Look Here!: Telling Stories with Photography!

Here's a link to my curriculum prezi!

http://prezi.com/z8laj4eowtda/look-here-telling-stories-with-photography/

a letter from Niagara Fishbowl (in the making)

"Ambitious," he said through grinning teeth as the other one flexed his tape measure and sighed, "so far so good but not much further," and I know you were thinking "quixotic is what he really meant" but I have to tell you, I too am suspicious of your pride.  So many weeks and hours of slow, slow labor under the vague notion that it will somehow make me strong.  I suspect you fear the trials still ahead, when fire will stop forever my growing, and water will explore my every resolve.  If you and I survive--if we come out intact--I'll become your most ambitious success but you'll still need someone to tell you that you're proud and ambitious.

play reflection

How are the 2 artifacts ( structure and photo) different? similar? &
How does your vision translate from 3D to 2D?
For me, sculpture is always a very tactile, trial-and-error experience, even when I think that I can see what the structure will look like in my head, I have to build, look at the result, and either modify, remove, or continue, and this was my experience with the paper sculptures as well.  Photography also involves a lot of trial and error but it's not additive--or, at least, not in the literal way of sculpture.  So, as maker of the two artifacts, these different making experiences influences my viewing experience: the sculpture--despite being the result of collaboration--seems more controlled: whimsical where we wanted it to be whimsical, sturdy where we needed it to be; meanwhile, the photo was chosen deliberately for its formal elements (contrast, rhythm, emphasis) which give it sturdiness and structure, but paradoxically, represents the fortuitous, less controlled circumstances of its making.


Does this process change the way you SEE the structure?
Yes and no.  I think that I mentioned in class that with sculpture I tend to think a lot of about areas of light and shadow and those elements came very strongly into play in the photo.  On the other hand, I hadn't been thinking about the play of different colored lights and the opportunities that the different plains would offer for contrasting those colors and that became very important in the photo.

Synthesis of PLAY experience (Symphony) 
Why do artists play?
To see things in new ways and to explore new possibilities.  In this experience, my photo does not describe the initial structure but instead uses that structure as a canvas to record the play of color and light.

How has playing with paper reinforced the importance of play?
Often, when we're making art, paper is just a surface on which we record our creativity, so it was in the spirit of play that we cast aside our pencils, pens, markers, crayons and let the paper speak for itself.

What did you learn about play in this class?
Sometimes, to really get into the spirit of play, we have to be willing to let go of our creations repeatedly and be ready to turn them into something new.

heuristic's ball

Boy, oh, boy.  If there were one assigned reading that we've done for this course that I could sign my name to with an unequivocal endorsement, it would be Eisner's sixth chapter.  This chapter thoroughly describes my feelings toward the madness for "standards" in our public education discourse (and my feelings toward those "standards" go a long way in explaining my move from English to Art--though, I should add, not all the way).

Even so, there was a moment in the chapter where I began to wonder if Eisner's stylistic choices were hurting his argument--specifically, the section that begins on 168, titled "Conceptions of Standards"  Here, Eisner seems to lapse into the page-filling, mind-numbing, Freshman Composition technique of pulling out the dictionary and reporting on what is there contained.  And even though my mathematician friends have amused me with tales of how Bertrand Russell filled 500 pages to prove that one plus one makes two, I couldn't help but marginally notate Eisner's statement that "a third meaning of standard is a unit of measure.  Units of measure are the result of arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric that can be applied to describe matters of amount" was "a little flip."

But then I read Pink's chapter on Play, wherein he quotes James Paul Gee as saying (in defense of video games) that "learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts.  It's about connecting and manipulating them" (p 193) and that got me thinking about my own long history as a video gamer and whether or not I felt this was an accurate appraisal and what it may mean to my perception of learning and standards.

I couldn't tell you when I start playing video games.  My parents had an Atari before they had me.  I do remember the day they bought a Nintendo as one of the happiest in my life and I have owned every succeeding generation of Nintendo platform since (Wii being the fifth) and many other non-Nintendo platforms as well, so that should tell you a thing or two about my relationship with the format.  But it's not the whole picture.

You see, I'm not only geeky, I'm obsessive.  Along with that Nintendo, I begged a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine out of my parents.  My parents--thankfully--indulged my inclination to spend hours not only playing, but reading about video games.  I couldn't tell you how many subscription renewals it took for me to realize that Nintendo Power was largely a mouthpiece for the Nintendo Corporation but the realization somehow sullied my enthusiasm for passing on their reviews and secret strategies to my friends and classmates (as had become my custom).  So, I switched to the edgier, independent Electronic Gaming Monthly, whose website eventually evolved into gamespot.com which gets top billing from Pink on p 212.

I won't bore you with the tale of how I suspect these habits of information gathering and dispersal eventually evolved into real-world, grown-up skill sets--partly because I think that lens demeans the continuity of play--suffice it to say that for years, I devoted a significant amount of time to gathering information about video games and even today I draw on that knowledge base to enhance my experience as a gamer--even though I rarely play through even one game a year from beginning to end any more.  So, yes, maybe there is enough variety and room for discovery in video games to warrant the appraisal that "when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom" (p 193).

The trouble is--being a relatively young medium--video games rarely live up to that potential and it can take an extraordinary investment of resources (time and money) to uncover the types of experiences that rival real world (classroom or not) learning.  Video games are a multi-faceted experience, often involving scripts, art direction, sound design, play mechanics, etc and etc and etc...  Frequently, a game will excel in one or two of these aspects and fail in every other regard, and probably even more frequently, a game will fail in every respect.  It's difficult to say exactly why this is: either games are just too complex, relying on a sizable group of people and it can be difficult to coordinate their efforts into a cohesive, working game experience; they're such a young medium that training still happens on the job, so the error of trial and error still creeps into the finished product; or, maybe, the audience still doesn't quite know what to expect from the format and has therefore been too forgiving.

When I purchased and played games regularly, it was with these shortcomings in mind.  Rather than expecting a wholly satisfying experience from the games I invested in, I curated exemplars: games that nailed the established gameplay rules within a particular genre, but maybe lacked a strong narrative or character design; games that pushed the established gameplay rules in a new and exciting direction, even if they did so a little imperfectly; even games with control systems or play mechanics that bordered on the inept or masochistic, so long as they pushed narrative or design in remarkable ways.  Finding these games and exploring their strengths and weaknesses was an exercise in context discovery and coordination.  It was a learning experience but it was top-heavy and I put a disproportionate amount of work into bringing meaning to the games.  They seldom returned the favor.  Eventually, I discovered music, literature, and art, and found they had a better track record.

