![\"KU](\"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/26-event.11733.002.jpg\")
<\/a>IARI demonstrates artistic practices as methods of knowledge production by integrating them into convenings that engage researchers from many academic fields and disciplines. The model currently being explored diverges from that of museum exhibitions conceived and organized only by curators, with education acting as an interpretive guide for general audiences. With two full-time staff now operating with equal representation across curatorial and education, we hope to be shifting away from a top-down model to one in which museum exhibitions and programs can be understood as research investigations authored more directly by a community of artists and scholars in dialogue with museum staff. We refer to this emerging structure as the inquiry<\/em>, a cloud of activities with exhibition components that are parts of the inquiry no more or less than other methodological or pedagogical forms. Arts and research integration upsets notions that privilege strictly visual forms of knowledge and isolate them from other methods. In fact, inquiries are intentionally broadly conceived to engage a group of researchers across disciplines, fields, and areas of expertise. The inquiry is a structure that integrates artistic practice into other forms of investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artistic knowledges are often not legible in the same ways as more standard text-based forms of knowing. Since different kinds of knowing are produced through different methods and received on various registers, a spectrum of knowledges requires a spectrum of pedagogies for its transmission. Of course, learning and knowing are never accessible to everyone in the same ways. As Jacques Ranci\u00e8re states in describing the \u201cignorant schoolmaster\u201d: \u201cfrom the schoolmaster the pupil learns something that the schoolmaster does not know himself.\u201d1<\/a><\/sup> We initiated our pedagogical experiment in this spirit of Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s \u201cequality of intelligence[s].\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> We seek to diminish inequalities of intelligences by, for example, toying with the hierarchy of knowledge-seeker on the one hand and knowledge-possessor on the other. Throughout our inquiries, artists and scholars who have spoken from a lectern in the auditorium in one session might be found in the next forum seated in the audience or participating as an equal member of a public roundtable discussion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To formulate an inquiry, we begin by posing questions through the exhibition of different kinds of objects in tandem with juxtapositions of perspectives and formats through a weeklong series of talks, discussions, hikes, meals, lectures, and roundtables. Each content provider conveys their work in their preferred format, but they are also present for all other contributions to the inquiry, which culminate in a public roundtable discussion. Audiences and community members can follow the inquiry as a whole, or simply join the parts of the inquiry that interest them most. In this context, our research inquiries do not reinforce knowledge silos. The work of those with disciplinary proficiency or with acuity in specific artistic, scientific, or humanities-based methods is not made obscure or incomprehensible to others, but is instead a resource for generating new points of access for different kinds of practitioners and publics. We explore disparate disciplinary methods to make legible a broader scope of understanding and to attempt to unhinge methodological assumptions that too tightly limit or overdetermine the potential horizons of our knowing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In fall 2017, for example, Daniel Hirmas, a former professor in KU\u2019s department of Geography and Atmospheric Science, was an IARI faculty research fellow and participant in an inquiry into soils and ecologies. His contribution to the exhibition component of the inquiry at the Spencer Museum was a series of soil monoliths, cross-sections of earth that serve as scientific pedagogical tools to teach students about the structure and formation of soils. Next to Hirmas\u2019s work, we displayed a series of Renaissance prints that depicted soil structure as Platonic solids, emphasizing their dimensionality through a commitment to single-point perspective. Unaccustomed to seeing his own work in contexts outside of the lab, Hirmas remarked that these images were created long before x-ray diffraction could prove the actual existence of such structures. Artistic and philosophical practices had actively contributed to historical understandings of his own object of study. Although his work in the field is strongly empirical and the lab equipment he relies on grants him access to such minute scale, he began to articulate his surprise about the usefulness of artistic investigation and philosophical speculation. He later pointed out that philosophical commitments often precede the construction of meaning, even for scientists working largely with empirical methods. Hirmas\u2019s interaction with other forms of research made aspects of his own research more legible. In addition, soil monoliths made in the field for instruction in the lab had very productive