Maxine Greene, case study 2

Maxine Greene was the mother on Aesthetic Education.  She spent most of her career at the Teachers College at Columbia University in NYC.  Additionally, she taught and lectured at the Lincoln Center Institute as its philosopher in residence. Greene continued and extended the educational philosophies of John Dewey concentrating on pragmatism and democracy.  She lived from 1917-2014.  She taught teachers and extolled the importance of imagination to true teaching and learning.  She championed the facilitation of students’ seeing new possibilities and awakening to embody becoming a part of community while embracing the integrity and worth of all people.  She lectured and wrote about the importance of keeping arts central in education.  She spread the importance of aesthetic education as THE way to foster imagination and awakening in the classroom and beyond.

“If the cultivation of imagination is important to the making of a community that might become a democratic community, then the release of imagination ought now to be one of the primary commitments of the public school.”

I will look into the thesis that art is important and generative for the teacher, student and democracy if it is done in a way to cultivate imagination.  Aesthetic Education is the way.  Art and teaching art is not a waste of time.  Let us awaken to the possibilities.

Aesthetic education and art education in public schools

Teaching art can be more than teaching how to make art or how to understand the historical importance of art.  The experience of making art can become an aesthetic experience if the maker is noticing the act of making and applies the experience to interactions with other artworks and to being a human experiencing the world. According to Greene, “Aesthetic education is an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful. When this happens new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened.”  The pressures of high stakes standardized testing and high stakes teacher evaluations are not conducive to teaching for liberation, aesthetic education is.  Public education is based on antiquated systems that had the goal to create file clerks and factory workers.  In the past this could have been argued to at least have helped the students to get a job after graduation.  Now low level, low skill jobs are replaced by machines or outsourced to areas of less expensive labor.  Imagination is the key to creative and entrepreneurial jobs.  Mass education has an oppressive power structure built into it.  The teacher lectures to all students they repeat/ memorize facts.  Facts can be looked up in a second now.  Now we need to discern truth from deception (a critical act) we need to make things or use things in new ways.  

Oppression in education is the nature of the institution. Much like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the students and teacher take on the role of the dominating authorities whose aim may not to educate but to maintain superiority and a base of cheap labor.

Imagination poetic visual and social imagination

Habitual routes create loss of vision.  The habitual acts are unthinking acts.  If you are unaware you are unquestioning/ unthinking.  Rote learning is a way of making new information habitual.  Aesthetic education is a way of making the everyday meaningful, beautiful, or enraging.  If you pass empty houses or boarded up houses everyday but do not notice them you would not be moved to outrage.  But if you notice the empty houses and bring experience with the windows in the art of Ben Shahn and Romare Bearden. If you see the empty windows a metaphor for empty eye sockets then the noticing may awaken outrage. What is causing these buildings to sit empty while people live on the street or are doubled up in overcrowded apartments?  You may imagine a different, better possibility.

You may be capable of indignation through engagement with paintings or novels. You may awaken to see feel and act!

 
  Ben Shahn(up) Romare Bearden (down) 

Aesthetic education helps enable a disgust for the status quo and an awakening to what is possible, to social dreaming. Paulo Freire spoke to the interest in art and imagination- “if peasants do not have a notion of a pleasanter world they will not be moved to create a different situation”  When people feel insecure they do not allow themselves the risk of dreaming or setting lofty goals.  This relates to something I recently heard; locations hit by natural disasters experience a twofold contraction of growth.  First through the initial destruction and the use of resources to rebuild but also in the limiting of goals by people who do rebuild. (NPR Maria coverage)

Sartre: 19th century French Factory, Union- begins better way of life makes current situation unbearable. The Utopian thrust of imagination. Rare today- knowing now to the past feeling that there is a cause worth working for that something we could do can change.  Thinking of things as if they could be otherwise. To look at things as if it could be otherwise.

Poems unleash new perspectives on old words, put together so to provide a queer order and novel meaning. Maxine Greene referred to this poem by Adrienne Rich in one of her many lectures available online.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it's necessary

to talk about trees.

