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.