When I was younger, what I knew about Julian Schnabel was mostly from what I read of him in Robert Hughes’ criticisms and so, it wasn’t a really great introduction to the man or the artist. And, since I wasn’t regularly seeing any of his work in major museums, its mostly taken that a young art student will form opinions on an artist through the eyes of ‘experts’. Now, I have learned an immense amount about art through Mr. Hughes’ writings but I’ve also learned much about it through my own life experiences and by seeing art in person. Words in the end aren’t much good at describing the experience of art on an emotional or visceral level. There’s an immediacy and intimacy when viewing a work in front of you (if it’s a painting) or around you (if it’s anything else). If the artwork is a film then that’s different as well. Sometimes you see a film that pulls out of you some long ago feelings of joy or sorrow that you forgot you still held. You certainly didn’t know where they were until some image or some exchange of characters reminds you of a fleeting but powerful moment in your life. Surely Jean Dominique Bauby’s life with Locked-In Syndrome would be touching to anyone. Here’s a person who had everything rich in life and then almost nothing. He was left with the blink of his left eye to communicate the wealth of emotions and desperation from deep inside him. In the end his time with the syndrome is triumphant. For those of us who have had loved ones that struggled with similar syndromes, conditions or diseases, his life is even more poignant. The effect this film can have on us is something that art can do to us and not something that writing about the experience, as Mr. Hughes would write about Mr. Schanbel’s painting, could do. “I try to tell my story from my sensibility,’ he says of his directorial method. ‘Most directors use a literary and linear map, I use a painter’s map. What I choose to look at, what I illustrate by music, where I put the camera, it’s all painterly. If rain isn’t in the script, and it starts raining, I don’t stop.I go with the rain.” What’s funny about my experience with this film is that I had a sense of Mr. Schnabel’s painting work through a critic’s eye but when I saw this film I knew that Mr. Schnabel’s paintings informed the way he built this work and his hand as an artist was both present yet light – allowing me to enter into the claustrophobic world of Jean Bauby and then back out into his projected imagination. Yet also, this is an artistic film about an artistic man without the artifice of art. The means by which it is filmed and the imagery cut right along the same lines. Process informs narrative. It’s a film that inspires as a film and as art and as a story of personal triumph.

I found the original entry that Ryan and I were debating.  Here it is:

Statement on Art

August 2007

When I was first seriously studying art as an undergraduate at Indiana University, painting, its history and process was the flotsam and jetsam through which I approached my understanding of art. This is a murky water indeed to wade through to see art. Painting inhabits a world of its own and has its own artistic language and long heritage. You can speak in painting terms of touch, space, tactility, compression and expansion, light and weight and the definitions to these elements will be totally different when you talk about them in the context of say, sculpture, once thought of as paintings’ rival but now its conqueror. So, as a student painter I had a kind of crush on the medium. And while I was learning to ‘shmush’ paint around on canvas – it was a flight of fancy that I could take when I went to the museum, to compare my work to the work on the walls and to say I felt an affinity to the way they did it. I’ve heard other artists – Richard Serra in particular say that there was no way he was going to be able to move paint like Rubens – so why try. He went towards an art making and language all his own. His sheet steel plates constructed in concentric circles of various configurations enclose the viewer inside them – like being in a giant steel flower. This is an experience that is totally interactive and requires a scale of art to rival or even trump the human one. To ‘get into’ a painting requires a conceptual leap. It requires an understanding of the tools of its making to fully appreciate. The image can be approached without this education but the knowledge of the medium of paint is required in order to fully understand ‘painting.’ So, contemporary sculpture beats painting at true unobstructed experience. It’s not required that you know something about rolled steel construction in artistic terms because it doesn’t come from an artistic heritage. It comes from a human-industrial heritage – one that we have all gone through in the last century. Thus, Serra can get right to the human/object interactive experience. Painting takes you back through centuries of history. It is a formidable task to study it.

