(dis)continuities: the movie!

Here is my first foray into animation in a very long time! Not sure what its all about yet, but it was fun to do....I used some of the drawings described in the previous post to create this video.

(dis)continuities

ink on paper, mounted on board, dimensions variable (7.5” x 7.5” squares)

“I am what I am not yet.”
(Maxine Greene, March 3, 2009, Teacher’s College)

In response to a seminar taught by John Baldacchino on Maxine Greene’s thought(at Teachers College, Columbia University) I wanted to create a work inspired by her ideas. I took many of Greene’s key concepts quite literally, attempting to transform them into a methodology I could use to create a work of art. I used Greene’s fundamental concept of infinite possibilities via the imaginary as the basis of the project, to create a work that had no definitive configuration, but could be endlessly rearranged and expanded. My aim was to create a set of limits within which I had the possibility for infinite exploration and increasing complexity.

I tried using a uniform paper size, such as 8” x 8”, and a category of subject matter, such as seeds and pods. I planned that the materials and visual language of depiction would continually vary, a literal translation into visual form of Greene’s concept of situated freedom. (Greene: 1988, p. 8) This approach went nowhere: the results felt too arbitrary. I had given myself too much freedom. I decided to pare down my variables, limiting myself to the simplest tools, a plain white paper and a permanent felt marker. I started with a single, intentionally banal subject: a pot of dried flowering grasses.


As I sat down to work on the first drawing of this series, early on a Saturday morning, I thought about what Maxine Greene had said a few nights before, during her lecture at Teacher’s College, about seeing things large. The more you pay attention, the more small things matter, they gain in significance. In describing what it means to see things large, Greene writes, “To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead.” (Greene, 1995, p.10) I became absorbed in the intricate interwoven structure of the plant in front of me, which grew steadily more complex and mysterious, the harder I tried to understand it. The strict limits I had imposed upon myself had liberated me. When I finally looked up, to greet my husband and daughters as they sleepily wandered into the dining room where I had been working, I was startled by their sudden vividness. These three people that I know so intimately, my family, seemed almost as strangers, unnaturally present to my gaze. Even the couch and bookcase across the room seemed more real, their existence more emphatic.

This experience was not new, though I hadn’t had it in a while. It was how I understand what Greene describes as a state of heightened consciousness, attributing this concept to Alfred Schutz, “what he (like Thoreau before him and Camus) chose to call wide-awakeness” (Greene:1994, p 436) The resonance Greene’s “wide-awakeness” has for me personally sends me back to my own adolescence, sitting on the banks of Walden Pond, in Concord Massachusetts, next to my bicycle, reading these words; “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” (Thoreau:1910, p 440) The idealism that was affirmed in me at that long ago, sun-dappled moment in my own life story led me to become an artist in the first place. Sitting at my dining room table that recent March morning, looking into the faces of the people I love most in the world and seeing them with such intensity, renewed my faith in the larger project of art-making.

I continued to make drawings within the confines I had laid out for myself. After making almost twenty, I needed to introduce a new element in order to create a dialectic tension in the evolving work. As Greene writes, “There is, after all, a dialectical relation marking every human situation… This relation exists between different, apparently opposite poles; but presupposes a mediation between them.” This mediation is “something that occurs between nature and culture, work and action, technologies and human minds.” (Greene: 1988, p. 8) A man-made element, in contrast with the plant forms, seemed right, and I eventually settled upon a jumble of power cords and computer cables that created curious visual rhymes in juxtaposition with the grasses and flowers I had been drawing. (My husband insists I should call this work “Power Plant.”) Here is an example of an (almost)
arbitrary arrangement:
The individual drawing, plant, knot or cord is less important than the patterns and continuities that emerge as the drawings are laid out in various arrays. In observing any particular array of drawings (one of many possible series of choices), the eye and mind connects lines and spaces from one square to those in the others, forming new, unplanned visual pathways. The continuity created in the viewer’s mind between a blade of grass and an I Pod cable is both random and intentional, designed to de-stabilize the work, to confound expectation of subject matter as a viewer moves from one square to the next. These imagined connections are the true subject of this piece, the way our minds create and hold onto threads of meaning that exist only in the individual imagination.

