Episode 2: Professor Claire Bishop

For this episode I’m joined by Dr. Claire Bishop, presidential professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she has been teaching since 2008. Her scholarly work focuses on contemporary art, particularly installation, performance, and dance. At the Graduate Center, she regularly teaches the introductory Methods class, which all incoming art history PhD students take in their first semester.

In our interview, Professor Bishop shares some of her pedagogical “origin story”, considers how graduate teaching fellowships shape the CUNY art history program’s learning environment, reflects on the place of the canon in today’s art history classroom, and decides on a rather unexpected teaching object. 

Listen to the episode here

Resources from this episode:

Credits:

AHA Pedagogy is produced by Forrest Pelsue. Our theme music was composed and performed by Aaron Edgcomb, who is also our editor. Special thanks to Marisa Orozco for her insight on podcasting, and to Luke Waltzer for supervising this project as part of the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Transcript

[Intro music plays]

Hello and welcome to the second episode of AHA pedagogy. I’m your host, Forrest Pelsue. I’m a Phd student in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (or as we call it, CUNY). Like many CUNY grad students, I also teach in the CUNY system. This has been a challenging and sometimes overwhelming experience, so I started this podcast as a way to check in with my peers and mentors and to share their experiences and advice more broadly. 

For this episode I’m joined by Dr. Claire Bishop, presidential professor of art history at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she has been teaching since 2008. Her scholarly work focuses on contemporary art, particularly installation, performance, and dance. At the Graduate Center, she regularly teaches the introductory Methods class, which all incoming art history PhD students take in their first semester.

In our interview, Professor Bishop shares some of her pedagogical “origin story”, considers how graduate teaching fellowships shape the CUNY art history program’s learning environment, reflects on the place of the canon in today’s art history classroom, and decides on a rather unexpected teaching object. 


Forrest Pelsue: Hi Claire.

Claire Bishop: Hi Forrest. 

FP: Thank you so much for joining me for this interview.

CB: It’s a pleasure. 

FP: I’m really excited to talk to you and get your perspective as someone who’s been teaching at a graduate level for many years now, but I’m going to ask you maybe to also think back to the beginning of your career. But to start, the question I like to start off with is about this “aha” moment. So I’m wondering if you have an “aha” moment from when you’re teaching. 

CB: I have multiple moments that really helped me think through teaching, but they didn’t occur while teaching. 

FP: Okay. 

CB: Does that make sense? 

FP: Yeah.

CB: So one was, I was doing my doctorate at Essex University and I was teaching undergraduates there. It was nothing like your teaching. We were just given half a semester and very much taught within our area and they sent us on a course to prepare us for teaching, although I think, got a feeling it happened at the end of the teaching. It wasn’t something that I did beforehand. And they said something in this one day course that really helped me and it’s going to sound really dumb to you, but it was revelatory to me, which was that it’s not about my performance, it’s about what you’re getting the students to understand. And this was huge because I had been only ever taught as the recipient of a monologue from a professor and I had assumed that that was my job to bank as much information as possible and then regurgitate it in front of a class. I had no idea that I should be thinking about it in a different way, which is: I am facilitating their learning. How do I create a situation that enables them to learn something? So that reversal of the pressure from myself and onto a class was huge and a relief because I was a very introverted, shy person and found it very hard to sleep before teaching. Everything would be going through my mind because I thought, “I have to be able to say everything perfectly!” Not thinking that you’re going to be doing this over and over again for decades and there’s many opportunities to improve as you go along. So that was one thing. 

The next thing that was really helpful, I was teaching at Tate Modern and I was team teaching with people in the education department and we were doing short courses of five or six weeks to members of the public and they were a real mix of people. It was great. Mostly mature students but also just the general public interested in art. I taught before an art and psychoanalysis class then it was awful, I was so bad at it and I froze and it was excruciating. But team teaching with someone, just sitting there preparing it and she said to me “Okay so we’ll do 15 minutes on that, we’ll do 20 minutes on that, we’ll do 30 minutes on that and then come back and do 15 minutes.” My god! You could just to think about carving up that block of two hours into units where certain questions were going to be posed or we would look at this work of art in the gallery for this amount of time and then this gave me a whole new relationship to structure and time which was again it’s going to sound obvious to you I’m sure this is what they teach but for me it was also a revelation: oh! I can block it out and make the time manageable. 

