Abstract
This chapter briefly detours into a look at the “critical thinking” obsession that has derailed conversations about artmaking and taken the field in a direction away from the violence of paint. The chapter looks briefly at the rhetoric of thinking from schools, the rhetoric of “critical thinking” from art educators, and foreshadows the noo-ology of Chapter 3.
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Notes
- 1.
The most comprehensive list of “notable alumni”—by number of students and faculty who were or became celebrities of their craft, the game changers in such disparate practices as dance, music, painting, and poetry—may come from the short-lived Black Mountain College. But notability doesn’t necessarily translate to pedagogy. The list includes students Ruth Asawa, Robert Creeley, Viola Farber, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Susan Weil, among others; and faculty Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, R. Buckminster Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jacob Lawrence, and Peter Voulkos. It wasn’t an art school and yet it placed artmaking at its center. John Rice, not himself a professor of art or an artist but a professor with progressive ideas about education, founded the school in 1933 “not to train professional artists but to sensitize people to the meaning of art.” The 1952 prospectus—a kind of admissions material without all the pomp and circumstance—boasted these two alarmingly vague principles:
I. That the student, rather than the curriculum, is the proper centre of a general education, because it is he and she that a college exists for.
II. That a faculty fit to face up the student as the centre to be measured by what they do with what they know, that it is their dimension as teachers as much as their mastery of their disciplines that makes them instruments capable of dealing with what excuses their profession in the first place, their ability to instruct the student under hand. (qtd. in Katz, 2003, pp. 36–37)
What can be gleaned from the two principles perhaps is that the school had both students and faculty. There was nothing special about the school; there was something special about something else. It’s no surprise, given the above, that the pedagogy varied wildly and maybe was entirely absent. Josef Albers was “a meticulous planner and organizer, entirely devoted to his task as a pedagogue… while being equally devoted and prolific in experimentation” (Katz, 2003, p. 40).
Willem (Bill) de Kooning’s, on the other hand, was a pedagogy of the loose. Elaine de Kooninga remembers it like this:
[Josef] Albers preferred to talk to students as a group; Bill liked to talk to students one at a time. Albers’ students sat at desks and worked cautiously on small, neat compositions; Bill’s stood at easels painting boldly on large canvases. Albers presents his students with the same specific problems; Bill waited until they had evolved their own set of problems on canvas before discussing the range of options open to them. Since most of the students worked under both of them, the different approaches proved to be stimulating rather than mutually exclusive. (qtd. in Katz, p. 40)
So loose in fact was de Kooning’s pedagogy that he often told students to quit school, move to New York, and start painting, because that was the only real path to becoming an artist. Such advice infuriatedb Albers who believed in meticulous preparation.
Black Mountain is an anomaly, though, and could not exist todayc, founded as it was to challenge the State apparatusd. Black Mountain College, says the 1933–1934 Prospectus, was founded without a board of trustees (likely because its founders were bored of trustees). In its place, John Rice created a board of fellows made up of faculty members who had a stake in education, not business. Rice et al. also discarded the role of President in favor of a rotation of faculty members who would be responsible for the major administrative duties. So too were the deans replaced with faculty members who would take on short-term dean-like appointments and the students given a role, “encouraged to assume whatever responsibility they will in the matter of work and conduct” (p. 1). The distinctions of freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior were replaced with the junior college and senior college groups, where the junior college was the place for finding a purpose and the senior college was the place for carrying out that purpose. Each student was given the chance to find his or her own path, and by all accounts it was much more rigorous than anyone was letting on:
When a student, after consultation with his instructors, thinks he has reached sufficient maturity to make an intelligent choice of a field of specialization and that he has built an adequate foundation for the work he proposes to do in the Senior College, he will be required to take comprehensive examinations, oral and written, set by a Board of Admissions to the Senior College, and to submit a plan of work to be done in the Senior College. (p. 1)
a. Elaine de Kooning was a superlative artist in her own right. Was she overshadowed by her husband or did she step back into the shadows for her husband? A 2015 show at the National Portrait Gallery, which showed “how she reinvented the modern portrait by using figuration with an Abstract Expressionist vocabulary” (Moonan, 2015), not only raised that question but made it more public. Interestingly, we can only know what we learn, which is that which is available to be learned, i.e., in the canon. Critic Sasha Archibald (2013) sums up the problem and its solution like this:
Finding specifically women progenitors requires a bit of extra effort—Warhol or Kerouac or Nietzsche are readier-at-hand than Kathy Acker or Claude Cahun or Agnès Martin—but, thanks to the Internet, feminism, and other cultural shifts, no one comes up empty-handed.
