SPONGE: An Artistic and Pedagogical Methodology

by Hope GinsburgB.F.A., Sculpture (1996)Tyler School of Art

Submitted to the Department of Architecturein Partial Fullfillment of the Requirements for the Degree ofMaster of Science in Visual Studies

at theMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyJune 2007

@ 2007 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAll rights reserved

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May 15, 2007

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SPONGE: An Artistic and Pedagogical Methodology

by Hope Ginsburg

Submitted to the Department of Architecture on May 15, 2007in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree ofMaster of Science in Visual Studies

Abstract

This thesis introduces SPONGE, a project developed at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology between October2006 and May 2007. SPONGE is a workshop model basedon immersion, absorption and making connections. Theproject is both an artistic practice and a method for teachingand learning.

My intent in the writing that follows is to give the reader acomplete sense of SPONGE. I will begin with a narrativedescription of the first SPONGE. Once the concept ofSPONGE is clear, I will put the project in an art historicalcontext by providing a synopsis of site-specific art and socialpractice.

The current debate about the role of aesthetics in sociallybased artwork underlies my discussion of the role of the visu-al and the sensory in SPONGE. Talking about aesthetics alsoinvites an exploration of the autonomy of artistic praxis. Iwill argue that by creating a distancing framework, SPONGEavoids the dissolution of art into life, even as it celebrates

content that exists outside of a traditional art context. A spaceis thereby preserved for criticality.

With criticality comes the politics of the SPONGE, which willbe considered in terms of pedagogy. I will address the role ofthe participant and the way in which SPONGE encouragesindependent thought and the assembly of ideas.

Once SPONGE has been evaluated through the lens of aes-thetics, criticality, and pedagogy, I will put forth some thoughtson the future of SPONGE. I believe the workshop has thepotential to be adapted for use in almost any context and Ipropose that any field of inquiry may find its place in SPONGE.

I have included excerpts in this text from an earlier paperentitled "The Artist as Employee." It is from that paper, andmy desire to find a formal structure for my artwork, thatSPONGE emerged. I will conclude this thesis with what I feelis an appropriate endpoint for a project that will continue toevolve: a section on the origins of SPONGE.

Thesis Supervisor: Krzysztof WodiczkoTitle: Professor of Visual Arts

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the following people for theinstrumental contributions they have made to this project andto my time at MIT. My gratitude goes out in abundance.

Special thanks to Krzysztof Wodiczko who challenged meconstantly and guided me with brilliance, humor and com-passion. I came to MIT at the invitation of Larissa Harris andher dear friendship and steadfast support were one of thebest things about staying. To Ute Meta Bauer, who has madeall of the right decisions at just the right moments. Her guid-ance has been invaluable. To Muntadas for his incisivenessand eminently trustworthy advice. To Regina Moeller for herrazor-sharp insight and for her warmth. Thanks go to DavidMindell for embodying the multidisciplinary spirit of MIT. I amgrateful to Wendy Jacob, Julia Scher and Joe Zane for the op-portunity to assist them with their teaching and for all that theyshared outside of the classroom. The Center For AdvancedVisual Studies was a haven and a constant source of inspira-tion; thanks go to Larissa Harris, Meg Rotzel and Joe Zane forthe always-open door. Melissa Bachman, Renee Caso, Dan VanRoekel, Charles Mathis, Jim Harrington, Rebecca Chamberlain,Jack Valleli and Judy Daniels contributed inestimably to mytime at MIT. I am grateful for their enduring patience. SPONGEwould still be a glimmer in my eye if it weren't for the contribu-tions made by the participants: Mary Hale, Pam Larson, JoyPerkinson, Joanna Rodriguez-Noyola, Meg Rotzel and MonicaRush. For their ongoing belief in my work, I thank Michele Os-hima, Susan Cohen and Magda Fernandez. And for sharing herworld of marine invertebrates with me, I thank Ardis Johnston

of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. Thanks go toMarisa Jahn, Alia Farid and my peers in the Visual Arts Programfor all that they shared. And to Gena Peditto, Rachel Brailove,Adele Lebano and Nadya Nilina who gave their friendship andcounsel unwaveringly. I owe an incalculable debt of gratitudeto my mentors who have been friends and champions for theduration; thank you to Mark Dion, Joanne Greenfield, WinifredLutz, Susan Lyons, Helen Molesworth, J. Morgan Puett and PaulRamirez Jonas.

Finally, I reserve infinite gratitude for my family and my honor-ary family, whose love I rely on every day: Carol and MarvinGinsburg, Felice, Jim and Andrew McSwiggan, Sussie Ginsburg,Amy Madden, Christopher Quirk, Deidre Hoguet, Peter Walsh,Robin Sacks, Gena Peditto, Denise Markonish, Helen Gyger,Carol Derby, Mary Eisendrath, Jennifer Kollar, Jessica ManlinStrauss, Amy Moyer, Abby Miller, Mirah Zeitlyn and the entireZeitlyn and Spring Hills Farm clan. To Larissa Harris who sawme through. And to Elizabeth Schambelan, who has been theresince the fourth grade.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 9

PART I

SPONGE: LAP 12Philosophy & Metaphor 20

PART 2

Theory 34Situating SPONGE 34Aesthetics 35Critical Distance 36Pedagogy 36The Future of SPONGE 38

PART 3The Origin of SPONGE 43The Artist as Employee 43

APPENDICES

SPONGE: CPW 53SPONGE: IAP Bibliography 68SPONGE: CPW Bibliography 69

BIBLIOGRAPHY 70

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis introduces SPONGE, a projectdeveloped at the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology between October 2006 andMay 2007. SPONGE is a workshop modelbased on immersion, absorption and mak-ing connections. The project is both anartistic practice and a method for teachingand learning.

My intent in the writing that follows isto give the reader a complete sense ofSPONGE. I will begin with a narrativedescription of the first SPONGE. Oncethe concept of SPONGE is clear, I will putthe project in an art historical context byproviding a synopsis of site-specific art andsocial practice.

The current debate about the role of aes-thetics in socially based artwork underliesmy discussion of the role of the visual andthe sensory in SPONGE. Talking aboutaesthetics also invites an exploration of theautonomy of artistic praxis. I will arguethat by creating a distancing framework,SPONGE avoids the dissolution of art intolife, even as it celebrates content that ex-ists outside of a traditional art context. Aspace is thereby preserved for criticality.

With criticality comes the politics of theSPONGE, which will be considered interms of pedagogy. I will address therole of the participant and the way inwhich SPONGE encourages independentthought and the assembly of ideas.

Once SPONGE has been evaluatedthrough the lens of aesthetics, critical-ity, and pedagogy, I will put forth somethoughts on the future of SPONGE. Ibelieve the workshop has the potential tobe adapted for use in almost any contextand I propose that any field of inquiry mayfind its place in SPONGE.

I have included excerpts in this text froman earlier paper entitled "The Artist asEmployee." It is from that paper, and mydesire to find a formal structure for myartwork, that SPONGE emerged. I willconclude this thesis with what I feel is anappropriate endpoint for a project thatwill continue to evolve: a section on theorigins of SPONGE.

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PART 1

SPONGE: LAP

The first SPONGE was held during theIndependent Activities Period (IAP) 1 atMIT, from January 16th-19th 2007. Therewere seven participants including myself.Two were affiliated with the Center forAdvanced Visual Studies: Meg Rotzel,who is the Curatorial Associate, and PamLarson, a research affiliate at the Center.The group included two undergraduates:Joanna Rodriguez-Noyola, an architecturestudent, and Joy Perkinson, a materialsscience major. The two graduate studentswho participated, Mary Hale and MonicaRush, are in the Architecture Programand the Technology and Policy Program,respectively.

SPONGE was promoted with a postercampaign across campus and with a listingon the IAP website. Below is the work-shop blurb followed by a detailed descrip-tion of SPONGE.

SPONGE is an experience in total immer-sion. During each of the four absorb-a-thon days one theme will be investigatedin depth. The workshop will string togetherreef ecology, Mongolian craft, art & in-dustry, and the notion of utopia. You willsee four films (maybe 5), go on two field

trips (one to an aquarium and one to amuseum), make a pair of wool- felt shoes,and read at least one manifesto. In keepingwith the model of sponge reproduction, youwill leave the workshop prepared to lead aSPONGE of your own.

DAY ONE

Theme: Undersea

Schedule:

10:00 Welcome and introduction in theSPONGE classroom

10:30 Van departs for Woods HoleScience Aquarium. Read aloudfrom SPONGE Reader duringtrip. Topics include sponge biology,reef ecology and the history ofaquariums

12:00 Lunch in Woods Hole1:00 Tour of Aquarium3:30 Travel back to MIT and finish the

SPONGE Reader5:00 Screen The Deep

Bibliography:

Sue Hubbell, Waiting for Aphrodite*Jaap A. Kaandorp and Janet E. Kubler,The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds,Sponges, and Corals.