Only once you can accept yourself, once you accept another person for who they are-even if you do not agree with what they do, then you can see life as it is and then real change can come.  You have to be willing to not know, to discover the answer and know that it will be incomplete, change and forever be in an act of becoming.  

Just because you are aware that there are those that want to make it disappear doesn’t mean that you will not dream of something different, something better. There are different types of dread.  Chicago is dragging with dread. Lives are unvalued and meaningless.  People feel drawn to protect their own survival and interest by use of a gun.  Young folk are plugged into a squawk box that yells insistently, provides live feeds of fights and lascivious pleasures.  Young folk are high.  The sweet feel of oblivion is potent and available where real world comforts are not.

If you feel this way why do you create?

Why do we bother to fight.  Why do we dream of something beyond what we have already seen?  

If poetry/art survives at all it is the combination of the belief in some possible happiness combined with feet planted in the common sense of dread.  It is not escapism to imagine.   It is reaching for the edge of the yawning chasm, letting your eyes adjust to the dim but remembering the brightness of a new day and knowing the sun will rise again.

“It is a sense that there is always more to experience and more in what we experience than we can predict. Without some such sense, even at the quite human level of there being something which deeply absorbs our interest, human life becomes perhaps not actually futile or pointless, but experienced as if it were. It becomes, that is to say, boring. In my opinion, it is the main purpose of education to give people the opportunity of not ever being, in this sense, bored; of not ever succumbing to a feeling of futility, or to the belief that they have come to the end of what is worth having.

Can we work toward a civil society in the future of education?

“Teacher educators and school administrators do not think speculatively despite all the work towards fruitful conceptions of active learning, critical questioning, and the construction of meanings. There is almost no mention of imagination or of its relation to notions of the possible. No attention is paid to Dewey’s idea of the incompleteness of meanings when not rounded out by the imaginative projection of possibilities.”

Can we engage students in constant effort to improve community?  Taking responsibility to improve community is understanding other’s worth and integrity. Other people's potentiality. Each person is on the way. Regard people who have a different aesthetic.  I may not like it but I know that the person is trying to express something.  I can expose myself to this different viewpoint and understand the integrity of this unknown.  This other answer may not be my answer and my answer may be evolving.

It is frightening if someone thinks they have the answer. Tyranny is an authority that prevents you from thinking for yourself.

Can’t control everything.  Interacting with art enable the understanding that we see things differently.  We do things differently. There are many correct answers. “There are no single views of the possible, any more than there are ways of measuring what it signifies in anyone’s imagination. Imagination summons up visions of a better state of things, an illumination of the deficiencies in existing situations, a connection to the education of feeling, and a part of intelligence.”

Education can be an emancipatory act.  “We (and those who are our students) must be given opportunities to choose to be persons of integrity, persons who care.”

Have a ‘we experience’ and connect to community.  Education is not something to do it is a means to unlock the potential of possibilities.  After unleashing the imagination then there needs to be the next step of working together.  As Deweyan democracy in education, “Through the building of a community the ground may be laid for an articulate public empowered and encouraged to speak for itself, perhaps in many voices, within classrooms (and corridors, and school yards) people look forward to seeing, across spaces where there can be dialogue and exchanges of all kinds in which persons can speak in their own idioms, avoiding the formulaic, the artificial and the `sound-bite’.”

Aesthetic education helps unleash social imagination!  Attempting to make sense of the world through experiencing something new.  A glimpse of the sublime allows for frustration at the current state of education and a call for something better. “Art can’t change the world, but it can change someone who can.” - Greene is quoted to say.  This thought alone can save creators from the paralysing self doubt that can arise through questions such as: Why am I doing this?  Is this the most important thing during challenging times?  Isn’t this art production self-indulgent?  Is this art product merely a decoration or plaything for the rich?

Looking into the work of art educator and philosopher Maxine Greene is like taking a cool sip of water: clear, simple and good for you.  Is it possible to practice aesthetic education in urban public schools?“There are, of course,” Greene wrote, “young persons in the inner cities, the ones lashed by ‘savage inequalities,’ the ones whose very schools are made sick by the social problems the young bring in from without. Here, more frequently than not, are the real tests of ‘teaching as possibility’ in the face of what looks like an impossible social reality at a time when few adults seem to care.”

