The Owls' Parliament

Caravaggio at the Kimbell

2011-10-17T05:34:00.000-07:00

Art History 2/History of Art & Design II students might be interested in the Kimbell Art Museum's new blockbuster show, Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, which started yesterday.

Caravaggio was an absolute master at manipulating light and shadow, as well as creating the most dramatic of all possible interpretations of any biblical passage that inspired him--such as the Sacrifice of Isaac, above (1594-96), now usually housed in Florence's Uffizi Gallery.

For a review of the exhibition, see Scott Cantrell's article in the Dallas Morning News from last Sunday.

The upcoming formal analysis essay assignment provides as good an excuse as any to head to Fort Worth for this chance to see Caravaggio's work, and that of his contemporaries. His enormous influence is well represented in this show.

Paleolithic Children's Art

2011-10-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

On my way home from work during the break, I heard about this cave, and these "finger flutings" on PRI's The World. Marco Werman interviewed an archaeologist (Jessica Cooney) who's been working in the "Cave of the Hundred Mammoths" in Rouffignac, Dordogne region, France--in the same general area as Lascaux Cave.

One of the things old folks like me actually enjoy is learning stuff we don't already know--and this was certainly a new one on me! I had never heard of Rouffignac, let alone the Mammoth drawings--nor anything called finger flutings (trailing fingers in damp clay to make designs).

I'll be bringing this up in the Art & Design I and Art History I classes this week, but thought some of you who are already beyond these classes might also enjoy learning something new.

Illumination and Mythography

2011-09-11T11:25:00.001-07:00

Former student and app-designer extraordinaire, Alex Antonio, sent this link--having remembered, no doubt, what fun he had illuminating a manuscript for me: Art Student Hand-Illuminates, Binds a Copy of Tolkien’s Silmarillion. I'm not posting an image for copyright reasons, but the link takes you to the article. Make is a terrific magazine (in print or digital form), anyway--well worth noting for many reasons. I'm always happy to plug stuff I love to read.

Drawing Lessons

2011-08-18T12:08:00.000-07:00

During my daily noodle through the New York Times, I ran across a terrific series in their Opinionator segment. It's called "Line By Line," written by James McMullan, and is "about rediscovering the lost skill and singular pleasure of drawing."

The first installment, "Getting Back to the Phantom Skill" (September 10, 2010) discusses why he embarked on the twelve-part series, and introduces his plan. Scattered throughout the columns are examples from art history that show how skills develop and how artists have used them in the past. The series ended last December with "The Road to the Ten Unknowns," about McMullan's creation of a theater poster.

This is about the best informal art course I've seen since I came across John Ruskin's Elements of Drawing a few years back, and has reminded me to reorder it (an overly enthusiastic student apparently couldn't resist the temptation and pinched my copy). Ruskin was not only an art critic and supporter of both Turner and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but taught drawing at the school he founded at Oxford in 1841.

The Ashmolean Museum houses his teaching collection, and has a website devoted to The Elements of Drawing. The materials are vast (they include a video drawing lesson based on Ruskin's principles) and of interest to anybody who wants to learn to draw--or to draw better.

The book costs less than $10 in paperback; the only thing cheaper and that good is the McMullan series.

Image notes: The painting is John Ruskin in His Study at Brantwood, by William Collingwood (1881); the self portrait is watercolor touched with bodycolour over pencil, 1861. Both from Wikimedia Commons.

Endangered Alphabets

2011-08-15T06:49:00.001-07:00

As many of you already know, I'm a lover of the word. Words, books, alphabets, languages--all aspects of reading and writing as a human cultural/technological activity fall under my owlish gaze.

So when I saw a review of Tim Brookes's Endangered Alphabets project, I was immediately intrigued, and got on board (a really awful pun, if you think about it).

Lovers of type and typography would do well to take a look at this, and contribute if you have any spare cash on hand. I've ordered the book and will share it with everyone when it comes.

News, Newsreels, and Uncle News

2011-08-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

For no particular reason, other than the fact that I'd been going through old photographs yesterday, it occurred to me to do a bit of research on an old family friend, Newsreel Wong.

Wong made a name for himself in the late '30s for a photograph he took (and possibly staged to some extent) of a baby on a Shanghai train platform.

What I didn't know was that he had been in New York City on July 28, 1945, when a disoriented pilot flew his Boeing B-25 Mitchell Bomber into the Empire State Building. Visiting the Hearst Metrotone offices early that morning, Newsreel Wong had been the only one in an office when the phone rang, and he answered it. He ended up commandeering a camera and headed to the site, where he was able not only to shoot the exterior of the building but got in to get film of the offices that were affected. The only other person who managed to gain access was Max Markman, who posed as a doctor, and shot the footage of the event included in this British Pathé newsreel.

A less sensationalized version of the coverage can also be found on YouTube, but I thought this highly edited bit was interesting for its embellishments. Since I'll be teaching the Visual Anthropology course in the Fall, this could provide some talking points about the role of the observer in the interpretation of events, and the impact editing has on the reception of information.

I don't know what happened to Wong's footage, but locating this particular event during an innocent search for a character from my past (he was known to my brother and me as "Uncle News" and lived near us on Yang Ming Shan outside of Taipei) amounts to a bit of the kind of synchronicity we've been talking about in the Myth class. As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 nears, this incident resonates eerily with more recent events.

One of the best blogs about media history I've ever found on the web is Amanda Emily's Feeding the News Beast: A Century of Tales from Behind the Lens. Her post on this event is the source of much of my information, and one on Wong himself explains how he got his nickname. Digital Video and Photography students ought to bookmark her site, because it's an endlessly informative record of visual news coverage.

Note: I'm posting this entry on both the Cabinet and The Owls' Parliament, due to its potential interest for a variety of audiences.

