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State University of New York Press - Roger I. Simon

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150 pages

English

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This outstanding comparative study on the curating of "difficult knowledge" focuses on two museum exhibitions that presented the same lynching photographs. Through a detailed description of the exhibitions and drawing on interviews with museum staff and visitor comments, Roger I. Simon explores the affective challenges to thought that lie behind the different curatorial frameworks and how viewers' comments on the exhibitions perform a particular conversation about race in America. He then extends the discussion to include contrasting exhibitions of photographs of atrocities committed by the German army on the Eastern Front during World War II, as well as to photographs taken at the Khmer Rouge S-21 torture and killing center. With an insightful blending of theoretical and qualitative analysis, Simon proposes new conceptualizations for a contemporary public pedagogy dedicated to bearing witness to the documents of racism.
Foreword by Mario Di Paolantonio
Preface

1. Exhibiting Archival Photographs of Racial Violence as a Pedagogy of Witness

2. Without Sanctuary Exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum and Chicago Historical Society

3. The Curatorial Work of Exhibiting Archival Photographs of Lynching in America

4. Public Performance in the Social Space of Museum Comment Books: Without Sanctuary Exhibitions and the Extended Conversation about Race in America

5. Curatorial Judgment, the Pedagogical Framing of Exhibitions, and the Relation of Affect and Thought

6. Some Closing Remarks on Curatorial Practice and the Pursuit of Social Justice

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Loisirs

Histoire de la photographie

USA

United States of America

History of art

Ethnic studies

20th century

History of the Americas

États-Unis

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	18 août 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438452715
Langue	English

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A PEDAGOGY OF WITNESSING
SUNY series, Transforming Subjects:
Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Studies in Education

