Tough Decisions and Ad Non-Sense

Admittedly, this blog has been a little light on ideas, heavy on concept of late. I will say, up front, that I have no intention of abandoning this blog as a space for play, but I had to re-evaluate the look and function of the blog after I received this:

"Hello,

As mentioned in our welcome email, we conduct a second review of your AdSense application once AdSense code is placed on your site(s). As a result of this review, we have disapproved your account for the following violation(s):

Issues:

Insufficient content..."

My application to AdSense was a project that was important to the continued play/experimentation on this blog. It's frustrating to have to re-work the blog and put some distance behind my embedded video posts (one of the cited problems in my AdSense application) and more "content". Whomever is responsible for writing the auto-generated e-mail that tells folks like me that their blog is rejected should substitute the term "content" for "long blocks of rambling text". In researching monetized blogs, the new "good blogs" are the ones with magazine-length essays and slick-looking photos. This makes me laugh, because when this blog first began in early 2008, I asked some successful art education bloggers to look over my blog and provide some feedback. The #1 comment:

"You have some great ideas, but you need to make your blog posts shorter. People don't want to read long blogs."

How the times have changed. Not only has readership of blogs shifted toward a more "digital magazine" format, there are specific demands being placed on the amount of text and number of images/video considered visually acceptable. The last straw, for me, is getting rejected by AdSense. I doubt an actual human even looked at my blog. They probably just run the front page URL through some scanning program of some sort and the acceptance or rejection e-mail is auto-generated. It felt even more impersonal than getting a bulk rejection e-mail for academic publication. Just as with the academic publication rejection, I am applying the criticism to my methods from henceforth. Here is a summary of the changes I'm instituting on my blog from now on:

1. More text, less image blog posts. I apologize to those of you who enjoyed my short musings with lots of image play every month or six. I am planning to write more and illustrate less. If you need photos or videos to compliment this writing you'll have to open a new window, search for images or video in that window, and ask yourself: is this what she was talking about? This question no longer has a tangible answer. I apologize for the added layer of ambiguity. What AdSense wants, AdSense gets.
2. More frequent posts. You may not really want to read this blog very often. You'll need to unsubscribe if the awareness of increased text-heavy posts causes you distress. (I'm specifically talking to my three subscribers here.) After carefully reading my rejection e-mail, I realize that blogging more often about things that words work well with is a superior way to approach blogging than just blogging with lots of images whenever the urge strikes me. 
3. I have changed the way the comments are set up. This has nothing to do with the rejection letter directly. In my previous blog post I was wrestling with what to do with the autonomous exquisite corpse. Allowing the comments to pile up in service to "art" is profitable for all the "poets" but I provide this service free of charge. It takes time and effort to moderate all the anonymous comments. In an effort to use my time better, I changed the settings today so that this blog only accepts comments from registered users. I never wanted to do that because it also means I get less actual "human" comments on the blog, but I had to do it. So it's official, the exquisite corpse is officially DEAD unless you want to send randomized text to the comments section as a registered user. Then, I will still APPROVE ALL comments for that blog post. You just have to be a registered user to comment, I don't have any interest in filtering any content in the comments. It's more about how I use my time right now. I may change my mind later.
4. If you're looking for a less experimental blog and you're not really that interested in home-brewed surrealism and other watered-down versions of conceptual art, then why have you read this far into the post? Perhaps you're wondering how I've managed to ramble about a blog that almost no human reads for this long. Perhaps you, like most of my blog traffic, are a bot. I always welcome bots. OR...perhaps you're a human and you're actually interested in reading some of my thinking on art education. The good news is I started a blog that will attempt to serve that purpose. You can read my art education writing at my personal website. 
5. Guest authors. I am looking for bloggers who are interested in "writing" on any art, art education, art history, or art theory topics. I am open to additional ideas, as well. I'm using the term "writing" because I'm still not interested in trying to turn this blog into a traditional blog. I'm interested in radical and experimental work that utilizes text as the primary means of communication. If you'd be interested in playing around with the form and function of a blog, please contact me. If, on the other hand, you'd like to engage in more scholarly and/or traditional work, please consider being a guest author on the blog at my personal website. When you use the contact form on my personal website to let me know your interest in writing as a guest author, please indicate which blog you'd like to write for and 3-5 sentences about what you're interested in writing about. 

So, in summary, I'm making a few necessary changes to this blog in service to my goals for some continued experimentation with using this blog as a work of art, a place of experimentation, and a place for intellectual play. Choosing to change the comment settings was a difficult but necessary decision that I'll write about in my next blog post here. I hope that the changes I am instituting will make my blog more appealing to the robots that review site content for AdSense. I have a specific artwork that seeks to utilize the AdSense content, so it's important to me to get approval for ad content on this blog. If you'd like to know more about my plan, contact me and I'll explain a bit about my rationale. Otherwise, you'll just have to patiently wait until I get approval to see how the artwork will unfold. I hope it's worth it. I will miss all my daily spam moderation. I have learned about SO many products and services I'll never use thanks to that comment section. Pouring one out for my spam homies.