Tidying Up Art

2011-08-06T12:39:00.000-07:00

In this week's History of Art & Design II class, I mentioned Ursus Wehrli's book, Tidying Up Art as a commercial example of parody. One of my students (sorry; can't remember who) said that he'd seen a TED talk by Wehrli, so I looked it up, and here it is.

Just in case you have a few minutes to spare, or need a break from studying for midterms.

Design and Stuff

2011-07-21T07:21:00.001-07:00

For my first Summer quarter post, I was inspired by an article in Good about whether or not it's possible for designers to save the world without creating more stuff. Material objects are, after all, the focus of our design programs at AiDallas. What would to design mean if we weren't focused on creating objects?

One of the major revelations to come out of my first week of classes (and I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me before) was that in the ancient world, people made things carefully because they couldn't just go down to their local Buy More and get a replacement when something broke. There probably wasn't much garbage to pick up, because early economies weren't based on disposable objects. Everything was designed with its purpose in mind, and the designs (as we learn from Uhlmeyer's Rule of Technological Development #312) endured when technologies changed. That's why the early ceramic jugs in neolithic Turkey looked just like the baskets they had replaced as water carriers.

In our art & design history discussions during these first two weeks of classes, we've talked about the notion of "art for art's sake"--the nineteenth-century idea that "fine" art was qualitatively better than "applied" art because it was made for no purpose other than its beauty. But the Greeks and Romans made beautiful things that all had uses: funerary or heroic statues, painted pottery for drinking wine, temples for worshiping gods, etc. The words they used for art (techne and ars) both contained the idea that the objects be well-crafted, skillfully wrought.

Archaeologists love ancient dumps (middens) because they contain clues about the people who occupied the sites under study. But those dumps rarely contain objects discarded whole--only broken bits of things. Acoma Pueblo native Americans actually gather old potsherds to add to new pots made using traditional techniques, wasting nothing. In fact, the reason Indiana Jones isn't a believable archaeologist is that he just takes whole objects out of context--something no reputable scientist would ever do. The real guys in the safari hats get their kicks out of finding bits and pieces that can be put back together to give us an idea about what they originally looked like and what they were used for. Just about the only time we find collections of intact artifacts is when they've been buried by some disaster, like the eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius or Thera.

I hadn't realized before this week that the archaeology exercise my humanities students do (figuring out what random objects in a box might "mean") is more realistic than I'd imagined, because the stuff in the boxes is all twenty-first century junk: miscellaneous bits of useless crap randomly put together, just like what future archaeologists are going to find in our landfills. Cheesy little toys from Happy Meals, broken crayons, miscellaneous buttons, and junky jewelry are going to tell our story more potently than a museum full of art works.

In the opening photograph, all of the items pictured could be recycled; instead some idiot (or idiots) left them in a pine forest somewhere. The plastics will be there just about forever--and somebody designed every one of these objects.

So here's the question: how do fashion, interior, web, graphic, and other designers create without just adding more junk to the growing mounds of waste on this planet?

Image credit: Photo by Michelangelo-36, via Wikimedia Commons.

Spring Quarter Miscellany

2011-06-07T08:23:00.000-07:00

Due to major lack of interest on my students' part, as well as lack of time on my own, I've neglected the Parliament for the entire quarter. Sudden needs for bonus points have emerged, however, and so to accommodate those who've been suddenly inspired to enhance their final grades, I'm offering up a couple of newsy bits that might be useful to some of you.

An old friend of my art and design history and humanities courses, Maggie Macnab (Macnab Design) recently presented a TEDx talk in Albuquerque, called "The Nature of Symbols." This should be interesting to anyone involved in design, advertising, branding, and any number of artistic pursuits.

I've frequently recommended Macnab's book, Decoding Design, to instructors and students alike, and her newest effort, Design By Nature, will be published later this year.

Here's one that goes to show you that taking art history classes might not be a complete waste of time. The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has launched an exhibit called Illuminating Fashion: Dress in the Art of Medieval France and the Netherlands, and the New York Times review of the show includes a nifty slide show with images from the featured manuscripts. Karen Rosenberg, who wrote the review notes that it "will teach you to scrutinize centuries-old manuscripts as you would a style magazine." For fashion history students, this approach seems made in heaven; not only can you find out what people wore when, but you might also be struck with inspiration for new and unusual designs based on centuries-old models. Aspiring rock singers could out-gaga Lady Gaga with information like this!

For further inspiration, try perusing the manuscript illumination images on Wikimedia Commons, where I found the image of Queen Isabelle of France at left. It's a 15th century painting by a guy known as "the Boethius Master" for the Froissart Chronicles.

This will undoubtedly be my last (as well as first) post for the quarter, so I hope everyone has a splendid summer vacation. I think we all deserve a bit of time off after having slogged through 22 weeks with only a seven-day break in the middle, and a couple of holidays that may have done more harm than good. Be careful out there!

This Just In

2011-04-17T06:27:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in a couple of classes last week, the Egyptian Museum in Cairo has not fared quite as well during and after the recent revolution as I reported a while back.

Rather, significant looting seems to have taken place, not only at the museum itself, but in storehouses elsewhere. The editorial by the president of the Archaeological Institute of America in this month's issue of Archaeology includes a plea for public support in helping to recover lost items. The heretofore indomitable Zahi Hawass has resigned in protest over the incidents.

Some of the objects seem to have been returned, as reported by the Huffington Post and other sources, so perhaps the publicity is doing some good. The article also refers to Hawass as having been re-appointed.

By all means visit the Archaeology websit e, especially if you're enrolled in my Humanities class this quarter, and check out the piece on Diving Ice Age Mexico. We'll be talking about the Maya later in the quarter, and this article contains some interesting material.

Geometry, Art, Pi, and Pie

2011-03-09T07:18:00.000-08:00

Now that the faithful are hung over from Mardi Gras, and walking around with ashes on their foreheads, I thought I might introduce another holiday that won't require breaking any Lenten Fasts: Pi day, March 14 (3.14). Here's hoping you haven't given up pie for Lent.

