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Mr. Miyagi was my best art teacher
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This is not an article about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who either did, or did not, make an art project out of her real, or fictional, abortions. It is, however, an article about what’s wrong with the cultivation of young artists and how people like Ms. Shvarts can be led astray by too much politicizing and too little practice on how to make an eye look like an eye and so on and so forth.
A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity — and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make “real art,” but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.
This same pedagogical method can be applied, really, to instruction in anything. Learn the rules first. Break the rules second. Come to a more healthy and less legalistic application and appreciation of the rules third.
It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.
Writing should be taught this way. And art. And architecture. And much else where imagination drives the work.
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Soul searching
I would like to add Philosophy & Theology to your list. The most frustrating thing in my undegraduate study (and even in my graduate studies) is when people refuse to deal thoroughly with the thinkers who have gone before them (or those who limit their reading to the “cool” thinkers….).
Thank you.
I think learning the basics of anything is necessary before one can (or should) attempt to deviate from what is considered “standard.”
HSK,
I knew it would happen eventually where we would agree. As a trained artist and Architect, I had to take drawing 1 and 2. Nude drawing 1&2 and hard line drawing 1 and 2 even printing classes to learn to write like an architect. With 4 semesters of architectural drawing before we could get into the good stuff like water colors, tempera, oils, acrylic way before before design and the various methodologies and structures of style, taste, form and function were considered and long before you could break a rule of any kind and get aways with it - like you could for your thesis work in year 5. You also should have taken sculpture 1 and 2 along with ceramics 1 and 2 as well. You needed 184 hours completed to meet the minimum as an Architectural graduate and there weren not many free courses you could squeeze in without one of your 3 major professors that guided your way going ballistic.
Now, if you had taken years and years of basic poetry where you were forced to make it rhyme every day for 4 years / 12 hours a day - like you profess it should, I might be more lenient when you break the rules today and try to pass off bad prose as good poetry
As a teacher, I saw new things come down the road in Education every year. Teachers wree expected to use these new pedagogies easily and well. It always seemed to me that they all had one thing in common, they always seemed “Liberal.”
One of the biggest and longest lasting things was that we were to be “Life Long Learners.” Education was to go on forever. Gag!
Another long lasting thing was that we weren’t to teach facts but we were to each “processes.”
This is a long way of saying that the Academy got rid of the Conservative. There was and still is nothing to restrain the foolishness that comes out of Education Department of the Academy. One of the first things to go was teaching such things as the proper way to hold a pencil. The proper way to make letters. You might be surprised how many middle schoolers don’t know their tables; addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
No part of the university can afford to be one sided. They must have both Liberals and Conservatives. Each side reins in the other from too many foolish choices. The modern US university has been and will keep on making foolish mistakes because it is so one sided.
What happens to your washing machine when all the clothes end up on one side in the spin cycle?