Thursday, September 24, 2020
We have what it takes
We have everything we need to reverse our progress toward further ending
Earth’s human and other life sustainability. What will we do? I will write, but
in the back of my mind I know I must not only act by writing, I must act by
making videos and sharing them on the Web.
What can I put into words that will inspire others to act, too? Will my
writing demonstrate what can be achieved by writing? Words – even in the most
effective form – are not enough. Video, no matter how expertly made, won’t do
what needs to be done.
Many people think money will solve the problem. I believe we have seen this
is not true. Money will not put out the fires burning the west coast of
America, or clear away the smoke. Thinking money can do this is like offering money
to lemmings not to run into the sea
and drown.
Indirect solutions
Watching a movie about playing chess, I recalled that chess was invented to
train military strategists the art of war. This is instructive, for we are in
several wars today – civil wars inside the USA, and climate wars globally. The
enemy is human shortcomings, primarily human emotions. The greatest of these is
fear; if the greatest were love, then we would be okay.
One year remains to achieve a love campaign. To the enemy, this is the
worst idea. Love is that which brought about the great fears. There’s truth in
the expression, “Love conquers all.” However, fear has always leapt into battle
gear to put down this as silly, childish, and emotional. Fear looms large at
the mention of the word, love.
Fear asks, “Can love put out the fires? Can love reverse global warming?”
Of course, love of life can; and love
of the Earth can. Love of one’s loved
ones can. It’s obvious, one loves
one’s own life! One must love oneself
if one is to save the Earth’s human and other life sustainability.
How, then?
I love to write. Writing – even if it’s unpolished and poor by artistic,
literary, and commercial standards – is my way of organizing and sharing my
thinking. I share it in digital form and in books not only to share with other
people but to share with my older self when I get t there.
By this I mean I can search back on my computer for what I wrote years ago
and, at that time, put on my computer memory retrieval systems. Like a squirrel
which hides food for later consumption, I busy myself putting thoughts into
digital form for later retrieval – food for thought.
One year from now, will I have occasion to come back to this essay about
Love? Will we, that is, humanity, be better off one year from now? What will I
have done over the next 365 days?
Three words in the line from the movie, Bridge
of Spies, comes back to me: Will it
help?
Sunday, September 20, 2020
ap200920 Where to now? The clock is ticking
Facing uncertainty at this end of his self-imposed, fifty-day
workshop using a video editing software program, Adobe Premier Pro, he asks
what is next in this post-graduate study in curriculum design development for
teaching printmaking. He does not know.
Time has form
What I learned in college was that time has form, and in the arts people
have an opportunity to shape time. We can do it within ourselves and for
ourselves. This is what they call art for
art’s sake.
When we exercise our time-shaping skills for others, it’s called art for goodness’ sake.
In a perfect world, people who want to own the honorific title of artist,
craftsperson, or designer (or all three) merely have to crown themselves as such
– like clicking one’s heels together and saying, “I want to be a great artist …”.
Few will object. Most will ignore such a person after a few seconds. Time-shaping
is not easy and hardly anyone can do it alone. Great artists – such as a Baryshnikov
or Rembrandt – may appear to be alone, but they have multitudes inside like
ghosts controlling their moves.
Where to now?
Ten days ago, I wrote an accusatory essay on the two kind of printmaking teachers
– the enablers and the disablers. One group is ensconced securely in a perfect
printmaking world, a rock-solid fortress of institutionalized art, teaches students
it has always been like this. For these teachers, nothing changes. They teach
their students to stay on the path they are on.
The other group teaches that, yes, printmaking has always been a matter of
making templates to make quick work of solving problems. They emphasize thinking
creatively, despite the paradox that creativity is an enigma, a capricious spirit
which can lead to dangerous outcomes – like the development of radioactivity by
Madame Curie. Hers was suicidal. Creative thinking, yes, but suicidal and fatal
for billions of people and perhaps Earth’s human and other life-sustainability.
If she hadn’t developed it, some other creative, discovering, innovative
and imaginative person would have. Such is the butterfly of creative thinking.
The butterfly effect refers no only to the ways one’s wings can generate
hurricanes, as they say, but also in the use of devices to share ideas. In my
case, prints made by printmaking from matrices called printing plates, screens,
stone, woodblocks, and combinations of these.
The outcome, currently, is video games – a long, twisting path that started
with the handprints on cavern walls, the easy way to make one’s mark – traversing
time and space with ever more complicated, interwoven systems of technology, science,
engineering, and math. What we call STEM today in education may be the only enabling
principle left for printmaking teachers as the fortress no longer ensures them
there will always be students to pay them.
About me
I was blind to all this when I started teaching college. At 25 I thought I
would continue what my teachers had started. It took me almost twenty years to
realize the institution was not for enabling students but for enabling
professors. Those students who were able to thrive did so by conscious acts of
taking what they learned in college and applying it to the world that only
rewarded the time-shapers who could keep an audience interested a long time.