FP: So both on the one hand not kind of over preparing in the lecture sense, in the monologue sense, but then preparing in the kind of structure of the class. 

CB: Preparing the structure and asking, what are the central questions I want to be asking in each of those and what do I want them – back to the first “aha” – what do I want them to get out in each moment? So maybe it’s a very simple point but it will take 15 minutes and they will arrive at it themselves, and if they don’t get there then I can come in and say something. But it’s really about setting up a situation in which people can work something out for themselves and that relationship of timing and questions was really important for me.

And then I guess if there was a third one it was more I thought, oh, this is interesting, I need to do more reading around teaching and radical pedagogy and critical pedagogy. So when I went to Warwick University I got in touch with a new center there which was called the Reinvention Centre and this was a teaching space for experimental education. It was a room about twice the size of this one that had a rubber underheated floor, no conventional chairs, it had a Corbusier chaise longue and and some beanbags and you could project on several walls and it had like a white board with pens and magnetic things and it was not a conventional teaching space. And this was great because I realized how much conversation is inhibited or structured through the format of a classroom and the rows of chairs—I hate teaching to rows of chairs I always want to be around a table—this was interesting because there wasn’t a table so it produced like everybody’s on the floor or people are sitting on beanbags, and you could move around a lot more and this this was a really interesting experiment. And through that I also realized the limitations of critical pedagogy at an undergraduate level because I went into it thinking we can devise the syllabus together, man, it’s gonna be great. And undergraduates are not equipped enough to produce a syllabus at that point. They need to have experienced something in order to then be input. And there was also a lot of fear around grades and how do I do well and “don’t mess with the formula,” you know, I’m good at what I do just give me an essay question to answer. So I realized that you can you can change up the educational space and that can accomplish a lot, but you’re still dealing with grading and the overall expectations of a university education and those those are harder to shift 

FP: I think recognizing your place within the institution is part of that balance. I’ve definitely had students who, I’ve given students an option sometimes where I’m like okay, do you want to do this or do we want to do this? And sometimes they like being able to give feedback and it’s really clear like, oh should we take a break and like everyone wants to take a break, it’s like okay great. But at other times I’ll kind of ask for their input on something and one time I literally had a student go, “That’s for you to decide.” I was like okay this is my this is also part of my role. I can only open it up so much before the students are like, I don’t want to make those decisions.

CB: So you learn to do it in ways that are manageable for them and relinquish a little bit of control yourself but don’t leave them lost. 

FP: So I’m really curious, so this is all coming out of your time in England, from your studies and from your work at Tate Modern and then from your first—was it your first teaching job or academic kind of teaching job?

CB: My first academic teaching job was basically what we call now called adjuncting at Essex, where I was doing my doctorate and then I moved to the Royal College of Art and I taught in the MA program in curating for five years, and then I went to Warwick for two years and got this job at the Graduate Center. 

FP: Got it. 

CB: So it’s interesting that I really began with graduate education. 

FP: Yeah so I was gonna ask, at Warwick it was also graduate level?

CB: BA and MA.

FP: Ok, both. I’m guessing that’s also where you kind of started to see that difference between what undergraduates could handle versus what grad students could handle? 

CB: Actually no, because the undergraduates were much better than the MA students. 

FP: Oh really? So interesting.

CB: The MA students tended to be people living locally, hadn’t got the money to travel and do an MA. It’s expensive if you don’t get funding. I mean, nothing compared to the US, but still it was a lot. So it felt like very small, really small, the classes were, you know, three of us sitting in my office. It was tiny. So what a pleasure to come here and have a room full of dynamic people who also really prepare for the class. And I think culturally there’s a different relationship to speaking in a seminar.

FP: I wanted to ask about this, the difference that you saw then coming to the US. Did you feel like your training in the UK prepared you for the US or were there different challenges here?

CB: No, did not prepare me at all. I came here and I felt like a fraud for quite a few years because I had not taught survey, I hadn’t done an orals exam. The doctorate in the UK is four years, in and out, you get straight to work on your writing. There’s no coursework. So that breadth that doctoral students have here, before they write their dissertations, is completely missing in the UK. I tried to fill in a little for myself by sitting in on MA classes, but it’s not the same thing. It’s like just auditing rather than actually doing coursework. 

