An insightful review of this show that reflects my feelings about the exhibit when I saw it myself last month.
Double Take at EMP
Through Sunday, Sept. 24
It’s impossible to talk about the art in Paul Allen’s Double Take exhibit without also talking about the venue, the lender, and the phenomena.
Much of the conversation that has taken place since the show opened in April has been a rehash of similar discussions that accompanied the 1998 opening of Steve Wynn’s Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art at his Las Vegas hotel-casino complex. Then, as now, a mega-mogul graced an over-the-top palace of popular culture with their own private art collection; then as now the trophy artists Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Monet, Renoir and Cezanne were centerpiece attractions; then as now detractors insisted that serious art was much better appreciated in the rarified confines of a true art gallery than in a glitzy shopping mall (Vegas) or an architectural white elephant (Seattle). On this last point, the two most prominent local art critics took opposite sides, with Sheila Farr at the Times saying the EMP setting made it impossible to appreciate the art in the Double Take show, a position mocked by her counterpart Regina Hackett, who advised Farr to get her head examined.
Having experienced both the art and the ambience, I’m inclined to take sides more with Ms. Farr than Ms. Hackett. Sure, great art transcends its setting, and the vast majority of the 28 works in this modest-sized exhibit are outstanding pieces in their own right. But since the concept of the exhibit itself turns out to be so flimsy, the distractions of the environment – the tacky design, the glowering rent-a-cops, and the sense that these are works only to be shared with the public on very limited terms – seriously taints the pleasures of the viewing. Perhaps part of the problem is that we have so few local opportunities to see the sort of art on display here, the here-today-gone-tomorrow sensation a visitor experiences is particularly poignant.
It’s always a challenge to make something meaningful out of a showing of an idiosyncratic private collection. It was one thing for a victorious Roman general to impress the hometown crowd by parading trophies of their conquests, but it would not do for triumphant modern entrepreneurs to simply invite the public to marvel at their wealth and power as demonstrated by their art collection (although that’s always a subtext). Curators assigned to design such shows generally search out a common theme or an over-arching narrative, a job made easier if the collector has focused on one period, style, or theme.
Since collector Paul Allen has done none of the above, curator Paul Tucker has chosen to make a virtue of necessity, pairing older pieces from the collection with more edgy 20th century works, matching art with no obvious relationship. The idea is to use the aura of novelty and transgression that still – theoretically – attaches to works by modern rebels like Eric Fischl and Jasper Johns to shock us into seeing old standbys like Manet or Seurat as the startling artists they originally were. Unfortunately for Mr. Tucker, the Impressionist masters who he wishes us to see anew are so familiar, so over-exposed, and so firmly embedded in the Pantheon of the Art Gods, that it would take nothing short of a collective brain transplant to get the average viewer to see a Renoir and a Monet as young and dangerous again.
But Tucker wants us to do more than simply learn to see the Impressionists in a fresh way, he’s also wants us to see the common elements that all art shares, and it would take a curmudgeon indeed to not enjoy some of the groupings he has arranged.
One high point is the trio of paintings featuring the female nude. First off is a spectacular panel by Peter Brueghel’s grandson Jan, an Allegory of Sight. An idealized nude figure representing Vision (she’s looking at a painting held by a winged boy) is nearly lost in the glorious clutter of an enormous, imaginary art gallery. This Brueghel scene is perhaps inspired by the very real Rubens collection nearby, which also included classical sculpture, ancient coins, prints, and paintings hung from floor to ceiling. Then there is a lush, pointillist Seurat, whose three un-idealized nudes are meant as a statement of the artist’s adherence to the avant-garde. The women’s casual nudity, highlighted by piles of discarded clothing, is contrasted with the 19th century bourgeoisie in Seurat’s own masterpiece, the Chicago Institute’s Grand Jatte partly visible at the rear of the studio. A tiny Picasso egg tempera painting completes the set, also alluding to the classical tradition of the undressed female. Four bucolic women lounge on an outdoor patio with a view of the ocean, one admiring her reflection in a mirror (the customary attribute of Venus). For Picasso, such derriere-garde work represented a peculiar (and temporary) interruption in his neo-cubist progression, coming a full 13 years after he all but destroyed the traditional nude in his earthshaking Demoiselles de Avignon. Clearly, these three paintings are part of an ongoing dialogue with lots of artistic juice.
