LARRY SUSSKIND: We are excited, and honored,
to have Professor Stephen Carpenter with us.
And this is the first of a series of events.
I'm Larry Susskind.
I'm on the faculty in Urban Studies and Planning.
It's interesting to me that several people here
have a water interest.
Several people here have a planning interest.
Several people here have artistic, or art methods
interests.
Several people here have public education interest.
And all of those are alive and well
in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning
in different kinds of ways.
There is an environmental group in the department
that I have had some responsibility for.
And water is a concern within the environmental group.
Not just domestically, but internationally,
which relates to part of your work.
We're interested in water as an environmental justice concern,
not just a natural resource management concern.
And so, when I first learned of some
of the ways in which your work has focused
on making clean water available to people in different places,
there was a direct connection with that aspect of what we do.
I was really interested in how issues of race
could be raised in a way that conversation was possible.
And that is another very big part
of what our department, and our school, are interested in.
So by way of background, those are
some of the thematic interests that led us to very much want
you to be here.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Well thanks, Larry.
As far back as I can remember, I like making stuff.
I would just make things, you know?
I'm the oldest of four boys.
And the oldest and the youngest were
born 5 and 1/2 years apart.
No twins.
So we were constantly together and doing things,
and we would make things.
Like a set of golf clubs.
My dad had golf clubs.
We weren't allowed to use them, so we made them.
Of course we used his copper pipe for the plumbing
in the house.
So making things was always part of what I did, and have done,
and just engaging in the--
it shifts, and it has moved.
My background's really pottery-- is really ceramics.
Touching the clay, touching the mud, making things.
That's my degree, is in ceramics and fine art.
I don't know what it was, this urge, ability, interest
for teaching, for education.
So that complicated the situation.
Making stuff, and teaching stuff-- well,
actually, you can do that.
That's called being an art educator, or a teacher.
And the ceramics piece stayed with.
I couldn't shake the clay, I couldn't get the clay out
of my fingernails.
The making of things had to always be there.
And then I taught elementary school art,
I was the art teacher, elementary school.
And that was among the most invigorating experiences
of my life, because the students are always
about making something.
Their bodies are always moving.
They're constantly in a state of absorbing what they're
doing in the world, and seeing other people doing, and moving,
and checking, and--
so that energy was quite interesting to me.
Followed that experience up with a doctoral degree
in art education.
But the idea was that the making, and the teaching,
and the learning, and the asking of questions through art--
through the visual imagery that you're talking about--
that was what was so important.
And you mentioned the notion of access.
Well, we didn't have golf clubs.
We didn't have access to--
we saw them, but we didn't have access to them.
So making our own access, I'm interested in that as well.
How does one make one's own access?
So moving around to a series of different universities
as an art educator.
Part of both graduate degrees was
about being in the clay studio as much as it
was being in the seminar room.
That was really the focus of my dissertation.
In the clay studio we were talking, and critiquing,
about color, and shape, and form, and how the glaze works.
And on the other side of the same part of campus--
on the other side of the road--
in the theory classes in art education,
we're talking about postmodern theory, and feminist theory,
and film theory, and interpreting installations,
and performances.
And then on the other side of the road,
I'd go to my class the next day.
We were, again, critiquing.
But we were talking about, oh, I like that handle.
Show me how you made the handle.
This handle works and that one doesn't.
We never defined what works meant.
But putting those together-- the making, and the interpreting,
and thinking, and theorizing in both registers
doesn't have to be separated.
So to think of us, even with labels, I find kind of curious.
We have to find a place on campus,
but to understand that we can move
in and out of those spaces.
And we can start to shed those identities.
The kind of group that has self assembled today
speaks to multiple interests that I have,
and trying to weave it into, what is an art education?
How does one learn through the making of things,
through the display of cultural products
through cultural production?
What kind of questions can we ask, not just
about what someone else has made,
but what kind of questions can we
ask through the act of making, itself?
We can make meaning through relationships,
we can make meaning through conversation,
we can make meaning through verbal or written responses.
So it's the making of meaning, making of cultural product,
making of a difference.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Right.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: So this notion of making
doesn't have to always have this physicality to it.
I'm saying all that to say, the clay
left my fingernails for a while, until I moved to Texas.
My wife is an engineer-- a mechanical engineer,
material science--
and it's a great opportunity for her to move there.
For me, there's no art education there at all.
