Art history

“To Stand Still Awhile”: Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World

Rohan Maitzen12 Comments

bringley1After college, for a period of two years and eight months, the “real world” became a room at Beth Israel Hospital and Tom’s one-bedroom apartment in Queens. Never mind that I was starting out at a glamorous job in a midtown skyscraper; it was these quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace, and loss—and, I suspected, about the meaning of art.

When in June of 2008, Tom died, I applied for the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew. This time, I arrive at the Met with no thought of moving forward. My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.

The “glamorous job” Patrick Bringley turned his back on was at the New Yorker; the job he took after his brother Tom’s death was as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a job he held for a decade. Reading All the Beauty in the World, his moving, meditative, wide-ranging reflections on his experience standing for thousands of hours among some of the world’s greatest treasures, I wondered if he always had it in the back of his mind that there would be a book in it someday. It’s hard to imagine anyone both literary and ambitious enough to work at the New Yorker not having that thought! This was not in any way a cynical notion on my part; if anything, I feel lucky that, with whatever long-term intentions, Bringley clearly thought and wrote down enough during his time in the museum that I could now read about it and be guided by him towards insights into what art can mean and do for us if we just stand still long enough to let it.

One of Bringley’s central insights is that art’s power comes from what it shows us about the most commonplace, and thus most human, parts of life. “Much of the greatest art,” he observes,

seeks to remind us of the obvious. This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know. Today my apprehension of the awesome reality of suffering might be as crisp and clear as Daddi’s great painting.* But we forget these things. They become less vivid. We have to return as we do to paintings, and face them again.Daddi

It isn’t always suffering and death that art invites us to stand and face. One of Bringley’s favorite paintings is Pieter Bruegel’s The Harvesters, which shows, in the foreground, a little group of peasants on their lunch break:

Looking at Bruegel’s masterpiece I sometimes think: here is a painting of literally the most common thing on earth. Most people have been farmers. Most of these have been peasants. Most lives have been labor and hardship punctuated by rest and the enjoyment of others. It is a scene that must have been so familiar to Pieter Bruegel it took an effort to notice it. But he did notice it. And he situated this little, sacred, ragtag group at the fore of his vast, outspreading world.

“I am sometimes not sure,” Bringley adds, “which is the more remarkable: that life lives up to great paintings, or that great paintings live up to life.”

templeThe individual sections of All the Beauty in the World are organized, more or less, around Bringley’s assignments to particular rooms or wings or exhibits; the larger framing is his gradual reconciliation, if that’s the right word, with the “real world” outside the museum as he learns to live with Tom’s loss. Both the people he works with (who come from all parts of the world and all have their own stories about how they came to be standing guard over Van Gogh’s Irises or the tomb of Perneb) and the people he encounters as visitors all play a part in this emotional journey, but it is the art that matters the most, in ways that are better suited to samples than summaries. Here, for instance, is Bringley’s description of a silk scroll hand-painted by Guo Xi, a “Northern Song Dynasty” master:

Ink on silk is an unforgiving medium; there are no do-overs; he couldn’t rub out and paint over his mistakes as the old masters could do with oils. My eyes can trace every stroke Guo made in AD 1080. No part of his artistry is hidden from me, nothing submerged under overlapping layers. According to Guo’s son, the master’s regular practice was to meditate several hours, then wash his hands and execute a painting as if with a single sweep of his arm . . . What this picture has afforded for a thousand years it affords today. My eyes travel the same old routes, past the fishermen in their small, still boats, the bare autumnal trees, the peddlers and their pack mule, the rock croppings, the stooped old men ascending a hill, and into the mountains shrouded in mist. It is achingly beautiful . . . I am happy to be inside this picture, so clearly a melding of nature and the artist’s mind. Guo himself feels like my intimate . . . Guo

Here he is being won over, after long skepticism about the Impressionists, to the magic of Monet’s Vétheuil in Summer:

I see a village and a river and the village’s reflection suspended in river water, only in Monet’s world there is no such thing as sunlight really, just color. Monet has spread around the sunlight color, like the goodly maker of his little universe. He has spread it, splashed it, and affixed it to the canvas with such mastery that I can’t put an end to its ceaseless shimmering. I look at the picture a long time, and it only grows more abundant; it won’t conclude.