There’s also a real visual and art historical logic to the quartet of depictions of the Venice’s Grand Canal, starting with the acknowledged master of such views, the Baroque painter Canaletto, and continuing with three 19th-century visitors named Turner, Manet, and Monet. The last three happen to include the same church in their pictures (all the better for comparison’s sake), and Manet and Monet even paint virtually the same view. Compared to the others the Turner seems a bit vague and colorless, the rather late Monet a bit garish with an overdose of purple and red-orange. The luscious Manet, on the other hand, is a minor miracle of plein-air virtuosity – bold, glittering, and unfinished, a celebration of the painterly vision.
But many of the Double Take groupings simply don’t come off, or are too much of a stretch. What is one to make of the excellent Richter photorealist candle painting paired with another too-purple Venetian Monet? The connection escapes me. Nor do I see the wisdom behind setting a gorgeous van Gogh peach orchard next to a grisly, surrealistic Max Ernst landscape, which the curator sees as representing the destruction of the hope enshrined in the Van Gogh. And I’m equally incapable of seeing a typical Gauguin Tahitian painting of three women any differently in spite of it’s being set next to a Japanese sci-fi photograph by Kenji Yanobe of spacemen trudging across a desert. Strange people doing mysterious things in exotic settings? Please.
All this points out another problem with the show. In spite of his well-meaning desire to enliven our viewing experience, what Mr. Tucker instead provides is yet another distraction in an exhibit with too many to begin with. His curatorial hand is so heavy, that we feel we must work to see what he wants us to see, even when we don’t get the point. I’m sympathetic to experimenting with ways to look at familiar art, but this particular attempt isn’t worth repeating. I look forward to getting another look at each and every work on view in a more permanent and sympathetic setting, at that point in the future when Mr. Allen is ready to truly share his splendid art with the public.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
Friday, July 21, 2006
America Needs You!
Bruce Taylor has been an arts professional for more than thirty years as director, manager, designer, and company labor negotiator for companies such as Seattle Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, the O'Neill Theatre Center, and Pacific Northwest Dance. Concurrently, his avocation is working with teachers and students. He was the originating source of numerous programs for Education at the Met, the New York Philharmonic, the Orchestra of St. Luke's, and the Royal Opera House, London. He currently runs his own arts in education company, Arts For Anyone, with schools in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America Needs You!
In the economy of the 21st Century, companies will pay their employees to think and communicate effectively. Throughout the United States school administrators are being told, “Teach your students to think for themselves and communicate with others. Anything else they need to know, we will teach them.” A close friend of mine, a rear admiral in the Navy, says the same thing about what the services look for in their young men and women. He wants sailors who are not afraid to use initiative and think on their feet. The military has mastered instruction - such as how to take apart and put back together the engine for an F-14. They instruct teenagers to do it and do it well. If you want to simply deliver curriculum you even can do it online. But to teach, to develop skills of imagination and communication, you need .......... a teacher. A teacher who is familiar with both areas - some one just like you.
The economy of the 21st. Century rewards innovation and unexpected outcomes, but present educational policy promotes a system and an assessment protocol that focuses on predetermined outcomes. In the words of Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “We’ve got it all wrong.” This country’s educators, children, parents......society itself, desperately needs what Teaching Artists can do. The previous paradigm of the industrial model of education is no longer appropriate to what kids and teachers require .
Why? In the economy of the 21st Century first world societies (e.g. in North America, Europe, Japan, etc.), employers will depend upon those who can imagine, create and communicate. Think of almost any well paying field now or in the future. Law, medicine, management, computer programming, design (media or industrial), popular entertainment (television, film, music), education - the list goes on. Isn’t it true that in each one of these categories you are required to imagine (a need, a product, a goal, an approach), create (a solution, a product, a method, a technique) and then communicate the result to others in a way that they can understand and buy into? Perhaps even be moved by.
Isn’t this what we do every day? Isn’t this what you were trained to do - to create original (i.e. unexpected) outcomes? Well, DUH! But don’t get too excited, because from what I’ve seen out in the field, we haven’t yet made the most of our skills in the critical role of preparing kids to be successful in the economy of the 21st Century.
It is my belief that we need to shift our attention from some of the goals that AIE practitioners have had for the past 30 years. These goals are admirable, but our focus on them has hampered our effectiveness. Since 1973, when I first began work in this field, we have, collectively, reached millions of kids, in thousands of schools. Those kids are today’s parents. If we had been successful, those parents would be demanding schools retain the arts, support the arts in their communities; fill our concert halls, museums, and theatres. Has that happened? No. To cite but two examples of our failure, overall government funding for the arts in this country has declined 40% over the past three years and less than 1% of kids who played an instrument in school ever picked it up again as adults.
Let me point out at the onset that we can still incorporate previous goals into a new paradigm. Our past primary goals have been the following:
An emphasis on the dysfunctional, disabled and disadvantaged, i.e. “special needs.”
