Vol. 1, No. 6 (2012)

What Makes These Things Kiowa?

by  Bradley A. Finson

ABSTRACT

After confinement to the reservation in 1874, the Kiowa were subjected to extremely harsh conditions. Men’s art became nearly non-existent, as the impetus for this had been eliminated. Like many Native peoples, the Kiowa were left with few venues for the expression of a sense of cultural identity and solidarity. Clothing remained one of the primary visual means of cultural continuity and artistic expression in a world turned upside down.  Beadwork applied to articles of clothing and moccasins served to perpetuate a sense of being Kiowa through the use of designs and colors that embodied basic tenets of Kiowa world view. Kiowa beaded moccasins in the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History (SNOMNH) Ethnographic Collection demonstrate the perseverance of Kiowa artists during the early Reservation Period in maintaining this sense of cultural identity by evidencing a distinctly Kiowa aesthetic that was preserved through the Reservation Period.

Anomalies catalogued as “Kiowa (Possibly Cheyenne or Arapaho)” in the Collections include one set of women’s boot moccasins thought to be Comanche, and items created under the W.P.A. Indian Project of the 1930s. Aspects of the moccasins to be considered are: aesthetics; color iconography; expressions of worldview; and, anomalies cross-cultural influences and responses to assimilation.  

Text copyright 2012 Bradley A. Finson

A theme issue of Open Inquiry Archive

Deadline for abstracts: July 15, 2012

Description:

As Joseph Campbell famously said: “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” Open Inquiry Archive, a scholarly web-based interdisciplinary journal focused on culture, invites submissions for possible inclusion for an issue devoted to the legacy of Joseph Campbell, whose thinking about the role of myth in societies across time and place first drew widespread attention more than a generation ago.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was an American professor, writer, and lecturer whose central interests were mythology, comparative religion, and world culture. His work on universal symbols in mythology was deeply influenced by movements in psychology, particularly relating to Carl Jung’s conceptualization of the “archetype.” Campbell’s ideas were disseminated broadly in nonacademic circles, and his influence on popular culture has been well noted. Campbell’s influence on the academic community has been more varied, however. Some scholars see his writing as insightful and enduring. Others judge it to be overly populist and less important. Yet, there is no denying that Campbell’s thought has been widely aired in American culture.

This issue of Open Inquiry is envisioned as a venue for taking a fresh look at Joseph Campbell and his ideas.  Original papers that revisit Campbell’s thought and the continuing legacy of his ideas across disciplinary boundaries are welcome, as are works that apply his thinking to new areas or in new ways.

Submission details:

If you are interested in submitting a paper, please send a letter of inquiry and an abstract of about 150-200 words to: openinquiryarchive@aol.com no later than July 15, 2012.

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ISSN 2167-8812

Disinterested Pleasure and Aesthetic Autonomy

in Georg Forster’s Voyage ‘round the World

.

by Sally Hatch Gray

Part I. Introduction

A twenty-one-year-old Georg Forster (1754-1794) began Voyage ‘round the World (1777), his astounding account of his travels aboard the Resolution and Captain James Cook’s second circumnavigation from 1772 to 1775, by stating their mission. Georg Forster’s father, Johann Forster, had been hired by the British Admiralty to be the naturalist for the journey. Georg Forster writes:

From him they expected a philosophical history of the voyage, free from prejudice and vulgar error, where human nature should be represented without any adherence to fallacious systems, and upon the principles of general philanthropy; in short, an account written upon a plan which the learned world had not hitherto seen executed.[Note 1]

As with most great journeys, not everything went as planned. It was the younger Forster, not his father, who would first publish their philosophical history of the journey. Yet, Georg Forster’s Voyage was indeed a travel narrative the likes of which had not been seen before. His efforts in remaining open-minded towards the peoples they would encounter were extraordinary, and this very attribute of his anthropologically-oriented work insures its continued significance in the annals of German intellectual history. Given his achievement in objectivity, the moments of distinct cultural prejudice found in Forster’s posture towards the peoples he encounters aboard the Resolution are especially revealing —not in regard to the peoples being studied, but in regard to the nature of the study itself. Indeed, Forster’s text may be read as a physical enactment of some fundamental Enlightenment-aged theories regarding the nature of sensate knowledge which figure prominently in an understanding of the limits of these new efforts in what would become the field of anthropology.

Focusing on establishing groundwork for a new science of the natural history of human beings, Forster was most interested in the objective verification of empirical data. For the most part, Forster used deductive logic in his analysis of his findings—a hallmark of an empirically-based modern scientific theory.[2] Interestingly, however, another budding field of study may also be found in Forster’s work as an inadvertent, underlying aesthetics figures prominently in Forster’s descriptions of the peoples whom he encounters along his journey. [3] This is not entirely surprising, as aesthetics, or a philosophy of beauty, originates as a philosophy of sensate knowledge. That is, aesthetics and anthropology are linked during their Enlightenment-aged origins.[4] Both are decidedly empirical, yet only aesthetics can provide access to an elusive, yet much-desired, transcendent truth.[5]

Indeed, I will argue here that the physical enactment of a philosophy of aesthetics in Voyage ‘round the World (and in Reise um die Welt), found specifically in Forster’s accounts of the explorers’ interactions with the women whom they deem beautiful, enact ideas of “purposiveness” and “disinterested pleasure” as they are later most eloquently elaborated in Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 epistolary treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen). Such a reading can serve to illuminate these abstract and metaphysical ideas by placing them in the context of a contemporary empirical study, and serve to demonstrate the intimate link between aesthetics and anthropology at their conceptual foundations.

Part II. Positioning Forster: Kant’s Pre-Critical Anthropology and Schiller’s Aesthetic Education

The mixing of aesthetics in anthropology is not unique to Forster, and one useful example for this discussion may be found in Immanuel Kant’s characterization of aesthetic judgment in his well-received treatise on anthropology entitled Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen), published by the Berlin Academy in 1764. Describing feelings of a finer nature, those of the beautiful and those of the sublime, a young, pre-critical Kant maintains that these are feelings which arise in response to certain objects.[6] They are not part of the objects themselves, and thus can be used in an empirical study of human beings. To distinguish between the two feelings of the beautiful and the sublime, Kant makes lists of things, a flower, for instance, is beautiful, while a view of the snow-topped mountains through the clouds is sublime. Kant demonstrates that he is speaking about discrete phenomena which are “apparently uniformly judged” (“ziemlich gelichförmig beurteilt”) by people with taste.[7] Thus, he attempts to establish some systematic objectivity over the manifold of experience. As the treatise develops this aesthetical theme, Kant then uses it in a characterization of different groupings of people, including a discussion of the relative beauty of women.[8] “The Circassian and Georgian women have always been held exceedingly pretty by all the Europeans, who travel through their countries.”[9] Believing that whiter skin reflects a finer character in women, he observes that some cultures like the Persians, Turks and Arabians sought to better themselves through the slave trade of fair, whiter women. He then claims that the Persians were successful in this, and that this proves that the taste for the beautiful, as for the sublime, does not differ significantly among men.[10]

Thus, Kant’s Observations demonstrates an interest in using discussions of the beautiful and of the sublime, the theme of his Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790)—a text which  would be foundational to modern aesthetics—as a means for making judgments which can unify seemingly unconnected empirical data in his study of human beings. That is, in Observations, Kant uses aesthetics in his anthropology as a measurement tool in order to unify phenomena which otherwise would not reveal any connection. He uses it to demonstrate some objectivity—the judgment of the relative beauty of women does not vary among men, even across cultural lines—which then will allow him to establish his observations of humans more systematically, as a budding science. With Observations Kant established himself as a popular essayist, demonstrating a more poetical style than he would in his later work.[11] This most popular work by Kant reflects sentiments of his times, and provides context in which to read Forster’s observations of the relative beauty of women whom he encounters during his adventure aboard the Resolution.

Significantly, the aesthetics which inadvertently arises out of Forster’s text resembles Kant’s pre-critical 1764 Observations but diverges significantly from Kant’s 1790 Critique of Judgment. In fact, Kant and Forster engaged in a debate over Kant’s skin-color based race theory in the 1780s, and Forster’s argument against Kant’s metaphysics and scientific theory during that debate helped Kant to form his theory of a teleological nature as elaborated in the second part of that text.[12] Forster rejected Kant’s metaphysical scientific method, and with it, his metaphysical view of nature. Friedrich Schiller also studied Kant’s work, and his 1795 response to Kant’s Third Critique, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, may be read as a critique of Kant’s aesthetics as well. Forster’s behavior toward, and discussions of, beauty in Voyage are more in line with those of Schiller, and of a pre-critical Kant, than with those of the 1790s Kant.  