Why art? Why teach?

Art because it may be the thing that can inspire the imagination to see things as they could be, not how they are.  The hope the kindness and the creative power of America the great is built on imagination.  To teach for liberation to offer authentic experiences aesthetic education the teacher must be highly trained but even more importantly highly ethical.  She need to believe in the integrity of all of her students.  To understand the limitations of the administration’s understanding and work toward something better even with her feet planted in the dread of high stakes testing and evaluations.  

“It is not that the artist offers solutions or gives directions. He nudges; he renders us uneasy; he makes us (if we are lucky) see what we would not have seen without him. He moves us to imagine, to look beyond.”

Can public schools build a community of aesthetic education or are they doomed to be a tool of the oppressor.  Can teachers in their classrooms and administrators in their offices imagine something beyond the tyrannical dictates they have little control over? They may be doomed, but maybe they can be open to the possibility of imagining- becoming the thing that does not yet exist- something better!

• Baldacchino, John. 2012. Art's way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Vol. 81.;81;. Rotterdam;Boston;: Sense Publishers.
• Baldacchino, John. 2013;2012;. Willed forgetfulness: The arts, education and the case for unlearning. Studies in Philosophy and Education 32 (4): 415-30.
• Baldacchino, John. 2017. Freedom, aesthetics, and the agôn of living in maxine greene's philosophy. Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies 39 (1): 18.
• Colwell, Richard. 2015. A challenge from bennett reimer. Philosophy of Music Education Review 23 (2): 117.
• Greene, Maxine. "The Artistic. Aesthetic and Curriculum." Curriculum Inquiry 6, no. 4 (1977): 283-96. doi:10.2307/1179650.
• Greene, Maxine. 1988. Imagination. From the Museum of Education’s Reader's’ Guide to Education exhibition [http://www.ed.sc.edu/museum/Guide.html]  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9pwAi8-bZE
• Greene, Maxine. "Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility." The Phi Delta Kappan 76, no. 5 (1995): 378-82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20405345.
• Greene, Maxine. 2000. Imagining futures: The public school and possibility. Journal of Curriculum Studies 32 (2): 267-80.
• Higgins, Chris. 2008. Instrumentalism and the clichés of aesthetic education: A deweyan corrective. Education and Culture 24 (1): 6-19.
• Rich, Adrienne "What Kind of Times are These" from Collected Poems: 1950-2012. Copyright © 2016 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust.  Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51092/what-kind-of-times-are-these
• Teachers College, Columbia University, Maxine Greene, TC's Great Philosopher, Dies at 96. Published Thursday, May. 29, 2014   http://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2014/may/maxine-greene-tcs-great-philosopher-dies-at-96/
• Thayer-Bacon, Barbara. 2008. Democracies-always-in-the-making: Maxine greene's influence. Educational Studies 44 (3): 256-69.

Case study three thesis

Jutta Koether
Jutta is a german artist who lives in New York City.
She is friends withKim Gordon of Sonic Youth.
I wish the perfomances were better that I have seen online.
The question is what is the relationship between performance movement duration and Painting?
Painting as performance as opposed to painting as a artifact of performance.
  Maybe there is a better artist to look at? Laurie Anderson.  Liz Phair. PJ Harvey. David Lynch.

So... not getting any response I have continued to think about why I am interested in painting as performance. The act of making, the solving, becoming is my happy place.  I do not need to have an important idea behind it.  I do not want to do all the work. I want the viewer to have room go draw connections.  I want them to play, dance, or sing their way through a composition. 

Still not sure what the thesis question is but I have looked into
*Cecily Brown, dancing paint through art historical forms?
*Iva Gueorguieva, paint that is so lively that it becomes sculpture and enters the room using the same rythmic articulations used on canvas?
*Arturo Herrera, Is there a connection between play and performance. Are they opposites or are they more alike than exhibition and play? Herrera plays with known images ( cartoons). If you paint/collage/draw a body in motion or fragmented does the brain supply movement connected with sound waves and dance?