George Karleskint Jr., Richard Turner andJames Small Jr., Introduction to MarineBiology.Celeste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom,On the Kitsch Eperience.Ginger Strand, "Why Look at Fish?"*For full citations, please see the SPONGE:IAP Bibliography in the appendix of this docu-ment.

Film:

The Deep. Narrator David Attenborough.The Blue Planet. 2001.

SPONGE began in the gallery area adjoin-ing the graduate studios of the Visual ArtsProgram. The space was transformed intoa classroom equipped with a large bannerI'd designed with images of the ocean'sdepths, a video projector, and severalbottles of SPONGE water (that is, bottlesof water with custom-made SPONGElabels that corresponded to the images onthe banner and all promotional materi-als). My studio, just off of the main space,served as SPONGE headquarters. Thestudio space was also painted to mimic anundersea environment and stocked withall the materials and supplies we would

need for the four following days.

When everyone arrived, the participantsintroduced themselves and my role asfacilitator began. I explained a bit aboutthe goals of SPONGE and presented theworkshop schedule. Our first day wasorganized around the theme of undersealife. On that day we would learn aboutsponge biology and behavior and haveour first field trip, a visit to the WoodsHole Science Aquarium.

I rented a twelve-person passenger van totake us to Cape Cod. Each participant re-ceived a copy of the first SPONGE Readerprior to the workshop. There were twocopies in the van, along with the originalsource material. Since our goal was to ab-sorb as much information as possible, weused the time on the road to go throughthe Reader. Each participant took turnsreading aloud. By the time we arrivedat the Cape we completed a chapter onsponges from a marine biology textbook;an article on aquariums, urban renewalschemes and corporate mishandling of theoceans; and part of a text on the nine-teenth century obsession with aquariumsand replicas of the natural world.

Our tour guide at the aquarium was ma-rine veterinarian Dr. Williams. He spenttwo hours taking us through the contentsof each tank and he gave us a "backstage"tour of his fish hospital. We saw quaran-tined fish and a post-operative sea turtle,and we learned how the filtration systemfor the entire facility worked.

There is a relationship between be-ing a "sponge" and being an expert. Inthe SPONGE lexicon someone who is"spongy," like Dr. Williams, is a highpractitioner of his or her discipline , fullyimmersed in his or her field. But the termalso refers to those with a desire to learnand absorb. SPONGE makes the assump-tion that any participant can be a learnerand a teacher. The workshop structuresets up a context for the exchange andtransfer of knowledge.

On the return trip, we delved fartherinto the SPONGE Reader. We finishedanother textbook chapter on coral reefs.Every day of the SPONGE ended witha film that was connected to the day'stheme. In order to cap off our investiga-tion of undersea life, we screened DavidAttenborough's The Deep, from The Blue

Planet, a BBC series about the oceans.Joy Perkinson proclaimed that she waschanging her major from materials sci-ence to EAPS: earth, atmospheric andplanetary sciences.

DAY TWO

Theme: Mongolian Craft

Schedule:

10:00 Meet in SPONGE classroom forslide lecture about Mongoliancraft, felt show-and-tell, and wool-carding demo

11:00 Move to downstairs SPONGE forwool felt-making demo

12:00 Begin first felt project1:00 Lunch1:30 Felt-making, finish first project3:00 Design felt shoes, bag or hat.

Make templates and lay out woolbats.

3:30 Screen Genghis Blues

Bibliography:

Judith Hoos Fox and Amy Ingrid Schlegel,Pattern Language, Clothing as Communica-torBradley Mayhew, Mongolia

Paula L.W Sabloff, Modern Mongolia,Reclaiming Genghis KhanGunilla Paetau Sjoberg, New Directions forFelt, An Ancient CraftFilm:

Genghis Blues. Dir. Roko Belic. Perf. PaulPena and Kongar-ol Ondar. 1999.

Day two signaled a transition from spongeas topic to sponge as activity and meta-phor. Mongolian craft day was largelyfocused on making wool felt, which issponge-like in that each wool fiber mustabsorb water so that its scales are forcedoutward, locking with the scales of otherfibers during the felting process to makea dense textile. The process also involvesagitating the wool in (hot, soapy) water.

On the morning of the second day, I gavea lecture on the history of felt and its usesin Central Asia. I covered the table withbooks on felt and Mongolia, piles of wool,felt objects and felting tools. I also gave awool-carding 2 demo and each participanttook turns combing wool fibers onto thedrum carder. We then moved to an areaof the building that was set up as a felt-making studio.

Participants were gearing up to makea pair of wool felt shoes (though somechose to design a hat or handbag.) Butthe first project was a simple piece of feltwith an inlaid design. Everyone workedalong with my demonstration of both thefelting and fulling3 process. The groupcompleted their samples and moved on topreparing the bats for their more ambi-tious project.

At the end of the day, we moved backupstairs to watch the 1999 documentary,Genghis Blues, which I chose because themain character is a very good exampleof what I mean by being "spongy". Themovie tells the story of Paul Pefia, a BayArea musician who played with T-BoneWalker, Jerry Garcia and Bonnie Raitt inthe early 1970s. He also wrote the SteveMiller Band hit "Jet Airliner." Pefia, wholost his vision due to congenital glaucoma,lived alone in a small apartment and, afterthe loss of his wife, left only once a day togo to the corner store. Pefia spent muchof his time listening to shortwave radio.One day he heard a program on Tuvanthroat singing, a Central Asian type ofvocalizing in which one voice creates twotones simultaneously. Pefia was fascinated

by the mix of guttural and high-pitchedsounds and he began to teach himself theprocess. As he became more involved inthe singing he started to contact peoplewho knew more about it. The disc jockeywho had aired the original broadcast putPefia in touch with one of the two found-ers of the Friends of Tuva Society. (Theother founder was the physicist RichardFeynman.) Pefia also used two dictionar-ies and a vision aid called the Optacon totranslate from Tuvan to Russian to Eng-lish, and proceeded to learn the Tuvanlanguage. The more engaged Pefia got inthe exploration the closer he got to Tuvaitself. The documentary captures Pefia'seventual trip to Tuva and his friendshipwith Tuva's champion wrestler and throatsinger, Kongar-ol Ondar. By the finaleof the film, Pefia has won honors for hisperformance in the national throat-sing-ing competition. The musician immersedhimself in the world of Tuvan singing.And by doing so, he found himself in anexpanded network of friends, ideas andparts of the world. To my mind, Paul Pefiais a master sponge.

DAY 3

Theme: Art & Industry

Schedule:

10:15 Meet at Central Square T to travelto the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston

11:00 Tour of exhibition Soviet Textiles:Designing the Modem Utopia

12:30 Lunch takeout on way back toSPONGE classroom

1:00 Artist's talk on Art & Industry witha focus on the textile industry

1:45 Felt-making, felt and full woolboots, shoes or bags

3:30 Screen The Man with the MovieCamera. Continue fulling projects.

Bibliography:

ArtSpace, Factory Direct: New HavenWalter Benjamin, "The Author asProducer"Hope Ginsburg, "The Artist as Employee"Pamela Jill Kachurin, Soviet Textiles:Designing the Modern UtopiaHelen Molesworth, Work Ethic

Film:

The Man with the Movie Camera. Dir.

Dziga Vertov. 1929.

Day three was organized around thetheme of Art & Industry, with a concentra-tion on textile production. By focusing ontwo fields whose interrelationship I haveexplored deeply in my own work, I wasable to highlight the creative potential inthe merging of disciplines.

The SPONGE group met at the subway totravel together to the exhibition Soviet Tex-tiles: Designing the Modern Utopia at theBoston Museum of Fine Arts. The showwas ideal for our second field trip forseveral reasons. We were able to makea seamless segue from an ancient textilecraft to industrial textile production. And,the Mongolians fought with the Bolsheviksduring the Russian Revolution of 1917.Finally, the Soviets aimed to integrate artand design with industry and everydaylife.

One of the exhibition's organizers, AlexHuff, gave us a tour of the show. Thoughher background was not in Soviet history,Huff used her work on the show to learnall that she could about the period. Sherelayed her knowledge about the textiles

themselves, America's involvement in theindustrialization of Russia, and the way inwhich art and design became a politicaltool in Soviet culture. Before leaving themuseum, I showed the group an objectthat was behind glass in the museum'spermanent collection. It was a Turkish felthat, produced in the 1980's, and no differ-ent from the projects they would completelater that afternoon.

When we returned to MIT, I gave a slidetalk about my own work in the textileindustry. While employed by the mar-keting department of Designtex, a NewYork-based interiors textile supplier, Imade an artwork about the company'senvironmental product development. 4

The project integrated my "day job" withmy art practice. It was exhibited in twoalternative art spaces and in the companyshowroom. The materials that I developedfor the artwork became company market-ing pieces. And I gave a lecture at the of-fice to students from two art schools. Theproject was a personal example of not onlythe way art and industry can fit together,but of the way different parts of life can fittogether. Communicating that experienceof fitting is a key component of SPONGE.

