R/W Curator's Talk

Gave a short talk tonight at the closing reception for R/W: Reading and Writing Visual Experience, a show I organized for the Hicks Art Gallery at Bucks County Community College. Here's some video:

What if you could read stupid fast?

Scanning my headlines today, I came across a curious article in FastCompany about Spritz, a technology that promises to speed your reading up to 250-1,000 words per minute (average reading wpm scores are between 180 on a monitor and 300 on paper according to a variety of places I located online).

Part of what was interesting about the article was the up front admission that not all reading is the same. Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Spritzing [sic] is not for everyone,” CEO and co-founder Frank Waldman tells Co.Design. “But for digesting emails, social media streams, and news especially, it allows you to read more in a shorter amount of time." 

and later...

“If you’re reading Shakespeare, you’re not going to want to do it with Spritz,” Waldman admits. “But with a romance novel, for example, people skim like crazy anyway. They just rip through a book, reading for plot. Are they savoring every word? Probably not.”

Whether people read romance novels for plot or for the steamy bits is not really the question, it's about that 'savoring' idea and whether some writing is fast food while other writing is haute cuisine. This plays into the myth of 'difficult' writing to some extent, as well as, on a cognitive level, what happens when you read.

Designers (who after all, are often responsible for the look and feel of what we read, that's not an author's job) know that some typefaces facilitate reading and others discourage it. They may also be familiar with research that shows that we read words all at once as a result of shape recognition and through predictions about what will come next in a given sentence. Some designers have even begun to develop type for readers who deal with reading-disruptive problems like dyslexia. Though reading began as a means of recording and transmitting the human voice, it lost that function more or less with the advent of printing in the west (according to Steven Roger Fischer, who write a great History of Reading). Though a number of readers still sub-vocalize out of habit, we can read at speeds that greatly outpace our ability to speak.

Spritz apparently exploits some of those cognitive loop holes by aligning text around a certain key space on the screen and flashing through it centered on that axis. Certain letters are rendered in red and their position in the word helps your mind decode them more quickly. Words flying by at the 500-word per minute rate were easy enough for me to follow.

All of which is fascinating, but it makes me think about the evolutionary conditions that led to reading in the first place and wonder whether or not we are living up to our potential. Presumably, our ability to read grew out of the evolutionary need to find meaning in the indexical signs in the landscape. Those who could 'read' the footprints of possible prey in the mud or dust, interpret how recently made they were and the direction the animal was headed, had an evolutionary advantage over those who couldn't infer that information from visible markers.

By that theory, the ability to read on a primitive level is shared with a large number of species who can figure out information from what they see. Written language didn't come along until approximately 4,000 years ago (some 30,000 - 50,000 years after early people started scratching patterns into ochre or paintings on the walls of caves), so it is arguably an aspect of our mental faculties that was latent until a function appeared for it.

Would I want superpowers of speed in reading? Yes and no...I realize that I often don't fully understand the impact of something when I first see it, and my books bristle with post-it flags that beckon me back into passages I need to think about. Watching words race by on Spritz, I wonder what happens if I try to reflect while I read, if I'll get myself tripped up and crash like a runner who has lost his stride. But the whole problem makes me wonder if we aren't actually endowed with powers we simply haven't discovered - capacities to read, to communicate, to notice - that we just haven't pushed hard enough to obtain but which lie dormant inside us, like the power of reading did for centuries.

Interesting things about writing

It would be easier to say Twitter is a colossal waste of time, though it would be more accurate to admit I just don't know what it's for. I feel like it is some tool I encounter in the hardware store that I don't know how or why to use. After all, many of us got along just fine without it for years...how essential can it be?

Then I read an interesting essay like Bob Mankoff's post about the relationship between Tweets and cartoon captions in the New Yorker (actually this one is part two; I am eager to read part one). I am struck by the ways comedy writers use twitter, as a 'warm up' and to accomplish specific joke 'moves', and it makes me wonder whether I am being too rigid in my thinking about this kind of writing....

Around our house, we have a special respect for people who can up with unexpected uses of existing materials - re-purposing is on  level with invention. Finding a way to use Twitter as a tool (rather than in its boring self-promoting, over-sharing, prescribed way) is startling in that manner.

