Vision

36 Views of the Locus of Beauty

From January 2014 to December 2017, I want to stage thirty-six productions at the Uptown Hideaway, a kind of “art speakeasy” across the street from our family’s, Mini Art Gallery. Each production will represent a chapter in my life story. I want to fill the walls with my life’s work, framed and for sale. I want to fill the floors with small equipment for making artisan etching presses, frames for artworks, and stages for improvisational theater, readings, music and multimedia. I want to populate the place with a “staff” of co-investors who practice the idea of the “Perfect Studios,” where Teaching, Research, Production and Service are continuous and seamlessly integrated into an experience. This will be a profit-making program—no grants—only contracts with individuals or organizations who can pay with no strings attached, to buy services and items of our productions, my artworks and all the contents of my family’s art collection.

For the 4-page essay background to this vision, request it by email, bill@ritchie-art.com

POOC DEFINED

Persistent Online Open Course

I took a couple MOOCs, 'Massively" (the word came from the MMRPGs) Open Online Course and I like them a lot. I am convinced I learned things which I could learn only in this way—on my own volition, on my own time, in my own space. It’s a great idea, and I want to do it, too. However, I think I am barred from working on a MOOC because ALL the MOOCs are premised that they must start in an institution of higher learning.

Even if they may be the new kid on the block, or even the L'Enfant Terrible, they have found safe haven on campus. I am reminded of a time in pre-war United States when people who were thinking outside the walls of academe were at first written off as kooks were later embraced and given stations in the universities. They were a big draw, in a sense, like hiring a movie star.

Sometimes this neutralized an otherwise powerful individual as it made their ideas okay and worthy of consideration. I think it was due partly because the universities wanted to appear to be cool, and appear to be doing what they are supposed to do. Usually, the new ideas would die on campus because of various reasons—they could not be accredited, there was not enough money, they involved illegalities, etc. It was a case of indispensable enemies—where the two forces needed each other to keep from doing what it must appear that they were trying to do.

I wanted to teach printmaking online in 1980, but it couldn't be an accredited course, so I took the concept to noncredit learning. They couldn't support it because the art school wouldn't approve it. It was a catch-22 situation, sort of, but mainly it was to protect the jobs of the professors and administrators. When a person in a distant, rural town could learn something they otherwise would have to move to Seattle to learn, they would be less motivated to move and pay the university tuition and conform to the accreditation in place.

Solution

The solution to the problem of teaching printmaking the way it really should be taught—as experience and as a preparation for future learning—is to put it where almost everyone can get at it. In the toy store, have the Wee Woodie Rembrandt press to start with. Online, have the instruction for trying to use the WeeWoodie, even building one from scratch. In schools, have a model on hand for after-school. At home, have clubs for vacation-time activities.

Next, create a persistent world—call it a Website—very like the persistent online games that became MMRPGs. Some parts of the world might be adventures in the game sense, in that they feature unnecessary obstacles to keep the user involved for awhile. But, mostly, it is a place to explore the techniques associate with the act of making exactly repeatable images, from the making of the press to the making of the plates to the making of the prints.

On the eve of starting a MOOC titled Video Games and Learning, from the University of Wisconsin I think, "We could'a been a contender!"

Missing in Seattle

An opportunity lost?

I first became aware of the University of Wisconsin in the 1970s when I was a professor of art at the UW. By someone’s ranking system, the UW-Seattle and the UW-Madison were somewhat alike in terms of scale and reputation as research universities. It was natural, then, to focus on the printmaking department of the art school at Madison and then to compare it to our printmaking department. 

When the chairman of our department retired, one of the potential replacements that was interviewed was a professor at Madison, over-qualified and out of the range of the salary that was going to be available, but he was flown out and interviewed, anyway.

It became obvious, later, that the hiring committee here had already chosen Kurt Labitsky to whom to offer the position of the new chairman of printmaking. The other two candidates were window dressing; they were brought here to legalize Kurt’s hiring as per the requirements of affirmative action.

It seems to me that the UW-Madison was perhaps above the UW-Seattle in one matter—the matter of ethical practices. In Seattle, the administration of the UW School of Art was having its way with the printmaking department, bending the rules and manipulating the outcome.

