Tag Archives: education

This is real. I need to emphasize that. It is a paper handed to me by an English major at Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, Va., in 1984. That’s right: an English major. The art-history assignment was to write a short research paper on an artist of the student’s choice, picking someone whose work they especially liked.

I was sometimes astounded at what I received from students. On one test for an art history class, with sixteen students, I got the word “coliseum” spelled sixteen different ways — and none of them correct. And that despite there being two acceptable spellings: “Coliseum” and “Colosseum.”

At any rate, this paper, on sculptor George Segal, was a particularly — what? — unusual — example. At many a faculty party, it was read aloud in full, with professors falling on the floor and holding their guts in laughter. If you have ever been a teacher, I’m sure you can understand.

It is important, when reading it, to pronounce all the misspellings and nonsense words. This transcription has been thoroughly copy-edited and proofread. Every typo and solecism is original to the student.

GEORGE SEGAL

It all started as a painter. George Segal, an artist fasinated by the relationships between form and space, especially with negative space. Most of Segals education was centered around painting, in fact, while persuading a life as a chicken farmer, Segal continued his education in art. In one of the xerxed photos youll notice a scene of an artists studio. In the background are some of George Segals paintings. His interest in space and form are obvious in these paintings, and are expressed vividly.

After twenty years of painting Segal felt the canvas was too confining and explored other options. However he wanted to maintain his interest in form and shape. He discovered sculppture and felt great satisfaction with this. He said Sculpture deals with basic forms. … All basic forms exists as volumes. … Volumes penetrate each other and in this way are no longer single formations. Through penetration, space is created in its entirety. Every portion of space results from it. Basic forms are positive space volumes; negative space is created through the opposition of these positiv space volumes. Positive space is life-fulfilled — negative space is force impelled. Both exist simultaneously — both conceivable with each other. Its only the simultaneous existence of positive and negative space that creates the plastic unity. Segal realized he could free the image from the canvas by emphasizing it, however he was restricted the use of color as he used in painting. He began his career in sculpture with chicken wire and wood, and is now using bandages soaked in plaster and molding it over the models. He realized that he felt dissatisfaction with the modes of painting, and that he couldnt express the quality of his own feelings and emotions.

Segals subjects for his sculpture are common, every day subjects. Life situations that tend to be ignored or forgotton. Hes sculpted a woman putting on her shoe to carpenters working an average day. He almost always have a messages or reasons behind his subject matters. The discovery of his powerful sculptures came about quite accidental. Segal was showing his last exhibits at the Hansa Gallery in 1959, and wanted to convey how painted figures aspired to a third dimension and the illusion of space was missing. He tried to acheive this idea by placing three dimensional figures stepping out of his paintings which were hung low. The rough, and loosely drawn paintings corresponded with his sculptures that were also very rough. This is when the impact of the sculptures hit the public. This became the basic principal for all of the rest of Segals sculptures. A scupture gains definition by its relationship to another consciously presenting itself. This is definitely a rule that Segal continues to use.

Segals sculptures didnt appeal to everyone. In fact it was art that some people found hard to swallow. Some criticism included that the figures only confirmed an impression of a knotty conflict between freedom and timitation that looks to physical means only for a solution. The sculptures were found to be grotesque and dull. This put Segal on shifting ground. Segal felt his sculptures had a certain realism to them, and it allowed for free expression. He proceeded with his creations in scupture. Continuing with plaster he explored the possiabilities with this media. He soon began to practice putting the wet plasrer bandages on live models to get his human forms. This was frowned upon by the public because it was not free-hand. In the nineteenth century Rodin experienced a similar dilemma with his sculpture of a ballerina wearing a real tu-tu. But the awesome perfection of this effect couldnt be ignored, aside with the originality involved. Segal took up for himself by replying that its impossiable to have a human model pose in any other way than realistically when sitting in wet plaster. He goes on to expain that people have attitudes locked up in their bidies and arent aware of this. A person may reveal nothing of himself and then, suddenly one movement is made in the wet bandages and that movement contains a whole biography. Segal tries to capture the slightest gesture in order to show the imperfection, which he considers to be beautiful. Therefore his sculptures take on more realism and more emotions than if he had molded them by hand.