Will I figure this out? I don't know, but I think a solution would involve exploring the limitations of the medium. I know there is an upper limit on characters, and that there are ways to tie messages together through special characters (@, #). It seems like there must be poets who are interested in limitations who are employing this thing...I am thinking about Twitterwriting and welcome any suggestions...

Impossible Books Opening

We had a lovely reception for Impossible Books at the Philadelphia Sculpture Gym last night. It was very interesting to hear each of the writers in the projects discuss and read from their work. Here's a short video shot by Gabriel Brown of his aunt, historian Mary Brown, describing our books.

Here are some images of the works on display...

Four Paradigms of Cold War Power, 2014, Wood, paper, and plastic, edition of 5, 6x6x6 in.

Principles of American Military Budget Planning, 2014, printed and embossed plastic,
edition of 250, 2 1/8 x 3 3/8 in. 

A History of the American Civil War from 1619 to the Present, 2014, digitally printed cotton and plexiglas,
edition of 5, dimensions variable


Historian Mary Brown and I at the opening...

Don't leave home without it - Updated

Our cards came in...

...and thie piece is up...A History of the American Civil War, 1619 to the Present

A History of the American Civil War, 1619 to the Present (detail)

Four Histories of the Cold War

Two 'chapters' of  Four Histories of the Cold War...I think the Xerox transfer is too hard to read; we're just going to have to go with the right-facing copy mounted to the pyramid...

In the final version, these texts are on the interior of the framework...it's just interesting to mess with them facing outwards....

Learning Philosophies

Each of us, to get our teaching job in higher education, has had to write the dreaded ‘teaching philosophy’ statement. But now I wonder when students will start writing their learning philosophies.

This comes to mind because a student wrote to me (in my capacity as Department Chair) asking to be moved to another section of drawing because, after a week of meetings, he felt that the instructor wouldn’t ‘challenge him enough’. Apparently, this student had sought a schedule change from advising but been turned down and had finally gotten to me. There was no mention of having spoken to the instructor in this request.

I wrote back and said the department works very hard to ensure consistency across the various sections of a course number and that we don’t make changes for reasons of personality conflict. I added that an implicit part of the curriculum is teaching students to deal with diversity of approaches and methodologies in the making and discussion of art and design.

I am taking this opportunity to reflect on this statement.

It would seem to me that the student has a learning philosophy in place: classes are confrontations in which the students are challenged by the teacher. This is buttressed by a lot of language we use in classes – the idea of assigning ‘problems’ for which students need to provide ‘solutions’. In one way or another, the teacher is responsible for motivating the student by providing a challenge, either in the form of assignments or in the form of a learning atmosphere that suggests competition.

This kind of thing turns up in discussion about crits, too. A great many students complain that people are soft in crits, and give the impression that if they are not called out for something then the critique is, in some fatal way, not ‘honest.’ The implicit assumption here is that critique has a toughening-up function to fulfill, and that students need to learn to ‘defend’ their work…presumably against some imagined, adversarial viewer. In my long experience as a teacher and critic, I can honestly say that the greater challenge artists face is learning to be generous enough to engage the indifferent viewer – who cares about your work, anyway? – but that’s another essay…

The confrontational class model, and its accompanying assumption that challenge motivates students, is just one of the possible myriad ways to think about running a class…and it’s one that is frankly at odds with a lot of what is going on in the world where collaboration is being stressed over confrontation and the ability to work in a group to achieve objectives that exceed the talent and skill of the individual is becoming more and more important.

So what if you want to run a class in which you nurture your students into moving from their comfort zone of familiar (and boring) habits into a new kind of creative identity? Where you work to get them out of the defensive crouch typical to students who are novices in a discipline and into a stance where they are willing to realize that the solutions they have are not entirely sufficient to solve the problems the class – as a whole – faces? In other words, to a place where they are ready to really learn, rather than repeating bad habits or sharpening useless, outmoded skills?

And what if your student has an unexamined assumption that classes are supposed to be bootcamps or trials by fire and you just don’t want to play along with that macho fantasy by being turned into the evil center of the class? I signed up to be a teacher, not to play a supporting role in some teenager’s private version of The Hunger Games by providing 'challenges'.

Teaching is not just transmitting information. It matters how you run your class (and that’s why those teaching philosophies are not going away), but it also matters what students expect from classes. They need the chance to think about that, to examine their assumptions about the role of the learner (which is utterly, completely different from the role of the consumer…which society expects them to play all day, everyday). A student-centered class isn’t a euphemism for making happy customers or taking away faculty research – it’s about making sure students know that they are active participants in their education and that they have work to do…and it might be harder than some ‘challenge’ handed down from a teacher. It might actually involve learning.