I’m hesitant to make generalizations because I moved here in 2008 and that’s 16 years ago and so a lot changes in that time. I’ve not taught undergraduates while I’ve been in the US and there have been much bigger changes at large, for example, digitalization. When I left the UK we were still, someone else was scanning the images for you to put into your PowerPoint and even that was a new thing because I’d begun at Essex with slides. And we dealt with photocopies and books, not PDFs. And so all of that feels like much more of a difference than anything culturally around yeah students being prepared. 

FP: That makes sense. 

CB: But I do think Britain is a culture more geared towards writing than speaking and certainly I felt as if I was very bad at speaking in seminars and I am perpetually amazed by how eloquent our students are in seminars. 

FP: Me too. It’s my favorite part of, I mean, yeah so much of the learning happens just from that aspect of sitting around the table and talking together through things. So I guess maybe, it’s hard to generalize and I think you’ve nicely outlined some of the kind of temporal shifts, but I’m wondering, you know, having now been here for 16 years and having also interacted a bit with other New York institutions do you feel like there’s a CUNY style of pedagogy? Again, I know it’s hard to generalize…

CB: I think the students are better at identifying this. Especially if you’ve done classes or come from the IFA or Columbia or NYU. I only have a sense of it from when I go there and listen to conferences or symposia. But I would, also then teaching within CUNY, I’ve taught at Hunter and I’ve done outdoor classes with Hunter and Queens MFA students, so it’s not like I have a large experience of a CUNY style in general—again you’re all more equipped to comment on this than I am. But I would say there are values that I try to bring to this institution and that I think work in this institution because of it being a public institution and I am very keen to make it as collaborative and generous as possible in a way that I am told does not exist at the other private institutions. So I’m always trying to factor in the moments of sharing, collaboration, group feedback, rather than individual competitiveness, which I feel is the baseline of the other places. 

FP: I would say my experience is definitely more collaborative and kind of community, solidarity, you know helping each other holding each other up.

CB: I mean it’s in part also because you’re all having to teach and you’re all thrust into this situation of having to suddenly scramble and teach outside your areas to large classes. You have to help each other out with that. It’s almost the only way to manage it 

FP: Absolutely, and it’s everyone: the students and professors have been so generous I think and in supporting us through that. So thinking now, you know, as someone who’s now in my second year of teaching—very early on—I’m really curious because I took your methods class in 2022 when you had kind of at that point overhauled the syllabus a bit. And I feel like I’m coming into art history you know at this moment where I’m already thinking about the ways that I’m wanting to kind of overhaul the history I’ve been taught, at this moment where I think everyone’s really kind of rethinking you know the canon these big structures but I’m really curious to hear what the process was like for you what that kind of shift was like of rethinking these things in your syllabus.

CB: I could, I mean, I could talk about this a lot but let’s narrow it down. Which parts in particular?

FP: So I guess in particular I’m thinking, okay, I guess if maybe if I frame it a little differently… I’m wondering because I teach survey, like a lot of students teach this kind of big survey class, and Methods I think is another one that can mean so many things, and it really kind of depends on the professor what it means often. And so I guess I’m just wondering if it felt like a natural part of the process to be overhauling a syllabus, if it feels like something like survey or methods needs to be changing, or if it felt like a rupture, or if it felt like a break in something that had been more consistent for you. 

CB: I’m now at the point where I like to, I don’t really repeat classes unless there’s something really unresolved or that didn’t work and I want to try and fix. I used to think: the first time you teach a class is bad, the second time you teach it is the best, and the third time you teach it is: you’ve lost all the energy and curiosity. Now I just don’t do those kind of repetitions. But Methods is nevertheless a mandatory course for incoming students into the program, so it’s an invitation to rethink and to take stock of, “What is art history grappling with at the moment.” It’s also a moment for me to think through what I would like to read, selfishly, or what should I be reading. I’ve been teaching methods I guess for maybe 10 years before before 2020 which was, as you know, the summer of COVID and Black Lives Matter and everything seemed to be up in the air and there was a sense of responsibility towards engaging with some fields and discourses that I had been ignoring and that I felt was my ignoring that was also symptomatic of art history in general. So I spent that August reading, frantically, PDFs. Like my hand, I’m massaging my hand now because I’ve got the same thing, my hand was so sore, whizzing through all these PDFs and trying to devise a different way of thinking through methods that would address the whiteness of my previous syllabi. And so… what was the question again? How did I do that? Or why did I do that? 