After a brief discussion of my talk, I gaveeach member of the group a copy ofWalter Benjamin's seminal 1937 essay onactivist artwork, "The Author as Produc-er." That essay, which challenges engagedartists to remake systems of productionfrom within, rather than endorse politicalpoints of view from the sidelines, was themanifesto for the IAP SPONGE.

The group then went downstairs to workon their felt projects. By the end of theday, two pairs of boots were finished andtwo more were underway. A tote bagand a hat with earflaps were also near-ing completion. Industry was the day'stheme, and no one wanted to stop work-ing to screen the film, so we projectedit onto the wall of the felting studio. Thegroup watched The Man with the MovieCamera, Dziga Vertov's 1929 documen-tary on work, play and factory life and inmodern-era Soviet Union.

DAY 4

Theme: Utopia

Schedule:

10:00 Meet in SPONGE classroom to set

up for student SPONGE presenta-tions

11:00 Individual SPONGE presentations12:30 Break for Lunch1:00 Individual SPONGE presentations2:00 Utopia presentation while students

make final quick felt project3:30 Screen The Gleaners and I

Bibliography:

Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land, Fur-ther Essays Cultural and AgriculturalJoseph Beuys and Carin Kuoni, JosephBeuys in America: Energy Plan for the West-ern Man *David Bohm, On Creativity and Wholenessand the Implicate OrderAnnie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker CreekWilliam McDonough and Michael Braun-gart, Cradle to Cradle

Film:The Gleaners and I. Dir. Agnes Varda.2000.

On Utopia day, the last one of the work-shop, participants presented SPONGESof their own. The format and subjectmatter for their presentations was wide

open, though I suggested two possible ap-proaches. One was to present a workshopthat would knit together their own areasof expertise and perhaps fold in topicsthey wanted to explore. Another optionwas to make an in depth presentation onone particular topic. Each participant hadroughly 45 minutes for her presentationwith time afterward for discussion. Fol-lowing is a brief description of a few of thenext generation SPONGES.

Mary Hale, a graduate student in theDepartment of Architecture and a na-tive of Texas, began her SPONGE with amultimedia talk about Brownsville, TX,including maps, old photographs, shortvideo clips and personal documentation.She then introduced bird watching inSouthern Texas. Hale presented an imageof every bird mentioned in a JonathanFranzen piece on the subject, which sheread aloud from The New Yorker.

Monica Rush, a graduate student in theTechnology and Policy Program, led aSPONGE on Polynesian dance. Rush hadbeen a member of the Polynesian Dancetroupe at MIT since she was an under-graduate at the Institute. She gave us an

overview of the different styles of danceand she showed us their regions of ori-gin on a map. Rush then used her ownperformance videos to teach us about themeanings of the different gestures and theway every dance told a story. Each mem-ber of the Polynesian Dance troupe hadproduced her own handmade costumeand we were able to closely examineRush's. Finally, she conducted a groupHula lesson, which I captured on video-tape.

Meg Rotzel's work focuses on commu-nity organizing. For her SPONGE sheaddressed the topic from the point ofview of public art and food preparation.Rotzel made a connection between hercuratorial work at the Berwick ResearchInstitute, the Boston-based arts non-profit which she founded, her work at theCenter for Advanced Visual Studies, andthe sausage-making she did growing up inWisconsin. Collaboration is a key ingre-dient in both the production of art andfood. Rotzel presented ways of using bothpractices to build a sense of communityand to generate new types of participatoryprojects.

Joy Perkinson took to SPONGE like a fishto water. The project made sense of herdrive to soak things up and then move onto the next exploration. And it triggered anew wave of plans to absorb. Perkinsonwas already organizing a sound mixingSPONGE with her bandmates when ourworkshop wrapped up. The SPONGEplan that Perkinson presented to ourgroup included virtual flight training; tan-dem jumping; knife-throwing; Japaneserock music (based on her band Nano-sau-rus); and Hikaru dorodango, the Japanesepractice of polishing balls of mud to agemlike shine.

After the SPONGE presentations, thegroup was anxious to do more felting.Some had projects to finish and otherswanted to quickly crank out one morepiece. Meg made a clutch with a circlemotif and Monica made an iPod case witha heart. While the group worked on theirfinal projects, I talked about the Utopia ofSPONGE.

By that point in the workshop, many ofmy ideas about creativity, art making andlearning had seeped through SPONGE.But I wanted to draw on the sources in

that day's bibliography to indicate wheresome of my ideas came from, and to pointout the connections between them. Thefollowing quote by the German artist Jo-seph Beuys indicates not only a "spongy"point of view, but the way in which it con-nects to both the content of the workshopand to the other thinkers that I cited.

Art alone makes life possible-this is howradically I should like to formulate it. Iwould say that without art man is incon-ceivable in physiological terms. There is acertain materialist doctrine which claimsthat we can dispense with mind and withart because man is just a more or less highlydeveloped mechanism governed by chemi-cal processes. I would say man does notconsist of only chemical processes, but alsoof metaphysical occurrences. The provo-cateur of the chemical processes is locatedoutside the world. Man is only truly alivewhen he realizes he is a creative, artisticbeing. I demand an artistic involvementin all realms of life. At the moment art istaught as a special field which demandsthe production of documents in the form ofartworks. Whereas I advocate an aestheticinvolvement from science, from economics,from politics, from religion-every sphere of

human activity. Even the act of peeling apotato can be a work of art if it is a con-scious act.5

In the late 1970s Joseph Beuys was oneof the founding members of the GermanGreen Party with Michael Braungart.Braungart, who runs the EnvironmentalProtection Encouragement Agency inHamburg, was the chemist who workedon the environmental textiles that I ad-dressed in the Designtex project that Imentioned earlier. In the 1980s Beuysparticipated in a project about art, scienceand spirituality, which was organized byDutch journalist Louwrien Wijers. TheDalai Lama, artist Robert Rauschenbergand theoretical physicist and Buddhist Da-vid Bohm also participated in the project.[ftnt about book and video] Following is aquote by Bohm, taken from his 1996 book,On Creativity.

What is of primary significance in the pres-ent context is not a consideration of such dif-ferences in "art forms" of the creative workcarried out by different groups of people.Rather, it is that each human being is artist,scientist, and mathematician all in one, inthe sense that he is most profoundly con-

cerned with aesthetic and emotional fitting,with functional and practical fitting, withuniversal rational fitting, and more gener-ally, with fitting between his world viewand his overall experience with the reality inwhich he lives. Even in his particular workhe is always concerned with all these kindsof fitting, though, of course, with differentsorts of emphasis. So one has to begin witha general feeling for the whole of human ac-tivity, both in society and in the individual.This is to be described as art: the action offitting.6

There will be more to say about thoseideas in a later section of this paper. Butfor now, I wanted to provide a snapshotof the SPONGE Utopia. It is organizedaround each individual's deep focus onhis or her creative pursuits, a belief thatconnections are made through an immer-sive approach to inquiry, and the proposalthat there is no field or activity that cannotbe practiced artfully.

The SPONGE participants felted as wediscussed the ideas above. Each personhad been an integral part of making theworkshop and each had given a part oftheir knowledge to the rest of the group.

As they finished their projects, I went backupstairs to set up the final film, AgnesVarda's 2000, The Gleaners and I.

The film is a "spongy" exploration of theprocess of gleaning, the peasant prac-tice of going through the fields after theharvest to collect what's been left behind.Gleaning is a legally protected right inFrance and so the culture of gleaning isrich and multifaceted. In her film, Vardaexplores many different types of contem-porary characters who glean in cities, inthe countryside, in fields and in dump-sters. She expands the practice beyondthe collection of food and discovers artistsand craftspeople who make their workfrom gleaned material. Varda comes atgleaning from every angle, including thefilming of encyclopedia entries on thetopic, and Millet's famous 1857 painting,The Gleaners. The irony of a deep inves-tigation of the process of skimming or for-aging reflects some of the contradictionsin SPONGE, which contains elements ofdilettantism even as it celebrates expertise.I am comfortable with these ideas livingside by side in SPONGE. Though it isabout fitting, it is also about eccentricities,disconnects and irony. Nothing need be

left out of the SPONGE.

The second SPONGE workshop wasproduced on April 14th, 2007 for Cam-pus Preview Weekend at MIT. The goalof the SPONGE was to expose incomingfreshmen to the Visual Arts Program. Forthe sake of moving on to a discussion ofthe SPONGE philosophy and metaphor,I have placed the full description of theCPW SPONGE in the appendix of thisdocument.