Segal claims to count heavily on the human ability to spot a metaphor, the urge to read poetry into things is universal. he has a lot to say and his scuptures have a dramatic way of expressing it. He arranges his figures as if there actors on a stage. They are placed as if we were as the audience, looking in through a window. This allows for the on-looker to feel free expression as to what is going on through the window.

Abstract Expressionsim is considered hot, serious, committed and spiritually strong. Pop Art is considered to be cool, ironic , detached and materialistic. Pop Art artist were often concerned with subject matter and technique. With this in mind Segal considered himself to be a Pop artist, if he had to place himself in a category. he considered an attitude of honesty as top priority, and to him there is neither good nor bad subject mater for life is life whether your tying your shoes or working a daily job. He claims to be primarily interested in aesthetic statements and insist on the attainment of abstract forms to carry this message out. he says it opens doors of riches of everyday experiences.

Many critics agreed with Segals opinion of his art. However there were some who did not. Still others would place him in the Abstract Expressionist scene. His colorous sculptures were seen as being absrtact, and his paintings have a lot of expression to them, yet still maintaining an abstract form. The critics saw a dynamic message behind his work which is a characteristic of Abstract Expressionism.

I personally view Segals talent lying in the Environmental Happenings or Assemblages. His work has escaped the flat canvas and moved to a three dimensional scupture. Much importance is placed on the environment of his subjects. This sets a mood for the emotion. His work is a frozen happening that stimulates a feeling. Take a look at the Execution, found in the back. This is four basic figures done in basic white. Nothing extravagavt is used here, however theres a strong reaction to this scene that creates an emotion.

Its been said its impossiable to place Segal in a certain historical category on account fo the various perceptural opinions. Possiably its a mix of Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism, and Environmental Happenings or Assemblages. People are different and will see things different. This is why boundaries cannot be placed on what art is. If it strikes a feeling or emotion, I consider it art, however way it is done.

A book’s long shadow

June 11, 2015

Uncategorized

1 Comment

In May, nearly half the world population of the rare Mongolian antelope, the saiga, were found dead, presumably from disease. Some 120,000 carcasses were discovered on the grasslands of Kazakhstan. The population of saiga has been under decline for many decades, and the Saiga Conservation Alliance estimates that the number of animals has dropped by 95 percent in the past 15 years — and that was before May’s catastrophe.

This is enough to alarm any animal lover, and anyone worried about the state of the environment anywhere on the globe, but it had a personal resonance with me, because I knew of the saiga vulnerability since I was a child, thanks to a remarkable book I received when I was perhaps 6 years old: Wild Animals of the World, by William Bridges and Mary Baker, which was first published the year I was born — 1948.

On page 221, Bridges writes: “This odd antelope of the cold, flat treeless steppes of Siberia has the misfortune to be highly prized by the Chinese pharmaceutical trade for the sake of its horns…” On the top of the page is a fine black-and-white drawing of a saiga by the artist, Mary Baker.

The book was one of those premonitory gifts of childhood that dug deep into my growing brain and stayed there. On the surface, it was a bestiary, a catalog of mammals of the world, written for young people; each page featured a portrait of an animal by Baker and a short text by Bridges giving a mini-overview of the animal, its habits, its usefulness to humans, when appropriate, and often, a warning as to its peril.

Looked at that way, it was certainly a successful book: I loved it on that level alone.

But it had several other things going on for me. It was in its way a “gesamtkunstwerk” for my curious child brain: It fascinated me on several levels, and led me to art, to language, to design and to a love of “the things of this world.”

Let me explain.

