mr200525 What did you do in the war, Grandpa? A chart how my day is invested
He ponders how he uses his days, as if he only has a few days to
live and work. Imagining what his granddaughter might as him, “What did you do
in the time of the pandemic?” he draws a chart in an effort to account for how
he spends his time and its worth.
What did you do in the war, Grandpa?
My granddaughter might ask me, “When teachers, students and parents were
suddenly evacuated from the normal schools and sent home - the school doors
shut and locked behind them – what did you do?”
I got ready to fight the enemy. The enemy used to be a vague, abstract
notion I call ignorance – a plague of ignoring important things. I am a
teacher, after all. My thing is art – specifically the art, craft, and design
of printmaking. Art might not seem like a weapon.
I’m spending my days like an artist works on a large, extremely detailed
painting. Instead of brushes and paint, I practice my content-building and
access to my content as a printmaking teacher.
The art of printing is the ancestor
of all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics which are designated
as STEM, a theory that says young people who work all four areas concomitantly are
preparing to fight the war on ignorance.
How I’m spending my last days
The corona virus
pandemic blindsided us. We were warned – like we were warned about climate
change and environmental disasters in the 1950’s. Like my father, who complained
about environmentalists. He was practicing ignorance, ignoring the effects of
DDT on birds for one thing.
Now two-thirds of the world’s bird population are gone. Not only because of
DDT but by thousands of other man-made pesticides, herbicides, climate change
caused by greenhouse gases, and the list goes on. It’s “Silent Spring,” as
forecast sixty years ago, by Rachel Carlson.
Now Nature has unleashed her doomsday weapon – a virus pandemic powerful
enough to stop human “progress” in its tracks and send human civilization on a
downward spiral. A good thing for us. 28 years ago, scientists forecast that by
2022, Earth would not sustain human life unless we reversed our production and
consumer binging.
But schools are where the cure might be found – not for the virus – but for
the mindfulness of people who realize they love life, that they love other
people and animals and all living things, great and small.
The chart shows how I’m spending my last days. I’m investing my life in
teaching on the web, and my plan is to make a virtual world, a region named
Emeralda, where prize-winning scientists, technologists, engineers, artists,
and mathematicians convene in STEAM Teams and act on issues of the day. I’m
there all the time, in my imagination.
It’s what I’m doing – as the chart shows – every day in the war. The chart,
by the way, doesn’t show me living – but I am, thanks to my wife Lynda.
ps200518 Worst nightmare: Exiguous teaching
I had the same awful dream
My worst nightmare is to fail as a teacher, and the nightmare I was having
this morning was exactly that – a recurring nightmare I’ve had since I left the
university. In the past I have described this dream before. I follows the same
theme – I’m late for class, the students are surly, and the building is under
remodeling.
What does it mean? That I’m a terrible teacher? I dismiss this by
remembering some students who – even recently – said I was the best teacher
they ever had in college.
Yet the dreams keep coming! The one I had this morning was so bad it made me
reconsider all that I’m doing now. In the onset of the global pandemic and economic
meltdown facing the world, American students are frozen in place like some
horrible sci-fi movie.
In the moments after I wakened from this nightmare, I questioned the notion
of making printing plates in the manner we’re accustomed to. The etching grounds
made of Asphaltum, the powdered rosin for aquatint and all the rest seem so
foolish.
Would it be better to use the silitransfer method I’ve been using for the
past ten years? In a way, yes.
Would it be better to use a combination of laser engraving and non-metal
plates? In some ways, yes.
In the end, however, it’s better to ask, why make plates at all? I think of the Proximates principle – that it’s
better to expand on the geosocial aspect of making and exchanging prints than
make prints for pleasure and profit.
It’s better to develop entertainment skills – thinking neither of the
wholly practical and rational nor of the wholly delusional and impractical but
somewhere in between. Better to vacillate than remain in the old world that is
dying.
If I could control my nightmare, I would speak out to the students. “Go out
and work in the garden for the same time duration as they labor over drawing
lines in a hard ground on a copper plate.” With growing things, communing with
the Natural order of things, one may hope of surviving the end of the old world
when printmaking was mere self-gratification.
By exchanging prints with a kid in Africa, for example, my friends the Hartman
family is can give their kid hope – him watching the mail delivery for a letter
from Africa with a print inside, part of the game of Proximates. If the mail
delivery system functions it will be by people who have eaten. If not by real,
physical, energy-wasting and air-polluting deliver, then perhaps the internet.
Why the exiguous teaching?