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves . . . Monet’s picture brings to mind one of those rarer moments where every particle of what we apprehend matters—the breeze matters, the chirping of birds matters, the nonsense a child babbles matters—and you can adore the wholeness, or even the holiness, of that moment.

With regret, I have left out some parts of this passage, because it is quite long, but I loved every word of it. One more, from Bringley’s encounter with a “nkisi, or power figure, made by the Songye people of what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo”:

Above all, I can see the extraordinary geometry the wood-carver achieved in his effort to make the nkisi supernatural. This artist faced a tremendous formal challenge, I realize. Unlike Guo’s scroll or Monet’s painting, his sculpture wasn’t an imitation or a depiction of anything else. It wasn’t meant to look like a divine being; it was the divine being and, as such, had to appear as though it existed across a chasm from ordinary human efforts. It had to look a bit like a newborn baby looks . . . a new, miraculous, self-insistent whole.

. . . More than just dazzled, I am moved. With its eyes softly shut, the nkisi has a powerful air of inwardness, as though summoning the will to take on perilous forces closing in on it . . . it had to be this magnificent to push back.

There is much more, ranging across the breadth of the museum’s collections. Although I learned a lot from Bringley’s explanations of specific artefacts, they are (almost) beside the point, as these examples show: the interest and impact of the book comes mostly from his personal interactions—emotional and intellectual—with the works of art. It is an idiosyncratic kind of art appreciation, perhaps, though well-informed (he has done his research, in and out of the museum) and open-minded, but I think Bringley would argue that this is also the best kind.

harvesters

As the years pass, all this time spend standing still gradually brings Bringley back in touch with the movement of life itself. “Grief,” he aptly observes,

is among other things a loss of rhythm. You lose someone, it puts a hole in your life and for a time you huddle down in that hole. In coming to the Met, I saw an opportunity to conflate my hole with a grand cathedral, to linger in a place that seemed untouched by the rhythms of the everyday. But those rhythms have found me again, and their invitations are alluring. It turns out I don’t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever.

One sign of his revitalization is, paradoxically, that art begins to lose its hold on him. Looking at a painting of a mother and child by Mary Cassatt, he is overcome with its beauty: “for the first time in a long time, I simply adore.” He is saddened by his realization that this total absorption in a work of art has become less frequent for him:

Strangely, I think I am grieving for the end of my acute grief. The loss that made a hole at the center of my life is less on my mind than sundry concerns that have filled the hole in. And I suppose that is right and natural, but it’s hard to accept.”

All grievers probably recognize this reluctance to admit that time simply will not stand still with you and your sorrow (I’m reminded yet again of Denise Riley—”The dead slip away, as we realize that we have unwillingly left them behind us in their timelessness—this second, now final, loss”). Life is movement, and most of us step back into the current again at some point, changed but persisting. “Sometimes,” Bringley concludes,

life can be about simplicity and stillness, in the vein of a watchful guard amid shimmering works of art. But it is also about the head-down work of living and struggling and growing and creating.

bringley2And so he leaves this job too. From now on when he returns to the museum it will be as a visitor, just another person stepping inside for a moment to be reminded of the obvious, and to be reassured

that some things aren’t transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes—and here is the proof, painted in oils, carved in marble, stitched into quilts.

