The Hospitable Pedagogies of Coffee: Difficult Knowledge as Creative Material

• In Event: Aesthetic Objects, Art Practices, and Curricular Inquiry

Abstract

This essay explores the extent to which “having coffee together,” as a conceptual and socially imbued practice, advances occasions to think differently about art pedagogy and research as creative practice. In addition to open qualitative work, I use photographic techniques (Glesne, 2006), what Claudia Mitchell (2011) calls “participatory visual approaches” (p. 4) to listen to and finesse the qualitative scene in which “data” is situated and from which it emerges.

The purpose of this paper is to engender a critical and creative encounter with the qualitative material of an art education course that was taught at the University of Georgia. Intended for undergraduate and graduate students, this course took as its point of departure the radical, yet hospitable, interventions of Chicago based artist, Theaster Gates. In particular, this course culled together, attended to, and fervently exercised the conceptual, pedagogic, and aesthetic gestures related to his project Soul Food Pavilion, and in doing so leveraged the ritual of “having coffee together” as a means to inquire into and engage with the difficult knowledge of art education. The aim of this course and its subsequent provocations was threefold. First, the course aimed to cultivate a space in and through which art pedagogy could take a more hospitable (i.e., generous) turn. Second, this course worked to purpose a tenor of thought that, when activated, vigorously pursued the everyday segments and situations of art teaching and practice—especially those elements and events that are most difficult to reconcile for art pedagogues (e.g., the dilemma of teacher/artist and the standardization of art pedagogy and practice)—as an incipient surplus of creative material. Third, this course utilized these first two purposes in order to forward the “conditions of possibility” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p. 85) that are necessary for thinking about and living the materialities of art pedagogy as an incipiently creative practice.

Drawing from the conceptual art theories of Peter Goldie and Elisabeth Schellekens (2009a, 2009b) I use this essay to examine the extent to which art pedagogy and the profession of teaching was potentiated through the analytic agendas of conceptual art. The purpose in doing so is to exercise the generative schemas of conceptual art as a means to induce course participants and myself into critical encounters (Davies, 2009) with the personal and culturally collective difficulties of the profession of art teaching. It is through these encounters—i.e., through the continuous act of “having coffee together” each morning—that, as a class, we were able to extend to the difficult and anxious materialities (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2001, 2010; Delueze & Guattari, 1987) of art teaching (and to each other), pedagogies of hospitality that affected new and unforeseen ways to think about and live “with” certain professional dilemmas. It was, I believe, through these hospitable turns that the professional catches of art teaching could be shaped and re-shaped as creative material

Author

• Christopher Mark Schulte, University of Georgia - Athens