I'm fond of pimping general studies classes of any variety, not just my own, so I pay attention to my monthly newsletters from the Annenberg folks (the ones who bring us Invitation to World Literature and Art Through Time). They have a nifty website on math in the real world: Math in Daily Life, with interactive pages designed for school-age kids. Let's face it, though; most of us have forgotten what we learned about math anyway--even if you managed to squeak through College Algebra or Creative Geometry just last quarter. If you're unclear on the notion of pi, check out the page on that. There's even a segment on math and interior decorating and another on cooking.

If you think math is essentially irrelevant to artists, consider the importance of geometry in art and architecture, explored in this unit from a course on the topic at Dartmouth: The Circle, The Wheel of Fortune, and the Rose Window. The image that opens this post is the south transept Rose Window from St. Denis (via Wikimedia Commons). Some of you may remember (depending on how you spent Fat Tuesday) that we've recently visited St. Denis in History of Art & Design I.

Google even gets in on the fun (this is from last year):

If you still don't believe me, and won't until you see actual proof that such a holiday exists, there is also a Wikipedia page.

I especially love this tee-shirt I pinched from Wikimedia Commons; you can find it and other appropriate festive attire at Thinkgeek.com.

Unfortunately, Pi Day falls on a Monday this year (I'm not on campus Mondays), so I won't be bringing pie to class. You'll have to wait for cookies on finals day.

TED 2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder

2011-03-01T05:41:00.000-08:00

Time to check in on TED to see what's coming up at the annual conference that started yesterday. The focus this year is on wonder, which--as anybody who's ever sat in any of my classes for more than five minutes knows--is the beginning of philosophy. But it's also the beginning of creativity, because curiosity is one of the primary characteristics of creative people. The blurb on the site offers a preview:

For 2011, we are assembling a cast of characters capable of stirring the imagination as never before. Explorers, storytellers, photographers, scientific pioneers, visionaries and provocateurs from all parts of the globe. And we won’t be forgetting the other, harder-edged meaning of wonder -- where “I wonder” equals “I ponder.” We’ll be adding in strong servings of thoughtful insight, so that the possibilities we dream of are anchored in reality.

Not many of us have the 500 smackeroos it costs to "attend" the conference online, but a peek at the schedule will give you an idea of what we can look forward to over the next couple of years, since the annual conferences are where the posted videos come from.

The talks are arranged by sub-topic ("Worlds Imagined," "Beauty, Imagination, Enchantment," "If Only, If Only"), and include speakers who're identified (among many others) as physicists, artists, filmmakers, photographers, bone diggers, and (my favorite) a "wrongologist."

Kathryn Shulz, author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (she has blog, too: The Wrong Stuff), will be one of the speakers. As will Bill Gates, Julie Taymor, film critic Roger Ebert, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and singer Bobby McFerrin.

Shulz is particularly interesting to me because I'm a faithful practitioner of the art of being wrong. I absolutely love it when I get it wrong. Maybe not so much as when I occasionally get things spot on, but I've always preached that one should embrace the process rather than the product. Being wrong leads us toward getting it right in the end, and stirs up our creative juices like like a shot of jalapeno juice in a fruit smoothie.

Not that simply trying is enough. I certainly don't fall into the "it's the effort that counts" camp. Rather, being wrong means you've not only tried, but that you've gotten somewhere. Maybe not where you wanted to get--but to a place from where you can begin to map out a new path. The first solution isn't always the best, but you learn from doing the work to get to it. That's why I like to call projects for my classes "problems," because all the possibilities aren't always apparent when you start, and there is seldom only one solution that works.

May I take this opportunity to request, however, that when you embark on said projects, that you take the time to read the instructions carefully, and design a plan of attack. That way, you can direct your energy toward potentially fruitful outcomes. Even if your plans don't work out exactly as you expect them to, you may be pleasantly surprised in the end. Not only that, but you'll have something suitable to turn in week 10.

Image credit: I hope this is legal. I pinched it from the "photos" section of the TED site. It depicts some of the featured speakers.

Here's Your Chance to Have a Say

2011-02-17T07:34:00.000-08:00

The Daily Good for February 15 (otherwise known as Half Price Chocolate Day) offers students the opportunity to speak up on the future of education: Hey, Young People: Arne Duncan Wants to Answer Your Education Questions.

For those of you who don't already know this, Arne Duncan is the U. S. Secretary of Education. And since you folks are the ones to suffer and/or benefit from changes currently being discussed and implemented, it might be a good idea for you to weigh in. It's mostly about K12, rather than higher education, but most of you aren't that far removed from those glory days--and some of you will be having children that will be affected by policies developed over the next few years.

I also wanted to alert you to the video I've been showing in some classes this week, given by Sir Ken Robinson and animated by RSAnimation: Changing Education Paradigms. The link will take you to other Robinson videos and others by RSAnimation--and/or go there to see a larger screen; I had to reduce this one to fit my snazzy new blog design.

Design Web News

2011-02-09T13:23:00.000-08:00

Yet another snow day has found me on the web, and fooling around with blog design. The initial "Watermark" template was only meant to be temporary, but I haven't until today had time to sit down and work on changing it. I'd appreciate some feedback, since this will always be a work in progress. If you think it needs more tweaking, let me know, and we can work on it together.

While I was messing about in my e-mail this morning, I found some stuff you folks might find interesting. The first item came to me via Good magazine, which featured an article on a blog called 10Answers, founded by Rebecca Silver who writes and designs in (where else?) New York City. The concept is simple. Every post consists of a series of ten questions Silver asks of fellow creative people, such as yesterday's interview with graffiti artist/muralist Caleb Neelon. Categories include almost every kind of art and/or design, so there's something here for everyone. I'm thinking of adapting her format for my student information sheets--since the answers are much more interesting than what I usually ask for.