PHILOSOPHY & METAPHOR

Immersion

An immersive approach is one of themainstays of SPONGE. Learning in theworkshops is experiential. Subject matteris explored from within in as many casesas possible. For example, on the day weexplored Undersea Life, we transportedourselves to the beach, spent time absorb-ing the aesthetics of the aquarium, andlearned from an expert. Knowledge wastransferred through our physical environ-ment, through social interaction, throughsight and sound and through touch. Weread texts that approached the theme ofthe sea life from several different angles.And by watching a documentary aboutcreatures at the lowest depths of theocean, we took in visuals that were almostcompletely unfamiliar. Our experiencewas aesthetic, sensory and integrated.The classroom was decorated with un-dersea motifs and our water bottles werelabeled with sea sponge designs. We weretransported.

Immersion is relative, of course. We spenta day with the material, not a lifetime.Therefore, it is important to point out thatanother way in which SPONGE supports

an immersive approach is by creating aframework to communicate the resultsof a more sustained exploration. Forexample, after spending a year on anorganic farm researching an art project,I was troubled by what form the projectshould take. I became concerned that myart practice, which had always managedto tread the boundary between art andlife, had finally slipped irrevocably intolife itself. I was without a framework forcommunicating my work. Ultimately, thepiece took the form of a monologue andslide show. However, I was disappointedthat so much of the experience had beenleft out of the final presentation.

The design of a structure that could sup-port all of the elements of my practicebecame essential. The metaphor of ab-sorption provided by SPONGE seemed toinvite the many forms in which I wantedto work.

Absorption:

SPONGE puts long or short-term investi-gations into a framework that allows themto be communicated to an audience ofparticipants or viewers. As can be seen in

the description above, the model is ableto absorb parts of my practice as diverseas performing, (through the role of fa-cilitator) teaching, creating social space,designing physical space and objects,making objects, and writing.

SPONGE also creates a context for partici-pants to absorb information and experi-ence. To be "spongy" is to be someonewho is open to absorbing new things orfamiliar things in greater depth.

SPONGE is flexible enough to absorb alltypes of content. SPONGE may be care-fully designed with great attention paid toconnections between themes but can alsobe a tool for discovering those connec-tions.

Making Connections:

In his second book, Wholeness and theImplicate Order, David Bohm exploresthe relationship between wholeness andhealth. The most important part of theconnection-making aspect of SPONGEis that participants experience the fittingtogether of disparate things in a way thatmay show how parts of their own lives

can cohere. I have been inspired byBohm's quote below:

It is instructive to consider that the word'health' in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word 'hale' meaning 'whole': thatis, to be healthy is to be whole, which is, Ithink roughly the equivalent of the Hebrew'shalem'. Likewise, the English 'holy' isbased on the same root as 'whole'. All ofthis indicates that man has sensed alwaysthat wholeness or integrity is an absolutenecessity to make life worth living. Yet, overthe ages, he has generally lived in fragmen-tation.7

However, all of this talk of wholeness begsa consideration of the flipside. Conflict,rupture, and confusion can also be in-tensely creative. SPONGE is not meant tobe so harmonious that it obviates ques-tioning or incongruity. If it is assembledcarefully, it will be provocative in itseccentricity. I think the following argu-ment, made by theorist Donna Harrawaycaptures the spirit of connection makingin SPONGE.

But it is precisely in the politics and episte-mology of partial perspectives that the possi-

bility of sustained, rational, objective inquiryrests. So, with many other feminists, I wantto argue for a doctrine and practice of ob-jectivity that privileges contestation, decon-struction, passionate construction, webbedconnections, and hope for transformation ofsystems of knowledge and ways of seeing.But not just any partial perspective will do;we must be hostile to easy relativisms andholisms built out of summing and subsum-ing parts.8

Reproduction:

Sea sponges reproduce both sexually andasexually. If a sea sponge is put into ablender, each particle will grow into anadult sponge. Sea sponge reproductioninforms the SPONGE workshop model.Though each participant is largely a co-artist for the duration of the workshop, itis essential that there is a time for wringingout, so to speak. At the end of the work-shop everyone presents a SPONGE of hisor her own. This gives everyone involvedthe chance to learn from one anotherand it creates an equality between all in-volved. It is instructive and interesting tosee how everyone interprets the SPONGE

way. And it is a fertile system for produc-ing new elements of SPONGE. It is alsomy hope that participants will take partsof SPONGE with them, and use the ap-proach to inform their own thinking andworking methods.

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PART 2Theory

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PART 2

THEORY

This section of the thesis places SPONGEin a theoretical context. Each of the sec-tions below on the historical context, aes-thetics, criticality, politics, and the futureof SPONGE are presented in synopsisform. The complexity of the topics suggesta more in-depth treatment than is given inthis document. However, it is my intentionto put forth the basic principles and to usethem as a foundation for further research.

Situating SPONGE

Many of the artists who have influencedmy work fall within the trajectory of site-specific art. In her book One Place AfterAnother: Site-Specific Art and LocationalIdentity, Miwon Kwon puts forth a histori-cal genealogy of site-specificity. I will useKwon's text to place SPONGE within anart historical context.

Kwon breaks the practice of site-specific-ity into three consecutive paradigms. Thefirst phase comprises works that respondto the physical or phenomenologicalaspects of a site. Work during this period,which dates from the late 1960s, investi-gates surrounding architecture, lighting,

and dimensions of the space. It is inte-grated with the site, rather than function-ing autonomously in a place. LawrenceWechsler's Seeing is Forgetting the Nameof the Thing One Sees describes RobertIrwin's site specific practice, which hasbeen an influence on my work. Irwin ismeditative in his approach to the site ashe attentively manipulates the viewer'sexperience of the space. 9

Kwon identifies institutional critique as thesubsequent phase in site specific practice.Institutional critique responds to a "net-work of interrelated spaces and econo-mies" in the art system. Artists respondcritically to the forces behind the art mar-ket and the exhibition spaces that makeup the "institution" of art. Mierle Lader-man Ukeles, whose work falls within thatcategory, has made a strong impact onmy approach from very early on. Ukelesdeclared that "survival work-mainte-nance-and art, including her domesticwork and her art, were one."10 In herTouch Sanitation Performance (1978-1980),Ukeles shook the hand of the 8500 sanita-tion workers in the New York City Depart-ment of Sanitation. It was her first work asthe official artist in residence at the DOS."

The movement of artistic practice fromphysical spaces or institutions into adiscursive realm signals the third phase ofsite specificity This is the realm in whichI see SPONGE residing. Kwon describesthis discursive phase as follows.

Beyond these dual expansions of art intoculture, which obviously diversify the site,the distinguishing characteristic of today'ssite-oriented art is the way in which the artwork's relationship to the actuality of a loca-tion (as site) and the social conditions of theinstitutional frame (as site) are both subordi-nate to a discursively determined site that isdelineated as a field of knowledge, intellec-tual exchange, or cultural debate. Further-more, unlike in the previous models, this siteis not defined as a precondition. Rather, it isgenerated by the work (often as "content"),and then verified by its convergence with anexisting discursive formation.2

The work in this third classification ceasesto be a "noun/object" and is, rather, a"verb process", according to Kwon. Theartwork is not bound to its site by physi-cal permanence. It is a fleeting situation,meant to be experiential and unrepeat-

able." This type of work, which may bereferred to by terms as varied as commu-nity-based, dialogical, relational, collab-orative or research-based, places artisticpractice in the realm of the social. 14

Claire Bishop, an art theorist and critic,who has written on socially based work,described this type of practice in her 2006Artforum piece, The Social Turn: Collabora-tion and its Discontents:

This mixed panorama of socially collabora-tive work arguably forms what avant-gardewe have today: artists using social situationsto produce dematerialized, antimarket, po-litically engaged projects that carry on themodernist call to blur art and life.15

Bishop's text is a critical analysis of socialpractice that calls for a method of evalu-ating work in aesthetic terms. As Kwonobserved in her book, aesthetics tendto vanish with physical sites as artworkdematerializes into social space. Kwondescribes strategies that, in their resistanceto commodification become, "aggressivelyantivisual-informational, textual, exposition-al, didactic-or immaterial altogether."16

This move away from the visual is aconcern that I have aimed to addressin SPONGE. The following section onSPONGE and aesthetics explores the issuefurther.

Aesthetics

In "The Social Turn: Collaboration and itsDiscontents", her 2006 article in Artforummagazine, author Claire Bishop lamentsthe standard that measures contemporarycollaborative practice by its social impactinstead of the its success at synthesizingthe sociaVpolitical and the aesthetic.17She responds to an argument that "dia-logic" art should be treated as an aestheticform with the following:

In Conversation Pieces, Kester argues thatconsultative and "dialogic" art necessitatesa shift in our understanding of what artis-away from the visual and sensory (whichare individual experiences) and toward"discursive exchange and negotiation." Hechallenges us to treat communication as anaesthetic form, but, ultimately, he fails todefend this, and seems perfectly content toallow that a socially collaborative art projectcould be deemed a success if it works on the

level of social intervention even though itfounders on the level of art.'8

This debate has became increasingly im-portant to me as I have worked to designa practice that satisfies my desire to makeobjects, design spaces, and communicatevisually. As I move farther into the realmof the discursive, I do not want the visualelements of my work to be reduced todocumentation or detritus.