How I wish I could walk out the door right now and take him up on his closing advice about the best time to visit (“come in the morning . . . when the museum is quietest”). I used to visit the Met regularly myself: as a graduate student at Cornell, I took advantage of my (relative) proximity to the city to get season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera (a dream come true for a long-time listener to their Saturday afternoon broadcasts) and as often as I could, I worked in a museum visit as well. There is never enough time to take in everything you want to see—Bringley had a decade, thousands of hours, and will still be going back, after all! I often feel, in art galleries, that I never know enough to get the most out of them, but Bringley has not just inspired me but given me new confidence. “You’re qualified to weigh in on the biggest questions artworks raise,” he says in his closing peroration:

So under the cover of no one hearing your thoughts, think brave thoughts, searching thoughts, painful thoughts, and maybe foolish thoughts, not to arrive at right answers but to better understand the human mind and heart as you put both to use.

I like that idea of how to be in a museum—and I loved this book.

*You can find links to all the works Bringley references here. Some of them, for copyright reasons, can’t be downloaded, which is why my inserted images (all public domain) don’t 100% correspond to the examples I’ve quoted from the book.

“Rests in the Gap”: María Gainza, Optic Nerve

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

optic-nerveMaybe it had something to do with my footwear, but this time it was fireworks, what A. S. Byatt calls “the kick galvanic.” It reminded me that all of art rests in the gap between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which truly captivates you. And that the tiniest thing can make the difference.

Optic Nerve is a generic hybrid: part memoir, or perhaps (as it’s subtitled “A Novel”) what we now call “auto-fiction”; part personal essays (or is that aspect intrinsic to the concept of auto-fiction?); part art history; part art criticism (or at any rate part commentary on art).

I had trouble, as a reader, unifying these parts. I found many–though not all–of the personal and family anecdotes interesting and most–though still not all–of the explorations of particular artists and their works engrossing and thought-provoking. I liked the surprises that so many of Gainza’s stories, about herself or about art, delivered; I liked the sense that we were wandering through a kind of gallery of her life that in its turn had doors that opened onto the lives of artists.

What I liked best was the way she showed me paintings. I frequently wished the book included color plates so I could see for myself, so that I could try looking at them through the lens of her writing. Happily, of course, having the internet at my fingertips made it easy to supplement the prose with the visuals, but it didn’t seem ideal to have to take my attention away from the book to do that. I wonder why it wasn’t possible to open each chapter with an illustration: would it have been too expensive – for the publisher and thus the potential purchasers of the book? or is there some way in which the book does not want us to do this?

optic-nerve-2What I didn’t like: Optic Nerve felt really miscellaneous. Its unifying force is Gainza herself, or the narrating version of her, I suppose, but I often found myself puzzled over what else bound together the specific elements she included in each chapter. Sometimes I could see it, or sense it (the chapter about her brother and El Greco, for instance, which turned on ideas about religion, and – I think – on tensions between ascetism and sensuality), but most of the time it seemed random. Was I not reading or thinking hard enough, or was that fragmentation deliberate? Maybe the idea was precisely to scatter our focus, or to reflect the ways our lives are not in fact neatly organized around common themes–or to match her commentary on art, which emphasizes that we should, or always do, feel first and think later. I would have liked a bit of guidance about this from the book itself.

Two chapters – or, really, two painters – made the strongest impression: they are the ones I couldn’t read more about without an image search. In both cases it was because of how Gainza wrote about their paintings. Here she is on Courbet’s The Stormy Sea (Mer orageuse):

A foamy roller breaks against rocks in the foreground; at the horizon, the sea and sky meld into one; and in the top half of the picture the sky is packed with bulging pinkish clouds. This oil on canvas from 1869 is close to one meter high and one meter wide, just right to hang on my chimney breast, if I had one. How lovely it would be to watch a fire burning beneath such a sea! Every time I look at it, something inside me becomes compressed, a sensation between my chest and my throat, like a small bite being taken out of me. I have learned to respect this twinge, to pay attention to it, because my body always works things out before I do. Only afterward does my intellect draw its conclusions.

