on becoming an artist
To be perfectly honest, when I think about what ‘got me into art’ in the first place, I can’t separate my interests in ‘the meaning of things’ and my desire to be ‘smart’. I’d always gotten off on being the one who saw more than met the eye. Reading subtext was always my ‘thing’, like a parlor trick. Until it wasn’t.
To say that teaching changed me profoundly is simultaneously a cliché and an understatement. But here, my talent for seeing more than seems to be there is quite effective.
The cliché is that teaching necessarily divests the individual of a certain sense of power or ability or importance. As soon as you stand in front of a class you ask yourself, ‘What can I possibly know that’s of any real use to these people?’ Even someone teaching CPR knows that there are times when it just doesn’t work. And yet, you get up and do it every day because maybe sometimes the thing you teach really does come in handy. It is literally humbling. Every teacher is humbled in the classroom. And to assume authority and be humbled at the same time is a weird paradox with which most teachers, I assume, struggle. (And if teachers come across as ‘larger than life’ or totally in control, that’s just protective armor. Promise.) This is a total cliché, right?
But that cliché is an understatement. Teaching is a horror show.
I don’t care if you’re teaching college or preschool, in an ‘urban’ public school or at an Ivy, particle science or the alphabet, if you teach long enough, one day a student will come to you with a problem or experience so completely outside of your purview that it will shake you to your core. And you won’t be able to do anything at all but stand in solidarity with that person. Period.
I had a student who had a dental abscess so bad he couldn’t think. He was a lovely boy: gentle, smart, talented, well-liked. And every day, that abscess got worse. When I talked to him about it, I could see pain in his eyes. I gave him ‘the numbers’ (you know, the numbers to call in ‘situations like this’), but I couldn’t shake the sense of injustice that led to his particular suffering. I couldn’t get over the dignity with which he faced it. I was enraged. And I couldn’t help him. In his rotting mouth, I saw the failings of this society, a monolith of fragmentation and lies and selfishness, an indictment I won’t let go any time soon because I know that his pain was only the tip of the iceberg.
Two years after that encounter, I decided to come to art school. While it wasn’t the reason I came to MCAD, it was one of several compounding reasons. I loved teaching, but if the society in which I teach treats its children the way it treated my student, I knew I’d better shore up my resources so at least when faced with situations like his, the well from which I drew to help or support was strong and deep and full and reliable. My students deserved to have adults in their lives who were steady and mature and fully developed, had thought at least one thing through, had asked and answered as well as they could hard questions about life and the world and living. For me, those questions and answers are in art, its subtly.
I have a friend who studied philosophy who says that when people say ‘art’, they’re talking about a uniquely Western phenomenon or concept. I don’t agree. When I say ‘art’ I mean ‘the distilling of something into a specific form with the intention of communicating meaning’. It’s quite simple. Everybody does it. Art can be any and everything. (But that doesn’t mean there are no standards or criteria that communities can use to evaluate art.) Artists are those of us who take as our vocation focus on that process in particular media. In art school, I learned that my medium is narrative as conveyed through gestures and language.
I’ll continue to test out this thing I’ve learned, push it, refine it, find ‘my’ way about it. And then, the universe willing, I’ll be back in the classroom with ‘my kids’. They’ll be different individuals, I’ll be a different person, but, hopefully, I’ll have some strategies for being one of the many adults they need to guide them through this fucked up society we all share. My desire to be ‘smart’ and my interests in ‘the meaning of things’ have become a desire to participate in establishing and maintaining healthy communities. And I sincerely believe art has a part in that.
the right light…
I watched Gidion’s Knot again before I participated in the post-performance talk-back.
Indeed, both actors have settled nicely into their roles since I saw the play opening night. They bring more nuance – complexities and complications – to their characters than I saw when I first read the script. While I still think the teacher, Ms. Clark, is scapegoated as an idealistic but ultimately vision-less bureaucrat, Laura Esping’s performance last night especially in the moments before and during her reading of Gidion’s story, rang so true. Here’s a person with self-regard, now here she is really being present and thoughtful, and now here she is reading something she detests with care, maybe even empathy.
