How to even begin…..? Like you, I am figuring out how to process being thrust into a world pandemic and learning a new normal, and as I write these words, I am entering the fifth week of the Covid-19 quarantine here in Vancouver, Canada. As an art historian and university professor, I am also facing a time of many firsts. My first time transitioning courses online, my first time invigilating remote final exams, my first time completing a book chapter without benefit of primary research (research I was supposed to complete in New York two weeks ago— yikes, can you imagine?!), my first time applying for conferences, fellowships, and planning for a field school, all of which may never happen, and my first time planning collaborative and brand new summer courses without the ability to take students to museums, studio visits, or to research in archives. I am even facing the reality of a launch for a book project I have been co-editing for the better part of four years, and without a physical audience. Many many challenges.
So why am I turning to my blog? To be sure, I reached a real point of struggle with what to do and how to deploy my website late last year, even as Avant-Guardian Musings enters its tenth year in existence. As my teaching approach evolved over the years to become more experiential, case-study focused, and even experimental in terms of adapting new non-linear and flipped classroom modalities for art historical analysis and meaning-making, the kind of “musings” I used to regularly post on this blog have entered more directly into my classroom. As such, the website has served more as a repository for targeted blog posts and open-education resources that address research, studying, and visual arts analysis. These posts remain popular, and I intend to continue creating this type of content for my students. It is also the reason this website persists.
But what happens now outside the paradigm of my face to face classroom? How do I introduce and model the case studies, musings, and unrehearsed connections that frames so much of my classroom teaching? Much has drastically changed as I am once again forced to evolve my teaching and research methods. A big part of that shift will entail migrating materials online for digital consumption along with presenting and workshopping case studies and visual culture news in the way that I used to do on this website before I all but abandoned the more traditional “sage on the stage” lecturing format.
So in the coming weeks, I will begin using my blog once again as it was originally conceived— a place of reflection and an extension of the ideas and visual materials raised in my classroom. And as much as that classroom is now, and for the foreseeable future, remote, online, and at a physical remove from the kinds of experiential and in-person dialoguing that I enjoy most with my students, I am hoping that my “thinking aloud” and visual brainstorming on this blog will serve a larger and perhaps unintended audience. More than anything else, I believe the art world has a vital and key role to play in how we make sense of this global pandemic, and in a manner that is not always immediately apparent to those who sign up for an art history class. In the spirit of the avant-garde, I am looking to entertain whatever unorthodox outcomes all of this brings.
