Archives for May 2015

Well, 12 posts later, we’ve come to the last post in the series covering my course in aesthetics and business (aka/ approaching beauty) offered at UW-Madison, for undergraduate business majors.  This post basically walks through the last two classes in which the students took stock, reflected on their journeys, and thought about where they go from here.

(The photo (left) is from an article that ran in a UW-Madison magazine. Unlike my Jumper posts, it’s a quick read.)

As the course has come to an end, several people have asked me “What’s next with beauty? Will you do the course somewhere else?” The answer is, “Very possibly!” I am taking the next year to finish my dissertation on the American regional theater and Broadway, but then hope to return to beauty in fall 2016. A couple universities have already expressed interest in the class. We’ll see what actually comes to fruition. I’m also interested to explore possibilities beyond teaching the course again. A MOOC, perhaps? A publication? A grassroots movement? (Ok, the latter is a vainglorious aspiration; but in all seriousness, I’m more persuaded than ever that all high school and university students need a course like this–a course, essentially, in human development.)

And while the UW-Madison does not have plans to offer this particular course again (it was offered this year only because I pitched and designed the course as part of a one-time visiting guest lectureship), the business school does seem interested to continue its exploration of beauty and, at the very least, to include sessions on beauty as part of its ongoing Compass Leadership Program, which reaches hundreds of freshman each year. So, that’s terrific.

Creating More Beauty in the World

For my last session with the students I invited no outside guests; however, I did bring two artists into the room indirectly as I gave the students assignments to engage with their work. The first artist is the Madison-based photographer Greg Conniff.

Greg found me on artsjournal.com the second week I was in town and generously reached out to offer encouragement with the course and an essay he had written, The Work of Beauty, for a 2006 catalogue published in conjunction with an exhibition of his work at the Chazen Art Museum.

I read the essay and knew immediately that I would assign it for the last class. It’s a moving, inspiring, humorous and well-crafted reflection on finding and creating beauty where you live. Here is one of my favorite passages (particularly meaningful because I moved from New York City to a small suburban village in the Netherlands and I have struggled to feel at home here the past five years):

And where we are, most of us, most of the time, is home. The character of home is made of many things, one of which is local beauty, either natural or built. This came into focus for me late one night alone on a small bridge in my neighborhood during a glorious blizzard. There, along the bridge’s familiar concrete balustrade, I was surprised by a row of ducks, a mother and her young, that someone had sculpted from the snow. They fluoresced in the glow of a nearby streetlight while the flakes, which continued to fall, fattened them with a glittering down. In the sculpture of the ducks I felt the presence of someone who had absorbed much local beauty and who, when circumstances allowed, passed the favor along. I went home and got my camera and woke my wife to come and see.

* * *

It is in our homes and in our hometowns, between work and family, that we live the story of our lives. Our challenge is to make a setting for that story so rich and sustaining that we won’t want to seek relief from it by fleeing to some manufactured elsewhere— some tourist Eden, if you believe the brochures. Why not live in a place of the sort people travel to? We could do this if we understood better the sustaining relationship we can have with our local landscapes.

The students seemed to love Greg’s essay as much as I do and many included lines from it in their final video collages or in their portfolio journals. I asked the students to sit someplace beautiful while reading The Work of Beauty and then to document that place. Here are two examples:

I also asked them to reflect on what it would mean (personally speaking) to take responsibility for creating more beauty in the world. Among other things, they wrote about paying closer attention to people–whether strangers, colleagues, friends, or family; being authentic or genuine in their daily interactions; designing work spaces that are uplifting rather than demoralizing; passing along what they have learned in this class; and (like Greg) planting gardens.

***

The other assignment I gave related to the recently (and tragically) deceased California-based artist Susan O’Malley.I didn’t know Susan personally but was aware of her work and know colleagues and friends of hers.

Here’s a passage from a moving eulogy written by JD Beltran, that was published in the Huffington Post:

She described her work as “making art that connects us to each other.” Simple, but enormously moving, it tapped into the mundane, and sometimes humorous, interactions of everyday life. Her projects included offering Pep Talks, asking for advice from strangers, installing roomfuls of inspirational posters, distributing flyers in neighborhood mailboxes, and conducting doodle competitions at high schools. Interested in shifting these otherwise commonplace exchanges into heightened experiences, her projects aspired to incite hope, optimism, and a sense of interconnectedness in our lives.

