Picasso in the Classroom

 Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, with the "Africanized' sex worker in the top right

In a darkened classroom, 12 teens stare at images projected onto a screen before them depicting both partially clothed and completely naked women. The bodies of the women appear distorted and in some of the pictures, scarred and mutilated, their faces distraught and streaming tears, while in others they lay prostrate before fully dressed males.  Over these images a male narrator explains that these women are prostitutes, mistresses, Africanized “whores”.  However, what the narrator and the teacher believe is most important for the students to pay attention to when looking at these works of art are the brilliance of the composition, the radical abstraction of three-dimensional space and that the man who created them was a genius. The rest? Silence.

While the above scenario is a dramatized composite of both real and imagined teaching experiences, it does capture the uncomfortable, inappropriate nature of showing segments from Simon Schama's The Power of Art:  Picasso to one of my high school classes. During the presentation to the class, I experienced a mild panic attack, and instead of the seamless narrative that is typical of teaching art in a traditional modernist approach, the presentation turned into a choppy, fragmented postmodernist lesson, requiring that I pause the playback and interject my meta-commentary on top of Schama's own whenever I disagreed with the facts or the glibness of his interpretations. I found myself feeling mortified by the raw misogyny of Picasso's images and felt that it would have been disrespectful - specifically to the young women in the class, had I failed  to address it more directly and in-depth than Schama does in the documentary.

Of course, Schama is being intentionally provocative in his attempt to make Picasso dangerous again, and therefore relevant to a new generation of artists and art lovers.  This approach is largely successful and makes his film an exciting introduction to Picasso for students as long as the teacher is willing to modify the presentation of the film for a classroom setting. However, while I had planned much of the contextualization, I was not prepared for how the act of watching the students watch the film further heightened my awareness of Picasso's creepiness. I   found myself stuttering through my presentation, feeling embarrassed that I would find this man worthy of my class time. What would happen if I really could bring Picasso into the classroom?  Given his penchant for late-adolescent females when he was well into his old age, would I have to worry about him molesting the students?

 
My renewed uneasiness about Picasso and other mostly white, male artists is not to discount theA poster by the Guerrilla Girls importance of their work and the value of looking at edgy art in a secondary school setting.  Instead, it should provide a way to explore the depiction of race, sexuality, and violence in art and how our interpretations are influenced by our socio-historical context. We should also think about how the artists were influenced by their context as well, while reminding our students that even within our social historical contexts, we still have choices - agency; Picasso’s relationship with women cannot be entirely explained by his 19th century Basque upbringing.

The humorous, in-your-face activism of the Guerilla Girls, whose work in the 70s and 80s brought attention to the sexist nature of the Western art canon, reminds us that sexism is sexism, whether its practiced by a few or an entire nation in either this century or the last.  Yet, in 2011, if we are asked to bring a more balanced perspective than second wave feminists did a generation ago, can we contextualize and provide balance points of views so much that, in effect, we are avoiding the real harshness of history? We don't need historical data to guess that in the past most women and subjects of colonization were not happy with their plight, and that there was real suffering that needs to be made part of the story we tell when looking at artwork that depict human subjects as mere objects. And if we don't, are we being apologists for artists and artworks that we used to love before we were smart enough to be highly critical of them?  I would like to ask my fellow art educators this: How do you deal with balancing art appreciation with relevant social criticism in the classroom?

SKOOL: An Institutional Critique

School sucks, even the great school are often too limited  in their ability to give us what we need to thrive in the world. I use the word “we” here intentionally, since the rhetoric so often is focused on “them”, meaning young people, youth, the future leaders of the world. And by world, I mean the planet, not just the social norms we live by.  Schools are primary means we use to shape our society, our government and ourselves. I am using this blog post to call for art educators to become critics of the institution of schooling. I’m calling it skool, a deliberate misspelling that reflects our commonly shared societal miseducation.

The vast majority of schools are based on a 19th century  industrial model, and instead of providing an education that operates organically, based on context and the individual, it creates a social monoculture by taking a uniform imprint - otherwise known as a “curriculum” largely based on what someone once said we all should know, and applying it on all of us.