Netiquette and Thought Crimes

I spent the last week on a cross-country road trip. While trapped in the rented minivan, our family indulged in listening to several episodes of the podcast "Welcome to Night Vale", written by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor and narrated by Cecil Baldwin. In case you've been living under a rock for the last two years, the podcast is somewhere between horror fiction, classic comedy radio play, and the hypnotic aesthetic of public radio news. The central theme of the series is a fictional desert community called Night Vale and the news regarding its various residents and visitors, human and otherwise. In the podcast, there is frequent mention of secret police and the ambiguous penalties for "thought crimes". The notion of thought crimes within the podcast is proposed in a humorous manner - though as with all things humorous in the podcast, they parody contemporary societal issues. Challenges to the ideological problems with digital surveillance are craftily hidden just beneath the surface of the comedy.

Logo by Rob Wilson

 So why am I thinking about Night Vale in relationship to this blog, you may wonder? Well, for those few human readers out there following the autonomous exquisite corpse art happening in the comment section of Marcel Duchamp and Invented Pseudo Algebra, you may be asking the same questions I have been lately. Is there something unethical about approving spam in service to the work of art? Are there consequences for allowing this artwork to continue? What kind of monitoring does this artwork undergo and what purpose does such monitoring serve? Who watches the watchmen?

All joking aside, I have recently begun to think about the lifespan of the autonomous exquisite corpse work hosted on this site. I wonder if I should consider a specific end point for the work? I am also curious about the life span of the work beyond this mortal coil. I have to review and approve all comments for that section now. I originally set up this blog to auto-approve comments, but then the Blogger platform changed and deleted many comments that were auto-approved as they had been identified as spam. Essentially, the continued process of approval of the comments is the primary reason I still maintain this blog.

What will become of this artwork in the future? What will this exquisite corpse say about our society some day? Even though his work was not directly related to the present dilemma, I can't help but think about the work of the artist On Kawara. The simple act of marking time has provided so many opportunities to reflect on history, both personal and global, for such a great number of those who have encountered his work in person and via the internet. Of course, I wonder if On Kawara would see a relationship between his work and the exquisite corpse on this blog. As often as we admit that no person creates in isolation, artists have the funny habit of believing that they have original ideas. Along those lines, I can't help but wonder that in the absence of linear time and the impediment of mortality, what Marcel Duchamp might make of this project as well.

Let me know what you think. Do you see similarities between the exquisite corpse and the "Today Series" by On Kawara? Also, what do you think Duchamp would say about this blog, if anything?

All Along The Watchtower: Layers and Time

"There must be some way out of here" said the joker to the thief 
"There's too much confusion", I can't get no relief 
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth 
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth. 

"No reason to get excited", the thief he kindly spoke 
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke 
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate 
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late". 

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view 
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too. 

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl 
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

What If Nothing Was Ever New

Roland Barthes: neither of us is in control of what we've written.

Today, I am gripped by the joy that nothing is new. Ecstatic waves of relief slam against my body as I sink into the sea of realization: Barthes et al. were right. Prior to reading mounds of critical theory with differing levels of interest, I had wandered in the naive way of an unscholarly "maker of things". I had some notion that I was creating artworks, writing ideas, and living my life in a fairly original way. What a terrifying burden that was to carry. I realize that so very many of the things I make or do have innumerable outside influences directing their creation. It is as if some unseen cultural puppet master guides any generative process with which I engage. It is impossible to avoid being a product of the various cultures and experiences that I have encountered throughout my life - all my art is a testament to this truth.

Perhaps every idea is, to some extent, a recycled idea.

I wish I was being sarcastic, in a romantic and modernist way, but I'm not. It is actually a great relief to realize that the zealous efforts I could briefly sustain to stay on what I thought was the surface of the ocean of ideas was in fact only bringing me to a pool of stagnant air in some cave. There is no "surface" so to speak. I don't have to be angry that I don't have some fantastic oeuvre to show for my brief bursts of energy. It may be more likely that there is some great gift to society in the non-making. I am not contributing to material consumption in this space. I am not adding to your ever-growing collection of tchotchkies. Perhaps, though, I am adding to your idea of ideas. Of course, the beauty in this is I am by no means a trailblazer on this path. There is a mountain of digital musings about the loss of/lack of ever having been original ideas. It's really quite liberating, once you start swimming in it.

Hiroshi Sugimoto knows where I swim.