First, the drawings were distinctive. Even as a kid, I could distinguish between the look of Baker’s drawings and the look of photographs, and the look of other artists’ styles. I valued Baker’s fine detail, the beautifully delineated textures of the fur, hides, and markings of each animal. The drawings were hyper-realistic, yet somehow not “photographic.” They were clearly drawings: I could see the pencil on the paper. This difference — the esthetic surface of the image — I did not understand at that tender age, but I clearly felt it, and it thrilled me. I pored over the book endlessly. It was my first acknowledged awareness of “art” as a separate entity.

When I was a little older, maybe sixth grade, I picked up a pencil and copied several of the drawings, and felt proud satisfaction when my version approximated the original.

Then, there were the animal names. I knew horses and cows, even monkeys and deer, but this book told me about scores of exotically named animals, such as the anoa, argali, chevrotain, coypu, douroucouli, gaur, gerenuk, nilghai, paradoxure, thylacine, yapok, kiang, and of course, the saiga. There are dozens more: sitatunga, ratel, quagga, pichiciago, okapi, galago, and the flying phalanger. Who knew the world was this strange, that language was this baroque?

I reveled in this richness of nounage. The world was full of amazing things, and this book showed them to me. There were more things in heaven and earth, etc. And they all had names. I started on a long quest for vocabulary and the building of a word-horde.

With my early and budding interest in language, I even put together the similarity of the European wisent and the American bison and thought, they must be related words. The wisent, by the way, was my best drawing copy.

But there was more. I cannot say I was consciously aware of all the book meant to me, or of all I learned from it, but I felt these things, even as a child. I loved, for instance, the typography. I wouldn’t have known that’s what it was, but the book was very well designed, and each page had the name of the animal at the top in a display typeface different from the text font. I loved the difference. There was something exotic in that display font.

In the same way, I had a nascent awareness of design. Each of Baker’s drawings had a blank background, except for a shaded rectangle, asymmetrically positioned to provide an active balance to the overall design. We are used to pictures being bound by a rectangular frame, but here, the animals burst out of the rectangle, giving them more life and vivacity. Again, I wouldn’t have put it that way as a boy, but I clearly felt it.

There were 251 animals described in the book, all of them mammals, and it gave me an encyclopedic sense of zoology. I wanted to learn more.

I don’t know how to express how essential books like Wild Animals of the World were to me growing up. There were other books that had the same kind of hold on me. Life magazine’s The World We Live In was one, the ancient Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia, from the mid-1930s was another, with its endpaper dirigibles and gyrocopters flying over futuristic cities.

But it is essential to recognize that it is not merely the information contained in these books that is important. What meant so much to me was not simply the factoids, but the whole experience of the book — its design, its typography, the color of the paper it was printed on, the smell of the binding, the stiffness or flexibility of its cover. It is a whole experience.

Which is why I worry about the current educational emphasis on information. This is an information age, we are told, but it isn’t fact alone that is meaningful. What I loved — and still love — about Baker’s book is everything about it. The physicality of the learning experience, not its disembodied data.

Which brings me to my last point. Now that I am old, I find that there is a recurring pattern to the years. There are moments when we acquire and moments we divest. This is true of possessions as well as ideas. At some point we buy things we want; later we come to “simplify” our lives by getting rid of clutter. Certainly one of the effects of retirement is reducing the number of things we need to pack when we move out of the large house and into something more convenient for age. But there is a countervening impulse to reacquire some of the things we have lost, whether it is a CD of a record that used to mean so much to us when we were courting, or a Ford Mustang we used to drive, or — in this case — a book that meant so much to the inchoate curiosity of our yearning childhood.

I had long ago lost possession of Wild Animals of the World. I have no idea where my original copy went. Probably my parents sold it off in a yard sale after I moved out to go to college and they got rid of most of the household residue when they retrenched to a double-wide in a retirement community in Florida. But I felt a deep nostalgic need for the book and found a used copy online for some ridiculous price — a buck ninety-nine or some such — and ordered it. I still pore over it. I still learn from it.

