Brief Moment

Why Art Works

If art is as inessential as the educational system treats it, then why has it lasted since the beginning of human time. After centuries of histories rewritten, theories of science overturned for new ones, celebrities shed as quickly as dead skin, art survives intact. No one corrects Rembrandt. Look into the face in one of his portraits and timeless humanity looks back. Looking at contemporary faces by Jenny Saville or Dara Engler and see the pain of our times, equally true, but sad in what they reflect about modern values and the anxieties of living today. As the philosopher Susanne Langer emphasized in all of her books, the arts are the best reflection of what’s true about human psychology. As she put it. “Art looks like feelings feel.” The art a person is drawn to is a reflection of their feelings, the ones they recognize from their own lives. This is an avenue of self-knowledge in the murky realms below conscious attention, the areas of human psyche that need morelight and clarity to avoid the sophisticated manipulation of perception managers that take advantage of what fears and desires lurk beneath the surface. Art takes you to the center of being human and if looking at it was part of a person’s self-care, an avenue to the bigger self is opened. Beyond the preoccupations of the mainstream surface, there is more to reflect on in the meaning an image has for an individual. Art stirs the mind with thoughts and memories connected to those feelings developing the intuitive understanding of emotions. At a time when emotional intelligence is prized, even in business, looking at art can be a first step to the self-understanding necessary to understanding others. Finding one artist that shows what you need to see is a bridge to a world of depth today’s marketing values eclipse. It’s not so much what art is but how. How balanced, how energetic, how intense. We feel these first as our bodies adjust to the requirements of the surroundings and apply them to the subject, giving it a mood or attitude. This universal sense of relationship to where we are, educated from birth, is free of the hazards of language. Near and far are positions in space that everyone understands in order to navigate. Visual form of any kind works the same way. Decoding the feeling of abstract space starts with which mechanism is responding. The body responds to the balance of the surroundings and its relationship with surrounding forms. If there is something like a figure, then automatic mirror responses to body language are active. If there something that could be read as a face, the part that understands facial expression adds information that hints at how the other is feeling. Whatever the feeling, it triggers associations with one’s own experience of that feeling. Brain systems that usually work separately, one which processes outer signals, the other involved in the inner world, are both active at once. Not only is the stimulation good for the brain, the intertwining of outer and inner strengthens their link. In a time when what to value has been eroded by modern culture, spending time with art can fortify our common humanity. Strengthening visual intelligence could help us see a bigger picture with broader implications and locate the problems hidden beneath the clutter of speech.

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