FP: Or just, you know, what these kind of overarching classes, like, is it a place that we do need to be continually refreshing? Or now that you’ve kind of reset, do you feel like it’s going to stabilize? 

CB: Yeah, so I did it with minimal changes again for your year in 2022. And the feedback at that point was more art, how do we connect it to art? This is all very good. All these are all exciting readings, but how do I implement this in the art world? So now the version I’m teaching at the moment tries to bring that back to some objects and different periods. And the challenge I set myself this August was knowing the incoming group and their interests, which spanned medieval, South Asian, 19th-century, and modern/contemporary. Can I try and find some readings from all of those areas as well? Not just relying on the students to contribute ideas in week two. 

FP: So really responding: responding to the feedback that you’ve had, and then kind of preemptively responding to the students.

CB:  I set great store by the feedback at the end of each session, end of each semester. What could be better? What worked? What didn’t you like? And of course, there’s always people who moan, and there are always people who say, oh, that was great. So there’s some, you have to just sort of dig around. But I do find the kind of feedback forms that are purely numerical to be of no help whatsoever. So it has to be qualitative ideas from the students, and then I can integrate it going forward. But I still don’t know if that’s really answering your question right? Which is about the need to, do we need to keep overhauling syllabi? I think you teach better if it’s fresh and interesting for you. So if you are bored preparing it, my God, the students are going to be bored as well. So everything has to come from your enthusiasm and passions and curiosity. 

FP: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, that’s how kind of I’ve started. I feel like every semester I make a lot of changes.

CB: But don’t drive yourself crazy at this stage, right? Because you’re doing, those kind of surveys are really a service. So there’s also things where you don’t have to do a complete overhaul, but it’s tweaking. You just, you change some of the parts as you go along.

FP: Yeah. And I guess I have been doing it with the idea that someday I’ll land on the perfect survey syllabus and then it will never change again, but it will always change.

CB: You’ll get bored.

FP: The perfect is always evolving. 

CB: But it’s also, you know what the other, there was another really important thing with which when I was starting to teach, somebody told me that teaching preparation will fill any amount of time that you’re willing to give it. So if you want to give it seven days preparing for that next class, you can use that time to do that, but it doesn’t need those seven days. So cutting. It’s also a time management question. So you don’t go crazy over preparing. 

FP: Yes. For sure. So, okay. Continuing to kind of think about the syllabus and teaching, I’m wondering if there’s like a particular object, either that can mean like an artwork, an art object, or we can think about it as like a text that you love to use when teaching, if there’s kind of one thing that you have carried through many iterations of a syllabus.

CB: No. Yeah. I was, it’s an interesting question. I really don’t think I have one. Instead it’s more about certain exercises that I will keep, like the group crit. So halfway through the semester when people are preparing their research papers, we’ll have one or two weeks entirely dedicated to people just talking through an abstract of what they want to do and having group feedback on it. And those sessions never cease to amaze me because the collective brain is so much better than my individual feedback, and I think it’s good for all the students in the room to see what each other are doing and to help each other along. So it’s more things like that that I hold on to. Oh, but you know what? I am really attached to Woodlawn Cemetery. I’ve done about five classes there now. Did you come to one?

FP: No, I wasn’t there for that one.

CB: I’ve used it in a lot of different classes. I think it’s an absolutely magical place, so I do love going there and you can use it for a lot of different things. 


FP: So interesting. Interesting that it’s not a museum that you like to go to, that it’s a cemetery.

CB: And that might also be to do with a British upbringing where you’re very near to, there’s a cemetery in every town and every village and there isn’t a place, New York is a city which pushes death to the outskirts. And it’s such an important part of our life and how we remember people and how we deal with the past. And so I think it’s something that you can use. Woodlawn’s great. You can use it, you can either go there for the architecture and the monuments and the design or you can pick certain figures and you can, so you can talk about ancestors in the last class I did, that was the lens into it. It’s full of robber barons, suffragettes, Harlem Renaissance, musicians, amazing musicians. There’s a lot of scope. 

