Grappling With Social and Aesthetic Dissensus in an Exhibition by, for, and About Emerging Bilingual Youth

• In Event: The Arts as a Public Pedagogy by, for, and About Bilingual, Bicultural Youth

Abstract

This paper is an aesthetic exploration of audience dissensus in response to political art works exhibited at a university in Southern California in Spring 2011. Mounted by the author, Border Inspections: Arts-based Encounters with Language, Culture, Identity and Power featured art works across North America about bilingual, bicultural issues. The paper seeks to understand the public pedagogy built through cultural interaction in the exhibition, utilizing an aesthetic of dissensus—a rupture in social consensus about bilingualism and biculturalism in the United States. This aesthetic language might offer a pedagogical approach to engaging various publics in social issues through a free play of creative expression and discussion.

The paper presents a brief narrative about the exhibition then analyzes the visitor dialog through the theoretical framework of an aesthetics of dissensus (Ranciere, 2010). When political actions scrutinize the values and beliefs of social consensus, revealing the fiction of such consensus, creating a new “we” of equal subjects. The paper utilizes sociological bilingual research (Gándara, 2010) to understand the consensus built through restrictive language, schooling and immigration policies the people’s experiences as affected by these policies, and the implications for aesthetic disruption.

A visual mosaic of art works prompts a series of poems by the author reflecting on this disensus. The poems and images allow for openings, gaps, and slippages in interpretation that invite further “dissensus.” Then the paper utilizes a/r/tography (Irwin, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong, & Bickel, 2006), to reflect on the role of the curator in navigating points of view presented by both the art works and visitors about immigration, language and culture, and being “American.” The curator/research reflects on the ways that testimony and critique offered by both artworks and audiences interact to influence normative ideologies, particularly on a Southwest university campus.

The paper suggests educators and researchers might envision curatorial approaches of exhibitions that feature testimony and critical art, such as the use of space and inclusion of artists with diverse ages, sociocultural experiences, artistic experience, and performative interactions. These choices assist in provoking increased free play about how various publics might act in response to the social consensus about being bilingual and bicultural in the US.

The paper ends with more questions than answers, suggesting that educators and researchers should feel uncertain about approaches to interacting with general publics about these issues. Such uncertainty ensures that any creative expression is tentative, and may contribute to an alternative consensus that also encourages inequitable hierarchies.

An exhibitive space centered in understanding the experiences of minoritized youth should be curated through inquiry: who has power and control over language, culture and citizenship? How is it wielded? To what effect? What is the impact of engaging multiple perspectives about bilingual, bicultural issues? How do these questions contribute to competing social agendas, to further arts-based inquiry and social action?

While the exhibition did not accomplish this interrogation successfully, it became a platform for the curator’s own reflexive practice as an art-based researcher and educator on bilingual, bicultural issues.

Author

• Sharon Chappell, California State University - Fullerton