Christian Frock wrote, “All of O’Malley’s work, both as artist and curator, reflected a rare generosity and empathy for those around her — to the extent that her boundless enthusiasm sometimes baffled cynics unable to grasp the actual work of optimism. But she knew it was work and she took it very seriously. Under her professional interests on LinkedIn, O’Malley listed: ‘Making the world a better place. Staying positive in a world that does the opposite.”

When she died (just a few weeks into the term) I vowed to do something in the class to try to honor Susan’s legacy. I sent the students a link to the HuffPo article and some other information about Susan and her work and asked them each to create a mantra for the world–inspired in content from the beauty course and in design by Susan O’Malley’s work. Here are a few of their mantras.

 

Contemplating Values & Next Steps in Life

I spent a good chunk of my last regular session with the students doing an exercise with them using the Schwarz universal values. I first asked them to review a list of 58 values (see The Common Cause Handbook) and identify any that resonated. I then gave them the following sequential prompts:

1. Go through the list again and mark the 10 values that are most important to you.
2. Go through the list a third time and narrow that list down to 5 core values.
3. Now, identify your top 10 and top 5 values on this map (also in the Common Cause Handbook).

 

What you see in the map is that all 58 values can be placed in one of ten universal value clusters, which are divided along two major axes:

1. Self-enhancement (the pink, red & purple areas) as opposed to self-transcendence (the green areas);
2. Openness to change (the orange and yellow areas) as opposed to conservation/preservation (the blue areas).

We then had a discussion about where students’ values were mostly clustered. In general, one would expect to hold values across the map but it is also not uncommon to hold values that cluster in one area. We noted that many had values clustered in the green (self-transcendence) section of the map.

We also talked about the career ambitions and next steps facing the students. Those graduating (all but a few students) expressed a combination of excitement and immense anxiety about upcoming moves to new cities and/or new jobs and/or to the unknown. I shared with the students a piece of wisdom that was passed along to me when I was in my 30s:

Burnout doesn’t arise because you are working too many hours; burnout is a result of living your life out of alignment with your values. If you are feeling burned out look at your list of values. There is probably some core value on that list that you are no longer upholding.

This Class in a Nutshell

Finally, in advance of the penultimate session I collected some reflections on the class from the students—including responses to the following question: If a friend asked you “What was that beauty class all about and what, if anything, did you get out of it?” what would you say? Now, clearly, I hold the power over their grades and their responses may have been influenced by this; but I was, nonetheless, curious how they would describe the class and its value. Here were some of their responses (abridged, in some cases)

• In this beauty class you discover not only what defines beauty and why it is important in business, but you learn about yourself and what you find beautiful and why. Your homework consists of exploring various beautiful experiences – sometimes it’s exploring what others find beautiful and other times it’s making your own experiences and discovering your own idea of what you find beautiful. It is unlike any other business class you will take – it is routed in experiences and exploration – not numbers, grades, and midterms.
• If a friend were to ask what the class was about, I would share that the course is designed to give business students an artistic perspective aimed at their everyday lives. Through a series of beautiful and art related experiences we reflect on our own personal tastes and aesthetics to ultimately gain some awareness for why we’re attracted to the things we are and what this means about us as a contributing member of a community and a person as a whole.
• It’s helped me think in a different way, to see different viewpoints and other softer aspects of business that usually get overlooked.
• It’s about forgetting about the fucking ROI for two seconds, stepping back, and realizing that there is a greater purpose to life than your damn material equity.
• It’s transforming us into people who care.

Presentation of the Video Collages:

For the final session the students were asked to create five-minute video collages. The aim was to give others a peek into their beauty portfolios and to reflect upon what they had learned about beauty and themselves over the course of the term. The students did beautiful work–and the experience of screening the videos for each other was all the more moving because many of the students were incredibly nervous about this assignment. Here are two for you to enjoy, created by Christina Hoo and Constance Colin.