Monty Python: Prophets of the Interwebs

"Oh great boobies honey bun! My lower intestine is full of Spam, egg, Spam, bacon, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...my nipples..." - Dirty Hungarian

I have to say that I feel immensely liberated by the whole natural evolution of this blog into a Spam artwork. I have always been a huge fan of Monty Python. I was remembering how much I love the Spam skit from their show (that I secretly watched as a kid even though my parents said it was inappropriate for kids...) while I was approving comments (flagged as spam by Blogger - thanks for nothing punk!) for my Marcel Duchamp and Invented Pseudo Algebra post when I thought I might share the Monty Python skit video. You know, kinda as homage to the creative ghost in the machine that drives this blog. I realize that some of you out there may find my shameless spam comment approval distasteful or unethical or morally objectionable or some other judgment you might levy against me that I've not thought of yet. If you are one of those people, I found an amusing Spam PSA to clear your conscience. Alternatively, if you find this video to be an inadequate warning, please....by all means....message me in the comments and let me know what you think I should be doing with my blog. I am open to suggestions and artistic directions for this work. I do plan to talk about Banksy at some point when his New York pop-up crap is sufficiently passe, but people are still infatuated with the character so I will stick to my Spam adventures for now. Unless you can convince me to stop.

I am open to your compelling argument.

Oh, so here's that nice video to remind you not to click on banner ads and what-not. It's probably produced by the lovely people at Snopes. They're trying to help you find the "truth" on the internet. So what if they make a small profit off of your clicks. Maybe I'll monetize this blog and make money off your clicks....oh wait, NO. That would scare away all my DELICIOUS spam!!!!

Horse_ebooks and a renewed passion for SPAM!

This video is several years behind, but I'm glad to see that other folks are thinking of exploring the native art form of the net. This video made me angry all over again that Blogger filtered most of my old comments on the Surreal Blogspam post and the Marcel Duchamp and Invented Pseudo Algebra post. These two posts are related works of art and Blogger decided to wipe my spam comments from them. It makes me sad. Stay out of my art, Blogger!

Threatplane, pedobear and sensationalism vs. rational thought

The banner pulled behind Threatplane read: "take down the statue or we will".

Obstacles aren't predictable

In my August post, I was concerned about intellectual posturing in art history. I'm happy to report that hasn't been the case. My problems have been of another sort.

In the overwhelming process of adjusting to graduate student life: loss of professional identity, loss of income, loss of direct contact with family, friends and familiar scenery, intellectual posturing has not been an issue. Adjusting to regional culture and feeling like I fit in this community socially has been a challenge unrelated to subjects of study. It's the classic case of trying to interact with people in the way that worked somewhere else, finding out that annoys people and then recoiling when you can't figure out how to do something different. All that navel-gazing has been sidetracked by the allegations of child rape in the athletics department at my university. Any personal concerns I had suddenly melted away in the flames of Paterno and Sandusky's reputations being burned to a crisp. I am trying to stop worrying about myself and shifting my discomfort to productive efforts to help the community that has willingly or unwillingly adopted me. I return to what motivates me to be an educator: the children.

I can feel uncomfortable and sorry for myself all day long, but I have nothing to complain about compared to those boys. I am grossly oversimplifying the issue when I say that it's unfair that this would ever happen to a child. I hope that the alleged victims of sexual abuse find some peace and a community that accepts them, regardless of how awkward they feel. My sympathy runs deep.

Back in the saddle again

So after disappearing from my blog again since January and a failed attempt at a sketch a day after March (and spring/summer museum education programming mayhem) I am back on the blog. Why, you may ask? I am no longer working at the art museum. What, you say? Yes, in a slightly unsettling conversation with AAM's president Ford Bell, facilitated by my museum's director this spring at the annual meeting I believe I explained it somewhere along the lines of..."I am seeking my PhD because as I see job postings for entry level educators in museums that require a Master's degree in art history or art education, I am looking toward the future of the field. Museum education is still in the developmental process of professionalization and understanding what training constitutes a prepared educator. I want to learn how to conduct a large scale research project and publish the results. I think it's important to understand the changing role of research in museums and I see the PhD as a way to stay relevant in my field." I hope I'm right. Wish me luck folks!

In the meantime, I will try to blog here and there about the whole adventure. I am minoring in art history, a professional deficiency of mine. I am most anxious about the differences in research methods between these two related disciplines. OK, to be honest, I am anxious about handling the subtle (and not so subtle) social interactions and intellectual posturing I may encounter in art history. It's what kept me from an MA in art history. I am trying to overcome my fear and lack of knowledge, gauntlet style. I will either grow professionally or be beaten to a pulp. More on that later.

Happy New Year!

My New Year's resolution was to draw something every day. No other specific requirements, just draw something. I completed a drawing tonight with no problem. I am just curious what the rest of the year will shape up to look like. I have never developed creative routine, so I find that my art reflects available time, materials and conceptual urgency. This is my way of justifying its tangential and inconsistent quality and utter lack of quantity. I am forcefully exiting an 18 month dry spell artistically. My current position as Curator of Education at the art museum has kept me from any physical artistic pursuits. I have just been too busy trying to orchestrate art experiences for everyone else and my art has really suffered. I thought this melon collie was a fitting beginning to my exit of the artistic slump. I hope to be sharing more poorly taken photos of my year in artistic reflection.

