Notes

      1. The sense of the term experience as discussed below will run as an undercurrent throughout this entire text and clearly guided many of the decisions I made in organizing this trip. It is a sense close to that which helped Victor Turner move away from the more positivistic methods of anthropology toward his sense of dramatic fields and "performance..... [a]s the proper finale for an experience (Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York:PAJ Publications, 1982, 13). Expanding on the work of the German hermeneutist, Wilhelm Dilthey, Turner found Dilthey's notion of "formal categories" of experience useful-- 
       

        [Dilthey] conceded that any distinguishable "manifold," whether a natural formation or organism, or a cultural institution, or a mental event, contains certain formal relationships which can be analyzed. Dilthey called these the "formal categories": unity and multiplicity, likeness and  difference, whole and part, degree, and similar elementary concepts. As H.A. Hodges, writing on Dilthey summarized: "All the forms of discursive thought, as analyzed in formal logic, and all  the fundamental concepts of mathematics, can be reduced to these formal categories. They are a network within which all thought about any subject matter must be enclosed. They are applicable to all possible objects of thought, but they express the peculiar mature of none of them (my emphasis [Turner's]); and, as without them nothing can be understood, so nothing can be  understood with them alone" (my emphasis). Dilthey goes on to argue that experience, in its formal aspect, is richer than can be accounted for by general formal categories (From Ritual to Theatre,  12-13).
      I myself have found two particular thinkers' notions of experience helpful in gaining  a useful sense of the limitations of formal categories in speaking of experience, particularly that of the experience of art. The first is the German hermeneutist and educator, Hans-Georg Gadamer and the second is John Dewey, American pragmatist and educator. 
      In German there are are two words for experience- erlebnis and erfahrung. Erlebnis  (Dilthey's preference) is used to discuss the idea of experience as isolated and categorical. Erfahrung, in contrast, is used to indicate the experience as ongoing and cumulative. Erlebnis is something you have; erfahrung is something you undergo. The singular, categorical nature of erlebnis makes the subject of the experience something which itself can be categorized, analyzed, and studied. (This, for example, is, in effect, what the study of aesthetics, as practiced by those aestheticians influenced by the position toward art taken by the Enlightenment and, later, by the Romantic thinkers, has done to artworks. The vocabulary created by these practitioners facilitates discussing art in terms of the object and its qualities, in terms of an experience of an abstracted set of criteria, much in the way that the objects studied by physics are discussed.  See also Geertz's anthropological take on "aesthetics" in note 4.) 

      In erfahrung, however, the subject is transcended and the experiencer participates in an "event of meaning," an event in which she involves her own horizon, or lebenswelt, and all it contains, and through which her horizon is widened. In this sense, for example, the experience of art becomes constitutive of the kind of knowledge which results in the broadening of one's horizon ".....by overturning an existing perspective, which we can then perceive was erroneous or at least narrow" (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, New York:Crossroads Publishing, 1989,  xiii). This sort of experience, then, is that by which we participate in our own self-formation. 

      Gadamer goes to great length to make the difference between the two terms clear, for, as with method, he clearly sees the problem created when the arts embraced the more scientifically applicable erlebnis rather than exploring the more interactive, integrative erfahrung.  The true experiencing of a piece of literature, for example, involves our own horizon, but, in true hermeneutically-circular fashion, the experience also alters our horizon, expanding it in new directions which, in turn, allows us to embrace new experiences- 
       

        And also only in this manner do I learn to gain a new understanding of what I have seen through eyes conditioned by prejudice. But this implies, too, that the prejudgements that lead to my preunderstanding are also constantly at stake, right up to the moment of their surrender- which surrender could also be called a transformation. It is the untiring power of experience, that in the process of being instructed, man is ceaselessly forming a new preunderstanding (Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, Berkeley: University of California Press,  1976)  38.
      Rhetorician Wayne Booth expresses, and perhaps clarifies, this same notion--  "It is not, then, that in identifying we stop thinking our own thoughts but rather that 'our own' thoughts now become different from what they were. The author's thoughts have at least in part become ours" (Booth, The Company We Keep, Berkley: University of California Press, 1988) 140. And, in becoming ours, gives us new ideas to think with which, in turn, make us open to yet more new ideas. 
      John Dewey, in Art As Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), also makes a distinction between two types of experience, although his is between the rather random, episodic nature of our generalized minute to minute experience and that of an experience- 
       
        Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience.........In such experiences, every successive part flows freely, without seam and without unfilled blanks, into what ensues. At the same time there is no sacrifice f the self-identity of the parts...... In an experience, flow is from something to something........ 
             This unity is neither emotional, practical, nor intellectual, for these terms name distinctions that reflection can make within it.......Yet the experience was not a sum of these different character; they were lost in it as distinctive traits. No thinker can ply his distinctive traits save as he is lured or rewarded by total integral experiences that 
        are intrinsically worthwhile  (36-7).
      The unified nature of experience, as both Gadamer and Dewey explain it, is the reason that the generally accepted approach to art, especially in education where the art survey course, when even offered, has replaced the more hands-on, experiential course, is contrary to the very nature of art. That is, the objectification of the work of art is a result of isolating, in Dewy's words, the intellectual from the emotional and practical and the denial that the allure of the intellectual comes from the integrated experience that is art- 
       
        In a work of art, different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and 
        yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so- just as in a general 
        conversation there is a continuous interchange and blending, and yet each speaker 
        not only retains his own character but manifests it more clearly than is his wont  (37).
      Dewey characterizes this unified "conversation"  as esthetic and portrays all experience which has unity as well as an impetus toward some sort of closure as aesthetic. Even "thinking-" 
       
        If a conclusion is reached, it is that of a movement of anticipation and culmination, one that finally comes to completion. A "conclusion" is no separate and independent thing; it is the consummation of a movement........Hence an experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality..............the experience itself has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through orderly and organized movement. What is even more important is that not only  is this quality a significant motive in undertaking intellectual inquiry and in keeping it honest, but that no intellectual activity is an integral event (is an experience), unless it is rounded out with this quality........In short, esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experience since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete (38).
      Both Gadamer and Dewey's understanding of experience is that it is ongoing, integrative, and constitutive. For Gadamer, genuine experience is hermeneutical, that, is, recursive and self-reflective, in that it is constitutive of knowledge, but also functions to provide an individual with "a new horizon within which something else can become an experience for him" (Gadamer, 354). Dewey prefers to speak of experience as constitutive of meaning, a notion with which I'm sure Gadamer would agree. However, both men do speak of the negative aspect of experience; that is, that each new experience is not simply added to previous experiences, but, rather, results in a restructuring of previous experiences. As Dewey says- "For 'taking in' in any vital experience is something more than placing something on the top of consciousness over what was previously known. It involves reconstruction which may be painful" (Dewey 41). Gadamer also speaks of this "reconstruction-" 
       
        This latter- 'experience' in the genuine sense- is always negative.  If a new experience of an object occurs to us, this means that hitherto we have not seen the thing correctly and now know it better. Thus the negativity of experience has a curiously productive meaning. It is not that we see through a deception and hence make a correction, but we acquire a comprehensive knowledge (Gadamer,  353).
      But finally, for both thinkers, the most important part of the nature of an experience is that it is, "like breathing....a series of intakings and outgivings" (Dewey, 56), with moments of rest, of reflection, in between, but nonetheless a continuous "undergoing" which was prepared for through previous experience. But it also makes possible each next experience. "The truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience. That is why a person who is called experienced has become so not only through experiences but is also open to new experiences.... The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself" (Gadamer,  355). 

      2. Clifford Geertz,  The Interpretation of Culture  (New York:Basic Books, 1972)  45, 50. 

      3. Jerome Bruner,  Actual Minds, Possible Worlds   (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,  1986 )  123. 

      4. Geertz also applies his interpretive anthropology to art in the essay "Art as a Cultural System"  (Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology, New York: Basic Books, 1983), which I find to be a very clear expression of some of the issues I deal with further on in the text. 
       