(As a side note: the "young medium" dynamic of video games may provide some useful perspective on the value of Great Works notions of studying art or literature.  Great Works curriculums are hobbled by bias, expertise, academic incest and all the ugly smugness that established power structures can bring. Rich Texts--as I defined them in an earlier post--provide a reliable springboard to broader studies because they've proven themselves to be reliable meaning delivery systems.  The tricky thing is that Great Works curriculums are generally composed of Rich Texts.  The distinction needs to be considered and maintained if we're to gather the benefits of the one while avoiding the pitfalls of the other.)

On the other hand, just as even narrow or imperfect works of art can yield unexpected, rich opportunities for meaning making that would otherwise be missed, often the unintended, jagged edges of game design yield some of the richest creative opportunities within the medium.  Indeed, bucking against a restrictive, artificial, or flawed system is one major way of uncovering the creative instinct.  Many a gamer has refused to merely suffer a game's weaknesses for the sake of its strengths, choosing instead to probe the rough spots for an opening--a way to bend the rules or physics or storyline into a more favorable configuration.  These openings come in many forms.  Sometimes they are glitches (errors in the coding or expected play sequence or game physics); sometimes they are cheat codes hidden away by programmers as a workaround to the game's finished form (cheats began their lives as ways for designers or hired testers to play through games without being slowed down by a game's difficulty, though they evolved into a way for programmers to include content changes that didn't fit the finished form as approved by the design team); sometimes they're additional code made by a third party and retrofitted to the game.  This article has some good examples of this creative gaming principle at work in the online gaming world (my favorite is 'Fansy the Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad', though I should warn you that the article is written in an elevated version of the kind of teenage boy-speak that is common in the online gaming world, with cursing, insensitivity and the lot):

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-elaborate-dick-moves-in-online-gaming-history/

I suggested, way back toward the beginning of this entry, that my thoughts on video games and their educational possibilities provided some insight on what Eisner was getting at with his 'standards' definitions, so I want to wrap this up by returning to that.  Later in his chapter, Eisner suggests: "Standards should be viewed as aids, as heuristics for debate and planning.  They should not be regarded as contracts or prescriptions that override local judgments" (p 173). To contrast the notion of standards as "arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric" against the notion of standards as heuristics is a bit like comparing apples to apples, but as Eisner makes clear with his enumeration of 'standard' definitions, it is really only comparing one definition of standards because it is neither their characteristic (im)precision nor their mutability toward which Eisner is critical.  It is, rather, the mix of meanings that allow that mutability, that arbitrariness to be forgot, and that is where video games come back into this...

A few video game companies have figured out the perils of spreading themselves too thin and have begun, instead, to put all of their efforts into expanding and refining relatively few titles.  Instead of becoming the odd addition to one gamer’s library to fulfill this or that need, they want their games to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible and be, as much as possible, all things to all gamers.  This means releasing two or three games a year—at most—instead of a dozen or more.  Blizzard does this with their Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo games.  Rockstar does this with their Grand Theft Auto series.  Bethesda does this with their Elder Scrolls games.  The games that have resulted have given rise to a whole new genre, the sandbox game.  Sandbox games typically allow players to invest 50+ hours and to choose, to some extent, their character’s role in the story/game world.  These games also have tremendous replay value because the choices made by the player have an effect on game events and outcome, meaning that one player’s experience will be very different from another player’s.  On the surface, this sounds like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel but the choices are far more subtle and numerous and the sequence of choices and effects isn’t linear, closer to a large equation that will yield different results depending on the order in which the various components are filled in and solved than a sequence of multiple choice questions.  These are the games that probably come closest to rivaling real-world learning.

But because these games are so huge, powerful, and well made and encourage gamers to spend tremendous amounts of time exploring the ins and outs of their sandbox worlds, they are more or less devoid of the sort of raw creative experiences that are facilitated by their imperfect, frustrating cousins.  It’s probably possible to find the rough edges if you search long and hard enough, but few gamers are going to be motivated to push past the already rich and seamless gaming experience to uncover the unintended rewards of bending a game that’s already so malleable.

Well-made “standards” could and should be like these well-made gaming experiences, they should offer such a breadth of learning and a variety of possible outcomes that the average student receives a rich and rewarding experience from their time spent within the curriculum.  To create such experiences, the programmers and designers of these games imagine a fully-realized world and do their best to anticipate the variety of interactions that would be desired in and facilitated by that world.  Superficially, such a world as realized in “standards” form veers perilously close to the bewildering array described by Eisner on p 171-172 but we’re living in the age of Wikipedia, of crowd sourcing, GUIs, searchability, etc.  Why should our idea of “standards” be a static, periodically updated PDF file?  Is it really desirable to reduce our desired educational outcomes to a set of elliptical sentences that fit snugly in rigid, sequential boxes?

Eisner suggests somewhat ambivalently that “standards” could be useful, but I’ll do him one better and say that “standards” should be made useful.  I think we need something like standards, and, following Eisner’s suggestion, we need to start treating them as heuristics rather than contracts.  There are already a variety of resources for sharing lesson plans and teaching tips online, but our profession would benefit from a centralized, professionally monitored and organized resource that offers the best in practical and expert “standards” and practices.  Our “standards” should be crowd sourced and broadened to reflect the wealth of learning opportunities at work in classrooms and they should allow students and teachers to confidently follow their curricular inspirations while receiving additional ideas and feedback from their peers and other experts in the field.  Such a database would never achieve a final form, but would instead be persistently renewed and, especially so by the students and teachers that continue to bump up against the rough edges of even this rich educational environment.  The opportunities for raw creativity will never go away because technology and cultural conditions will continue to evolve.  Unlike the worlds imagined by sandbox game programmers, the world being addressed by such a resource—the real world—will never become static.  It’s time we stop looking for standards that are.

the light/tunnel ratio continued

(The end of my last post probably felt a little abrupt--especially given the grandiose title and introductory image.  As has become the case with the reading that I'm doing for this class, I spent a little too much time "chewing" and neglected to leave myself enough time to adequately cull and transcribe the thoughts that formed in the process.  So, with this post, I'll attempt to continue the train of thought where I left it at the same time that I integrate the additional freight picked up from the interceding reading.  [How's that for metaphorical thought? And that last bit rhymes!])

