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

image manipulations

THEVERYMANY

There was much of interest and much that rang true in the “Developing a Repertoire of Skills for Visual Perception and Artistic Response” chapter.  Many of the suggestions in the first three sections dovetailed nicely with the VTS work we’ve been doing with the Boy Writers over at Ridgeway.  Also, I’ve still not shaken the frustration I repeatedly experienced as I observed a field teacher (during an earlier placement) consistently send her students imaginatively cold into the work of art creation.  I particularly liked this statement from the ‘Practice’ section of the first section: “When a full and rich image has developed in the imagination, work can begin to bring the image into visual form.”  The distinction between active imagination and active creation is too often overlooked. 

However, my curiosity was most piqued by the mention of an article that challenged that challenged traditional design terminology as being insufficient or outmoded by the advent of computer graphic technologies.  And the article was written in 1996.  1996!  That was way before Photoshop became a verb (though still a whopping eight years after the development of Photoshop 1.0).  So, I looked it up…

And almost everything it had to say is still valid.  If anything, I had to stop and wonder whether we’ve already inadvertently bent some of the old terminology to cover our new understanding of pictorial space.  It may be that I can’t step far enough outside of my contemporary box to say which terms have already evolved and I kind of suspect that’s one factor that made this such a dense and difficult read.  I had to stop regularly and try to remember whether there was a slightly different nuance to words like space, shape, and texture before navigating digital displays became a daily occurrence.  But it’s also that the author is dealing with some pretty abstract concepts—things that either fly under the radar of our daily activities or that we’re still coming to terms with. 

Here, for example, is the first disparity identified (out of a total of 20):

“In the literature of art education, the traditional formal image was viewed as a whole, with stable, analog contents bound to the form.  Computer graphics were determined to be dynamic and digital, and procedures were determined to play an important part in expanding the idea of an abstract "language." Generative and interpolative procedures in computer graphics, as well as the replicability of the same image in different output modes, beg notions of what is original or unique in art. Signifiers that are appropriated (see Gombrich, 1961, for a discussion of codes and signifiers) also appear to be an important part of artistic language in both mediums. The implications are that, even in terms of its visual properties, the formal image can no longer be perceived as referring only to itself  with what has been described as  "permanent or residual aesthetic value" (Crozier & Greenhalgh, 1992, p. 83-4).”

Wooza, that’s a lot to digest.  On first read, I latched on to “replicability” begging “notions of what is original or unique in art” and it led me to think of Gude’s Postmodern Appropriation Principle. But after  a second (and third) read I think it may go deeper than that.  It may help to refer back to that magnificent distinction that I pointed out earlier, the one between active imagination and active creation.  Take, for example, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.  We think of this painting as an object—a painting—because that is the corporeal form by which the image is conveyed.  Now, if Picasso had designed the image on a computer, then it would have no corporeal form—its dimensions would be relative, palette, saturation, brightness, etc would be variable.  The work of imagination that brought it into being would still belong firmly to Picasso, but the creative product is harder to pin down, involving an interaction between the creator, the end-user, and the technology in-between.   The reality is that this has been the case for a very long time.  I’ve never actually seen Les Demoiselles in person.  I’ve seen slides, posters, etc. recreating it, so I’m familiar with it—which means that I’m familiar with Picasso’s visual idea, but realistically, I’ve never actually seen the created product of that imagined idea.  As such, any evaluations I might make of it cannot be wholly considered valid until I’ve seen the real thing.  (And, of course, this is the reason that many people claim to hate various modern and contemporary works until they see them in person: I would never ever buy a book of reproductions of Rothko’s paintings, but I’d love to own one.  Same goes for Donald Judd and most Op Art.)  However, once I’ve seen the corporeal Les Demoiselles, I may finally rest my opinion or understanding of it amongst all those who have seen it since Picasso laid down the final brushstroke.  With digital artwork, there is no comparable end-point for knowing a work.  It may be that by the standards of traditional artwork, digital artwork is never actually complete.  It never reaches a definitive, perfected state.  That’s quite the change.

