things i’m thinking about- photography, documentation, process, memory (lack thereof), authentic experience.
It may sound trite and overstated but the truth is the world is changing. Fast. On a large scale, we live on a planet with a rapidly changing climate whose inhabitants (humans) have as of yet no feasible plan to manage how this change will affect their lifestyles. Twenty five years ago it would have seemed impossible to think that we could sit at a keyboard and get a direct any answer to any question we could think up from anywhere in the world. Now, with Google and Wikipedia, it’s a given. 40 years ago it was impossible to carry an album in your pocket. Now, many people carry portable CD players and MP3 players as part of their daily routine In a little over a hundred years the automobile has been re-worked, re-thought and has radically changed. In over a century, however, the educational model in the developed world has changed very little. In April 2009 chairman of religion at Columbia University, MARK C. TAYLOR, called for an end to the western university system. Siting the over-specialization of degree programs as a reason for our inability to come up with viable solutions to our planet’s increasing problems, not least of which is the global water crisis. Taylor proposed a new model, one that would allow for degree programs to organize around a main idea. Taylor suggested, as an example, that a student, instead of working towards a degree in chemistry, would instead follow a course schedule towards a degree in water. The degree candidate would not only study chemistry and the make up of water but would also focus their attentions on the biology of organisms that found their home in bodies of water. They would study all organisms that needed water for their survival, their biologies but also their histories. That study would expand to the histories of people and wars waged over water. It would also include geography and the study of the earth and it’s make-up. All of this course work would be barreling towards the problem of how to create practical and workable solutions to the conundrum of providing the earth’s population with a clean and drinkable water supply.[i] Or maybe it would lead to irrigation and agricultural solutions for areas with no current resolutions. The idea behind Taylor’s suggestion is that when we have whole and interdisciplinary education on a subject we are better equipped to problem-solve. A chemist may be able to find an alchemical solution to the drinkable water problem but with no political understanding would be at a loss as to how to implement their ideas into the areas that need them.
A few months before Mr. Taylor’s article was printed, president of Bennington College, Liz Coleman, orated a lecture for TED explicating her reasoning for revamping the Vermont liberal-arts college. Ms. Coleman was frustrated with how the 19th century model of public education being a cure for ailing society, proposed as a way to truly democratize society had instead become a series of institutions focusing on mastery and instead fragmenting our population instead of uniting it. Ms. Coleman also sited narrow fields of study as an example of how increasing emphasis on [the] obscure”[ii] was fostering elitism and an idea of knowledge for academia’s sake and not for the civic good. The proposal was to “connect rather than divide naturally dependant circles rather than isolating triangles” of knowledge.[iii] Through truly inter-disciplinary approaches to education, students would have the resources they need to bring about change and innovation in our world. Change, that Ms. Coleman is adamant about, that needs to happen. Fresh ideas, new policies. “When improvisation, resourcefulness and imagination are key, artists at long last take their place at the table where strategies of action are in the process of being designed.”[iv] Art has the power to integrate all areas of study, to provide the context for a truly holistic course of study. It is, indeed, the greatest commonality between peoples, places, times and disciplines.
[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html
[ii] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html
[iii] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html
[iv] http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/liz_coleman_s_call_to_reinvent_liberal_arts_education.html
‘We are who we are. Layered and overlaid, we make a world within our bodies.’
Imagine, please, that you are to write an autobiography. But this autobiography, this story of your life, this representation of it, will only describe events in your life that occurred on Mondays-Fridays. Or maybe it will only record events occurring when you were located at certain latitudes. Or maybe someone else is writing the biography and they are only really detailing events that they were present for. This book may be an insight into your life. It may, perhaps, even be a very good starter-guide to knowing all about you. It would not, however, be an accurate, true-to-life depiction of your life. In effect, no one could say they knew you, in total, from reading it. Now let’s name this book, The Western Historical Art Canon. The history of art, (the history of the world, for that matter) has been told as if by someone only paying attention to certain events, the Mondays-Fridays of history.
I want to be clear. There is nothing inherently wrong or demonic about this half-history. It is like a childrenís dictionary. A basic definition might be given but it lacks the fullness of intention, form and alternate definitions. Unfortunately, we, as a people, have advanced, we are no longer children. We know more. If we think of human kind as a single person we may say that this single person has had time to reflect. She (humankind) came up with a host of bright ideas during the classical age, thought about them, reworked them, took a nap during the middle ages when she didnít think at all but dreamt instead of heaven and hell and then had a flurry of ideas and re-workings through to the 20th century. She progressed from antiquity to modernism. And now she has reached a new stage, she has re-thought modernism and its easy, inside-the-box, answers and in response to a civilization that is more global than it has ever been (thank you railroads, cameras and sound recording) she has developed into what we call postmodernism. Maybe she even has post postmodern tendencies.
