Two recent stories have me thinking that TDAR ought to open a Psychological Services Division. First, today’s NYTimes reports an ongoing battle on Wikipedia over the publication of all 10 plates from Hermann Rorschach’s famous Rorschach test, the ambiguous inkblots that a patient is supposed to interpret. I had no idea that these things were still used for psychological examinations, but it turns out they remain pretty important. Not only does the current Wikipedia article include the inkblots, it lists some common responses and analyses. For irate psychologists, “the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT,” according to Noah Cohen of the Times.

I love the SAT comparison for all the problems it raises. The obvious distinction is that one test is a standardized multiple choice exam and the other is an open-ended, more interpretive exercise. But the more interesting problem with this comparison, it seems to me, is that it suggests that there might be a “right” and “wrong” answer on a psychological exam, as if one could get a better or worse score. What would it mean to cheat on one of these tests?

This brings me to the second story, which I heard on the NPR show This American Life not long ago. Jon Ronson tells the story of young British guy who faked his way into a mental hospital. The man (Ronson gives him the pseudonym Tony) was heading to jail for a street fight and thought faking mental illness would get him into a cushier facility.

Tony didn’t have any answers to Rorshach inkblots, but he did have a childhood of watching horror movies full of the criminally insane. In his conversations with prison psychologists, he simply lifted Dennis Hopper’s character from Blue Velvet, then bits from Hellraiser, Clockwork Orange, and Cronenberg’s Crash.

When Tony arrived in England’s Broadmoor Mental Hospital, he realized he had made a big mistake. He was surrounded by the most violent and disturbed serial killers and pedophiles from all of the United Kingdom. But it turns out it’s a lot harder to convince people that you’re sane than it is to get them to think you’re crazy. Acting “normal” when you’re in such a horrific environment can look like a sign of insanity. Over a decade later, Tony is still in Broadmoor, long after he would have finished his prison term had he never pretended to be mentally ill.

Tony’s story is incredibly depressing, but Ronson tells it beautifully with a bit of humor. I highly recommend listening to it (free for streaming). Ronson’s basic conclusion is, “you should be careful not to tell people you’re crazy because you might turn out to be way too convincing.”

More generally, it all has me thinking about the idea of the psychiatric exam, a weird mix of traditional test-taking and total performance. In closing, I propose a TDAR exploratory commission for a possible psychiatric division, building on our findings from Test-Taking, Test-Making and the Final Exam.

So we made a cube. Ok, one step back. Here’s how we arrived at the cube’s construction. TDAR thought: what nuanced ideas could we deliver to the students? Obviously they’re smart. To tell them not to c.h.e.a.t, that’s just cliche. What if we created a temporary stress-free space in which the transmission of knowledge would take place independent of grades or evaluation? One wherein TDAR was not teaching them something, but they in fact were teaching us?

So we made a cube. We put the cube in a high-traffic area. And we invited students to step inside and teach us about ANYTHING–a favorite hobby, a little known fact, an essential high school survival skill. TDAR planned to sit in the space and take record of the lessons students offered in passing. We had no idea that it would become the center of attention that it did: over 250 students met with us.

1:09 p.m. – Just learned how to spot a WWII airplane!

12:49 p.m. – Too many updates to mention. We’ve had a few more 3-D submissions, lots of cool origami

11:45 a.m. – A teacher has decided that his class is going to teach us how many students can fit in the cube…here’s hoping the pvc piping holds out…

11:41 a.m. – We just added a 3-D object to our collection. How do we get it in the book??

11:28 a.m.- A student who taught us how to doodle just returned to the box with an awesome drawing for us!

Update – 11:04 a.m. – In the past hour we’ve learned how to spot a vampire, the official date of the apocalypse (12/12/12), and the basics of sign language:

Hello! Here we are live at the high school. It’s 9:42 a.m. and I’ve  (this is Sarah) already learned how to milk a cow, jump a horse, and the difference between classic tap shoes and rhythmic tap shoes. We have  also learned how to spell the school’s name correctly (apologies to the readers of previous misspelling!). I think there’s a volleyball team on the way. James is about to learn how to foxtrot with a teacher. Okay, he has to lead. She is teaching him how to take the right steps and how to hold her correctly. I think the main challenge here is that James has to learn how to be a strong leader while remembering the steps. She is also letting James know that he needs to have a better flow. James is blaming his new shoes. Sure James. Sure.