Last book, in progress...

By far, the most complicated of these books is the one about the Cold War, in which four paradigms for understanding the superpowers are addressed. Here is a screen shot of the files that will guide the laser cutter/engraver in making the wood frame that holds it all togehter...hope to have it ready to test tomorrow...

Another 'page' in our history book

working on the segment on military technology, I needed a break from all those large numbers...

Fighting the Civil War

One of the books we're making for the show is called (tentatively) The Civil War in the United States from 1619 to the Present. In it, six banners describing the conflicts of the nearly 400-year long American Civil War (ranging from race to finance to the Constitution) pass through the sculptural eye of a needle that represents the armed conflict of the war (from 1861 - 1864).

Here's a screen shot of the banners in progress...I am struggling mightily to learn the sofware as I work...

more to follow....

Impossible books update

Getting ready for the show at Philadephia Sculpture Gym next month, Mary Beth and I visited and staked out some space. It is an excellent space...

and we hope we can do something good.

We retreated to Sabbatical Studio and did some writing and building...very small steps...

Mary Beth working on text for a 'book' about the Civil War that will consist of streamers passing through a sculptural hook on the wall...

a piece of a text collage in process...

War always costs more than cash on hand...updated

Custer finds a home in this sketch...I've been looking for vendors to print these - embossed cards are kind of expensive, but they would really look right. Got to figure this one out...

Updated! Added the pattern that makes it look at little more legit...here is the text that will go on the back of this 'experimental book':

War Always Costs More Than Cash on Hand 1776    1848    1861    1914       1964 ·      1776:  The Second Continental Congress declares war on Great Britain without having the money to pay for it. Started printing money, which was soon “not worth a continental.”
·      1848:  The United States declared war on Mexico, and recoups the money spent by claiming the northern third of the country in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
·      1861:  Faced with having to put down a rebellion, Congress passed the first income tax law, only to have Chief Justice Roger Brook Taney declare it unconstitutional.  The states ratified an amendment in time to help pay for World War I
·      1942:  The U.S. government forgives tax payers one year of federal income tax in order to implement a new system whereby estimates of taxes owed are deducted from paychecks as they are issued, with the tax payer getting any overpayment back at the end of the year.
·      1964:  The Gulf of Tonkin gives President Lyndon Johnson a “blank check” to fight the war in Vietnam as he sees fit, but no means to pay for it; Johnson hides some expenses in other parts of the budget, raises taxes, & eventually borrows money through the regular bond market, touching off a generation of inflation.

Updated! Two more sketches...very recognizably related to a credit card...I would appreciate any thoughts in the comments!

Impossible books...illustration in progress...

Turns out we need a picture of General Custer for one of the freshman history 'books' in our project...so I am struggling to remember how to work Illustrator to produce an image...here's a screenshot of our progress...In the end he's going to end up standing in for the American Express centurion as part of a take one in the show.

Collaborating

For a while now, I've been making drawings with my seven-year old son, Andy. Lately, I've been trying to learn a few lessons on expressions from him...here are some examples...

Andy will start the designs and then ask me to draw 'the prototype"...I was really taken with the underbite he gave Goopshot...

Mystic seemed to have a mask of some sort, but the diamond on his tail was what really mattered (I learned...after I drew the mask...)

I'm thinking some of these need color...next version.

Sometimes, a character needs a little company....

Visiting David Stephens

In preparation for a little lable-writing I need to do, I visited David Stephens' studio last week. I've been interested in his work for some time and I'm looking forward to his upcoming (and overdue) show at the Center for Art in Wood. Here are some picutres....

Daid with pieces of an unfinished work (Peeled Turf) that will be in his upcoming show at the Center for Art in Wood. The completed work will have an organic, textured surface.

Unwrapping segments of a large sculpture. Some parts of these pieces look like wooden robot limbs...

A bookshelf in the studio

We talked in one of the studio's work rooms...

Unwrapping another piece of a sculpture that will be part of the show at the Center for Art in Wood

I am SO excited...