A professor told me once while I was studying for my graduate degree in painting that film would be the most important medium in the next century (the 21^st). I rigorously denied that, trying to preserve the romantic and personal relationship with my medium. I was an am a film lover and think of some of my favorites as true artistic statements but I was unable at that time to relinquish painting’s stately hierarchy in the arts. This was before YouTube and ubiquitous video and homemade movies on the internet and full motion video on cell phones. I think we’ve entered into an era where personal expression can happen in a matter of seconds and be transmitted all over the world. It’s a powerful new form of artistic expression and I think it will relegate traditional mediums of art to the dusty corners of academia. I’ve not lost the love I have still of painting. I still dream of spending summers totally engrossed in what’s happening in a two-dimensional plane a few feet from my face. I also think that over my lifetime there will still be a few people who rise to broad public consciousness as masters of the medium who bring new ideas from it about the way we see the world and ourselves. It’s just that they’ll be peculiar oddities in the onslaught of image makers pushing art through their digitally web-linked devices across the world.

My friend Ryan and I graduated from the same school of painting.  We share a similar belief in the power of individual creativity but differing views of the importance of painting in contemporary society.  I tend to go with its marginalization to other forms of media while he’s a devout believer in its importance as a visual medium.  I don’t doubt that it is but I feel that its importance in society has diminished.  We have been having an ongoing debate about this and I asked him if it were ok if I were to broadcast it to the wider public and see if we got any feedback.  So, I’ll be putting up parts of our conversation in future posts and see what comes back to us from the wider world; a world probably caught up in more important matters than whether painting is relevant or not.  Thanks again for reading.

“Anyway, it’s nice to think about art sometimes as a diversion from reality.  I think we’re talking around two different issues.  The idea that painting can be relevant and the idea that painting can be outdated.  I think both could be true in the future. Innovation in painting has historically been a leading driver of moving art forward (changing our ideas of what a painting could be or giving us an alternate vision of the world).  Innovation in technology seems to be what’s driving art now (in scale, medium, accessibility, etc).  You’re right that art and painting particularly is still about individual vision and I agree.  What I’m saying is that there are other factors now that are driving art forward innovatively like painting once did (the abstract expressionists, Frank Stella, etc) and they are from outside the art world. 

Julia went to the Harvard museum and saw these glass model plants that were done in the early 1900s by a pair of German craftsmen.  They were exact replicas of different  plants used for scientific study.  She was amazed at their beauty and how seamless the transition from science to art was.  It was almost that you didn’t care that they were used for biology students because they were works of art but at the same time they were totally conducive to the scientific study of plants.  I bring it up because I think we’re seeing a revolution in terms of mediums – where engineering and computer modeling is enabling the creation of art ideas on a scale and complexity that was not previously available and that’s exciting.  I’m not saying that painting ideas cannot be complex.  It’s just that modern material accessibility and technology is something everyone is familiar with and so these works like Serra’s and Kapoor’s are getting lots of study – they are driving art ideas somewhere else and fast.  They don’t have the baggage of history to hold onto which painting has.  Painting is a much slower learning curve both in terms of making one and viewing one.  And I’m talking about one that is genre changing or art changing like Demoiselles d’Avignon.  My guess is that innovation in the visual arts will come less from painting and more from other mediums for form building. Then again – that’s a rat race maybe painting doesn’t need – I’m not sure.”

Take care buddy,

Joel

(September 2007)

***I’m still searching for the email of the lead in to this debate.  I’ll post it as soon as I find it.

“Sketch out an idea for a work of art you have been thinking about.  Provide as much detail as possible, making notes where necessary.”

I actually drew this last year and have yet to put it to paint:

img207.jpg

My dear friend has been busy and is currently showing a new crop of work:

Museo de Identidad Nacional: A Jewel in El Centro

Patrick Ahern
Special Honduras This Week

Courtesy of Patrick Ahern
A large welcome banner greets visitors of the Museo para la Identidad Nacional.