Coming home

February 25, 2014

Uncategorized

The Dumbification of a nation

November 16, 2013

Uncategorized

1 Comment

”For one million dollars, how do you spell IQ?”

If you asked America that question, America would not win a million dollars.

What can I say? When Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was popular on network TV, a study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that most Americans thought it counted as educational television.

Some 70 percent of those asked also identified the Oprah Winfrey Show as ”serving their children’s educational needs.”

It has only gotten worse since then.

As a nation, we are dumbing down. We have decided, like one third-grader told my wife when she was teaching, that ”my mama says there’s only so much the brain can hold or it will explode.” And we’re playing it safe.

So we think the questions Regis Philbin asked were actually tough.

”Who is buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

Although, actually, most of the questions on that show involved celebrities rather than past presidents. The only Grant who counted was Hugh.

Another study found that 80 percent of seniors at 55 top universities flunked or nearly flunked a basic high school history test.

So that, nowadays, it is rare to find an actual quiz show on TV, outside Jeopardy, which keeps up a decent and atavistic standard. Instead of watching smart people answer questions, we now prefer to watch people being stupid and doing stupid things on “reality TV.” Perhaps this gives us the illusion that if we are not as idiotic as the contestants, perhaps we are now the “smart” ones.

Nothing says as much about the course of empire than the slow dumbing down of quiz shows, from the really arcane questions that Allen Ludden asked on the G.E. College Bowl to the pap that passes for knowledge on Millionaire. It is no surprise that in its current syndicated incarnation Millionaire is hosted by Cedric the Entertainer.

Nowadays, we are amazed when a contestant remembers the name of the cute little girl on Family Affair.

It tells us what we, as a culture, value. And we don’t value learning. We value entertainment.

In the past, even people who didn’t have much education valued it and made sure their children received its benefits. Older schools often have the names of great thinkers or artists carved into friezes around their sides: Aristotle, Mozart, Pasteur, Newton. They stood for high goals we should set and aim our efforts at.

That all has changed.

It isn’t merely that schools being built now might scribe the names of Katy Perry, Justin Bieber or Beyonce, but that we think there should be no names at all.

For in our warped sense of democracy, we have decided that ”all men are created equal” means that no one should be better than anyone else.

I never have understood this: We somehow maintain the belief that there are basketball players who are more talented than everyone else, and we reward them richly. We keep the belief that there are more successful CEOs and reward them richly too. But somehow we are not to believe — or at least applaud the fact — that there are some people who are smarter or more talented academically or artistically. We reward such people only with suspicion.

And we make our education system inane to the point that everyone can earn a ”B” and keep their wonderful sense of self-esteem.

Then we wonder why our kids don’t know where Chicago is on a map, can’t balance a checkbook, or believe George Washington was the general on D-Day.

Obviously, we decide, our school standards are set too high, and we lower them yet further.

For it isn’t just the students who don’t know anything of history, geography or spelling but also their parents and teachers who don’t know and don’t think it important.

Another study, by the non-profit Foundation for Academic Standards and Tradition, found that half of all current education majors in college — those who will become the teachers of our children — don’t read books other than what is required for class. And 60 percent think there is too much emphasis placed on books.

What do they want instead? If they are like most Americans, they want to be entertained. They want wall-to-wall television. And they’re getting it.

It is the democratization of culture, so that if you have the Encyclopedia Britannica on one side and Project Runway on the other, we decide they have equal weight.

Learning gives us the context to understand events. It prevents us from making egregious choices. It gives us skepticism.

Learning turns us into individuals rather than demographic statistics, rather than mere consumers. It gives us the confidence to make difficult choices and makes us the free agents for political choice that democracy was originally meant to nurture.

But we have become instead a nation of intellectual and emotional infants, swayed by commercial advertising, hoodwinked by ”alternative” science, led by politicians who can utter no thought longer than a sound bite.

We have the world’s largest and most sophisticated military yet are left defenseless by our own embrace of ignorance. Read your Gibbon.