Schools provide our society a key mechanism for ensuring social conformity. A complicit relationship forms between the adults and the status students, an unofficial curriculum of bullying and  snubbing that keeps the oddballs, blabber mouths, hot heads, fags, ethnic types and the general freaks in check. Let’s be clear; the type of behavior that is unacceptable in the classroom also becomes a problem on the playground, so that by high school these marginal kids have been largely assimilated, kicked-out or silenced.

Schools are fully primed and ready for an aggressive,  bare-faced institutional critique, a full onslaught  not against teachers like the attack that’s been playing out in Wisconsin, but against society’s expectations of what schools should be, against the way society pushes schools to become day-prisons for errant youth.  Hans Haacke, a German artist whose work took aim at the connection between museums and their wealthy donors, has served as a model in the art world for how to use art to critique the institutions that govern us, especially those institutions that appear to be corrupt. Some critics call his work mere commentary because it lacks irony or academic obtuseness, the trademarks of serious contemporary art, but those characteristics make his work an excellent model for the classroom. The ability of art to show us and not merely tell us can become a tool for students to transform education and society’s future.  Let’s make “skool” happen.

The Great Museums in 20 Minutes!

WARNING: This post is riddled with exclamation points (!).My son Orion at the de Young Museum in San Francisco
Like a lot of artists, I have a love-hate relationship with museums.  I often think of museums as mausoleums: glorious, often ostentatious burial places for great ideas as well as radical and sometimes revolutionary expressions of human culture.  I also know that if you uh... dig a little bit deeper you will find living, breathing works of art under all that marble. 

That is why taking a friend or family member who is not an art enthusiast to a museum feels sadistic.  Instead of sharing your excitement you find that your loved ones have become nervous and agitated as if fulfilling a dire obligation. They know and you know that like honoring the dead their visit will be grim, tedious and way beyond their deeper understanding, but they go anyway in order to become a better person and make you happy.  I have friends who grew up in Manhattan who now hate museums because they were taken as  kids  by schools and parents and are bitter at having been forced to spend hours of their youth “appreciating” the old and long-dead masters.

So what to do?  Well, brace yourself, for as you have duly noted in the above title of this post, I will show you how to take on the great museums in less time that you spent making and gobbling down your breakfast this morning!  The Louvre in under an hour? No problem! The Metropolitan in a matter of minutes? You betcha! But before you think this is an insane run-through of many a hallowed halls à la Band of Outsiders, I will outline the process so that you too can live the life of Kultur like yours truly.

Still from Kentridge's film Tide Table
The key is to stop trying “to do” museums, and instead partake of the deliciousness of institutionalized art through slow-roasted visits.  First, start with the museums in and around where you live.  Get a membership at one or two, and instead of those marathon 4 hour stints every year (not including the visit to the gift shop), plan 7 visits at 1/2 hour to an hour each over the course of the year. That can add up to nearly 10 hours or more in one year! Also, don’t feel as if you have to see it all and more importantly, like everything you see.  Be aware of what you don’t like or or just don’t get and take those in the smallest doses.  With regular, intense exposure to the difficult, you will build that mental muscle for appreciating Color Field paintings in no time at all! When you drop by your friendly neighborhood art warehouse to say hello, save that special time for those friends you really want to see and don’t be ashamed to ignore the rest.  I am to this day held in disrepute by many whenever they recall my rude and abrupt intrusions to see William Kentridge’s Tide Table at SFMOMA in 2007, but I don’t care. I would go through the door, rush up to the 3rd floor, see it once or twice (it's about 7 minutes long) and then leave with nary a good-bye. It takes courage, but I promise that If you act quickly, you will find that skipping floors and shortcutting through random galleries will help you avoid the ever-dreaded museum fatigue, guaranteed.

To test my hypothesis, I allowed my son, ORION, TO BE THE SUBJECT OF A DANGEROUS YET FAR REACHING EXPERIMENT: can a museum be interesting and fun to the more or less uninterested? Well, let’s find out! Ready?  Here we go!