The Museo (para la) Identidad Nacional (MIN) is marking its first anniversary this month. Have you visited it yet? This is a true jewel in the middle of Tegucigalpa’s center city of which many,Honduran and ex-pat alike, haven’t taken advantage.

Even though President Maduro inaugurated the museum in December of 2005, the wait until November, 2006 to actually open was worth it. In fact, should make December 16th your personal deadline for an initial visit because of the added attraction of the impressive, temporary exhibit of Honduran artist Santos Arzu Quioto. Called “Los Errantes: Migraciones y Cruce de Identidades,” this collection of paintings is striking and compelling.

Granted, abstract art in the tradition of Jackson Pollock and using “drippings” is not my particular cup of tea, this exhibit grabbed me in ways difficult to fully express. Therefore, let me use some of the words of Maria Dolores Torres, art historian at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in Managua, from the very instructive, full-color brochure handed to visitors at the entrance:

…The odyssey of migrations is an eternal phenomenon in history and is reaching alarming proportions in the 21st Century. From the crossing of the Arizona desert on foot in search of the American dream, to those rowing across the Straits of Gibraltar, to the rafts leaving Cuba across the Caribbean, and certainly to those crossing Central America using diverse means of transportation in the quest for a better future, the exodus to flee and many times not arrive has resulted in a cross of split identities, the estrangements, the planting of roots and the pulling up of roots. All of these phenomena are metaphorically represented in the large canvases of Santos Arzu.

Arzu was inspired by Ernesto Cardenal’s poetry in “Cosmic Canticle” and he shows the migrants’ journeys as comets in the heavens, alternating between order and chaos, light and darkness. Each migrant’s comet is making its own path in the skies, some to rise, some to fall, and some to never return.

Don’t wait until the New Year for a resolution to visit the museum! Make an Old Year resolution to visit before December 16th and win the bonus of this excellent exhibit.
For more information, visit the museum website at www.min.hn or call (504) 238-7412/7395.

I got the feeling from both the teacher and intern that they were pretty laid-back and non-authoritative. I’m typically laid-back in personality but as a teacher I come alive and expect a lot from my students. I’m energetic and like to get my hands dirty. I also talk a lot. I think I’d be more strict with discipline and definitely be more involved and have more complexity in the assignments than the teacher I observed. I think the high-school art classes seemed too easy and the students seemed restless. I’d get right in there and help the students more. I can’t really say how the intern taught because I didn’t see him with more than five students but he seemed to let the few students he was working with at the time sort-of take over the discussion and horse around even in a short time period. I don’t know what his class of 26 would look like in comparison but I bet it’d be pretty crazy.

I arrived for my scheduled field observation at Wardcliff Elementary to find an intern and a mentor teacher but no kids.  The students were out on a field trip that day.  So, the intent of the visit wasn’t what I expected but I did get to talk to the teacher who was about my age.  He was really enthusiastic about the projects the students were doing and gave me a tour of his tricked-out classroom with all the gadgets they had and could use including a video camera, green screen, interactive bulletin board, movie editing equipment, ceramics and on and on.  I was impressed.  This school is in a fairly wealthy district obviously.  However, the students were also using recycled and cheap found materials: cardboard, wood scraps, cardboard tubes and empty pop bottles.  The cardboard and wood scraps were for a project he was inspired by in an rural architecture book.  The students (3-5th graders) were making actual mock-ups of modern homes.  He showed them pictures of modern architecture and let them build their own.  I was impressed here as well.  The pop bottle and cardboard tubes were for building models of space stations.  The kids were joining the tubes to the bottles in different configurations, paper mache’ing them, painting them and then they were going to put them in front of a green screen, film them in sort-of a fly by perspective and then design the backgrounds on a computer.  Sweet!  I was totally inspired by all of this.  If you can do this in elementary school – I’m in.  I always thought I’d be in a high-school environment but this gave me hope that the elementary classroom could be inventive, challenging and exciting.