When Serra made that comment about art not being democratic, he was in the midst of a very unpleasant episode in which his work had been rather violently rejected by his audience.  This was before his process of work-making had brought him to the point where curves came to figure heavily in his repertoire of techniques (PING Eisner, p 114).  Though he was perhaps already on his way to that point, because Tilted Arc (PING Dustin)--the much maligned piece in question--was, in fact, a slow, stately gradually described curve.  Unfortunately, it wasn't quite curvy enough and some very loud voices decried it an unsightly gash, spoiling their public ground and their vista.

This response was visceral.  In this respect, Tilted Arc was a success.  It engaged the audience as a sensual, "physical and, in a sense, erotic" (Freedman, p 96) experience.  And on this level, Tilted Arc met the criteria by which Kimmelman declared Serra's work successful.  It reduced the terms of viewing to the point where the audience and their roving, subjective viewfindership became the only point of entry by which to "locate themselves in the fictional realities of artistic forms" (Freedman, p 92).  This idea that narrative ("fictional realities") is the dominant interpretive lens for the average viewer is supported by VTS stage theory and also by Lowenfeld's stage theory in which haptic and descriptive approaches to art production give way to representational schemata (as tends to be the development in the dominant Western tradition anyway).  So, for this average viewer then, the troubling part of Serra's work is the aggressive way that it refuses to be fictionalized.  Its presence is obtrusive and demanding.  Stripped of all other context, the only narrative it offers is the attraction or repulsion of the viewer to its presence.  In Kimmelman's review of the Serra retrospective, this quality is lauded; in the case of Tilted Arc, it proved fatal.

I've already suggested that maybe Tilted Arc wasn't curvy enough to make that achieved effect pleasurable for the audience.  That evaluation is based partly on my familiarity with critical response to Serra's work over time and partly on my own responses to his works.  The early, uncurving, self-supporting slabs of lead and steel have an aggressive quality.  Serra could, theoretically, have made these works out of some other equally rigid but less hefty material (plastics? strong wood?), but the work required to make and sustain the pieces is ultimately part of their effect--they focus the viewer on material and process, at least in part out of a regard for personal safety.  In my kitchen, I keep a postcard of Serra densely suited in protective gear hurtling molten lead into the corner of his studio.  I consider his presence an icon of the visceral culinary approach to which I aspire, an approach that to my mind lines up with the early character of his work.  There's a sort of brutish, take-no-prisoners showmanship in this work and perhaps this is the reason that some people have characterized it as excessively masculine (PING, Kathy).

But this is not the sort of work that has, ultimately, made a popular artist of Serra.  Or, rather, it is--but modulated by finesse and the blessings of institutional savoir fair.  His works still offer the viewer the same stark narrative, but the curving forms no longer push or indicate the presence of an aggressive artist.  As Serra's relationship to his own work has shifted from lifting, pushing, and throwing heavy metals around to massive designs that are turned over for fabrication, the pieces have become more seductive. Great big museums like MoMA have bent over backwards to accomodate them and viewers have been provided with a "safe" space in which to fall under their influence.  No more ugly confrontations; no more unwanted democratic intrusions.

So, Freedman's correct.  No matter how pure the form, context and associations play a role in our experience of it.  It's one thing to be invited to approach and experience Serra's work as art in the traditional institutional settings and it's another to have his work invade your space and to have to live with it on a daily basis.  For me, the irony builds as I apply my own social activist lens to Tilted Arc.  I see the aggressiveness of Tilted Arc as equal to that of the urban landscape into which it was installed.  In that sense, it could have served as a critique or satire of the resignation with which individuals submit  their landscape, their worldview, their point-of-view--to urban developers and the felicities of capital.  Under this lens, Serra subverted the methods and language of the urban landscape to create a non-functional work of art--an object that exists by virtue of its desire to make its audience think and consider.  But that's what I bring to the work, and Serra deliberately avoids burdening his sculpture with politics.  Wisely, I think.  Such considerations would derail his oeuvre.

the light/tunnel ratio

"As minimalist artists have taught us, form is never pure; it can always stimulate associations." (Freedman, p 42)


"In Mr. Serra’s case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp." (Kimmelman's New York Times review of MoMA's Serra retrospective)


First of all (or rather, second of all--see how I snuck those two quotations up there to set up a dichotomy for my arguments before I even began to address the reader directly?), let me apologize because I never got around to finishing the argument that I'd worked up in my previous post.  What it boiled down to is pretty neatly captured by the jotted note that I made while reading those first two chapters: "Freedman's approach, with its broad narrative and exhaustive citations, strives for subjectivity, while her tone works against it," the overall effect of which serves to make her argument less coherent and her history less convincing.  I suspect that her goal is to provide us with a catalog of the ideas that have influenced her thinking, some of which she has assimilated or built on and some of which she has reacted against.  This approach makes sense if she aligns herself with post-structuralist theory (and, to my mind, the quote from her that I used up top confirms that alignment), but it comes off as a history with a not-so-well-hidden argument as a subtext.  Her book would gain substantial clarity, credibility, and readability if she would take the first sentence of chapter four (which comes, tellingly, with a citation from Eisner attached) to heart and foreground her own sensibilities, tell some stories, and generally let the reader see how she evolved into the voice that is presently speaking to them through her book instead of burying her head in the forest of erudition and Lacanian quadruple speak.


My own intention in taking so very long to work my way up to that conclusion in that past post was to provide an example of the kind of writing that I prefer: writing that demonstrates a sense of personhood and brings the reader along a path with definite landmarks that can be retraced like bread crumbs.  Eisner, I feel, represents this type of writing as well.  When I finish reading Eisner, I can remember various descriptions that he's incorporated into the chapter and, whether I agree with him or not, I have a pretty strong sense that I've followed the thrust of his argument.  By contrast, when I finish reading a chapter of Freedman, I have to look back at the notes I've made in the margins and do my darnedest to form a picture of the chapter as a whole--and if I don't do this, I leave the reading almost completely blank.

Ironically (or does it become meta-irony, since irony is one of the favorite languages of the type of "post-Pop Surrealism" that Serra dismisses and that Freedman would adamantly defend?), the aesthetic choices that Freedman has made as a writer do not follow the standards that she advocates for both art and learning.  Instead of creating a context-rich environment in which metacognitively-activated learning will be scaffolded by the materials that she presents, she has created a hermetic world in which her research and thought is presented unmediated by familiar (or uncanny) structures.  And just as ironically, that great stalwart structuralist, Richard Serra, whose works appeals unmediated to each and every viewer regardless the wealth of their "imagic stores," once made the comment that "Art is not democratic."