A Practical Post

With so much written about the use of blogs as research tools, their place in the broad spectrum of research is unquestionable. I set up this blog a few years ago with the intention of exploring the intersections of visual art (particularly street art), interactive web applications, object interpretation and educational research. I have been following a few different art education related blogs, not specifically research oriented, and I have noticed a few overlapping characteristics that make them all frequent-reads that illicit further thought or interaction. First, the posts are short, digestable. Second, there is eye candy...pictures to keep me interested. Third, they are frequently posted, and the content is consistently related to the parent concept or thesis. So I have this nagging curiosity about why I feel the need to sporadically maintain this blog in spite of my knowledge of the "unofficial best-practices for blog readership". Furthermore, I question the effectiveness of this blog as a research tool. I never articulated a question (or questions) that I continue to pursue. I encounter issues in my practice that I question and seek to resolve through conversation and contemplation...but these posts don't necessarily read as practical questions. Looking at the few posts I have as a body of work, this blog seems like a handful of tangents. Like the found objects and photos I used to collect in graduate school. So the practical question I ask myself (and you, dear reader), should I post more, or abandon ship? Does this help anyone out there in their profession as art educators... or even me? Specifically, can this blog ever be considered a research blog?

Spam II

In a previous post, I complained about my blog being bombarded with spam. What I originally found to be a nuisance, I attempted to turn into a work of art via a related blog post. I had been fascinated by Duchamp and his contemporaries and the cut-up method. I decided that I would allow spam comments on the Duchamp post, since the spam exemplified the random nature of what I was attempting to express about Duchamp's work. Since the "blog spam" posting, I had remembered seeing the video work of artist/educator Juan Carlos Castro. His artistic take on internet spam takes an entirely different form. He has created a lovely short video you may enjoy when you click on this. I am looking for further artistic explorations of electronic junk/auto generated nonsense. If you know of any other artist working with this media, please share!

Who's interpretation?

Position titles are a funny thing. In my field it's not uncommon to see curator/manager/interpreter/educator/director attached in various combinations to a colleague's name. I probably sound naive to veteran museum educators when I say that the position title confusion seems so indicative of our ambiguous roles in the museum. My title is simply museum educator, but I oversee a paid intern and several part-time employees. I work with curriculum based programs for children, a weekly art studio program for intergenerational visitors, and a huge monthly cultural event. I develop tours and gallery experiences for visitors of all ages. I design workshops for adults, teachers and students as well as developing curriculum and materials for holiday and summer camps for children. I also often assist with researching the collections and exhibits, I create gallery guides, interpretive DVD's, write tours create other didactics for the galleries. I maintain our Facebook and create marketing materials for education programs and general museum events, I even write grants. I feel that I do much more than my title implies. I also find that I have to explain my function at the museum on a constant basis to people who hear/see my title. Most people think museum educator=docent, and all I do is give tours. I do give tours, but...there's so much more (I hear myself saying with a slight echo effect).

So when a small group of third graders approached me last fall about how to become a museum professional, I had to take a closer look at my daily function within the museum so that we could begin learning together. Wait, I'm putting the cart before the horse. They wanted to know how to become artists. We met for the first time in November 2009. The children had already begun research about the training, pay and variety of jobs an artist could pursue. Their teacher had suggested that they interview a person working in the field to learn more about working in the arts. These students had been visiting the museum regularly for a curriculum-based interdisciplinary art/science program. Since they don't have an art teacher on their campus, I was the reasonable and familiar facsimile. (I don't mean to imply that I am chopped liver to these kids, but I think they would have rather interviewed a flashy painter initially. Again, the teacher was the intermediary for their decision process, I believe.) So we discussed careers in visual arts. I told them about teaching art in public school, working as a graphic designer, my personal experiences in working with studio artists, and working with craftspeople. They took notes, asked a few questions, and thanked me when I was done. I figured that I had at least abraded their dreams, if not crushed them with my fairly straightforward (read bland) presentation of artist careers.

