ri200330  Searching for hope: Following the advice of Moss-Kanter  

Good advice then and now 

Rosabeth Moss-Kanter, in an article published in AARP magazine in 2006, stated, “A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope,” and it came at a good time. I was, that year, exploring ways to tap into senior experiences – such as my own – that would help college art students at my alma mater – Central Washington University.

I never found good soil there, sadly, although it added to my experience. Her statement about an insurance policy for hope never left my mind. Now it’s more important as we live in the onset of the corona virus pandemic, and schools nationwide are shut, forcing separation of teachers and students.

Parents of school-age students are forced into home-schooling and most were not prepared. Many are not going to their workplaces because of the risks of contagion. Once again, as people have faced crises in the past, we need an insurance policy for hope.

What does “a structure for collaboration” mean to me?

In the first place, it’s an abstract design, this structure. In a perfect world, it would be a successful printmaking studio where people came together not only to make prints for their enjoyment, but to share in the creative processes that color human interaction in achieving goals.

The collective goals, for example, of having a group show such as an “Open Studio.” When I was a member of the collective, Triangle Studios, we hosted those events and they are among the highlights of my life. The physical studio and the abstract design of an open studio event are structures for collaboration.

I think this fits Moss-Kanter’s definition.

But, what now?

pp200328 Value your museum: Your future has arrived

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible. A surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM)… 

 It’s happening

The future of the brick and mortar museum has been questioned for two generations of the information age. It’s like the 1850’s when halftone photography made mechanical printing plates feasible.

The surge in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) was unstoppable, yet printing in the old ways continued in the arts. Artists found the obsolete printing methods useful, freed of the pressures of mass production associated with publishing.

The Internet caused a similar sea-change in the art world. Art museums and galleries, however, hung in there because the physical presence of tangible artworks means more than what meets the eye.

There’s something about the presence of a real artwork that transcends digital communication – like the presence of a real person!

Then how shall we deal with it? As an artist, I love to meet people who like my art whether or not they buy it. If distance makes this impossible, then knowing they ordered it online and received it is enough. I can imagine my art somewhere in their home.

Thankfully, I can communicate with my art patrons and people who own the presses I designed for printmaking via email and social media. Thanks to the web, I can even communicate with my former students from fifty years ago!

An old movie image comes to mind as Carlton Heston ponders humankind and time in the movie, Planet of the Apes. “Are people still cruel to their neighbors?” he asks. I ponder, “Will people return to museums when – and if – the corona virus is brought under control?”

What about the present? What about artists who are faced with cancelled gallery exhibits, art festivals and art museums? Art schools are closed and my cohort – printmaking teachers – are scrambling to figure out how to keep their students going.

A good question

I liked a question posed on the Facebook group addressing the emergency, Printmaking Distance Learning:

Hello all, I am looking for a good (ideally short) reading on the history of the printing press and its impact on society, its relationship to mass media, accessibility etc... Similarly, along the same lines, how about a reading about print media, such as the newspaper, and its history up until today (its decline and takeover by internet/digital media, much like the decline in printed books...). Open to any resources related to these topics as well (like videos, podcasts, exhibition websites, etc...) Any suggestions?! – Professor Beverly Acha, University of Texas at Austin

Historically, I think print was always closer to STEM than to fine art. This is not a welcome concept for people (and I am one of these people) who, as students, never cared as much for science, tech, engineering and math as much as they cared about arts and humanities.

Change was forced on me when I was a professor at Ms. Acha’s stage in her career. Today, if what I think about print and STEM is of use, then what is it? If it’s valid, then what to do about it today when the whole shebang – faculty, administrators and students - is on forced leave of absence, shut out of the art buildings?

Hope

Professor Acha sets the stage, a forum, for hope! I compare it to the flat bed of a press – that piece of equipment around which people of all stripes gathered for centuries. Priests, paper makers, artists and business people used printmaking; and when presses were invented to be more effective, they benefited – each in their own domains-of-expertise.

Now, for almost everyone in art schools, presses are under lock and key. It’s like a dictator took over and banned independent printing - like entering a kind of censorship.

Where’s creativity?

However, we have the Internet– the child of the press - for now. Printmaking is the ancestor of all STEM, yet when the pressure grew to train more technical people, the creative element of research had a hard time.

I get comfort when uneasy around “STEM people” by thinking creativity, imagination, discovery and innovation are part of STEM, and Art has these cornerstones in common with the world of science and the rest. I research how to fit Art into STEM and make it STEAM.

I’m not alone – there’s a huge community who promote STEAM. There’s even one called STREAM which is R for Reading/Literature.

It’s in the moment

Where the press fits in, therefore, deserves hard study, and that’s why I was glad to see Professor Acha raise the question. She reminds me of that moment we printmakers enjoy, the moment we lift the freshly-printed paper off the plate lying on the bed of the press.