La_Mer_orageuse_-_Gustave_Courbet

Here is some of what she says about Rothko:

People say you have to approach a Rothko in the same way you approach a sunrise. The work has a clear beauty, but that beauty can be either sublime or decorative . . . Perhaps there is something spiritual in the experience of looking at a Rothko, but it’s the kind of spiritual that resists description: like seeing a glacier, or crossing a desert. Rarely do the inadequacies of language become so patently obvious. Standing before a Rothko, you might reach for something meaningful to say, only to end up talking nonsense. All you really want to say is “fuck me.”

Light Red Over Black 1957 by Mark Rothko 1903-1970

One more sample, from the section on El Greco:

One winter’s night, an icy wind began to blow through his paintings. The space inside them grew constricted, and his figures, as if to adapt to these new climes, hollowed themselves out and lengthened upward.

Optic Nerve is not the kind of book I usually seek out, and the discomfort I felt with its form (or formlessness) confirmed my typical hesitation. I liked these passages (and others) so much, though, that reading this book also made me think I should overcome those hesitations more often–that I should take more reading risks. It’s true that some of my best reading experiences have been with books that are not at all, at least at first glance, my usual kind of thing (Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden, for example–I still don’t really understand why I felt such a strong compulsion to buy it!). On the other hand, my irritation when I take a risk and hate the result is immense! That perpetual struggle to weigh risk and reward is one reason the Rothko chapter affected me so much. His is exactly the kind of painting I ordinarily have no time for, but Gainza made me really want to look at it–she made me want to go to MOMA or the Tate and stare at the real thing, wish that I could have gone to the MFA in Boston to try their experiment in “seeking stillness.”

Maybe what I should really read is not more generically miscellaneous writing but more good art criticism–and yet what Optic Nerve proposes, or maybe proves, is that “good art criticism” is a function of the observer, that the optic nerve is part of the whole person. I may find the whole idea of auto-fiction both incoherent and solipsistic, but genre labels aside, in that respect at least Gainza’s book makes perfect sense.

“An Artist”? Nell Painter, Old in Art School

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

Painter

An An Artist artist finds her identity in art, does nothing but make art, and does it all the time, making work of unimaginable creativity. An An Artist artist makes art 100 percent of the time. . . . All of me wanted to be An Artist–and yet at the same time to keep my past as a thinker and writer. But how could I be An Artist, when “academic” was so poisonous a concept in art and while I had always been academic?

I have never wanted to be “An Artist,” never dreamed of reinventing myself the way Nell Painter did herself when she retired from a distinguished career as a historian and enrolled in a BFA and then an MFA program. I was drawn to her memoir about this experience, though, partly because of my own recent (and ongoing) attempts to at least become more artistic and partly because in a different and more modest way I have reinvented myself over the past decade. It has been a more sputtering process for me, not begun with anything like the same decisiveness and clarity of purpose–but as eventually happens with Painter, the result has been work that could be described as “hybrid,” rooted in academic experience but expressing itself differently. One of the recurrent questions in Painter’s book is what exactly defines “An Artist”–or, when are you entitled to consider yourself one? In a similar way, I puzzle about what it means to call yourself “A Writer,” an identity that surely overlaps with being a professor but which is rarely claimed by or attributed to those whose writing is academic.

Painter-Self-Portrait-10
Nell Painter, “Self-Portrait 10”

Old in Art School is a fascinating read if you are interested in these kinds of questions, or in questions about what makes art “good” (and who decides) or how (or whether) art can be taught. Painter’s own journey follows her from enthusiasm to painful doubt about her own goals and talents: an alternative subtitle could be A Memoir of Imposter Syndrome, given how often she is driven to despair about whether she can or should sustain her ambition to be an artist (much less An Artist), or how to reconcile her own interests–in particular subjects as well as styles, and especially in incorporating historical and textual material into her work–with the advice she gets in the relentless “crits” that are a key part of the art school apparatus.

