Friday, December 16, 2011

Sometimes I'm Reminded Why I Teach

New Bedford in HD from Maggie Perez on Vimeo.


I tell my students that sometimes my best lectures are played in head as I'm leaving the class.  Those lectures are stored in my "Should'a. Could'a. Would'a." file.  There are also some day when I feel I did a good job and wished I had a video of my performance to look over and help inspire me on another day.

But, the best "moments" are those when a student does something that not only shocks them; it also makes me happy and proud that I do what I do.  Of course, that little voice in my head also questions me about whether I really had something or anything to do with the student's success.

This is a video my student Maggie Perez made to illustrate how she felt about the city of New Bedford and the beauty and possibilities she sees.  The class was Topics in Sustainability.  The course project assignment challenged students to present their vision of a totally diverse and sustainable urban environment that retains its identity and vibrancy through its neighborhoods and villages.

Maggie presented the first step - Believe!  This is her trailer.  Her final product is in fact still a work in progress since there was no time to insert the interview clips of a diverse cross-section of residents.  She plans to return to this project and carry it further. 

Hope you like it as well as I do!

Friday, September 16, 2011

An Example for My Students

Please Note:  This posting provides all of my students in all of my classes with an example of the format I prefer when they post to their individual blog sites.  This example is to assist them in fulfilling the requirements of their Topic Essay Question assignments. 


FORMATTING NOTE: Please use the essay number and title for your posting headline  - for example: Essay 17b - Artist - Religion - Art


Essay 17b
Artist - Religion - Art


THE QUESTION: If Art and Religion can be considered inextricably linked, then what do you believe the relationship or connections between the Artist, Religion and Art itself is all about and, why could this alliance possibly be responsible for influencing humanity the most? 

PART ONE
SUMMARY: What I experienced in my attempt to answer this Topic Question was a greater clarification of the relationship or connections between the Artist, Religion and Art itself.  It gave me the opportunity to focus my research and discover more than I had anticipated.  

REASON:  The reason this question was asked was to explore the place of the Artist, Religion and Art in the greater scope of human history and to further determine if they were interdependent. 

PURPOSE: As for the purpose of selecting and answering this question among the others we had to chose from, I believe that by better understanding whether or not concrete relationships or connections between the Artist, Religion and Art exist and to what extent, I will be better able to understand art itself and, religion as well.  But perhaps more importantly, the evolving role of the artist in society.

DIRECTION:  Doing the research for this Topic Question and answering it as honestly as I can may or will set me towards asking similar questions that I will set out to answer if for the only reason of deepening my knowledge and understanding of the subject. 

IMPRESSIONS: What perhaps impressed me the most was was how artists have evolved through the millennia and how the connection between the Artist, Religion and Art lasted in various forms.  Sadly, both religion, most notably Catholicism, and art have been on the decline for well over a century.  As a result of the research however, I truly believe that when both, or either, Art or Religion become more pertinent to the average person, then, and only then, will they enjoy the popularity they experienced at their peak in the Italian Renaissance.

PART TWO
ANSWER: Artist, Religion and Art are connected and interrelated because they provide answers to questions that have vexed us since the beginning of time.  Who am I?  Why am I here?  Am I alone?  The answers to these questions have been provided by the Artist, the organized belief of the commune (Religion) and the work they have produced or directed both solely and collaboratively.

Ambrose Bierce the author of The Devil's Dictionary, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Dictionary) was a columnist in the San Francisco-based News Letter, a small weekly financial magazine.  He wrote in 1911 that religion was, "A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable."  (http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=258) The explanation required visual support since, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Arthur Schopenhauer the 19th century German philosopher  (1788 - 1860) said, "Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first." (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/author/a/arthur_schopenhauer_5.html) He was one among the first of many 19th century philosophers the to contend that at its core, the universe is not a rational place. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer)

Is then religion a rational function?  Before I answer that, I must go back in time to find the origins of Religion.  And, with that said, its collaboration with Art.  However, without the Artist, there is no Art.  Following that train of thought: without Art, there may have been no Religion.  According to Trevor Pateman, "It is an arguable claim that all serious art is in some sense an attempt to articulate something ineffable, something which transcends everyday reality, and that it is consequently religious art, whatever the conscious beliefs of the artist or the audience. On this basis one may think that artistic creation is (in some sense) a religious act."  Or, as the Twentieth Century artist once said, "To reproduce is human, to create is divine." (http://www.selectedworks.co.uk/religionandartrevised.html)

Max Sterner,(1806–56) the author of The Ego and Its Own (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/max-stirner) writes, "Art is the beginning, the Alpha of religion, but it is also its end, its Omega. Even more - it is its companion. Without art and the idealistically creative artist, religion would not exist, but when the artist takes back his art unto himself, so religion vanishes. However, in this return it is also preserved, for it is regenerated." (http://i-studies.com/library/articles/art_religion.shtml)

As for the role of the Artist in all this, Aristotle said, "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." (http://quote.robertgenn.com/getquotes.php?catid=249) How then could it not be so without the artist?  My favorite art historian Ernst Gombrich who wrote in my favorite art history book - the Story of Art,  said that art was, "...a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science."

He also said that, "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists." He also said, "What an artist worries about when he plans his pictures, is something... difficult to put into words. Perhaps he would say he worries about whether he has got it 'right.' Now it is only when we understand what he means by this modest little word 'right' that we begin to understand what artists are really after."

In his book, Art and Illusion (1960) , Gombrich wrote that, "Indeed, the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent. In teaching us to see the visible world afresh, he gives us the illusion of looking into the invisible realms of the mind - if only we know, as Philostratus says, how to use our eyes."

The Pioneer spacecraft was launched in 1972 with a a pair of plaques with a pictograph depicting, among other symbols, the nude figures of a human male and female to provide information, in the event they are intercepted or found by extraterrestrial beings,  about the origin of the spacecraft and the planet it was launched from.  Gombrich, in true style, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, "...what could a directional line mean to creatures who hadn't invented bows and arrows? And if, somehow, they were to grasp that the drawings depicted humans, without a knowledge of foreshortening how could they know that the woman's body was slightly turned, partly obscuring a hand? They would assume that Earth women had a claw."


FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pioneer_plaque.svg



In short, he answered this question as he continued to ponder on the "art" spacecraft was carrying when he said, "The pictograph illustrated that illusion in art derives from a system of conventions evolved over centuries of trial and error, a process of "making and matching" whereby our reaction to an image corresponds to the reality of what it represents.

Therefore, Art and Religion is inextricably linked through what Gombrich so aptly describes as the Artist's attempt at making and matching and our reaction to the image and how it corresponds to our reality of what it represents.  This reality he believed is "what happens when somebody sits down and tries to paint what is in front of him." (http://www.4shared.com/document/GGLvh3kR/Gombrich_-_ART_AND_ILLUSION.htm)