Living in 10 Easy Lessons
Artists: Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone
Living in 10 Easy Lessons is a video installation consisting of interviews with 10 street-involved women. Each woman is asked to teach the artists a new skill – one that she uses in her daily existence.
Living in 10 Easy Lessons consists of three main parts: a series of ten 2-3 minute videos each consisting of an instructor teaching a skill to one of the two artists involved; inspirational posters that highlight the main points of each skill; a free booklet that consists of each of the skills presented as a list of instructional points.
This project references the fact that we live in a culture in which almost anything can be learned through a series of steps. The Internet has made many skills from changing tires to bee-keeping both accessible and teachable. This project Living in 10 Easy Lessons disrupts the usual institutional model of teacher/learner and challenges the viewer’s assumptions concerning the kinds of skills usually presented. Viewers must become active in sorting the relationships among the various instructors and the artists. Questions regarding experience, gender, education and authority come to the fore.
Within the shelter system many classes for skill building are offered. But the skills that these women already possess are ignored, and even discouraged. The artists aim to provide a context for learning and acknowledging some of these traditionally undervalued skills. The resulting project Living in 10 Easy Lessons allows the viewer to gain knowledge of skills that are not conventionally taught or appreciated.
Read full text here
A look at Living in 10 Easy Lessons by Linda Duvall and Peter Kingstone at Gallery 44
A takehome guide is part of the Living in 10 Easy Lessons exhibit at Gallery 44.
By Leah Sandals Special to the Star
Recently opened at Gallery 44, “Living in 10 Easy Lessons” features videos of 10 street-involved women teaching the artists how to apply false eyebrows, get free drinks and fend off physical attacks, among other skills.
The project also includes posters with slogans that Duvall and Kingstone distilled from their lessons, like “Always put two on, girls” and “Do not be rude.” A free take-home booklet contains notes from all 10 videos.
Street-involved people “are always being taught how to write a resumé and other things that may not help in their particular world,” Kingstone explains in an interview at the gallery. “And they know all this interesting information that no one is asking them about and is not being taught to anybody. It would be nice if we could start recognizing those skills.”
Some of those skills are valued by mainstream society, albeit in other contexts. The woman who is a successful drug dealer employs the same strategies as any good salesperson or small business owner — she provides a range of price points; she markets herself well; she is personable; and she is reliable.
“If I owned a business, I would hire her in a second,” Kingstone says.
Three thousand “Living in 10 Easy Lessons” posters have also been hung along downtown streets for the exhibition’s opening week. “Because these women are street-involved, we wanted the project to be street-involved,” explains Kingstone. The street postering is also one way of letting the project participants — who move often due to three-month residence limits at many shelters — know that the show is on, Duvall says.
Both artists have worked with street-involved people in the past.
Duvall’s 2009 project “Where Were The Mothers?” helped ex-offenders write and record songs about their mothers, while Kingstone’s 2008 project “100 Stories About My Grandmother” documented 100 male hustlers discussing their grandmothers.
Interestingly, in “Living in 10 Easy Lessons,” Duvall and Kingstone decided to exclude participants’ personal biographical details. They say that leaning on the personal prompts mainstream audiences to distance themselves from street-involved subjects, rather than identify with them.
Yet this choice, among others, has also brought criticism to “Living in 10 Easy Lessons.”
In Gallery 44’s official exhibition essay, local curator and writer cheyanne turionscriticizes the lack of name recognition given to its participant-instructors, as well as the way the project could reinforce (rather than reverse) popular stereotypes.
“While these women have consented to participating in an art project that aims ‘to provide a context for learning and acknowledging some of these traditionally undervalued skills,’” turions writes, “an effect is that the women are now marked as having been prostitutes, drug dealers, liars, poor.”
Staff at the Adelaide Resource Centre for Women — where the videos were filmed in spring 2011 — also expressed concern that the project would reinforce negative behaviour, the artists say.
Ken Moffatt, a social work professor at Ryerson University, hopes a November 14 panel at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre will open up discussion of these and other thorny issues regarding the project.
Moffatt says he likes “Living in 10 Easy Lessons,” though he experiences discomfort when considering the way social and racial privilege play out in it.
“The open-endedness saves it for me,” he says.
Duvall and Kingstone welcome such criticism, and remain undaunted by it.
Duvall hopes to apply the teacher-student model to future projects with other undervalued communities, like seniors. Submitting to being taught, or asking to be taught, she says, is “a way to give someone power, and to make it visible that we’ve given power.”
“I make projects because I have questions — and who knows if I have the answers, or the right answers,” Kingstone says. “So I often want people to come and ask good questions too.”
Living in 10 Easy Lessons continues until December 1 at Gallery 44 (gallery44.org).