formal, conceptual, and methodological connections with other works in the inquiry\u2019s exhibition, many from the museum\u2019s own permanent collection. His practices in the field were in conversation with embodied and performative knowledges, while his methods were considered in relation to other global practices and issues around research accessibility. By bringing a scientist\u2019s work with soil monoliths into direct conversation with artistic investigations into the same materials, we learn more about soils, but also about how we make and circulate knowledge more broadly as a diverse community of researchers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Social Histories,<\/em> the 2018 IARI inquiry, had programmatic components that ran October 16\u201320, 2018. Scholars and artists presented and performed their respective practices and discussed how the forms and methods they use inevitably shape their understandings of social histories. The inquiry was initiated in a roundtable about some of our own internal launching points for what we define social histories against<\/em>\u2014political history, or the history of kings and queens or \u201cgreat men\u201d; intellectual history, or the history of big ideas and thinkers; or constitutional history, for example. We certainly used disciplinary and field-specific assumptions as pushing-off points, as is often the case in many forms of inter\/trans\/extradisciplinary inquiries. We also identified an academic interest in lived experience that flourished in the 1960s and 70s, broadly signaling an emphasis on the marginalized and exploited as fundamental to historical understanding. Some well-known textual examples include Dee Brown\u2019s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee<\/em> (1970) and Howard Zinn\u2019s A People\u2019s History of the United States<\/em> (1980).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The exhibitions on display at the Spencer Museum set the stage for the inquiry. They exhibited different forms and methods to investigate social histories, through video, photography, installation, and painting, with exhibition schedules that ran before and after the official public gatherings, enabling preparatory prompts and provocations, as well as spaces for consideration and reflection. The three exhibitions included Larry Schwarm: Kansas Farmers<\/em>, Mohau Modisakeng\u2019s three-channel video installation Passage<\/em>, and The Ties that Bind: Haiti, the United States, and the Art of Ulrick Jean-Pierre in Comparative Perspective<\/em>. Exhibiting artist Ulrick Jean-Pierre was among the visiting creatives and scholars for the social histories inquiry. Visiting artist Adrian Stimson presented Resistance is Futile<\/em>, a performance of Buffalo Boy, his Two-Spirit persona referencing Indigenous gender-variant identities. Tina Takemoto, artist, associate professor of visual studies, and Dean of Humanities and Sciences at the California College of Art, gave an experimental lecture that incorporated her recent videos exploring queer social histories among Japanese Americans in World War II\u2013era US concentration camps. Finally, artist Rena Detrixhe, an alumna and visiting artist in KU\u2019s department of Visual Art, installed an iteration from her Red Dirt Rug <\/em>series that uses finely sifted Oklahoma dirt to represent landscape and history at The Commons, the university\u2019s premiere interdisciplinary space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One important theoretical foundation was Irit Rogoff\u2019s 2010 essay \u201cTurning,\u201d in which she reflects on an educational turn in curating. Rogoff\u2019s notion of a turn<\/em>\u2014changing one\u2019s position toward spaces of learning, research, and exhibition\u2014is fundamental to our ambitions for IARI\u2019s work. Rogoff states, \u201cEducation is by definition processual\u2014involving a low-key transformative process, it embodies duration and the development of a contested common ground.\u201d3<\/a><\/sup> We understand the inquiry as initiating this process of low-key transformation by opening spaces where disparate practices and commitments can begin to coexist. The exhibitions, programs, and performances posit subjects, questions, and propositions that give participants different ways of encountering and producing knowledges together, if at times in oblique relation. By working across academic and artistic assumptions and perspectives, we do not seek consensus as much as an openness to the different forms knowledge can take. As IARI builds an accretion of inquiries over time, we hope to develop longer-term affiliations with researchers of many stripes and begin to understand what might be possible through such an experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Social Histories<\/em> took place over the course of a week, with participants occupying different positions in lectures, performances, screenings, gallery talks, exhibitions, and roundtables. The inquiry was also guided by the museum\u2019s own commitment to making the art museum a space for social action.4<\/a><\/sup> We anchored this writing in the work of visiting and exhibiting artists. This enabled us to be explicit about integrating artistic practice into research. We have, therefore, embedded visual documentation here alongside discussions of the contributions to give readers