From the venerable New York Times section on the Arts came a short article on an exhibit at Milan's La Triennale Design Museum, Celebrating a Graphic World. Oddly enough, there are more images available on my iPad version of the Times online--but the primary interest of the article lies in its discussion of changes in how we view the field of graphic design and its relationship to advertising.

And just in case you haven't heard about this yet, Google's latest wizardry involves applying its street-view technology to museums. Go to the Google Art Project to visit some important museums around the world, and use its features to explore significant works of art really close-up. Ever wanted to put your nose right up to Van Gogh's Starry Night? You can do it here--just go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and zoom in.

As usual, I leaped over to Wikimedia Commons when I was looking for an image to illustrate this post. I wanted to see if there was anything available that had at least something to do with graphic design (since all of the stuff related the articles I mentioned is copyrighted). With my usual serendipitous luck, I found a work by the British poster artist, Tom Eckersley which reminded me of the snow outside my window, of the Pont du Garde aqueduct in Nimes, France (featured in this week's History of Art & Design I lecture), and Henri Matisse's cut paper works. You can see an online collection from his long career at the Visual Arts Data Service.

And if all the above isn't enough to keep you from getting bored (if, of course you're already finished with whatever I've assigned for the week), take a look at this site full of Free Images from generous folk who, like those who contribute to Wikimedia Commons, don't mind not making a buck off of everything they do.

Snow Days

2011-02-04T07:37:00.000-08:00

By now you lot are probably either sick of the weather or rejoicing that you've got extra time to get assignments completed before midterms. This week's adventures in education have included three full days of canceled classes (including today) and a pretty flimsy attempt to get things on track yesterday. When I got to school for my afternoon class (having spent over an hour to drive 30 miles), I met Dr. Frisbee in the hall, who'd had one student make his morning class--out of about 23. Other instructors reported similar statistics.

For my 1 pm History of Art & Design II class, eight (count 'em) intrepid souls showed up. But because exams are scheduled for next week, I decided to construct them around the first three weeks, and try to catch up a bit afterward. So, Be Here Warned: exams for HAD I and II will cover material from weeks 1-3, and will take about 2 hours. After that, don't expect to be able to head out to the bars, because any lectures and/or workshops will be held in the second half of class. That includes the Friday night people, too. Updated schedules are available on the course pages linked to Owldroppings.

If anyone's interested, I showed the film, Mr. Bing, L'Art Nouvea u to those devoted folk who attended Thursday afternoon. They will be rewarded accordingly. The video is available in the Library for anyone interested in seeing it, and is well worth the effort. Please watch it in a viewing room, however, since I'd rather it not leave the building.

One of the highlights of the day was the wonderful coincidence of winter knit hats that led to the following photo, for which Katie and Donna obligingly posed.

In case folks don't get it, my hauling them into the library for the shot was inspired by this poem, composed by Edward Lear, the first verse of which goes like this:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

and the second:

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?'
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

Since we didn't have a piggy hat, I'll leave out the last verse--but you can go to the link for the rest. And since Katie and Donna don't even know each other, concentrate on the hats!

I suppose I made the connection not only because of all the owl silliness that surrounds my name, but because I've been listening to Natalie Merchant's terrific new album, Leave Your Sleep, which contains a song based on a poem by Edward Lear, Calico Pie.

Now, I can't possibly leave this teaching moment at this stage, because this album is a prime example of the connection between art, creativity, and scholarship. Merchant has gathered together a large selection of poems, mostly written for children, but which lack the usual syrupy sentiment associated with kids. The poems themselves are clever, witty, disturbing, sad, inspiring, funny, and thought-provoking--sometimes all at once. And I can't even begin to say enough about the music. The arrangements run stylistically from Jewish klezmer to Gypsy to Cajun to New Orleans jazz and beyond, with wonderful instrumental accompaniment by outstanding artists. It took her five years to arrange the whole thing, and it's totally worth the effort.

You can get samples from her website (linked above), or try this TED lecture, which features one of my favorite cuts, The Sleepy Giant:

This is just the thing to snuggle up to with your iPad or computer on a cold snowy day. Enjoy your weekend, and the Super Bowl if you're into that sort of thing (Go Steelers!). Get some rest, and show up next week ready and eager for your exams.

Sense Amidst Nonsense

2011-01-29T08:31:00.001-08:00

As many of you know, I'm pretty convinced that violence is seldom the answer to any problem, even though it seems to inevitable in troubled times. Thus it comes as no surprise to me that the political unrest in Egypt (after the government shut down all manner of social media) has escalated to mob violence of the kind that can precede either true reform or a descent into absolute chaos. We'll have to wait and see what happens here.

Despite all the turmoil, however, Egyptians worried about the possibility that mobs bent on destruction would target the Egyptian Museum, formed a human shield around the building as announced in The Daily Good. From Ireland, The Journal.ie reports that the army and students cordoned off the museum after marauders had already destroyed two mummies.

The Egyptian Museum is, of course, the home of the (in)famous funerary mask of Tutankhamen, along with innumerable other treasures. The official home page is inaccessible because of the internet block, but an alternative is available here--with several pages of photos.

It's good to know that a country as old as Egypt hasn't forgotten the value of its past, even as it struggles to determine the shape of its future. Lets hope that the sane prevail over the insane as Egyptians locate a path toward more reasonable governance--and more reasoned protest.

Update 2 February: Whilst we're snug in our homes and flats waiting for the ice to clear so we can get back to school, Egyptian students are now busy protecting their libraries, as reported in today's Daily Good. The importance of institutions like museums and libraries is sometimes lost in the heat of battle for basic rights, but the priorities of the protesting students seem spot on, if they want to ensure the success of whatever future government they manage to construct.

