradox (pp. 190-202). At first I was riveted by Dr. Kalin’s paper because the critiques she made in her paper were leveraged on the participatory artworks of my dear friend and frequent collaborator Jim Duignan (aka Stockyard Institute) and also buttressed by the art reviews of another friend and former colleague Bert Stabler. Later though, my fascination with Dr. Kalin’s paper was kindled by my suspicion that there was something I was unable to get from the paper because of my first reaction to the unfair criticism Duignan’s work receives in it. Not wanting to trust a superficial reading (or reaction) of Dr. Kalin’s paper, I decided that the best way to grapple with my “itch” was to reread the paper, continuously, for an entire day. Although it may seem absurd, my primary mode-of-operation as an artist is to break the operational sensibility of things in order to expose areas of potential contemplation. In other words, I needed to take Dr. Kalin’s paper from being “ready-at-hand” (meaning useful) to being “present-at-hand” (meaning turned into material) in order to truly think about it. I felt that one way to do this was by turning the substance, form, and intention of Dr. Kalin’s paper my curriculum for a day.
Aside from reading Dr. Kalin’s piece all day long, I decided I would open up a telephone hotline for that day where I could take phone calls from anyone wanting to discuss the paper or the performance with me. I would document my entire day with photographs and notes. I would inform the general public of my whereabouts through social media so that anyone who was near enough could visit me in Hyde Park while I studied Dr. Kalin’s paper, the artworks she discussed, and even the sites that hosted the artworks in question. I decided I would pull all of Dr. Kalin’s sources and slowly read through her citations attempting to tease out the threads in her paper. I wanted to fray Dr. Kalin’s paper, but more importantly, I wanted to fray my reading of it.
Despite being initially disheartened to see the things Dr. Kalin was saying about some of Jim Duignan’s work, I did not have cynical intentions with my performance. In fact, were it not for the invitation to make a “public expedition” for Amat and Aguilar’s exhibition, I wouldn’t have pursued my itch concerning Dr. Kalin’s paper at all. Perhaps I would’ve have asked her about it at a conference. Given the opportunity to make an artwork though, I wanted to perform a slow, deep, study of what Dr. Kalin was stating in her paper as a contrast to the more usual skimming, quick-synthesis, and overall anxiety that comes with the foregrounding of productivity and agility in academic activity. I did not intend to come away from the project with resolutions, rather I wanted to see what would happen if I gave myself the opportunity to wade beyond the point of saturation in someone else’s text.
Through the performance—and this, its document— I reflect on an expanding and urgent search for artistic pliability within academic discourses. What I mean here is that I am consistently attempting to bring some of the more radically unaesthetic forms of art into play with scholarship. Dr. Kalin’s paper prompted me to go there with the essays I read in our professional journals. I ask through my scholarship-gesture-performance and through its presentation on this webpage: What do misdirection, boredom, exhaustion, repetition, entropy, formlessness, uselessness, and dematerialization bring to inquiry and study?
///////////////////////////////////////////////
** It is important to note that Dr. Kalin and I have become great friends. We have co-presented at both national and international conferences. We have co-written work together and in 2018 I did an artist residency—by Dr. Kalin’s invitation—at the University of North Texas. [1] Public Expeditions: The Artist is Present was an exhibition supported by the GFRY Studio (a Motorola funded initiative) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was part of professors Peter Exley and Drea Howenstein’s yearlong project PUBLI©ITY. PUBLI©ITY aimed to “[forge] new models for public space…with/by and for city stakeholders” and also “to understand democratic public space as an urgent design problem” (http://saic-mfa.com/attachments2014/gfry-strudio-publiity/ ). The exhibition was co-curated by Álvaro Amat and Alberto Aguilar.