The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Research and Practice

ONE Introduction

ONE INTRODUCTION The Prosthetic Space of Art Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. —Paul Klee, Schöpferische Konfession Gaps seem to give us somewhere to extend: space for our prosthetic devices. —Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections I have often wondered about that canvas (Figure 1.1), that first canvas leaning against the wooden easel, the one that I stretched in the first, that beginning painting course in which I was enrolled years ago . . . its 18" x 24" dimensions . . . its pure, immaculate surface sealed with thick white gesso, reflecting bright light from an adjacent window, taut from drying and shrink‑ ing against the milled wooden bars upon which I had pulled and stapled its loose fabric . . . its unbleached cotton duck, which upon drying and shrinking, and stretching, resonated the thunder of a kettledrum in response to the thump of my snapping finger . . . its blank, empty space, suggesting a patch of skin from art history’s body, loudly staring back daringly, returning my gaze . . . 1 2 THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY OF ART that canvas, on easel and ready for painterly action . . . its space a lacuna, intimidating while inviting my leap into its open gap . . . the art classroom like that canvas, equally paradoxical, spatially available yet awesome and indifferent . . . Thanks to my unknowing teacher who invited my participation in the painting lesson, who enabled and encouraged me . . . to begin a process, a trajectory of work . . . to extend beyond . . . to reach outside the demarcated space, the bounded, rectilinear, pictorial edge of the surface while applying paint he said, his words suggesting the confidence of Francis of Assisi . . . Figure 1.1. Stretched canvas, 2011 (Courtesy Charles Garoian). 3 INTRODUCTION to “start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible” . . . to transgress the walls of the classroom . . . to disrupt its academic and institutional confines he said, by imagin‑ ing, exploring, and creating in ways similar to the playful making, working, and living on the raisin vineyard and farm of my emigrant parents he said . . . where my spatial parameters extended well beyond my parents’ provisions of safety and home as I ventured out on foot or bicycle across and beyond Valentine Avenue and Whitesbridge Road . . . or, as I floated away on inflated inner tubes with my brother, rafting the waters of Fresno County’s irrigation ditch bordering our property, hacking our way through its congested jungle of Johnson Grass . . . to and from the County Dump where heaps of cultural refuse and detritus awaited curiosity, our insatiable desire to sift, to dig through its ruins, and scavenge what remained in that ancient tell . . . ours was an archeological disposition to search, perhaps geneti‑ cally and historically determined, an eagerness to find buried frag‑ ments, broken and discarded objects that comprised the Dump’s sedimentations . . . a surfeit, an excess of visual and material culture that stirred the imagination (Figure 1.2), compelling our ambition as alchemists to turn lead into gold . . . our bricoleur’s fancy improvising, jerry rigging incongruous images and ideas, adding and subtracting, attaching and detaching, gluing Figure 1.2. . . . bi/cy>cles,t/oy+s, 2011 (Courtesy Charles Garoian). 4 THE PROSTHETIC PEDAGOGY OF ART and nailing, leaning and propping, in order to extend and expand their presumed functions prosthetically, linking the present with the past, the familiar with the strange, to see and understand the one through the other, back and forth, and again . . . Such drifting of the imagination and facility with the hand, playful work, research for making meaning, coincided with our parents’ fractured lives, their telling of persecutions and atrocities experi‑ enced as children, surviving the Armenian Genocide, forced from their homeland . . . their exodus and displacement among a worldwide Diaspora . . . their refuge and search for new beginnings and possibilities in America . . . their newly adopted country, where memories of past oppressive regimes and representations of space could be transformed through the lived representational spaces of the raisin vineyard and farm— their new Armenia . . . That, that is where my art teacher encouraged me to go on that day, to the space of memory and cultural history, that which I received from my parents, and to the unknown spaces beyond the haven of our vineyard, home, where I migrated as a child . . . the County irrigation ditch, and the Dump where Mr. Lindsey was the tender, Mr. Bonnini’s dairy, Zareh Balasanian’s onion patch, across Valentine Avenue, on Whitesbridge Road, and the other emancipating...