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A Brain, A Heart and Courage: Gifts from the Wizard
by
Karey Perkins
FROM: Puzzles About Art., An Aestheti g la~bonk;
Chapter Three: Meaning and Interpretation"
The Case:
Suppose that the faculty of a large state polytechnic university is revising the institution s general education requirements to ensure that all students receive a sound education that will be useful to them in later lives. Since 1974, they have been permitted to take any course about anything now thought of as art, whether it be a course on Shakespeare 5 plays, Chaplin 5 films, Bach 5 music, rock and roll, Renaissance painting, or American textiles and quilts. The Dean of the School of Agriculture insists that even the more recent requirement be dropped.
Agriculture majors are serious students who come to this university to learn, and nothing much can be learned from art. Before 1974, our students were required to study the so?called great poetry and plays and painting and music. These seem meaningless to me, but, even if they do mean something, students could never learn what they mean because the experts disagree about it.
The requirement we've had since 1974 is not much use, but at least our agriculture majors can fulfill it by taking a course specially designed for them by the Art History Department. This course is, relevant for future farmers. It focuses on agricultural art, like paintings of fruit by Caravaggio, Chardin, and Cezanne; orchards painted by Van Oogh; pictures of barnyard animals and fowl by Cuyp, Js,' tubby, Audubon, and Hicks; flower pictures by Redon; and even pictures of processed food, like Vassallo °s The Larder. Even so, learning from art is not efficient because artistic representations of agriculture, whether in painting or in such literature as William Langland's Vision concerning Piers and the Plowman, Edward Thomas's HaymakirW ° or H.D.'s Orchard, ° are not as instructive as, and harder to understand than, standard agricultural science textbooks.
Is the Dean right that nothing much, or perhaps nothing at all, can be learned from art, and that, consequently, art should have no place in a universitys core curroiculum?
More Questions: (page 61): Why should the study of art [literature) [the humanities] be thought of as an appropriate university level subject? l5 art in an education valuable because we can learn from it? Wbat can we learn from it? Some believe art can instruct us ...more effectively than standardized teaching methods. It can teach about morals; it can teach about emotions, they say. But if so, how? And what is the criteria for "truth" inlof an artworks instruction given that it is not a vehicle for theory or fact?
And More Questions (page 76): Are there good educational reasons to support the proposal to make courses about art [literature] [the humanities] part of a university's general core requirements? Answering this question depends, to some extent, on whether we maintain that everything that is valuable to learn can be expressed propositionally ? in other words, by using statements that can be proven to be true. We may be more inclined to include art in the university's curriculum if we believe nonpropositional modes of learning exist for which truth and falsity are not appropriate criteria, if art is a nonpropositional mode of learning, can it function effectively in organized educational settings? Are there ways of testing whether people have been successful in learning from art? If learning from art requires direct experience of the artistic vehicle through which the information is conveyed, what role does a teacher play, and what are the teacher's contributions to learning art? ...despite the complexities of understanding how art is related to cognition, many people believe that an education is impoverished if art is omitted from it. WHY??
A Brain, A Heart and Courage: Gifts from the Wizard
I. The Place of Art in the University
When Dorothy traipses through the land of Oz, encountering witches, Munchkins, forest beasts and other odd crcaturcs, but searching for the Wizard who will lead her home, ?she is accompanied by three companions: a Scarecrow, hoping the Wizard will give him a brain so he can think intelligently; a Tinman* hoping the Wizard wilt endow him with a Heart so that he can feel; and a cowardly Lion, seeking Courage of the Wizard. Were The MIzetar of Oz written today, however, Dorothy would have just one companion on her obstacle filled journey home (besides TOto, of course), and that would be the Scarecrow.
The Scarecrow's Brain is what we want today; the Tinman's ficart and Lion's Cour$ge arc of tittle consequence to us_ We see that in our polities; we sec that in our busincsscs; we see that in our science; and worst of all, we see that in our univcrsidc& There may be some individuals scatLcrcd throughout the educational system who have Heart and Courage, who teach Heart and Courage, and who try to impart Heart and Courage, but the educational system as a whole has little use for Heart and Courage any more, and those who think it should be in the university must now fight a battle to keep it there.
The? Dean of Agrieulturc is the case stgtcd above errs because he docs not understand that art (poetry, plays, music, paintiW) is not about the brain, but it is about the heart Its purpose is aot to impart intollcctual knowledge that will be practically "useful" to the student in the future; and thus to structure an art course for his agricultural students based on its ability to impart facts about agriculture, based on its ability to improve their intellectual knowledge base about farming, based on its enhancement to their performance in the specific day?tro?day activities of their career, is absurd. But.that docs not mean that teaching art to these students is an unneccasary, superftuous activity, with. no rctcvance to their future. however. the Deans inability to sec its relevance, to see that art "will be usefut to them in their later lives: is not only an understandable mistake, but a common mistake in the world we live in today.