Sharing that moment is the key, in my opinion, that might open doors to reasons to make prints. Printmaking moments can be useful in the unfolding, post-corona virus future. If there is more than meets the eye in a print, it’s that moment of 4-dimensions: The height, width and depth of a print plus time – time marking the moment the print is pulled and time expressed by international agreement: GMT.

The date and the twenty-four-hour clock, in other words, can be part of the signature of the print. It states the moment it was pulled. Combined with the year, month and day, I call it the moment number. For example, I wrote this text as: 2003281012. The year 2020, month 03, day 28 hour 10 and minute 12 – that’s Pacific Standard time (for GMT, add 8 hours).[1]

In addition, today we have found GPS is useful. It’s stamped on every Google street view and satellite image. One pastime I like is to enter the address of a friend or owner of my work and look at their home via satellite. I “beam myself up” and get a birds-eye view and for a moment I can imagine myself flying over to them.

Somehow this helps me realize our relationships, similarly as to when they share an image on social media only, in my case, we share something of a physical kind, too, if I made an artwork that they see in their home – or an etching press which I designed and helped make.

In this way I would like to introduce to Professor Acha what I think the printing press has brought us to and what’s in printmaking education for her students’ futures. It’s a relationship few people have considered – STEM – in art schools because, until now, there was no need for it. Now students might need to know about this as part of the history of printing and art.

Let students be challenged to examine the history of the printing press in the STREAM age.

---

[1] My friend Peter van Honk, an hour’s drive out of Amsterdam, thinks it’s about 6:30 and, for a moment, I can think of Peter and his Rembrandt project! I’m a time traveler!

os200327  Rembrandt’s secret gift  What’s under those floor tiles? 

 What’s under those tiles?

 Fooling around early one morning I came across a HOG and, maybe it was because I’m looking for a way to reach back to my former students, it looked different than when I made it. In this hidden object game, I furnished a picture of the restored studio in the Rembrandt museum.

I’d looked at this picture dozens of times, but today it looked different because of the floor. It’s a tiled floor which was tiled with blue-glazed ceramics. The glaze was worn off in places, revealing red, low-fire clay the tiles were made of.

http://www.printmakingworld.com/emeralda/pp/ppprod/pp_games/RembrandtsHOG/RH_index.html

In the years since I made this image and set hotspots where the hidden objects were, the tiles – not the objects printmakers used that are listed at the bottom of the image - mean more because I wrote a novel years after I made the HOG.

The novel, “Rembrandt’s ghost in the new machine,” I self-published it in 2013 using amazon’s Kindle system. In my novel, those tiles figured in the plotline because Rembrandt put his thoughts on paper, but since his thoughts were risky, he hid them under the tiles.

The floor was full of Rembrandt’s secrets! His dread was that someone would find his notes and he’d be crucified for them. In my story, retrieving the secrets became a driving motive, and my protagonist, Mac, is drafted to help get them out of the room that had been his studio.

Much in my novel has historic bases – how he lost his house and studio in bankruptcy (including his press), the people he associated with, his family and what he was likely doing in 1660 when my time-traveler encountered him. No one knows if Rembrandt wrote anything.

This month I started a rewrite on the advice of an editor I hired a few years ago – John Belmont. In this rewrite a “Rembrandt’s secrets” theme beats the ghost theme. Now, secrets are more interesting.

On this day, the gift of Rembrandt is overtaking his “secrets.” The gift, to me, is what we infer from Rembrandt’s life. He was not on a quest of the kind which colors heroes’ lives. Most likely, he likely just wanted to make art, and he had a gift for it. We might say that by making his paintings and prints he created gifts, but gift-giving was not on his intent.

It was not meant as an offering. It was his business. I don’t think Stephen Spielberg was thinking of making a gift to society when he went to work – he had a passion for storytelling through film and making a living at it. Like Rembrandt, I bet.

Today, we’re at crossroads because the coronavirus pandemic is upon us. No one is sure that life on Earth for humans will look like weeks or years from today. As for me, I’m glad I made the HOG, glad I wrote the novel, glad I met – through my experience writing and promoting it – people like Ernest Horvers and Peter van Honk.

These Dutch men taught me things like Rembrandt taught me. Not as gifts - not that teaching me was their intent. In my mind meeting with them gave me ideas and took on lives of their own in my imagination. I kept thinking up new ideas about printmaking and how printmaking might be useful for teaching people – young and old.

STEM-based education, for example, for kids. By adding Art to the mix (STEAM), maybe printmaking is more important to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math than art teachers realized.

This is not new. Decades ago, when I was a professor at the UW, there were attempts to cross-fertilize art and science. The pressures of the art world always transcended those rare efforts. An artist who took up computer graphics, for example, would likely to end up working for a game company and become a famous artist. A gallery that showing art heavy with technology was unlikely to thrive on this genre.