My Final Remarks–Inspired by the Late David Foster Wallace

Finally, for the last class I had the students read the commencement address by David Foster Wallace, This is Water. It’s a funny and moving talk–all the more poignant given that David Foster Wallace took his life a few years after giving this talk. I leave you with remarks I made to the students at this wrap-up session. It is advice I am endeavoring to hold onto myself:

I assigned one last essay for today – David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.

It’s a commencement address, actually, in which he begins by taking graduating seniors through the sort of typical, hellish day that he believes they are likely to encounter once they are out in the real world. And he talks about the sort of default setting that we can fall into as we go about living our lives—a default narrative in which we are the center of the universe and the whole world seems to be constructed to annoy and frustrate us as we go about trying to get through the day.

But then he offers a way out of this hell. He says:

But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship…

Wallace says that we have “the freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” or we can pursue a different kind of freedom, one “that is most precious” and that you “will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.”

He continues:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

His parting words of advice:

It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Throughout the past 12 weeks you have invested your selves into the assignments and experiences of this class and I believe that they have begun to return something to you … this consciousness that David Foster Wallace is talking about … a new way of looking at the world … a new way of knowing, doing, being.

I hope you will keep popping into museums, not to see everything, but to find the one or two pieces that hook your attention—perhaps because they make you feel uncomfortable, perhaps because they seem stupid and you need to figure out why anyone thought they were worthwhile, perhaps because they draw you in like a moth to a flame. Go to those pieces and spend some time. Document them. (Don’t forget to include the name of the artist and the title of the work).

I hope you’ll keep taking time for sunsets, for sitting quietly and listening to beautiful music, for days (or just hours) without your phones, and for days (or just hours) in which you allow yourself to get lost. I hope you will continue to wander and wonder.

I hope you’ll keep collecting quotes from the beautiful essays, articles, and books that you will read as life goes on … and reviewing them now and then.

I hope you’ll look at the big list of values every couple years and reflect on how you have changed and whether you are still living your life in line with the values that are important to you. If you start to feel burned out that may be a sign that you are not and that you are in need of an adjustment in your life.

I hope you’ll keep collecting experiences in your portfolio and reflecting on what you find beautiful, and why, and how your judgments or tastes are changing over time.

I hope you will continue to find beauty in “the thing to make the thing”—in the creative process, in the journey. I hope you are able to approach the work of life with optimism and creativity rather than despair and anxiety.

And I hope you’ll keep your eyes open for both beauty and her opposite, injury, and allow both to inspire you to seek truth and advance justice—to do your part to help repair and make more beautiful some corner of the world.

Stay conscious. Keep your eyes open. Live fully.

 

In my last post and this one I am sharing highlights from presentations by the several artists who joined us in the second half of the course and key ideas that resonated most for the students.  The last two sessions, discussed in this post, focused primarily on the notions of taste and craft.

April 14 – On tastes, on obssessions, on beauty in unusual places (Fred Stonehouse & Polly Carl)

In the first half of this class we enjoyed a great lecture by the artist Fred Stonehouse, who is on faculty at UW-Madison.

Fred was laid back and put the students entirely at ease. He began by talking about growing up in a middle class family and not knowing much about museums. As a Roman Catholic, he said that his experience with art as a child was mostly from religious calendars.

Fred’s work is inspired by where he finds beauty—in tattoos, in devils, in the sacred heart, in bats, in his dog, in skulls—in short, in things that most people find rather dark. Fred’s presentation alternated between the motifs that have inspired him over the years and the works that he created. (See his online gallery for images.)

The students were able to relate to Fred and his art and many expressed later that it was a relief to understand that Fred draws bats, for instance, because he finds bats beautiful; and that sometimes futher interpretation is neither necessary nor even beneficial. At one point, Fred quoted Barnett Newman, the abstract expressionist who said in 1952, “aesthetics is for artists as ornithology is for birds.” Fred characterized artists generally as being about the idea, the object, communicating visually, having imagination and intelligence—but not being intellectuals, per se. Speaking personally, he said that he is most interested in art not sanctioned by the academy. Fred’s talk was very much in line with the Greil Marcus commencement address that I had the students listen to in preparation for this class (see below).