TLC 8740 post in progress

First of all, it looks like the link that I posted to Laurie Anderson's Only An Expert has gone kaput, so here's another:

Only An Expert

And while we're cruising YouTube, how 'bout this one too:

The Shining Elevator Scene analysis

Ok, ok, I know, I already demonstrated my ability to derail a reading response with a tenuous analogy connecting the readings to a movie I've recently watched, but bear with me because this so totally relates to Eisner, Freedman, and Barrett...

As I read Eisner's reproduction of a student's response to the red dye creepily saturating a glass of water (p 60), I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Shining because the day prior I received reassurance that I wasn't the only Kubrick nut rattling on semi-coherently of late. Check out this article.

Now, being a proper fanboy, I was already aware that The Shining has been interpreted as a comment on the destruction of the Native American peoples. But since it's not one of my favorite readings of the film(PING Barrett: some interpretations are better than others), I doubt it would have came to mind if I hadn't just recently been reminded of it by this article. But far and away, my favorite thing about this article and the YouTube clip is that they provide more linguistic snd conceptual fodder for my thoughts on Kubricks's films because "the ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text" (Eisner, p 86) is important and film, which includes a temporal element, is so nearly experiential that without those intermediaries the experience can slip away. Also, it's good to know that someone else out there is watching closely enough to have called out the Times article's author on his tuxedo/top hat mix up (see article correction) and to see that Lichanos' comment on the bottom echos the observation I made in my last post about the homicidal apes in 2001 (because that helps me as I seek to balance personal and communal interpretations; PING Barrett again).

All of this serves to reinforce the notion I already held that Kubrick's work serves as what we called in my days as a lit student a Rich Text. Rich texts are works that reward repeated readings/viewings; works that grow and change as we do. The reason I've got Kubrick on the brain right now is that I got his collected works on blu ray for Christmas. I already had them all on DVD since they were among the first DVDs I bought back in high school when I got my first DVD player and some of them I had on VHS before that, so I can testify to their quality in this respect, but I don't really need to since a wealth of literature has grown and continues to grow around them. Which is the only quantitative means of determining a rich text: how many other works exist that draw on or discuss the work in question. The Bible and Shakespeare are among the richest texts extant, but, as Barrett mentions in passing, volumes of work on Magritte were likely consulted and whittled down into the encyclopedia entry that he reprints, so Magritte's work constitutes a rich text as well.

But how does that happen? How does one text become richer than another? Freedman uses two Kubrick films as examples of the type of "popular films that have postmodern forms [and] are edited in a pastiche that focuses the audience on structure and process" (p 34) and that, I suspect, is one means by which a work achieves such status--by leaving ample room for interpretation. In this sense, it is partly the medium and its handling that creates the condition. For Shakespeare, it's not only the breadth of his vocabulary and the quantity of material he left behind, but that his works are plays and lean upon the reader or theater professional or film maker to complete them. The Bible's variety of cultures, time periods, authors and styles make it an extraordinarily malleable reference point for a variety of ideological and creative ends (though, I would argue, it's a bit of a mixed bag in therms of Richness).

I'm misusing Freedman a bit though because in that passage, she's actually suggesting that these films are an examples of a new phenomenon and the two examples I've just given are very old. But I think she's misusing Kubrick, so turnabout is fair play. Freedman asserts that "no audience in a postindustrial democracy can be considered visually naive" and makes use of Kubrick as evidence for that statement but of Kubrick's and the other films listed in those parentheses, I would count none--with the possible exception of Pulp Fiction--as solid examples of popular culture in a postindustrial democracy. The reality is that the most mainstream of films in our postindustrial culture still adhere quite faithfully to the machinations of the invisible narrator. Which is not to say that she does not have a point, just that she should have narrowed her argument: given the proliferation and dominance of visual information in our culture, audiences are only as naive as they would like to be--alternatives are available. What she touches on, though, in suggesting that these are "popular" films, is the other means by which a text becomes rich--popularity--and that popularity may have little to do with any inherent quality in the material, it's just that a bigger audience results in a bigger audience response. And that bigger audience can be as much from luck as anything else. One of my favorite examples of blind popularity enriching a text is the phenomenon of film/album synchronicity, as exemplified by the pairing of the films version of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (there's a whole culture of looking for such pairings on the Internet if you care to search for it). These are wholly unrelated works of art being used by their audiences to build new communal meanings.

What has really happened with visual culture over the past century is not that it has become more sophisticated, as Freedman suggests, but that it has become more popular. Any perceived increase in sophistication is likely a residual effect of that popularity. Freedman goes on to elaborate on the new need to reassess aesthetic study of visual culture because of this proliferation with reference to Theodore Adorno's "lament" at "the collapse of the boundaries between fine art and popular culture" and she later (p 41) brings Adorno back up as a contrast with Dewey's "neopragmatist" approach, at which point she works a bit of her own aesthetic magic by using what I believe is the only first-person singular pronoun in the entire chapter. "I have always been uncomfortable with the apparently elitist perspective of Adorno's aesthetic..." she confesses. This is in spite of the fact that the very first marginal note that I wrote in this chapter was right next to the very first sentence: "active-ist."

From her first sentence, it is clear that Freedman has an agenda; that she is making an argument.  Yet, her writing style has the peculiar habit of hiding her voice.  In other words, right up until the imaginary fourth wall is broken by her confessed discomfort, Freedman has been hiding the narrator.

Bumper Sticker

Since I got stuck on an Eisner/Kubrick kick in my last post, I'll borrow my bumper sticker from Freedman:

"The new conditions of visual culture illustrate that personal freedoms no longer only involve matters of free speech. They concern freedom of information in a range of visual art forms integral to the creation of individual and group knowledge. People cannot only speak freely; they can visually access, display and duplicate, computer manipulate, and globally televise."

Power to the people!

(That said, I must admit I feely both sympathetic and weary as I read Freedman. I've written elsewhere on this blog about how "As a student of literature, I wound up getting pretty frustrated with the poststructuralist critical discourse: all that reading between the lines leads one to suspect equivocation everywhere." That was about an article by Duncum, but their perspectives seem pretty closely aligned.)

