From: Michael Healy (mjhealy@kcnet.com)
Date: 10/25/02-02:02:10 AM Z
Sorry to tell you this, Jack, but I am from San Francisco. Played my Haight
and Avenue and SOMA haunts for many a year until very recently. Spent 5-6
days a week printing at Rayko in SOMA. Enjoyed a fine summer there printing
alongside Zig Jackson before he too packed up and left, for Savannah. I was
fortunate to leave Rayko before they suffered their demise and got closed
down. No, I know your town. The more it changes, the more it has remained
the same. Say otherwise, and I'm afraid I will (respectfully, I hope) nurse
the suspicion that you either suffer those delusions peculiar to SFans, or
haven't lived there long enough to see the planets' return. Which will
happen, I promise you. Meanwhile the proper response was, "I'm outraged!"
Seriously, though, my response was not intended to be pejorative at all. I
was being deadly serious. On two points. First of all, the idea of "out of
date" sounds really bizarre to me. It sounds painfully ridiculous. Sure,
painting like Monet is out-of-date. Talking like a Beat poet may be kind of
out of date (unless you frequent what's left of North Beach...) I recognize
this syndrome all too well. Sad to say, I think it is especially prevalent
in the so-called SF art scene. But that wasn't my point. My point was, what
the hell does it even mean to talk about art and out of date?
The trouble is, artmaking, and you can like this fact or hate it, embrace it
or deny it, but the fact is, artmaking sweeps us into the (now) long
continuum and dialectic of at least six centuries of Western artmaking. This
is true whether you paint or work clay or shoot images. Artmaking certainly
has a history of attempting to break ground, or just to "break with".
Perhaps that's what you were referring to. We do live in an age that has
acreted plenty of mod names; yet it is interesting to observe that this age
remains fleeting as to its true "label". One thing I would note: artmaking
seldom has been artmaking by accident or mere impulse. I mean to say that
the reflective human being -- the experienced human being? -- and I don't
care whether they make art or or only get up every day and live their
life -- had better exercise a conscience if s/he is to be taken seriously by
people who take this stuff seriously. We forgive a 19-yr-old kid for failing
to understand this. How could they think otherwise? Geez, all of us were
19-yr-old kids. Maybe it would be safer to say that we HAD BETTER look the
other way, so they can find their feet underneath them. But for how long are
we supposed to do this? Not until they're 60. Not even until they're 40. I
do not feel at all that we have a responsibility to be forgiving of the
older ones among us, the ones who supposedly have knocked around and learned
from it, the ones who supposedly are experienced, the ones actually in
charge of teaching and guiding.
Which brings me to the other point I was alluding to. Leading means looking
into the distance. That distance has a frontal, forward dimension (future);
and a backwards dimension (past). In the presence of these, we who lead or
speak for, need to try to stand above this particular moment's particular
cry for some particular "hip" -- which after all means video-everything in
2002, Peter Frampton in 1975, Beatle boots and Peter Max paintings in 1966.
To borrow from Ecclesiastes, things come and things go. Young people may or
may not be cognizant of this, and this is to be expected. But by God,
teachers who are not cognizant of this are a completely other sort of
problem.
Don't get me wrong. I empathize with the need to try to "reach" the next new
generation of potential artmakers; but the responsibility carries far more
ramifications than a concern for their opinion that people older than 20
can't say anything meaningful, or their relief when we make them feel warm
and fuzzy. This syndrome is misguided. It is tantamount to selling them down
the road. They need to cultivate a character. They need to practice a
resiliance. They need to develop a packet of personal solutions to art
problems. And this is helping them do that? No, this is akin to holding our
tongue when we see that they can't read and write, because we're afraid that
if we tell them so, they will feel bad about themselves -- or dismiss us as
old farts for caring about brick-and-mortar in the New World Order.
I just had the wonderful experience of spending two years watching the
ceramics professors at the Kansas City Art Institute push their students. In
ceramics, this is a renown art school, the premier school in the country.
These people were merciless. They are NOT insensitive, I think; but they
have bigger fish to fry than feelings. They had agendas based on vision,
based on experience, based on a keen appreciation of history and the
character development those kids will need if they hope to keep making art
past their 27th birthday. The professors really weren't all that concerned
with whether their students felt warm and fuzzy, or thought their teachers
were hip to the jive. And I do not believe for one minute that this is a
medium-driven condition that requires a different approach because it's
photography or underwater basket weaving. Teachers who care about their
students' future artistic strength and growth, know better than to worry
about what's hip and "now". They know that what is hip and "now" in 2002
wasn't in 1995, and won't be by the time 2005 rolls around either. And they
know, too, that other and deadly serious issues do not get addressed when
this is a concern -- issues having to do with their own duty as teachers and
leaders, their DUTY, to help students come to terms with strengths and
weaknesses.