Toward the end of his lecture I reminded Fred that when we first met each other I had been talking about the Elaine Scarry idea that beauty is lifesaving and that he had responded, “Absolutely. It’s what keeps us from hanging ourselves.” Fred elaborated a bit on this, saying that art is an obsession and necessity for him. He commented, “When I’m in the studio I hate to be distracted; it’s hard to come out and deal with life … And if I’m not in the studio for more than about three days I turn into a total douchebag.” The students laughed and I responded, “It’s interesting to think about which practice, if one doesn’t do it for a few days, makes one turn into a total douchebag.”  For me, these days, this seems to be writing. A few weeks later I asked the students to think about just that question. Another portfolio assignment inspired by Fred’s talk: I asked the students to document beauty they find in something typically perceived by people as dark.

***

This same week Polly Carl returned and did an engaging and insightful riff on the Carl Wilson book, Let’s Talk about Love: A Journey to the End of Taste. The book is Wilson’s quest to figure out why so many people in the world love Celine Dion, an artist that he had come to loathe since her triumph at the 1998 Oscars with the theme song from Titanic (over Elliot Smith, who composed the music for Goodwill Hunting). In advance of this class the students wrote about an artist/genre that they loved and one that they loathed and also interviewed someone quite different from them age-wise or background-wise and asked, “Who is a musician/band or other type of artist that you deeply admire, and why?”

I also gave them the assignment to listen to this 20-minute SVU commencement address by Greil Marcus, in which he talks about art, audience, and artistic hierarchies, among other things.

In class, we spent about an hour exploring the students’ loves and loathes. While almost all students’ taste preferences were firmly planted in the realm of popular art, their loves and loathes were sometimes polar opposites–so the exercise seemed to be a good setup to Polly’s lecture, which focused on tastes and their relationship to values. She began by taking the students back to the 1998 Oscars. She played videos of the performances by both Celine Dion and Elliot Smith and asked the students which artist they would have selected to win had they been voting members of the Academy. (Somewhat surprisingly to Polly and me, all but two voted for Celine Dion.) Polly then introduced the premise behind Wilson’s book and walked the students through the journey he makes. Basically, Wilson’s eyes-wide-open examination of Dion and what her fans value about her ultimately leads him to the point where he can no longer loathe her (or, by extension, those who love her).

Polly also talked about her experience in various gatekeeping roles in the arts. (The term gatekeeping is used by both economists and sociologists to refer to those individuals and organizations who control resources and select which artists/works are produced and distributed). Polly talked, in particular, about the tension that curators, producers, and presenters of art sometimes feel between programming what they love versus what they think other people will like. And she conveyed the discomfort she felt when she first realized that she had the power to make or break an artist and how this caused her to question her judgments and what she was excluding, and why.

This led to a brief introduction to her current position (among other titles she holds at Arts Emerson) as the editor of the online journal at HowlRound. She explained why she is an advocate for the idea of a theater commons and why she encourages the philosophy that anyone who wants to write for the HowlRound journal should have the opportunity to pitch an article. By diminishing its gatekeeping authority and, essentially, allowing hundreds of voices to be heard through the platform, HowlRound is endeavoring to expand and democratize the conversation about theater in America.

We ended with a brief discussion of Pierre Bourdieu and the concepts of social and cultural capital (which, as Polly pointed out, is the only kind of capital most high school and college students have). We encouraged the students to think about what has shaped their tastes and how one’s taste biography is tied to one’s identity. That week I gave them a portfolio exercise to think about an area in life where they now have great taste and to reflect on the process by which their tastes were developed.

April 21 – On the aesthetics of craft (Joshua Berkson, co-owner of Merchant; and Magnus Genioso of Mad Genius, the anonymous sound collective)

Finally, in the last regular session with guests, I invited two individuals: (a) the restauranteur Joshua Berkson, who runs the farm-to-table and craft cocktail establishment, Merchant; and (b) a member of the anonymous sound collective, Mad Genius, who goes by the alias Magnus Genioso. We explored a range of topics with each of them, but the unifying concept had to do with craft.