They got my CV and didn't know where to put me.
Sent it all over campus.
And finally, the education folks said, oh, we'll take him.
It has education in his degree, we'll take him.
Telling you all that to say, I got to Texas,
and art education had to be--
I had reinvent it, or at least, I
had to figure out what I meant by it.
And how I fit in.
If you don't have an art department,
how do you have art education?
Well, you just open a studio in your garage
and have people over on Fridays.
I did that.
Or you can engage in the work in the curriculum,
that fixed set of notions and premeditated concepts,
terms, practices, skills, construct
that educational experience.
My entrance into a more curriculum instruction space
was through my background as an artist, and as an art educator.
The water filter work that I do, and have started to do,
came about when I was in Texas.
I met a guy, his name's Oscar Munoz.
Oscar is in charge of the Texas A&M Colonias programs
all along the border.
Texas is a third the width of the United States.
So that distance, and then 150 miles up,
is called the border of Texas.
In that space, there live over a half
a million people, most of whom don't have access
to clean water in their homes.
And Oscar let me know this, and he works with communities
all across that swath.
And as an art educator, that was interesting to me.
Because I had to learn about a lot of the practices
that he's up against, and faces.
I'm telling you all this to say--
not that I planned where my work has gone,
but it's always migrated-- always moved and shifted--
to new-- it's almost like water, water finds its own level,
right?
Water fills the vessel in which it's poured.
But I've never lost the clay.
I've never lost that notion of making.
Or the ways that meanings can be made, and understandings
can be constructed through engagement with other people.
That's what education is, it's a social space.
Teaching and learning is a social space.
Art education can take up and take on those tasks as well.
LARRY SUSSKIND: The title for this visit
that people have seen, and that you gave us,
is Making Something from Nothing.
And first of all, the immediate doubt about
whether you can actually make--
I mean, you can transform things--
but the notion that you can make something out of nothing
would sort of defy most of the laws of physics, presumably.
And so, you mean something by that.
And then, Appropriate Technology as Intentionally Disruptive
Responsibility.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: That is a mouthful, that title, isn't it?
LARRY SUSSKIND: I actually had a lot of trouble with it.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: To the left of the colon, making something
from nothing.
That piece was intentionally provocative, right?
I mean, you kind of have to do that, in some ways,
to entice folks to show up to certain things, maybe.
But the idea of making--
of course, defying laws of physics, yeah, I'm with you.
So knowing that there's a problem with that,
if we think of it in certain realms,
the idea that there's some folks who don't necessarily have
access-- it's about access.
Maybe it should have said, making something from whatever
it is that you have.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Right.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Right?
But if we move it to nothing, you
start to think, well, there's a complete and utter lack
of something.
For example, there's some people who
have no access to clean water.
We can raise a bit of hyperbole there
and say they don't have access, or they have nothing.
They're folks who-- we talk about food scarcity,
we talk about folks who are homeless folks, who
need shelter.
So you can take minimum, and exaggerate it
just a little bit more--
there's this thing called artistic license,
let's use that--
and turn it into nothing.
So making something from nothing,
what can we make from what is available to us?
So that's the something from nothing.
And in the case of this first visit,
the something is adequate access to clean water.
And the nothing is the lack of that.
And the something is a response, which in this case,
is a ceramic water filter made out of clay and sawdust.
The nothing is, well, that's just clay.
It's just in the riverbed.
That's nothing.
That's just sawdust, that's leftover scraps.
That's nothing.
You understand that play that's going there?
Appropriate technology is essentially
whatever is available culturally,
and locally, that fits in within the cultural practices
of a community.
Introducing an external, or an unfamiliar substance,
or chemical, or food, is not appropriate
to a certain community.
Because it's either against one's religion,
it's against one's history, against one's culture.
It doesn't fit in, so finding something that's appropriate.
For example, clay is essentially a material
that is accessible to almost every single culture
in the history of the world.
And clay is a naturally occurring material
in most places around the world.
Now, some places using plastic, that
doesn't seem to make sense.
Or appropriate technologies, using what is at hand.
Philosopher, theorist Umberto Eco--
he was a guy who knew everything,
but he didn't know it.
Eco had numerous theories.
Among them was this theory of intentions.
When he says the artist, or the author, has an intention,
and the viewer, or the reader, has an intention.
But he also says the work has an intention.
That comes about through this process, or a series of events.