Cletus does CERN

November 5, 2013

Uncategorized

Museum elegy

September 17, 2013

Uncategorized

1 Comment

I had two homes as a boy. First, there was the house my family kept, where I was fed and went to sleep. But second, there was The American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Its vast halls and marble floors held the wonders of the world. I couldn’t get enough of it. To say nothing of the Hayden Planetarium next door.

There were dinosaurs and sharks the size of split-levels; there were dioramas and a life-size blue whale; there were vast vitrines of rocks in darkened rooms where sound bounced off the hard floors and walls, giving young ears their first taste of echo location — the inner ear knew this was a large space.

There was the “Soil Profiles of New York State,” always one of my favorite places. The museum opened me up to the wide world and the things in it. The woods I grew up knowing were enshrined behind glass, letting me know that such things were important enough to study. It first showed me that there was nothing truly “ordinary,” that everything was somehow miraculous, like the gigantic centipede in the leaf litter exhibit.

I have gone back to the museum countless times in the ensuing years, and it has always been a joy. But something has changed, and not just in the Wordsworthian sense.

What has changed is museum philosophy. Back then, museums were collections displayed indiscriminately: glass cases of quartz crystals; boxes of dragonflies; walls of stuffed birds.

Today, the emphasis is on education and, as a result, the displays are smaller, more organized and accompanied by explanatory text, with maps and diagrams. What used to be a pile of rocks is now one or two dramatically lit examples with a video display next to them with a media baritone giving us the pertinent facts.

It used to be the museum was about stuff. Now it is about words, and the stuff has been turned into visual aids.

The new museum is less cluttered, has greater clarity and is easier to digest. And, for me, that is just the problem. I feel cheated: My museum experience becomes passive.

I am no longer allowed to think for myself but am given only a single interpretation of the material, one that can only be called ”the official story.”

What I loved, and what sparked my boyhood imagination, was the profusion of specimens, and the lack of coherent explanation. There were those vitrines, with their hundreds of small chunks of quartz, and next to each a tiny typewritten label saying it came from Haddonfield, N.J., or Bloemfontein, South Africa. It was up to me to figure out why they all meant something, and why they were exhibited together. I got to make up my own story from the blizzard of data.

Surely, my stories might not be accurate, but then, they might be more accurate than the “official story.” That’s how Alfred Wegener figured out that the continents were rafts, how Johannes Kepler figured out — from the rafts of data collected by Tycho Brahe — that the planets move in ellipses.

Science, after all, like history, is made up of two elements: data and hypothesis, that is, primary material and the sense we make of it.

A historian, for instance, doesn’t write history from history books, but from the letters people have left behind, the church records and deed registers, old clothes and kitchen middens. A mass of confusing detail comes into his hands, and he has to whittle it down to a believable story. Only then is the history book written, and, if the historian has done a good job, his version becomes the accepted version.

Just being spoon fed the accepted version hinders our ability to make progress. Because the accepted version is always, to larger or smaller degree, imperfect.

Part of the wonder of museums for me was just that: seeing a jumble of minerals or scarab beetles and figuring them out. I miss the confusion and the creative thought that is born of it.

The history of science is littered with abandoned theories, from geologic catastrophism to uniformatarianism, from geocentrism to heliocentrism, from Newton to Einstein.

In the science of history, this is often called ”revisionism” and thought of as a bad thing, although I can’t imagine why. New information or better hypotheses are good: They are truer.

So, when I go to the American Museum of Natural History and I see a few dinosaur bones with a timeline on the wall, I know the version I’m being fed is no more sacred than the version it replaced: coldblooded, lumbering lizards replaced by warmblooded, twitching, nervous birds 20 feet tall.

The new museum thinks it is being educational, but more exactly, it is being entertainment. It is like TV.

And I cannot call that an improvement.

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Tag Archives: education

It all started as a painter…

A book’s long shadow

Coming home

The Dumbification of a nation

Cletus does CERN

Museum elegy