We live in a scientific, secular, materialist society. With the 19' century advent of Darwinism, biblical textual criticism and the industrial revolution, stable, shared world views determined by religion and culture mores were challenged and collapsed. The twentieth century continued this loss of reason and meaning grounded in communal values and mutual ethical considerations with World Wars I and II, which shattered our perception of reality and changed the way we think about the world. Our sense of security Was shattered with bombs that could destroy the planet; our sense of confidence in the inherent goodness in the progress of technology was shattered as weapons of destruction were created with the fruits of this knowledge; our faith in the stable world view that religion provided was shattered as our very existence was threatened.
In addition, the modern world lost cultural constancy when world wars introduced the common man try many different cultures. Technology also brought different world views and cultures try man by compressing time and space. as travel acxbss the world was no longer a matter of weeks and months, but hours and days. There is a transience to modern culture, both in time, as society changes and progress (its values, its technology, its lifestyle) at exponential rates unfamiliar try previous centurics, and in epaec, as people travel more both temporarily and permanently, uprooted from hometowns (if thcy have them) and moved across the country several times in a life time. These factors contribute to the realization that nothing is stable or faced in the modern world. Postmodern writer and critic Annie Dillard says that "the collapse of ordered Western soeicty and its inherited values following World War I cannot be overstreesed; when we lost our context, we lost our meaning. We became, all of us in the West, more impoverished, and in one. sense more ignorant than the pygmies, who, like the hedgehog know one great thing: in this case, why they are here" ('Z5?Z6; Living by Fiction) Meaning has disappeared.
c5o, by default, science has become the shared, stable world view, and materialism has become the commonly held intellectual premise of philosophers in educational settings. &ienee and scientific paradigms remain relatively constant and relatively agreed upon; the scientific method holds from culture to culture, religion try religion, world view try world view.
since the world's new constant is now constant change, We can no longer be IN one particular culture or world or myth, accepting the values and standards without question for the rest of our lives, but stand outside them all, as distant observers, analyzing them all, like the scientist &ientifie views arc the final authoritative views, and even as new physics reaches into the realms of unccrtainty and probability, the logic of scientific method and its rational means, linear progression of thought, veriftablc facts, provable thcorics, empirical evidcncc, tangible data becomes the only certainty in an otherwise uncertain world. It is physical and material rathcr than abstract and idealistic, and it is logical and rational rather than emotive and intuitive. It is the new ethic for the new age.
8cienec, on the surface, ?seems to have no room for cmotions, and also, many obscrvcrs even fail to sec the role of intuition in the seicntific method. Logical rational thinking is upheld as the criterion to which we should reach, the means and the goal towards which we educate our student. Those Fringe disciplincs that walk the line of the rational; disciplines such as art and literature (and to a lesser extent, the soft sciences, like psychology and sociology) have to frght to claim their worth in a society that accept as it unsWtcd assumptions, it question bcMing premise, that the emotional and moral realms arc suspect, shaky, unrcliablc, untrustworthy, flighty; changeable ? secondary citizens in society, but also, secondary citizens in the individual human charactcr.
Thus, failure to fit the artistic process into a rational, linear "problem solving" modus operandi devalues art in eyes of the world in general, and the educational world in particular ?and means that the creation of art, the prcscnce of art; and the instruction of art is questionable. Evcn the enjoyment of art is an cxtrancous activity, at the least, and a usclcss one at the most; to be done only after othcr, more important, work is accomplished. Artist beeomc dcfcnsivc, claiming that, while production of art does not Ft into a linear paradigm of problem solving, that just because it uses fluid, intuitive, discursive and recursive proecsscs, and that just because art is not "rational" in it production, docs not mean that it is "irrational" (rcad: worthfcss, obsolctc, unjustified; even: insane). Just because art is concerned about conveyance of "emotion" (according to cxprcssionist thcorics and others), it does not mean that it is a tumultuous melodramatic melee of agitatccd emotion, say the dcFensive artist. It has form; it has order, artist say to protect their baby. It has purpose; it has mcaning, the artworld claims of thcir own.