Today, as I reviewed my old HOG, and glad to see it again, I looked at the floor in the image and imagined what we’d find if my story were true – that those tiles had, the originals in their day, covered Rembrandt’s secrets, his gifts.

This image itself is a gift to me. How can I share it? One way is to back to that image and make a hotspot on each tile. Click on the hotspot, would a secret pop up? A scientist, for example, what would he or she make of that? Imagining this, is Rembrandt’s secret gift.

es200325 Hiding Emeralda: The secret 

   It is especially important in the early days of the corona virus pandemic to own something in the way of an occupation that can be pursued in a lock-down situation, when it’s best to stay inside, out of public venues and confined to one’s home. What to do?

I have a secret. It’s Emeralda: Games for the gifts of life. It’s a suite of games, in plain sight; but no seems to notice it. If anyone notices it, and I speak from past experiences, Emeralda seems to have a repellent quality.

Several times in the past three decades (yes, that’s about how long I’ve played this game) people have asked me to explain. One, Pam Beyette, the artist, asked me, “What’s the payoff?” and since I couldn’t say, we dropped the subject. That was the moment I realized Emeralda is not a game at all, but an activity, more or less.

Another time, Betty Merken’s spouse, David, living in the neighborhood where the best-selling game, Cranium was invented, spent time trying hard to understand my idea. This experience indicated that I’m be pursuing a chimera, not a game and not an activity which can easily be shared - yet.

Pam and Betty are former students from the UW, where I was teaching printmaking. Emeralda became my virtual campus after I left the UW. I built as the ideal, virtual and virtuous university, a communiversity, a paradisiacal region, a community of creative, inventive, discovering and imaginative people. These diverse people all played Emeralda, seeing Emeralda’s abstract structure as ten islands-of-domains-of-expertise of skills, knowledge and positive attitudes.

Emeralda is a gift which I’m given, and I have always wanted to share it. Instead, however, despite my wish, I seem to hide it, as though I had been given a precious stone, an emerald, and I’m afraid to tell I have it. In a world of uncertainty, who can blame me?

Now, as the corona virus pandemic shows how vulnerable our United States is, and staying home, I’m glad I have an abstract structure to play with. It’s lonely, however, like Solitaire. I’d rather it was a multiplayer game – even if it had to be on the Web.

When computers and the Internet showed it’s possible to have Massive, Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, I was excited because Emeralda is suited to this kind of interaction among players worldwide. With Emeralda’s abstract form – a make-believe region, a fantasy world for exercising one’s mind and artistic skills – Emeralda is suitable.

Unfortunately, MMORPG’s are dominated by a different strain of activity – not mind-building and using – but dominance and often destructive behaviors. Winning and losing, zero-sum games seem to be the way.

Emeralda, unlike these, is of the class of game concepts based on cooperation and quests. When I come back to this subject on my next visit to this island called E’Studios (Electronic Studios), I may have an example to share.

mr200316 What did you do during the war, Grandpa? Reflections of a first responder

 He considers himself an outsider, one of a minority of people who respond to stimuli before other people. It’s not that he’s smarter or has better reflexes; on the contrary, he confesses that he tests badly in conventional schemes, is poor at math and sp…

Before I answer, what kind of war is this?

The corona virus is on the attack – not at the command of a human commander or cohorts of a terrorist group. The war on corona virus is like no real war humanity has faced, although it is labeled a pandemic and is compared to past ravaging killers of humanity.

Leaders compare it to war when they speak to the public. The public, however, the masses, are slow to respond. The leaders are the first responders. They sound the alarm, like someone who spots a fire first. They are, for some reason, able to respond first.

I call the ability to respond, “response-ability.” Responsibility is what comes both from the ability to respond and the guts to do it – to respond. Unfortunately, first responders are often frustrated because they are the first to point out an emerging problem. Few believe them. No guts.

Masses of people can respond to a fire, but a first responder calling for everyone to respond to a corona virus - which cannot be seen - is liable to be met with naysayers. First responders are, for whatever reasons, outliers. The medical leader who explains what he or she sees and understands to be an act of war was always a first responder.

An example is in the story of the first responder in China.

History tells of first responders who raised their hands during their school years and how they were put down – either by the other students or the teacher or both. “The nail that sticks up gets hammered,” came to me from a Japanese artist when he contrasted Japanese thinking to the freedom he saw in my teaching in an American university.

Reflecting on this, I can say that the saying is true in the United States, too. In fact, it’s universal – from China to Seattle, for all time; but in a country of plenty, like the US appears to be, emergencies are fewer, constraints are less, and it doesn’t matter if a nail sticks up. People can ignore it. There’s room for error.

