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.