Storytellers of Art Histories by Siddiqui Yasmeen;Patel Alpesh Kantilal;

Author:Siddiqui, Yasmeen;Patel, Alpesh Kantilal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd

Part II: Creativity is never free: Thinking creatively in the academy

Given this trajectory—my instinctive resistance to accepted norms while being fully ensconced in the academy—I now turn to the question of my creative life. The following expresses some aspects of my emotional connection to (and sometimes repulsion from) aspects of the dominant disciplinary structures as well as the larger structures of power in the university system (both of which I resist but, admittedly, also occupy). Within these ruminations, it will be clear that the leitmotif of all of my work, the theoretical and political thread that unites all that I do, has been an increasing awareness and theoretical highlighting of the embodiment and relationality of the art encounter—both within and beyond disciplines, both of imagery or performances and of their discourses and institutions.6 Acknowledging this relationality entails an awareness of the contingency of all meaning and value as we make, exhibit, write about, and otherwise engage with art, in and beyond the university. This acknowledgment gives me room to breathe, and the space to acknowledge and even flex my own biases (in itself a political move), while also honoring the fecund and richly complex modes of creativity I encounter through art and performance. My work, I hope, honors the energy and ultimately unfixable meanings generated by these encounters.

My creative life is that of an academic who squeezes creativity into the interstices of time left to me after doing administration and teaching, particularly as I have now become “vice dean” (or “dean of vice” as I prefer to call my position!) of academics and research at the Roski School of Art and Design at USC. I am thus someone who has already acceded to a hierarchical array of systems that siphon what I do into mostly predictable forms (the refereed journal article, the conference talk, the book published with an academic press, the show curated in a space designed for art and performance). And yet …? As I contemplate how to live creatively within these systems, I hope to generate some energy through these words to inspire forms of creative thinking (however minute and momentary) in return. I want to say most of all that creativity, for me, is about recognizing the structures of power I negotiate every day in academia and self-reflexively positioning myself within them in new ways. It is about maintaining a sense of dynamism attached to knowing (or thinking I know) that I am engaging an audience of others, saying something to someone else—again an acknowledgment and making use of the relational. This is how I teach, read, interpret, and historicize art and its discourses critically, but it is also how I hope to affect others through my teaching and writing and curating.

I am attracted to the work of others (artists, writers, scholars, curators) who have a similarly skewed relationship to the everyday norms and institutional imperatives—along the lines of Louis Althusser’s concept of “Ideological State Apparatuses”—that constrict us.7 Universities today are difficult places to carve out

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