Josh told the story of graduating from business school and going to work in hedge firms—work that he referred to as soul killing and back breaking (literally, he developed chronic back pain). While living in NYC and making money on Wall Street he became a bit of a foodie—and spent an increasing amount of his time and money checking out the best restaurants in the city. His passion for food began to become an obsession and he decided to go culinary school. Along the way he became increasingly interested in concepts like sustainable food, slow food, farm-to-table, and the American Craft Movement.

Josh ended up in Madison and opened Merchant—a casual farm-to-table restaurant, craft cocktail bar and liquor store. It was one of the first of its kind in Madison at the time. He showed one of the most beautiful PPT presentations I’ve ever seen (and talked a bit about his obsession with great PPT design). He expounded on the challenges of balancing a pure notion of craft against the reality of running a business that is profitable. He also explained the philosophy of “accessible craft” that is at the heart of what he’s trying to do at Merchant.

The students were given a chance to experience his restaurant and were quite engaged in his session. Students asked what he looks for in his employees (answer: people who are nice, who have passion and commitment to the values of the place, and who are not concerned with being hipsters, per se). They also wondered about particularly tough choices or decisions he had to make along the way.

***

Our next guest, Magnus Genioso, is an artist who creates sometimes whimsical, sometimes serious, but inevitably moving works of radio art using noise and conversation that he records. He is part of the anonymous sound collective Mad Genius, whose works can be found on Sound Collective. Magnus played several works; but there were two that we talked about extensively.

The first piece was created as part of a short radio series about the sense of place called @whereabouts. Titled Resale Records, it was recorded in a Madison-based used vinyl shop (of the same name), located in an old rusted-out shed. It is composed from a collection of sounds endemic to the record shop (the sound of flipping through vinyl, for instance) interwoven with an interview done with Eric Teisberg, the owner of the shop, about his work and life.

The second piece we discussed extensively is called Someone’s Screaming Outside and is composed from a series of 911 calls that came in before, during, and after the Trayvon Martin shooting. Magnus called this a piece about witnessing and commented, “Witnessing is really hard. Sometimes there are no concrete facts. Sometimes you don’t know what the hell you are witnessing.”

The conversation with Magnus touched on concepts like injury, beauty, and ethics as well as the nuts and bolts of collecting, modifying, combining, and layering found sounds to create radio art. He also gave the students some terrific tips to keep in mind when creating their final assignment for the class–a video collage based on what they have collected in their portfolios (e.g., think in terms of a metaphor for your experience in this class and use that metaphor to give the piece shape and meaning).

The presentations by Joshua Berkson and Magnus Genioso helped us better understand two approaches to an aesthetics of craft. Josh begins with using only the highest quality inputs and processes to create the food and drinks in his establishment; but he must balance this ideal against the material reality of having to earn sufficient profit to stay in business. Magnus begins with the material constraints of using found sounds and voices (whose quality is unpredictable and uncontrollable to a some extent) and then strives to craft from this assemblage of auricular artifacts, compelling music-based narratives.

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In the SVU commencement address embedded above, Greil Marcus says:

What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.

That’s what art does, that’s what it’s for — to show you that what you think can be erased, cancelled, turned on its head by something you weren’t prepared for — by a work, by a play, a song, a scene in a movie, a painting, a collage, a cartoon, an advertisement — something that has the power that reaches you far more strongly than it reaches the person standing next to you, or even anyone else on Earth — art that produces a revelation that you might not be able to explain or pass on to anyone else, a revolution that you desperately try to share in your own words, in your own work.

At the end of the term I asked the students about the experiences in class that were most meaningful to them and  there was a remarkable diversity in where the students found the most meaning and connection. I invited more than ten artists to join us over the course of the term and each one of them was mentioned.

This reinforced an idea that I started out with at the beginning of the class: that we would approach beauty from as many directions as possible—on the faith that this would increase the odds that each student would encounter something meaningful, revelatory, perhaps even life-saving.

 

Apologies for the radio silence. The beauty course marched on but I failed to get anything written on Jumper the past few weeks as I was finishing up the term and writing talks for two symposia (a symposium on Beauty and Business that I helped put together at UW-Madison and then the fourth biennial Pave Symposium on Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University). I’ll post transcripts from both conferences in conjunction with the videos from each being posted by the conference organizations (UW-Madison & ASU, respectively).