Use the arts as implements in a policy of social rectification
Promote self-esteem through the vehicle of artistic self-expression
In our idealism we gravitate towards the marginalized, but in doing so we distance our work from the core majority of student populations. “Enrichment” therefore, has become a euphemism for “non-essential.” Administrators will tell you that only 5 to 10% of the kids in their schools will probably grow up to be corrosive elements in our society, but we imply that the other 90% are also in need of behavior modification when we tie art activities to social reform. And, finally, it is ironic that while knowing full well that making a living as an artist is a never ending journey of rejection and criticism, we promote the arts as an antidote to low self-image!
Again, we can incorporate these good intentions, but within a context more inclusive and less paternalistic. We can base our work on a couple of very basic understandings. To be human is to be artistic. Our capacity to think in the abstract (i.e. to imagine), along with our proficiency to communicate in a wide variety of forms, are central to our very nature. Taken together, these characteristics have enabled the human race to dominate the planet. It is critical to develop these abilities in students because of what will be required of them in the economy of the 21st Century. Along the way we can reintegrate the arts into the body of the core curriculum beyond “celebratory events” such as the class play, winter concert, and hallway exhibition.
While we’re at it, we must show non-arts specialist teachers how to integrate artistic fundamentals in their everyday teaching so that our work is not used as an excuse to eliminate routine participation in artistic activity! You don’t use an assembly program to teach science, or a residency to teach math, or after school project to promote social studies. There aren’t very many “teaching-scientists,” or “teaching-mathematicians” peripatetically bouncing from school to school being paid for by the PTA or outside funders, rather than by a line item in the school board’s budget. If we believe that the arts are basic to a child’s education, we have to advocate that they be viewed in the same light as “academics.” And they must be if children are to succeed as adults.
Three qualities drive artistic process: imagination, self-interest, and discovery. To create something we first imagine it. To catalyze self-interest we invest relevance in content - to include a bit of the student’s identity, world view, or belief system. To excite a student’s participation we add the thrill of discovery. These qualities are inherent in the creation of original art work in all genres. Any teacher can do it and you are just the person to show them how. It’s what we’ve been trained to do.
To accomplish this, I suggest a heresy. Perhaps, for the time being, we need to divest ourselves of the Getty Foundation’s Discipline Based Arts Education (DBAE) model. There is not enough room, time, staff, or money to meaningfully teach any art form as a separate discipline in most public school settings, much less all four major ones - Dance, Theatre, Music, and Visual Art. Kids are only in the classroom for 14% of any given year’s time and schools are already overtaxed. The No Child Left Behind act has made the environment even more toxic to our ambitions.
We should think more along the lines of how science is taught. Through elementary and middle school, kids are taught the basics of science generally, not isolating out genetics, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but to focus on the broader concepts of scientific inquiry. The aim is not to make every kid a scientist, but to provide every student a foundation which could support such an ambition later, while enabling the child to have an overall understanding of his or her physical environment. So it can be with the arts - to better understand their social/human environment. To teach The Arts, collectively, as a discipline.
This means that as an actor you are not teaching Acting 101 or fun-time improvisation, but using your skills as an actor to provide teachers and students with the ability to empathize with literary and historical characters, understand the motivations of people’s behavior, and develop an awareness of the power of language. Or as a musician, rather than teaching notation or meter, you reveal the capacity of music to elicit emotional reaction, reveal elemental characteristics of your own or the composer’s historical period, create aural images, and express what cannot be conveyed by words alone. In any art form, we can demonstrate generative concepts such as metaphor, theme, and structure that go to the very essence of how human beings evolve and communicate with one another.
The artistic process is also the process of making a living. Making a living means more than making money. Drug dealers make money, but how many junkies do you see over forty five? They’re either dead or in jail. Whether we function as parents, spouses, or employees we are constantly engaged in the creative process of “solution-creation.” To reiterate: Isn’t it true that you have to imagine the essential components of a situation, problem, goal or objective? Isn’t it usually required that you have to create (think up) a solution, product, plan, approach or method to address the need? Isn’t also a fact that you are going to have to communicate what you come up with to others in such a way that they understand and buy into it?
Don’t you have to do the same as a director, actor, composer, writer, designer, whatever? Don’t you have to create possible choices, analyze your resources, fit within parameters, rework what you do, and effectively communicate with others (actors, the director, musicians, editors, scene shop/stage hands, etc.) We are used to the process of creating original work because we do it all the time. Teachers have been trained to manufacture reproductions of “the model graduate” by putting student A on an assembly line with curriculum B in school/factory C to produce satisfactory, efficiently measurable test results D. However, to prepare students for their roles in the economy of the 21st Century the educational system will desperately need what we can provide in a new evolving paradigm of education.