The early part of the memoir follows her struggle to see differently and to let go of her fixation on coherence. “False and foolish pride, mine,” she remarks tartly, “beguiled by my lying twentieth-century eyes”:

My lying twentieth-century eyes favored craft, clarity, skill, narrative, and meaning. My twenty-first-century classmates and teachers preferred everyday subject matter, the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic, appropriation, and the visible marks of facture: drips, smudges, and what in the twentieth century would have been considered mistakes needing to be cleaned up. What I thought of as private intimacy is out in the open, as graphically as possible. Penises and vaginas are commonplace motifs, and nowadays even I contemplate making penis art. painter-audio

One way that, as a non-Artist, I understand this shift is away from art as pictures (whether more or less representative) and towards art as visual thinking–mimetic or figurative art is out, and highly conceptual art is in. (The more advanced Painter’s work gets, the more explanation it requires to know what she thinks it is doing, or is about.) This won’t surprise anyone who knows even a little bit about art history, of course, but Painter helped clarify for me why an artist, or at any rate an aspiring Artist (one who wants to be taken seriously in what she calls “the Art World”–Painter is irritatingly fond of capitalizing words to given them more, or more ironic, weight), would have to, and presumably want to, embrace the 21st-century modes she outlines. Other ways of seeing and painting would condemn you to being seen as derivative or commercial–heaven forbid! I think there is some tension between that compulsion towards the new and what an amateur like me might think of as authenticity. What if you love doing beautiful watercolors of recognizable landscapes? should you really have to abandon them for “penis art” to qualify as an artist? (Similarly, do you–should you–have to abandon plot and character to be taken seriously as a novelist? Some critics clearly think so.) But at least as Painter tells it, for her it was a genuine and ultimately satisfying–if often unhappy and difficult–process of transformation in her aesthetic vision.

soul-bowling-1
Nell Painter, “Soul Bowling”

Old in Art School is also interesting about Painter’s feelings as she loses her hard-won authority as a historian and academic. Not only did she hold prestigious professorial appointments, including at Princeton, but she was the President of the Organization of American Historians and served on the boards of multiple other important professional organizations including the American Historical Society and the Association of Black Women Historians. None of this means anything to her art school “peers,” who see her only as an anomaly–as an “old” woman mysteriously landed among them (Painter is 64 when she begins her BFA at Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts), and as a black woman in a conspicuously non-diverse context. Though she is occasionally and understandably bitter about the awkwardness and exclusion that results, she is also acidly funny about her undergraduate classmates:

Day after day after day I ate alone among undergraduates laughing uproariously and commiserating dramatically over what was Technicolor red-orange hilarious and what was acrylic cyan-green catastrophic. Everything new. Everything just born. Drama, always. Undergraduates’ lives were so vivid. . . . In their arty costumes and fabulous tattoos, they nuzzled one another, arms on shoulders, kisses on cheeks. They laughed some more. They chose their vegetarian meals together, paid up together, sat down together, fed off each other’s plats, and left together arm in arm. Everything mattered so deeply.

Her curmudgeonly perspective does not keep her from learning both alongside and from her youthful peers, who distress and annoy her sometimes with what she perceives as their lack of commitment, organization, and patient effort but also often surprise her with the results of their different habits and artistic instincts. Still, she attributes her own progress to “education and hard work”: this approach may be less glamorous than frantic all-nighters in the studio and run contrary to the popular assertion that an artist is born, not made, but in her case at least, it is the route to success.

new dogs symmetrical
Nell Painter, “New Dogs: Symmetrical”

What does success mean to her? Another interesting strand of Old in Art School is Painter’s attempt to answer this question, which is closely related to the question of why she attends art school at all. “You don’t need it,” one of her teachers tells her about her decision to go on to an MFA after finishing at Mason Gross. Painter resists that advice, partly because she rejects a narrative the sadly familiar subtext of which is “you can’t do it” or “you shouldn’t do it.” Her determination is also clearly related to her academic background, and the fixation it cultivates on credentials and validation. “I just assumed,” Painter says,

I could not be a serious artist without art graduate school, just as I had known I could not be a serious historian–a publishing historian, a scholarly historian–without history graduate school. For history graduate school, I went to Harvard. For art graduate school, I went to RISD.