Much to my surprise, they came back for more. They had a new agenda based on further independent research, and they were looking for a museum-specific research project. So, a couple months later I had three 3rd grade interns, the Jr. Interpreters, visiting me for three hours a week with a parent volunteer. We familiarized ourselves with the education studio, toured the public areas of the museum, and met several of the staff members. We developed a list of what each staff member's responsibilities are at the museum. Next, we developed a collaborative definition of interpretation, using other familiar jobs (language translator, air traffic controller, etc.) as the basis. After we agreed on a set of characteristics of museum interpretation, we developed a very stripped down four step version of how I personally approach object interpretation. Next, using the four step program, the Jr. Interpreters identified a piece in our permanent collection and got to work. Several weeks later, we have a how-to video for responding to a ceramic artwork, a commercial for an artist's work, and a PSA about the value of visiting the museum to view sculptural glass art. The Jr. Interpreters have also presented their work to incoming Kindergartners, the PTA, and their teachers. Our next step is Facebook. We decided to share our video interpretations with the museum's Facebook audience in hopes of productive feedback. (I am the site moderator, so nobody gets hurt). All in all, the kids accomplished tons of self-guided research on artists, art techniques, artist statements and came up with some witty written, verbal and video outcomes.

So what did I learn? Well, lots more about how to connect all that grad school reading and emerging research methods with my actual practice. I am very excited about my personal realizations in this process. I know there are three kids that know and love the process of what we do as museum educators. More personally important, as a guide to the process of discovery of these guidelines and definitions with the students, I found the streamlining and simplification of how I understand my job currently has given me a new confidence in my ambiguous title. I know how to summarize some of what I do, and it creates room for me to grow professionally. The certainty of what I currently understand has solidified a foundation for me to begin building on my current methods. I am ready to start reading again, and I'd love to hear from/interact with other museum educators/curators/managers/interpreters/directors about their reflections on practice.

Second Life Symposium

Well, today was my first full day of of the NMC's Second Life Symposium on new media and learning, the fifteenth in the NMC’s Series of Virtual Symposia, exploring the impact of new media on teaching, learning, research, and creative inquiry, especially in higher education. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Second Life, explore here before reading further. For those that do know about SL, NMC has its own private campus that is invite only for these events, so I was honored to be part of an exclusive group learning in a virtual online interactive environment. Nothing like teleporting to the sessions and sitting next to a blue dragon while listening to a 7' tall man describe contemporary understandings of oral history!

Today, we explored digital storytelling. My mind was blown by the speakers. I heard keynote speaker Joe Lambert with the Center for Digital Storytelling talk about Centering the Circle: Storywork in the Era of Media Ubiquity. Joe is one of the foundation people to digital storytelling, and it was a great way to get things started. Next I heard Cynthia Calongne of Colorado Technical University talk about The Mars Expedition as a Virtual Context in Storytelling. We sat on black orbs in a virtual planetarium and discussed throwing money in Second Life to inattentive undergraduate students, among other more meaningful things...
I took a little break and came back to hear Anthony Curtis with University of North Carolina at Pembroke talk about Digital Storytelling: An Ancient Tradition in the 21st Century. Anthony has done some great work with his undergraduate students by encouraging them to work with digital storytelling. After another longer break, I heard Lou Rera of Buffalo State College talk about Digital Stories:Flash Fiction. Flash fiction is a fun genre of writing/storytelling consisting of the basic principle: economy! Lou talked about Hemmingway's six word fiction and we explored the idea of machinima haiku. (If there is a rare chance that a symposium atendee is reading this blog, I do know I am crudely paraphrasing.)
We finished by learning with Ruben Puentedura of Hippasus talk about Mapping the Digital Storytelling Domain: Notes for a Future Cartography. I don't even know where to begin. This was truly a grand finale. Reuben talked about the evolution of storytelling beginning with the pictographs in Lasceaux and ending with a horde of URL's I hadn't even heard of. If you are curious about Reuben's projections, post a comment and I will share my notes. Suffice if to say, he had a charted trajectory of levels of interactivity for storytelling that blew my mind.

So, I will post a snapshot of my symposium experiences if they ever come through the e-mail. Not sure if I sent them correctly, but we'll see....or not. Anyway, as far as learning in an web 2.0 environment goes, this was quite a day. You should try it!

Surreal blogspam?

So there are spam blogs, you know, the ones you used to find on Google when you typed in a subject and the blog that came up in the search results was just gibberish and repeated keywords. Google and other search engines now have programs to largely eliminate these. Sure, they were funny, but they tried to re-direct you to e-marketing sites or installed malware on your computer. (Not funny)
Then there is blog spam. This has been a recent development on my blog. I was deleting the posts as they came in for approval (yes, I do approvals for posts, largely due to just this sort of issue...) but now I have another thought. What if these auto-generated posts were some sort of robot art? (I don't actually believe this, I just like the theoretical possibility)
So I decided to approve the comments for the Marcel Duchamp and invented pseudo algebra post. Check it out.
So these posts kept making me think of the exquisite corpse poem I found online a few years ago. Oddly enough, the exquisite corpse poems online have anti-spam protection now. I find this perplexing as it seem counter-productive in a sense. How can you decide that some contributions are spam and some are not in a surrealist creativity exercise? I am approving all comments for the Duchamp post based on this rationale:

Exquisite corpse (also known as "exquisite cadaver" or "rotating corpse") is a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled, the result being known as the exquisite corpse or cadavre exquis in French. Each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. "The adjective noun adverb verb the adjective noun") or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.