The reason they did this was because I was pressing for a fundamental change in the way printmaking was being taught. While the majority of the faculty saw printmaking as a mere extension of painting and drawing and as a kind of craft with little significance to art.

My view, that printmaking is part of a larger topic—media arts—and as such, therefore, printmaking should be taught in the context of new technologies which were emerging on campus and all around the Seattle area. Today, these find their finest expression in video games, and they all date back to printing. Today, too, a MOOC for printmaking is imminent and would—if it were to happen at the UW—would put Labitsky out of a job.

It is likely that the printmaking department at the UW-Madison is still being taught as an extension of painting and drawing. A visit to the Website might show the studios with large-scale presses, sophisticated toxic chemical safety facilities, and great spaces for printmaking.

In other words, the training was to continue the position of printmaking as a second-rate art form—something not quite as grand as painting and sculpture, installation and performance arts. After their initial grounding in the rules of 2-D composition, graphic design, reflective color laws, etc., printmakers could aspire to make huge, multi-color prints and expend their resources emulating painters. They might compete for space in art galleries and museums; but they will be wasting their resources in the process, in my opinion.

“Bigger is better is the rule” at universities like the two institutions, UW/Seattle and UW/Madison. It is the result of political and economic plays carried on by art school faculties backed up the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and other major accreditation boards.

I wonder, what could have happened if I had not lost the battle for change at the UW-Seattle? It is possible that—today—there would be an effort like that which is behind the current MOOC coming out of the UW-Madison (which I am starting in a couple hours).

If it had happened my way, then the Seattle version would not only be a course which on the value of video games for learning, my course would connect antiquity with today’s games in general because printmaking is the ancestor of games. It is the ancestor not only of games, but all technologies which depended on exactly reproduced words and pictures in time and space.

What is missing in Seattle is a company that produces games for learning with printmaking as one center of focus. Games for learning is a huge topic, and printmaking is only a small part of this; but it is one which exemplifies the social value of games and technology in an age when hands-on learning has been diminished by a perceived lack of resources.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can change this by means of which I have made a beginning—with the help of a handful of friends and hundreds of people who think the mini press is worth having. The mini press can be a console for learning, not only about printmaking techniques, but also about the social value of the art. The most important thing about it is that kids can do printmaking—in groups—given the mini presses our company makes.

Therefore, I reach out to people to join me in forming the company that will produce all kinds of learning opportunities in ways similar to what is happening all over the world—using old printmaking and new technologies to restore education.

No more prizes for me

     In the art world there are many awards given to artists for reasons of their art, their contributions to the community and their impact on the culture of their nation and its people. For over twenty years I thought I might someday win a big award and I kept my eye on prizes. This notion may have started when I was in high school when I became aware that, besides good grades, someone like me could get awarded for jobs well done in art and publishing.

By the time I was ready to graduate from my formal education (graduate school) I had a few sips from the awards goblet and I liked it. Getting a job at the University of Washington School of Art was quite a big gulp; in fact, it was bottom’s up! For the next nineteen years I continued on my binge, winning all kinds of awards from prizes at local art fairs to a National Endowment for the Arts grant for video work and, along with these, promotion to full professor.

Prizes came also from the UW in the form of research grants—usually less than a thousand dollars, but helpful for paying for non-budgeted items such as videotape and experiments in printmaking. Two sabbatical leaves—in 1976 and 1983—plus unpaid leaves of absence were wonderful perks for a young, ambitious artist and teacher like me. The sabbatical in 1983 was a substantial win, coming as it did in a lean year for Washington State colleges.

To me it meant the crowning achievement of my career because, with a fact-finding trip around the world, I would have the proof that would justify a shift in my field—printmaking—toward a new union of the antique printmaking arts with new technologies. It would give my students a new outlook on their future as global artists. My family was willing to go along for the ride, and we took on a $50,000 debt to make the trip to augment the 66% of my $29,000 salary.

It did not turn out the way I wanted, however; instead, that sabbatical was the last major award I would receive for the rest of my life, the beginning of the end of my career in education. The leave was given to me so I would go away long enough to let the administration put a choke hold on the changes I was pressing for and fortify the old guard determination to limit printmaking as a minor art and craft in the UW School of Art.