FP: Yeah, and it’s outdoors.

CB: It’s outdoors and you can plot, every time it’s a different path that you plot around this city of the dead, it’s great. 

FP: That’s nice. An unexpected object, maybe.

CB: I only thought about that while talking to you. 

FP: That’s great. So maybe this is kind of the last area that I want to talk about, which is that you’re someone who’s kind of on the receiving end of students coming out of undergrad. Sometimes students have MAs, sometimes not. Whereas as teachers, we’re on the kind of front end of that. We’re like, maybe it’s the first class that someone will take in art history, sometimes the only class. Sometimes they’ll go on to other things, but I’m just curious to hear from you if there are any– when you see that a student has completed an art history survey class or art history coursework, I’m wondering what expectations you might have of that student. And this is because, I’m thinking as someone who is teaching those students and trying to kind of figure out what my responsibilities are to them, again, at this moment where everyone’s really questioning a lot of art history and what’s happened. And I’m trying to figure out kind of, yeah, if I’m sending out my students into the world with what they need coming out of an art history classroom.

CB: I don’t know. I find this an interesting question. I have no idea how to answer it. Because there are so many different ways of teaching survey now. Also, I never had to do a survey class. I never taught a survey class. So I’m really, I feel kind of blind in relationship to the survey. And because in Britain, my exposure to anything like a survey was always very localized. What I mean by that is: my undergraduate degree at Cambridge, 10 sites were chosen around the city, and there was a way of telling art and architectural history through those different sites. So there was no aspiration to doing Lascaux to yesterday. 

So I don’t know what I would expect from someone apart from, you know, a passing familiarity with some canonical works, an ability or willingness to look at something for more than the duration of a swipe, and to be able to deduce some things about an image as a result of spending time looking at it. I mean, maybe now you’re pushing me, you’re not pushing me, but I can, I’m pushing myself because I’m thinking through and looking at this picture, this wall of pictures behind you. Maybe it’s also about, all of this is very canonical, what I’m saying, I’d like a familiarity with basic categories around medium and materials and genres. I don’t know.

FP: Yeah. No, I mean, I don’t know either. That’s, you know, I think it’s, for me, I’m kind of… I guess, you know, what’s maybe hidden in this question is kind of a questioning of the canon, and that I do find, you know, when I go back to my own foundations and where I see how I’m building my knowledge, at the root of it is kind of the canon, for better or for worse, that I’m responding to. And so I have been trying to teach in a very kind of anti-canonical way, I would say, but then I kind of question that sometimes, it’s like, actually, is it important to teach the canon? Does it have a place? 

CB: Well, you know, sometimes these canonical things are canonical for a reason, and they are very rich, dense, compact crystallizations of a moment, and they… and because they’re canonical, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look at them, but it means that, if anything, it means that there are multiple interesting ways of looking at them. So if you’re just producing one standard rote line, then that’s not so interesting. So my methods class this semester ends with Olympia, and you can imagine how many approaches to Olympia there are. I chose the best seven, in my view. And they are all really different and really exciting, and it ends up with David Getty’s article on teaching Olympia after trans studies. It’s great! So these works are canonical because of the attention lavished on them from so many different directions, and I… yeah, so I think it’s about how you look at things more than the thing itself being canonical and therefore problematic. Does that make sense?

FP: Yeah, I did show… we did look at Olympia in my class this semester, and I kind of framed in the context of looking at… I think we did Venus of Urbino, and then we did the Odalisque, and then Olympia, and it was great. The students got it, like, so quickly, and it was exciting. It was… I liked being able to tell them about more recent scholarship also, that it’s not fixed. It  isn’t a fixed, you know, received narrative, but it’s ongoing. Yeah. 

CB: And this is a work that was contested from the outset, and continues to be a place where battles are staged. 

FP: Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your time.

CB:  Thank you Forrest. 

FP: Thanks for thinking through some of this with me. It was really helpful. 


[Outro music plays]

That brings us to the end of our second episode. You can find a transcript, information about Professor Bishop’s favorite teaching cemetery, and other handy resources on our website: ahapedpod.commons.gc.cuny.edu

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