The technique was invented by Surrealists and is similar to an old parlour game called Consequences in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold it to conceal part of the writing, and then pass it to the next player for a further contribution. Surrealism principal founder André Breton reported that it started in fun, but became playful and eventually enriching. Breton said the diversion started about 1925, but Pierre Reverdy wrote that it started much earlier, at least before 1918.

André Breton writes that the game developed at the residence of friends in an old house at 54 rue du Chateau (no longer existing). In the beginning were Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, Benjamin Peret, Pierre Reverdy, and André Breton. Other participants probably included Max Morise, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Simone Collinet, Tristan Tzara, Georges Hugnet, René Char, Paul Éluard, and Nusch Éluard.
Henry Miller often partook of the game to pass time in French cafés during the 1930s.

Thank you Wikipedia (it's own exquisite corpse, of a sort) for the justification.

Seven Months Later...

I deviated from my art/technology post topics in this blog after I left graduate school. For my readers that are looking for more of those posts, I promise to get back to that topic soon. In the meantime, I think I need to tie up a few loose ends. In my last post from January 18th I discussed my struggles returning to the middle school classroom. Since that post I had many replies offering advice, voicing concern, and in the case of the reply I posted, sharing similar struggles in the classroom. With those replies in mind it is with mixed feelings that I update my current work status.
The day after my last post I was notified that my younger sister had died suddenly. My mother is a disabled widow and a retired teacher. She is a strong-willed and people-oriented woman who insisted that she was fine all by herself halfway across the U.S. As the weeks after my sister's death passed, though, it was clear that looking at the long term, she would either need to move to Florida or we would have to move back to Texas. I share all of this with you to help explain how I have ended up working as the museum educator in a rural west Texas art museum. Call it coincidence or fate, but after applying for museum jobs and not finding a fit for me and my family I was teaching middle school in Florida and giving up on the idea slowly when something eerie happened. Imagine my shock when I received the call from the director of the museum asking me to come to Texas for an interview on Monday, January 19th. I didn't call him back for over a month because I was too busy teaching and mourning my sister's death. When I finally snapped out of it in February and called him back, we agreed on a spring break on-site interview. I loved the museum and the staff immediately, and luckily the feeling was mutual. At the close of the 2008-2009 school year I submitted my resignation. I love my new job, but I have mixed feelings about these last 14 months.
With that update in mind, I want to return to the replies I received to my first post. I want to believe that public school art education can survive the current challenges it is facing. I want to believe that our students' parents support what we do in the classroom and beyond. I want to believe that our legislators and policy shapers have a deep understanding of the imperative nature of quality art education. I want to believe that local administration and our tested subject area colleagues respect the extra hours we volunteer without pay to help run art clubs, prepare student exhibitions, and provide rich experiences for all students interested in learning about art.
I believe that these things are true sometimes.
I also believe that it is shameful how often those things are not true, at least for some of my colleagues in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and across our nation. This post is not intended to be a political rant, although it leans that direction. Rather, I want to publicly reflect on my transition from classroom teacher to working in a museum. This job represents years of hard work and preparation seen to fruition. I love what I do and I still consider myself an art educator in addition to a department head, interpreter, facilitator, community representative, and artist. I am in a position to help provide professional development for the art teachers in our town and art experiences for our public school students. I am able to work with our community's retired adults, individuals with disabilities, as well as college and private school students. I have the ability to reach out to many more people and provide art to diverse groups that I could not easily work with as a classroom teacher. In many ways it seems like a more dynamic job that will make a positive difference in the community.

I just can't fight the nagging feeling that I ran away from a fire and didn't get adequate help. I still want to help resolve the nagging issues facing public school art educators.

Now what do I do?

How To Make Seven Months Disappear

I finished my coursework at the University of North Texas in May 2008. I was running out of time to get a job. My housing was about to be pulled out from under me. I couldn't see a better option locally. I figured that if I was going to move out of the house I had lived in for eight years, I might as well really move.
I took a job in central Florida teaching art in middle school....again.
I figured that I'd done it in Texas, why not do it again in Florida until I get something else going. The school had a great art classroom that was well stocked. The previous teacher had been let go due to a lack of classroom management.
I thought....hey, I've taught college students, preschoolers and I even taught teachers when I worked at that museum, I can get that classroom managed.
I was only somewhat correct. I've managed the classroom, but I have no life outside of my job. I leave my house at 7:30 for the commute, arrive by 8:15, kids pour in at 9:00. I teach seven classes, 45 minutes each. I have a 30 minute lunch connected to my one conference period. That's one hour fifteen minutes in theory. I never get that time, though. I have to walk the 3rd period kids to the cafeteria (that's 5-10 minutes from my building fighting foot traffic) and I have to pick up my 5th period kids (another 5-10 minutes gone). I made a new year resolution to leave by 5:30 every day. I've already violated that five times because I got hung up making parent phone calls. I have to exhaust every in classroom/parent contact method in discipline before the office will even touch the kid. The kids want to go to in-school-suspension because they don't have to complete classwork there. The girl who said she'd shoot me in the back got 4 days of out-of-school suspension. Her friend screamed in my face a few weeks later that she hated me. She got one day of ISS. I work with some pretty crazy kids. I am happy when I get home by 6:00 p.m.
At least my colleagues are good people. Having conversations with adults for those 30 minutes of lunch is probably the only reason I haven't quit. Oh yeah, and my son loves the music program there. He gets to play cello and upright bass. Except that his amazing band teacher, a young woman only 25 years old, had to quit the first week after school was back in session this January due to health concerns. Her doctor told her the job was far too stressful for her. Sounds like a smart doctor, huh?