When I started this essay, I titled it, “Why I will never win an award for what I do,” but then I removed the title because it sounded hopeless. I probably will never give up hope for the union of antique printmaking arts with new technologies. If I can marry these, my award will not come from the established, award-giving entities but from the thousands of individuals who purchase what I have participated in making—a company that makes hardware and software for printmaking experience.

A MOOC leads to surprises - sometimes

People talk about education being a good thing, but what happens in school is not necessarily the best thing as it would appear. If you take a course in Economics, for example, the best thing that might happen is that you meet someone who, later, hires you into her company - or you marry!

The Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) which have lately come into being are great except that you rarely, if ever, sit next to someone in a lecture all. You usually do these by yourself. It doesn't have to be that way. I enrolled in Coursera's Gamification, taught by a law professor at the Wharton School of Business. Immediately there was a weekly Meetup group every Saturday, so we talked about gamification.

The last MOOC I took was Songwriting, taught by Pat Pattison of Berklee College in California. It took more work than I could handle, and my handicap was that I never had music lessons. I survived five of the six week course, however, before I flunked myself out.

And, in the same way as school is like a box of chocolates ('you never know what you're gonna get"), you never know what will happen when you experience a MOOC. In my case, when Pattison assigned lyrics, I got words as my subject from my story, the Emeralda, a story about a doomed ship full of etching presses.

I came up with one song to satisfy the recording requirement. The surprise came when the exercise was the solution to a problem in the back story: A pet monkey! this led to my storyboard for that scene, the song being the subtext. I made a sketch and uploaded it with the canned music background (it was required) and my singing the song.

You can hear my one-minute song by clicking on this link.

My plan is to be part of a MOOC on printmaking - either as a teacher or someone in its team, and I know that whoever enrolls is going to get a lot more than what they expect.

Money bags?

 When I moved my studio early this year, I hastily stuffed prints from one of the drawers—which had served as a kind of catch-all—into sandwich bags. Today I had occasion to take out one of those bags to locate a certain print and as I did so, it occurred to me that this bag of prints might be worth something. But what?

In the art market, they are saying there is a depression. Many of the artists I talk to say so, that there’s no market for art now. Other people I talk to (who are not in art but who talk about raising money) are excited about crowd-sourcing for technology projects. They cite instances where thousands of dollars have been raised for projects to finish everything from movies to smart transportation prototypes.

I see more people in technology and business these days than I see in the inner circles of art and printmaking. It’s a consequence of my thinking that printmaking is the ancestor of all technology and therefore, to understand and practice printmaking on the artistic level you need to know where printmaking came from (cave handprints) and where it is today (video games, as one example). Therefore, I meet a lot of geeks and hackers.

Wishing to share the printmaking gospel with more people (that’s what printmakers do), I go to many meetings where I can stand technology on its head and show my etching press as an example of technology antiquity. Then I ask these groups—hackers, business people, engineers, etc.—for help to create a factory school of printmaking art where I can walk my talk.

In starting a school the subject of money always comes up, and I think many of the people who watch me do my dog and pony act wonder when I’m going to hit them up for money. I never do, because the real value of the idea of a factory school is so great I couldn’t handle the amount of money involved by myself.

The bag of prints I took out of my cabinet that day, containing twenty-five or thirty etchings, is worthless on the art market, I think; but as a component of a fundraising scheme—a crowd-funding scheme or an auction for example—it’s worth at least $100 - $500. This isn’t enough to start a school, but it is worth a lot in the larger scheme of the school.

Considering these aspects of my bag of prints, I extracted a print and looked at it in the perspective of crowd-sourcing or auctions. It was a gritty-looking print I remembered as having made on a sailboat, the Kadeca, with Tom and Margie Kughler. Tom did the engineering and steel work of the Mini Halfwood press. I wanted to demonstrate printing a Solarplate (a technical process for plate-making in the sun), and to do this I brought my Mini Halfwood Press (Tom built both the Kadeca and the press, by the way) and the print I happened to pull out of the bag resulted.

By the standards of the art world, the print would not meet the professional, technical standards demanded by a commercial art gallery (such as Davidson Galleries, where I had my last one person showing in 1998). However, by standards of entertainment and teaching, storytelling and technique, it meets other standards and, as something of dollar-value or part of a larger scheme (such as a factory school of printmaking art) it may be worth a great deal.
Bears thinking, does it not?