This is the first artwork I can remember making where theory preceded practice. Visually, it is also a marked departure from my previous body of work, consisting of large oil paintings of torn fruit. Although many similar ideas have been present in my previous work, they have only emerged into verbal consciousness post facto, while speaking with others about my intentions and their perceptions regarding a particular piece. I am encouraged that this approach opened up new territories for me to explore as an artist, and look forward to future expeditions into uncharted lands of both theory and practice.




References
Baldachino, J. (2009). Education Beyond Education: the Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang.

Greene, M. (1988). The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Greene, M. (1994). “Epistemology and Educational Research: The Influence of Recent Approaches to Knowledge.” Review of Research in Education. Vol. 20. pp. 423-464.

Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, The Arts and Social Change. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.

Thoreau, H. (1910). Walden. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, Publishers.

Chairs? CHAIRS?! Chairs!

Over the past couple of weeks, I put together a website documenting a project I did with two 7th grade math classes. The students were asked, "What is a chair?" and addressed this question in a variety of ways. They researched contemporary and historical chair design. They created small 2-d models out of cardstock and masking tape, and then made posters advertising fantastic chairs: ones that could fly or transform in surprising ways. They were split into teams to make real, functional chairs out of cardboard and tape.....

At times, it seemed like the classroom was in total chaos. But they succeeded: the final chairs were able to hold even my weight. I was really delighted and surprised when I asked them to write about their experiences: their writing was as fun as their actual creations.

You can leave comments for the kids here, and I will pass them on.

Here's a sample:

Chairs? CHAIRS?! Chairs!

Murmuring swept through the room.
Chairs? CHAIRS?!
Books, too? BOOKS?!
Yes. Chairs and books.
Disbelief spreads through the room, like a plague.
Fun! Draw, staple, dream!
Time to go on computers.
Computers? COMPUTERS?!?!?!?!
Whoohoo! Computers!!!
No games. Research only.
More murmurs.
No games?
No games.
Paper? Check.
Scissors? Check.
Tape? Check.
Imagination? Check!
Work, work, work, like excited bees in a hive.
Cut, paste, think.
Cut, paste, draw.
Wonder. Dream. Create.
Design poster.
Draw, draw, draw once again.
Group up.
Think. Bicker. Decide. Sketch.
Cardboard, scissors, bamboo, and tape?
CHECK!!!!
Work, work, work once more.
Many new materials!
Lace! Cushions! All things comfortable!
Finished!
Heavy hearts and good byes fill the air.
Goodbye! We'll miss you, Ms. K!

Thinking about adolescence

"Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead….But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another."

I recently interviewed four 14 year old girls I've known for years for a research project. It was an interesting opportunity to reflect on the experience of adolescence, and to see and listen to teens I've watched grow up. The lines above are from the third act of the play, Our Town, by Thorton Wilder. In this scene, the newly dead young woman, Emily, goes back to relive one of the happiest days of her life, her twelfth birthday. At first, she is so excited to be home again. But at this moment, she becomes aware of the habitual and cursory nature of our daily encounters, even with people we love, and is heartbroken at that discovery. When I saw this play as a teenager, this scene spoke deeply and memorably to my own adolescent desire to be both seen and heard, and I remember promising myself, that, as an adult, I would stop to really look and listen. In attempting to listen more deeply to young women in my life, I realized that I have more in common with Mama Webb than I thought.