In his 1790 Third Critique, after his debate with Forster over race and scientific theory, Kant argues that beauty remains universal, but judgments of the beautiful are reflective and subjective. They are not constitutive, they do not tell us how the world is, but rather are regulative, telling us how the world ought to be. These kinds of judgments are not taught, but rather exist as a priori legislative categories of the mind. Thus, they can be both subjective and universal. Beauty exists not as an objective reality for Kant, but as a subjective experience. As a demonstration of human freedom which connects empirical experience with a priori categories of the mind, beauty for Kant may be a symbol of morality. Schiller, in his Letters, makes a critique of Kant’s idea of beauty, understanding beauty as freedom’s appearance in the sensible world. He objected to Kant’s idea of a reflective, subjective judgment, believing our experience of beauty to be more than subjective reflections of a priori categories of the mind. In the end, Schiller fails to articulate an alternative metaphysics which could counter that of Kant.[13] Instead, he argues that analytic philosophy expressed in such technical terms reduces beauty to an abstraction, a mere skeleton of concepts, and fails to preserve her true nature in the process of analysis.[14] In other words, Schiller rejected Kant’s critical analysis for being too technical. For Schiller, beauty cannot be understood as a mere transcendental idea, it must have a physical reality too. Thus, discussions of the beautiful must perform beauty as well as describe it. Style can kill it, and Kant’s style indicates for Schiller, that his critical philosophy is incapable of accessing the essence of beauty. Explaining the limits of pure reason and nature of human existence, Schiller writes, “Reason does indeed demand unity; but Nature demands multiplicity; and both these kinds of law make their claim upon man.”[15] Kant’s idea of beauty is too focused on unity, thus it must be a priori and merely reflective. For Kant beauty cannot have objective reality, as that would limit it to time and space. Beauty, for Schiller, has objective reality, but it is, at the same time, still capable of revealing truth. For Schiller, beauty, found in art, allows insights into the limited nature of everyday thought and has the power to free people from their limited realities. It also has the power to release one from the demands of pure reason. Once freed from their profound limitations, the aesthetically educated are then capable of seeing truth.[16]

For Schiller, beauty is morality’s phenomenal form, and as such, beauty is the key to an “aesthetic education.” Schiller’s aesthetic education promotes the practice of a disinterested pleasure, and it focuses on the beauty of the female form, where the disinterest is defined literally as a kind of emotional disinterest in beautiful women as people, separating their personhood from their form. Forster’s text, as a description of the contact between European explorers and those who would be the colonized, provides a context for the kind of aesthetic education as described by Schiller, such that the island women become the actual objects training the eyes of the aesthetically educated European voyeurs. For him, as for Schiller, beauty has objective reality, it exists as empirical evidence for his natural history.

Part III. On Discovery: Beautiful Women and the Practice of Schiller’s Aesthetic Education

The Resolution’s first stop is Madeira. There, as with most places along the way, Forster is not impressed with the beauty of the women. He writes of the women there,

. . . in general they [the people of Madeira] are hard featured, but not disagreeable. Their women are too frequently ill-favored, and want the florid complexion, which, when united to a pleasing assemblage of regular features, gives our Northern fair ones the superiority over all their sex.[17]

Forster’s translation of this statement into his native German is more direct, in that instead of saying the women are “too frequently ill-favored,” he writes “the women are ugly” (“die Frauenspersonen sind häßlich”). They lack a “florid complexion” which is, for Forster, a marker of the most beautiful, and whitest, women in the world—those of Europe. Forster makes similar statements regarding the beauty of women in New Hebrides (Vanuatu), New Caledonia, Mallicollo, and Tierra del Fuego. His view of the women of Tahiti and the Society Islands stands out in contrast to these others, as he and the other officers, according to his account, are captivated by a fair-skinned beauty.

In August of 1773, after what Forster described as “a very tedious course in search of the southern continent” during “the uncomfortable season of the year,” in which they positively asserted the location of Antarctica, the sailors were eager to reach warmer climes and to see the green island of Tahiti.[18] For Forster, “It was one of those beautiful mornings which the poets of all nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of O-Taheitee.” He describes the “delicious perfume from the land” and how “the mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in various spiry [sic.] forms.”[19] According to Forster’s account of their first contacts with the people, the sailors find the women very attractive. He notes that they had not seen their own country women in twelve months, and adds that their dress had a “perfect form, so justly admired in the draperies of the ancient Greek statues.”[20] He mentions that they were “adorned” or “disfigured” by “singular black stains,” which would later come to be known to them as tattoos. He describes the people as gentle and affectionate.

Tension in the text rises when affection turns to sexual arousal, as Forster continues with his description of the women’s state of dress—or of undress:

The simplicity of a dress which exposed to view a well proportioned bosom and delicate hands, might also contribute to fan their [the sailors] amorous fire; and the view of several of these nymphs swimming nimbly all round the sloop, such as nature had formed them, was perhaps more than sufficient entirely to subvert the little reason which a mariner might have left to govern his passions.[21]

Clearly Tahiti was a refreshing change for these men. As Forster describes it, he and the others enjoy the beauty of the island and its inhabitants. Yet Forster makes a careful distinction between the way the more educated naturalists and officers behave and the behavior of the common sailors. Forster notes that one of the women among those who were given a tour of the ship in their first encounter was fascinated by the bed sheets and wanted one. One of the sailors offered her one of his, but only if she would engage in sex with him. Forster describes this scene in some detail: “She hesitated some time, and at last with seeming reluctance consented; but when the victim was just led to the altar of Hymen, the ship struck violently on the reef, and interrupted the solemnity.”[22] Throughout the text, Forster sees the women who have sex with the sailors as victims, and here as well, the reader is left to wonder at the nature of her consent.

Forster contrasts the close, physically sexual enjoyment of the women by the sailors with the voyeuristic distance of the officers and naturalists. A few weeks after arriving in Tahiti, the Resolution has sailed to Matavai Bay, and the European explorers are treated to a night of dining and dancing. After the officers had dined, “the boat’s crew and servants feasted on the remains,” and a crowd had gathered who were also treated by the officers to some pork. Forster continues, “The sailors were complaisant only to the fair sex; and giving way to their natural disposition for sensuality, for every piece of pork required the performance of an indecent denudation.”[23] While this was going on, the chief, Orea, brought the officers into the dressing rooms of the ladies who were going to perform a ceremonial dance, known as a “heeva.” In the dressing room, they find a singular beauty:

Her colour resembled that of white wax a little sullied, without having the least appearance of sickness, which that hue commonly conveys; and her fine black eyes and hair contrasted so well with it, that she was admired by us all. She received at first a number of little presents, which were so many marks of homage paid at the shrine of beauty . . . .”[24]

Certainly his account of their voyeurism gives no hint of impropriety; indeed, the officers are obeying the will of their distinguished host, Chief Orea. The powerful British officers of the Resolution defer in this moment to the wishes of the island’s King, a man, clad simply in a toga-like dress, which reminded Forster of the Ancient Greeks. On a tropical island on the other side of the world, they participate in what would be a most scandalous scene, were they to apply their own customs to the situation. Instead, they have been transported out of their own realm and into that of the other. There they open themselves up to a sensuous experience. It is as if they are freed from their own reality to play in an imaginary realm. Here, in view of their customs, they are slightly undressed themselves, and are free to experience a moment of collective admiration which leads them to make sacrifices at the “shrine of beauty.”

Forster’s contrast of the officers’ proper, distant voyeurism with the sailor’s base, physical sensuality mirrors Schiller’s concept of disinterested pleasure as he describes it in his Letters. For Schiller, aesthetic education, and thus, the moral development of the educated male, depends on a sublimation of physical sexuality. Physical sexuality entails an appreciation of female-gendered beauty as a means to an end and disallows an intellectual appreciation of beauty as an end in itself. The idea that fine art is complete in itself, and cannot exist for any purpose outside of itself, and the related idea of disinterested pleasure, that the work of art may serve no interest in the observer, may be found as early as 1785 in Karl Phillip Moritz’s essay, “Effort in the Unification of all Fine Arts and Sciences under the Concept of that which is Complete in Itself”(“Versuch einer Vereinigung aller schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten”) which was published in the Berliner Monatschrift. Here, Moritz began a movement in aesthetics in which fine art would be disassociated from usefulness. Thus, in order to appreciate the kind of beauty that reveals truth, beauty must be experienced as an end in itself. Schiller writes,

The beauty of a living woman will please us as well, or even a little better, than a mere painting of one equally beautiful; but inasmuch as the living beauty pleases better than the painted, she is no longer pleasing us as autonomous semblance, no longer pleasing the purely aesthetic sense; for the appeal to this sense, even by living things, must be through sheer appearance, even by real things, purely in virtue of their existence as idea.[25]

The process of aesthetic education is a process whereby the form of the woman is separated from her living person.[26] The aesthetically educated, heterosexually-oriented male voyeur then experiences a greater truth, leaving his everyday reality to experience something more profound, much the way Forster describes how the British officers react to the fair-skinned woman at the heeva. Upon his return to the German lands where his translation of Voyage, Reise um die Welt, into his native tongue catapults Forster to fame, the celebrated naturalist, explorer and writer became a friend of Schiller’s. Forster then developed his own aesthetic theory out of his readings of Schiller’s poetry. He defended Schiller from an attack on his poem “The Gods of Greece“ (“Die Götter Griechenlands”) in an 1789 essay entitled “Fragment of a Letter to a German Writer, or Schiller’s Gods of Greece” (“Fragment eines Briefes an einen deutschen Schriftsteller, oder Schillers Götter Griechenlands”) and then published “Art and the Age” (“Die Kunst und das Zeitalter”)  in Schiller’s Thalia in 1789. In “Art and the Age,” he writes, “The concepts of the whole, the harmonious, and the perfect [Vollkommenen] are brothers to the beautiful. These relationships occupy the understanding; which finds the beautiful in their center; but long beforehand it [the beautiful] found the heart and melted in nameless delight.”[27] The beautiful impresses itself on the heart, encompassing ideas of the whole, the complete harmony, and the perfect, while bypassing all rational conception of them. The men’s deference before the woman transformed into a work of art is, then, the deference shown by finite beings before a revelation of “the whole, the harmonious and the perfect.”