Case study 1, Frankenthaler

“I think most things are about ambiguity”

Helen Frankenthaler is an American abstract painter. She burst forth on the art scene when she was featured in Life magazine article in 1952. She was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg whom she met at an opening in 1950. Greenberg was arguably the most influential critic in the world at the time. In 1958, she married Robert Motherwell, a well known Abstract Expressionist painter. She does not want to talk about feminism. She does not want to talk her past marriage or about contemporary painters. “There are three subjects I don’t like discussing: my former marriage, women artists, and what I think of my contemporaries.”  She wants to make beautiful paintings and throw beautiful parties. I appreciate the spontaneity of her work, the quickness, the application of paint, and the non-fussiness above the surface. I think I also like her cocky above-it-all portrait from her breakout Life article. The same thing that makes her paintings convincing I see in portraits of her. She is not asking for permission to be who she is and to create her way.

I have tried to curtail this case study to only be about Frankenthaler’s art, but art is influenced, and the way art is categorized is influenced by who you are.  Some question whether Frankenthaler would have been as successful and remembered as big a painter if she had not been exposed and introduced to the art world through Clement Greenberg. Greenberg brought together many artists and publicized their working style. He showed the soak stain paintings to more artists.  “When Greenberg brought the abstract painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis to Frankenthaler’s studio in 1953, they seized upon both her technique and the broad, flat expanses of color she created.”  Noland and Morris brought the soak stain method into their paintings.  Frankenthaler and Greenberg traveled all over Europe looking at paintings and painting side by side. It is hard as a woman to feel like you are taken seriously or your work is taken seriously.  Helen Frankenthaler was an attractive woman who made attractive paintings. Women and all artists have to think about how their art will be viewed.  I am still of the age where I have a chip on my shoulder about being taken seriously as an artist because I am a woman.  Make, make, make, marry, marry, marry... Will you make me? Will you marry me? It is not hard to have a chip on your shoulder “At a time when so many younger artists wouldn't be caught using a word like ''beauty'' - except sarcastically“ She was assured enough to partner with powerhouses and carry on her own work.  She pioneered a new way of working.  She is known as Helen Frankenthaler not so-and-so’s wife.  So, note to self,  knock that chip off honey!

Frankenthaler reacted to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings by creating the soft glowing soak stain painting technique.  A technique that allowed the surface and the paint to be really flat, quickly applied and open to happy accidents.  I like to think that letting the material do part of the work is a material collaboration. She ushered abstract painting from abstract expressionism to color field painting.  She refused to leave-out the reference to anything observable. “What concerns me when I work is not whether the picture is a landscape…or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is, did I make a beautiful picture?” ''Women, as a rule, tend to tidy up pictures that don't need tidying up.” Her enduring question is, it seems: how can I bring the spontaneity of small works, the genuineness of immediate reactions of color, shape and placement, to a larger scale work? This is a question I come back to over and over. Artists I respect have said that my very small study paintings are more successful than the large paintings done after, but that was after seeing the large ones.  I think large scale says, “look at me, everything in this painting is important.”  That is how artists may look at their own small paintings and how others may view them after seeing larger ones but I do not know if they would have as much power without the big brother to compare to.  Here is Frankenthaler on size, “Size and scope is necessary. You cannot accomplish on an easel size what the message is that you might be able to accomplish large scale.”

Photo by Gordon Parks for Life magazine 1952.

The bay 1963

My goal is not to work with color alone. I like the squishiness of paint. I like the hand of the artist visible in the application. I do like the spontaneity, quickness the non- fussiness, openness to interpretation and yes the beauty of Helen Frankenthaler’s paintings. She talks about color only working in space, ''Color doesn't work unless it works in space,'' she says, launching one of her favorite subjects. ''Color alone is just decoration - you might as well be making a shower curtain.''

Explaining the artist/s approach.
Helen is educated and aware of art history.  Her early Bennington College work referred to cubism.  She created her own style in reaction to the abstract expressionists action paintings.  The freedom from rendering of form and the dependence on a brush was established through her soak stain method. First she diluted the oil pigment with turpentine and poured onto unprimed canvas. This creeping flow of color and bloom of oil was at times manipulated with soft brushes to guide the flow but not to establish the initial shape.  She has kept with the non-objective soak stain method for her entire career.  She has switched from oil to acrylic and water on unprimed canvas.  Frankenthaler was also a part of the printmaking renaissance of the early 1960’s.  She created work at many print shops including, Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in Long Island and Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.