LTC 8740, Post 1: The Begetting Stone

“…even a stone can be attended to so that its aesthetic character can serve as a source of that special form of life we call art.”  (Eisner, p 10)

2001: A Space Odyssey: Dawn of Man sequence

In chapter one, Eisner describes the nature and birth of learning.   With characteristic cynicism, Stanley Kubrick dramatized this same process in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  As Eisner tells us, “[the] ability to experience the qualitative world we inhabit is initially reflexive in character….But we also learn….to see, to hear, to discern the qualitative complexities of what we taste and touch” (p. 2).  In other words, what begins as instinct develops, through repetition and practice, into deliberation.  Deliberation becomes the basis for the formation of concepts.  Concepts, in turn, create and shape culture.   Through concepts “we can imagine possibilities we have not encountered, and we can….create, in the public sphere, the new possibilities we have imagined in the private precincts of our consciousness” (p. 3).  But all of it begins with and grows from experience and perception. 

                Eisner and Kubrick seem to be in agreement that this quality is unique to humans.  Kubrick depicts an imagined moment at which the leap from the animal to the human world is made, via the intervention of…  Well, of what, exactly?  The scenario presented in the film leads the viewer to believe it to be the intervention of some sort of alien intelligence, but Kubrick deliberately leaves this vague.  The monolith, which is later encountered again on the moon and in orbit around Jupiter, is the only evidence we have of an alien being in the film, so, like the characters who organize a mission to seek them out, we are forced to assume their presence.  But this is only a concept that we are applying to the scenario.  We are familiar with intelligence as a concept and we presume that we can spot its makings.  In (cinematic) reality, it is the ape’s encounter with an unprecedented experiential phenomenon that sparks its imaginative leap, and that is all.  For Kubrick, that imaginative leap leads, ironically, to new destructive possibilities--this YouTube clip has been edited to cut out a scene in which the bone-wielding ape and his tribe assault a neighboring tribe, and the satellite in orbit that occurs at the end of the clip was originally intended to be read as containing nuclear weapons—but it also leads to the kind of culture that produces a visionary like Kubrick and the shared experiences that his films create.  As Eisner has it, “imagination, fed by the sensory features of experience is expressed in the arts through the image,” which, in turn, allows us a qualitative, shared vision, that will—with any luck—“ refine our sensory system and [cultivate] our imaginative abilities” (p 4).

                But how does qualitative, visionary work like Kubrick’s get us, as a culture, past the urge to smash, bomb, and blast for personal gain?  Eisner describes that a little more fully near the end of chapter one.  First of all, the arts encourage us to slow down by rewarding effortful concentration.  Of this, Eisner says:

“In the context of practical activity, the criterion of efficiency matter a great deal.  Normally we try to see the world and act upon it with the least amount of energy that will satisfy the realization of our purposes.  Put another way, we typically see things in order to classify and use them.” (p 23)

This effect is also described in the ‘Make a Gap’ chapter of our Imagination First text.  In that chapter, the example of a cat that is observed from the opposite size of a picket fence is given: our minds fill in the gaps created by the fence and we perceive the cat without any conscious effort.  In the recent book by Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he refers to this effect as being the result of what he calls the “lazy controller.”  Kahneman describes how glucose stores are actually used up by effortful processing in the mind, and as a result, we’ve developed a variety of mental shortcuts that allow us to function without needing to suck down sugar 24 hours a day.  As a result, the more “expert” we become in a task, the more shortcuts we work out to help us continue with our work.  The arts “help students learn how to savor qualities by taking the time to really look so that they can see” (Eisner, p 24) and Kubrick’s  film, as with many works of art that came before it, presents an opportunity to reflect on our world, our actions, our motivations, and the possibilities present in all of those things. 

This reflection is important because slowing down and reflecting operates on the development of concepts, which in turn, influences culture and all of those that do and will take part in that culture.  “What is clear,” says Eisner, “is that culture depends upon these communications because communication patterns provide opportunities for members of a culture to grow” (p 7) and “….the child’s mind is shaped by the culture of which the foregoing conditions are a part” (p 22).  So, by delineating the destructive and dangerous sides of innovation and progress and juxtaposing them against their heroic and beautiful aspects, Kubrick may have done more than provide a cautionary tale or a bit of black humor—he may have forged a few new mental shortcuts to make it easier on the next generation of innovators and educators.

Post Script: On Experts

Our talk last week about experts and expertise versus the (dying?) ideal of a liberal education made me think of this song off of Laurie Anderson's last album which is catchy, funny, and spot on:

One Quality of Inaction (visual metaphor for Speak)

Super Cool Person Making Stuff On The Internet

Alright, so here's an Art Ed resource that you probably won't find described that way anywhere else so pay attention! :-)

http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart

This is Vi Hart's YouTube channel. I found her because I'm a compulsive reader of The New York Times and they did a profile on her a while back.  What's Super Cool is that she's not an Art Ed person and she doesn't even identify as a Visual Artist but she is a full-fledged Visual Thinker (among her many other Modes of Thought).  She's a Mathematician and a Musician and a Maker of Videos and if you're ever stumped for ways to cross-disciplinize some basic math ideas in an arty way, her videos just might be the seeds to get your arty ideas growing. (Not to mention being great examples of lo-fi, smart, engaging, internet-era video making.)

Art Ed Visual Metaphor Statement

I tried to let my Art Ed metaphor reflect my beliefs from the bottom up.  I’ve been experiencing a revival of my interest in film/video as an art form—partly, I think, as an outgrowth of my field assignment this semester where half of my time has been with a photography class.  It’s my belief that the best kind of art education provides a model of learning in which students are allowed to capitalize on their strengths and interests—to develop and grow by following their muse.  My muse was leading me toward learning a little about Adobe’s After Effects video editing software, so I took this assignment as an opportunity to follow it.  Further, my tastes often lead me toward neatly bundled conceptual packages, so I decided to use my “teacher”—the instructional video—as the material for my own creation.  This allowed for a layering of perceptual experiences with the first layer being the “on-screen” instruction and modeling being demonstrated by the source material (teacher) and the second layer being the “off-screen” learning being modeled by the source material’s manipulator (student: me).  I made an effort to exaggerate the techniques being described by the narrator and delayed and prolonged certain effects after the narrator had moved on so as to simulate the play between observation and experimentation as it occurs in the art classroom. 

3 Artists addendum

So I forgot to tie my three filmmakers together with a Big Idea, but no worries.  With cinema there's one big idea that's never too far away no matter the project and our biggest local film fest captures it exactly: True/False.  Cinema may be the closest we get to a pure expression of reality (though interactive media, most broadly explored in "video game" format is perhaps a hint of something even closer), but it is still--in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini--"a certain reality."