She doesn’t spend much time interrogating these assumptions, though they are part and parcel of her ambition not just to paint better on her own terms but to become a recognized participant in the Art World. As she tells it, entrée into that world does depend on credentials and connections, but especially given how important she finds advice and critiques from people she knows outside of her degree programs, I wondered about how necessary such formal programs were to her or indeed are to art itself, or whether they have the same equivocal relationship to art that MFA programs do to writing. I don’t know the art world well enough to know if there is a faintly disparaging term equivalent to “MFA fiction,” or if there’s the same lingering sense that the degree is really essential only so that you can compete for jobs teaching in similar programs–not because a degree is either necessary or sufficient for you to write a great novel or brilliant poetry.

plantains3
Nell Painter, “Plantains 3”

In any case, success for Painter ultimately means both completing her degrees and finding her way to art that encompasses her historical expertise and her love of text. “In my history books,” she concludes,

I have already had my say in clear language and discursive meaning about community. Now what history means to me in images is freedom from coherence, clarity, and collective representation. My images carry their visual meaning, which may or may not explicate history usefully or unequivocally.

Painter’s book did not entirely convince me about the rightness of this result: I don’t really grasp the value in abandoning coherence, for instance, and (relatedly) my own taste in visual art is pretty old-fashioned. By and large I prefer figurative art to abstract or expressionist art, and Painter’s more chaotic, collage-like works do not appeal to me aesthetically, though her comments about them and the conceptual projects they fulfill certainly interest me.

Old in Art School is not really that kind of a book, though: it is not a work of theory or art history, or an aesthetic treatise. It is, as its subtitle indicates, a personal memoir. A significant amount of the book is spent on Painter’s family, and on her feelings–which are not separate from her artistic development but entangled with it, as one of her main struggles is reconciling the pull of her personal life with the art school expectation that “an An Artist artist makes art 100 percent of the time.” In particular, Painter lives in New Jersey and her aging parents live in California. They demand and deserve her time and attention; her grief for the loss of her mother, the emotional vortex of her father’s depression and his eventual move east to be closer to her, his death–these are not things she can avoid or deny, though for a long time she feels intensely conflicted about how to cope with them and still pursue her artistic ambitions. The artistic ethos Painter finally embraces is one that does not insist on separating life from art, just as it also incorporates history and writing.

4-the-america-I-know
Nell Painter, “The America I Know – 4”

Old in Art School is sometimes awkward as it shifts among its many topics. Painter’s narrative jumps around in time in ways that did not always make sense to me, and her prose often seemed stilted. She is refreshingly frank, though, including about her own failures of empathy, patience, or insight, and she is consistently sharp and illuminating about being older, especially as a woman, among mostly young people, and about being a black academic and artist in worlds where to be either, never mind both, is still a rarity. Though her experiences in these respects are far from my own, I definitely recognized the plague of self-doubt and the frustrating truth that appeals to other people’s judgment can never really appease it. As for being “An Artist” or “A Writer,” Painter is happier having reconciled her academic and artistic selves. The key may be to stop fretting about identity in any such absolute way and just keep doing the work in front of you–while always also imagining how else, and what else, you might make with the time you have.