b. It also infuriated the federal government. The FBI did not approve of such looseness. A 1956 FBI memo reported that “they are conducting a very unusual type of school” in the mountains of North Carolina, wherein “[a] student may do nothing all day and in the middle of the night may decide he wants to paint or write, which he does, and he may call on his teachers at this time for guidance. They advised that everything is left to the desires of the individual” (Brown, 2019). Among other slights to the State, the school effectively ignored segregation a decade before Brown v. Board of Education when it admitted musician Alma Stone.
c. “Liberal institutions immediately cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions… it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (Nietzsche, 2003, p. 103).
d. Oddly, the main building of Black Mountain College, eighteen miles from the liberal refuge Asheville, North Carolina, was named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee, a misnomer for a building at a school for the arts. The name is a holdover from the pre-BMC YMCA campus that is still intact today.
- 2.
Dean Young: “Purposeless is not meaninglessness. I wasn’t put on this planet to explain myself”a. (2010, p. 30).
a. Darcie Dennigan operationalized this in her “review” of Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness. Instead of explaining, Dennigan does the concepts done in Young’s book. She meets him in the blizzard because a review of a storm from the calm of one’s fireplaced office captures none of the storminess of the storm. It is like telling me what is in the refrigerator without opening the refrigerator, or worse, teaching me how to drive from the comforts of a classroom. Sounds easy. Also sounds far away. Dennigan digs a hole in the earth the size and shape of Dean Young’s literary organ and then shouts at it for 2,000 words. It’s a damn-near perfect review because it is not a review and I wish others would take notice. But there I am again using the word review again and again. It is not a review. It is a doing. After some opening remarks, most of which proclaims into the sunset a litany of listeners, Dennigan (2010) says, “I will try to give you a review of The Art of Recklessness, a book of prose about poetry.” Then, she tells us why she is not qualified:
Once, I was teaching a poetry class. I began the semester by declaring that no one could teach poetry. I mumbled mysterious and recipeless and sweated a lot. That instilled just about zero confidence in the students.
Then, she tells us more about why she is a bad teacher, which is why she is a good teacher, or why I would like to take her class:
I had an attendance policy. But then I felt compelled to tell them a story about Gertrude Stein. About how she was taking a philosophy class at Harvard from William James. William James! And she was excelling, of course. And then it was time for the final exam, and it was a beautiful spring day, and she’d just been to the opera or something the night before—and it was spring! Which in Boston is really something. So she sat down and looked at the exam and wrote, “I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today” and left. And William James later sent her a postcard saying I completely understand and here’s your A.
Take notice, young writers! This is a review that DOES the art of recklessness, which tells us more about the book than any other approach could. Here are some gems:
Rather than studying it, you’d do better to tear out its pages, eat them, and let Dean Young’s excited ink stimulate your spleen into writing poems…
AND:
Verse
Verse Donald Barthelme once wrote, “I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that fails.” The oceans are rising! The streets will soon become canals. And before us we see a nice cruise ship, and the first raft a human ever built, and a dinghy, and my daughter’s imaginary red boat, and a banana peel, Who’s to say which is the best craft?
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Morrow, S.M. (2021). Thinking Schools & Scholarship. In: Rethinking Art Education Research through the Essay. Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81269-0_2
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