Late Summer Anxiety

Visual Culture- The Importance of Art Students

Today feels like the adolescence of visual culture, when the global culture’s mindset hasn’t fully developed its frontal lobe and is gobbling new games, entertainments and social media with a mindless avidity that is warm clay for manipulation by perception managers. Whether through front groups to influence opinion around the world to controlling imagery in popular media, it to aims at promoting a particular look and attitude. The insistence on certain norms is great for capitalism because so few fit the norms. This requires products and expense of time and money. When the images are limited people think those are the only choices. This leaves a variety of gifts and capabilities untapped. Like the undeveloped adolescent brain people are swamped by the images, believing what they see with their own eyes and trying to modify themselves to fit the norm. These images aim at deep unconscious strivings and aversions that twist people to commercial purposes. Unrecognized emotion is their motherlode. The universality of the image is hardwired, seeing humans' homes on fire, violence and dead bodies, and fear is the automatic adjustment to the scene. Remedying this is the task of art. Understanding the power of visual imagery is the beginning of resistance. Art and beauty offer what attracts and stimulates. Art is where people have the opportunity to recognize their deepest emotions and the thoughts stirred by them. When people respond to art they are seeing something in themselves. Once it is seen and conscious awareness understands those levels a person has a choice where they didn’t before. The internet allows more artists to be available to everyone. Not just museum collections but current art people are posting that reflects what modern life is like. It’s a resource for learning about the self that doesn’t show. What is responded to is a mirror showing some part of inner life. Having a tool to witness personal depth strengthens connection with what revealed it, not just the artist but humanity for sharing that emotion. It isn’t fear but love that summons up what will help other people recognize more of their own uniqueness. Taking responsibility for what parts of the brain are grown and cultivated should include exposure to great art of all kinds. This is what the modern art school tries to do. Today’s art students are alive to so many levels of information it must be creating very complex brains who can integrate them with training in visual sensitivity. That combined with the exposure to art around the globe, particularly what has been overlookedby the mainstream, can build a more comprehensive perceptual consciousness. Art is part of an ecological consciousness enlarging our view of the whole. New generations of art students can help others see what’s true in our technological hall of mirrors. Art shows what it’s like to be alive now.

Unending

Focused Seeing

At the end of last semester, when so many of us finished the school year on zoom, almost everyone commented on how exhausting it was, myself included. But it wasn’t clear to me why. It is only now, facing a full semester on-line, that I discovered one reason was I was thinking about what I liked about zoom teaching. Faces. When I reflect on what about my classes changed mid-semester, one surprise was how my image of each student changed. Instead of the figure hunched over the drawing in the corner I saw a face full of light and curiosity.

Faces are such an intense source of information that there is a whole part of the brain dedicated to them, the fusiform gyrus, a bulge of brain with two aspects, a part that reads the expressions and finds them even where there isn’t a face, and a part that recognizes faces we’ve seen before. Paul Ekman estimates that we can discern over 3000 different facial expressions. This is a scope of understanding we may not appreciate but is in active use in a zoom one to one.

The limitations of on-line teaching are opportunities to focus on what we may not have otherwise. One-on-one in person doesn’t mean the other looks at you. But on-line, the other has to look at the screen to see what’s going on, and we get a chance to appreciate the extensive information in a  face. The memories I have of each individual are always the face on the screen. This isn’t just because they’re the most recent, but also because looking at their faces showed so much more of their person than shy or anxious body language might allow. With some I felt like I’d never seen their faces before, and others seemed so much more relaxed in their own spaces, less exposed and self-conscious. So much of the role being played in the social world, the outer shell of identity, slid away. One-on-one is a very concentrated experience but it feels like it’s training something good, a greater awareness of the person beneath the surface, the individual human behind the labels. Like when I first got caught by tennis when I chanced on Bjorn Borg’s face on the screen, it feels like a privilege to witness something more real, connected to the pulse of being and not the shell.

Maybe with on-line teaching we lose something in group dynamics, but with in-person group dynamics certain personalities assert themselves and others try to disappear. The screen has an equalizing effect. Everybody is the same size tile or the whole screen, group or absolute individual. The more I reflect on it, the more the opportunities multiply.

Predict

Looking Up

When George Lakoff and Mark Johnson came out with Philosophy in the Flesh, it shifted the foundation of how I thought about concepts. The idea that so much of our conceptual language was made of metaphors for physical experience underscored the way our bodies participate in our thinking. One of the first developmental concepts is ‘more’. The feeding infant develops the early understanding of quantity which branches into areas from mathematics to our sense of injustice, that someone is getting more than another. Physical experience is entwined with perception, an ongoing dance of seeking and adjusting. What we feel as emotion is the adaptation of the body in anticipation of what might be required in relation to our world. We experience meaning before we put words on it.

Understanding facial expression and body language is a resonance with another’s actions, a direct knowing of how it feels inside to be in those behaviors. It’s a two-way influence. As facial expression expert Paul Ekman said, “Make the face, feel the emotion.” We don’t just smile when we feel good, we feel good when we smile. Body position works the same way. Changing a body position can change a feeling and attitude.

When something is above us we have to look up to see it. Eyes raised and even the chin lifted, these are behaviors we see in religious painting in states of wonder and awe. A gothic cathedral evokes those feelings by lifting our eyes upward. Looking up the hill we’re about to climb is a versatile metaphor for self-improving goals. On the other end of the metaphor if someone’s is standing over us after knocking us down looking up is being dominated. Whether we have agency, can do something about it, is the pivot.

Recently, when I was talking with a very conservative friend about statues being torn down I said that some of these people weren’t to be looked up to, and she said she wasn’t necessarily looking up to them, it was just history. So, I resorted to a different use of the same physical metaphor. Putting someone on a pedestal means they are idealized, to be esteemed, revered, considered above us. The higher the pedestal the more you look up. To what degree might that body position communicate a sense of eminence that is not deserved. The installation itself creates dominance. The message infiltrates the body unconsciously. When one man sits on a horse and the other standing on the ground it’s a clear implication of status. Without any need of inscription, statues on pedestals communicate stature. Where there is clear worth must be examined.

Slicing Night