Kevin Duong / Politics

 In principle, I try to stress “learning through making” for undergraduate students. Understanding and fabrication are two-sides of the same coin. The things we understand best are the things we make ourselves, through our own activity. That premise is obvious enough, from ancient philosophy to twentieth-century pragmatism, but implementing that premise is not always easy on an arts quad. Seminars and lecture classes communicate this pedagogical conviction in theory, but less so in practice. 

 My dream idea is to have students put together a small Surrealist exhibition at the end of Spring ‘24: photographs, collages, found objects, sculptures, poetry, or video. The Surrealists were committed to an ethics of “found objects”: the capacity of ordinary things—and their surprising juxtapositions—to carry aesthetic force. Their poetic and artistic practice tried to harness that aesthetic force and channel it towards psychological liberation from stultifying convention and, eventually, a revolution of everyday life. Hence their art and poetry emphasized, not technical expertise, but—to borrow their words—each individual’s capacity to serve as a “recording device” for collective desires and wishes.

 I plan to have students read some of the major Surrealist works together with their modernist sources. But from the beginning, I also want them to be engaged in Surrealist practice. We will dedicate a substantial amount of class time to planning, creating, and staging our own small Surrealist exhibit, populated with the various objects they create, find, and arrange over the semester. UVA has various “makers labs,” and I hope students can use these to create some objects for the exhibition—3d printed objects, video installations, audio recordings, or just photo collages and large-format prints of their poetry and verse. I want them to plan an exhibition together, the better to better understand the history of Surrealism but also to enter that history as participants of a living, if now overshadowed, tradition of radical art and politics.

 We may be able to use the space in Nau Hall atrium for the exhibit. It has sometimes been used to display, in gallery form, photographs from students. There may be better spaces suited, and if so, I hope that can be found. But the exhibition should be open to the public, positioned as something for people can stumble upon—in the spirit of the “found objects” the Surrealists so admired. 

 Budget:

 ·      Fabrication materials for sixty students (high-quality photographic printing, 3-d printing, framing, costs for mounting and displaying, approximately $100 per student, but the bigger the budget, the more we can do): $6000

·      Food/snacks for exhibition planning meetings outside of class over semester: $600

Total: $6600