Intellectual history (and thinking in general) is frequently sacrificed at the altar of political expedience by well-meaning but oddly motivated politicians--like some of those sitting on the Texas State Board of Education (see my related posts on The Owl of Athena). But when those fomenting revolutions against repressive governments make significant efforts to preserve their cultural heritage, it speaks well of the possibility of real reform. We won't know the outcome for weeks, months, or even years. But at least these folks are showing that the mobs aren't just out there to rain destruction on Egyptian culture.

Image credit: Façade of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, taken by Fajor in 2002, via Wikimedia Commons.

New Course Site Up

2010-12-27T06:58:00.000-08:00

In case anyone's interested, the pages for my new class (Philosophical Perspectives: Technology and Utopia) are up. Not complete yet, but up. So, if you're considering it for an upper level humanities elective, the basic information and a tentative schedule can be found linked to the Owldroppings main page.

Anyone enrolled in my sections of History of Art and Design II might want to hold off printing slide lists, because I haven't finished updating the list. That's in the works for this week. Ditto my Humanities intro class.

I'm already looking forward to the new quarter; hope you all are having a pleasant break and getting some well-deserved downtime.

Happy New Year!

Art History in the Movies: Hildegard of Bingen

2010-12-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

History of Art & Design I students may remember, from our discussion of illuminated manuscripts, the image Hildegard of Bingen painted of herself receiving a vision. So you might imagine how pleased I was to read in the Daily Poop this morning about a new film, showing at the Angelika in Dallas, called Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, and directed by Margarethe von Trotta. Here's a trailer (sorry about the German--but there are subtitles).

VISION: FROM THE LIFE OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Barbara Sukowa, Margarethe von Trotta

I always recommend seeing good films that help make the past more "present" to us, and the review of the film makes it seem promising. It looks like it focuses on her visions more than anything, but she was a remarkable woman and certainly deserves to be recognized by a broader audience than antiquated art history instructors and lovers of Gregorian chant.

If you are at all interested in Medieval music, you might also enjoy this YouTube version of her Kyrie Eleison:

Real fans of the genre can check out some of the best versions of Hildegard's music, recorded by Anonymous 4; my favorite album is 11,000 Virgins (samples are available at the link).

This just in: Painless (Art) History. I got a link to this YouTube page through my daily dose of Good. The perpetrators are history teachers, and much more familiar with pop music than I am. I'll probably show a couple in class, but you may want to check them all out before finals--no matter which of my classes you're in.

More Nincompoopery about Nekkid Bodies

2010-11-22T10:55:00.000-08:00

Oh, puh-leese! Not again.

Last week the Daily Poop (aka the Dallas Morning News) ran a story about parents' objections to a textbook used in Plano's high school humanities class for gifted and talented students. The book in question is Culture and Values: A Survey of the Humanities. The reason? According to the article's author, the parents who protested the book's use claimed that "the college-level textbook reveals the darkest of artistic expressions" and objected to their daughter's being forced to look at the naughty images--of Michelangelo's David, the Hermes of Praxiteles, Botticelli's Birth of Venus, and Goya's Third of May 1808.

Now, I would agree that the Goya depicts one of the darker moments of human history, but am pretty sure that fourteen-year-olds have seen much worse on the news. If, of course, they watch the news--and if their mommies let them.

But we've heard this song before. In 2006, a Frisco teacher was fired for taking her charges to the Dallas Museum of Art, where one of them apparently caught a glimpse of some naughty bits down the hall and blabbed to mommy. These were fifth-graders, all of whom had obtained permission slips from their parents.

To Plano ISD's credit, they've rescinded their withdrawal of the book, although the parents are pursuing a review through the State Board of Education. Given that board's history, who knows what'll happen (for my take on the Board, see these posts on The Owl of Athena: Back to the Future and Educational Secession). I cannot help, however, but to see the whole episode as yet one more example of how education in Texas is being compromised by short-sightedness and ignorance.

There's apparently a Facebook page on this issue (authored by Ashley Meyers, who graduated from a Plano high school and now attends Northwestern University). Since I'm not a participant in this particular social network, you might want to look up the page and let us know what the 500 followers are saying.

The Future as Past

2010-11-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

A slide show in the New York Times this weekend, The Visual Design of 'Megamind,' made me think first of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and then about Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Alex Proyas's Dark City. The Art Deco influences are obvious to anyone who's ever made it through History of Art & Design II, but the others might be a bit more obscure. What made me think of Brazil is the slide of Megamind's Lair; Dominique Lewis's view of Metro City made me think of the last scene in Dark City. The Hugh Ferris-inspired shot of Metro City looked like something straight out of Lang's 1927 classic--which was also a classic application of Art Deco.

Artists get ideas from everywhere, as Terry Barrett reminds us ("All art is, in part, about other art"). In fact, it's very difficult for us human beings, metaphor-makers that we are, to come up with anything truly original, even when we're imagining the future. It's enormously difficult for even the best science fiction minds to imagine visually a place we've never experienced, much less beings we've never met (hence the present-day default setting: aliens as marine creature-like embodiments of our worst nightmares). So Art Deco, which seemed futuristic at the time (the 1920s and '30s), was really grounded in a romanticized version of the machine aesthetic from the late nineteenth century, with a bit of Bauhaus and Art Nouveau thrown in.

To complicate matters, we're now seeing a combination of Industrial Revolution-era technologies with another adaptation of Art Deco into an alternative view: the past-as-future aesthetic of Steampunk. I don't mean this as negative criticism, because it seems a perfect compromise to an old geezer like me. But to give you an idea of how out of it I really am, I looked for a good link for "steam punk" and was quickly corrected by Google.

As an alternative to the now old-fangled "Where's Waldo," may I offer a new game for art and design history students: locate the art-history influences in your favorite new film.

Report back when you find interesting connections.

Image credit: the original 1927 poster for Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis. Via Wikipedia.

Art and Archaeology in the News

2010-10-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

This will be a regular feature of the Parliament, in hopes of furthering students' understanding of course topics--and perhaps fostering a bit of curiosity.