Next I talked to the intern.  He seemed a bit overwhelmed.  The lead teacher had to leave so I got a little insight on what it was like to work with a mentor.  Pretty much on your own he said.  This is the way you learn though.  Letting him take over the class and then leaving.  He said this worked in getting him used to a whole class dynamic.  The trouble was that the lead sometimes didn’t have a plan for the day.  I got the feeling they did things a bit on the fly.  He was working on editing a movie the kids in the class were doing and so I got to see him working on that.   He’d bring in about 5 students at a time to do the voice overs for their film.  The kids were really excited to see their movie and speak into the microphone the dialog they had written and try to keep it in sync with the visuals.   Altogether, it seemed like the technology was really great but time-intensive.  What you can do with cardboard and glue and paper mache doesn’t take much prep time.  Without the intern, I wonder if the lead teacher would have time for all of that movie work.  I got the feeling that he wasn’t as up to par with it as the intern.

The intern was going from this classroom where they had everything to an inner city school for his high school intern session where they had nothing.  He was a bit worried about it.   I’d be interested to follow up with him at the end of next semester to see where he’d want to start a career.

Artist Julian Schnabel on his new film The Diving Bell & the Butterfly:

Our last two classes were outside field assignments to observer a teacher and student intern in their natural environment – the art classroom. My first observation was a high school class here in a wealthier district. The teacher was a ten year veteran of the art program and she had seen it grown progressively in size over her tenure. The school had added a second teacher to cover the ceramics, graphic design and art club responsibilities and he had been teaching there the last two years. I observed three classes starting with the very basic art class where the students were doing fairly simple assignments to an advanced art class where most of the students were creating oil paintings. The classes diminished in size as the difficulty rose. I really liked the teacher in terms of her personality and laid-back style at first but saw that the students took advantage of that and didn’t seem that engaged by her or the work. It seemed too easy and she seemed to let them socialize at their will. At one point a student who had a can of Monster drink that he had chugged placed it on the work table in front of me and crushed it with his head. The teacher didn’t say anything. I went ahead and got around the classes and engaged with the students a lot. I even got in a bit of teaching myself. I’m not sure this was what I was supposed to do but the teacher was out of the room and a student had a specific question. He asked me how to draw water in a pool. I sat down and we drew together and talked about the physics of water and really tried to break down how water flowed, how it appeared in a pool, how it was a volume but was not opaque, how solid surfaces underneath it were affected optically by it, etc,. It was great experience and the student even stayed during his lunch to figure it out with me. In this first observation I really felt that I could jump right in and teach. I observed things I’d change for sure in terms of curriculum. I’d definitely make it more demanding. I think this would do two things. It’d make it more crucial that the students got right into working when they came into the room and it’d make it a necessity for me to be there to help them and answer their questions. I think for a veteran teacher, the difficulty of assignments might get easier as they get older and their energy level starts to go down. I noticed she seemed tired after the three classes and she had three more to go that day. These classes clear out and then a new group of students come in right away all within five minutes. Overall the observation was a benefit for me and gave me a lot of excitement to start in my own room.

Our textbook this semester is: “Art In The Elementary School: Drawing, Painting and Creating for The Classroom” by Marlene Linderman.  The textbook really is for a teacher with no prior knowledge of art.  It’s most likely targeted to the teacher who’s asked to include an art segment but who’s a general educator.  So, in that context, I don’t find the text revealing in terms of art insights.  However it does have some information on childhood development and creativity by age group.  This I did find useful in terms of what to expect when approaching younger students.  I’ve primarily taught middle and high school and then college students, so some help with the younger students was welcome.  I find that the younger kids usually exceed my expectations – especially if they are new to art and unencumbered or unafraid.  Their imaginations are pretty wild sometimes.  They are concerned with how to make particular things, (planes, cars, people, faces, animals, etc..) but they combine this knowledge into environments that are fanciful and colorful in a really saturated or intense way.

One thing I did find interesting about the book is the author.  I Googled her trying to find a review of this book and was startled to find this artwork by her (caution: intense image).