More Nincompoopery about Nekkid Bodies

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To Plano ISD's credit, they've rescinded their withdrawal of the book, although the parents are pursuing a review through the State Board of Education.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

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

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

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

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

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

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.