Teaching Art: “Let me describe it to you”

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that we’ve been watching one of The Learning Company’s ‘Great Courses,’ The History of European Art. In the comments thread, I noted that the lecturer’s favorite move is to “describe” an artwork to us. At first glance (so to speak!) that seems an odd strategy: we’re looking right at the art, after all. There are many things we can’t do (interrupt him with questions chief among them) but we can see what’s right in front of our own eyes.

holmes

Or can we? That, of course, is the trick, the gimmick, the magic, even, of the process. We see it, but, as Sherlock Holmes so often says to poor Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” The untrained eye does not really know what it’s looking at. Professor Kloss may begin by stating what seems self-evident (“there’s a woman in the center of the painting,” “the man on the left side is wearing a wonderful blue robe”) but this is only a preliminary stock-taking, prior to pointing out what requires more expertise to really see: who the woman is, perhaps, and how this version of her differs from other ones; how the blue robe makes other blue bits stand out and maybe form a design across the canvas; why that particular shade of blue is rare in frescoes; how the artist’s brush strokes create a light effect on the woman’s body; what the striking whiteness of her skin suggests about not just the design but the larger meaning of the painting. Even the stock-taking is sometimes a good prompt: perhaps I wasn’t looking at the man on the left at first, because my eye was more immediately drawn to something else.

It’s not a perfect process, especially pedagogically. Not only does Professor Kloss often not describe something we’re curious about, but he never invites us to look first and see what we notice. Realizing this is salutary, as I’ve been thinking that his method is close to one kind of thing I do all the time in my classes: focus on a scene or a passage and try to bring out what’s interesting about it. There too we typically start with a description: “what’s going on here?” Then we move to the more open-ended process of noticing: “what’s interesting about it?” Early in a course, I am likely to do sample analyses, to model what we’re trying to do. Throughout, I also provide relevant contexts, including historical, biographical, literary, or theoretical. But as we go along, the burden of noticing shifts more and more to my students: knowing what they’re looking at — being able to “describe” it with expertise — could be considered our ultimate “course objective.” When I lecture, but also when we discuss and analyze and debate in class, what we’re doing is accumulating the knowledge and skills to make their descriptions more than just statements of the obvious — in my classes, which are fiction-intensive, the crucial distinction is to make them more than just plot summary.

Watching Professor Kloss describe sculptures, lithographs, wood cuts, paintings, frescoes and everything else makes me very aware of how little I have in my own head that helps me with his task: he knows all kinds of things that I don’t, and as a result he sees all kinds of things that I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d swear he sees things that aren’t there — and now I wonder how often my own students feel the same way. I’m also very aware of how passive it makes me knowing he’s going to do all of his own noticing, and how little room the video lecture format leaves for me to have any ideas of my own. Well, I could have speculative ideas: heck, I can pause the video and say anything I want! But what I really want is to test my tentative observations against his expertise. I feel confident in my own taste (many times I have thought, as he rhapsodized about whatever’s on his current slide, “I hate that!” or “That’s beautiful!”), but I know that visceral reaction is irrelevant to the important process of really seeing and understanding what I’m seeing. That lack of interaction with an informed point of view is the biggest obstacle to my becoming anything of an expert myself.

Édouard_Manet_-_Le_Déjeuner_sur_l'herbe

Of course, I’m never going to become an expert art historian, but my job is all about developing expertise in my students. Stocking their heads full of information is one thing, but it’s not the only thing, and it’s not the most important thing. In some ways, it’s also something they can do on their own, if they’re motivated, though as I’ve written about before, it’s easy to overestimate the ease and efficiency of finding good information, much less knowing how to make it useful. Watching Professor Kloss describe great works of art is very interesting, but it’s also very passive. It reinforces for me the pedagogical necessity of going back and forth. Sure, let me describe it to you — but now, tell me what you see. Then we’ll talk about it.

One question I would definitely ask Professor Kloss, if only I could: we’ve reached Monet and so far pretty much the only women in the series have been Madonnas, Magdalenes, saints, or nudes. In the history of European art to 1860, there’s not one woman artist worth including?

