Seen from where I have been

ps200627 Seen from where I have been:  

A press and the modem artist  

Having been far, I added some impressions to my ongoing education. I learned a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when seen by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment and elucidation.

Upon Seeing an ugly press

Ten days ago, I thought about going where no one has been, and as I glanced over the Facebook groups dedicated to prints, printmaking and presses I thought:

“What ugly presses!”

Where did I get the notion that printing presses should be beautiful?

  
Two examples of ugliness in presses – one assembled from junk and one of such large and heavy proportions that they are unaffordable.

It is because I have been where no other printmakers have been. I’ve been around the world, for example, in one contiguous journey. Before that I have been in many schools, workshops, and museums – plus I’ve been in machine shops to realize my dream of a perfect press. I’ve in the Rembrandt Museum and I’ve seen a facsimile of the old master’s press.

Having done this, and added these impressions to my ongoing education, I learned that a press is more than meets the eye, that it’s a generator of dreams and anticipation when taken by an artist, craftsperson and designer who makes printing plates for enjoyment.

It is clear to me that the press should be a progenitor of beautiful prints. Add to this the digital age where communicating the image of the print virtually is reasonably simple and an added pleasure; and the combination is harmonious.

A beautiful press makes beautiful prints; and it can make a beautiful life for the one who has the fortune to have a beautiful, functional press such as this.

Bill Ritchie’s award-winning designs, the Halfwood press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press

The designs of the Halfwood Press and the Wee Woodie Rembrandt Press come from my having been where no one has gone.

From the days I transitioned from farmer to professor I gained a deep and wide range of views from which to see printing presses.

The most important view is that a press is an instrument, not a tool, not merely equipage. Similar to what a pipe wrench is to a plumber and an explorer is to a dentist, one is a mechanical thing in the hands of a mechanic while the other – the delicate, fine instrument in the hands of a highly skilled and knowledgeable person in oral health – is an instrument.

A musician does not refer to his or her violin or piano, or voice, as a tool but as an instrument. Over centuries, such musical instruments have been refined so that they combine physical characteristics to achieve both visual and utility perfection in the musician’s art, craft and design; and so, it is, too, with the printmaker.

The second most important of these views, these printmaking worldviews I’ve gained, is that the press is the ancestor of all sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics that are the cornerstones of the STEM movement in education.

Without print, these would be moribund, never leaving the confines of their discoverers, inventors, imaginers and creators. It’s this view that justifies printmaking experiences for young people (and old people looking for continuous, contiguous learning experiences).

The idea that art should be implanted in the acronym STEM to make STEAM is a good idea. It’s that which Allan Bloom said in his book, Closing of the American Mind is what makes artists valuable to problem-solving enterprises:

“The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man. His unconscious is full of monsters and dreams. It provides the pictures to consciousness, which takes them as given and as "world," and rationalizes them. Rationality is only the activity of providing good reasons for what has no reason or is unreasonable. We do what we do out of a fate that is our individuality, but we have to explain and communicate. This latter is the function of consciousness; and when it has been provided with a rich store by the unconscious, its activity is fruitful, and the illusion of its sufficiency is even salutary. But when it has chopped up and chewed over its inheritance, as mathematical physics has now done, there are not enough nourishing plants left whole. Consciousness now requires replenishment. Thus, Nietzsche opened up the great terrain explored by modern artists, psychologists, and anthropologists, searching for refreshment for our exhausted culture in the depths of the darkest unconscious or darkest Africa.”[1]

[Note: in one iteration, I mis-typed modern and typed modem, to yield modem artists. Ha ha! Or, that I may have used a scanner to get this text, and the scanner saw the r next to the n and resulted in an m (em)]

This overly-long paragraph boils down to the need that there be an artist among the five solvers-of-problems facing Earth’s human and other life-sustaining ability.

Not just any artist, however. The painter works alone, for example, but the artist who calls himself or herself a printmaker is more suitable for the teamwork and collaboration than artists who work in solitary and are disinclined to collaborate.

