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: