Teaching
Learning and Teaching
We learn whatever we teach, and we teach all that we've learned, simply by going about our daily lives. Because our bodies, words, actions, attitudes, and behaviors are evidence of our education, whether that has been in a formal classroom, the family in which we grew up or one that we've begun, or the large systems and structures of culture, such as the fashion and medical industries.
Teaching happens every moment. Teaching and learning are one, and they are erotic. I define erotic as connection, the deepest and richest connection that is life force itself, so teaching reaches far beyond the imparting of facts or textual and conceptual information and far beyond any classroom. Teaching and learning exist in greetings between strangers, during dinners with friends, when buying groceries, when being alone and aware of oneself–anywhere and anytime. Spontaneous and unpredictable openings of soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body, which can happen anytime and anywhere, are especially eye-opening. Teaching and learning is a joy.
Eros, Activism, and Sweetness
I write about teaching in my book Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. The section titled Pleasure and Pedagogy communicates my passion for teaching. As I write,
The erotic is not exclusively or even necessarily sexual . . . . Most important, it encompasses relations whose potency, unpredictability, and usefulness proceed from and create the capacity for individuals' intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation, which may activate social transformation. (M/B, 175)
My teaching exists in my writing, performances, and photo works as well as in workshops and classrooms in which all of us students/instructors learn. We think in a collaborative energy about beauty, creativity, contemporary culture, and ourselves. We learn that we are agents who can transform reality. We inspire each other.
Learning and teaching are sweet; which I affirm in Monster/Beauty:
Sweet, related to Latin suadere, "to persuade," and suavis, "sweet." Pleasure and eros are the sweetness of life, . . . without which one easily grows grim and unforgiving. Pleasure is a necessary luxury, for it is the fat of education, the finest, richest part. (M/B, 213)
Studio as Classroom
My first teaching experience happened when an artist friend of mine invited me to join her in giving critiques to exhibiting artists. I was living in Chicago at the time and had begun to write art criticism, mostly about Chicago art, for local and national publications. The workshops took place in my friend's studio and in the participants' studios.
Professor
After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in History of Culture, I left Chicago in 1981 for my first full-time teaching position. I was a professor of art history at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. My specialty was contemporary art, even though my doctoral studies were in nineteenth-century art and literature.
After two years at Oberlin I moved to Tucson and taught at the University of Arizona. Once again I was the specialist in contemporary art, and I also taught studio courses in performance art, and I fell in love with both Tucson and the Sonoran Desert. A couple years later I left and taught at a few other schools before moving to Reno in 1989 to teach at the University of Nevada, Reno. While I was hired as the historian of contemporary art, the faculty there were excited that I was a performance artist as well as a scholar and critic. They liked that a colleague could bridge studio practice and academic knowledge and, unlike other schools where I'd interviewed over the years, my new colleagues actually wanted me to teach performance art as a practicing artist. Those other institutions had found it interesting that I was both a scholar and an artist, but the faculty wanted me to teach only art history.
Currently I am Professor of Art History Emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno and Professor of Practice in the School of Art at the University of Arizona.