Another big change is the notion of three-dimensionality.  In computer design terms, the creation of three-dimensional shapes is both less of an illusion than in the traditional two-dimensional formats and the codification of an illusion.  Ironically, even though the illusion of three-dimensionality in computer graphics is created by a complete description of a three-dimensional object (along all three axis of dimension) as opposed to the selective recording and hiding of information (as happens in the rendering of three dimensional illusions on a traditional flat drawing surface, i.e. the illusion of foreshortened objects in drawings or paintings), rarely does that complete three-dimensional description achieve realization in the third dimension (you know, the palpable, real dimension that we go about our daily business in).

Here’s one of the exceptions.  This is THEVERYMANY by Marc Fornes from 2010.  I came across it on the contemporary floor of the Pompidou and aside from its obvious eye-catching qualities, something else about it that caught my attention: the museum label said that it was designed in Rhino 3D.  That brought back some memories.  Rhino 3D was the very first 3d design software that I ever used—and that was way back in 1996!  Ha!

Rise Above

I’d really like to see (or hear) a conversation between Gude and Duncum comparing and contrasting their respective systems of seven.  I remember being bowled over by Gude’s Postmodern Principles the first time I read them and I’ve referred back to them a number of times since, so I couldn’t help but wonder as I read Duncum’s introductory paragraph just what it was that compelled him to contrast them with a system of his own.  I kind of hate to admit it, but it actually put me into a bit of a defensive mindset initially.  I suppose I’m as fond of a useful and sympathetic ideology as the next guy…

In any case, on closer inspection, I don’t think that it’s Duncum’s intention to create a competing ideology.  Though necessarily, by the logic of his own argument, that’s exactly what he must be doing: all artifacts are engaged in a power struggle for the attention of an audience.  However, I choose to exercise my share in the power struggle (“Power is equally exercised when viewers interpret images,” he tells us) and to think of their works in collaboration rather than opposition.  So there.

Sorry to be cheeky about it but Duncum’s article was a bit of déjà vu for me.  The first five principles that he offers were straight out of the critical theory branch of the college English curriculum (which , in turn, I believe have their origin in the writings of the French historian, Michel Foucault).  The last two principles were new but they didn’t quite fit with those first five either.  The first five principles offered constructs by which to examine the relationship of an image to its audience; these last two examine  the relationship between an image and another phenomena (be it sound, word, or another image).  But these quibbles aside, what Duncum offers is an idea-based alternative to Gude’s technique-based elements.  The funny thing is that I never realized how formal/technique-based Gude’s approach was until I read Duncum’s offering and I think that’s because Gude has a tendency to tie the discovery of her postmodern techniques to the circumstances (changes in culture, technology, etc) that made them useful so that the artistic ends/ideas are hard to separate from the means/technique.  Duncum teases out the psychological constructs, disentangling the postmodern mindsets from the postmodern methods.

But all of this begs the question: how are our students to use these constructs in their art making.  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.   Examining the war of ideologies potentially frees us from inadvertently indoctrinating students with our own preferred artistic ideologies, but isn’t there more to teach about art than how to be a conscientious soldier in the war of ideals?  It’s hard to attach an ideology to Rothko’s paintings, or even to Jeff Koons’s Bunny for that matter and I like to think that’s because they operate above the fray, far from the shouting and persuasion.  Duncum’s principles are useful ways of seeing and knowing visual culture, but ultimately, it may only be through the act of creation that we rise above the power struggle.

