Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

The classroom space acts with us. It is ontologically marked as a site of pedagogy with a strict hierarchy and a competitive impulse: teacher-student, a grading curve, a fight for the 4.0, etc. Egoism, selfishness, socially fracturing: these are the conditions of the classroom, the site of pedagogy.

But is this the best environment to learn?

We want to break down the site and start it anew. The classroom can be a space of trust. The classroom can be a space of mutual dependency and learning. The classroom can be a social space, not one of digesting pedagogical vomit, but one of conversing. But this must happen through a reinvention. We take the tea party as our site of departure from the established classroom space. The tea party conjures images of a lady’s garden luncheon, a mad hatter’s chaotic unbirthday, a place of revolution, a nihilistic hypernationalist movement. All of this history informs our party, but we create our own party. Haphazard, open, free to all who choose to come. We host this party only as suppliers. There is no obligation to join. Not joining and joining have their own markings, and we make no judgments on these decisions. In fact, these decisions create the piece. We only hope to set the stage for a new learning. Learning that takes individuals and binds them to one another through difference, through preference. There must be a grounding, but this is only a site of departure for an alternative future. An opening up and breaking down of the classroom, of the student, of the teacher, of the tea party for something to transform and transgress.