Archaeology Magazine this month offers a plethora of articles relevant to both my art history and humanities classes. The issue is available on the periodical shelves in the Library, and some of the information is available in online abstracts:

The Power of Chocolate traces the cultural distribution and importance of cacao in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.

In class this week I mentioned the opening of the House of the Chaste Lovers in Pompeii. The well-preserved frescoes provide good examples of Roman painting, as well as a peek into the domestic lives of the upper crust in rural Rome.

New discoveries in Tuscany (Italy) are helping scholars better understand the Etruscans, and digs are turning up evidence about domestic life in Italy before the Romans, as well as examples of gold jewelry and other luxury goods. The photo that opens this post is an example of Etruscan artistry, although it's not one of the objects discussed in the article.

Since we’ll be covering daily life in ancient Italy in both History of Art and Design I and Intro to the Humanities during week 4, these last two articles will perhaps be of some interest. The Humanities class will be discussing the Maya during week 6, so the chocolate article will be useful to everyone –especially the culinary folks. But don’t we all love chocolate?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is featuring a Roman mosaic from Israel in a current exhibit. The link takes you to an overview of the work, and a short video. As I’ve pointed out in class, mosaics rely on the same optical principal as pixels. This one depicts all manner of critters, both from land and from sea, with rather remarkable detail. There’s also a link to the Met’s YouTube page, which includes over 300 short videos on just about every topic imaginable related to the history of art and design.

Image credit: 5th-4th century BCE Etruscan gold necklace, displayed at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Photo by Mary Harrsch, via Wikimedia Commons.

Things Medieval

2010-10-19T07:19:00.000-07:00

I just happened to notice in this morning's edition of the Daily Poop that the 38th season of PBS's spectacular series, Nova, begins with an episode of interest for History of Art & Design I students especially. It may also spark fond memories among my HAD II students.

At any rate, the episode is called Building the Great Cathedrals and airs tonight at 8 pm locally on KERA. It will be repeated on Thursday the 21st (on KERA World) at 9 am, 3 pm, and 5 pm. The link takes you to the Nova page, which includes interactive features on the building process, engineering points, and the chemistry of stained glass. The program runs for 60 minutes (in answer to the perpetual whine, "how long is this movie?").

One of my loyal students whizzed by my classroom Friday night with a copy of The Secret of Kells on DVD. I've been waiting for this since before the Oscars last year (it was nominated for best animated feature, competing against the likes of Up!). So this weekend I ran out and snagged the Blu-Ray edition, which is just plain scrumptious. This has got to be one of the most beautiful animated films I've ever seen, and is directly related to the manuscript illumination segment of HAD I. The link is to the promotional trailer (I tried to embed it here but it was too wide, so I just linked it).

The features on the Blu-Ray include the director's discussion of inspirations--including Medieval manuscripts, Celtic designs, and even Gustav Klimt. If his remarks don't make art history worth knowing, nothing will.

Image credit: Chartres Cathedral, southern facade, by TTaylor, via Wikimedia Commons.

Welcome and/or Welcome Back

2010-10-04T08:01:00.000-07:00

The first day of a new quarter always represents promise: everything's looking up for the moment, and there are slews of new faces and names to remember (something that grows more and more difficult for me every year), as well as new experiences to, well, experience.

To start things off I thought I'd mention some events of potential interest to student-artists occurring around the country and here in Dallas.

The first of these is the Dallas Museum of Art's new exhibit of fifteenth-century funerary sculptures, The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy. They provide an unforgettable example of the Renaissance reconciliation between Classicism and Christianity, with exquisite small-scale depictions of grief. I'll work on an extra-credit assignment for those who need a little inspiration to get to the exhibit--but you really shouldn't need to be coaxed.

Of particular interest to anyone studying anatomy and life drawing, The National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC) is featuring selections from its library in an exhibit on The Body Inside and Out: Anatomical Literature and Art Theory. The brochure can be downloaded in .pdf format (8 pages) and contains some useful information on the history of visual understanding about the body.

The Meadows Museum at SMU has scored something of a coup in exhibiting El Greco's Pentecost as part of a three-year alliance with the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Meadows collection focuses on Spanish and colonial art, and the new partnership can only prove to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

In honor of one of the themes we'll be pursuing in my Humanities class (memory), take a look at the Museum of Modern Art's education pages--this one featuring Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory, with an explanatory video. Although I'm not one of Dali's acolytes, most of my students find him irresistible, and this seemed like a way to acquaint you with what MoMA has to offer. If you find yourself in St. Petersburg, Florida about a hundred days from now, you could also visit the new Dalí Museum, which has been under construction for the past two plus years.

A new feature of this blog will focus on discovered work by new artists: those I didn't know existed until I ran into them on the web, or until my students mentioned them to me. The first of these is Turgo Bastien, a Haitian-born abstract artist whose work reminds me of the scarification designs and Luba memory-boards we'll talk about in the Humanities class. His mixed media piece, Another Call From Africa, opens this post.

Have a great quarter, People. Let's do some good work and have fun.

Image credit: Turgo Bastien, Another Call From Africa, 2009. Via Wikimedia Commons.

The Newest MacArthur Fellows

2010-09-30T07:35:00.000-07:00

I don't imagine that many of my students are "tuning in" this week, but the Daily Good just hit my mailbox with a reminder that the newest batch of MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grants" have been awarded. Some of you probably have no idea of what I speak; if not, click the link.

The reason I mention them is that they represent the breadth and depth of creativity available in this country. The fellows include artists, writers, scientists, musicians, and all manner of creative folk. So, if you want to know what your education is helping to foster, these are the people you should be watching, rather than the latest pop-celebrity.

For an overview of the 2010 crop, go to Meet the 2010 Fellows and browse through their many, varied, and rather astonishing talents.