Participation in artistic activity must be deeply satisfying and meaningful to teachers and kids’ self-interest. To do this, we will need to stress communication more than expression, to integrate the arts collectively rather than to address each discretely, increase an emphasis on achievement within specific parameters, incorporate a reasonable fear of failure so that students can attain a genuine sense of success, and be willing to criticize sub-standard work or effort as an important tool for inculcating in kids the desire to do better. If anything will do, there is no standard. No standard, no sense of accomplishment. If kids have no sense of accomplishment, there is no commitment to what they’re doing. Participation in the arts has to be more than fun, more than a conduit for expression. Expression is easy, communication much more challenging. Utilizing your imagination is more difficult than simply doing what you’re told. The economy of the 21st. Century will demand much in an ever increasingly competitive global environment. We are uniquely equipped to prepare children for it.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
America Needs You!
In the economy of the 21st Century, companies will pay their employees to think and communicate effectively. Throughout the United States school administrators are being told, “Teach your students to think for themselves and communicate with others. Anything else they need to know, we will teach them.” A close friend of mine, a rear admiral in the Navy, says the same thing about what the services look for in their young men and women. He wants sailors who are not afraid to use initiative and think on their feet. The military has mastered instruction - such as how to take apart and put back together the engine for an F-14. They instruct teenagers to do it and do it well. If you want to simply deliver curriculum you even can do it online. But to teach, to develop skills of imagination and communication, you need .......... a teacher. A teacher who is familiar with both areas - some one just like you.
The economy of the 21st. Century rewards innovation and unexpected outcomes, but present educational policy promotes a system and an assessment protocol that focuses on predetermined outcomes. In the words of Tom Vander Ark of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, “We’ve got it all wrong.” This country’s educators, children, parents......society itself, desperately needs what Teaching Artists can do. The previous paradigm of the industrial model of education is no longer appropriate to what kids and teachers require .
Why? In the economy of the 21st Century first world societies (e.g. in North America, Europe, Japan, etc.), employers will depend upon those who can imagine, create and communicate. Think of almost any well paying field now or in the future. Law, medicine, management, computer programming, design (media or industrial), popular entertainment (television, film, music), education - the list goes on. Isn’t it true that in each one of these categories you are required to imagine (a need, a product, a goal, an approach), create (a solution, a product, a method, a technique) and then communicate the result to others in a way that they can understand and buy into? Perhaps even be moved by.
Isn’t this what we do every day? Isn’t this what you were trained to do - to create original (i.e. unexpected) outcomes? Well, DUH! But don’t get too excited, because from what I’ve seen out in the field, we haven’t yet made the most of our skills in the critical role of preparing kids to be successful in the economy of the 21st Century.
It is my belief that we need to shift our attention from some of the goals that AIE practitioners have had for the past 30 years. These goals are admirable, but our focus on them has hampered our effectiveness. Since 1973, when I first began work in this field, we have, collectively, reached millions of kids, in thousands of schools. Those kids are today’s parents. If we had been successful, those parents would be demanding schools retain the arts, support the arts in their communities; fill our concert halls, museums, and theatres. Has that happened? No. To cite but two examples of our failure, overall government funding for the arts in this country has declined 40% over the past three years and less than 1% of kids who played an instrument in school ever picked it up again as adults.
Let me point out at the onset that we can still incorporate previous goals into a new paradigm. Our past primary goals have been the following:
An emphasis on the dysfunctional, disabled and disadvantaged, i.e. “special needs.”
Use the arts as implements in a policy of social rectification
Promote self-esteem through the vehicle of artistic self-expression
In our idealism we gravitate towards the marginalized, but in doing so we distance our work from the core majority of student populations. “Enrichment” therefore, has become a euphemism for “non-essential.” Administrators will tell you that only 5 to 10% of the kids in their schools will probably grow up to be corrosive elements in our society, but we imply that the other 90% are also in need of behavior modification when we tie art activities to social reform. And, finally, it is ironic that while knowing full well that making a living as an artist is a never ending journey of rejection and criticism, we promote the arts as an antidote to low self-image!
Again, we can incorporate these good intentions, but within a context more inclusive and less paternalistic. We can base our work on a couple of very basic understandings. To be human is to be artistic. Our capacity to think in the abstract (i.e. to imagine), along with our proficiency to communicate in a wide variety of forms, are central to our very nature. Taken together, these characteristics have enabled the human race to dominate the planet. It is critical to develop these abilities in students because of what will be required of them in the economy of the 21st Century. Along the way we can reintegrate the arts into the body of the core curriculum beyond “celebratory events” such as the class play, winter concert, and hallway exhibition.