For literally months I have been trying to get these shaped panels made. One fabricator said he could do it and a circus of delays ensued. On the suggestion of lots of artists, I called NextFab, and they told me it would be another twelve week wait. I was despondent and started working canvas since this search was going nowhere...

Then it dawned on me that I might be able get them from an industrial supplier (I am being tight-lipped about who made them out of superstition...) and they came through in less than a week and for less than I was going to pay NextFab or the fabricator. I'm starting with plywood, but can get a range of other materials...

They will need to be cradled and gessoed, but they are cut and in the studio - very excited to start working on them...will post pictures when things get underway...

I talk with my hands

It's funny when the wide Internet ocean washes up two similar pieces of information in one week, but that's what I found on my shore. First, the always delightful Brain Pickings people posted a curious article about erotic Surrealist hand signaling.

Like so much about Surrealism, it seems laughable in its juvenile naughtiness. It's mostly crude jokes appended to the signs of the ASL alphabet.

But when you see two things about gestures, you need to take notice. And so, when I finished laughing at A Glossary of Gestures for Critical Discussion, I knew I had to share these...

The Critical Whirl. ‘I’ve read too much Marx and I can’t get my words out’

Circle hand clockwise in a small but rapid motion towards the audience. Accelerate and repeat until idea unpacked.

Though these are just silly coincidences on the web, they call to mind a few things...first I think about the way gestures and speaking are related. I've been reading a good deal about the origins of language over the last few years in hopes of putting together a class, and I've been fascinated by some of the ideas I've encountered.

Closely related is the way that gesture clarifies communication - I have heard stories about when the telephone was new and how people couldn't quite communicate through it clearly, lacking facial expressions and gestures. Even now, we have to supplement emails and postings with punctuation and hints about the emotional tenor of our messages ;-)

Finally, I was thinking about Andrew Solomon's doorstop of a book, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity, with its detailed discussion of deaf culture. These are, of course, not about that, but they do imply the limits of speech and the need for us to have recourse to communication by other means....Solomon poses an interesting question about ablism in his book, suggesting that deafness is not - as it is so often figured - a handicap of 'deficiency' as a form of 'horizontal' identity, a term he invented to describe the kinds of communities we join that are not passed down to us through genetics, heredity, or tradition. From time to we all need to join other communities, and these sites talking about gesture codes play on that need in a small way...

Sudden changes

It's a strange feeling when you have a number of paintings going over a period of weeks and then, all of a sudden, you have a number of paintings nearly done all at once. That's what happened this week - all at once it seems five paintings are in the final phases and I am just tidying up...Here is a picture of new one (which takes a phrase from Roland Barthes: "It is the act of writing that subjugates pictorial gestures so that to paint is never anything but to inscribe")

I am still messing around with solids for the Impossible Books, too, and here are some other pyramids...these are made from equilateral triangles and fit together very differently than the ones made with right triangles...I am still getting the hang of reconciling what I think a solid should do in space and what it actually does. Definitely I was not wired for sculpture...

Impossible book models

With my sister, Mary Beth Brown, I am working on some models for a show in February at Philadelphia Sculpture Gym called Impossible Books. Early on, we decided that 'impossible' books were text books and have tried to deal with that problem...I'll flesh out that idea in writing in the weeks ahead, but here are some photos of the first of what I hope will be two or three models...

Each unit is part of a text about principles that guide the study of American History in a freshman class...

...they will nest in a structure within which they can be rotated and considered on various levels...

We're thinking of 3D printing the pyramids and cutting the framework from wood...just wrapping my head around the geometry is a bit of a trick right now...

Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings at Arcadia University Gallery

Installation view of "Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings"

I have been trying to get out to Arcadia University Art Gallery for a few weeks. As everyone in Center City Philadelphia knows, it's a trek...but it's worth it.

This is especially true this month, as the gallery has mounted an unusual exhibit of meditative works from India, Anonymous Shiva Linga Paintings.

The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism describes linga as a "mark" or "sign" but also as the "name of the pillar shaped form of the god Shiva." Because Shiva is as a generative force, the pillar-shaped form he takes is described as kind of 'phallic symbol.' Evidently, Shiva is worshipped in this form as the result of a curse put on him the brahmin Bhrgu. But it's interesting to dig around a little on this and to learn that the linga and its cousin, the shalagram are forms of 'aniconic' images; symbols that are intended to represent deities. The way the linga is discussed in the literature I encountered suggests it is primarily a sculptural form, but in this exhibit, various forms of ovals play the part.