Danse Serpentine offers an easy entrance to this idea.  The goal of the filmmaker in coloring his/her print was to get a closer rendering of the spectacle of Loie Fuller's dance work than could be achieved through the mere mechanical works available to him/her at the time.  But does this extra-mechanical rendering--the hand coloring of the print--somehow make it less documentary?  Must an image be produced by a mute machine to be called documentary?  Aren't we kidding ourselves by trying to make that distinction?  Machines, being man-made, create images that are man-made.  To tinker with a machine's image only adds another link to the chain of extraction (or abstraction).

By the time Orson Welles made F for Fake, he had already become something of a myth.  Unable or unwilling to do things through the studio system, Welles scrambled from project to project using his credibility--his obstinacy and artistry--to secure independent funding for his projects.  But in an irony that he seems to have been fully aware of, he devoted inordinate amounts of time fighting the strings attached to the money that he'd secured through such a thorough demonstration of his willingness to fight against any and all such strings.  He was burning the candle at any and every end he could come to.  F for Fake is a magnificent expression of the corner that he'd painted himself in but it also must be taken with many grains of salt.  I don't want to give anything away but by the end of watching the film it becomes clear that Welles notion of illusion extends well beyond the trompe l'oeil of clever editing.

Finally, something that I really love about Terrence Malick is the respect for cinematic spectacle that he seems to share with the neo-realists of the 50s and 60s.  Although The Thin Red Line wonders broadly from the novel its based on (which was, in turn, based on the experiences of its author James Jones), it strives to get the details right--from the yellow grenades to the Japanese's deep jungle camp.  Malick seems to be concerned with capturing reality on multiple levels: as the details experienced at a particular time and in a particular place (which, in this case, are faked/recreated), as the reality of a particular set of people engaged in the process of recreating that particular time and place (the actors retracing the events of the script/novel: real people experiencing more or less real emotions and circumstances), and as the reality of the conveyance of these details and experiences into the lives of the audience (by way of the director's agenda: in Malick's case, his commitment to his particular philosophy and aesthetic).  All of these things can be said to be realistically or honestly represented but the viewer gets nearer or further from the "truth" depending on which lens of reality is being examined.

On Film: 3 Artists

This is perhaps a bit wide of the box, but film has really had my interest of late and there are a lot of filmmakers that strike me as visual artists and really, why on Earth should a moving image be any less of an art object than a still one.  So, here goes…

By way of transition from the staid and true art of the museum world, here’s something I came across in the Pompidou:

Mesmerizing isn’t it?  The Pompidou’s info card has this listed as Anonymous, although the dance and costume are attributed to Loie Fuller.  A quick Wikipedia search shows that Fuller was known for her innovative use of stage lighting to create effects of illumination in combination with her costumes.  It seems that the filmmaker here painstakingly and lovingly hand colored the film in an effort to mimic the effect.

I fell for Orson Welles a long time ago after seeing Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil but by a happy accident I was flipping through the channels thinking about going to bed one night recently when I came across one of his last films, F for Fake.  I was tired but I couldn’t stop watching.  Having just recently watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, I was stunned by the parallels.  Not only were the exact same themes being explored by Welles, but the style and methods were very similar.  Welles made F for Fake in 1974(!) and everything about it is shockingly innovative, from the frenetic editing to the casual blend of documentary and farcical (tumbling into fictional) elements.  Welles was conscious of what he was doing too, describing it as a “new type of film” and a “essay in film.”  Here’s a beautiful, though not quite representative passage, a meditative moment from somewhere near the middle of the film:

Finally, I missed Tree of Life while it was in theaters but I’m eagerly awaiting the Blu Ray release.  I recently made the jump to high definition with a new television and Blu Ray player and Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line was one of the first I bought on Blu Ray so I just recently re-experienced it in high def glory.  It was probably the first “art” film that I ever saw because Malick is one of the few art house directors with enough Hollywood clout to still get major releases and this was two years before the original Ragtag Cinema Café would grace Columbia’s downtown culture.  Malick’s ability to continue to release to major theaters is even more remarkable when you consider that the usual fair at Ragtag is really more ‘indie’ than ‘art house’ with films that deviate only slightly from mainstream script and filmmaking conventions.  Malick as a filmmaker is very nearly a world unto himself.  He seems to focus primarily on the composition of his shots, looking for poetic imagery while his scripts operate almost independently of his direction giving the actors something to do while he moves in, about and around them.  It’s like he commissions a play and then creates his film as the play is performed, usually radically re-editing and disregarding the story as he creates something new from it through use of voice over and soundtrack.  Anyway, if you’ve never seen The Thin Red Line it’s even more dream-like and beautiful than it appears in this trailer but here’s a taste:

Speak and the Crisis of Adolescence

In reading through Speak, the aspect of adolescence that stung with the sharpest nostalgia (though we rarely associate nostalgia with unpleasantness) was Melinda's helplessness in the face of overwhelming dysfunction in the people and institutions that are supposed to serve as her caretakers.  If anything, Melinda is extraordinarily sensitive in accurately detecting the presence and causes of this dysfunction.  I suspect that few junior high/high school students truly share her gifts.  They know enough to be bitter, angry, and withdrawn--to be sure--but rarely do their observations or rebellions strike the deserving targets.

At least that was the case for me when I moved with my family from the small town I grew up with in the summer between seventh and eighth grades.  The crisis I experienced was largely the result of academic discord and disappointment.  In my home town I had ranked at the top of my academic class but the curriculums were so vastly mismatched between my old school and my new one that I found myself quickly buried beneath the workload.  If I recognized the problem, I certainly couldn't articulate it.  I floundered and did my best to ignore school and minimize its significance in my life.  This was, necessarily, a losing battle, since school would continue to be my greatest time commitment for the next five years, but--as an adolescent--the qualities of inaction were as novel a solution for problem solving as the variety of alternatives that were, as yet, a vague, unruly, and likely disappointing lot.

The misfortune of my ill-timed move and subsequent academic struggle pales in comparison to Melinda's lot but I felt I could identify with her response.  The mingling of Melinda's tragic rape with the more insidious brutalities that accompany our first tastes of the adult world is perhaps a shortcoming of the book, or, at least, a shortcoming of its role as a tool to provide insight into the adolescent mind.  Rape is abhorrent and--I imagine--extraordinarily traumatic.  So, it would not be unreasonable to expect a similar shift in personality/psychology for a victim of rape regardless of age.  The book seems to suggest a brighter horizon for Melinda at the end and the character is perhaps clever and resilient enough to proceed brilliantly into her sophomore year, but anyone who has their image of the world and their self-image strongly shaken at a formative point can probably expect to carry certain habits of mind well beyond their initial recovery.  As for me, I have little more faith in the adult world and the Deciders that helm our institutions than I did when I was 14.  The hard-earned difference, acquired somewhere along the 16 intervening years, is that I no longer think it expedient to ignore them.