But this idea of having an intention
means it's deliberate.
So I'm interested in thinking about why
we're doing what we're doing.
That's where that intentional piece--
disruptive.
If I pick this up, and I threw this water at the camera,
that would be disruptive in a number of ways.
Or if you're in a quiet library, and a stampede of aardvarks
comes through the space, that's disruption.
So we understand disruption as something that is abnormal,
or not expected within a particular context
that has assumed rules, regulations, and ways of being.
But I'm also thinking of disruption
in the intentional sense of, to reveal, or to poke at,
or to engage, or to entice a certain kind of conversation,
or relationship.
And that conversation or relationship
is the responsibility.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Would you agree that most educational efforts
are disruptions aimed at fulfilling a responsibility,
that it's defining education that way?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: I don't think enough of them are.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Oh, you think they should be.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: I think they should.
I'd like to shift that up, and question that.
And it's very difficult to get at new ways of doing something,
without disrupting a status quo, without questioning it.
LARRY SUSSKIND: We say it's because we're responsible
and we have to disrupt, but what about the choice
of the people, and the place, whose lives you're disrupting?
Is that fair to them?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Sure.
Yeah.
Certainly the way you frame it, it's not fair to them.
But in the disruption of the lives
of communities that I mentioned, in Texas,
is not disrupting uninvited.
It's an invited disruption.
And second, the disruption has to do
with whatever the current practice was, was not
fulfilling, or responding to needs of the community.
LARRY SUSSKIND: In their eyes.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: In their eyes.
And to my eyes, as well.
So my friend-- as I mentioned--
Oscar, who for years has been working throughout South Texas.
When he learned of the work I that I was--
at that point-- still learning how to do,
he said, oh, there's a water issue.
Would you come down, and work with us, talk to us,
let's see if this would work out.
That was my invitation to come in.
Oscar was already part of that community,
I would never imagine just driving down there--
driving to any community--
and say, hey, I have something you need.
I'm going to sell you something.
That's not my approach.
And so, that kind of disruption, I think,
is on the unethical side.
He was a bit wary of someone coming in.
And he's shared-- and other people
have shared-- stories with me of researchers
going into communities, oh, yeah, I have these ideas.
Let me study what you're doing.
Let me work with you.
And they take the information, and there's
a report that's promised, and the report never
gets back to the communities.
Or the results never help.
And he said he had never seen a report come back,
based on the invitations to the scholars.
And so, once we got to know each other,
he felt comfortable with me.
But then he had to go through a process of talking with members
of the community and say, hey, here's--
I have this friend coming down.
That's the invitation piece.
LARRY SUSSKIND: So what does an invitation have to consist
of-- for you--
to be of a sort that you are comfortable then responding
in this disruptive way?
Do you need a vote or the community?
Has to be 100 percent?
Majority rule?
People you like say, come on down?
What is, in your mind, what legitimizes
these kinds of disruptions?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Again, there has
to be that invitation from someone who is positioned
within the community.
Then there has to be--
for me-- a conversation.
And so, no, the entire community.
Because defining who is in the community
is often difficult to do anyway.
Certainly, it's often just a leader,
or a member of the community who might
want engage a conversation, that then might
expand in their own circles.
In this particular case--
in Texas, through my colleague-- we
met with a few leaders, people who
had worked within the communities as [SPANISH],,
as community educators, and other senior members
of the community.
Senior meaning they had been doing work
at the community centers.
And it was, let's just talk, let's
see where the conversation goes.
Very much like what we're doing here, having a conversation.
Now, it's not my role or position, or personality,
or interest, to push that.
After that conversation, that's on whomever to take that up.
So when I speak of community, it's not the entirety.
LARRY SUSSKIND: There's not a simple answer to this.
We all struggle with this notion of the artist
as a independent thinker, as a creator of something
that's an expression of an individual view when
you're calling this a form of art education.
But isn't it contrary to artists being artists?
How is it art?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: So that's not a small question,
but it's a very important question.
It's a central question that I'm still answering for myself.
But there are three realms here.
One is the work in South Texas, that I actually wouldn't call
that art, or art education.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Oh, OK.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: OK?
Second is the kind of work that I will do tomorrow,
the performance.
And that moves into the realm of social practice.
And that's where I've come to an agreement, understanding,
comfortable place with myself, that that's where
the art education happens.
And then, there's a third piece, your definition of an artist,
and what an artist does, that I want to disrupt.