        To some degree art is everywhere talked about in what may be called craft terms....This is especially true in the West where subjects like harmony and pictorial composition have been developed to the point of minor sciences....But what is more interesting and I think more important is that.....in the West, some people have managed to convince themselves that technical talk about art, however developed, is sufficient to a complete understanding of it (95-96).
      As an anthropologist, Geertz sees art not as a set of abstracted sensibilities, but rather, as a cultural system rendered through signs and symbols which serves the purpose of representing to ourselves how we feel- "For Matisse, as is no surprise, is right: the means of an art and the feeling for life that animates it are inseparable" (98).  Preferring to think of art as primary documents that are the embodiment of societal conceptions seeking expression, Geertz sees the commonality among all the arts in all the places that one finds them in the fact that "certain activities everywhere seem specifically designed to demonstrate that ideas are visible, audible, and- one needs to make up a word here- tactible, that they can be cast in forms where the sense, and through the senses the emotions, can reflectively address them" (119). As a cultural system, art therefore functions in terms of the models of- models for dynamic- - 
       
        One could as well argue that the rituals, or the myths, or the organization of family life, or the division of labor enact conceptions evolved in paintings as that painting reflects the conceptions underlying social life..... Like the incised lines on Yoruba statues, the color ovals in Abelam paintings are meaningful because they connect to a sensibility they join in creating...... 
                  Whatever the innate capacities for response to sculptile delicacy or chromatic drama, these responses  are caught up in wider concerns......and it is this encounter with the locally real that reveals their constructive power. The unity of form and content is, where it occurs and the degree it occurs, a cultural achievement, not a philosophical tautology   (101-102).
      5. The phrase dialogical principle  is most closely associated with the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin. However, the notion that language, and more importantly, dialectic, plays the fundamental constitutive role in the creation of both the individual and the community has been expressed across disciplines by any number of thinkers;  note Wittgenstein's language games, Hiedegger's stance, Gadamer's conversation, Harre and Gillett's discursive psychology, Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphors, Kuhn's paradigms, Vygotsky's world structures, Feyerabend's science talk, and so on. Simply put, "Being that is understood is language" (Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960).  Or as Bakhtin puts it, "All understanding is dialogical." 
       
        The signification of discourse and the understanding of this signification by the other (or by others).....exceed the boundaries of the isolated physiological organisms and presupposes the interaction of several organisms, which implies that this third component of verbal reaction has a sociological character........ No utterance can in general be attributed to the speaker exclusively; it is the product of the interaction of the interlocutors, and, broadly speaking, the product of the whole complex social situation in which it has occurred.   (as quoted in Mikhail Bakhtin:The Dialogical Principle by Tzvetan Todorov, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1984.) (30)
      The extreme of this position  is that intersubjectivity precedes subjectivity. The scope of this paper does not allow for an exploration of the disprovability of this position; however, even assuming a moderate version, that all knowledge is dialectically created, does require pointing out that many of the refinements that have been launched from this position include an acknowledgment that discourse may be construed as all symbol systems, that is, that we engage dialectically with not only others but paintings, music, literature, advertising, music videos, fashion, and, of course, performances of all kinds. Bakhtin himself makes this connection in his study of Rabelais and  the cultural act known as carnival.  But the most broadly conceived sense of performance comes out of anthropology and most particularly, the work of Victor Turner (see also note 7). Recognizing the performative aspects of all social acts, Turner was instrumental in encouraging a move to doing fieldwork on the goings-on in the "house-yard, marketplace, and  town square...." as performances.  (I hope it is clear that this is what I, in part, had in mind in setting out on this little adventure--not merely to attend to my students as if they were performing for me- the ethnographer- but to enhance their own participation in and awareness of the performance. Stealing a bit from Jerome Bruner, Wayne Booth, Suzanne Langer, Martha Nussbaum, et al, I also tried to enhance the who you hang around with aspect of the trip. That is, if our dialectic with symbol systems is constitutive of who we are, then the content of those symbol systems does matter. [And how we choose to talk about them does matter.] My appreciation of this fact is what led me to include the performances, the four student facilitators, Dr. Karnezis, and the time spent in the Newberry ,although what the Newberry  ended up actually meaning to the students was not only a surprise but a learning experience for me.) 