That Japanese artist, Akira Kurosaki, met me (and taught me) for only one reason. That was the singular fact that I was experimenting with electronics. I was using video as if one might make something like art with TV. We – the students who were first responders, too – met in a closed-circuit TV studio and, in the afternoon, we worked in a printmaking studio.

Akira Kurosaki - 1980 woodcut print, gift to B. Ritchie

I was hired to teach printmaking. I wasn’t supposed to teach video art. I stuck up. If I had not been doing this, Kurosaki would probably met me. True, I was part of the printmaking division at the UW School of Art, and he was on a teaching mission as a printmaker. As it was, he – being a first responder himself – was interested in video before he met me.

“You’re already doing what I dreamed of doing in my university in Kyoto!” he said. It was 1974.

The war against ignorance

Yes, there is a war against the corona virus, but it is more accurately a battle. The war is against ignorance, that real killer in people. I don’t mean people are basically ignorant, or any more deeply ignorant than I am. In fact, those who hammered me all my life were smarter about conventions than I was – or am.

For example, did I not get fired from teaching, eventually, for aberrant thinking that video could be an art tool? Did I not get fired for proposing reform of the printmaking division so students could extend printmaking and study electronic arts for artmaking? True, I got hammered. I was a first responder. I saw that the students in my classes in 1980 needed equipage to strive and thrive in the 21^st Century. I thought emergency measures were needed. I responded. I acted. First.

I couldn’t articulate and convince the leadership in the 1980’s that we needed to link printmaking to the media because print is the ancestor of photography, film, video, telephony and computer graphics, i.e., multimedia. Printmaking is part of the genetic code of, for example, video games. Today I advocate blending the algorithms of gaming to teaching printmaking. Another first response. I act, too. Every day, on my intent to teach printmaking by MOOC.

In putting this on my blog, I'm MOOC-ing, one might say.

Today, while on-site schools are shutting down, I am watching, from the sidelines, printmaking teachers using computers, cameras, online channels to teach printmaking online. It was this possibility that I witnessed in 1980 when the UW hospital in Seattle – a teaching hospital –used microwave to beam medical procedures to Omak, Alaska.

My video art students were making video art in the same room where, in the hour previous, medical practitioners and electronic engineers were huddling to design ways to get their teaching through the airwaves – via a system dubbed Washington Educational Network (WETNET).

Screenshot: Carl Chew and Scott Milzer in "Theory of Gravity" video
made in video art class, the University of Washington hospital studios, 1974.

In that moment I saw the possibility of teaching woodcut at a distance.

I thought I could teach small groups hundreds of miles away from Seattle if I could translate my woodcut lessons into practice. I proposed it to the continuing education department, and they were all for it; but, I guess the art school leaders saw it undermining full-time equivalent, in-person enrollment.

I was, in this sense, a first responder to a new twist on correspondence schools. The plan, and my experiment in teaching printmaking at a distance, got hammered. I couldn’t ignore it. I was ignorant of strategic manipulation of the powers-that-be. Instead of slowly approaching the objective by finding, “What’s in it for them?” I forged ahead, my head sticking up.

Ignorance means ignore-ance, the tendency to ignore. A fire somewhere in California? Who cares? We’re in Seattle, dummy. It’s raining here! It’s not nearby. A virus in China? Don’t worry. One asks another, “Which is closer, Florida or the moon?” gets the answer: “Duh … can you see Florida?”

I see a need to think of printmaking as something greater than being merely an extension of painting, drawing and design principles – something more than a visual art. I see printmaking as much a social art or a performance art as it is a visual art. It is a time-based art, an art for teamwork, communication, sharing and learning about other people, places and things. It’s an experience that activates more than the eyeball’s receptors and left-side thinking.

STEAM

Science, technology, engineering, art and math are interdependent, where the A stands for the shared necessity of creativity, discovery, experiment and imagination which is quite prominent in art as it is in research in non-art working and professions.

Visual art reigns supreme in this because the eye is a powerful organ. They eye does what certain parts of the human brains like most – eye candy that titillates and pleases the human brain. However, TV and other media arts are more powerful when it comes to education because they operate over time as well as spatial, i.e., visual dimensions.

One of my mentors, Stephen Hazel, said, “The print is in 4-space,” referring to the effect that a pile of prints that scatter out to multiple owners can have the effect o connecting those owners. His teaching had a profound effect on me – like learning how a corona virus piggy-backs on our benign cells and replicates itself – editions itself, in other words and multiplies.

I began this essay at 6:30 a.m. and worked again on it a 9:15 – it’s ten now and time to quit. It was about what I did – and I am doing – in wartime. We have one granddaughter, too. In my imagination, she might have asked me that question.

As it is, I would be happy to share my story with anyone and beg them not to think I’m whistling down the wind, lamenting or complaining. I’m calling all printmaking teachers to consider the paradigm shift that started in the 1970’s and has now an chance to work for the coming generations of STEAMers.