So that's how to make seven months disappear.

It's not that magical, really.

Perspectives

There's nothing like leaving your comfort zone to broaden the outlook. I have had a busy summer and a few museum trips worth noting in this vein. My knowledge of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was secondhand until recently. I visited the museum for the first time this month. I had heard from museum educators that the SFMOMA had some impressive programs and they were keen on the technology integration. Their website certainly attests to this notion. I visited the Frieda Kahlo exhibit and was shocked, however.
I have rarely been more claustrophobic. I have never seen so many people pushing, shoving, and clamoring to see artwork in a blockbuster exhibition on a weekday that exhibited such a lack of courtesy. I thought I might suffocate it was so crowded. The galleries were not well attended, either.
I watched a backpack scrape against a Miro painting while a student posed in front of it for a snapshot. I watched a couple step on part of the What happened to the preservation part of the mission statement at the SFMOMA?
This is a great example of why the argument for/against the blockbuster museum exhibitions has arisen. I am not the first person to mention this issue see here. The presentation of objects for mass culture has several problem areas, safety of the objects being only a small part of that criticism. The danger of "dumbing it down" or creating an airport/mall/generic public space are also concerns. Then again, perhaps I'm taking the social role of museums too seriously. Where do you stand on the subject?

Goodbye Milton

I have been absent from the blogosphere for over a month, but a headline today brought me back to reflect on my own inspiration for artistic pursuit. Artist Robert Rauschenberg died yesterday. His artwork was not what caused me to feel reflective, although as a photographer and assemblage sculptor, I can identify with his process. No, it was upon reading his life in headlines that I felt compelled to share my thoughts.
The AP article stated:
"Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of odd and everyday articles earned him a reputation as a pioneer in pop art but whose talents spanned the worlds of painting, sculpture and dance, has died, his gallery representative said Tuesday. He was 82.
Rauschenberg died Monday, said Jennifer Joy, his representative at Pace Wildensteins.
Born Milton Rauschenberg in 1925 in Port Arthur, Texas, and raised a Christian fundamentalist, Rauschenberg wanted to be a minister but gave it up because his church banned dancing.
"I was considered slow," he once said "While my classmates were reading their textbooks, I drew in the margins."
He was drafted into the U.S. Navy during World War II and knew little about art until a chance visit to an art museum where he saw his first painting at age 18. He drew portraits of his fellow sailors for them to send home.
When his time in the service was up, Rauschenberg used the GI bill to pay his tuition at art school. He changed his name to Robert because it sounded more artistic."
Click here to read the full article

I particularly enjoyed the New York Times article regarding Rauschenberg.
here's an excerpt:
"Apropos of Mr. Rauschenberg, Cage once said, “Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”

Cage meant that people had come to see, through Mr. Rauschenberg’s efforts, not just that anything, including junk on the street, could be the stuff of art (this wasn’t itself new), but that it could be the stuff of an art aspiring to be beautiful — that there was a potential poetics even in consumer glut, which Mr. Rauschenberg celebrated. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.”

The remark reflected the optimism and generosity of spirit that Mr. Rauschenberg became known for. His work was likened to a Saint Bernard: uninhibited and mostly good-natured. He could be the same way in person. When he became rich, he gave millions of dollars to charities for women, children, medical research, other artists and Democratic politicians.

A brash, garrulous, hard-drinking, open-faced Southerner, he had a charm and peculiar Delphic felicity with language that nevertheless masked a complex personality and an equally multilayered emotional approach to art, which evolved as his stature did. Having begun by making quirky small-scale assemblages out of junk he found on the street in downtown Manhattan, he spent increasing time in his later years, after he had become successful and famous, on vast international, ambassadorial-like projects and collaborations."

