For the last three years, I’ve been part of a group that
organizes and hosts an Arts & Culture Conference at the University of NorthDakota. The conference’s mission: to promote a conversation within our
university and our community about the relationship between the arts and public
life.
We hold a series of talks on campus, featuring each of our
visiting-artists (and thanks to Aristotle’s treatment of techne, we feel
confident calling all our guests artists). We feature artistic performances
each night of the conference in the downtown community—typically a concert and
a film screening. We run an art exhibit at a downtown gallery throughout the
month of October, and close the exhibit and the conference on the same evening.
We also produce a series of art prints exclusive to the conference that are
then archived in the university’s collection.
When we invite our visitors, we ask them to do three things.
First, they give a presentation or performance of some kind. Second, the sit on
a panel with the other visitors and have a conversation with each other. Third,
they visit at least one classroom. Lunches during the conference are also
reserved for students and artists.
As a result, our conference engages students inside and
outside classroom settings. It brings interesting events and art to the greater
community. It puts diverse people into conversation with each other. And if we
wanted to examine the macro-economic impact, it feeds a whole bunch of people
in area restaurants and contributes to what I can only imagine is a noticeable
uptick in the local Old-Fashioned market.
The reasons I lead with this belabored account of the
conference is two-fold. First, it is important to recognize how the conference
works to understand why I think it is such a vibrant and unique way of doing
academic work. Second, it underscores how the institutional mechanics of the
university work against that kind of work and imperil a truly interdisciplinary
approach to higher education.
When I picked up Kerri Miller, Minnesota Public Radio host
and one of our 2013 visiting artists, she asked what her background had to do
with this year’s theme, “Cultures of Curation.” The truth is, there are two
answers. One answer posits public radio, and Miller’s shows in particular, as
gatekeepers of a complex cultural environment, curators of information. The
second answer is much more interesting to me: Kerri Miller is interesting. This
story can be told about every guest we’ve brought in for the conference.
There’s a way to use a theme to justify bringing someone in, but there’s an
easier path to identifying potential visitors: by asking if they’re
interesting.
Kevin Schreck, the director of Persistence of Vision,
came because he messaged Joel Jonientz while Joel was live-tweeting The
Thief and the Cobbler during family movie night. Is Persistence of
Vision a good example of how the film The Thief and the Cobbler gets
made, shaped, and ultimately circulated? Sure. But it’s also interesting. In
addition to Miller and Schreck, this year’s conference included art critic
David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Preston of the New York Times, and artist Craig Drennen (who curated the conference exhibit, Canon Fodder).
The point I’m
trying to make, hastily and perhaps sloppily, is that a theme (like “curation”)
makes your happenings recognizable, but recognition implies familiarity. What
if you’re interested in the unfamiliar? What if you want to see what happens
when a commercial print journalist, a public radio host, a print journalism art
critic, a painter, and a filmmaker get together and have a conversation? Where
on your campus is the venue for that kind of trans-disciplinary,
trans-professional discussion?
We hear an awful
lot of chatter about the desire for an interdisciplinary university, but I’m
not sure we’ve thought about what it will look like (as much as we love what it
sounds like). I suspect the struggle is a function of wanting it to seem
familiar and predictable. I can’t say I knew what last week’s panel discussion
was going to produce. I didn’t think it would involve the filmmaker asking the
print journalist for a phone number so he could see how “Page One” gets curated.
I didn’t think it would involve the radio journalist using a metaphor of a
train window spurring on the painter to talk about John Cage’s curation of an
art museum. I didn’t think it would result in the print journalist exclaiming
that thinking alongside artists was thrilling and insightful. I didn’t know any
of those things were going to happen. When the panel wrapped, fellow planner
Joel Jonientz asked “Who knew that was going to be interesting?” We did. We
didn’t know how or why, but we had complete faith that it would be interesting.
But how to qualify
(or even quantify) interesting. Our conference attendance is fair to middling.
We had over 100 audience members at about half our events, closer to 60 for the
rest. If you divided our budget by our attendance, it isn’t a great deal. But
we also put about 40 students around lunch tables with our guests. The first
lunch, everybody ate together: artistis, professionals, undergraduates,
graduates, Art students, Communication students, English students. The second
day, the crowd broke up into smaller groups. We put visitors in classrooms
across the disciplines, we brought students from one discipline into the
classroom of another. And, perhaps most importantly, students were able to
watch and join in a conversation that acknowledged their disciplinary grounding
and then mixed it in with other disciplinary backgrounds. The artist can talk
with the radio journalist, the print journalist can talk with film-maker and
curator. A conference that secretly aims only at interesting (and it has to be
a secret, because you don’t fund aimless hunting expeditions) makes it interesting
to imagine the role of academia outside its typical structures and strictures.
And that’s all a
lot of long talk to note that the Arts & Culture Conference faces an
uncertain future. Funding is hard to come by, even harder for an event that has
trouble quantifying what it plans to do. For all of the selfless talk about
“the interesting” it is important that those involved get recognized for their
efforts, and because “the interesting” is a squirrely metric, the work gets
conflated with other speaker-series and academic conference activities on
campus. In an institution where credit, recognition, and expertise all depend
on the narrow categories of departments that tend to work against the logics of
the interesting, I’m not sure what kind of future the interdisciplinary
university has. Normally, I’d say unpredictability is “interesting,” but—in my
experience—higher education’s predilection for predictability has me thinking
otherwise.