Most of them were not Baryshnikov’s or Rembrandts, of course, but good
enough to make their art, crafts, and design work for the long haul. And me? I
used the system I found myself working in at 25 – a system that said if I could
teach, then I could stay out of the military and the Vietnam – the American –
war. When it became impossible to teach, I left, but with a stipend that helped
keep my family going.
That’s my story. How can I now, in this imperfect world, develop a MOOC for
printmaking? I think I can do it by shaping time not as an art of the kind
consumers love to have free of charge – like streaming free, feature-length
movies in months of isolation like prisoners – deluding themselves in the
powers-that-be will save them from working for Earth’s human and other life
forms’ sustainability.
No. It has to be taking on the work.
Artsport in five minutes.
I have it on good authority, from my teachers in Russia, that a MOOC
affords the teacher only a few minutes at a time to make the point of their
lesson. My MOOC teachers (How to Make a MOOC MOOC) assumed their students would
have institutional facilities with crews and money to make their lessons and broadcast
them.
In the course of events, this will not happen for me. Like the great
artists and other time-shaping survivors in history, I must work alone for the
present, shaping my 50-year career into five minutes of fame. If I can hold my student
audience’s attention for thirty-seconds or more, I may progress.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
os200915 ACE Makes the World Look Big: Why the American disaster doesn’t discourage me
He thinks globally although the air he breathes is smokey with ash.
It appears the world is coming to an end, but he finds an organization in
Argentina called ACE, where life appears to be going on and it is business-as-usual
for artists and craftspeople.
Yes there is hope somewhere
By chance I found the equivalent of my imaginary Emeralda Region. It’ in
Argentina. It reminds me of when I discovered there is a real Emeralda located
in South Vietnam, a five-star getaway named Emeralda
Resort Ninh Binh which opened in 2011.
As I read the text about the Argentina space on the homepage of https://www.proyectoace.org/en/home-2/
it felt like I was reading a description of the Gates Prize and its features
and amenities.
It took a while to figure out that it is a physical residency – not in a
paradisiacal setting like the Great Lake of Emeralda Region, but a real place
near Buenos Aires.
Still, the feeling lingered that, Yes,
there is a place like I imagined Emeralda could be. However, my concept is
one heavily weighted toward art blended with science, technology, engineering,
and math. Emeralda awards leaders in those fields. Most artist getaways do not.
To know that these two places exist and that they have plans to continue
makes me hopeful. What I need is a structure for collaboration I can offer
people in the USA and thus make a kind of insurance policy for hope.
We are living under a shroud in America, the sun is literally behind a haze
of smoke from the burning of west coast America extending into Canada. Metaphorically
we have lived under a cloud of a corrupted government since the 2016 election
and dates back decades.
It is the decline of American educational policies that caused it, and I
hope we survive and change the trend that threatens this country and is
wreaking havoc in all parts of the world.
To know there are places in the world where the sky is clear of smoke gives
me hope. Americans will not lead in restoring Earth’s human and other life
sustainability, but leaders and populations in other – mostly small – countries
will.
ACE is a reminder there is hope in the hearts and minds of their
participants.
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
vi200908 Hope Rope: Synergetic hopeful
He ponders the small things he does each day and asks he does
them. A change in a website, a search of his database for a certain image of a
Mini Etching Press with a carrying case, a search for its current owner – small
things are like strands in a rope. 412
Words
Inspired by a Mini Etching Press
As I began my day, sitting at the desk and opening files to read them on
screen, thinking about having placed the Mini Etching Press in Etsy as I told Tom
Kughler I would, I wondered who bought the one which had the chest with it.
The woman in Canada? Yes, I think so. Tom said he had an order for another one.
My mind wandered to other things. There is a hint of smoke in the air – California
is burning – and we have a major fire burning in Central Washington. God said, “a
fire next time.”
But it was not God – it was humankind.
Is this how the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper? Schools – the last
hope for the USA and some other countries in the world – are closed or reduced because
of the virus. Americans haven’t been able to rid the cancer in Washington DC,
rending the nation comatose.
My best friend’s wife is undergoing surgery today – a mastectomy.
What keeps me going? I think of one little detail – like finding who owns
that beautiful little press with the carrying case and linking this to the Etsy
page. I think of the video I put up yesterday which I made years ago when a
woman in Florida ordered a DIY kit and I sent her a ready-to-print plate, and
the print, and ink.
She said she had a demo coming up fast and needed help, and, boy, did I send
it! Could it happen again? I hope so.
Little things like this are like the strands in a rope. Single fiber is
joined, twisted around another fiber and the combination of the two is stronger
than either one is if alone. I think someone said this is the demonstration of
synergy.
Add another fiber, and another and another until you have a piece of twine.
Add more strands of twine, twist, and twist and then one has a rope. Every
small gesture I make, every video minute, every post in Facebook, is a strand
in my rope of hope. My Hope Rope.
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