This I believe...

To do a thing artfully is to do it with attention or purpose that extends beyond the ordinary; to do a thing artfully is to do it with care.  I believe that the role of art education in today’s public school curriculum is to provide students with a model for a type of excellence that cannot be achieved through test-taking strategies or rote memorization.  The practice of the professional artist has always involved a keen awareness of the models and methods of art creation that have come before, often with an eye toward advancing the practices or aesthetics of his/her particular medium(s).  But the methodology for achieving success as an artist or with a particular artwork has never been a strictly linear or, even, entirely logical operation.  There are many, many paths to great artistic achievement and every great artist must ultimately find their own way.  As art educators we must provide students with the groundwork on which to construct their individual paths; we must make efforts to familiarize them with models of excellence culled from art history and we must help them understand the tools through which that success was achieved.  But because art cannot be defined as one type of activity, or even any grouping or list of activities, we must be ready to extend our practice beyond the precedents of art history and follow our students as they find the mediums to which they have decided to focus their care and attention.

addendum: about poets and purification

I struggled to explain my interpretation of what Eliot felt about a poet’s role being the “purification” of the dialect of the tribe and how this applies to the evolution of visual culture this morning, so I wanted to take a second to try and explain it a little better here…

While the role of “purification” does not necessarily fall to poets alone—since writers of prose can be just as deliberate in their choice of word and sentence structure—the process of making those choices is all the more transparent in poetry  because, generally speaking, there are altogether fewer words in a completed piece of poetry than in prose and because both the author and the audience are likely to be familiar with the traditional poetic structures available to the poet and the level of adherence/caprice being used in following or diverting from those structures.  Over the course of the Four Quartets, Eliot slips into and out of various structures and deliberately quotes (or “appropriates”) past masters/masterworks, altering and juxtaposing them at his own discretion.  It is the level of care that he takes in employing his poetic tools that allow him to show concern for the “dialect of the tribe.”  He elaborates on the process at another point in the Quartets:

“…every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)…”

Eliot always took great care to acknowledge the literary shoulders on which he stood (he wrote a very famous essay, Tradition and Individual Talent, about the relationship between the canon and its contemporary workers), so he saw this “purification” as a slowly evolving and deliberate process in which the self-aware poet did their best to chart a position in the course of literary affairs and choose the right words for their particular time and purpose.

Now, here’s how I see this applying to visual culture…   Because of the way that technology and culture evolved, Eliot was in a better position to choose deliberately and understand his place at the end of that long chain than anyone working in the century preceding his own.  The printing press had been in action since the 15^th century but the early 20^th century was probably the golden age of the printed word: newspapers wielded tremendous power, public libraries were ubiquitous, television was just a twinkling in some techie’s eye, and even radio broadcasting didn’t really get started until the 1920s (Elliot published The Waste Land in 1922).  Written language, through its long course of evolution, had achieved a tremendous amount of agency.  The masses were, by and large, literate and contributing to the written collective.  This means that written culture had come a long, long way from the days when written culture was largely the domain of the lawmaking and priestly classes.

Which leads us to why this is a matter of “purification”…  Another 20^th century literary figure (and coincidentally, another St. Louis native—Eliot was born and raised there), William Burroughs, had a sort of sci-fi scenario/theory that language is a virus, that it arrived from the outer reaches of the universe and started to prey on human beings by taking control of their thoughts and actions.  I think that may be taking it a bit far, but there may be some truth in it too: if language evolved to serve a need and if that need was, for a long period of time, exploited to reflect the ends of an elite ruling class, then it is reasonable to expect language to contain some vestiges of its evolution as a tool of oppression.  At the very least, it probably took until the 20^th century for the majority of a population of a nation to be encouraged to make use of writing as a tool for deliberate and reflective action.  So, I believe that to “purify the dialect of the tribe” means to take a more perfect control of the tool of language—to do one’s part to wipe out the ostentatiousness, pedantry, and vulgarity—and to help everyone think just a little more keenly.

I believe that visual culture is now at or nearing the point at which Eliot encountered the written word.  We must try to help our students see the Photoshoped models, the smartly seductive product placements, the ideologies of perpetual consumption and unhappiness, etc.  clearly and we must try to help them see the alternatives clearly also.  Visual culture is becoming a collective.  As art educators we must help our students see the whole and plot their course.

when the going gets weird... (this I believe)*

We live in a time when rapid progress in technology is driving the habits and understanding of successive generations further apart at the same time that it is bringing the distant corners of the Earth closer together.  As Howard Gardner points out, “We should, for sure, think globally, but we should, for equally strong reasons, act locally, nationally, and regionally” (Gardner, 2009, p 18).  This puts educators in a sticky situation, with the duty to reach students who have been born into a whole new world while that world raps loudly and deservingly at the door to the classroom.  As teachers we must develop habits of mind and methods of working that reflect a far-reaching and inclusive attitude toward culture and knowledge at the same time that we evolve pedagogy capable of keeping pace with the changing needs of our students.

I believe that we in the field of art education can lead the way into this exciting new educational landscape.  As Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown point out in their chapter ‘Knowing, Making, and Playing’, recent changes in technology and culture call for a new kind of literacy—one in which context is the locus of meaning (Thomas & Brown, 2011).  Olivia Gude’s postmodern principles describe a variety of specific techniques used by artists that provide avenues of creation, play and communication through the manipulation of an object or symbol’s conceptual framework (Gude, 2004).   The techniques she describes are not new, Gude has begun the task of recognizing and describing them, but professional art practice has arguably reflected the sensibility of contextually directed meaning for nearly a hundred years now.  Art educators have the wealth of their discipline’s past century of work to draw from as they move to meet the needs of today’s students.