As a teaching artist in New York City for the past ten years, I’ve worked with incredibly diverse groups of young people in a huge range of educational settings. One day I find myself in a small classroom of emotionally disturbed, ethnically diverse 8th grade boys in Queens. The next day I am on W135th Street in the heart of Harlem, talking about Anne Frank to a class of 25 gifted, primarily African American 10th graders. I could be making chairs with a math class of Chinese and South Asian immigrant 7th graders in Flushing and an hour later be in a transfer high school, with 18-20 year-old students, in the South Bronx, silk-screening T-shirts.

I love this work: its freedom and the level of intellectual and creative challenge it brings. One of teaching’s chief joys, and great difficulties, however, is being able to see each child as a unique individual, with her or his own story to tell. In the whirlwind and practical exigencies of actual classrooms, it is sometimes too easy to miss that moment of recognition, when you look into the eyes of just one of your students and see a universe of meaning and experience.

In an early essay entitled “Existentialism and Education”, Maxine Green wrote:

“The teacher, conscious of his students’ capacities and predicament, respecting truth, and passionately devoted to the cause of his students’ emergence, will work for the moment when the individuals in his class stand away from him in freedom and show their respect for him and his ideas by relating to what he has taught in unique, authentic ways. Such spontaneity and authenticity arise in the context of communion, of the full I-Thou relationship in which each participant is profoundly and consciously himself.”

This research project reminded me to be mindful of the significance of that I-Thou relationship, to remember to honor the life stories, perceptions , and developmental processes of our students.

My essential task as a teacher is not to create “mini-me’s,” but to do whatever I can to help my students become themselves. In interviewing girls I thought I knew well, I was awed by the mystery inherent in their journey toward adulthood. How much more mysterious are teenagers I am encountering for the first time in schools in unfamiliar neighborhoods.

Daily life does not often offer the extensive opportunity for deep listening that this research provided. But moments, even in the busiest classrooms, can be found where we can stop, look, and really listen.

Welcome to the Aquarium: A Year in the Lives of Children

Early on in my work as a teaching artist in New York City, I had the great luck to be teamed with Julie Diamond, a master kindergarten teacher at P.S. 87, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. She's just published a beautiful book, Welcome to the Aquarium: A Year in the Lives of Children in which she distills her philosophy, methods and observations of her classroom. It takes the reader from the last weeks of August, when Julie prepares herself psychologically for the year ahead as she arranges baskets and blocks, to the final celebratory and clean up days in June, as her students move on to the rest of their lives.

Julie was an amazing role model for me, as well as a coach, mentor and friend. At the time, as absorbed as I was by the excitement and many challenges of making art with five year olds, I also felt a private embarrassment that the work was trivial and insignificant. Julie's deep sense of mission and commitment to empowering her students was a potent demonstration of the importance of our work together. She shared her insights into the cognitive and creative processes of her students, along with useful tips on how to keep my supplies organized and instructions brief. (I can still picture her giving me the time signal from the back of the group of fidgety five year olds gathered on the rug in front of me.)

Julie showed me how close the roles of teacher and artist can be, and how much we have to learn from one another. The open and responsive style of Julie's teaching meshed well with my philosophy that art can and should be about so much more than colors and shapes: it should help children develop their own unique potential as human beings. In the chapter on making art, Julie reflects on the work we did together, along with the role of art more generally in the elementary school classroom, "for elementary students to make something that revolves around a narrowly set problem is a waste of an art period, too scarce a thing to waste. To whatever extent young children study art, their work should be inspired by their own desire to create art." One of the rituals Julie and I developed together, was having the children reflect at the end of the class, by drawing in their sketchbooks what they had done that day. As she writes, "the drawings were marvelous," in their detail and close observation, way beyond what is usually expected from kindergarteners.

I've written in this blog about wanting to be useful to my students. Paying attention, in order to offer the skills and tools students need to do what they want to do, is what makes teaching rewarding. Julie writes:

One essential piece of teaching--of wanting to do it year after year, of sticking with it so that you get better--is the will for connectedness, the determination to find out who these children are, which is not entirely separate from finding out more about oneself. It is in the wish to bend and listen, the meaning to the teacher of that motion.