Explaining the artist's intentions/ideas.  

Frankenthaler was in a relationship with Clement Greenberg.  She had to have been influenced by his writings and theories about painting.  Greenberg, in short, stated that painting should use painting to understand the motivations and limits of painting.  He introduced Frankenthaler to the galleries and artists who were the most influential during their marriage.  They also toured France and Italy together looking at and discussing art.  They painted together.  Having a critic for a lover to constantly engage with art ideas had to have solidified her understanding of her own place in creating her own ideas.  Art is often a solitary affair.  Making art and being in a relationship with a critic may have been more like a polygamous affair.

Frankenthaler wants to make beautiful paintings. She spoke of beauty as the goal of her painting often.  Wrestling with the formal ramifications of this quest sustained a very long and productive career.  Her work suggests spaces: interiors sometimes, landscapes often.  She makes small works on paper and heroically large works.  She is interested in the materials.  She has stripped down the elements of art to color, shape size and placement.  “My pictures are full of climates,abstract climates, and not nature per se, but a feeling”  This is enough to suggest many things but reveal little definite content over and above beauty and materiality.  

Explaining the artist’s use of materials.

Helen Frankenthaler is most known for her large-scale soak-stain paintings. November 1950, Greenberg escorted her to a show of Pollock's work at the Betty Parsons Gallery. ''It was original,'' she says of Pollock's work, ''and it was beautiful, and it was new, and it was saying the most that could be said in painting up to that point - and it really drew me in. I was in awe of it, and I wanted to get at why.''

Her reaction to the why was eventually to put an unprimed cloth with some charcoal sketches on it on the floor and poured diluted oil pigment into puddles.  She said that she immediately saw a connection to the watercolors she had done plein air.   Getting to the immediateness and the spontaneity of large gestures on large surfaces.  The surfaces are flat the pigment is soaked into the fabric not sitting on top. Frankenthaler seems obsessed with flatness.  Her most successful prints are lithographs, a planographic print.  They look and feel very much like her paintings.  The surface of lithographs do not have the plate marks or incised lines of intaglio prints.  The colors created with touche on stone feel very much like watercolor.  The drying of the oily ink creates tide lines. Touche made marks suggest the bloom of oil stains on paper or canvas as well.

Frankenthaler draws with color.  Drawing to her is creating space not lassoing a shape.  She is using line as a delineation of one thing next to another an edge that well placed creates shape.

In the 1980s she slowly started adding just a bit of thicker paint.

“To acknowledge an osmosis of the past and present around you and go naturally creatively free: Head heart and wrist; to be in control enough to not be in control at all. To have a dialogue with the work and to let yourself go in relation to it. Paintings don’t lie they have their beautiful working order just as nature itself has” “If you have a real sense of limits then you are free to break out of them.”

Explaining the artist’s process and key issues.

Frankenthaler works on the floor pouring liquid color then dragging with brooms, sponges, and fingers.  Her issues are beauty and ambiguity.  She is concerned with the placement of shapes, light, depth, beauty, color, form and perspective on a rectangular canvas.  She balances the magic of direct experience with limits of educated experience.  She works on the floor but thinks of paintings as rectangles on the wall.  Once she sees the paintings on the wall then she cuts down the image to work as a painting. Everything in her life experience affects her art. “One IS one’s work and one’s work is one’s self.”

Some have criticised Frankenthaler for being formulaic and not pushing beyond a specific style.  These same people may take issue with her talking about beauty in painting.  They may not like the ambiguous content.  They may not like her posh style and her upbringing.  They may not like that she is unwilling to be a spokesperson for women.  Helen Frankenthaler was a painter who painted, continued to paint and to deal with issues about the elements that create a beautiful painting with no apologies.

Helen Frankenthaler White Portal, 1967 Lithograph 30 x 22 inches Artist's proof.