What is the purpose and meaning. Moral instruction' Knowledge about human nature? Expression of emotion? It varics according to the theorist one chooses; but the point is, in a goal oriented, capitalist, goods producing society, art must have an end meaning and art must havc a constrictive social purpose in order for anyonc in a postmodern world ? the artworld included ? to consider it having arysort of value at all; as limitrcd as that value might bc.
However, the very assumptions from Which the apologetic artists begin arc handcd to them by a system Whose circular claim automatically cxcludcs the worth of art The Western world today values only the 8earecrow' s holy grail ? the brain. Education, too, seeks increasingly try primarily edify and improve only the brain. The Heart and Courage arc not a part of the education arena or public, useful sphere, or so some would say. Thus, the artists lose their argument before they have begun. The very ground and being of art, the artistic process and purpose, the mcans and methods involvcd in the creation and apprceiation of art, is qualitatively diff'ercnt from the scientific process and purposc, means and mcthods. But the radical premise from which somc humanists operate, and which the "Wizard of Oz" illustrates, is that neither is superior or inferior in actuality; it seems so only through the eyes of a postmodern, scientific world.
Artists nccd not and must not defend themsclvcs based on scientific assumptions and scientific thinking; they need to challenge those very assumptions. Ycs, art is not linearly .rational" in its production or in its interpretation. Ycs, it is non?propositionally based and does not concern itself with a tangible truth or falsity. Ycs, art is expcricntially oriented, and at somc level according to many theorists, has an integral connection to emotions. And even, art has no hypothesis from which the work begins and no experimental findings to support the truth of the hypothesis. But these characteristics arc not flaws in the ficld of art that need defending or correcting; these arc what make it valuable.
II The Dol of h Art T ca
h r
If /earning from art reguiree direct experience of the artistic vehicle through which the information i5 conveyed, what role does a teacher play, and what are the teacher's contributions to learning art? A Wizard. and the tom 'wizard, hag multiple meanings, and ?the wizard of Oz plays intro them all. I! irsLof all, it means "sorccrcr or magician" (a male witch). As a bumbling magician, the Wizard of Oz hides behind showy, ineffective contraptions to deceive his pilgrims; he has no ?tfick* up lis sleeve ? magical or otherwise (or rather, the triek& he does have up his slccvc not only are ?not real magic, but they failj. As for the second denotation, °a skillful or clever person," tltc magician attempt?to?pose as clever; but not v* do hf& chuff contraptions?4ov h?w lack ?of shill, Dorothy and her cohorts immediately perceive this and confront him on his errors upon thew I'w4st moct%a. And Ti`nall?y, a vatwd is a. wlw, man or sage , an Educates, onE W'liahparts Wiscto~a ta?hi~'~o~oWCrs.? ~ou7~ th~t~?sense cToes~ Wizard o~ ?~ta him?Tic
doe? ii&paer_W18&& t4? hli?BfcCvg ; =noL ii?way M6y??~ ??I~ impadg, not Me.? lip=s
that they seep but, either the mean& by which??to? acquire , or the rccogn'tiof that they
already exist inside thems&vca, which they had atscady ina&crtantIy acquired to their
advcnturqtjou=ey through the land orOz.
In the first two meaniW of the term wizard, the Tizard of Oz is duplicitous, deceiving
his4_ His tcchnotogical contraptions work no miractcs; they, are $ sham, ancthi`s mighty
magical shams turns intro a farce. And he 'ss no more so`u'l or clever than his sutcet~ despite his
po&Wria8s, as thcy?rdtsoucr. im the v=sfaItff_thc_t=cficx can?Z_ 'Iha art
tcaeh= or the?lLcmturc tcach= do&?not purpovLta?fix_th&?mag=i, godly cxpevt oa. the
painti&?or thepock?lic?may.havc?some.?know1cd8c. .taimpart. to th.thcartta6cr,
like.Ehe Tixard_ol?az, fu& Uir? thud mcao"~%zard?°, a Wise man or sage. Nit ifThc artistic
vehid?c is_an cxpcxicntiat one, thm?the_art_tcw?hcx?is not. only a tceturcrr eomveyiil&merely Bets
and information, the art fcachcr s role is that of facirtator, as the Wizard a role Was factl'ttator. The
&arccroW, Tinmaa, and Lion ~sct~ had. What?they We.sag fco the Wig ink?them
already; they had gained it on their journcy fro the Wizard ? through their experience. 6im'larty,
the students already have the means to appreciate art; the emotions and experiences arc
already inside them to varying dcgrces. The art tcaehcr simply shoals them the ray,, gives them
the tools for understanding the artvorh the eyes with Which to see how the artistic vehicle ? the
poem, the painting, the song ? illuminates themselves, others, their lives, and life.
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