The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice

THREE The Prosthetic Pedagogy of the Ignorant Schoolmaster

THREE THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY OF THE IGNORANT SCHOOLMASTER Whoever teaches without emancipating stultifies. —Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator” Handful of nails, pounding hammer (Figure 3.1), th‑h‑hu‑ud, th‑h‑hu‑ud, th‑h‑hu‑ud, another nail, again, a hammer pounding, th‑h‑hu‑ud, and again, another nail, poundings of a hammer, th‑h‑hu‑ud, th‑h‑hu‑ud, and again and again. . . . Because of his very young age I would not allow him up in the tree with me, to build the tree house that I was building for him with proper building tools, tools and materials, tools, materials, and procedures, milled lumber, exact measurements, plumbed verticals, level horizontal planes, tightly fitted joints, sturdy foundation, and a buttressed roof. . . . Having lost hope of climbing up into the tree with me, he left, then soon returned, dragging disparate geometric and biomorphic shaped pieces of wood from the refuse heap on the other side of the yard to where I was working up in the tree. . . . There, below me, he erected his tree‑house‑on‑the‑ground, its craggy edifice, a hodgepodge leaning against the backyard fence and rising up roughly four feet in the opposite direction toward where I was balancing myself ten feet off the ground in‑between two large branches. . . . While I constructed a presumptuous, unassailable place for him to play in the tree, his was a modest, contingent, de Certeauian space open to all sorts of pos‑ sibilities. . . . His earlier, childhood architectural achievements consisted of tent shelters that he would improvise with all that was present at hand, stretching his blankets and bed sheets over one piece of furniture to the next in the living room, from the upright piano near the front window to the floor lamp on the opposite corner of the room, fastening them with clothespins. . . . Unlike the modernism of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, 41 42 THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY OF ART Mies van der Rohe, Philip Johnson, and I. M. Pei, his was a schizophrenic, nomadic construction that Deleuze and Guattari would have admired, com‑ plex and contradictory, and ready at an instant to disassemble, transport, and then reassemble, feeling at home on the move through an eccentric blueprinting of architectural play. . . . His was not a structure that rein‑ forced and protected existing theories of architecture. . . . Board‑by‑board, he hauled those dismembered pieces of lumber, the ruins of memory, across the yard. . . . Board‑by‑board, he dropped them helter‑skelter, scattered amputations next to the backyard fence. . . . Board‑by‑board, he lifted, then gently propped them against each other defying gravity. . . . Board‑by‑board, nail‑by‑nail, he erected a bricoleur’s shanty, a re‑membered, precarious house of cards on the verge of collapse. . . . Nail‑by‑nail, he leaned the jumbled, baroque mass against the wooden fence to ensure stability. . . . Nail‑by‑ nail, he declared his assemblage a “house,” a “tree‑house,” a “tree‑house‑ on‑the‑ground‑against‑the‑backyard‑fence”. . . . Nail‑by‑nail, like the teetering accomplishments of his labor, this naming, a “tree‑house‑ on‑the‑ground‑against‑the‑backyard‑fence,” s‑t‑a‑mmered, s‑t‑a‑mmered, s‑t‑a‑mm‑ered, s‑t‑a‑mmer‑ed, hence stumping my academic architectural Figure 3.1. Hammer and nail, 2011 (Courtesy Charles Garoian). 43 THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY understandings, then reconstructing them anew. . . . What could he know at age nine? How did he come to know it? What had he experienced? His bedroom, our house, his classrooms at school, Prince’s doghouse, the domestic spaces of his friends, neighbors, his grandparents, aunts, and uncles, where else would he have learned about built environments? His architectural his‑ tory also consisted of a toy workbench and tool set, the wooden building blocks, that he played with dedication in his early years. . . . His youth‑ ful, playful memory yielded a post and lintel structure, however, disjointed, gone awry, with gaping holes in‑between the oddly shaped assembled pieces of weathered wood unbefitting a shelter, yet able to hold the weight of a roof overhead, for his body to feel a sense of security inside, a prosthetic skin protecting him from the outside, for him to move to and fro, to play in and out and around it with his friends, a “tree‑house‑on‑the‑ground‑ against‑the‑backyard‑fence”. . . . His was a fearless labor, the result of emancipated obsession, one that his father, me...