The paintings are riveting. Arrayed on three walls of the gallery are about thirty five pictures, all vertical in orientation (like portraits), none larger than twenty by sixteen inches. Each is hung on an invisible horizon that encircles the gallery, so they are all about level with the head of a person of average height.  Framed under glass, the paintings dimly reflect your face as you look at them. The majority of the paintings are broodingly dark, like cartoon holes. Some of these seems to be eclipsing rings and busts or color that shimmer and peek out from behind the dark forms. A few paintings are built on vibrant colors, which seem shocking in this context. An ovoid burst of Pepto-Bismo pink appears to raise cerulean eyebrows in a 1994 picture described as being from Sanganer and New Delhi. In another, a dark rose lozenge is criss crossed by pale blue gray droplets of paint. One senses that everything is planned; in some pictures the central form has straighter sides than in others, giving it a different gesture or attitude. In a few, as in a 1987 picture from Jaipur, it wears a necklace of three dots. Occasionally, a tiny dot appears within the form below the center, like a kind of painterly belly button.

Anonymous tantric painting, Shiva Linga, 1972, Jaipur unspecified paint on found paper 13.75 x 9.25″ 

All are painted on rather fragile and forlorn looking scraps of paper. Writing appears to be struggling to pass from the back of some sheets and into plain (if backward) view on the display side. Here and there, it looks like conservators have tried to patch thin areas of the paper. Effulgent mists of red, blue or yellow paint (or is it ink? India has a long tradition of watercolor painting...) drift lightly across surfaces. Sometimes little holes of have been worn through by painting and one gets the impression that they may have been been created by intense gaze.

Looking at the paintings slowly and in succession, one understands their meditative function. It's hard to imagine the abundance of them in the gallery is anything like the way they would be used in the world (in fact, the gallery notes mention that "When complete, the paintings are pinned or pasted to the wall at home to foster private meditation, eventually to be replaced by another fresher example"). On the cold and quiet winter day I visited the gallery, it was easy to pretend this was a space outside of the art world's usual hustle and bustle of make-believe commerce, but it wasn't so far outside of that as to preclude feeling a little strange looking at ostensibly sacred objects in an avowedly secular context.


The crossroad of the sacred and the secular becomes an important aspect of the exhibit. Being very spare and abstract, the paintings seems entirely different from western devotional art. They appear to appeal to the kind of general spiritualism that has replaced organized religion in contemporary life...despite being firmly rooted in a specific set of religious texts and imaging conventions. Gallery notes observe "an uncanny affinity" between these works and "examples of 20th century abstract art from Europe and the U.S. (works by Paul Klee and Agnes Martin are frequently cited as examples)". Those of us who have sat through secular sermons that 'justify' non-western art in terms of western modernist aesthetics will, I hope, be forgiven for rolling our eyes.

The idea of anonymity in today's art world, saturated by celebrity as it is, is strange enough. The idea that a work of art could be a useful object, one that focuses attention, limits distraction, and encourages meditation sounds revolutionary. Walking through the show, I was, more than once, put in the mind of Philadelphia painter Quentin Morris, whose Buddhist sympathies inform his monochromatic paintings and drawings. In the gallery notes, we read of the French poet Franck Andre Jamme, "who has played an instrumental role in introducing these works to western audiences." Jamme has an interesting story, and was apparently entrusted with access to the paintings after considerable hardship. It feels strange to have such easy access to them given how well-concealed they were - until relatively recently - in the religious communities from which they originate.

So how far would you go to see something really great? The magnetic pull of New York is inescapable in Philadelphia (and this exhibit came to us through NY's Feature Gallery), but people seldom talk about going to Baltimore, DC, or Chicago to see great work...let alone visiting the West Coast or traveling abroad. There are whole art worlds in these cities in the shadows of their respective megamuseums. What are these artists doing and thinking?

I'm not of the economic strata that can plan my travel around exhibits in London or elsewhere  (even Baltimore...), but I worry that we are getting a little local in our art viewing...that a diet of a few galleries interrupted from time to time for an art fair is good enough and that when we come face to face with something strange and wonderful, we'll see it only through what we already know. With the collapse of the art criticism world, I cannot count on reading about shows in other cities as easily as I once could, and that's terrible. If those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, what happens to those who don't know what's going on around them?