Evidence for the special significance of beauty the eyes of European explorers may be noted in the idealized role given Tahiti and the Society Islands in the shaping of European ideas of natural man.[28] The Tahitians were mythologized in Europe after the French captain Louis Antoine de Bougainville first arrived there in 1766, inspiring French theorists such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot. Tahiti seemed to provide a living so bountiful as to free its inhabitants from the need to protect private property. Furthermore, the people there were seen to be free from social constraints such as the bonds of marriage, technology, and civilization overall. After accompanying Cook on his first voyage around the world in 1770, botanist Joseph Banks depicted them as the quintessential noble savage.[29] Forster’s work further propagates this myth.

Part IV. Purposiveness: An End Necessarily Without Purpose      

Demonstrating an idealized form of beauty, Forster’s descriptions carry cultural specificity over to class specificity. As a Jacobin, Forster believed in the essential equality of all men and women. He later attempted valiantly to realize his political theories by joining the French revolution and was subsequently ostracized in a frightened Germany, his hero-explorer status revoked. Forster’s radical egalitarianism contrasts starkly, however, with his display of an exclusionary disinterested pleasure performed on the female form. Thus his egalitarian politics are both affirmed, and fully eclipsed, by his inadvertent aesthetics. Indeed this pattern in which an autonomous aesthetics will be valued for its own sake—often in spite of its logical incongruity with other practical goals—is characteristic of the dynamic relationship between Enlightenment-aged aesthetics, anthropology, and ideals of political freedom.[30] In order to illuminate how this pattern plays out in Forster’s work, and how it is also mirrored in that of Schiller, a discussion of Forster’s analysis of the goals of Cook’s exploration as a whole becomes necessary.

The main goal of Cook’s second circumnavigation was to explore the reaches of the South Pacific and map any land that might be found there. The South Pacific being such a large body of water, it was thought at the time that there could be another, as yet undiscovered, inhabitable continent in it somewhere. The goal of the naturalists was to create a new natural history incorporating the environments of newly discovered, and rediscovered, exotic lands, documenting their land forms, plant and animal life, and people. Of course Europeans had explored many islands of the South Pacific before—several recent efforts including Philip Carteret for the British in 1766-69, Louis Antione de Bougainville for the French from 1766-1769, Cook’s first circumnavigation from 1768-1771—so these explorers were aware of the lifestyles of many of the peoples who lived there. Thus, they were not merely interested in charting and documenting, they wanted to make some improvements too. To conclude his introduction, Forster writes,

And here I cannot but observe, that considering the small expence [sic.] at which voyages of discovery are carried on, the nation which favours these enterprizes [sic.] is amply repaid by the benefit derived to our fellow-creatures. I cannot help thinking that our late voyage would reflect immortal honour on our employers, if it had no other merit than stocking Taheitee with goats, the Friendly Isles and New Hebrides with dogs, and New Zeeland and New Caledonia with hogs.[31]

The European explorers believed that they could improve the lives of the people whom they encountered by introducing new live-stock to the islands. As he continues, he mentions that these voyages of discovery are disinterested and done in the name of science. He concludes,

A single remark, which may be of extensive use to posterity; a single circumstance, which may make happy our fellow-creatures in those remote parts of the world, repays the toils of the navigation, and bestows that great reward the consciousness of good and noble actions.[32]

In the German translation, he punctuates this conclusion with an exclamation mark. This was more than a simple journey of exploration, the explorers and naturalists aboard Cook’s second circumnavigation are to make people happier too. Forster states that future gifts of black cattle and sheep sent to Tahiti could also lead to “the improvement of their intellectual faculties” while in German he says it will lead to the “moral improvement” (“moralischen Verbesserungen”) of those people.[33]

This exchange would conceivably be reciprocal, as demonstrated by the experience of O-Maï, a native of Tahiti, who traveled with the Resolution on its homeward journey to the British Isles. Forster describes O-Maï as having “a quick perception” in English, in German he uses, “einen schnellen Verstand,” a quick understanding, and “a lively fancy” or in German a lively “Einbildungskraft” or “imagination.”[34] For Forster, O-Maï is an example of the natural goodness of his people from Tahiti and is a quick study as to the manners of high-society London. However, according to Forster, the Tahitian is unable to comprehend how to fully transform his society into an “advanced” one. Forster is disappointed in that O-Maï does not bring back the information the Tahitians would need to increase their agricultural production and provide more wealth for their people. Instead, he is fascinated by trinkets. Forster criticizes him:

The multiplicity of objects which crouded [sic.] upon him, prevented his paying due attention to those particulars which would have been beneficial to himself and to his countrymen at his return. He was not able to form a general comprehensive view of our whole civilized system, and to abstract from thence what appeared most strikingly useful and applicable to the improvement of his country. His senses were charmed by beauty, symmetry, harmony, and magnificence; they called aloud for gratification, and he was accustomed to obey their voice.[35]

Evidently, O-Maï enjoyed the toys, exercised his imagination and had fun in England. He seems to have behaved in London as Tahitians in general behaved in Tahiti, as Forster described it; the Europeans were much impressed with how enjoyable life amongst them was. However, Forster bemoans O-Maï’s lack of interest in more serious subjects concerning the transformation of Tahiti into a society developed more along the lines of England. Forster continues in this passage to say that O-Maï showed no interest in learning about agriculture or manufacturing and he underwent no moral improvement. Indeed, why should O-Maï, or his island, change only to be more like Foster and Western Europe? Interestingly, when Forster was in Tahiti, he was impressed with how little the people needed to do to provide for themselves; he describes it as a natural Eden. Yet, Forster still believes O-Maï needs to change his island, and that he misses the point of a fabulous educational opportunity.

Indeed, Forster’s stated practical goals of Voyage present consistent problems. The islanders neither developed an understanding of European industry nor ever exhibited much of desire to do so. The explorers, for their part, did not provide a good example. The sailors engaged in prostitution, contributed to the spread of venereal diseases, and generally made the islanders worse off than they were before.[36] Yet the practical reality does not lead Forster to question his assumptions concerning the potential power Forster seems to assume Europeans have to aid the islanders in their moral improvement. This position Forster establishes for Europeans in his new natural history seems to derive its power not from empirical reality, but from an inadvertent aesthetic theory which privileges “the beautiful” as moral. Thus, Forster’s work demonstrates how practical reality has little effect on the world of Schein, or illusion, confirming the gulf between universal, transcendent beauty and objective reality.

Following a theme concerning the sailors’ relations with island women, Forster describes a dismal scene in New Zealand in which young women cry and wail in protest as their fathers and brothers offer them to the sailors for sex in exchange for trinkets. Forster has sympathy for the girls and young women, but his narrative remains somewhat matter-of-fact. He writes:

Some among them, however, submitted with reluctance to this vile prostitution; and, but for the authority and menaces of the men, would not have complied with the desires of a set of people who could, with unconcern, behold their tears and hear their complaints. Whether the members of a civilized society, who could act such a brutal part, or the barbarians who could force their own women to submit to such indignity, deserve the greatest abhorrence, is a question not easily to be decided.[37]

He depicts the sailors as especially hard-hearted in their ability to ignore the sufferings of these young women forced into unwanted sex. Forster then speculates as to the class of these people who could sell their young girls for trinkets. He then suggests that this trade would not take place without the lure of the Europeans’ exotic objects, and goes on to note that the peoples who do not come into contact with the explorers are generally far better off. People have been killed, their morals corrupted, and they have derived no real benefit from their contact with Europeans. He then he concludes,

. . . I fear that hitherto our intercourse has been wholly disadvantageous to the nations of the South Seas; and that those communities have been the least injured, who have always kept aloof from us, and whose jealous disposition did not suffer our sailors to become too familiar among them, as if they had perceived in their countenances that levity of disposition, and that spirit of debauchery, with which they are generally reproached.[38]

Such an admission demonstrates Forster’s heroic struggle with open-mindedness, as well as the impossible contradictions for his project at every turn. As the vanguard for moral improvement, the Europeans inflict degeneracy throughout.

Interestingly, despite the disaster in the South Seas brought on by the Resolution’s visit, Forster does not give up on his view of education and the moral responsibilities of the northern Europeans to provide an example, as evidenced by his discussion of O-Maï’s largely unsuccessful education in London. Such inconsistencies, I would argue, evolve from the inherent problem of aesthetic education, as it essentially involves transforming the real world into one of illusion. In the end, the practical goals are simply replaced by an ideal. Thus, failure in practice does not present a foundational problem for the purposive end of aesthetic education. Much the way beauty cannot be questioned, as it is not an analyzable concept at all, the moral superiority of the European explorer is not subject to practical validation.