With our eyes toward the past century (and, indeed, the centuries and millennia before), I believe we must work toward what T.S. Eliot once referred to as a need “to purify the dialect of the tribe.”  With advances in technology, visual culture, like written language before it, has moved from the hands of the elite to become a collective property.   But all too often the dialogue is saturated with manipulation and the residual meanings of an antiquated power structure that is fighting to squeeze whatever it can from this apparatus before the reins are pulled completely away.  As workers in the field of visual culture—as artists—our tribe is truly global.  As educators our greatest responsibility is to reveal to the students that pass through our doors the rights and responsibilities that are attendant on their own membership.  By studying visual culture and the works and methods of great artists, and by facilitating deliberate and reflective art making in the classroom, I hope I will be doing my part to empower my students and to help them become respectful and effective members of the global community.

Gardner, H. (2009). Five minds for the future. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21^st century art education. Art Education, 57(1), 6-14.

Thomas, D, & Seely, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: Createspace.

*Bonus rant.  I just can't stop synthesizing.  This title is the first part of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson.  The quote popped into my head as I began to write this statement at just about the same moment that I knew I needed to lead toward the T.S. Eliot quote.  The two references together help explain my transition from a student of literary to artistic discourse and the original motives behind my desire to become an art educator.  In my time as a student of the English department at MU, the term 'text' had already come to describe just about any phenomena that would bear close-reading and interpretation.  Thus, images were a suitable subject for study and reference in the papers we wrote as students of English and I quickly spread my interests to Art History and used my understandings of each discourse as a buoy for the narratives and analyses I constructed there.  But, as I wrote and wrote and wrote I began to become dissatisfied with this relatively passive approach to visual culture.  To be an informed and critical consumer of visual culture is all well and good, but it is still only consumption.  As advances in technology have moved the elements of visual design to an integral role in the production of nearly all media--written and otherwise--the time seemed ripe to broaden our understanding of Eliot's conception of literary tradition.  The word is still vital and active but it is rarely encountered or considered au naturel anymore, nor does it need be: the visual idea is now as easily transmitted as the verbal (see my discussion of this shift in THEVERYMANY blog entry).  

The idea that literacy now involves a simultaneous engagement with verbal and visual disciplines sometimes strikes me as an anachronistic novelty.  It’s as though the high-piled evidence of 20^th century culture has belatedly triggered recognition, one decade deep into the 21^st century, that cultural artifacts have undergone a dramatic remodel.  Perhaps this helps explain the muddled aspect of English/language arts pedagogy over the last quarter of the 20^th century: film (the original multi-media recording format) was already generating a tremendous library but nobody was quite sure what to do with it and certainly some film directors deliberately shifted their productive efforts from literature over to the new medium.  Pier Paolo Pasolini provides one of the most dramatic examples, describing his transition from writing to film as “an explosion of my love for reality.”  In retrospect, Pasolini looks like a secular prophet.  His statement reflects a fundamental shift in the dynamics of authorship that occurred with the advent of film: if the author’s act of recording was motivated by a particular love of or engagement with the phenomena of life, why struggle with the intermediary any longer?  A more perfect medium had been invented.

But, of course, that interpretation is a bit naïve.  There are difficulties wrapped up with the medium of film as well.  Reality is immersive; film can only capture targeted aspects of that immersion.  And in some respects, the shortcomings of film edified the functional shorthand of language, just as the shortcomings of photography fortified the expressive qualities of painting.  Regardless, the manner of knowing and understanding life had changed dramatically and irrevocably.  Now, in the medium of hypertext, the choices to be made about how best to represent one aspect of reality or another is no longer a matter of choosing the best word only, but of choosing the best format as well.  This is what is now required to “purify the dialect” and to do it we must study, experiment, and play, in the variety of formats available and we must teach our students to do it too.

Gardner suggests that it takes ten years to achieve mastery of a discipline and I’m sure that he has a mound of theory and research to back that up (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26ideas.html for a recent, interesting discussion of the shortcomings of science), so the code-switching I suggest may seem daunting, but I’m not at all convinced that a standard for mastery is justifiable or necessary.  And even if it is, when one stops to consider the rapid exponential improvements in technology that lie at the heart of our changing culture, do the time frames studied really apply anymore?  It seems unlikely.

We live in weird times and when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.  Who knows?  Maybe in the next five years art will become the discipline that leads policy and pedagogical discussion.  Stranger things have happened.

(And just one more little aside: if you’ve never read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I strongly, strongly, oh so strongly recommend it: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/  My quote comes from the Fourth Quartet when Eliot encounters the ghost of a poet that could be any--even his own. The Quartets are sequential, with references that build on each other, so reading the whole thing helps it make better sense than the lone segment, but it’s strong meat and you can probably pick and choose profitably too [although Joni Mitchell resigned from the task of whittling them down for a composition by Charles Mingus, saying that it was like trying to cut verses from the Bible])

paper proposal

I’ve recently become very interested in ancient Egyptian art.  I admire the way that their artworks—or, at least, what we know of them—blend seamlessly into their culture.  The Egyptians did not have a word that serves as an equivalent for ‘art’.   The Egyptians did not make works of art, but they put great effort into making things artfully.  Their priest class was closely related to their class of scribes and it is difficult to distinguish too finely between their scribes and a grouping of people that we might in our parlance deem ‘artists’.    Indeed, many of the strategies employed for the composition of paintings, architecture, and statuary are derived from the hieroglyphic writing system that also serves as an integral part of these works.

Alongside the admiration that I feel for the holistic achievements of Egyptian culture is an awareness of the subversive side of this integration.  The Egyptian art that we study today was almost exclusively created to serve the ends of the ruling class and was almost certainly a source of oppression for the classes of society that served them.  Literacy was reserved to members of the royalty, political functionaries, the class of priests, and the scribes, and the cultural remains that survive attest to the disproportionate share of resources that these classes enjoyed.  For the rest of Egyptian society, the impact of the hieroglyphs and their transparent integration with all aspects of civil engineering amounted to a constant reminder of their subservient and largely invisible role in society.

In my paper, I am interested in exploring the history of art education in the United States to uncover examples of figures, schools, and movements that have acknowledged the presence of social inequality in visual culture and the efforts that they have made to work against those inequities.  Even in our culture, fine art has generally been a pastime for the wealthy, subject to their patronage, and reflecting their interests.  In the early 20^th century, a variety of efforts were made to address the power struggle inherited by students of the discipline.   In his work with the Barnes Foundation, John Dewey sought to reunite the accepted cannon of fine artwork with decorative and folk works.   Margaret Naumberg and Florence Cane sidestepped the issue outright by excluding previously made artworks from the classroom and encouraging expression over craft.  In my paper, I hope to discover the range of responses to this issue and chart its course from the beginning of the 20^th century up to contemporary practices.

combo