The press that is designed for collaboration is a perfect press and should be in the hands of young people in STEAM education programs. A structure for collaboration is an insurance policy for hope.

I want to use my assets to make this so. The press is that structure, thanks to the modem artist, an artist who sees a modem as a perfect press.

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[1] Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. Touchstone Books, Simon & Schuster. NY. 1987. P. 206

What did you do in the war, Grandpa?

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.

 

Worst nightmare

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.

 A demonstration of reading notes

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 20^th 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.

sp200410 Rewards and buried treasure:  What it’s all about 

  In his academic years (which never ended, it seems) he read about anticipatory learning, the role which anticipation plays in our life. For some, the anticipation of treasure is the thing. For others, it is a big win – either to achieve oneself or a team.

A lizard and a ruby

As a kid I was fascinated by buried treasure. One time I put several of my most valued things in a glass jar – the dried carcass of a chameleon I’d had a while, a fake ruby and such – twisted the lid on tight and buried it. I thought some day I’d go unearth it but never did.

The movie, Treasure Island stands out as a film I still like – in fact I “unearthed it” on the web a while back. I realized I hadn’t remembered the details but one, the treasure itself. I probably watched the whole movie to see the treasure.

In my academic years (which never ended, it seems) I read about anticipatory learning, the role which anticipation plays in our life. For some, the anticipation of treasure is the thing. For others, it’s a big win – either to achieve oneself or see one’s team make.

I’m no kid anymore, but as I thought of a topic to write about and seal it in my computer along with others in this directory, reward popped into my mind, and buried treasure. What did I think I’d find if I had dug up that glass jar? Would the chameleon look any different? Would the ruby turn out not to be fake, after all, but worth thousands?

Reading notes

In my middle age, I was fascinated by books about creativity and human potential for problem-solving. By this time, I was an art professor; and some I was considered an artist, but that meant less to me because, in my pursuit to be a great teacher, research taught me art is not as essential to sustainability as science, technology, engineering and math.

STEM, today, reigns supreme. The coronavirus pandemic is a demonstration of this. For the past three decades, climate change and a score of other critical needs have shown it, too. Art is critical for communicating the need for STEM in early education especially.

The most important thing I learned in school is that printmaking is the best communicator among the arts. We need design and craft, but the repetition of a message is what makes it important to STEM.

I believe printmaking could be the “A” in STEAM, a small movement among educators who try to blend the terms for a more rounded, interrelated curriculum for kids. They are correct in this, but it’s more difficult when the masses were educated in a half-century of fragmented curricula.

Resistance to STEM starts in college, where teachers are trained to be suited to autocracy. The politics of college and university programs is legend and trickles down to educational policy at the government levels from the local school board all the way up to the federal government.

Map to treasure

Most efforts to educate the masses have failed, leaving youth to find meaningful ways to satisfy our shared sense of anticipation. Business has rushed in to fill the void where school failed to provide meaningful goals and treasure maps. Games prevail.

Fantasy and delusion are the cure for depression when people face the coronavirus pandemic. The tiny cadre of microbiologists, epidemiologists and other researchers are working overtime to find a solution, a cure or a vaccine against the virus (or mutants) causing it.

Every healthcare worker spent years learning their art and now they’re on the front lines of a war they never really expected. Kids are shut out of regular schools and colleges are also shut down. People are ordered to stay home, and the world economy is depressed.

Is there a map showing how to get out of this alive? Who are the map makers? Where are they now, when we need them most? Are they the fantasy and delusional artists who have entertained kids for decades – and adults who, early on, found respite from school in games?

Daily I face this question. I wanted to be a map-maker, to at least begin drawing maps for the students in my classes. In my drawing, design, printmaking and video art classes, that’s what I was doing – sketching possible roads and byways they could try using to fulfill their anticipated treasure hunts.

It has come to this: Writing an essay a day and storing it on my hard drive – sometimes putting on my old, outdated blog online which, in fact, few people find, and no one comments on.

Still I look to find a reason to believe.

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.

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[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!