Part V. Conclusion

Describing this process in which aesthetic autonomy replaces practical reality with respect to Kant’s Third Critique, Critique of Judgment in his 1999 book, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy, Jonathan Hess writes,

Rather than forging a bridge between the noumenal realm of reason and the phenomenal realm of nature, art infinitely defers this bridge, taking the place of nature by casting itself as the ideal domain for aesthetic judgment. The meditating function of aesthetic judgment hinges on its ability to read symbolically. It seems that it is ultimately the art work – not nature – that provides the perfect domain for this activity.[39]

Forster’s 1777 text, seen as an inadvertent performance of aesthetic judgment and not as an explication of it, presents only the beginning of this process. Kant’s articulation of beauty as a symbol for morality in his Critique of the Power of Judgment is a conscientious attempt to bridge the acknowledged gulf between the transcendent, noumenal world of reason and the phenomenal world of nature. Yet, even Kant’s symbol fails to do this, replacing the practical, political realm with the aesthetic realm and introducing an autonomous world of art. The problem, specifically, in Forster’s work is that it is supposed to introduce a natural history. As such, the natural history becomes part fiction, reinventing the European as quintessential human, and remaking the Tahitian as an original function thereof.

The effective abandonment of any real advancement in the lives of the South Sea Islanders as a measure for Forster’s scientific endeavors in natural history mirrors Schiller’s abandonment of any practical component at the end of his Letters. Ostensibly the goal of that work was the creation of an “educated” populace more prepared to lead itself. In other words, the goal, although a distant one, was political freedom. Schiller’s letters, addressed to an unnamed member of the aristocracy, could not advocate for a republican-style government given the violent revolution taking place at the time in France.[40] Replacing a problematic practical reality with a world of illusion, a symbolic aesthetic freedom, Schiller concludes that perfect freedom can be attained in the free play of the imagination and the understanding in the aesthetic realm. An aesthetic education as an end in itself grants the male citizen, now having been freed from his sexual and more animalistic drives, a greater freedom of intellect and imagination than any practical situation could provide.

Despite his emphasis on empirical evidence and practical applications, Forster’s work, like Schiller’s, supports an autonomous world of art. In his 1789 essay, “Little Writings on Art and Literature” (“Kleine Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur“), Forster writes: “Each poem should be instructional; it should enrich us with new connections of ideas, wake the feeling of the beautiful in us, exercise our intellectual powers, sharpen, strengthen us, through its glowing, lively representation, the concepts of the truth [des Wirklichen] in the painting.”[41] Art allows its beholders a chance to practice their intellectual strength and enriches their field of ideas. Poetry should be educational; it should awaken a sense of the beautiful, and once awake, this sense will provide a living representation. When Forster describes the beauty of the women at the heeva, it is from this aesthetic perspective that he speaks. This living representation, in so far as it becomes an ideal, then replaces the living.

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Text copyright 2012 Sally Hatch Gray

Image: Map published for Hogg’s account of Cook’s Voyages, c.1780. Public domain image, Wikimedia Commons.

Vol. 1, No. 5 (2012)

Aesthetic Autonomy and Disinterested Pleasure in Georg Forster’s Voyage ’round the World

by  Sally Hatch Gray

ABSTRACT

In August of 1773, after a grueling journey to Antarctica aboard British Captain James Cook’s Resolution, and second circumnavigation from 1772 to 1775, the sailors were eager to reach warmer climes. For young Prussian naturalist, Georg Forster, seeing the sunrise over island of Tahiti for the first time was enchanting, as he described a perfumed land with green-clothed mountains. The sensuous experience becomes sexual as the island’s natives dive naked around the boat for trinkets. Yet Forster makes a careful distinction between the distanced voyeurism of the more educated naturalists and officers and the common sailors’ engagement in prostitution. This paper shows how Forster’s description of the voyeur’s disinterested pleasure in response to interactions with actual women may be fruitfully interpreted as a performance of Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic education as presented in his 1795 treatise, On the aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. The island women become the actual objects training the eyes of the aesthetically educated European voyeurs. Forster’s inadvertent aesthetics leads his open-minded and empirical science to a world of illusion. And, in the end, the effective abandonment of any real advancement in the lives of the South Sea Islanders as a measure for Forster’s scientific endeavors in natural history mirrors Schiller’s abandonment of any practical, political freedom at the end of his Letters.

Full text article available here.

Text copyright 2012 Sally Hatch Gray

Vol. 1, No. 4 (2012)

MALLIUS’S WIFE: A Brief History of a Joke 

by Norman E. Land

ABSTRACT

Two of the most important dimensions of human existence, art and sex, or artistic creation and human procreation, have long been associated, sometimes seriously, even philosophically, but often also in jest. Among the first authors to link artistic creation and sexual reproduction is the fifth-century A. D. Roman author and Neo-Platonic philosopher Macrobius.  In a joke about the famous Roman painter Mallius, Macrobius implies that the artist is more skillful at creating figures than he is at making children. Mallius claims the difference lies not in skill but in the conditions under which he carries out each kind of creation. In this essay, we see that Mallius’s joke has a long history in which it undergoes several significant permutations. Still, the essential meaning and humor of the story remains constant even into the Renaissance and beyond, when it turns up virtually throughout Europe.

Full text article available here.

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Vol. 1, No. 2 (2012) 

ONE FLESH… TWO (WISE) FOOLS: Evidence for Artistic Collaboration Between Judith Leyster and Jan Miense Molenaer in Four Festive Paintings

 by K.A. Cloutier-Blazzard

ABSTRACT

It is generally assumed that the seventeenth-century Dutch artists Jan Miense Molenaer (c.1610–1668) and Judith Leyster (1609–1660) worked collaboratively, both before and after their wedding in 1636. This paper examines the broader concept of artistic collaboration as intellectual endeavor by Molenaer and Leyster, focusing on four thematically-related comic paintings from before their marriage: Leyster’s slightly earlier The Merry Company and The Last Drop of 1629–1631, and Molenaer’s smaller set of 1634, The Battle of Carnival and Lent and Twelfth Night. These festive pictures have not yet been fully considered in relation to each other, perhaps because some scholars have questioned identifying these paintings as directly paired within the artists’ oeuvres. There are many valid reasons for seeing them as companion works, however, not least of which is that all four paintings share a common theme: they link the two central festivals of the Christian liturgical calendar—Christmastide and Eastertide. In European popular culture the two are bound together by an entire socially-leveling carnival season that runs from early December through Mardi Gras or Vastenavond, six weeks before Easter. In their related paintings, Leyster and Molenaer depict carnival celebrations in juxtaposition to the complimentary end of those festivities with the advent of Lent. These works share an overlooked theme of ecumenical Christian humanism and an abiding form of seriocomical philosophy that was burgeoning in select humanist circles of Haarlem and beyond at this time.

Full text article available here.

Mallius’s Wife:

A Brief History of a Joke

By Norman E. Land

Two of the most important dimensions of human existence, art and sex, or artistic creation and human procreation, have long been associated, sometimes seriously, even philosophically, but often also in jest. An early instance of a humorous association of art and sex is in the Greek Anthology (11. 215) where Lucilius writes that the portrait-painter, Eutychus was never able to achieve a likeness, even among his twenty sons.[Note 1] Here getting a likeness is important to both creation and procreation. Eutychus was not very good at portraying his subjects because of his lack of skill as an artist, and none of his numerous sons looked like him because, as Lucilius implies, he was not their biological father.

Macrobius

Sexual reproduction is also linked to artistic creation in the Convivia Saturnalia (2. 2, 10) of the fifth-century A. D. Roman author and Neo-Platonic philosopher Macrobius. In his book the author has a series of speakers give brief accounts of famous people. One speaker, named Evangelus, tells the following anecdote. While dining at the house of Lucius Mallius, “the best painter in Rome,” Servilius Geminus noticed how ugly (“deformes”) the artist’s sons are. Mallius responds that conceiving children (“fingis”) is not the same as painting figures (“pingis”): “I conceive [“fingo”] in the dark and paint [“pingo”] in the light.”[2] We are not told why Mallius’s ugly children are remarkable, but his position as a superior painter seems relevant, for it implies that he is a skilled artist. We may assume, then, that Geminus notices the difference in appearance between Mallius’s ugly children and his beautiful figures. The implication is that Mallius is more skillful at creating figures than he is at making children. In effect, Mallius answers that the difference lies not in skill but in the conditions under which he carries out each kind of creation.

As we shall see, Mallius’s joke has a long history during which time it undergoes several significant permutations.  Still, the essential meaning and humor of the story remains constant even into the Renaissance and beyond, when it turns up virtually throughout Europe.

Petrarch

A Latin version of Macrobius’s joke circulated around the time of Petrarch (1304-1374).  In this version an anonymous painter replies to the question about his children and his painted figure.[3] Petrarch, however, seems to be the first modern author to record Macrobius’s joke, and he does so in his Rerum memorandarum libri (2. 48), which was written between 1343 and 1345.

The famous painter Lucius Mallius had ugly children. A friend who was dining with him said on seeing the children: “Your children are not as attractive as your pictures, Mallius.” But Mallius replied: “that’s true, because I make children in the dark, but pictures by daylight.[4]

Petrarch, who clearly understood the implication of Macrobius’ joke, refers to it again in one of his letters on familiar matters (Familiarum rerum, 5, 17), addressed to his friend, Guido Sette (1304?-1367).[5] There Petrarch, who notices that ugly artists often make beautiful works, rejects the joke as an explanation of that phenomenon.[6] Petrarch implies that because Mallius was an ugly man, his children would naturally be ugly too.