Here's a 2009 TED talk by a previous Fellow (2002), Bonnnie Bassler, from Princeton University, talking about how bacteria "talk" to each other:

The video's only 18 minutes long, and I promise you that watching it will make you smarter--and possibly jack up your creativity a little in the process.

Art, Science, Storytelling, and Life

2010-09-09T09:30:00.000-07:00

I'm adding another TED lecture to your repertoire this week, namely one by Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame. Almost all of you should have encountered him by now, if not in your intro to design classes, or storyboarding, then in Writing II (or is it I?).

At any rate, I came upon it by accident when I was looking for TED lectures that might reference the Renaissance (one of the tags on the video, but not really referring to the actual period in art history). This turned out to be one of those wonderful moments of serendipity the web makes possible, because it's relevant to our class in several ways, even though it doesn't really have anything to do with the Renaissance.

One of the first things he does in his talk is to map out three kinds of vision: blind faith (things you believe in but can't see); stuff that's physically visible and thus manifest precisely because we can see it; and what's possible: what we can en-vision. These distinctions are useful, because they can help us talk about art through the ages, and begin to understand how people perceived art in different contexts.

Better yet are his principles for using vision: learn from everyone; follow no one; watch for pattern (where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves); work like hell.

Essentially what this leads to is a path toward innovation--making the new connections that make new stuff happen. In other words, it leads to creativity.

Later, in his discussion of the relationship between art and science, he notes a connection between vision and meaning that points directly to my lecture on the origins of writing: the rebus. Remember the rebus I showed you when we were talking about the origins of alphabets?

Well, this is a good example of the visual made audible--and the achievement of sound through vision. When you think about it, hieroglyphic writing systems depend on this marriage of the aural and the visual in order to make the transition that actually divorces sound from object.

One more thing: if you ever want confirmation that I'm not completely off my noodle about those infamous "rules of technological development," McCloud affirms at least one of them when he reminds us of the error Marshall McLuhan warned about: putting the content of new technology in the shape of the old. Or, according to Uhlmeyer's rule #312, "New technologies often follow the form of the old."

This video is longer than the previous one (about 17 minutes), so grab a snack and sit down for a few minutes. It's a bit dated (filmed in 2005), but quite enlightening nonetheless. Feel free to comment on interesting points you notice, or connections you make as a result of having watched.

Now and Then

2010-08-27T07:01:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the connections between past and present are brought home to us with vivid clarity--as they were when I watched this TED video by Jacek Utko on designing newspapers. As he tells you what he does, pay attention to the graphics; think about how his innovative newspaper designs use the principles of manuscript illumination.

Yes, the guy has an accent (Polish), but so do you (Texan). Get over it. And for the attention-spanned challenged among you, the video is only six minutes long.

After you watch it, talk amongst yourselves. We'll chat in class week 8.

How to take an exam

2010-08-06T07:13:00.000-07:00

Some of you are beginning to freak out about the midterm (in both classes), so I thought I'd offer some words of advice.

Keep in mind why you're being tested in the first place: to find out if you're grasping the learning objectives put in place for this course. Believe it or not, instructors do not test people for the fun of it, or to torture them, or to give themselves something to do in their copious free time.

Instead, we test you see whether or not the collaboration between teacher and student is working. If, for example, nearly everybody in my classes missed particular questions, I'd know that either the students were ignoring my presentation on those topics (not entirely impossible), or that I wasn't making the points I thought I was (fairly probable). I would then make sure to go over the information again, trying to make it clearer. I would adjust points accordingly--but only if the wrong answers were clearly my fault.

Sometimes it is my fault; I assume too much or I present the material in ways that don't get across the points I want to make. On the other hand, the "fault" frequently lies in lack of preparation on the part of the student. Since I provide multiple opportunities for students to arrange the information into learning-friendly forms (like slide lists, charts, maps, etc.), their inability to access that information, study it, and think it through comes primarily from not completing the tasks.

I know there's a huge amount of information. I also know that to many of you, I'm almost speaking a foreign language (all those terms from Greek and Latin and French and Italian!). But you are in charge of your own education, and you're paying a pretty penny to get it. As the NASA administrator famously said about the Challenger shuttle accident, "I can explain it to you again, but I can't understand it for you."

So, here are some tips on how to get through the midterm:

Read the material. This sounds like a no-brainer, but many of you rely solely on the lectures. Even if you take really great notes, reading the assigned pages in the book will help you make sense of what we talked about in class.

Complete the slide lists with images from the book and the supplementary web list, do the worksheets, and know the locations on the study map. I can't imagine why anyone would choose not to complete one or more of these items, because they help you learn the material and you get to use them on the exam.

Make sure you keep the materials in your workbook in order. If you go to the trouble to complete the items mentioned above, but don't have them arranged properly, you'll spend too much time hunting around and you'll miss the chronological context that's so important in these classes.

Read the instructions on the exam carefully. For each section. Make sure you understand what I'm asking you to do. If you don't ask, I can't explain it.

After you've read the instructions, make sure you follow them. All too frequently, when I go over the exam at the beginning of the test period, everybody's so anxious to get it over with that they forget my warnings about paying attention to directions.

Don't forget to think. Because I don't give true/false, fill-in-the-blanks, multiple-choice tests, you do have to interpret questions and materials in order to earn a decent score on the exam. Even if you're completely stymied by the question, take it apart--analyze it and try to figure out what I'm asking. If you really can't understand the question, be sure to ask. I might not be able to understand it for you, but perhaps my explaining it to you again might help. At least in terms of the question itself.

Finally, here's a little hint for those of you who actually read this blog. In many cases, the answer to a question can be found elsewhere on the exam. This is sneaky, but it also helps to get you to make connections.

I am, after all, the Queen of the Weasels.

PS: Get a good night's sleep the night before, and stay away from adult beverages until after the exam. Just sayin'.

Image credit: Things could always be worse. This is a photo of students taking an exam during the 1930s. At least y'all have desks . . . (it comes from Wikimedia Commons).