Deborah P. Britzman, editor
A PEDAGOGY OF WITNESSING

CURATORIAL PRACTICE AND THE PURSUIT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE
ROGER I. SIMON
Cover image, Run Up 2002 from the series Searching California’s Hanging Trees, photography by Ken Gonzales-Day, is used by permission.
The Simon Family thanks the artist.
Figure 2.1 , “Schematic diagram of Without Sanctuary exhibit at the Chicago Historical Society,” is used by permission of the Chicago Historical Museum.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production by Jenn Bennett
Marketing by Anne M. Valentine
Simon, Roger I., 1942-2012
A pedagogy of witnessing : curatorial practice and the pursuit of social justice
ISBN 978-1-4384-5269-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014941805
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Foreword by Mario Di Paolantonio
Preface
1. Exhibiting Archival Photographs of Racial Violence as a Pedagogy of Witness
2. Without Sanctuary Exhibitions at the Andy Warhol Museum and Chicago Historical Society
3. The Curatorial Work of Exhibiting Archival Photographs of Lynching in America
4. Public Performance in the Social Space of Museum Comment Books: Without Sanctuary Exhibitions and the Extended Conversation about Race in America
5. Curatorial Judgment, the Pedagogical Framing of Exhibitions, and the Relation of Affect and Thought
6. Some Closing Remarks on Curatorial Practice and the Pursuit of Social Justice
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
R oger Simon was a thinker of the remnants. A consistent concern occupied Roger’s late thinking. Emerging—but certainly not exclusively originating—from his Teaching Against the Grain , Roger became more and more focused on drawing out a pedagogical responsiveness to past sufferings, to a legacy of injustices, disposable lives and forlorn histories that still wound and implicate our present. In contrast to the commonplace manner of understanding the past simply through the social, emotional, and political needs of the present, Roger sought to underscore the ethical possibilities that open up when we gain counsel from the past. In his thinking there is a certain priority and alterity that the past must retain over the present. In his Touch of the Past, Roger cites Alain Finkielkraut to remind us that “memory does not consist of subordinating the past to the needs of the present. He who looks to gather the materials of memory places himself in the service of the dead, and not the other way around.” Roger insisted on attending to the past not as a way of escaping our time. His was a complex appreciation of our need to think through our contemporary moment, and, for him, working with the past was the way to preserve critical learning and hope in the present.
Giorgio Agamben tells us that a thinker of the contemporary is someone who perceives in the darkness of our times a light that strives to reach us but cannot. Such a thinker is someone who, while acknowledging what will always evade us, nevertheless ﬁnds and can point us to a trace of luminosity, which despite coming from elsewhere persists—however vaguely—amid the obscure conditions of the present. To be contemporary is to hold steadfast to an untimely, often unexpected, glimmer that can cast the world anew and so allow us to act on our time. For Roger, the past offers us this threateningly faint illumination. More precisely, as a thinker of the contemporary, Roger draws us to the past in order to draw us to the hope and possibility of our learning from an untimely (radically unexpected) encounter. He understood that it is through our being gathered and summoned to attend to the past—as something new—that we can learn to see and so act on our present: drawing on the past anew to counter, displace, and interrupt what is expected in the here and now. Throughout his later thinking he consistently emphasizes that the past “teaches” only when it “comes to me, comes to the present, from outside,” as something other, “for only that which ‘I am not’ (which I think not, which I am not already capable of speaking of) can teach me.”
In this period of his work we ﬁnd a method of study, an approach—let us say—to the remnants. His approach urges us to stay near, and extend care and attention to the details of unredeemed sufferings, to the scattered material fragments of a past that remains at the edge of legibility, enigmatic, forlorn, and consequently a potential (untimely) opening for our present. Fond of Walter Benjamin’s thinking, Roger often invoked Benjamin’s words and mood for helping us approach the remnants. Through his work, he asks us to consider Benjamin’s musing, in his essay “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” that “to live means to leave traces.” We invariably and uniquely shed the remnants of our daily lives for other times to come. Moreover, remnants themselves, to be sure, possess the chance for an afterlife; they hold an inherent capacity to allow for other possible meanings with the passing of time and under altering cultural conditions. Though Roger acknowledges that remnants possess a certain durability, he also shares a melancholic sensibility with Benjamin, regarding the ways in which remnants—the images, stories, and materials of another time—are always partial, fragile, and susceptible to being lost amid the so-called course of history. And like Benjamin, he, too, becomes concerned with the threatening and inhospitable grounds upon which remnants are received in our time.
Drawing on Benjamin’s often-cited phrase, from the “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably,” Roger stays with the difﬁcult point here. He presses us to admit that recognizing the past as one’s concern is far from simple, that it is fraught with problems and is never assured. Any plea or urgency for the present to recognize what remains of the past must necessarily take an account of how memorial practices risk falling into facile assurances, assimilations, defenses, and idealizations.
On one level, there is the risk of falling into what Roger terms spectacle: the contemporary condition structuring our attention to the past—our manner of receiving and transmitting, compressing and reﬁguring the remnants of history. For Roger, spectacle renders the past into quick encapsulations and units of information that can circulate smoothly through the channels of mass mediation. Acknowledging the limits of this mode of attention, he urges us to critically recognize that this present tendency diminishes, rather than cultivates, a care for the particular differences and knots embedded in a difﬁcult past that does not ﬁt the present form of mediation. Circulating through the primary currency of information, images and stories from another time have the lifespan of the moment and thus run the risk of not merely the compression of their form, but also of running out of time—of being stripped of the very time they require to make their contact point, their transactional claim on the present.
On another level, while appreciating the affective intensity and connection to the past that communal afﬁliations and identiﬁcations afford, Roger calls for a critical vigilance here. Especially when engaging with communal memories of suffering, we are always susceptible of falling into a certain compulsive conservatism, mimetic self-enclosure and a competitive memory politics. Accordingly, commemorative practices primarily mobilized by identity and resemblance tend to draw from the past only to the extent that it conﬁrms what we already know and only so that the past does not trouble who we think we are. Hope and critical learning is often foreclosed here.
The problem becomes how to recognize the past “as one of our concerns” without cannibalizing and compressing its alterity within the terms of spectacle or identity. How might we foster a particular responsiveness to the remnants so that the past retains for us that which does not expend itself simply as information or become more of the same? How might we work with the past so that it can teach us, face us, and challenge us as the past, as something admittedly different than the present and yet as something that deeply concerns us today? How might we draw on the untimely to think the contemporary? How might we foster and sustain the touch of the past ?
Roger sought to respond to these questions on pedagogical terms. Indeed, the novelty of his approach lay in his insistence on conceptualizing remembrance as inherently pedagogical. Accordingly, he points us to heed the pedagogical possibilities afforded through the careful arrangement of artifacts within spaces of learning, the textual practices and curatorial work that might welcome the untimely and activate the touch of the past. And amid all our work with difﬁcult images and stories from the past, he reminds us of the need to revisit what one is learning—not only about what afﬂicted others in the past, but also what one is learning of and within the disturbances and disruptions inherent in comprehending unsettling events in the present.
Looking back, Roger’s deep regard for thinking more thoroughly about what goes on behind the scenes of archiving objec