Before Coursera, There Were the ‘Great Courses’

Rohan Maitzen10 Comments

arenachapelHave any of you watched any of the videos produced for The Great Courses series? We’re pretty big fans of these in our house as sources of enrichment and edutainment. My mathematically-inclined son has watched  a number of them (along with his dad), including The Joy of Mathematics, Zero to Infinity: A History of Numbers, An Introduction to Number Theory, and Discrete Mathematics — as well as some music ones, including (aptly, for him) How Music and Mathematics Relate. My husband and I are currently watching A History of European Art, which I chose as a birthday gift because I’ve strolled through too many museums feeling I don’t really know enough about what I’m looking at.

I’m enjoying the course a lot. The lecturer, William Kloss, is not only erudite but endearingly enamored of his subject: he seems to stay pretty much on script, but every so often he gets this little extra glimmer in his eye or urgency in his voice and you know he just can’t help himself — he has to share how he feels about something. He has a lot of ground to cover in just 48 lectures and as a result has to skip along quite briskly (we got to peer closely at only three works by Michelangelo, for instance) — but that said, I think both members of this Teeny-tiny Open Offline Course would have been happy with a little less attention to medieval altarpieces, however revealing the distinctions between their various reworkings of the identical scriptural scenes.

It’s been impossible to sit through these lectures without thinking about their much larger cousins, the MOOCs. MOOCs, after all, are built around recorded lectures by eminent specialists. I discovered that the booklets accompanying our DVD set include some review questions, so if we were so inclined, we could take that extra step or two to help with comprehension and retention. Of course, we can’t ask Professor Kloss to check our answers (but then, that can’t happen in MOOCs either) — but we’d have each other, and I feel confident our ‘peer evaluation’ would be pretty rigorous. We’re not doing the fairly dull provided questions, though: we’re just watching the videos.

Piero-della-Francesca-The-Nativity

And yet we do have a lot of questions about what we’re seeing. They aren’t usually of the “reiterate the main distinction between Romanesque and Gothic architecture” kind but are, more typically, challenges to Professor Kloss’s conclusions or effusions. For one thing, we find the vocabulary of art criticism — or, perhaps more justly, his vocabulary — kind of impressionistic, if you’ll forgive the pun, and sometimes his rhapsodies about the wondrous unforgettable quality of one piece or another strike us as special pleading more than reasoned analysis. It would be nice to be able to  press him on just what he means, now and then. We often wonder about details of the paintings that he doesn’t choose to comment on, but of course he carries on quite impervious to our curiosity. Sometimes there are technical issues we’d like to understand better, or additional materials we’d love to see. In a MOOC, we’d have forums where I suppose we could crowd-source these questions, and even now if we really cared we could do some research of our own to see if they’re addressed anywhere. But there are at least two advantages to having a real live instructor: one would be our trust in the answers we got, and the other would be the efficiency of talking to someone who can filter the noise for us, rather than trying to create our own expertise on the fly. Here’s a third, actually: that real live instructor can help us reframe our questions too, which itself, in an unfamiliar field, is not easy (as anyone who has ever had students create discussion questions for class can attest), and in that back-and-forth too there is learning.

I do feel I am learning from my Great Course. I would be learning even more if I were doing more than watching it fairly passively, and I would be learning more still if I were actually taking the course in person, face to face. I don’t think there’s anyone who is claiming that MOOCs are as pedagogically effective (never mind as socially engaging) as actual classroom instruction. What’s odd is how much hype there is around them as if we haven’t already, for decades, had similar options. Our TOOC* lacks the online infrastructure, but otherwise, in its essentials, it’s about the same: you watch and listen, and then you decide how involved you want to be. That’s OK for us, because our only stake in this experience is personal, our only goal some extra enlightenment. It’s not OK if you imagine this activity as part of a deliberate process of intellectual and academic development.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with Hieronymous Bosch: tonight it’s Lecture 25: Netherlandish Art in the 16th Century.

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*Technically it’s not entirely “open” since the DVDs aren’t free (but if you keep an eye out for sales, as we do, they aren’t expensive either) — but they could be borrowed from libraries, I expect.