I absolutely LOVED Aditi Kapil’s Corryn Fell! She’s the better written character, for sure, the one that clearly Johnna Adams knows best. But Aditi’s performance – for me – captures not only the loneliness of being the widowed single mother of an only child/son, but the loneliness of being an academic, and the paranoia of being a parent of color. Not a word about race is spoken in the play, but Aditi’s brown body means something very, very particular in that classroom space with these and other ‘facts’ laid out in the play. Aditi’s performance makes me wonder if Corryn’s husband was white and, if so, was Gidion visibly a person of color. Her performance makes me wonder where Corryn is going when she finally leaves the classroom. Her performance makes me wonder who else in the world is there for her. There’s a lovely, subtle parallel in the play. Ms. Clark is grading papers at the beginning and Corryn says she was grading papers when Gidion brought home the suspension note…
Alas, the premise of the play is problematic – it has never been my experience that any student, much less an 11-year-old, who is suspended from school is allowed to leave campus without a parent or guardian present.
But, built on that flawed premise, the play does do something that we don’t seem to have in this culture: it creates a space where people are brave enough to dignify each other long enough to have a painful conversation that doesn’t solve anything but perhaps resolves something and leaves the humanity of all involved in tact.
As Tyler Durden says, “Fights will go on as long as they have to.”
Which is a contrast to the real world. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, maybe I’ve been a student too long, but, at the talk-back, there seemed to be fertile ground for talking about adult/child communication, community support for families, and why education policy seems to get in and in the way of both. And yet, because a talk-back is about getting a ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of the play, the conversations that Gidion’s Knot starts take place elsewhere… Which, is good, but was, for me, frustrating.
It was interesting listening to Sandra Smith, MN PTA Outreach Commissioner talk about the ways she creates relationships with her young people by staying involved and hearing, really being interested in what they and their friends say. I wonder if maybe too many of us are so caught up – in real life – playing roles or having kids play roles that we forget to see kids as full individuals with particular needs that only they can articulate. I also wonder if maybe too many of us abdicate our responsibility as adults to measure what kids say and do against a matrix of time and experience…
in conversation
Patricia Hill Collins:
No uniform, homogenous culture of resistance ever existed among U.S. Blacks, and such a culture does not exist now. One can say, however, that U.S. Blacks have shared a common political agenda and culture, one that has been differently experienced and expressed by U.S. Blacks as a heterogeneous collectivity. Historically, survival depended on sticking together and in many ways aiming to minimize differences among African Americans. More recently, in a changing political economy where survival for many U.S. Blacks seems less of an issue, space to express these differences now exists.
Taiye (Tuakli-Wosornu) Selasi:
What distinguishes this lot and its like (in the West and at home) is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.
quote of the day
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:
By conserving and re-creating African-influenced cultural production, U.S. Black women participate in this larger “interrogation and resistance” effort. This dimension of activism undermines oppressive institutions by rejecting the anti-Black anti-female ideologies they promulgate. In the context of U.S. race relations organized via deeply entrenched racial segregation, having access to Black women’s standpoint, especially one dedicated to reproducing African-influenced, gender-specific resistance traditions, is essential. The Black feminist consciousness nurtured and articulated in this safe space may be all that stands between many U.S. Black women and internalized oppression.
Zora Neale Hurston
From Their Eyes Were Watching God:
As soon as the crowd was out of sight they closed in circles. The near ones got nearer and the far ones got near. A circle, a swoop and a hop with spread-out wings. Close in, close in till some of the more hungry or daring perched on the carcass. They wanted to begin, but the Parson wasn’t there, so a messenger was sent to the ruler in a tree where he sat.
The flock had to wait the white-headed leader, but it was hard. They jostled each other and pecked at heads in hungry irritation. Some walked up and down the beast from head to tail, tail to head. The Parson sat motionless in a dead pine tree about two miles off. He had scented the matter as quickly as any of the rest, but decorum demanded that he sit oblivious until he was notified. Then he took off with ponderous flight and circled and lowered, circled and lowered until the others danced in joy and hunger at his approach.
He finally lit on the ground and walked around the body to see if it were really dead. Peered into its nose and mouth. Examined it well from end to end and leaped upon it and bowed, and the others danced a response. That being over, he balanced and asked:
“What killed this man?”
The chorus answered, “Bare, bare fat.”
“What killed this man?”