Down in South Texas, that kind of work, for me,
is not art education.
It certainly uses an employees certain artistic practices.
Folks who have access to a kiln--
know how to fire a kiln-- and have access
to clay, that's where you want to begin your work.
Usually that's the tile person, or the potter,
or it's the brick maker.
But my collaboration, and my involvement in that project, I
wouldn't call that art.
That was kind of me shed--
if that helps to clarify that piece of it.
So the work that I will do tomorrow.
I'm going to set up a water filter production
facility in one of the rooms downstairs,
and going to make water filters.
The idea there is to engage in a practice that somehow blurs
what might be our conventional notions of art making, art
practice, with practices from other disciplines.
We're not quite sure where one ends, and one begins.
And it's supposed to remain in that uncomfortable space,
if one is thinking in that social practice-- art is
social practice-- register.
If you can set up that practice as an engagement,
as an ongoing set of activities, where people
can come in and out of that space,
there's an educational component.
Invariably, there'll be a question, hey man,
what are you doing?
That's an invitation, right there, for me to respond.
So we can establish this conversation as a relationship.
LARRY SUSSKIND: You're not creating art.
You're creating something that serves a function in response
to the need of a client.
You're saying, no it's not art.
I'm an artist, and it's my social practice
that you should observe here as art education.
But the product of my artwork is not art.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: It's more than the filter itself.
That filter is just one component of the work.
The work being the performance.
Education as experience, this notion of experience
is where the education happens.
LARRY SUSSKIND: For some of us, the next step is, oh,
and I want to help a place in Africa,
or Latin America, in a community,
make a factory where there are people--
now, without me there-- capable of making more filters.
And maybe they can sell 'em for a small amount
to be able to maintain a community business.
The doing of all of that seems to be a different realm.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: It is, yeah.
And I have not worked closely with communities--
as you're saying-- to set up facilities.
Although, in South Texas, I did.
I helped laid the groundwork in that facility--
LARRY SUSSKIND: I saw pictures.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: --is working.
You saw pictures, right.
But there are a number of groups who
are doing the exact kind of work that you're mentioning.
And it's not from an arts, or an art education perspective.
It is from that social entrepreneur realm
that you're talking about.
And I am very supportive of that piece.
And that is actually an intriguing component
of what comes out of this work.
It's that work that then has benefits
in terms of health, economics, self-sustaining capacity,
that I find intriguing.
And it's something that can be attempted,
where it's not intended to be a money maker initially,
it's intended to save people's lives,
and to respond in that way.
AUDIENCE: So I'm curious about the longer
term with this community in South Texas
that you're working with.
Obviously, it sounds like there's a really pressing need,
so these water filters can meet that immediate need.
Is the long term goal still to get a more traditional grid
water setup for them?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Yeah.
Yes.
The origin of the filters was that they
were supposed to be a first response to natural disaster,
and they were not supposed to be long term.
Their point of use, temporary solutions.
Unfortunately for some folks around the world,
these have become more long term responses.
AUDIENCE: What do you do when you're just starting out?
What's your advice for how you go about getting an invitation?
STEPHEN CARPENTER: That's a tough one.
Sometimes it's not about poking for the invitation initially.
Sometimes you find ways to become part of the community.
At some level, that might sound like, oh,
but you're really kind of manipulating.
Because in the back of your mind you're saying,
OK, at the right moment, I'm going to spring the question.
I'm going to get the invitation.
That's not what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about is being part of a community,
and doing the work in the community.
Where the work that you're doing might be seen
by folks who could invite you.
Again, that sounds like it's some sort of nefarious,
manipulative component.
But not really, I think it's about continuing your work,
and staying visible.
And the invitations come.
There's an approach called arts entrepreneurship that
is gaining traction, and several universities
have courses in arts entrepreneurship-- and minors,
and I think a few are starting majors as well, or have majors.
Because these other groups are doing this kind of work,
folks know about the water filter technology.
It's starting to take off, and people are collaborating,
they're entering into that space.
And what they're doing, is they're making
available for their learners--
K-12 learners-- possibilities that they might not
have thought.
It's the curriculum work that I'm
doing with teachers, I think, that becomes quite engaging.
LARRY SUSSKIND: Great.
Thank you all, very much.
STEPHEN CARPENTER: Thank you very much.
Yeah, hope to see you tomorrow.
Thank you, thank you.