References

Art 103 Gallery,  “Art 103 Content 08 part 1 Fhas01 Helen Frankenthaler” film, Youtube video, 0:57-1:37 (August 30 2012).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9kfufFMRvg

Beyond Print: The Kenneth Tyler Collection, “Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Tyler: a 25 year collaboration” (February 21, 2012). Accessed Online

https://tylerblogs.com/2012/02/21/helen-frankenthaler-and-kenneth-tyler-a-25-year-collaboration/

Ruth Fine, Helen Frankenthaler Prints. 1993 Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1993), 11-29.

Gagosian and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, “NOW: HELEN FRANKENTHALER: Line into Color, Color into Line,” film [2016], Youtube video, (October 4, 2016).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h35AJ2cn72Y

Jon Mann, “How Helen Frankenthaler Pioneered a New Form of Abstract Expressionism.” Artsy Editorial (September 29, 2017). Accessed Online

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-helen-frankenthaler-pioneered-new-form-abstract-expressionism

Portland State University, “Helen Frankenthaler at Portland State: Q & A, 1972,” film [1972]. Youtube video, posted November 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00A1R06tLa8

Deborah Solomon, “Artful Survivor” New York Times Magazine, (May 14, 1989). Accessed Online

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/14/magazine/artful-survivor.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=3

Charline von Heyl
Cecily Brown
Dana Schutz
vanessa prager- figure heavy paint pink
Albert Oehlen
Michael Raedecker
sarah dwyer
Amy Sillman
Helen Frankenthaler

Mary Abbott

joan mitchel

Jusith Godwin
Franz Ackermann multimedia collage
Perle Fine
Dexter Dalwood perspective collagy painting like hockney brutal red
Grace Hartigan

Ethel Schwabacher

Lee Krasner

Jutta Koether- with sound performance

grace munakata

iva gueorguieva- with sculpture

http://notesonlooking.com/2012/06/iva-gueorguieva-from-child-to-adult-too-soon-on-the-conversation-art-podcast/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7501btB1uwhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7501btB1uw

Case Study, Thesis proposal 1

Laura Owens

b. 1970

• Born, Euclid, OH

Lives and works in Los Angeles

Education

1992

• B.F.A. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
• 1994
• Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME
• 1994
• M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA

What is necessary to provoke a painting practice?  I saw Laura Owens talk recently and she intimated that an installation of a series of paintings is at once one painting and installation art.

How do artists take the pressure off, just a bit to allow the creative process to happen. Owens states that she is “never not aware of the pressure”. It is always there, but how does one invite play and questions into the work so that a painter can concentrate on the "how".  

Owens stated that for her painting is not about the "what" but the "how". If it is about the "how", then how much does the "what" matter.  How much does the content matter to the artist’s or market’s concerns. For that matter, is market concern the same as cultural concern.

Artists may need to have a “wake up” moment. For Laura Owens it was the destruction of Cal Arts campus. At that point all of the graduate students had to ask themselves, “Are you in or out?”

How much of art life is just the act of fully engaging in the selfish yet manipulated art world.

If you make a painting and no one sees it is it still art?  What if I said there was a painting but covered it up (like that artist that put his shit in a can, and like Owens created the nesting doll painting for the Whitney Biennial). Is Owens' collaboration with family a conceptual act or an act in materiality?

Epigraphs

These are my contenders for summative quotes from this week’s group of readings to stand as epigraphs for this course.

“We need to invent fire once more, to settle down once again to the job of appeasing the body’s hunger.” Camus, p 140

“If (s)he is hungry for bread and heather, and if it is true that bread is the more necessary, let us learn how to keep the memory of heather alive.” Camus, p 142

“His long stubbornness has more meaning than his revolt against the gods.” Camus p 142

“Death lies not

in not being able to communicate

but in no longer being understood.” Pasolini, p. 333

“Yeah (I have to admit),

I’m in a state of confusion, Miss.” Pasolini, p 349

“The point was to humiliate a humiliated man...illness.) Pasolini, p 351

“Action is a WE not an I.”