The mysterious and the not-so-mysterious

2010-07-22T06:59:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I leaped up onto my soapbox to spout in the Tuesday afternoon class on the question of who built Egypt's pyramids and how. I'm a bit sensitive to this because I don't have much patience for uncritical thinking, but I also know that it's not my students' fault.

We're mired in a world so devoid of real imagination that even educators seem to think it necessary to hype "mysteries" and "secrets" in order to grab attention away from popular culture. In doing so, they've concocted something they call "edutainment," which has turned out to be neither educational nor particularly entertaining--at least to those who do the real work of archaeology.

So, for those of you who want to know how pyramids were built, two issues of Archaeology's online magazine can shed some light on the ramp question: How to Build a Pyramid, and Return to the Great Pyramid. Both of these make hash of my claim that we know how the pyramids were built; what I should have said is that we now have a pretty good idea of how it was done, but the details are still unclear.

Since other fads involving space aliens also came up, I suggest a look at a really good article on the crystal skull craze, also from Archaeology: The Skull of Doom. Many of you may find it way too long, tedious, "boring," or whatever, but it really delivers the goods. The Wikipedia article on the topic is pretty informative, too, and contains a whole slew of resources for further research.

Some of my students have complained that I make studying some of these questions less intriguing--that it's more fun (entertaining?) to imagine all manner of wild stories. But that's a little like the argument against science in general: that studying and analyzing phenomena like the rainbow takes all the wonder out of life.

I can't for the life of me figure out how understanding the way light works when it hits a prism lessens the wonder of a rainbow. Doesn't knowing how the ephemeral display of light through raindrops make it even cooler? The phenomenon is so fragile and momentary that appreciating its fleeting beauty makes it seem, to me at least, even more wonderful (as in "full of wonder").

Does knowing how the pyramids were built make them any less amazing? I don't think so. Realizing how inventive folks were all those thousands of years ago inspires awe rather than extinguishing it. Human beings have been and still are screwing up right and left, but knowing that we do have our moments of glory is kind of reassuring.

But the real problem to me is that seeking mystery for its own sake indicates a gap in the human imagination. If we can only learn stuff if it's "entertaining" (or "mysterious" or full of "secrets"), we're in trouble. There are many aspects of life, the universe, and everything that we don't understand. But if we don't respect reason enough, we're doomed to remain swamped by ignorance and hype.

Students simply must learn how to distinguish the reasonable from the idiotic, the truly mysterious from the merely puzzling, and the expert from the charlatan. But please don't be afraid to ask questions; even if I hop back up on the soap box, we'll all benefit from your asking.

Real learning comes from wondering, and from developing strategies that help you find cogent answers your own questions.

Image credits: The lithograph of The Pyramids of Geezah is by Louis Haghe from an original drawings by David Roberts between 1846 and 1849; it's from the Library of Congress, but also available on Wikimedia Commons. The Crystal Skull photo (of the British Museum specimen) is from the Wikipedia article on the subject.

History is important; art is even more important.

2010-07-18T07:49:00.000-07:00

The title of this post comes from one of my students; it was the best reply I got of the many written on the backs of the yellow index cards I distributed last week. I asked people to think about why it might be a good idea to take an art history class, and most of the responses were thoughtful if not entirely unpredictable. I was a bit surprised that so many were interested in understanding the continuity from past to present, and projecting it into the future. Although several quipped that they were coerced into taking the class (it's required in most programs), most seem to think that it wasn't a bad idea to know something about the history of their craft.

The comments were also rather refreshingly hopeful, and a large number of them saw knowledge of art history as being important to them professionally: gaining a useful vocabulary, knowing what's already been done, being inspired by the works of great artists.

Another student remarked that "It's hard to make a future when you have no knowledge of the past." Now, this kind of insight is exactly what makes my little Borg-enhanced heart go pitty-pat. Many folks my age have noticed an almost terrifying a-historical bent among today's young people, so finding out that we're (at least in part) wrong actually makes us feel better about the future.

After going through a slide show that demonstrated several practical uses for art history, we went on during that first class to discuss the nature of art and its relationship to design. In all three sections of History of Art & Design I I got the sense that everyone really did see a point in the exercise--that learning about history can, in fact, be helpful to artists and designers in the present.

Time will tell, but I'm pretty optimistic about this quarter. I hope at least some of you will contribute to this blog and keep the conversation lively. Here's to ten more good weeks!

The Beta Post

2010-06-26T08:58:00.000-07:00

I've long wanted to host a blog focused on my students, and since my Summer quarter will be relatively light (four courses and administrative duties), I thought this would be a good time to begin.

The title comes from the imaginative invention of collective nouns for birds, and is fortuitous in this case because of the "owlfarmer" connection (derived from my surname) and the fact that I would like this project to act as a creative forum for students who are in the process of gaining wisdom. It also ties in with my other blogs, but since they tend to intimidate, inflame, or puzzle some of my student readers (so that few of them ever comment), I thought this would be a more student-friendly venue.

I have several plans for the Parliament, including the awarding of extra credit in classes I'm currently teaching. I'll put together a checklist of requirements before the Summer quarter starts. I'll also invite guest-posts from past and present students, and encourage the contribution of original artwork to illustrate topics we're considering. Occasionally, as when my History of Art and Design II students participate in the "Photography and Modernism Workshop," I'll post the results of class projects on the blog, and welcome comments in response.

For now, I'm using one of Blogger's new templates, but welcome help from students with appropriate expertise in designing our own page. I'd like the basic layout to stay the same (because I'm entering my doddering years and like familiar spaces), but the title could use some work, and I'd love an attractive, nicely textured background. Suggested gadgets would be nice, too. All work must be compatible with a Creative Commons license, but other than that I'm open to all manner of submissions.

I look forward to working with Members of Parliament; feel free to offer suggestions, comments, design and technical advice, etc. This will always be a work in progress.