      6. David H. Fisher,  "Public Art and Public Space," in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Spring/Summer, 1996) 47. 

      7. Bruce Kaperfer,  "Performance and the Structure of Meaning and Experience," in The Anthropology of Experience, ed. Victor W. Turner and Edward M. Bruner (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,  1986) 189. 

      8. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in  Basic Writings, ed. by David F. Krell  (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993)  168. 

      9. In his seminal essay "The Rites of Passage," Arnold van Gennep posited three distinct moments in a rite of passage-- separation, margin (or liminal), and aggregation. Working with this framework, Victor Turner concentrated on the liminal period, noting that "the state of the ritual subject (the 'passenger') is ambiguous," a state which has "few or none of the attribute of the past or coming state." Liminal states serve as both a source and/or place of instability,  a "betwixt and between" which allows a person to be "not this, not that," (for example, the liminal period during a male puberty rite allows a male to be both not-boy and not-man at the same time) and an economy of symbolic reference with the opposed states being represented by one object, act, or place. 

      Both Van Gennep and Turner allow that "rites de passage are not confined to culturally defined life-crises but may accompany any change from one state to another.......Rites de passage, too, are not restricted.....to movements between ascribed statuses. They also concern entry into a new achieved status, whether this be a political office or membership of an exclusive club...." 

      Viewing the field trip through this perspective, I think it is clear that for those open to the event, a rite of passage, of sorts, may have taken place. The separation state occurred with the students' boarding the cramped, uncomfortable van and pulling away from spacious, air-conditioned Sauk "signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point or a set of cultural conditions (a 'state')." That is, while  at Sauk, students are used to putting forth little effort in pursuit of knowledge (this mode often contains behaviors they have been trained into by our educational system) and often do not see themselves capable of creating knowledge. This then would be the "state" from which they were separating. 
      Entering the space of the Newberry then functioned as the liminal state-- no longer passive students, they were also not yet active learners, but rather, "betwixt and between." The Newberry itself functioned as the pivotal symbol by evoking the sense of sites used specifically for "learning" (just as Sauk is) juxtaposed with  its structural distinctiveness evoking a sense of "gravity" and "tradition," and, in its function as a research library, a site where knowledge is struggled for through one's own efforts. This was perhaps subtly reinforced by the fact that, regardless of not being allowed to use the comfort and anonymity of the associates' lounge, we still made the library "work" for us by struggling against the gaze of others and bad acoustics. 
      The return to a more stable state, but with a new sense of status or cultural state,  may have occurred for some as soon as we walked across the street to view the installment. I feel this to be true of Laurel and Jenny. For others, returning to Sauk may have foregrounded their new state or more clearly given them a site for expressing new behaviors. 
      [All quotes are taken from Victor Turner's "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,"  The Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (1964) as reprinted in Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach (fourth edition) , ed. William A. Lessa and Evon Z. Vogt, (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1979)  (234-5).] 

      10. Unfortunately, Phil did not get that particular quote or its context on tape. However, he did record a speech which captured much of what the two women were trying to express to Laurel and Jenny. The women, Joyce and Marie,  were sisters who lived two blocks from Washington Square Park. Both were dressed in shorts and cotton blouses with daytime make-up on. Laurel reported to me that when Phil asked if he could turn the camera on, Joyce, the one whose conversation appears below, sat up, crossed her legs, and turned slightly toward the camera and away from them. Laurel and Jenny both noticed that she also began speaking a little more what they called formally. On the tape, Joyce appears to be speaking toward the installation, often gesturing toward it. Her hands worked the space in front of her as if pulling the words out of the air, forcing them to work for her. There is a slight flatness to her speech. She spoke, for the most part, rapidly with few clear cut end stops. 
       