Furthermore, it is important to methat there be a way of communicatingSPONGE to viewers who are not work-shop participants. As such, I designedSPONGE to take place in two phases,the experiential and the perceptual. Byplaying with the word workshop, I cantreat the project as both a happening (theworkshop as an intensive course), and asa site (the workshop as a space of produc-tion). The "headquarters" developed foreach SPONGE becomes an installationthat can be activated for later viewers.

Along with putting aesthetics at risk, art'sdisappearance into the realm of the socialmay also sacrifice criticality. In the follow-ing section on critical distance, I discuss

the way SPONGE negotiates the presenceof "everyday" content without becomingeveryday life itself.

Critical Distance

The dissolution of art into social praxisis part of the discourse of the historicalavant-garde. In late-capitalist society,however, when everyday life is saturatedwith the products of the culture industry,art dissolves into life at the expense ofcriticality. In his book Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger argues that preservingart's autonomy is the only way to keep acritical perspective. The following pas-sage, in which Burger references Marcuse,sheds light on this issue:

For the (relative) freedom of art vis-b-vis thepraxis of life is at the same time the condi-tion that must be fulfilled if there is to be acritical cognition of reality. An art no longerdistinct from the praxis of life but wholly ab-sorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticizeit, along with its distance. During the timeof the historical avant-garde movements,the attempt to do away with the distancebetween art and life still had all the pathosof historical progressiveness on its side. But

in the meantime, the culture industry hasbrought about the false elimination of thedistance between art and life, and this alsoallows one to recognize the contradictori-ness of the avant-gardiste undertaking."

Though SPONGE provides immersive ex-posure to disciplines that exist beyond ar-tistic praxis, it nevertheless creates a framethrough which those contexts may beconsidered. I propose that content whichis pulled into SPONGE can be viewedwith increased perspective. Additionally,relationships created by the connection-making function of SPONGE may lead tonew insight and approaches.

SPONGE and Pedagogy

In the March 2007 issue of Artforum,which was dedicated to the work ofJacques Ranciere, Bettina Funcke intro-duces the French philosopher's call forformal structures in art that can be put topolitical ends.

Ranciere claims that the truly political ap-proach for art today is to engage popularculture and countercultures in terms of"the capacities they set in motion" rather

than the images they offer. In other words,we must learn to create formal structureswithin which one may operate with anar-chic equality. Art can be a response to theinequality of inherited hierarchies, whetherthe systems of art history or those of a domi-neering popular culture; it can break themdown and propose new connections, acti-vating previously overlooked capacities.20

I have already shown that SPONGE main-tains a critical distance from its subjectmatter. But along with the potential toshift our perspectives on preexisting condi-tions, what purpose can SPONGE serve? Ipropose that the project be considered interms of what it may add to the discourseof pedagogy.

SPONGE mobilizes a method of teachingand learning that allows participants tobe co-creators of their experience. The"wringing out" component of SPONGE,which asks participants to teach aSPONGE to the rest of the group, createsequality between the participants and be-tween the participants and the facilitator.SPONGE exposes participants to a methodfor configuring their own ideas and forinitiating their own independent projects.

And, based on the SPONGE reproductionmodel, those participants may carry theapproach into expanding circles of theirpeers. SPONGE embraces the notion thatindividual creative emancipation is es-sential for effecting change at the societallevel.

There is a relationship between pedagogyand performance, as Jacques Ranciereobserves in his 2004 lecture, The Emanci-pated Spectator. Ranciere built the lecturearound an earlier work of his entitledThe Ignorant Schoolmaster, which toldthe story of the early nineteenth centuryFrench schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot.Jacotot asserted that "an ignorant personcould teach another ignorant person whathe did not know himself, proclaiming theequality of the intelligences, and callingfor intellectual emancipation against thereceived wisdom concerning the instruc-tion of the lower classes."2' Ranciere'semancipated spectator may be a studentor an audience member or the viewer ofan artwork. Each of those positions cor-relates with the participants in SPONGE.I would like to draw upon Ranciere'swriting to shed light on what I see as theparticipant's role as co-creator or transla-

tor in the workshop:

Artists, like researchers, build the stagewhere the manifestation and the effect oftheir competences become dubious as theyframe the story of a new adventure in a newidiom. The effect of the idiom cannot beanticipated. It calls for spectators who areactive interpreters, who render their owntranslation, who appropriate the story forthemselves, and who ultimately make theirown story out of it. An emancipated com-munity is in fact a community of storytellersand translators.

The assumption in SPONGE is that anyparticipant can be both learner andteacher. The workshop structure sets upa place for the exchange and transfer ofknowledge. My definition of the word"spongy" is twofold. The "spongy" per-son is both an expert and someone whodesires knowledge. SPONGE embracesRanciere's principle of the equality of theintelligences, described by the author asfollows:

The common power is the power of theequality of intelligences. This power bindsindividuals together to the very extent that

it keeps them apart from each other, it isthe power each of us possesses in equalmeasure to make our own way in theworld. What has to be put to the test by ourperformances-whether teaching or acting,speaking, writing, making art, etc.-is not thecapacity of aggregation of a collective butthe capacity of the anonymous, the capac-ity that makes anybody equal to everybody.This capacity works through unpredictableand irreducible distances. It works throughan unpredictable and irreducible play of as-sociations and dissociations.3

This point of view requires the facilitatorof SPONGE and the participants to remaincognizant that the effect of their teachingis unknowable.2 The unpredictability ofthe outcome of a SPONGE is to my mind,one of the most exciting aspects of theworkshop.

This emancipation, or acknowledgment ofevery individual's propensity to think forhim or herself, harmonizes with ImmanuelKant's notion of enlightenment: the cour-age to use one's own reason.25 It is thatindividual enlightenment which paves theway to an enlightened society. In Kant'swords:

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As nature has uncovered from under thishard shell the seed for which she mosttenderly cares-the propensity and vocationto free thinking-this gradually works backupon the character of the people, who there-by gradually become capable of managingfreedom; finally, it affects the principles ofgovernment, which finds it to its advantageto treat men, who are now more than ma-chines, in accordance with their dignity.26

The Future of the SPONGE

Though SPONGE has been incubated inan academic environment, the future ofthe project lies in its ability to adapt to dif-ferent contexts, participants and fields ofinquiry. I put forth the project as a meth-odology for artistic practice and pedagogy.SPONGE is catalytic and reproducible.The practice is not designed for my usealone. I offer the method to anyone whowishes to explore it.

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PART 3

THE ORIGIN OF SPONGE

SPONGE grew out of a model that Iarticulated for my practice between myfirst and second years of graduate school.That model, entitled The Artist as Employ-ee, was built around my work on environ-mental product development in the textileindustry and the way I integrated my jobwith my artwork.

Here I will summarize The Artist as Em-ployee in order to explain how it gave wayto SPONGE, and also include relevantexcerpts from the paper itself.

The Artist as Employee practice is a two-part method of artistic production that takesplace in the corporate office and in the stu-dio. While the job in industry, the mainstayof the practice, allows for direct influence inthe move toward environmentally sustain-able manufacturing, the ancillary studiopractice has the role of critically observingthe work in industry and of translating thoseobservations into strategies for effectingchange. The studio is also the place wherethe project is documented and visual artand artifacts are produced.

Like SPONGE, The Artist as Employeepractice addresses politics, aesthetics, and

the production of artwork that is situatedat a critical distance from everyday life.Though I was invested in the model, Ineeded to resolve a way to work with it atMIT. Teaching a course seemed to be alogical way to set up a dynamic betweenmy studio practice and engaged work atthe Institute. MIT's winter term, the Inde-pendent Activities Period, was the idealcontext to conduct my experiment.

In my conversations with visiting professorRegina Moeller, it became clear that theproject needed to take a form differentfrom that of a standard course. Duringone conversation in particular, I shiftedgears to say something about how I'dcome to MIT to be a sponge and that Ireally just wanted to absorb informationduring my time there. Regina perked upat the idea of the sponge, and we sharedan "a-ha moment". The metaphor dove-tailed with my conceptual concerns aboutimmersion and absorption, and it carriedwith it visual and thematic associationsthat I was excited to pursue.

The Artist as EmployeeHal Foster opens his 1996 essay "The Art-ist as Ethnographer" with a pithy recapof "The Author as Producer", WalterBenjamin's essential 1934 text on politi-cally engaged art. To paraphrase Foster,Benjamin insists that the advanced artist ofthe left needs to do more than just dem-onstrate the correct literary tendency toparticipate in the class struggle. The artistmust directly intervene in the means ofartistic production. For Benjamin, bour-geois culture is transformed only when thetechniques of traditional media are revo-lutionized.