To be parsimonious
or petty gave exiguous
its present sense of inadequacy in education. As a subscriber to the Merriam Webster
“word of the day” service, this word came when I was thinking about my inadequacy
as a teacher in the higher education system which I entered in the 1960’s - a
time of exiguousness in teaching at all levels.
vp200512 What does museum quality mean? STEAMWORK
He revisits the museum without walls idea, asking that the subject
be looked into to help understand what print professors must do to make the
arts part of education to help Earth’s human and other life sustainability by
making printmaking the A in STEAM.
In two instances in this essay I found opportunity to test my reading notes
“app” which was to be part of the Art Students software Carl Chew and I planned
in 1988, but which never was realized. This test probes the possibility now may
be the time to share it.
In a world of closed museums …
What does museum quality mean?
It used to mean permanence, enduring, reliable, certified, precious, rare,
exclusive, valuable, unique, and of limited access. I suppose all those things
still apply. However, in mid-twentieth-Century, Andre Malraux wrote, Voices
of Silence: Museum
without walls, a book that changed my mind.
Nelson Rockefeller, who was once Mayor of New York City, lauded the book
and interpreted it to mean he should finance companies that used modern techniques
to reproduce exact replicas of rare works of art. The technology was there,
waiting to exploit the market demand for these.
To Rockefeller, the museum without walls meant his walls and the walls of those who can afford these replicas at
prices ranging from fifty to five-thousand dollars. Museum shops stock these
replicas, in addition to hundred of take-offs from posters to puzzles.
As I read his book, I don’t think Malraux meant what Rockefeller thought. Malraux
meant reproductions, but in the mass media. Malraux didn’t mean that companies
should start making perfect copies of the Mona Lisa, but merely postcards or fairly
good color posters.
It was the consciousness of the existence of masterpieces that Malraux was
suggesting, a consciousness that, Yes,
there is a painting in Paris, and this is what it looks like. More importantly,
to Malraux, is the back story, the words that can go with the painting.
It is the back story that we respond to, words that can written, translated,
told, or shown in the media that grabs our attention and sustains our interest.
We take away an impression; and the more times we hear it, see it, and tell it
in our own way, the more it sticks in our mind.
The icons of the art world, in all their forms – the visual and performing arts
– which can be mediated, and their back stories told – become part of the cultural
fabric of humankind. If the back story can be translated into the languages of most
humans, set to music, acted out or made into a video game, all the better.
This is what museum quality really means to me.
Virtual museums
In the 20th Century, people of the stature in their fields –
such as Malraux and Rockefeller – were not experts in science, technology, engineering,
and mathematics - STEM. They were politicians and admen, more expert in behavioral
psychology than STEM.
Experts in STEM visited museums, but probably more often the museums of science,
history, and industry than the museums of art. Some were no doubt well-paid and
therefore they could buy season tickets to the performing arts and museums,
too.
I have found a few in those fields who told their views of the arts – Einstein
and Feynman come to mind – plus the book on the creative process by Ghiselin
which I read when I was a college student. There is no doubt that people in the
research areas of STEM are creative, innovative, discovering, and inventive.
They share this with many artists, but their work goes beyond the walls of museums.
In fact, even museum walls are the products of their collective work, as is
the mediation of what’s inside and on those walls.
Now we have a problem – Earth’s human and other life sustainability is
coming to an end. Mass destruction is happening. Thirty years ago, fifteen-hundred
of them warned humanity of this and they called for the help of all the world’s
people.
Almost no one answered or acted. I wondered then, “How can artists respond?”
I called my musings on this subject, “EarthSafe 2022.” It didn’t do any good,
but it helped me in my quest for a better world.
My museum without walls
My neighbors, a company called Linksbridge, is also working for a better world.
They want to buy our family’s art gallery – what I consider my museum. Our Mini
Art Gallery is an art gallery in all appearances, but it’s really my place of
musing and carrying out the suggestions my musings give rise to.
What shall I do without it when we sell it to Linksbridge? How can I make it
more than self-serving and a pattern of self-indulgence? My life has always
been around education and my specialty has always been the arts. Malraux, Einstein
and even Nelson Rockefeller were among my guides - like teachers without
classroom walls because they are mediated teachers.
The word virtual teachers comes to mind.
How to be a virtual teacher
Is there a book about becoming an effective virtual teacher? Is there a
book of the kind Stephen Covey wrote, Seven
Habits of Highly Effective People? Maybe his book, and the companion book
about effective
leadership, would serve as blueprints to write it.