Petrarch twice repeats Macrobius’s joke, but another fourteenth-century author uses it as the basis of a tale about a famous painter and a renowned poet. Around 1376, in his commentary on the Divine Comedy, Benvenuto da Imola (ca. 1330-ca.1390), a scholar who lectured at Bologna, tells of an alleged meeting in Padua between Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), while the painter was working on his frescoes in the Arena Chapel. As the story goes, Giotto invited Dante to his house and when the poet saw the painter’s children, “all extremely ugly and [. . .] resembling their father closely,” he asked, “ ‘Good master, since you are said to have no equal in the art of painting, I greatly wonder how it is that you make the appearance of others so attractive while your family is so dreadful’?” Giotto quickly responded, “ I paint during the day and create at night.” Benvenuto says that Dante was impressed and delighted by Giotto’s reply, not because it was original (he cites Macrobius as the source) but because it appeared as a product of Giotto’s own “ingenio,” or genius. In other words, Dante (and by implication Benvenuto) admired Giotto’s verbal wit because the artist recognized immediately that he and Dante were acting out Macrobius’s joke. Dante plays Geminus, and Giotto at once joins in as Mallius.[7]

We should notice here that nineteenth-century writers continued to tell Benvenuto’s anecdote about Giotto.  One of them is the French painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who repeated a version of this tale in a journal published by his son twenty years after his father’s death: “Giotto had some very ugly children.  Someone having asked why he made such lovely faces in his paintings and such ugly children in his life, he answered, ‘My children are night work . . . my pictures are my day work.’ ”[8]

Leonardo da Vinci

A few years after the publication of Macrobius’ Convivia Saturnalia in Venice in 1472, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) records in one of his notebooks the version of the joke in which the painter is anonymous. He also adds a new dimension to it.

A painter was asked, given that he made such beautiful figures, which are lifeless things, what caused him to have made such ugly children. The painter replied that he made his paintings during the day, and his children at night.[9]

The voice that queries the painter implies that he has the skill to perform the difficult task of transforming dead matter (i. e., paint) into beautiful, seemingly living figures, but that he is unable successfully to carry out the less demanding job of making beautiful children, who actually live and breathe. As usual, the artist replies that skill is not the determining factor. All depends on when he must do his work, at night or during the day.

English Versions

Versions of Macrobius’s anecdote were widely repeated throughout sixteenth- and seventh-century Europe.[10] For example, an anonymous English author recorded a version around 1535, and in it skill is again an important factor. The author writes about a “paynter that had foule children.”

There was a peinter in Rome that was an excellent connynge man: and bycause he had foule children, One sayde to hym: By my seyth I marvayle that you paynte so goodelye, and gette so foule children: yea, quod the peynter, I make my chyldren in the darke, and I peynte thoses fy[g]ures by daye light.[11]

Here we have an accomplished Roman painter — presumably a reference to Mallius — whose “cunning,” or skill, makes people wonder why he cannot also achieve excellent results when he makes children. Like Leonardo’s painter, he, in effect, claims that his skill is not to be questioned. The quality of his creations and procreations is determined by the circumstances in which each is made.

Another sixteenth-century English writer, Sir Nicholas Bacon (1509-1579), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, also made use of Macrobius’s joke, this time in a poem titled, “Of A Mayde and a Paynter,” which begins:

A merye Mayde

To a Paynter sayde

That muche she mused to see

His pictures soe fayer,

And his sonne and heye

Soe muche deformed to bee.[12]

We can easily imagine the remainder of the poem, which was excluded from the only printed edition of Bacon’s works.

In the eighteenth century an anonymous translator produced a version of Macrobius’s joke as recorded by Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536).  “Servilius Geminus, at supper with Lucius Mallius, a very prominent painter at Rome, [observed] that all his children were, one way or another, considerably deformed.” “Mallius,” Geminus remarks, “you don’t mould as you paint.”  The artist replies, “I mould in the dark but paint in the light.”[13] In this context, the translator’s use of the word “mould” means “to shape, or give form to.”  Procreation is a means of “shaping” children; painting is a means of shaping figures.

Master Gherardo

Other tales are less directly and obviously related to Macrobius’ joke: for example, an almost forgotten anecdote about a seemingly fictional Florentine painter named Gherardo.[14] The story, which has been attributed to Niccolò Angèli dal Bùcine (1448-1532?), goes as follows.

There was in Florence a painter named Gherardo, who was not the best master of his times. A man who wanted a painting made went to him and not being very confident in the said Gherardo, repeatedly showed him a drawing [of the work he wanted], asking again and again if he [Gherardo] knew how to serve him [the patron]. When it appeared to Gherardo that the man had bothered him too much [and] having with him a rather beautiful young son, he turned angrily to the man and said, “Does this child appear beautiful to you?” The man responded, “Heaven protect him, yes.” Gherardo then added, “I made him with my prick; just think what I can do with a brush.”[15]

Gherardo seems to claim that his ability to employ his relatively blunt and awkward “cazzo” to create a beautiful figure is proof that he is capable of excellent performance with his finer and more elegant brush. In effect, he asserts that the making of beautiful creations is not simply a matter of skill, nor is it dependent upon whether the sun or the moon is shining; one also has to consider the instruments of creation as well.

Michelangelo

In his Lives of the Artists (Florence, 1568) Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) also tells a relatively elaborate story that is in part a variation on the ancient example. According to Vasari, while Michelangelo (1475-1564) was making the (now-destroyed) bronze figure of Pope Julius II in Bologna, a local painter Francesco Francia (1450-1517) paid him a visit and marveled at the sculptor’s work. At last Michelangelo asked Francia what he thought of the bronze figure and the latter replied that the sculptor had used good material and had cast it well. Michelangelo, who was certain that Francia had praised the bronze rather than his artistry, grew angry and called the painter “un goffo,” a doofus. Later, when Michelangelo met one of Francia’s sons, who was very handsome, he said: “Your father makes living figures that are more beautiful than his painted ones.”[16] Michelangelo uses Geminus’ observation, not to question the discrepancy between the quality of an artist’s painted figures and the appearance of his children, as Macrobius and others had. Rather, Michelangelo insults Francia by pointing out that his skill at procreation far outstrips his abilities as a painter. Michelangelo, who, Vasari tells us, considered his works to be his children, believes that, in effect, Francia has accused him of making his figure of the pope in the dark. Feeling insulted, Michelangelo implies that Francia paints in the dark but procreates in the light.

Mallius’s Wife

There is yet another version of Macrobius’s joke that significantly departs from the original. In this version, Mallius is said to have a beautiful young wife. The Italian author and editor Lodovico Domenichi (1514-1564) recounts one example of that version.

One day Servilius Geminus was in the house of Lucius Mallius, an excellent painter, who was staying in Rome at that time. Mallius had a very beautiful young woman for a wife, but his children were ugly. Geminus said to the painter: “O, Mallius, it appears strange to me that you do not make children as beautiful as you make the figures in your paintings.” To which, Mallius replied, “I make children at night in the dark, and I make my pictures during the day, in the light.[17]

The English boatman John Taylor (1577-ca. 1653), who called himself a “Water-poet,” followed Domenichi’s example in his long poem about rowing, first published in London in 1612. Taylor does not name Mallius; rather he refers to the “pretty” wife of an anonymous painter.

A Skilfull Painter such rare pictures drew,

That every man his workemanship admir’d:

So neere the life in beautie, forme and hew,

As if dead Art ‘gainst Nature had conspir’d.

Painter, sayes one, thy wife’s a pretty woman,

I muse such ill-shapt children thou hast got,

Yet mak’st such pictures as their likes makes no man,

I prethee tell the cause of this thy lot?

Quoth he, I paint by day when it is light,

And get my children in the darke at night.[18]

Everyone admires the skill of the singular artist who uses his colors to make beautiful figures that rival nature. People wonder why an artist of so great a talent makes such ill-shaped children. The artist gives the standard answer: he paints by daylight, but begets children in the dark.

Perhaps Domenichi and Taylor give Mallius and the anonymous artist, respectively, an attractive young wife because such a figure lends the tale a specifically marital and domestic quality only implied in the original version.  Significantly, too, she is the mother of the ugly children and therefore participates in their creation.  In other words, she is not merely an addition to the joke; she seems to have deeper significance.  The Italian philosopher Antonio Persio (1550-1610) helps us to grasp that significance.

Persio makes a connection between artistic creation and procreation in his Treatise on the Human Mind (Venice, 1576).  Speaking of children born out of wedlock, he explains that they are usually born to a man and a woman who are beautiful, or at least one of them is beautiful. Because the couple is able to meet only infrequently their illicit love is all the stronger, and when they meet, they are united in body and in soul. As a result of “such well-executed labor in most cases one cannot expect anything but perfect offspring — beautiful, vigorous and distinguished in mind.”  Persio goes on to compare the act of procreation with Titian’s method of painting. When representing human beings, the Venetian painter, who was known for his beautiful and sensuous female figures, would be so affected by the sight of the living model that he would seem to be in a trance, and his spirit would enter into his figure, making it like “another Nature.”[19]

Seen from the perspective of Periso’s explanation of creation and procreation, the beautiful wife in the versions of Macrobius’s joke told by Domenichi and Taylor make Mallius and the anonymous painter seem especially inept as lovers, and we understand what happens when they procreate at night. Even though they work in the dark, if they were capable and passionate lovers, the beauty of each wife — we assume that the painters are ugly — would be passed on to their children.