There is much profound richness in our collective experience. Only a part of
the immediate experience of life today actually contributes to that
collective (historical) experience. Still less does today's "hip" actually
refute our collective experience. There is indeed a possibility -- maybe not
a probability but certainly a good possibility -- that such coddling may
lead to pandering, which is tantamount to abdication of responsibility. I
think we have an obligation -- a moral obligation if we teach or lead young
people -- to look this possibility in the eye and be honest about it with
ourselves. To be honest about the character of this temptation, and to be
honest about its implications for a generation of young art students. What I
am saying is teaching, leading, supporting, require an integrity that has
very little to do with being a hipster.
A provocative book I have been reading about "reading" brings home this
dimension. The book is Fadiman and Howard's "Empty pages: a search for
writing competence in school and society" (1979 -- very dated). "Clear and
effective writing is not simply a skill or a socioeconomic advantage," they
write. "Because it expresses the integrity (or dishonesty) of an
intellectual process, it is a moral activity." Of course we need to give
artists considerably more slack than that, no matter what their age. There
is, after all, a mysterious element to artmaking that we need to handle
softly, or at least obliquely. (And this may be the MOST fundamental reason
why the Jesse Helms's need to be absolved of their oversight of the NEA.)
Okay, perhaps calling artmaking per se a moral activity is pushing a bit too
hard. But I am a Modernist more than a post-modernist, and so I bring to
bear my Modernist's bias. The artist, I believe, works to find
himself/herself. That, and not the design of appealing New Yorker covers, is
the point of artmaking at its core. So then, in its most focused, most
impassioned hour, the making becomes something of a quest. In this sense,
artmaking certainly and absolutely DOES qualify as Fadiman's "moral
activity". And I do not see how our concern for "mod" nurtures or supports
or inspires any young potential artist. All I see in that is a lack of
confidence, and a kind of betrayal.
And all of this is very heavy, and all of us know it already w/o having to
be reminded. Your remark was fun, it was kind of weird, and I did assume
that it was just one of those off-the-cuff things, not something you'd
pondered deliberately. That's why I tried to give the whole thing the spin
of some levity. At the same time, it did touch on an issue which, at least
in my own experience, is very real. But honestly, I did NOT think even for a
minute that you would need to run out and buy Radiohead. I swear.
Mike Healy
----- Original Message -----
From: Jack Fulton
To: alt-photo-process-l@skyway.usask.ca
Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 10:28 PM
Subject: Re: Book(s) query
Well, I will take this as comedic for I don't know what sort of
artmaking
you refer to.
However, perhaps my vernacular language exhibited my own datedness in
using the hip as a way to mean 'of today'. Merriam-Webster says of that
word
as: "characterized by a keen informed awareness of or involvement in the
newest developments or styles"
Your referral to SF falls upon another blank stare as I wonder what you
imply.
However, Chris Lovenguth kindly dropped by today with his Becqueral
Daguerreotypes and a copy of James Elkins "Why Art Cannot Be taught" and
the
Orland/Bayles "Art & Fear". Those two books contain the sort of informed
words I was after.
I'd say your pejorative mind-vision of what art, SF, et al is about is
truly out of date. Perhaps you've been licking the stamps for your
envelope
too much.
Jack
> Hip & Up2Date?! Oh, THAT kind of artmaking. Jack, why didn't you say
so?!
> Listen, if that's the crowd you're dealing with, you need to forget
books.
> That medium is way too brick-&-mortar, Dude. The very antithesis of hip.
> Especially in SF. Plus (and you gotta be sensitive to this today...) the
> print may be a constant reminder that they left high school at the 7th
grade
> reading level. No, man, if I were you, I would put away those books
> (probably also the non-video equipment...). Get out there wearing black.
> Sport a toilet-bowl brush goatee. Make frequent allusions to the lyrics
of
> Radiohead and Dave Matthews. That should, as they say, push the
envelopes.
>
> Mike H.
>
>
>> But, my wish is to be hip and up to date.
>
>
>
>
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