A Very Big Idea: Catherine on Relationship/Context
This post is number 5 in a series in which Catherine and John take turns reflecting and expanding on the attributes of Interdisciplinaryness practitioners, originally outlined in “A Very Big Idea: Interdisciplinaryness People, What Makes Us So?”
InterD people are often preoccupied with relationship and context. We look for links, pathways, similarities and differences, flashpoints and counterpoints, influences, escape hatches, doorways, reasons and surprises. Our desire to declare an even momentary understanding of an overall relationship or context regarding our process is potentially as strong as our desire to make the things that our processes produce. We also simultaneously explore Big Picture/Little Picture applications of our work, in that we focus on the task at hand with an eye to that task’s placement in the world and vice versa.
One of the more influential advisors I had during graduate school is an artist named Pam Hall. Pam works across a myriad of media, including still image, film and installation. During the intensive residencies that precede each term, advisors and their students are given daily work sessions intended to supplement the independent research proposed by each student. Each advising group makes determinations as to how to use this time as best suits its needs.
On our first day, Pam gathered us together and asked us to each write down three big questions that were really driving our artistic inquiry. These questions related to the ethics of being an artist, the challenging intersection of art-making and capitalism, and how we each function across a spectrum of artistic practice and idea. Pam then distilled our questions into four large, open-ended ones that encompassed our individual concerns. In each group session, we began to parse open these questions in a shared dialogue that she lightly guided, while taking notes on large pieces of white paper.
My experience with Pam’s leadership was invigorating. I have always been a dialogic processor, and Pam exemplified an unassuming capacity for context and synthesis that I deeply admired. She is firmly rooted in knowledge, fierce and funny. She quietly listened to our comments, selected key words or ideas from them and made connections between past and future iterations of concepts. She did not shy away from scope or complication. She validated personal concerns such as artist sustainability by granting them space to be heard and she buoyed proposals with references to other artist/thinkers. She listened with compassion, holding firm to her own perspective while also making room for ours. It was a balanced, vibrant room and our week of meetings concluded with the walls covered with a living document that recorded our humanity, artistry and serious inquiry.
Somewhere along the way in my life, a well-meaning person advised me to stop asking why?, stating that this was a useless question because one can often never arrive at a single, indisputable answer. In my hazy memory, I believe this person was speaking specifically about the intricacies of human relationships, so complicatedly submerged in multiple perspectives, experiences and interpretations. What I found enlightening about Pam’s guided discourse is that she did not shy away from why. She prefaced our inquiries with an awareness of their complexity and open-endedness, but these qualities deterred neither her nor us from pursuing them. What is art but a means to understand what seems incomprehensible? Pam also asked a lot of how and what if. She gently gave our ideas value, affirmed our perspectives as we were actively creative new ones, and was deep in the thinking and feeling trenches with us. By doing this she also genuinely created space for us to do this for each other, neutralizing any sort of set hierarchy that might be perceived to exist in a traditional model of curation or leadership.
In retrospect, she was embodying this penchant for relationship/context as proposed in this particular Interdisciplinary aspect. Personally meaningful for me, her example validated my own lifelong preoccupation with how things and people connect. As an adolescent, I was fascinated with how people came to discover that they loved each other and wanted to spend their lives together. I yearned for stories, for patterns, for guideposts, for assurance. I wrote letters to multiple pen pals in attempts to foster camaraderie across distance. I thought about the impact of the actions of characters on both the soap operas my mother preferred as well as in the musicals in which she performed. It wasn’t just about getting swept up in aesthetics for me as a viewer, I wanted to be submerged in the poetry but also delighted by how the poetry informed the beings it encompassed -- how it informed me, how it let me see and feel.
In many ways, I still am attached to this kind of inquiry and apply it across all matters of interest. I still ask for stories of origin in terms of partnerships and families. I love to meet parents of friends and loved ones, as the intricacies of those moments often illuminate aspects of my friends or lovers in new ways. There is always more to learn. We are many-layered creatures. It makes sense that we operate in the world with a desire to peel layers back to understand what lies underneath them, what makes them so, knowing that another layer awaits us when we are ready, and that even as we peel one layer away a new one is forming somewhere else.
Pam made no excuses for her technique, clear that its supposed lack of arrival at certainty did not diminish its importance. She willingly and enthusiastically stepped into the web of interconnectedness across form, expression, experience, aesthetic, location, and any other supposedly divisive factor that arose in that room. As interdisciplinaryness people, perhaps our quest for connection comes from a subtle acknowledgement that we do not, could not, know all, but see all knowing as possible/impossible. Like Don Quixote, we dream impossible dreams that enable others to dream as well. We think at the center of a series of concentric circles, overlapping with all the other concentric circles emanating from all other sources. This gives us duality of purpose, guides our penchant for supposition, and exposes in us a worldview that sends back the insistence of the singular path or vision. The world is not so much random as multiple, and we find pattern in its possibilities.