“Bare, bare fat.”
“What killed this man?”
“Bare, bare fat.”
“Who’ll stand his funeral?”
“We!!!!!”
“Well, all right now.”
So he picked out the eyes in the ceremonial way and the feast went on. The yaller mule was gone from the town except for the porch talk, and for the children visiting his bleaching bones now and then in the spirit of adventure.
Jean Toomer
I’m in conflict over Jean Toomer, particularly Cane (but not that cover, this cover). His is lovely, observant, poetic writing, but what, or rather, how, exactly, does he see. This passage is echoed in Toni Morrison’s description of Nel and Sula in Sula, but Morrison’s ‘girls’ ultimately have more… agency (for lack of a less of-the-moment word) than Karintha. From Cane:
Karintha, at twelve, was a wild flash that told the other folks just what it was to live. At sunset, when there was no wind, and the pine-smoke from over by the sawmill hugged the earth, and you couldn’t see more than a few feet in front, her sudden darting past you was a bit of vivid color, like a black bird that flashes in light. With the other children one could hear, some distance off, their feet flopping in the two-inch dust. Karintha’s running was a whir. It had the sound of the red dust that sometimes makes a spiral in the road. At dusk, during the hush just after the sawmill had closed down, and before any of the women had started their supper-getting-ready songs, her voice, high-pitched, shrill, would put one’s ears to itching. But no one ever thought to make her stop because of it. She stoned the cows, and beat her dog, and fought the other children…. Even the preacher, who caught her at her mischief, told himself that she was as innocently lovely as a November cotton flower. Already, rumors were out about her. Homes in Georgia are most often built on the two room plan. In one, you cook and eat, in the other you sleep, and there love goes on. Karintha had seen or heard, perhaps she had felt her parents loving. One could but imitate one’s parents, for to follow them was the way of God. She played “home” with a small boy who was not afraid to do her bidding. That started the whole thing. Old men could no longer ride her hobby-horse upon their knees. But young men counted faster.
David Hammons
From An Interview with David Hammons:
1. I CAN’T STAND ART ACTUALLY. I’VE NEVER, EVER LIKED ART, EVER. I NEVER TOOK IT IN SCHOOL.
2. WHEN I WAS IN CALIFORNIA, ARTISTS WOULD WORK FOR YEARS AND NEVER HAVE A SHOW. SO SHOWING HAS NEVER BEEN THAT IMPORTANT TO ME. WE USED TO CUSS PEOPLE OUT: PEOPLE WHO BOUGHT OUR WORK, DEALERS, ETC., BECAUSE THAT PART OF BEING AN ARTIST WAS ALWAYS A JOKE TO US.
WHEN I CAME TO NEW YORK, I DIDN’T SEE ANY OF THAT. EVERYBODY WAS JUST GROVELING AND TOMMING, ANYTHING TO BE IN THE ROOM WITH SOMEBODY WITH SOME MONEY. THERE WERE NO BAD GUYS HERE; SO I SAID, “LET ME BE A BAD GUY,” OR ATTEMPT TO BE A BAD GUY, OR PLAY WITH THE BAD AREAS AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS.
Charles W. Chesnutt
From The Wife of His Youth:
“May I see it?” asked Mr. Ryder. “It might help me to remember whether I have seen the original.”
As she drew a small parcel from her bosom; he saw that it was fastened to a string that went around her neck. Removing several wrappers, she brought to light an old-fashioned daguerreotype in a black case. He looked long and intently at the portrait. It was faded with time, but the features were still distinct, and it was easy to see what manner of man it had represented.
He closed the case, and with a slow movement handed it back to her.
“I don’t know of any man in town who goes by that name,” he said, “nor have I heard of any one making such inquiries. But if you will leave me your address, I will give the matter some attention, and if I find out anything I will let you know.”
She gave him the number of a house in the neighborhood, and went away, after thanking him warmly.He wrote the address on the fly-leaf of the volume of Tennyson, and, when she had gone, rose to his feet and stood looking after her curiously. As she walked down the street with mincing step, he saw several persons whom she passed turn and look back at her with a smile of kindly amusement. When she had turned the corner, he went upstairs to his bedroom, and stood for a long time before the mirror of his dressing-case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection of his own face.