       

      Something that couldabeen...  
      money that coulda been  
      utilized to a more pr..  
      productive measures something that couldabeen....  
      uh, utilized to do something more  
      together, you know,  
      inaunified manner than, than,  -  
      manner than this here, you know. (Snaps her right hand toward the installation..)  
      I think its really a waste of a lot of material that coulda been used better.  
      you know what I'm saying?and I think it should have had a little more focus and insight than...  
      Ithinkitwasjusta spurof themoment thing hadsomemoneyallocated       letsdosomethingquickbeforetheysnatchitback...uhtype of scenario,  
      I really do.  
      I haven't seen anybody utilizeit or whatever.And nine times outaten, in this particular area,  
      you know, you get up there somebody's gonna think you a nut....  

      (Laurel: "Oh really, to go up there and do that?" Gestures toward installation)  

      Sure, sure, sure....(overtop of Laurels interjection)  
      You know, this is not a outspoken area over here, you know.  
      It used to be you know I hate to....  
      I been over here for forty years and I've watched it go through a-  
      a metamorphosis....  
      I've watched the peoples' attitudes in the community change, you know,  
      get divided over social issues, fears,  
      a lotathings that people have put in people's minds, you know,  
      about certain ethnic groups and this that and the other,  
      andIcansee  maybe  howitcanbeused to bring some kind of   camaraderie   together  
      to get somebody to do something together you know inaunified fashion,  
      but just to get up there to speak, to be speaking per se,  
      I think that's kinda facetious. (She stares at the installation)  

      NnnnI really do.  

      I think it's really a waaaaste of time. 
       
       
             
      11.  In his article "Public Art and Public Spaces" (see note 6)  David Fisher presents Suzanne Lacy's sense of what she calls "new genre public art." Lacy, who was a participant in the "Culture in Action" projects in 1994, distinguishes between "public art" as a term used "to describe sculpture and installations sited in public places" and new genre public art -- "visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diverse audience about issues directly relevant to their lives--[it] is based on engagement" (43). 

      After rehearsing and rebutting the arguments against the funding of public art, Fisher himself offers the following suggestions for a new type of public art which- 
       

        .......might move social awareness towards healing the wounds caused by unreconciled differences. 
        This art must be noticeable, demanding public attention rather than serving as an unobtrusive background for other public activities. It should be an art that seeks to represent actual differences within society  creatively rather than to depict or create a common taste. Finally, it should be a type of art not consumable as a private experience apart from the social and cultural context of its place (43).
      For the most part, I agree with both Fisher and the various voices he engages with in his article (Lacy, Seyla Benhabib, Suzi Gablik, Murray Edelman, Hannah Arendt, among others). And if we look at the two particular works that were included on our trip, each captured some, if not all, of both Lacy's and Fisher's vision. Again, however, I would point out that both still hold to a notion that "artists" make art and that the new twist occurs in asking the various communities for their input. The question I would put to both Fisher and Lacy is-- how would the quality and nature of the input change if the community that was being engaged  1) saw art as something everyone, themselves included, did, and 2) knew the "lingo," so to speak, because of their own background? This may seem to be a very naive notion. And it is certainly one that flies in the face of the "art survey" approach to the topic. But it is also one shared by a number of prominent educators and art historians and critics, not the least of whom is Rudolph Arnheim and Howard Gardner (see bibliography for representative works by Gardner and Arnheim). Whether it be because of the research  showing the cognitive value (Gardner, Rauscher, Sloboda, Seashore) of practicing the arts or because of  a deeply held sense of the cultural (in the anthropological use of the word) enrichment and constitutive powers (Arnheim, Edelman, Nussbaum, Bruner, Gadamer, Cook, Booth) of engaging with the arts, these folk persuasively argue for a reintroduction of the arts in both education and public life. 

      On this topic, I must give Joseph Beuys, already evoked, the final word-- 
       
       
       

          Everyone is an artist....I am really convinced that humankind will not survive without having realized the social body, the social order, into an artwork. 

          They will not survive.