Foster goes on to update Benjamin's "TheAuthor as Producer" model by proposingthat the socially marginalized worker hasbeen replaced by the culturally marginal-ized "other" as the beneficiary of the activ-ist artist's labor. Through the then-prevail-ing lens of identity politics, he outlines thedanger faced by activist artists of furthermarginalizing their subjects through theprocess of "over-identification." To ad-dress that danger, Foster offers up the ideaof critical distance. By producing "paral-lactic work that attempts to frame the

framer as he or she frames the other,"27

the artist can achieve the correct distancefrom his or her subject.

Today, ten years after Foster's "The Art-ist as Ethnographer", forms of critical art,described by terms as varied as "dialogic,""relational," "research-based" and "col-laborative," have come under attack notonly for their lack of critical distance, butalso for their abandonment of aesthetics.In "The Social Turn: Collaboration and itsDiscontents", a recent article in Artforummagazine, author Claire Bishop lamentsthe standard that measures contemporarycollaborative practice by its social meritinstead of considering the work's successat synthesizing the sociaVpolitical and theaesthetic. To quote Bishop: The former[aesthetes] at their most extreme wouldcondemn us to a world of irrelevant paint-ing and sculpture, while the latter [activ-ists] have a tendency to self-marginalize tothe point of inadvertently reinforcing art'sautonomy, thereby preventing any produc-tive rapprochement between art and life. Isthere ground on which the two sides canmeet?28

It is with Bishop's repurposing of that time

honored question that I'll close my briskprecis of politically-based art. For myintent here is not to introduce a discussionof activist art in general, but rather to pro-vide the theoretical framework that hasbeen instrumental in the rebuilding of myown artistic practice, a practice in whichI've long since grappled with the so-calledboundary between art and life.

For almost a decade my work on environ-mental product marketing and researchand development in the textile industryand my work as an artist have emergedside by side. Though at times I've cre-ated a dynamic between the two,29 moreoften than not I've been conflicted aboutwhich activity should take precedent overthe other, since each fulfills an importantset of needs. Working in industry hasgiven me a concrete understanding of theimpact of manufacturing on the environ-ment; the way products are made; anda behind-the-scenes view of how busi-ness ticks. It has also allowed me to playa participatory role in the transformationof business as it responds to the currentenvironmental crisis. My art life is whereI've protected the space for criticality andfor my own hands-on production. It is

within the art context that I've been fo-cused on the larger cultural issues at stakein "green" business: the need for a radi-cal environmentalism within industry, theconstruction of identity through consum-ing, and the need for skepticism about thefalse or exaggerated claims of the mar-keting machine. Projects I've producedaround those issues have taken the formof video, performance, installation andsculpture.3 0

And so, with that bit of background inplace, I'd like to pull Benjamin, Foster andBishop back into the discussion to showhow working with their ideas has allowedme to construct a new version of mypractice that takes full advantage of thesedivergent pursuits. The Artist as Employee'relies on one key contribution from eachof the thinkers above. From Benjamin, Itake the idea of active intervention intosystems of production. From Foster it isthe artist's need to establish the correctdistance from his or her subject and fromBishop it is the preservation of aestheticswithin politically based practice. Now thatthe concepts of activism, critical distanceand aesthetics have been identified, I canuse them to understand the different ele-

ments of my practice in order to come upwith an effective configuration. Thoughthe connections are established here in anutshell, they will be expanded upon be-low. In short, Benjamin's producer modelbecomes a way of understanding my envi-ronmental work within industry. Foster'sidea of critical distance speaks to the ques-tioning of the social and cultural issuesin business world. And Bishop's call forpreserving the aesthetic within a politicallybased practice resonates with my desireto communicate discoveries through theproduction of objects of my own.

So what configuration do these particularforms of activism, criticality and visual pro-duction suggest? I propose a practice thattakes place in two sites: the corporationand the studio. The primary site, the cor-porate office, becomes the activist terrain,the place of transformative intervention.The secondary, or supporting site is the artstudio. It provides the space for critical re-flection on the issues in industry. It is alsothe place where strategies for representingthe project are developed and visual re-cords and art objects are produced.Whilethe job in industry, the mainstay of thepractice, allows for direct influence in the

move toward environmentally sustainablemanufacturing, the ancillary studio prac-tice has the role of critically observing thework in industry and of translating thoseobservations into strategies for effectingchange. The studio is also the place wherethe project is documented and visual artand artifacts are produced.

In order to begin my discussion of activismin the artist as employee project, I look toBenjamin's call to arms in the "The Authoras Producer": Instead of asking: what is theattitude of a work to the relations of produc-tion of its time? Does it accept them? Is itreactionary-or does it aim at overthrowingthem? Is it revolutionary?-instead of thisquestion, or at any rate before this question,I should like to propose another. Ratherthan asking: what is the attitude of a workto the relations of production of its time? Ishould like to ask: what is its position inthem? 2

It is not without irony that my proposedresponse to Benjamin's version of engagedpractice is a corporate job. But becausethe notion of obliterating the "dominantapparatus of capitalism" is itself obsolete,I think that a successful model for effect-

ing change in industry will have to be onein which industry also stands to gain. Inshort, though Benjamin's objective maybe anachronistic, his demand for artisticintervention could not be timelier. Nowa-days business and manufacturing practicesare quite literally destroying life on earth.

It is no secret that the destruction of theenvironment is a global crisis. One needlook no further than the supermarketcheckout line to find mainstream maga-zines like Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Voguedevoting entire issues to the matter. Forthe sake of context, I will illustrate thepoint here with an alarming passage takenfrom entrepreneur and environmentalistPaul Hawken's book The Ecology of Com-merce: Given current corporate practices,not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, orindigenous culture will survive the globalmarket economy. We know that everynatural system on the planet is disintegrat-ing. The land, water, air, and sea havebeen functionally transformed from life-sup-porting systems into repositories for waste.There is no polite way to say that business isdestroying the world.33

Because reversing the trend toward

environmental devastation is dependenton the radical remaking of industry, it isprecisely to that end that engaged workmust be directed. As I started with a grimpicture, I turn back to Hawken for a ral-lying cry that offers a hint of optimism: Ifbusiness is prepared to reexamine its under-lying assumptions and listen to ecologistsbotanists, toxicologists, zoologists, wildlifemanagement experts, endocrinologists,indigenous cultures, and victims of indus-trial processes, without the selective filter ofits internal rationale and biases, it will notonly fulfill its own agenda of contributingto society by providing products, jobs, andprosperity, but also initiate a new era ofecological commerce, more promising andultimately more fulfilling than the industrialage that preceded it.3

Naturally, I hold the firm opinion that art-ists have something to offer to the strug-gle. In an effort to put my own abilities towork, I must find a situation in businessthat is both appropriate and useful. At thisearly stage in the project, I have the fol-lowing parameters in mind. The practiceshould be situated in a company that is ei-ther doing important environmental workor in the process of launching environ-

mental initiatives. Given my fascinationwith consuming, identity construction,lifestyles and marketing, I will aim at aconsumer or design-driven product com-pany. I think it would be best to engagea large company with its own manufac-turing facilities, and an expansive supplychain and distribution system to maximizethe impact of incremental change. It willalso be important to find a community oflikeminded colleagues with whom to joinforces.

The project can be launched from a vari-ety of positions. Many product companieshave employees whose job it is to spotcultural trends and translate them intonew product categories. There are alsoroles that involve the interpretation anddevelopment of environmental standardsfor industry. Those standards, which ad-dress issues such as chemical and materialinputs, water and energy use, disposal andsocial equity, are an important part of theprocess of industrial change. Finally thereare project managers who work directlywith outside environmental consultan-cies to develop strategies for optimizingprocesses at the company. Any of thosepositions would offer influence over mate-

rial improvements, standards of evaluationand communication in the marketplace.

The success of the project will be de-pendent on the way I navigate withinthe company and negotiate the politicsof the office environment. The projectrequires both risk and caution and will bestrongly reliant on communication skills.Finally, the force behind my ability to ef-fect change will be a critical perspectiveon the actions of the company and thecultural context in which it operates.