 (Please wait for the slide show to load)

That Spot on the Floor

When an adolescent looks at life and sees how strange and unpredictable it is, we should embrace this aspect of youthful questioning and not try to close the loop with yet-another-project-about-identity. Being confronted with art that is not easily explained away is an opportunity to talk about life itself, and as Chekhov and Kerry James Marshall can show you, the closer you get to these unanswerables the closer you get to something that can be called (if you can forgive me for being UN-post modern) great art. A real art history education will show you that after satisfying aristocrats and religion, even those old-time European masters where subverting the hermeneutical straight-jacket of narrow interpretation. A great work can provoke and challenge, so much so that color, form and life become startling once again.

In order to show my students the wonders of the unanswerable (humor me, please), I point to a spot on the floor. That spot is surrounded by cracks and an uneven surface. The light from the window highlights an area near that spot so that the floor color gradually changes from grayish to something approaching white. Now after examining and contemplating that spot I ask my class "Do you get it?"  What is there to get?

There seems to be a fear that art that is not "gettable" will leave us speechless, and not in a good way. This fear of feeling uninitiated and uninformed and therefore not sure what to say in front of art grips the young and old alike, leading the closest of lovers and the best of friends to have awkward moments in a museum. This awkwardness has been somewhat intentional on the part of modern and contemporary artists, serving as the last bastion between themselves and a glib popular culture.

There is a way out. Young people can be shown that once we get past this quest for conclusive meaning in art we can begin to discuss what it is in front of us.

The folks over at Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) show that learning to verbalize what you are seeing when talking about art leads to the most interesting discussions. In fact, the contemporary art world could learn a lot from this approach because inverse to the fear of the uniformed, there is an equal if not greater fear shared by those who are well educated in art. It is a fear that without the theory and historical references there is little or nothing to say about the art object itself. Criticism has suffered as a result and substitutes clarity with challenging and often convoluted discourse.  If one were to dig a little deeper one would find that this discourse is symptomatic of the faithless who believe that there is little connection between the richness of thought and language and the visible world except what culture artificially creates.

The VTS strategy allows us to strip away everything we have learned and actually look at the art work.   Instead of imposing meaning upon art, we let art inform us. We can restore our faith in the possibility of the visible, and instead of dropping our young into a contemporary art world that believes in nothing, we can share with them something other than the societal cynicism they are trying hard to not to make their own.

Pixar's Conservative Nostalgia

My son enjoying The Incredibles along with his Saturday morning oatmeal.

While my son was watching one of the fake old films Pixar had cooked up for The Incredibles dvd extras, supposedly from the 1940s or so, I overheard a curious thing. Frozone, the only African-American character in the Pixar pantheon, was complaining about the fact that he had been depicted as white in one of the “newsreels.” Also, in those extras is an outtake of the Holly Hunter character defending her status as a stay-at-home mom.  Is this Pixar making up for their films' culturally staid narrative?

I like Pixar and truly admire the artistry and craft in their movies. However, I really find the nostalgia for the mid-20th century annoying. They have refined a visual style that is an anachronistic hodgepodge of fashion and design that stretches from the 1950s to now. They rely on über-American mythical tropes of picturesque small towns and pin-striped big cities, picket fences and boy scouts that really undermine any claim to originality.

Because they are on the very cutting edge of a new technology, Pixar relies upon these clichés in order to package the very newness of what they are doing. And yes, I'll admit that they also sell us the newness and the strangeness of this technology by using masterful story-telling and animation.  However, Pixar also romanticizes a mythical and fictively innocent pre-1960s America, before Civil Rights and feminism made white male identity problematic. In that America, like the dvd, the true voices of the Frozones and the Holly Hunter feminists would be relegated to the special features instead of being central to the main program.

Beginning with 1995's Toy Story to 2009's Up,  Pixar has explored this theme of lost innocence so extensively that they have over-made their point. Ironically, in these films Pixar also eulogizes a bygone material culture of objects and media, using newsreel footage, old toys and tv sets as stand-ins for a world that, as a leading innovator in media and technology,  they have played a big part in dismantling. While these films have been hailed as instant classics, I think that to a future audience they will appear strangely dated, as if they are some anachronistic cgi films from the 1950s.  In that theoretical future, the technology will look run-of-the-mill, and the cultural landscape that they have painted will look much like the 1950s media of nuclear families and picket fences look to us now, not cute, but like an embarrassing and unforgiveable lie.