Conclusion

In the late eighteenth century, Richard Cumberland (1732-1811), who recorded the joke without reference to Macrobius, presented it in a new light: “A man’s fame shall be recorded to posterity by the trifling merit of a jest, when the great things he has done would else have been buried in oblivion.”  In other words, a mere joke can save the fame of a reputable man.

Who would now have known that L. Mallius was once the best painter in Rome, if it was not for his repartee to Servilius Geminus? — You paint better than you model, says Geminus, pointing to Mallius’s children, who were crooked and ill-favoured. — Like enough, replied the artist; I paint in the daylight, but I model, as you call it, in the dark.

Mallius — the great painter and poor lover — makes a witty reply that saves him from oblivion.[20]

Issue Introduction

Postmodernism has exerted a powerful influence on the arts of the Western world for more than a generation. It has been a particularly strong presence in college and university programs aimed at educating a new generation of artists. Indeed, postmodernism has been spectacularly successful in this realm. Once the new idea that challenged  the status quo, it now largely is the status quo. Yet, despite postmodernism’s widespread acceptance, earlier ways of thinking about education in art have never faded away completely. In fact, postmodernist ideas, though dominant in many respects, have remained hotly debated in some circles. In his essay, “A Defense of the Educational Value of Perceptual Drawing in an Increasingly Postmodern World,” Professor Brian Curtis offers his perspective on the effects of postmodernist ideas in the education of artists and about a different path that might be taken going forward. While this paper may not settle the debate about the role of postmodernism in an artist’s education, it enriches ongoing discussion of an important topic.

-G. Arnold

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Leonardo’s Legacy:

A Defense of the Educational Value of Perceptual Drawing in an Increasingly Postmodern World

By Brian Curtis

University and college art programs once nurtured visual sensitivity, talent, craftsmanship, and creativity. Recently, however, these goals have been displaced by the de-skilling and dematerializing promotion of a conceptually oriented approach referred to as “contemporary cultural practice” or “postmodern art.” Although educators at national conferences stress the importance of instilling visual sensitivity and offering skill-based studio instruction to their students continues to be a re-occurring theme, in practice, neither the teachers nor the students in most art programs across the country behave as if these are meaningful goals. I intend to demonstrate that this discrepancy points toward the erosion of the integrity of art education in institutions of higher learning and that students are better served by hands-on studio instruction in traditional media.

Today’s prospective art students are generally more interested in skill acquisition than in concept driven cultural production, performance, art video, or installation. As a result, art programs that wish to stay current with an overinflated, consumerist driven art market  are pressured to engage in a “bait-and-switch” curricular strategy to fill seats in their first-year studio classes.  Such programs pay lip service to traditional, hands-on studio training while bombarding their students with  courses that aggressively and purposefully dematerialize the art object and undermine the long-standing intellectual underpinnings of our institutions of higher learning.

It is currently the norm for Foundations programs across the country to indoctrinate first-year students with postmodern, anti-Enlightenment intellectual provocations by front-loading their Foundations programs with vaguely constructed courses that are non-hierarchical, theory-dependent, multi-cultural, issue-oriented, and community-sensitive. These multivocal, transmedia  courses privilege digital technology and conceptualization over hands-on studio training in traditional high-art media.

It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that the admitted goal of these “innovative” Foundations programs is to pressure entering students to “unlearn” their “naïve” understanding of what constitutes a work of art–specifically,  the need to disavow retinal, skill-based, quality oriented, media-driven art forms. Two such programs are described by Dr. Jodi Kushins in an article entitled “Brave New Basics” [note 1] which appeared in FATE in Review (2008 – 2009). Kushins documents how hands-on training in traditional media has been replaced by conceptually driven approaches using ‘new media’– she specifically mentions sewing and baking — that the introduction of these ‘new media’ has the stated intention of helping students develop critical awareness of the relationships between concepts and context. Kushins acknowledges that these curricula continue Marcel Duchamp’s denouncement of craft, his assault on good taste and his adamant rejection of “retinal” art.  She then quotes a faculty member from a high profile art institution who unhesitatingly refers to its innovative curriculum as “deprogramming,” in which incoming students are “forced to let go of their previous notions about art making” while being taught that to be an innovative artist demands a wholesale rejection of the longstanding reverence for visual aesthetics and craftsmanship.

This trend is not restricted to high-profile professional art schools. In 2010 at the Southeastern College Art Conference (SECAC) in Richmond, I encountered a similar trend. The call for papers for a session entitled “Busting the Boundaries in Foundation Drawing” read as follows:

 “This panel will investigate moving beyond those boundaries of foundation drawing as observation by presenting assignments and methodologies that cover, but are not limited to, Collaboration Among Students, Architectural Drawing, Drafting, Cartooning, Drawing Science and Nature, Mapping, Representing Popular Culture, Illustrating Fashion and Ornamentation.” [note 2]

The individuals who were chosen for this panel addressed issues of collaboration, pop-culture metaphors, creative writing, and the development of ‘critical thinking,’ despite the fact that the course content presented by the panelists more closely resembled second-hand, warmed-over critical theory. And, critical theory is not critical thinking. If anyone doubts how consistently critical theory is presented as critical thinking, I refer you to the 2008-2009 FATE in Review, in which a twenty-three page summary of the Integrative Teaching Think Tank, entitled “Putting Theory to Work: Building a Foundations Program for the 21st Century,” states:

“the primary purpose of the Foundation year should be an introduction to critical thinking”.

 “a 21st century approach to foundations teaching needs to be tied to pedagogical goals that reflect a deeper and more complex understanding of contemporary society and the world at large“

“Foundations faculty initiate a process of learning that serves as a basis on which the disciplines can build and channels students into more expansive modes of thinking and making.”

In visual arts education, “historical, contextual, and critical studies” take a central role in the verbal and conceptual articulation of the visual.”

“Foundations teachers are then encouraged to revel in their role as generalists – to introduce and blend ideas with passion, knowledge and their own professional experience.” [Note 3]

While I understand why a contemporary art department would want to associate its progressively fragmented and disorganized curriculum with the gravitas associated with the liberal arts that have a reputation for rigor of critical thinking, this initiative is intellectually flawed. Were the art faculty in question truly committed to critical thinking they would begin by actively dispelling the illusion that postmodernism’s rejection of reason and intellectual certainty is compatible with critical thinking. We would also expect disclosure, analysis, and discussion of the anti-cultural and de-civilizing implications of the foundational ideas of the deconstructive postmodern world-view. Studio faculty committed to critical thinking would make it clear to their students that in adopting postmodern cultural practice they are effectively rejecting the principles of the Enlightenment inasmuch as postmodernism discards belief in objective truth, optimism about human progress, egalitarianism, the validity of scientific method as a means to arrive at truth (logic), the universality of reason, and the importance of individuality, not to mention the overarching political ideals underlying the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Oh, those pesky meta-narratives!

Multiple presenters on the Busting the Boundaries in Foundation Drawing panel also made it a point to add, after dismissing observational drawing as something anyone can do, that an innovative conceptual focus was necessary to appeal to the Millennial generation at the Foundations level, because the Millennials crave ‘relevant’ content and team-oriented projects and find observational drawing to be boring. While I do not have time to address such unsubstantiated and shortsighted characterizations about the restricted learning styles of Millennials, I can report that the student drawing examples that were projected during all four of this session’s  presentations consistently exhibited a lack of understanding of visual thinking related to dynamic pictorial composition while exhibiting  little knowledge of the techniques that allow for depictions of coherent spatial relationships.  Perhaps most disturbing of all  was the total lack of a practiced understanding of the inherent expressive characteristics of the media that were used to record and preserve the movement, energy, rhythm, excitement, and “feel” of the drawing process. Language-based conceptual projects were plentiful, but the importance of something as essential as heightened sensitivity to sensory experience was nowhere to be found. What makes this oversight so unfortunate is that receptivity and responsiveness to sensory stimulation are baseline indicators of the fullness and profundity with which a human being engages life.

As widespread in the distain for traditional studio training there are those who believe that sensory experience is at the core of art training. Peter Kaniaris, a professor of painting at Anderson University in South Carolina, reflected on the importance of direct sensory experience in a paper delivered at the 2009 FATE conference in Portland, Oregon titled, “The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor”:

“Rooted in the practice of art is an ancient metaphor: that art is (at its core) an irreducibly visual experience; its “language” and knowledge are unique; its outcomes are like no other outcomes; its value is intrinsically bound to its means. It is a foundational experience that has its origins in the visual impulse, the innate human desire to communicate through visual means. It is the ancient metaphor at work, as old and deep as the paintings of Lascaux.” [note 4]

Drawing attention to and fine-tuning a student’s receptivity and responsiveness to sensory stimulation is what traditional studio training is about. Franklin Einspruch, a painter, blogger, and a remarkably precise writer on art made some penetrating observations about the shortcomings of exchanging trendy concepts for serious skill and sensitization training in a paper he read at the 2009 FATE conference in Portland, OR entitled “The Mind of Materials: Why a Good Education in Art Emphasizes Techniques Over Ideas”:

“We’re witnessing an effort, a hundred years in the making, to legitimize ever-increasing kinds of objects as art, starting with a bottle rack and culminating in a shared meal. This is a kind of freedom, a freedom of possibilities, maximized to an absurd scale that moots a discussion about traditional media training. But it’s a dissipated freedom that gives rise to artworks as lethargic as their titles”.

“But where there is only freedom of possibility, there is effectively no freedom at all. There’s another kind of freedom that we need to address as teachers: the freedom of ability”.

“Against a background of freedom of possibility, which is more or less given, one has to develop freedom of ability by dint of practice— physical repetition of skills with the desire to produce a particular outcome. We should recognize that we are dealing with an entirely different sort of freedom here.” [note 5]

While some might consider my characterization of postmodern pedagogy as extreme, facts, and the majority of topics addressed at national art conferences suggest otherwise. There is ample evidence that the curricula currently in place at a majority of art programs are firmly rooted in a chronological sequence of de-civilizing, anarchical theoretical perspectives.

First there was the Dada dissolving itself in its nonsensical founding manifesto. That was followed by Duchamp’s denouncement of craft, his assault on good taste and his aggressive rejection of “retinal” art. Then came the Futurist manifestos’ exaltation of the destruction of the existing social order and its redefinition of beauty as political struggle followed by Die Brücke’s anti-Enlightenment fascination with primitivism.

These radical perspectives continued with the purveyors of shock art in the 1960s. First was the international network called Fluxus, the manifesto of which called for the elimination of illusionistic art, abstract art, and mathematical art, as well as the promotion of anti-art and of non-art reality. Then came Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (known to their friends as simply “the motherfuckers”), which was a Dada-influenced anarchist art group connected with the Weather Underground and SDS. Motherfuckers was famous for its disruptive political interventions, such as throwing trash in the fountain at the Lincoln Center, cutting the fences at Woodstock, and faking assassinations. (One peripheral member of this group did, in fact, actually shoot Andy Warhol). And the list continues to the present day with the conceptualists, Pop artists, performance artists, installation artists, video artists, punk rockers, graffiti artists, and the variety of postmodern approaches that have been lumped under the banner of contemporary cultural practice.

The underpinnings of contemporary cultural practice continue to be supported by a cluster of radical postmodern perspectives, such as radical feminism, Marxism, gay theory, multiculturalism, deconstruction, and pluralism. Each embraces ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and chaos while making no attempt at counteracting or transcending the de-civilizing aspects of postmodernity. These assorted perspectives insist that there are no objective standards on which to base value judgments, and that the notion that visual quality and the notion of a singular best are discredited capitalistic white male European ‘master narratives.’ Within this pluralistic model core courses, prerequisites, course sequencing, and the like are considered to be misguided, parochial, chauvinistic, and pernicious and it is anathema to insert intellectual discipline (real critical thinking), structured learning, or skill training into the curriculum. Ironically, whereas ‘openness’ used to refer to the virtue of pursuing good through reason, it has now been co-opted to mean the acceptance of anything except reason.

Because my academic background may not qualify me to singlehandedly challenge the underlying philosophical premises of postmodernism, I will quote a colleague at the University of Miami, philosopher Susan Haack, who is both eminently qualified and highly vocal in her criticisms of postmodern academic practice. She observes,

“When sham and fake reasoning are ubiquitous, people become uncomfortably aware, or half-aware, that reputations are made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work, as often by mutual promotion as by merit. Knowing, or half-knowing, this, they become increasingly leery of what they hear and read. Their confidence in what passes for true declines, and with it their willingness to use the words “truth,” “rationality,” etc., without the precaution of scare quotes. And as those scare quotes become ubiquitous, people’s confidence in the concepts of truth and reason falters.” [note 6]

 Unfortunately, the sort of meta-twaddle that Susan Haack warns against is precisely that which serves as the rationale for the postmodern redesign of art curricula. At my university, advanced students of contemporary practice are adept at reciting a litany of the names of postmodern theorists: Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lacan, Lyotard, to name just a few. And curiously, this superficial second- or third-hand familiarity with contemporary critical theory is loudly proclaimed to be critical thinking. However, missing from our students’ repertoire are the great minds from the Western rational tradition, such as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.

Not only are our students not being exposed to the intellectual giants of the Western rational tradition; they are not even aware that the legitimacy of postmodernism has been questioned by people such as Alan Sokol, a physicist from NYU who, in 1996, attempted to reclaim the legitimacy of the Western rational tradition from those prone to theory-babble. Sokol wrote a parody of a postmodern article and submitted it to the prominent postmodern journal, Social Text. [note 7] The editors of the journal, undeterred by the outrageously far-fetched assertions in the article and unaware that it was written tongue-in-cheek, published it. He describes his process:

“Throughout the article, I employ scientific and mathematical concepts in ways that few scientists or mathematicians could possibly take seriously. For example, I assert that Lacan’s psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory. Even non-scientist readers might well wonder what in heavens’ name quantum field theory has to do with psychoanalysis; certainly my article gives no reasoned argument to support such a link. — Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions.” [note 8]

While Sokol’s article, in itself, is not evidence that all postmodern propositions are invalid, it does lend disquieting support to Susan Haack’s assertion that in our current academic environment “reputations can be made as often by clever championship of the indefensible or the incomprehensible as by serious intellectual work.” [note 9]

The curriculum innovations that are being adopted at art programs across the country are most often based upon popular-media hype, unsubstantiated facts, poorly reasoned premises, and/or arcane philosophical abstrusiosities. Since history illustrates that innovations can sometimes be disastrous, it behooves us to carefully weigh the importance of what is being sacrificed before rushing headlong into “innovative” curricula. It is a dangerous misinterpretation of the maxim that “those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past” to suggest that history is only a repository of failed ideas. A corollary maxim reminds us, “those ignorant of the past are condemned to an infinite loop of having to rediscover the wheel.”

The fact that art education is simultaneously riding a pop-culture wave of techno-euphoria has exponentially complicated the de-skilling, de-civilizing, dematerializing, and de-sensitizing direction of art education. While a standard list of the virtues and benefits of digital technology is widely circulated, the real question is whether all or any of it is true, especially since the promoters of digital technology seem to have little or no data to support their claims. There is, however, data that suggests that students with considerable exposure to screen-based technology read less and have shorter attention spans than those with less exposure, making digital technology more like a curse from Pandora’s Box than the wonder tool that is claimed to be. And being sold it is, like the automobile was sold by the automotive, petroleum, and highway construction industries in the late 1950s, as the pivotal element in the equation for human happiness. [note 10] A similar case can be made that the current wave of techno-euphoria in academia is more the result of corporate hucksterism in a hyper-competitive, marketing-saturated, consumer society than of sound social or educational policy.

Another shortcoming associated with the use of computers as learning tools is their reliance on simulation over hands-on manipulation of the physical world. It is important to remember that learning is, at its best, a broad based emotional, intellectual, and tactile experience. It flourishes when all five senses are engaged. Knowledge is enhanced when we learn with our senses and experience the physical world through our muscles and reflexes as opposed to substituting something as mechanical and synthetic as a computer interface for our physical experiences. Without direct awareness of our physical bodies and how our bodies react to and affect wider natural systems, we become unable to separate the natural from the artificial, real from unreal. [note 11] Interestingly, among an increasing number of computer and neuroscientists working in Artificial Intelligence (AI) there is a growing suspicion that artificial intelligence can never be achieved. [note 12] This hypothesis is based in the understanding that human consciousness is fundamentally an intuitive process. Without a body a computer cannot “feel” and therefore cannot develop intuitive and emotional information processing, the corner stone of what it means to be a creative thinker.

What we sacrifice when we promote computers for the easy and convenient access to information that they provide, are the traditional skills of thinking logically, learning to make qualitative judgments, writing clearly, speaking well, developing perceptual and motor skills, and aesthetic sensitivity through hands-on training in drawing, painting, printing, sculpting, ceramics, design, and weaving. Deprived of the ability to think rationally, and raised without integrated knowledge from firsthand, real life experience, students become powerless to discriminate the relevant from the irrelevant and the significant from the insignificant in the information glut found on computers. In a cloud of techno-euphoria students confuse information for knowledge. They become more passive in their judgments, more alienated from their traditions, more devoid of community. Theodore Rozak, in The Cult of Information, admonished us that thinking must always come first in education and that thinking means how to effectively manipulate ideas, compare them, contrast them, and discriminate among them. All of this is more important than having access to information. Knowing how to manipulate ideas is what is important. [note 13]  Students don’t learn better from computers. They learn best from nature, from other kids, from teachers. Without this ability to manipulate ideas, “screenagers,” [note 14]  when confronted with difficult challenges, are condemned to a life of rolling their eyes and muttering “Whatever!”

Despite the fashionable popularity of radical theoretical perspectives and the exalted status of digital technology there are some among us who still look at these issues from an Enlightenment-based, life-affirming perspective. Ellen Dissanayake, for example, in Homo Aestheticus, presents a thought-provoking Darwinist perspective on aesthetics that takes serious issue with the postmodernism denial of the naturally aesthetic part of human nature that has evolved to require beauty and meaning.