Whether or not it is possible to achievethat kind of distance in the face of capital-ist enterprise is a longstanding debate inthe field of cultural theory.3 5 However, forthe purpose of my argument, I take theposition that critical distance is in fact pos-sible and that it is an artist's task to main-tain it. In his "Whatever Happened toPostmodernism?" text, Foster puts it thus:We can, however, make value judgmentsthat, in Nietzschean terms, are not onlyreactive but active-and, in non-Nietzscheanterms, not only distinctive but useful. 6

I turn to Foster and his ethnographerparadigm to frame the idea of critical

distance in the artist as employee practice.The key distinction between this practiceand the ethnographer model is the char-acter of the "other" that is being engaged.In the case of the artist as ethnographer,activist art is put in service of marginalizedsocial communities. Therefore distance isneeded to prevent the further marginal-ization of the subject by the artist's overi-dentification. Howeverwhen the "other"is industry, marginalization does not enterthe discussion. But the likelihood of losingperspective or becoming absorbed bycorporate culture is no less of a threat. AsI attempt to negotiate this role, I will relyon the studio practice to serve as a criticaloutpost and an incubator of new ideas.

Here I end my excerpt of the Artist asEmployee. SPONGE was my response asan artist to the questions and challengesraised above. MIT was the project's pri-mary physical, institutional, and discursivesite, taking the place of the theoreticalcorporation discussed above. SPONGEforegrounded the kind of acquisition anddissemination of new knowledge that myprevious projects also demonstrate, butthis time I was at a premier research insti-tution also known as a formal and infor-

mal pioneer of hands-on learning (with itsIndependent Activities Period, its Under-graduate Research Opportunity Program,and hacker ethos) not to mention itsstudents for whom learning is a genuinepassion. In other words, MIT was a naturalplace to reflect on, theorize, consolidate,and experiment with the results of years'worth of "spongy" practice.

ENDNOTES

1. The Independent Activities Period takesplace during the month of January at MIT.During that "winter term" students, staffand faculty may offer classes in almost anysubject imaginable. Those affiliated withthe Institute may take classes for credit insubjects like special relativity or participatein non-credit activities like salsa dancing,financial planning or SPONGE.

2. Carding is the process by which wool iscombed so that all of the fibers are runningin the same direction. After sheep aresheared and the wool is cleaned, the fibersare carded so that they may be felted orspun into yarn.

3. Fulling is the second phase of the felt-ing process. One the fabric has beenmade into felt, it must be fulled to achievestrength. A common fulling method is toroll the fabric repeatedly, which causes thefibers to twist and lock further and resultsin shrinkage and increased density. Thefulling process may also involve poundingor trampling.

4. The artwork, Designtex, Climatex@Lifecycle'", 2001, was completed when I

worked in the marketing department ofDesigntex, a textile company that devel-oped the first 100% biodegradable com-mercial upholstery. Struck by the artfulnessof the company's project, I decided toreframe it for presentation in an art con-text to challenge received notions aboutthe corporate. A compost bin/displayunit showed the fabric at every stage ofits lifecycle, from wool to yarn to wovengoods to edge trimmings to felt. Inside thecompost compartment, redworms turnedthe fabric back into soil. Information sheetsthat told the Climatex Lifecycle story weremade available to viewers, along with mybusiness cards. The piece moved fluidlybetween art institutions and the companyshowroom. The information sheets that Idesigned for the project became officialcompany marketing materials. When thecompany hosted a film screening at theGuggenheim about their environmental,the Designtex, Climatex@ Lifecycle'" projectwas exhibited there for the evening. (Itshould be noted that Designtex, the com-pany celebrated by the work, is now a ma-jor distributor of wallcovering made fromvinyl, a highly toxic material that is knownto be the most insidious type of plastic.)For more information about related proj-

ects, I refer the reader to:http://www.hopeginsburg.com.

5. Beuys, Joseph and Kuoni, Carin. JosephBeuys in America: Energy Plan for theWestern Man. New York: Four Walls EightWindows, 1990.

6. Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York:Routledge Classics, 1996. 105-106.

7. Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Impli-cate Order. New York: Routledge Classics,1980. 3.

8. Harraway, Donna. "Situated Knowl-edges: The Science Question in Feminismand the Privilege of Partial Perspective."Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 584-585.

9. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another,Site Specific Art and Locational Identity.Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002. 3.

10. Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in PublicArt. Cambridge:The MIT Press, 2000. 295.

11. Ibid., 296.

12. Kwon, Miwon. One Place After

Another, Site Specific Art and LocationalIdentity. 26.

13. Ibid., 24.

14. Bishop, Claire. "The Social Turn: Col-laboration and its Discontents." ArtforumFebruary 2006. 179.

15. Bishop, "The Social Turn: Collabora-tion and its Discontents." 179.

16. Kwon Miwon. One Place After Another,Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. 24.

17. This language also appears in mypaper "The Artist as Employee" which isincluded in its entirety at the end of thisthesis.

18. Bishop, "The Social Turn: Collabora-tion and its Discontents." 181.

19, Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press, 1984.

20, Funcke, Bettina. "Displaced Struggles."Artforum March 2007. 284.

Ranciere, Jacques. "The EmancipatedSpectator." Artforum March 2007. 271.

22. Ibid., 280.

23. Ibid., 278-279.

24. Ibid., 269.

25. Kant, Immanuel. "What is Enlight-enment?" Berlinische Monatsschrift. De-cember 1784. Reprinted in Foucault,Michel. The Politics of Truth. Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2007. 7.

26. Ibid., 19.

27. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real.Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996, 203.

28. Bishop, Claire. "The Social Turn: Col-laboration and its Discontents." ArtforumFebruary 2006, 180.

29. See endnote number 4 for a descrip-tion of the artwork, Designtex, Climatex@Lifecycle", 2001.

30. For more information about relatedprojects, I refer the reader to:

http://www.hopeginsburg.com.

31. I attribute the origins of the title TheArtist as Employee to Walter Benjamin,Hal Foster and Helen Molesworth, whoin Work Ethic, her 2003 exhibition andcatalog about artistic labor, divided theartwork into four categories: Artist as Man-ager, Artist as Manager and Worker, Artistas Experience Maker and The Artist Triesnot to Work.

32. Benjamin, Walter. "The Author asProducer." The Essential Frankfurt SchoolReader. Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Geb-hardt. New York: Urizen Books, 1978. 257.

33. Hawken, Paul. The Ecology of Com-merce. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. 3.

34. Ibid., 9.

35. Foster's "Whatever Happened toPostmodernism" essay in The Return of theReal, offers several good leads for explor-ing the issue further.

36. Foster, Hal. Cambridge: MIT Press,1996, 226.

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APPENDICES

SPONGE: CPW

A Salty, Sour, Bitter and Sweet Workshop

SPONGE is an experience in total immer-sion. In one absorb-a-thon afternoon, youwill make a cast of your tongue, design anice-cream flavor, have an ice-cream-makinglesson and tasting at Toscanini's, screen onesugary film, and leave with 5 treatises ontaste.

Schedule:

2:00: Welcome & snacks. Discuss icecream flavor.

2:30: Alginate mold-making demonstration. Tongue casting. Screening ofWilly Wonka & the ChocolateFactory

3:30: Ice-cream-making lesson and icecream tasting at Toscanini's.

Bibliography:

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of theSenses*Gray's Anatomy: the anatomical basis ofmedicine and surgery.Kant, Immanuel. Critique of JudgmentRancatore, Gus and Epstein, Helen. "IceCream Man: 25 Years at Toscanini's" Rob-

bins, David. The Ice Cream Social.*For full citations, please see the SPONGE:CPW Bibliography in the appendix of thisdocument.

Film:

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

The second SPONGE workshop wasproduced on April 14th, 2007 for Cam-pus Preview Weekend at MIT. The goalof the SPONGE was to expose incomingfreshmen to the Visual Arts Program. Intwo and a half hours, the students workedalongside a video projection, learned tomake a wax cast from an alginate mold,and participated in a project off campus.

Seven high school seniors who have beenaccepted to MIT attended the workshop.The students came from all over the USand each was interested in participatingin the arts at MIT. The workshop beganwith a conversation in which the studentsdescribed past art projects. Their workswere as varied as the building of com-puter hardware, installations dealing withfeminism and the body, photography,and 2D digital design. Willy Wonka andthe Chocolate Factory played in the back-

ground and the group snacked on salty,sour, bitter and sweet food: olives, SourPatch Kids, bittersweet chocolate andmarshmallows

The first part of the workshop was con-ducted by VAP technical instructorCharles Mathis. The students mixed algi-nate, a material used for making dentalmolds, in small buckets. The alginate wasthen poured quickly into a small plasticcup, and the students put their tonguesinto the pink paste. After the molds set,they were filled with melted wax. Apopsicle stick was dropped into the waxto form a spoon-handle when the tongueshardened. Once each of the students hadtheir very own tongue-spoon, the groupset off to Toscanini's [ftnt] for an ice-cream-making lesson with proprietor GusRancatore.

Gus started his lesson with a discussion ofhow the SPONGE metaphor of immersionand absorption related to ice cream mak-ing. He chose tiramisu ice cream for thedemonstration because absorption is a keypart of making the flavor. Ladyfingers aresaturated with rum, cocoa, espresso andmascarpone cheese. The students were

able to take an active role in the mak-ing of the flavor. They grated chocolate,separated the ladyfingers, and scoopedthe mascarpone, all while listening to Gusexpound on the loftier elements of icecream making.

