Assembling Desire, Love, and Affect in an Art Museum School

• In Event: The Affective Turn in Literacy Research: Theories, Potentials, Difference

Abstract

This paper is comprised of literacies pertaining to desire, love, and affective flows that passed in and around an emblematic art museum school in a major US metropolitan center as it was being shut down. Moving through the research are matters of power, race, belonging, loss, and identity. Of the latter, two researchers, a graduate student and research professor in education, join in a blurred, second person account of their experiences during the dissolution of the school. 
 
The narrative method is based on Deleuze’s (1994) concept of event, which is comprised of three spaces. First, to one side of the event is the debris of the past: the historical founding of the art museum school over a hundred years ago, and how its romantic, progressive ideals recently collided with political agendas and the economic realities of maintaining a major art museum. Second, on the other side of the event is the “yet to come,” an idea of potential, which aligns with the AERA conference theme of dreams and possibilities of public education.
 
Our research interests and the focus of our presentation are to start up in the middle of these two spaces during the art museum school’s final student exhibition. Our approach maps the affective intensities, vibrating with desire through art, whose principal aim is to produce affects (Deleuze 1994). At the center of our depiction of this closing art show are affective objects arranged around a gallery based on the theme of love, which is packed with multimodal communication media—printed texts on postcards, audio recordings, love letters, dream telling, books about love—situated around a bed, a place of lovemaking, births, deaths, and dreaming. The intent of our research presentation is to show the intensities of the event and to bring forward ideas of art production, through affect, content, and expression, to the research of literacies in public education spaces, such as museums.

Author

• Jonathan Eakle, George Washington University