Art Action

It was around 1977, I think, when I was faced with a need of quite a lot of money in a hurry. C. T. Chew suggested I have an art auction. Since the law requires licensing for auctions, he invented the Art Action to get around the legal issues. His Art Action was similar to a Dutch Auction, where the prices go down instead of up.

At the live event, the audience is challenged to bid on a piece at the lowest price; they must resist the urge to call out, “Stop the Clock!”—the clock which was an Apple computer screen programmed with numbers that ticked down in $5 increments. Beer was served at the Art Action, which was held in Kent Lovelaces’ Stone Press art gallery, in Seattle.

Carl’s plan worked; I think we cleared about $7,000. With it I was able to transfer a certain videotape art work to film, using what was then a then-new technology for which I had to go to Los Angeles. The only problem with the Art Action that it alienated art dealers, and it was a long time before people forgot how I had actually depressed the value of my art. But I made a lot of new friends, a lot of people got art, and I got my video project done.

What it taught me was that there is an entertainment value inherent in printmaking—and that I was able to part with examples of my prints—which spanned decades—with impunity because I had multiples. It was for a good cause—the video-to-film work. It taught me that printmaking is an art form which builds bridges, not only a form of making consumer products, but also as a social art with economic power capable of achieving wonderful things.

Photo is a screen shot of Pat Pattison, teacher at Berklee Music College and creator of a MOOC in the Coursera program today.

My MOOC Blues - I'm slipping in my songwriting course!

I’m dying by the time I watched the video for this one, feeling the pain of having I missed out on years of music lessons, knowing that it would require a lot of practice on my part and memorization, and no time. 

My reason for taking the course was to learn something about the mechanics of songwriting—if such they are—but when the teacher, Berklee College of Music, Pat Pattison, suggests that we move across the aisle from the lyric-writing side to the melody-writing side of the room, without essential, basic knowledge, I'm dead.

I'm not a musician, and there's no place to hide. 

What am I doing here?

This MOOC, Songwriting, would prepare me to deepen my understanding how printmaking and a performance art—in this instance, songwriting—are related. A cursory understanding of songwriting mechanics (if you can call them that) will help  me to know how to create an online printmaking course the way Pat Pattison has done his course on songwriting. 

Combining Thadeus Hogarth’s MOOC on guitar I started earlier (until I was drowning, unable to keep up) and Pat Pattison’s MOOC on songwriting, feels to me like boot camp so I might on a team to make the world’s most effective printmaking teaching method for online and blended learning.

 Coming out of the two Coursera/Berklee MOOCs, I can neither play the guitar nor can I write a song, but I have, through the process, learned what experiences musicians might go through as the learn their art and craft by seeing, on the screen, how two music teachers have approached the creation of a MOOC in their arts.

During my lessons over the weeks, I look up from my work on the MOOCs and I can see a way to teach printmaking. When, for example, Thadeus was naming the parts of the press, I took screenshots and substituted parts of the etching press where Thadeus was showing guitar parts.

 When Pat Pattison was explaining the ways to achieve prosody in music, I thought of ways to do something similar in composing  and printing etching plates—rotating the plate, for example, to get bi-symmetry.

I recalled Stanley Hayter’s lessons. This printmaking pioneer knew there was a connection between musical counterpoint and visual art, and the soft ground etching method gave him a way to show students one way to achieve a good composition by trial and error, since the soft ground allows you to erase and start over without much work

This is the third Coursera MOOC I enrolled in. The first was Gamification, with Professor Werbach at the University of Pennsylvania. An online course in printmaking will work better with a game feature combined with my point view that printmaking shares properties with performance art, especially musical performance.

Give it up?

No, not so fast, my wife said, and she handed me the little Casio keyboard I keep by the computer keyboard. In one minute, she showed me it's easier to look at the black-and-white keys and see and hear the A-minor and G-major chords Pattison is using.

Not as hard as it sounded and seemed, looking at the MOOC onscreen. I still have one more day to write my song, give the words their correct weight and feel, paste in a loop and pick out the tones for the keywords in the verse and chorus. I might be able, after all.