After the students' job was done, theywere set loose behind the counter foran ice cream feeding frenzy. They usedtheir tongue-spoons to scoop as much icecream as they wanted (of whatever flavorsthey chose) into paper cups. Customerslooked on with envy as we had our veryown Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryexperience. And the tongue-spoons wereas effective as they were grotesque.

At the end of the workshop, each of thestudents received a CPW SPONGE Readerto provide as much background knowl-edge for their experience as possible.The Reader, comprised of five treatiseson taste, included selections from Gray'sAnatomy and Immanuel Kant, and a bi-ography of Toscanini's owner Gus Ranca-tore. Students left with a unique spoonsculpture, a pile of literature and a fullstomach. They gained a tangible knowl-edge of wax casting and a larger sense of

how art can leave the school and studio toengage the world around it.

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SPONGE is an experience in total immersion. During each of the

four absorb-a-thon days one theme will be investigated in depth.The workshop will string together reef ecology, Mongoliancraft, art & industry, and the notion of utopia. You will see fourfilms (maybe 5), go on two field trips (one to an aquarium andone to a museum), make a pair of wool felt shoes and read atleast one manifesto. In keeping with the model of sponge repro-

duction, you will leave the workshop prepared to lead a

SPONGE of your own.

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MIT Visual Arts ProgramCamapus Preview Weekend

Saturday April 14th

2PM-4:30PM

Meet at N52-318, 3rd floor of the MIT Museum Building

SPONGE is an experience in total immersion. In one

absorb-a-thon afternoon, you will make a cast of your

tongue, design an ice-cream flavor, have an ice-creamn-

making lesson at Toscanini's, taste ice cream with a

homemade spoon, screen one delectable film, and leave

with 5 treatises on taste.

SPONGE: IAP Bibliography

MIT Independent Activities PeriodJanuary 16*-19*, 2007

Day 2: Mongolian Craft

Hubbell, Sue. Waiting for Aphrodite, Jour-neys into the Time before Bones. New York:Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

Kaandorp, Jaap A., Kubler, Janet E. TheAlgorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges,and Corals. Berlin: Springer, 2001.

Karleskint, Jr., George; Turner, Richard,and Small, Jr., James. Introduction to Ma-rine Biology. 2nd ed. California: ThomsonBrooks/Cole, 2006.

Olalquiaga, Celeste. The Artificial Kingdom,On the Kitsch Eperience. Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1998.

Strand, Ginger. "Why Look at Fish?" TheBeliever. February. 2005.

The Deep. Narrator David Attenborough.The Blue Planet. BBC. 21 Sept. 2001.

Fox, Judith Hoos and Schlegel, Amy In-grid, editors. Pattern Language, Clothing asCommunicator. Somerville: Tufts University,2005.

Genghis Blues. Dir. Roko Belic. Perf. PaulPena and Kongar-ol Ondar. Wadi Rum,1999.

Mayhew, Bradley. Mongolia. 3rd ed. Mel-bourne: Lonely Planet Publications, 2001.

Sabloff, Paula L.W editor. Modern Mongo-lia, Reclaiming Genghis Khan. Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Museum ofArchaeology and Anthropology, 2001.

Sjoberg, Gunilla Paetau. New Directionsfor Felt, An Ancient Craft. Loveland: Inter-weave Press, 1996.

Day 3: Art & Industry

ArtSpace, Factory Direct: New Haven [ex-hibition catalog]. New Haven: ArtSpace,2005.

Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Pro-ducer." Reflections. Ed. Demetz, Peter. NewYork: Schocken Books, 1978. 220-238.

Ginsburg, Hope. "The Artist as Employee."Unpublished. 2006.

Kachurin, Pamela Jill. Soviet Textiles,Designing the Modem Utopia. Boston: MFAPublications, 2006.

Molesworth, Helen. Work Ethic. UniversityPark: The Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2003.

The Man with the Movie Camera. Dir. DzigaVertov. Kino-Pravda, 1929.

Day 1: Undersea

SPONGE: CPW Bibliography

MIT Campus Preview WeekendApril 14th, 2007

Day 4: Utopia

Berry, Wendell. The Gift of Good Land, Fur-ther Essays Cultural and Agricultural. NewYork: North Point Press, 1982.

Beuys, Joseph and Kuoni, Carin. JosephBeuys in America: Energy Plan for theWestern Man. New York: Four Walls EightWindows, 1990.

Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York:Routledge Classics, 1996.

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the ImplicateOrder. New York: Routledge Classics, 1980.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.New York: Perennial Classics, 1974.

McDonough, William and Braungart, Mi-chael. Cradle to Cradle. New York: NorthPoint Press: 2002.

The Gleaners and I. Dir. Agnes Varda.Cine-Tamaris, 2000.

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History ofthe Senses. New York: Vintage Books,Random House, 1990.

Gray's Anatomy: the anatomical basisof medicine and surgery. New York:Churchill Livingstone, 1995.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment/Im-manuel Kant; translated, with an intro-duction, by Werner S. Pluhar; with aforeword by Mary Gregor. Indianapolis,Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company,1987.

Rancatore, Gus and Epstein, Helen. "IceCream Man: 25 Years at Toscanini's."Amazon.com. 2006. Retrieved April 13,2007, from http://www.amazon.com.

Robbins, David. The Ice Cream Social.Zurich, Switzerland: JRP I Ringier Kunst-verlag AG, 2004.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Dir. David L. Wolper. Warner Brothers,1971.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Produc-er." The Essential Frankfurt School Reader.Ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt.New York: Urizen Books, 1978. 254-269.

Berry, Wendell. The Gift of Good Land, Fur-ther Essays Cultural and Agricultural. NewYork: North Point Press, 1982.

Beuys, Joseph and Kuoni, Carin. JosephBeuys in America: Energy Plan for theWestern Man. New York: Four Walls EightWindows, 1990.

Bishop, Claire, "Antagonism and RelationalAesthetics." October Fall 2004.

Bishop, Claire. "The Social Turn: Col-laboration and its Discontents." ArtforumFebruary 2006.

Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York:Routledge Classics, 1996.

Bohm, David. Wholeness and the ImplicateOrder. New York: Routledge Classics, 1980.

Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde.Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1984.

Carnevale, Fulvia and Kelsey, John inConversation with Jacques Ranciere. "Artof the Possible." Artforum March 2007.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. "AThousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Scho-zophrenia." The Norton Anthology ofTheory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, VincentP, et al. New York: WW Norton & Com-pany, 2001. 1593-1609.

ElDahab, Mai; Vidokle, Anton, and Wald-vogel, Florian. Notes for an Art School.Amsterdam: International FoundationManifesta, 2006.

Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art.Cambridge:The MIT Press, 2000.

Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real. Cam-bridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

Funcke, Bettina. "Displaced Struggles."Artforum March 2007.

Genghis Blues. Dir. Roko Belic. Perf. PaulPena and Kongar-ol Ondar. Wadi Rum,1999.

Hallward, Peter and Ranciere, Jacques.

"Politics and Aesthetics: An Interview"Angelaki 8.2 (2003): 191-210.

Harraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cy-borgs: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the 1980s." The Norton An-thology of theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch,Vincent P, et al. New York: WW Norton &Company, 2001. 2266-2299

Harraway, Donna. "Situated Knowledges:The Science Question in Feminism andthe Privilege of Partial Perspective." Femi-nist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-599.

Hawken, Paul. The Ecology of Commerce.New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

Hubbell, Sue. Waiting for Aphrodite, Jour-neys into the Time before Bones. New York:Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

Kant, Immanuel. "What is Enlightenment?"Berlinische Monatsschrift. December 1784.Reprinted in Foucault, Michel. The Politicsof Truth. Los Angeles:Semiotext(e), 2007.

Karleskint, Jr., George; Turner, Richard,and Small, Jr., James. Introduction to Ma-rine Biology. 2nd ed. California: Thomson

Brooks/Cole, 2006.

Kester, Grant. "Another Turn." ArtforumMay 2006.

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Com-munity and Communication in Modem Art.Berkeley and Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 2004.

Kwon, Miwon. One Place After Another:Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity.Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

McDonough, William and Braungart, Mi-chael. Cradle to Cradle. New York: NorthPoint Press: 2002.

Molesworth, Helen. Work Ethic. UniversityPark: The Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2003.

Ranciere, Jacques. "The EmancipatedSpectator." Artforum March 2007.

Robbins, David. The Ice Cream Social. Zur-ich, Switzerland: JRP I Ringier KunstverlagAG, 2004.

Ross, Kristin. "Regime Change: Jacques

Ranciere and Contemporary Art." Artfo-rum March 2007.

Wechsler, Lawrence. Seeing is Forgettingthe Name of the Thing One Sees. Berkeley:The University of California Press, 1982.