While we’re at it, we must show non-arts specialist teachers how to integrate artistic fundamentals in their everyday teaching so that our work is not used as an excuse to eliminate routine participation in artistic activity! You don’t use an assembly program to teach science, or a residency to teach math, or after school project to promote social studies. There aren’t very many “teaching-scientists,” or “teaching-mathematicians” peripatetically bouncing from school to school being paid for by the PTA or outside funders, rather than by a line item in the school board’s budget. If we believe that the arts are basic to a child’s education, we have to advocate that they be viewed in the same light as “academics.” And they must be if children are to succeed as adults.
Three qualities drive artistic process: imagination, self-interest, and discovery. To create something we first imagine it. To catalyze self-interest we invest relevance in content - to include a bit of the student’s identity, world view, or belief system. To excite a student’s participation we add the thrill of discovery. These qualities are inherent in the creation of original art work in all genres. Any teacher can do it and you are just the person to show them how. It’s what we’ve been trained to do.
To accomplish this, I suggest a heresy. Perhaps, for the time being, we need to divest ourselves of the Getty Foundation’s Discipline Based Arts Education (DBAE) model. There is not enough room, time, staff, or money to meaningfully teach any art form as a separate discipline in most public school settings, much less all four major ones - Dance, Theatre, Music, and Visual Art. Kids are only in the classroom for 14% of any given year’s time and schools are already overtaxed. The No Child Left Behind act has made the environment even more toxic to our ambitions.
We should think more along the lines of how science is taught. Through elementary and middle school, kids are taught the basics of science generally, not isolating out genetics, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., but to focus on the broader concepts of scientific inquiry. The aim is not to make every kid a scientist, but to provide every student a foundation which could support such an ambition later, while enabling the child to have an overall understanding of his or her physical environment. So it can be with the arts - to better understand their social/human environment. To teach The Arts, collectively, as a discipline.
This means that as an actor you are not teaching Acting 101 or fun-time improvisation, but using your skills as an actor to provide teachers and students with the ability to empathize with literary and historical characters, understand the motivations of people’s behavior, and develop an awareness of the power of language. Or as a musician, rather than teaching notation or meter, you reveal the capacity of music to elicit emotional reaction, reveal elemental characteristics of your own or the composer’s historical period, create aural images, and express what cannot be conveyed by words alone. In any art form, we can demonstrate generative concepts such as metaphor, theme, and structure that go to the very essence of how human beings evolve and communicate with one another.
The artistic process is also the process of making a living. Making a living means more than making money. Drug dealers make money, but how many junkies do you see over forty five? They’re either dead or in jail. Whether we function as parents, spouses, or employees we are constantly engaged in the creative process of “solution-creation.” To reiterate: Isn’t it true that you have to imagine the essential components of a situation, problem, goal or objective? Isn’t it usually required that you have to create (think up) a solution, product, plan, approach or method to address the need? Isn’t also a fact that you are going to have to communicate what you come up with to others in such a way that they understand and buy into it?
Don’t you have to do the same as a director, actor, composer, writer, designer, whatever? Don’t you have to create possible choices, analyze your resources, fit within parameters, rework what you do, and effectively communicate with others (actors, the director, musicians, editors, scene shop/stage hands, etc.) We are used to the process of creating original work because we do it all the time. Teachers have been trained to manufacture reproductions of “the model graduate” by putting student A on an assembly line with curriculum B in school/factory C to produce satisfactory, efficiently measurable test results D. However, to prepare students for their roles in the economy of the 21st Century the educational system will desperately need what we can provide in a new evolving paradigm of education.
Participation in artistic activity must be deeply satisfying and meaningful to teachers and kids’ self-interest. To do this, we will need to stress communication more than expression, to integrate the arts collectively rather than to address each discretely, increase an emphasis on achievement within specific parameters, incorporate a reasonable fear of failure so that students can attain a genuine sense of success, and be willing to criticize sub-standard work or effort as an important tool for inculcating in kids the desire to do better. If anything will do, there is no standard. No standard, no sense of accomplishment. If kids have no sense of accomplishment, there is no commitment to what they’re doing. Participation in the arts has to be more than fun, more than a conduit for expression. Expression is easy, communication much more challenging. Utilizing your imagination is more difficult than simply doing what you’re told. The economy of the 21st. Century will demand much in an ever increasingly competitive global environment. We are uniquely equipped to prepare children for it.
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