There is some great hope in the retrospection of Robert Rauschenberg's life. As I presented certificates of recognition last Thursday, May 8th (Children's Mental Health Awarness Day) to young artists with whom I spent several weeks working, hope was the message I sought to convey. I shared with the artists, their families, and community members that I was a troublesome student for many of my teachers and I have never been known for my impressive academic record. Despite my struggle with a learning disability, I have become a healthy, happy, productive artist and teacher. I attributed this to a small handful of people who believed in me. People who stood in opposition to the many who said (and perhaps hoped) I would fail.
Robert Rauschenberg is one of so many artists that we can add to the list of students who were marked as failures that made indelible profound marks on society nonetheless! When will the educational system stop basing their assessments of students on narrow parameters that lead to assumptions that may be destructive for those students that can't fit the mold? More importantly, how many potentially Robert Rauschenberg-esque students miss opportunities to change lives because opportunities are not provided to them due to judgments made about them based on assumptions? This was why I came to be an art educator, and it's still a tremendous motivating factor. Recently related to me by Dr. Nadine Kalin was the statement her mentor Dr. Rita Irwin made "we learn more from pain than pleasure," which becomes more true for me as I continue to reflect.

So...thank you Milton. Thank you for defying the preconceived notions of art. Thank you for the example you have provided to us in your life. Thank you for helping me to reflect on my motivations for being an art educator.
Thank you.

Ari Marcopoulos and Paul D Miller: institutional critique re-mix

I just viewed Ari Marcopoulos' exhibition Architectures at the New Orleans Museum of Art. According to the NOMA's website, the exhibit is described as-
A special exhibition of xerox and laser-jet prints...Ari Marcopoulos: Architectures will be the first in the _museological exhibition series curated by Diego Cortez, The Freeman Family Curator of Photography.
Based on my observations, it was a room full of institutional critique. The near meter-length wide predominately black and white photos were printed on paper and tacked to the gallery walls with pins. The images were familiar, knowable scenes of youth culture, skateboard ramps, graffiti, and cityscapes, printed on humble materials without the recently popularized hyper-precision for which large format photography (I'm thinking of Gregory Crewdson's work, etc.) has become known. It's not the images alone that provide this institutional critique, it's the do-it-yourself didactic label text that Marcopoulos has added that grabbed my attention.
Marcopoulos has intertwined quotes from critical theorists and various other authors with his own philosophical musings in an effort to broaden the way learners define architectural photography to encompass graffiti (dialogue=structural) human bodies (flexible/mobile structures) architectural models (surrogate realities) among other photographic subjects. These sophisticated concepts are not clear in viewing the photographs alone. The key contextual piece (not found in the exhibition booklet) is the textual addition. This was an interesting component to this show that I felt embodied the "artist as curator" role that I have see in previous shows dealing with similar urban/global/culture as collage subject matter. The self-actualized artist as political and institutional critic resonates strongly with my own interests in reinventing the roles of art educators to encompass broader definitions of their practice as well as analyzing the museum as an institution and the role of education within that institution through the lens (literally and metaphorically) of train yard graffiti. That brings us to Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJSpooky.

Dj Spooky and Q*bert Copyright Criminals Graf Wall by Twick and Buder from the ICP Crew "Tire Island" in San Francisco at the end of 24th St.
Lifted (perhaps appropriately) straight from his personal page-
Paul D. Miller is a conceptual artist, writer, and musician working in New York. In 2005, Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media by contemporary cultural theorists followed his first publication, Rhythm Science. Miller’s work as a media artist has appeared in a wide variety of contexts such as the Whitney Biennial and The Venice Biennial for Architecture (year 2000).
Miller is less interested in critique of the museum, but he certainly seeks to critique social systems via his multimedia experiences. As DJ Spooky, his performances in museums are often well received by the young, hip, intelligentsia. He's capable of creating an engrossing experience while maintaining an expository message of societal disfunction.
My burning question for both of these artists (who have had artistic collaborations in the past, incidentally) would be:
Do these artworks create more than conversation and reflection? Further, is action/change in society an intended outcome of the artistic processes each of the artists enact?
I ask these questions in response to the abstract and sometimes esoteric nature of the artistic content. In Marcopoulos' case, I understand his didactics and the art historical basis for his creative processes, but I wondered (as a liminal space interpretive border-crosser) who the intended audience was, and what Marcopoulos' intentions for the outcome of that audience's interactions were.
Similarly, I can't help but wonder if DJ Spooky's Antarctic ice music will facilitate ecological awareness or if his book Rhythm Science will prompt readers (whomever they may be) to read W. E. B. Dubois, Emerson, or Joyce, or if there's any overt educational intent at all.
Why should that matter at all, you may ask. I don't know that it does, directly. Within the context that both of these artists have successfully bridged the gaps between-artist as curator-street/urban culture-art as activism/institutional critique-I tip my hat to them. I am curious about the role of the educator in this equation. Does artist/researcher/practitioner fit into another gap to bring the messages of these artists to a wider audience?
Are educators DJ's too?