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I reflect on the second half of the beauty course I now perceive that it was about trying to add, subtract, multiply and divide with what we had soaked up (in terms of concepts and frameworks) in the first half. It was about releasing ourselves a bit from the philosophy and formal definitions; engaging with art, artists, and life; and seeing what would stick. In this post and the one that follows I am sharing highlights from the presentations by the several artists who joined us in class and key ideas from them that resonated most for the students.

March 17 – Revealing and obscuring ourselves through self-portraits (Lynette D’Amico)

You may recall that the students created photographic self-portraits the first week of class and we used the assignment to, among other things, discuss the difference between a selfie and a self-portrait. In the same week that Polly Carl discussed the Elaine Scarry monograph On Beauty and Being Just, Lynette brought in slides of self-portraits by two artists: Vivian Maier and Francesca Woodman (links are to documentaries on each artist and are highly recommended). Lynette discussed that what interests her is how these artists both reveal and obscure themselves in their self-portraits. Lynette shared the Diane Ackerman quote:

Selves will accumulate when one isn’t looking; and they don’t always act wisely or well.

— Diane Ackerman

As she scrolled through slides of self-portraits by Maier and Woodman, Lynette asked the students, What selves are being shown in these self-portraits? She also played the grammy video of Sia, a pop artist who has attempted to evade a celebrity’s life by hiding her face in all live performances and videos and commented, Hiding oneself or camouflaging oneself is its own version of revelation.

Lynette ended her terrific lecture by encouraging the students to further consider their self-portraits and how they might re-approach the assignment in light of this idea. After spring break the students were given just this assignment. The students, by and large, did strong work on their second self portraits. Indeed, it was difficult to choose only five to share. It’s perhaps also worth noting that more than a few students expressed gratitude at being able to go back and repeat an assignment from the past, with new knowledge, skills, awareness, and confidence.

March 24 – Designing beautiful interventions (Michael Rohd)

Michael Rohd  joined us for our final class before spring break for a terrific session that I titled “designing beautiful interventions.” If you don’t know Michael’s work he is founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre, founder of the Center for Performance and Civic Practice, and on faculty at Northwestern University. Much of Michael’s work is situated in the intersection between theater and democracy. In advance of his session the students read a short text by Michael called Listening is the New Revolution, which is a good introduction to his ideas. They also spent two weeks collecting experiences (from real life, not their FB feeds) of the following:

Michael’s session was broken into three parts. In the first hour he did an exercise called, “Where I come from”—a kind of musical chairs in which the person left without a chair must go to the center of a circle and finish the sentence, “Where I come from …”.  The “where” could be geographic, identity-based, or values-based. So,”Where I come from there are skyscrapers” was one geographic example. If this statement is true for others students they stand. Funnily enough, when someone made the statement about skyscrapers almost no one else in the class stood up. So instantly we all grasped that most of us were not from large, urban areas. An identity example: “Where I come from one’s parents are divorced.” A values example: “Where I come from most people are politically liberal.”

Following this exercise students talked in small groups about which of these revelations by their classmates struck them most intensely. Working in groups students were then asked to design a scenario based around a particular perspective—for instance, “Where I come from, anyone can say anything.” The aim was to demonstrate with the scenario how such a perspective could be a source of tension or conflict between two or more people. The students later commented that they loved this exercise as it allowed them to learn about their classmates and themselves in comparison.

In the second part of the class, Michael spent some time describing six projects he has worked on that he finds “beautiful” and asked the students to listen to these six stories and then reflect back to him his notion of beautiful work. There was a general consensus that beauty for Michael is knowing that the interventions or projects that he and his collaborators design have enabled individual citizens or whole communities to achieve their goals.

Finally, Michael led the students through a series of physical exercises with the material they brought to class (from having gone in search of beauty in the 11 sites outlined above). It’s hard to do justice to this exercise in writing, but essentially the students were led through a process of embodying the essence of these sites of beauty, relating their individual physical expressions to each other, and then working together to create a a brief performance incorporating text, movement, lights and sound. I would characterize it as an exercise in combining, layering, iterating, and shaping. It was definitely a challenging experience for the students, but one they embraced and seemed to enjoy.