different encounters with the archive of their work at the Spencer Museum. What follows is a summary of the Social Histories<\/em> inquiry\u2019s content and themes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kansas Farmers<\/em> showcased photographic work by artist Larry Schwarm. The exhibition was composed of fifty photographs depicting the realities of contemporary farm life in Kansas, and is one of the many outcomes of \u201cBiofuels and Climate Change: Farmers\u2019 Land Use Decisions,\u201d a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). As a research project funded by the NSF, this exhibition may have the most legible connection to more traditional understandings of research. Although a deeply interdisciplinary project that spanned research areas in multiple fields and disciplines, it featured Schwarm as the sole artist-participant.5<\/a><\/sup> Curator Kate Meyer describes Schwarm\u2019s work as both offering visual evidence of the study and providing his own form of research into lives and landscapes.6<\/a><\/sup> Although the exhibition featured photographs that directly portray farmers, the lives of farmers were apparent even in the depiction of big skies and tornado-sculpted silos, or the palimpsests of buildings whose materials have changed along with their uses. Even unpeopled images of farm equipment and crop design speak volumes about how farming decisions can change in relation to emerging technologies and shifting economic realities that deeply impact farmers\u2019 lives. Schwarm\u2019s work reveals how these particularly located economic decisions become legible in place, a question that was central to the larger research project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Passage<\/em>, a three-channel HD video installation by South African, mixed-media artist Mohau Modisakeng, highlights cultural and social histories that have been impacted by the long history of slavery in South Africa. Modisakeng uses what he refers to as \u201cmaterial, metaphor and the black body,\u201d all tools that trigger questions on how we remember the past and how the past shapes the present.7<\/a><\/sup> Passage<\/em> revolves around movement, water flow, pauses in time and space, submerging, and reemergence in the wake of black death. Modisakeng explores the establishment of racial hierarchy by the Dutch and British, who maintained the longue dur\u00e9e<\/em> of racial capitalism that still impacts social relationships. As colonizers, the Dutch and British elite exploited people, goods, and land; in their use of slave labor, they extracted brown and black people from the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and Africa. Modisakeng exposes slavery as a site of rupture in the fabric that binds blackness across waters: tenuous, ever-changing, and violent. But this site is also metaphorically figured as a journey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\nModisakeng\u2019s video, the center channel shows a bird\u2019s-eye view of a black man\nin a boat that just frames his body. Two different black women, also in boats\nand filmed from overhead, are featured on the left and right channels, their\nboats sinking into the water. The submersion of the man\u2019s boat in the center\nchannel is played in reverse, challenging a strictly forward movement to the\nnarrative. The three characters in their boats reference the social histories\nof the global black diaspora. The possessions and boats they lose by the\nvideo\u2019s end allude to the disbursement of cultures and languages and the loss\nof heritage and belonging. The three channels of digital video were projected in\nlarge scale, each taking up an entire gallery wall. The seating in the middle\nof the room enabled viewers to engage with each of the video\u2019s channels, but\nrequired them to shift their gaze or position to follow the actions of a\ndifferent subject, causing at once an embodied interaction and a fracturing of\nthe viewing experience. The sound composition did not simply evoke a sense of\nstruggle as the three black bodies sunk beneath the surface. At times it served\nthe immersive nature of the installation; at others it seemed to gently\nindicate narrative movement in tones that were at odds with the gravitas of the\nsubject matter. Indeed, struggle, power, abandon, and meditation seemed in\nactive tension throughout. Some viewers were soothed and remained in the\ngallery for longer than one run of the work, while others were uncomfortable\nwith the work\u2019s references to racialized violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Because water plays a central role in the containment of black bodies, the \u201cdeath and life-giving capacities of water\u201d are at the center of the social and visual dialogue in the gallery space.8<\/a><\/sup> As Modisakeng points out, the Setswana word for life is botshelo<\/em>, which means \u201cto cross over.