How can I get better and better at listening? Am I listening? Am I taking new ideas/info on board?
Visiting my sister in California years ago, we took a day trip to visit her friend Michelle, a woman who practiced civil and private mediation for a living. Descending the valley to Michelle’s house, I was surprised to find a triangular barn. Next to the A-frame was a yurt––her daughter was visiting. Over dinner we talked about the spaces where we live; why Michelle chose a triangle as a young single mother on the West Coast and why her daughter later chose a circle in Alaska. We spoke about how different compositions afford––or shut down––space for conversation, debate and listening.
This lesson about space and debate is one that I’ve learned as a student and teacher, as an artist and curator, and as an organizer and participant; whether in university classrooms, lock-down shelters or museum boardrooms. I have learned this discursively and kinetically. I see it in action.
I bring muscle memory to the process of listening: training from reflexive ethnographic method, exercises from Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non Actors, strategies from riding public transit, and years of embedding grassroots organizing tactics into institutional settings.
A large part of my work as an artist, educator, programmer and curator has been about cultivating spaces for listening. This certainly is the case in my current position curating public practice and directing engagement at Northwestern University’s Block Museum. Here, I further refine the questions of listening. What does is mean to listen from the vantage point of a university museum? What does it mean to invite a variety of voices and perspectives into dialogue, and how can one be accountable to those voices? How does one begin to listen in a new city?
I’m currently in the midst of one such listening process. When I began my new job in late 2013, I sunk my teeth into programming for an exhibition close to my heart, The Left Front: Radical Art from the Red Decade (1929-1940), which focuses on artists who participated in the John Reed Clubs and the American Artists’ Congress. In 1936, hundreds of artists signed the Call for the American Artists’ Congress. Asking artists to realize that “the cultural crisis is but a reflection of a world economic crisis”––the call to action charged them to come together against fascism, considering the impact of what it had done to living standards, civil liberties, workers’ organizations, science and art, and peace between nations.
I was interested in updating this call, and more specifically, in inquiring locally to identify the looming crises of our day around which we might band together. I proposed to my museum colleagues that we might reimagine an Artists’ Congress. In the collaborative spirit of artists from the AAC and to solicit a range of local voices, I invited two colleagues whom I respect for their ethics and creativity––Daniel Tucker and Michael Rakowitz––to come on board as collaborators in planning a local Artists’ Congress for May 2014.
Rather than curate a program a priori, we organized a series of listening sessions at Northwestern and at the Chicago Cultural Center to help identify urgent and relevant questions from which to build the event’s framework. We left room for these conversations to dictate what the shape of the Congress might be. We reached out to dozens of Northwestern faculty members, as well as artists, scholars, and organizers in Chicago to solicit their opinions and ideas for the Congress. We found that contemporary practitioners concerned with social change prioritize a wide range of issues. There is not the 1930s’ monolithic target of fascism, but various roving targets including global climate change, wealth inequity, the prison industrial complex, gun violence, gender disparity and the intrusion of surveillance into the private realm.
The material generated through the listening sessions became the foundation of planning sessions where, over falafel in my living room, Daniel, Michael and I sorted through the cacophony of questions and issues to create a framework for the Congress. The planning process since has included conversations with each Congress participant to help shape the day. With the facilitators of an open session, we’ve been navigating that sticky question of how to best design an event space. With a social choreographer, we’re sharing ideas about how to integrate architecture and audience into a performance. In the weeks before the event, we’ll convene the growing group of stakeholders to give them an update on how planning for the congress has evolved and to listen to their thoughts on that planning.
In many ways, this discursive process is the Congress. Prioritizing listening has made space for a broad range of questions, including: What is the productive function of history beyond nostalgia? How do forms of propaganda and tactical media operate at the intersection of the aesthetic, social and political? How can “social engagement” overlay with changing notions of consensus?
A circular space as a facilitator of welcoming, non-hierarchical communication remains at the forefront of the Artists’ Congress planning process. Listening has been an open-ended, unruly, improvisational experience. Ultimately, we hope, it’s resulted in a space where participants can continue asking critical questions, fostering relationships beyond the space of the meetings themselves.
About the contributor: Susy Bielak is a Chicago based artist, writer, educator and curator. She is currently the Curator of Public Practice and Associate Director of Engagement at the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Prior to joining the Block, she served as the Associate Director of Public and Interpretive Programs at the Walker Art Center. Approaching museums as laboratories and civic spaces, and cities as studios, she has worked with a range of artists including Marisa Jahn, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Museum of Non Participation, Mark Nowak, Pedro Reyes, and Mark Shepard. Bielak’s own work has been published and exhibited in New American Paintings, Art Papers, the International Print Center, Luis Adelantado Mexico, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, among others. Bielak received her MFA from the University of California San Diego. She is currently collaborating on a project about hotels and the churn of cities. susybielak.com /blockmuseum.northwestern.edu