“Making special is a fundamental human proclivity or need. Aesthetics is not something added to us– learned or acquired like speaking a second language or riding a horse — but in large measure is the way we are. To make something special generally implies taking care and doing one’s best so as to produce a result that is — to a greater or lesser extent, —- accessible, striking, resonant, and satisfying to those who take time to appreciate it. This is what we mean when we say that via art, experience is heightened, elevated, made more memorable and significant.”[note 15]

Perceptual drawing is an essential building block for making the visual world special. Perceptual drawing has contributed to both the development and maintenance of the “post-medieval mindset,” a mindset that is fundamental to the modernist enterprise known as the Western rational tradition. E. H. Gombrich described this mindset as one of constant alertness, a sacred restlessness and readiness “to learn, to make, to match, remake, seize, and hold” that which is unique and important in human experience. He goes on to say that the symptom of this mindset is the “sketch.” [note 16]

With perceptual drawing being the symptom of this sacred restlessness it follows that a thorough introduction to perceptual drawing will necessarily embody wide-ranging lessons in aesthetics, philosophy, psychology, history, theology, mathematics, mythology, not to mention both rational and intuitive problem solving. It also encourages artistic sensibility (taking care and doing one’s best) and provides the means to heighten and make more significant personal and collective experience. Perceptual drawing is the epitome of multidisciplinary experience. Perceptual Drawing stands as a positive human alternative in the increasing nihilism of an Increasingly Postmodern worldview. This is Leonardo’s legacy.

A class in perceptual drawing engages the full spectrum of human intelligence as described by Howard Gardner and requires students to apply six out of seven of his  most commonly cited types of intelligence. Besides the requisite and obvious Visual-Spatial Intelligence, there are lectures and demonstrations that involve Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence. The physical nature of the drawing process demands Body-Kinesthetic Intelligence. The use of analytical gesture, proportion calculation, geometric schema, and the principles of Brunelleschian perspective rely upon Logical-Mathematical Intelligence. One-on-one instruction and project-oriented activities often require Interpersonal Intelligence. In addition, the concentration and sensory focus required for perceptual drawing has been likened to a meditative act, “the kind of seeing that penetrates the surface of appearances to discern an internal structure beneath.” (This is referred to as Intrapersonal Intelligence.) Of the seven commonly listed types of intelligence only Musical-Rhythmic Intelligence doesn’t play a critical role in a perceptual drawing course. However, it is not uncommon to stimulate intuitive information processing by playing pre-recorded instrumental music for the students during intensive drawing sessions. Perceptual drawing is, unquestionably, a “whole brain” educational process. [note 17]

If Dissanayake is correct in identifying our essential aesthetic needs,[note 18] and I believe she is, then it is critical that we acknowledge the aesthetic, rational, ethical, and spiritual character of art making and art education. I encourage this return to aesthetic sensitivity in the understanding that our long-standing cultural values, far from being the root of evil, are that which give meaning to our lives. In the words of Theodore Dalrymple:

“Art, in its highest expression, explains our existence to us, both particularities of the artist’s own time and the universals of all human history. It transcends transience and therefore reconciles us to the most fundamental condition of our existence. In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.” [note 19]

Because all humans inherit a common central nervous system at birth it is of utmost importance that we structure foundations curricula around our shared perceptual mechanisms so as to provide our students with a understanding of the design elements, principles, and manual skill training that constitute a well-balanced studio foundation. This pedagogical model is rooted in the understanding that you don’t need words to think. Making is thinking. Such a course requires a student to look deliberately, look intensely, seek meaning in experience, and pursue a state of complete awareness of what it is that they are accomplishing. From a Darwinian perspective, as outlined by Denis Dutton in his book, The Art Instinct, [note 20] the above pedagogical model springs from an innate human predisposition to value objects that provide direct sensory pleasure, require specialized skill, require a decoupling from practical concerns, logic, and rational understanding, and acknowledge their place in the traditions of art. [note 20] He goes on to describe art as:

“CHEESCAKE for the mind – delivering a mega WHALLOP of agreeable stimuli concocted to push our pleasure buttons wired in the Pleistocene era.” [note 21]

In closing, consider this exhortation: “Teach your students to care, encourage them to feel. Demonstrate the joy and satisfaction that comes from being constructive rather than deconstructive. Provide them the tools to actively respond to the things in their experience that are beautiful and alive. Instruct them on how to draw, paint, sculpt, model, print, and weave before exiling them to the anti-art wasteland that dominates so much of contemporary cultural practice.”

We can make a difference. The choice is ours to make.

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Brian Curtis is Associate Professor of Painting & Drawing in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Miami, where he is Director of Graduate  Programs in Studio Art and Coordinator of Undergraduate Painting and Drawing. He maintains a website at: www.brian-curtis.com. Contact him here.

Notes 

[Note 1]. Jodi Kushins, “Brave New Basics: Recommendations and Implications for 21st Century Art Foundations,” FATE in Review, Foundation in Art: Theory and Education, Volume 30 (2008 – 2009): 22 – 29.

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/81634595/FATE-IN-REVIEW

[Note 2]. FATE session abstract: “Busting Boundaries in Foundation Drawing, SECAC conference Program – Curiouser: Where Cerebellum Meets Antebellum”, Richmond, VA, 2010.

http://www.secollegeart.org/archive/2010_Conference_Program.pdf

[Note 3]. Dan Collins and Mary Stewart, “SPECIAL SECTION: Report from ThinkTank 3 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Putting Theory to Work: Building a Foundations Program for the 21st Century.” FATE in Review, Foundation in Art: Theory and Education, Volume 30 (2008– 2009): 58.

http://www.foundations-art.org/documents/FATE_Volume30_CorrectedFinal.pdf

[Note 4]. Peter Kaniaris, “The Visual Impulse: A Lost Metaphor,” Paper delivered at a session titled Art before N’art, Chair: Brian Curtis, FATE biennial conference, Portland, Oregon, 2009.

[Note 5]. Franklin Einspruch, “The Mind of Materials: Why a Good Education in Art Emphasizes Techniques Over Ideas,” Paper delivered at a session titled Art before N’art, Chair: Brian Curtis, FATE biennial conference,  Portland, Oregon, 2009.

[Note  6]. Susan Haack, “Science, Scientism, and Anti-Science in the Age of Preposterism,” Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 21, no. 6 (November/December 1997). 

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_scientism_and_anti-science_in_the_age_of_preposterism/

[Note 7]. Alan Sokol, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46/47 (Spring/summer 1996): 217-252.  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

[Note 8]. Alan Sokol, “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,” June 5, 1996. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html

 [Note 9]. Haack, “Science.” 

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/science_scientism_and_anti-science_in_the_age_of_preposterism/

[Note 10]. Philip Goff, “Car Culture and the Landscape of Subtraction.” http://www.worldcarfree.net/resources/freesources/CarCult.htm

[Note 11]. John Suler, “The Psychology of Cyberspace.” http://users.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/showdown.html

[Note 12]. David L. Waltz, “The Prospects for Building Truly Intelligent Machines,” Artificial Intelligence, Winter 1988 (Issued as Volume 117, Number 1, of the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences): 193.

[Note 13]. Theodore  Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon Book, 1986), 87-107.

http://www.shkaminski.com/Classes/Readings/Roszak05.html

[Note 14]. Douglas Rushkoff, “Playing the Future: What We Can Learn from Digital Kids,” Riverhead Trade, 1999.  http://www.rushkoff.com/playing-the-future/

[Note 15]. Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 224.  http://books.google.com/books?id=b0BJ0XyqO9IC&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=ellen+Dissanayake,+not+something+added+to+us–+learned+or+acquired+like+speaking+a+second+language+or+riding+a+horse+—+but+in+large+measure+is+the+way+we+are&source=bl&ots=nZddh4CcJg&sig 

[Note 16]. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 173.

[Note 17]. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983; 1993), 73 – 277.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/education/ed_mi_overview.html

[Note 18]. Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus, 157.

http://books.google.com/books?id=b0BJ0XyqO9IC&pg=PR19&lpg=PR19&dq=ellen+Dissanayake,+not+something+added+to+us–+learned+or+acquired+like+speaking+a+second+language+or+riding+a+horse+—+but+in+large+measure+is+the+way+we+are&source=bl&ots=nZddh4CcJg&sig

[Note 19]. Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and The Masses (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), 125.

[Note 20]. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 196 – 202.

[Note 21]. Ibid., 95. 

 _________

Text copyright 2012 Brian Curtis

Volume 1, Number 3 (2012)

Leonardo’s Legacy: A Defense of the Educational Value of Perceptual Drawing in an Increasingly Postmodern World 

by Brian Curtis, University of Miami

ABSTRACT

University and college art programs once nurtured visual sensitivity, talent, craftsmanship, and creativity. Recently, however, these goals have been displaced – and are increasingly being replaced – by the de-skilling and dematerializing promotion of a conceptually-oriented approach referred to as “contemporary cultural practice” or “postmodern art.” Advanced students of contemporary practice are adept at reciting a litany of postmodern theorists: Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lacan, Lyotard, to name just a few. However, missing from our students’ repertoire are the great minds from the Western rational tradition like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. Not only are our students not being exposed to the intellectual giants of the Western rational tradition, they are not even aware that there are those who question the legitimacy of postmodernism. The solution? Perceptual drawing is an essential building block for making the visual world special. Perceptual drawing has contributed to both the development and maintenance of the “post-medieval mindset,” a mindset that is fundamental to the modernist enterprise known as the Western rational tradition. E. H. Gombrich described this mindset as one of constant alertness, a sacred restlessness and readiness “to learn, to make, to match, remake, seize, and hold” that which is unique and important in human experience. He goes on to say that the symptom of this mindset is the “sketch.” Perceptual drawing is the mother of multidisciplinary experience, engaging the full spectrum of human intelligence. This is Leonardo’s legacy.

Full text article available here.

Text © Brian Curtis

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