\u201d[9] The title Passage<\/em>, therefore, simultaneously references individual lives lived and the longer global histories of colonialism and enslavement that have produced our present moment. The issues of underpaid labor, slavery, black dispossession, death, and migration remain relevant today, and within this context, Passage<\/em> makes clear the relationship of contemporary black diasporic subjects\u2014as well as nonblack subjects\u2014to Western colonization. Passage<\/em> speaks to how slavery and its afterlives impact our collective narratives and personal histories, even if at times imperceptibly. Modisakeng\u2019s installation contributed a video and sound composition to the inquiry, exhibiting the use of space and mixed media in exploring the impact of history on the present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nexhibition The Ties That Bind<\/em>\nexplored the histories of Haiti and the United States and the complicated ways\nin which they are entwined. This was a result of IARI faculty and undergraduate\nresearch fellowships. Dr. C\u00e9cile Accilien, Associate Professor and Acting Chair\nof African and African American Studies and Director of the Institute of\nHaitian Studies, used her IARI faculty fellowship to research and cocurate the\nexhibition with Spencer Museum curator Dr. Cassandra Mesick-Braun. Tyler Allen,\nnow a graduate student in Museum Studies and African and African American\nStudies, served at the time as the IARI undergraduate research fellow on the\nproject. This research team selected works of art from the Spencer Museum\u2019s collection\nof contemporary Haitian art, which largely depicts daily social life in Haiti,\nand paintings by New Orleans\u2013based Haitian artist Ulrick Jean-Pierre.\nJean-Pierre works within a grand master, historical tradition, depicting\nimportant figures from Haitian history in a manner that asserts the importance\nof their inclusion in more widely circulated Euro-Western histories. In this\nsense, the work is revisionist. Jean-Pierre\u2019s gallery talk, however, revealed\nhim as an educator who knows this history well; he remixes a well-known narrative\nand opens up a part of US history to a more robust and precise retelling.\nUlrick\u2019s talks were integrated into other university-wide initiatives, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One\nof these programs is the Common Work of Art. In 2018, the museum selected\nJean-Pierre\u2019s painting Marie Laveau<\/em>\u2014a\nportrait of Marie Catherine Laveau, a priestess who influenced the development\nof the Voudou religion in New Orleans, where it is known as Voodoo\u2014as its\nCommon Work of Art. The massive canvas\u2014over nine feet tall and six feet wide\u2014depicts\nthe priestess surrounded by symbols that reference Haiti, Catholicism, and\nAfrican and West Indian spiritual beliefs, providing opportunities for many\ngallery discussions around cross-cultural influences. The Common Work of Art is\nselected for its productive intersections with the Common Book, organized by\nKU\u2019s First Year Experience. This program offers incoming students and faculty\nand staff a shared reading experience. In 2018, the Common Book was Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at\nWork<\/em> (2010) by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat, which explores immigrant\nartists who create work in conversation with the struggles of their homeland. The\ncoordination of these programs enabled the KU community to engage with both Danticat\nand Jean-Pierre directly through gallery talks and lectures. Students just\nentering the university also begin to experience the museum as a space relevant\nto many disciplines that promotes critical engagement, in this case with the\nhistories of social, economic, and political struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond the artists exhibiting in the museum\u2019s galleries, IARI invited practitioners deeply invested in the work of social history to share their own scholarly and artistic practices. The many ways these artist-scholars performed, resituated, or diverged from dominant historical narratives revealed that social and cultural histories are composed from available evidence and are therefore always particular constructions. These non-static histories may also be actively choreographed as a way of examining their evidentiary status and historical claims. Tina Takemoto, a fourth-generation Japanese-American scholar, performance artist, and filmmaker, focused on experimental film as a mode of engaging with archival evidence of queer lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Takemoto delivered her experimental lecture, \u201cQueer Social Histories and the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans,\u201d in the Spencer Museum of Art\u2019s auditorium. She asked how \u201cqueer of color artists and scholars approach those silent yet provocative historical traces\u201d in the archive when the material is being excavated and pieced together after histories of violence and incarceration.9<\/a><\/sup> Takemoto\u2019s lecture specifically addressed her own attachments to queer histories that are speculative and remain beyond our grasp. In response to these gaps in the archive, she pieced together her Queer Camp Trilogy<\/em>, made up of three short films screened over the course of her lecture, which revealed her deep commitment to archival knowledge from a queer-of-color point of view. She made connections among cultural and archival encounters, images, soundtracks, and performance\u2014for example, mashing up propaganda wartime video footage with a Madonna soundtrack, and slowing down video reels out of sync with the music, inviting the audience to read with her against the archival grain.10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>