“That is a real problem of every philosophy or history: How it is possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it [history] couldn’t have happened otherwise? Arendt p. 56

“ Where Hannah Arendt, for example, is able to fluidly cross between German, French and English she will still miss aspects of the intricacies of other languages, as does English within her interview.”

Arendt refused to be filmed for the interview [at home]?  I know I hate being seen on film, especially seen and heard on film because it causes a jarring encapsulation of a thought precisely to the words spoken NOT necessarily what was meant or what was understood at the time, between those people.  Truth is NOT the understanding of each word in itself or in its sentence but is somewhere in truth in time and may come around again to the truth.  Do writers believe more or less in the infallibility of a word.  There is always a translation between thought and words.  The language you use is indicative of the way and place and time in which you are reared.  Of course I do not understand what you are saying but can get a glimpse of it, a mirror reflection, an echo of the silence that points to a direction of communion if not communication with the other.

Prometheus in the Underworld:

P 139

Choose hell over quest for beauty because get caught up in the delusions of tyrants and madmen. And don’t realize until you are already on the path- wait what have I done? “Who shouted, it was the sun, Slapping Chen, NO HOPE”

“I took my place i the queue shuffling toward the open mouth of hell. Little by little, we entered.  At the first cry of murdered innocence, the door slammed shut behind us.”

P 141

“...blind justice does not exist, that history has no eyes, and that we must therefore reject its justice in order to replace it as much as possible with the justice conceived by the mind. This is how Prometheus returns in our century.”

We are in a new century. I’m afraid that western politicians have forgotten the horrors of war; they seem to be flirting with war for the glory and status like a bully picking a fight that they “know” they can win.  Eventually the bully gets knocked down- either by the pipsqueak who has nothing to lose and plays by different rules or by a bigger bully.  Hermes mocks Prometheus, “I am amazed that, being a god, you did not foresee the torment you are suffering.” “I did see it,” replied the rebel.”

Artists are the rebels.  Artists can accept this challenge from the Prometheus.  

“I promise you, O mortals, both improvement and repair, if you are skillful, virtuous, and strong enough to achieve them with your own hands.”

P 142

“...any mutilation of man can only be temporary, and that one serves nothing if one does not serve the whole man.”

Bernie over Hillary.  Hillary tried to feed the body first, to be a pragmatist,  to be reasonable.  Bernie was virtuous and strong but not skillful enough to take on the machine of shuffling civil servants en queue to Hell.

Mass incarceration, public education, health care.

Arendt, last interview

P 53

“See, this is not a nation-state, America is not a nation-state and Europeans have a hell of a time to understand the simple fact which, after all, they could know theoretically; it is this country is united neither by heritage, nor by memory, nor by soil, nor by language, nor by origin from the from the same... There are no natives here.  The natives were the Indians. Everything else are citizens and these citizens are united only by one thing and that's a lot: that is, you become a citizen in the United States by simple consent to the Constitution.” republic

P 54 Constitutional crisis of a head-on lash between the legislative and the executive offices.

Greatest danger of tyranny is of course the executive. A republic not a democracy- in order to preserve the voice of the minority and the plurality of opinion. TYranny could be the majority- majority rules but there is always opposition.

“I felt the Gods were lacking as long as there was nothing to oppose them.

Lucian, Prometheus in the Caucasus”

Opening quote from Prometheus in the Underworld

P 55

“They took it because they didn’t have any other framework.”

Why we suffer fools.  Because they are foolishly willing to lead even if they know there udea is not going to work.  Willing to fail, but try, Churchhill-  Democracy is a failure but it is the best I can find.  

P 56

We don’t know the future- too many contingencies.

Action is a WE not an I. Tyrants and Zealots act for a foreseeable future.  The future is not known, living to be remembered or to dictate the future is not a worthy goal because you sacrifice the now and the integrity of basing your actions on what IS knows.

“This shows that things were still alrights even if they were wrong because bureaucrats (like McNamara) still wanted to learn from what happened even if it is “not pretty””

P 57

Political will to dominate and to “believe the image” not succeeded (1973) because “Maybe I'm mistaken, but I feel perfectly free in this country”

Rene Char (mis)quote-

“Notre heritage n’est garanti par aucun testament.”