Watercolors in Moscow by Erró, 1975

I'm throwing in this link to Dirty Projector's "Rise Above" for a few reasons: first, the last sentence of my post brought it to mind; second, I think it pairs in a quirky way with this piece of art; third, it's a postmodern pop song--the band decided to try to recreate an album called Damaged by Black Flag that they hadn't heard in nearly 15 years (talk about appropriation and recontextualization!).  Here are the lyrics:

sJealous cowards try to control
They distort what we say
Try to stop what we do
When they can't do it themselves

We are tired of your abuse
Try to stop us, but it's no use

Society's arms think they're smart
I find satisfaction in what they're lacking 'cause
We are born with a chance
And I'm gonna have my chance

Rise above

Absent are the subtleties

This scene from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio highlights the absurdity of one very small corner of Michelle Marder Kamhi’s argument (and it’s only a very small corner because she so breezily dismisses such a broad portion of the art making world).  According to Kamhi, photographers (and I take it, by extension, video artists as well) exercise “some selectivity and control, [but] the image is ultimately formed by an automatic photochemical process, which is not under volitional control in every detail.”  Later, in describing another work--Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait--she enumerates the details that qualify such works as legitimate works of art: “…its “natural” subject matter, its depictive and expressive qualities—such as the sober, intensely serious facial expressions of the young couple, their gesture of joining hands, and the aura of tranquil solemnity of the elegant bedchamber.”

Jarman’s Caravaggio paints from models, just as the historical Caravaggio liked to do, and he (Jarman and the actor playing Caravaggio both) painstakingly produces the scene he’d like to render by nudging the models into their positions—creating such effects as the “sober, intensely serious facial expressions” and the hand gestures as well—and controlling the lighting.  In painting, photography, and video controlling the lighting is, incidentally, the quickest and surest way to achieve the desired “aura.”

I recently had the opportunity to see the Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin in the flesh, so to speak.  It’s presently hanging with the rest of the Italian masters in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie.  Here, I’m sad to say, the lighting was not especially good for such a dramatic and deliberate use of chiaroscuro.  Unfortunately, the sort of bright, noisy, natural light that works perfectly for the brighter palettes of the earlier, Renaissance era Italian masters, doesn’t work as well for the father of the Baroque style.  I’m certain that the great minds running the Louvre are aware of the disservice they’re doing Caravaggio, but they have to use the palace they’ve been given and regional organization is probably the only fair (and least crazy-making) way to display the vast collection that is their charge.

For the student casually strolling down this 100+ yard gallery, such details which distract from the “natural accessibility” (to appropriate a phrase from Kamhi) of a painting are not readily apparent.  Kamhi seems to think that art can exist inside a vacuum and while the absurdity of this is most readily apparent when one considers the history of artistic patronage and the relatively limited range of subjects thus engendered in the accepted Western canon, it also extends to perception: recently cleaned paintings and a paintings properly matched to their intended lighting are easier to appreciate than paintings that have not received the same amount of attention or have been made subject to a museum’s constrictions or broader agendas.

Some quick research on Kamhi points pretty firmly to the conclusion that she is a follower of Ayn Randian Objectivism.  This had me reaching (in near knee-jerk fashion) for a book I read a long time ago by Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Jameson is an unabashed Marxist and in quickly perusing the book again the differences between Kamhi’s approach to an argument about the validity of postmodern culture and Jameson’s becomes readily apparent.  Kamhi seeks to narrow the argument—to disregard works and ways of working that are not useful to her idea of what art (and consequently, art education) should be.  Jameson, in extremely dense prose, attempts to make sense of everything that has come to represent the culture of the modern world: literature, painting, architecture, film, etc, etc.   And while Kamhi seems to think that we can go back to a “great works” approach to understanding art, Jameson positions the Modernist era as the last great stomping ground of Atlasian artistic heroes.  He argues that “in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of increasing institutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag.  Some parts of the economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more modern and futuristic than the future itself.  Modern art, in this respect, drew its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out.”  And while this might at first sound like a bleak prognosis for the contemporary artist, it instead signifies a democratization of artistic practice.  The history of art no longer belongs to the chosen few but instead to the proliferating possibilities of a global culture.