April 7 – Beauty in the Thing to Make the Thing (Paul Sacaridiz)

I’ve already shared a few points made by sculptor Paul Sacaridiz (concerning the role of beauty in a democratic society) in my prior post on beauty and justice. There were a couple more themes from his lecture that really seemed to resonate with the students. The first had to do with finding beauty in the creative process. As he scrolled through slides of his studio and works in process, Paul commented:

Our job as artists is to notice the moments, the little beauties everywhere. … I document the process. At every moment I am looking for what no one else will see.  … I find beauty in the thing to make the thing.

 

The second theme had to do with the tension between the ideas “art is for everyone” and “you need special knowledge to understand art.” Paul commented:

• Museums want people in their institutions because we believe that what is inside is worth the experience. That’s why museums are often free. Nonetheless, people feel intimidated by art. We’re confronted by something we don’t understand.
• One of the dangerous notions out there is that art is a universal language. It isn’t. It’s specialized. For instance, there is the Japanese notion of wabi sabi, that there is beauty in imperfection. The Japanese make pots that highlight the cracks and bumps. But westerners see the pots and mis-interpret them as “not successful.” Our understanding of beauty is culturally contingent. Just because you don’t get something, or even whole societies don’t get something, doesn’t mean it’s not a “successful”  work.
• Art is a kind of system. And we cannot grasp it immediately but we often feel immediately whether or not we are drawn to something, or repelled by it. Like physics or medicine we need to invest time and energy if we want to understand art, to figure it out. When we find something “stupid” or  incomprehensible or we don’t grasp why it is worthwhile to anyone we can ask, “What is it?”  And we can stick around and seek to understand what we are offended by or what we don’t understand.  We can transfer this same skill to other things in life. Rather than rejecting things we don’t know and understand as stupid, we can back off a bit and seek to understand.
• The idea that you need specialized knowledge to understand and the idea that everyone should be able to approach art are both true. On the one hand, you don’t need historical knowledge to walk up to something and perhaps be compelled by its form, shape, colors, or even to understand it on some level. However, particularly with works from a different era, to have a deeper relationship with the piece, you may also find value in learning more, in understanding the context, the history, etcetera.

Portfolio Assignment: A second visit to the Chazen Art Museum

In order to examine the notion that art is a way to understand another culture, I gave the students the assignment to go to the Chazen Art Museum on their own to see the exhibition: Tradition and Innovation: The Human Figure in Contemporary Chinese Art. The students were generally quite enthusiastic in their responses to this exhibition. I gave them two assignments: (1) spend time with the exhibition and give me five adjectives to describe the culture being represented based on what you have experienced and (2) wait three days and document the work in the exhibition whose form proves to be most memorable.

In response to the second part of the assignment, foreign exchange student Constance Colin (from France) reflected:

At first I thought the piece that stuck to my mind would be the painting of Chi Peng entitled “Mood is never better than memory” because I stayed watching that one for a long time … However, two days after, the one that I could not forget was Endless Tower (sic) of Xiang Jing. It was so impressive by its size and striking. From a far point of view, you tend to think that all the women are similar but getting closer you realize the faces are all different. [It] raises the question of being special and unique in a society that pushes you to fit in, to be like others. To illustrate this experience, I chose a piece I found on a social media dedicated to art I really enjoy, Stack (theartstack.com), entitled “Dialogue” by David Kukhalashvili.

Another student, Stacey Dougherty, wrote about the following artwork:

I don’t remember the name, but the piece that sticks most in my mind is the large painting of the Chinese man walking in what looks like fire. The picture intrigued me because I could not stop wondering, where is that man going? Why is he taking such long strides? Is he walking into hell?  …

She documented her interpretation of the work in a Haiku:

Hell is Near

Fire is burning now / I run, but cannot escape / Hell is awaiting

In class I reminded the student that the title of the work is Busy People No. 1. I remarked that her interpretation, combined with the title, caused me to think that by racing through life and not being present, by allowing life to be consumed by busy-ness, we are, in a sense, living in a kind of hell.

Perhaps letting beauty in and letting it work on us helps us make strides in the other direction?