Accurate quote-

“Notre heritage n’est precede par aucun testament.”

“We are entirely free to help ourselves wherever we can from the experiences and the thoughts of our past.”

“ Every human being as a thinking being can reflect as well as I do and can therefore judge for himself”

“ the only thing that can help us I think is really to rephrase left you and to always mean to think critically period and to think critically is always to be hostile. Every thought actually undermines whatever there is of rigid rules General convictions exedra.

“ That is,  there are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous Enterprise. I think non-thinking is even more dangerous.

Calvinist, student centered classrooms, teaching for liberation, ability to think at all is a freedom that balances justice.

P 60

“First of all a totalitarian dictatorship is neither a simple dictatorship nor a simple tyranny. I analyzed totalitarian government what is the new form of government that wasn't known before I tried to enumerate its main characteristics. One characteristic is entirely absent from all tyrannies today and that is the role of the innocent the innocent victim. Under Stalin you didn't have to do anything in order to be deported or an order to be killed. You were given a role according to the dynamism of history and you had to play this role no matter what you did. No government before has killed people for saying yes period usually a government kills people or tyron's kill people for saying no. Now I was reminded by friend that's something very similar has been said stop by some Chinese many centuries ago namely that men who have the impertinence to approve are no better and they Disobedience will pose. This of course is the quintessential sign of totalitarianism and that there is a Total Domination of men, by men. “

“The great Political Criminals must be exposed and exposed especially to laughter.”

Arendt quote Brecht

Undermine the “greatness” of evil.  If he is a clown he will remain a clown no matter how many millions of people he kills. It is the ruling class allows a small crook to become a great crook. To undermine this you must keep your integrity by remembering your old way of looking at such things and laugh at the clown instead of fearing him.

Pasolini, tr. Stephan Sartarelli. A Desperate Vitality

P 331

“- I am like a cat burned alive crushed by a tractor trailer’s Wheels home by boys from a fig tree, But with 8 of its nine lives so left like a snake redo used to a bloody pulp a half-eaten eel.”

So many connections

The cruelty of man is without limit but nature, truth, justice are limited.

The pretty fiance that pulled the legs of the mosquito

The cat that ate her young.

Gassed prisoners

Crushed under a machines wheel

Tortured by innocents

There is not innocent bystander

From a fig tree- fig and grapes and heather

Liberty and beauty corrupted by the unlimited indifference of men

To kill

To kill without thinking

To kill as part of a machine is the same- not questioning, not critical not finding your moral compass for yourself

P 335

“How little it takes to shrink his snarl to the sulk of a mama's boy on death row .”

Like Arendt’s quote of Brecht laugh at the fool to undermine his power to perpetrate evil.

“Neo capitalism has won and I'm on the street as a poet, ah [sob] and as a citizen [another sob].”

America is a republic made up of citizens who consent to the constitution.  If Capitalism wins then we are no longer citizens just cogs in the wheel of the tyrannical machine steered by the dictatorship of the majority of the ruling class.

Capitalism is the rallying cry of the right.  Democracy is the cry of the left.  Isolationism and Nationalism is the cry of the alt right.  Freedom and Equality is the cry of the alt left.  There is opposition, but is the opposition creating such a rumble that a citizen cannot think?

Struggles when you know you will loose but you resist anyway, not to get somewhere but because it is the right thing to do according to your truth:

“A fascist victory! Write, write. Let them know (them!) that I know:

conscious as an injured bird that gently dies but never never forgives.”

“He took move it to his side and like a cracked skin up there in the world that precede life laid his hand on his head and altered the curse” whacky voice to text  353

“You shall descend into the world, be innocent and kind, faithful and fair;  you shall have an endless capacity for obedience, and an endless capacity for rebellion you shall be pure. For this I curse you”

“My God, then what have you got to show for yourself?...

“Me? -

Me? A desperate vitality.”

Is this a why bother statement?

Away from nihilism

Desperate vitality I know that it is hopeless (none of us are getting out of here alive!) but live fully nonetheless- is this absurd or spiritual?

BE HERE NOW

DO WHATS RIGHT (NOW)