Description:

Guest lecture by Julia Elizabeth Neal (University of Michigan), titled “‘THE ONE THING WE NEED MOST OF ALL’: Benjamin Patterson’s Call for Discipline.” The lecture, organized by Art History graduate students, will be held in the Trienens Forum, Kresge 1515, on Friday, February 13 at 10:30am with a light reception to follow. Please RSVP to confirm your attendance. An abstract for the talk can be found below.

In 1988, an assemblage of kids learning tools, toys, and a handwritten folktale, announced in no uncertain terms the potent, political edge of Benjamin Patterson (1934-2016), a multidisciplinary intermedia artist whose criticality often shrinks in the shadow of his association with Fluxus and its tawdry notoriety. He sourced the folktale from African American popular culture and scrawled it verbatim and in white atop an emerald chalkboard, loudly proclaiming: “THE ONE THING WE NEED MOST OF ALL IS EDUCATED WHITE FOLKS.” In one fell swoop, Patterson, in the guise of a provocateur par excellence, summoned an omnipresent force shaping his experiences within the United States–structural racism–and framed it in terms of child’s play by pairing technologies of adolescent learning with racialized presumptions about need. 

Audiences familiar with a version of Patterson’s political position–indirect and nonviolent–were certainly unprepared for this fierce moment of direct address, which he shrewdly anchored in Black satire as a strategy to delay scathing critique’s intensity. Educating White Folk (1988, also known as Educating White Folks), an object-based work unlike any of his previous experimentations with sound, language, and bodies, vouches for the fact that the artist embraced the visual as an aesthetic matrix to platform serious cultural work. Striking, like the grand scale of his upright double bass, Benjamin Patterson demanded recognition.

Ever since Patterson aspired to overturn the color barrier barring the entry of classical Black musicians into vaunted US symphony orchestras, he cultivated an ethics of discipline that would later fuel an aesthetic practice invested in overhauling perception. His vigilance warrants greater scrutiny for it challenges assumptions about the subtlety of his critique and artistic criticality. My talk, “‘THE ONE THING WE NEED MOST OF ALL’: Benjamin Patterson’s Call for Discipline,” introduces the serious, biting dimension of Patterson’s radical sensibility, and sources much of his frank, pragmatic approach to friction within the interpretive slippage framing his work and from archives that support my book manuscript, Methods and Processes: Benjamin Patterson’s Art of Discipline.