This is the Padlock video the previous post refers to. It is all well and good viewed here with a nice steady internet connection, but let’s  be clear: this exists on a VHS tape, playing from the purest white television compact set in the Padock Gallery in south philly. Indeed.

The show continues throughout the month. You must make an appointment to visit the show. Contact markprice1026 (at) gmail (dot) com.

For those out and about this weekend–TDAR will be screening a “greatest hits” video from our “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session” project this Saturday, May 2nd, from 8 p.m. – midnight at Padlock Gallery. The video is TDAR’S contribution to Padlock’s “PIFAS at Padlock” show, which features new work from other faculty members from the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study, and, uh, old archival work from us. Live it again for the very first time. Anyway, if you can’t make it out, the video will be on view at the space for the month. Padlock is located at 1409 Ellsworth St. in South Philadelphia (basically a few doors west of Broad St. on Ellsworth).

After we came up with this idea, I began to think about how much it echoes previous artistic strategies like the instructions and “music” scores of the Fluxus movement, or the more recent “Do it” series by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The main commonality is that all these things involve giving the viewer a guide to something that he or she can interpret, perform, or simply read. But the more I thought about it, the more I see our project as distinct from these precedents, at least as far as motivations are concerned.

The Fluxus instructions I can think of usually involve some nonsensical element that brings attention to patterns and rhythms of everyday life that are otherwise easy to miss. This George Maciunas video is a nice example:

I would be very happy to see the high schoolers going in this direction, but I don’t think it’s very likely.

The other thing I associate with Fluxus is an interest in breaking the sense that making art is done by an elite group who can profit from the rarified works they produce. Obrist seems quite interested in taking this up in the “Do it” project, where artists submit instructions to go online, into a book, and in traveling exhibitions where audiences can go execute them. Again, I don’t see a parallel with our project here, since undermining the system of art’s production isn’t what we have in mind.

But, I still see our project as a strange cousin of the “Do it” endeavor, partly because I don’t think “Do it” does what it was meant to do…does it? I mean, this whole thing about the production of art becoming shared seems like a bit of a false promise. Dara Birnbaum recently said in Artforum, “I think Hans Ulrich became infatuated with seeing work disperse widely into culture. And who gets eliminated from that system? Well, the artists.” But if you look at many of the “Do it” submissions, most seem to be about extending the identity of the artist into an instruction format, not removing him/her from the equation.

Here’s one from Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

Get 180 lbs. of a local wrapped candy and drop in a corner.

And another from Christian Boltanski:

[1] GET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S PHOTO ALBUM [2] GIVE THE NEIGHBOR YOURS IN EXCHANGE [3] ENLARGE ALL THE PICTURES TO 8 X 10 [4] FRAME THEM IN SOME SIMPLE FASHION AND HANG THEM ON THE WALLS OF YOUR APARTMENT [5] YOUR NEIGHBOR SHOULD DO THE SAME WITH YOUR ALBUM

And here is one of my favorites from Tino Sehgal:

you are already doing all of it

The project has some wonderful little submissions, but I don’t see them as displacing the function of the artist as Birnbaum suggests they might. Instead, I think the best ones define some core element unique to the interests and efforts of the artists who wrote them. And that’s what I hope the students can define for themselves.

Work continues on TDAR’S high school “academic integrity” project.  After discovering that the pvc plumbing joint we really needed didn’t exist, we finally erected our new temporary classroom–an old idea we’ve just now gotten around to trying out in preparation for this event.   The cube is shown here at The Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study (PIFAS); Oliver looks on with pride.  Not quite as collapsible as we had first imagined, the room eventually broke back down into 24 4′ pipes without too much effort.  It may seem motionless thanks to the wonders of photography, but the room actually looks a bit like a wobbly piece of translucent polygon jello in real life.

Half the fun (for me at least) of TDAR’s white aesthetic has always been in its juxtaposition with the colorful chaos of PIFAS; I wonder how our room will or won’t fit in when installed in the high school’s main lobby?