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.