Thanks again, Julie, for showing me how teachers can make a difference in the lives of children, and how, in turn, our lives as teachers become more meaningful.

Is art useful? (should it be?)

A few months ago, I wrote here why I think art is and should be (sometimes) useful. In 1890, Oscar Wilde wrote (in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray), that "All art is quite useless." I loved that book when I was a teenager, perceiving a vivid description of the hypocrisy of the adult world which really appealed to my adolescent sensibility.

These days I'm around teenagers all the time. As the adult, I try my best to be honest with them and worthy of their trust. I try to offer whatever I have that they might find useful in their struggle to make meaning and find their way in our complex, messed up world.

Today I was introducing a portrait lesson to a group of middle school students. It is for a class "Inspired by Anne," that I am teaching for the Anne Frank Center. We talked about how Anne's diary is so riveting because her experience was so unique and different from ours, but her feelings--about growing up, her family, her hopes and dreams-- are so recognizable. We recognize them as our own. On the board I wrote: Every person is the same. Underneath, I wrote: Every person is unique.

Then I gave the students mirrors, pencils and paper. I also gave them a simple diagram of the proportions of the human face (that the eyes are located halfway down the head, etc...) I had them lightly sketch out the basic structure of the face. Then I gave them the challenge to observe the subtle, individual qualities of their own facial features and to see if they could make it clear to anyone that knows them that their drawing was a self portrait.

We started a discussion about the small acts of superficial prejudice and hatred we encounter everyday, and how every person is infinitely more complex and mysterious than you might imagine at first, the more you get to know them. My hope is that through making art, the lessons I am trying to teach about being human will become real and concrete. I have thirteen more weeks with these students. In the end, how will I know I have succeeded?

So is art useful, or should it be? I'd really like to know what you think about this question. Please e-mail me (andrea@andreakantrowitz.com) or post your comments below. Thanks.

Enduring Questions

My dad's memorial service was on Sunday, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the next day I was teaching at the Bronx Community High School, a transfer school for students that have dropped out or failed out of other Bronx high schools. Without really planning to, I decided to tell the students about my dad, about how he knew how to dream big, and make at least some of his dreams come true. It wasn't until the second class that I remembered to tell them that he had been kicked out of school in fifth grade, and told to learn a trade, because he was good with his hands.

In the last class of the day, a student asked, "So if your dad was a rocket scientist, what are you doing here, with us?" I gave a quick answer, which was honest: that I believe in education, and art, and in their power to transform people's lives. So what better place could I be? But what, exactly, was I doing there? That one's going to take a little longer to answer.

Later in the week, I found myself at the Lincoln Center Institute at a workshop in aesthetic education for teacher education faculty (I teach graduate students in art education.) The workshop was all about asking essential questions, questions that can't be definitively answered, exactly the questions which can form the basis of a life's work, the questions that can change the world. On Friday, Maxine Greene, the philosopher-in-residence at LCI, came to talk to us. She is 91, very much of my parents' generation and culture, and has an intimate way of talking to a group that makes you feel like she is addressing you personally-- I certainly felt that way. If you are reading this blog, and don't know her work, look it up! In a half an hour or so, she was able to articulate many of my essential questions: why art matters: in society, in education, how it can help us be more fully alive, more fully human.

Here's a taste of Maxine's thought, from Releasing the Imagination, 2000:

When habit swathes everything, one day follows another identical day and predictability swallows any hint of an opening possibility. Only when the given or the taken-for-granted is subject to questioning, only when we take various, sometimes unfamiliar perspectives on it, does it show itself as what it is -- contingent on many interpretations, many vantage points, unified (if at all) by conformity or by unexamined common sense. Once we can see our givens as contingencies, then we may have an opportunity to posit alternative ways of living and valuing and to make choices.