artist

– Master/Novice

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Since writing the “Wide eyed” post on novices, I’ve been seeing references to newness everywhere.  (Is my unconscious attention looking for them?)

Shirin Neshat, a “visual artist who works primarily in video,” has produced a body of work — Passage (2001), for example — that has garnered prizes and earned permanent placement in the collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and the British Museum (Collins 86).  Although such a project has risks, she’s at work on her first film-length project, an adaptation of a novel by Iranian writer Shahmush Parsipur.  Neshat tells interviewer Lauren Collins that she felt “compelled to make Women Without Men“:

“It got to a point that it was a biennial here, a biennial there,” she said… “I started to get really tired of it. I needed a project that would let me be alone, let me be a beginner again.  I wanted to hide from the art world.  There was a danger that I would lose persepective–the integrity, honesty, and naïveté being washed away.” She pounded her fist against her palm to illustrate a wave eroding the shore. (90)

Historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun is about to turn 100.  His former student, Arthur Krystal, “first encountered” Barzun in 1970, when Krystal was 22 and a graduate student at Columbia where Barzun, then 62, was University Professor of History; in spite of many differences, the two “hit if off” (Krystal 100).  Remarking on Barzun’s reputation and many accomplishments, Krystal points out a quality in his now friend that differentiates his work, and his stance, from others’:

Barzun regards himself in many respects as an “amateur” (the Latin root, amator, means “lover”), someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about.  More than any other historian of the past four generations, Barzun has stood for the seemingly contradictory ideas of scholarly rigor and unaffected enthusiasm. (94)

I see that my friend and colleague Jan Donley, a writer and teacher, has altered the title of her website’s page on teaching to call it “Learning.”  One of my favorite running conversations with Jan has been on the seeming contradiction of being inside and outside an experience at once.  We’ve talked, for example, about being present in a classroom moment while stepping outside it, so that one can deeply participate and get some perspective, simultaneously.  A kind of duality.  It’s hard, requiring a person to let go and remain steady at the same time.  Now I’m mulling over Jan’s suggestion that, to be a teacher (and a writer), one must be a learner, too.

Which reminds me of a conversation I had last Easter with my father, Stephen Kokernak, about students.  (He was a teacher, a more than good one, of high school math for almost four decades.)  I was venting to him and my sister Sally about how some of my freshman students were not stepping up to the plate: not doing the reading, not bringing the book or homework to class.  My father commiserated as a teacher, and also talked about his own habits in college.  Then he said (something like this): “You know, I think it wasn’t until I became teacher that I finally figured out how to be a student, when I had to learn how to learn.”

To be a master and a novice at once seems key for being a teacher, writer, filmmaker.  Does the inverse work?  To be a student — a learner — must there be opportunities for teaching?

—-

Sources:
Collins, Lauren.  “Voice of the Veil” (Shirin Neshat).  New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007.  86-92.
Krystal, Arthur.  “Age of Reason” (Jacques Barzun).  New Yorker, Oct. 22, 2007. 94-103.

– Oh, to draw!

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Today I’m wishing that my black notebooks — full of penciled words, notes to self, lists, names of books, phone numbers for contractors, half-baked ideas, found language, beginnings, and occasionally the pressed leaf of a plant I come across and want to remember — contained one thing as lovely as this:

“Autumn” by Mattias Adolfsson

“Autumn” by Mattias Adolfsson, http://mattiasa.blogspot.com

See more entrancing notebook images from various artists at the Moleskine Project. You might find yourself wishing my wish: to draw, and to do it well.

– Dead letter dress

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After reading my friend Lauren’s lovely short essay, “Paper Trails,” about the archives left in her care by three deceased relatives, I thought about my own files of cards and letters from people, once dear, who are now dead to me, whether or not they are still living: Aunt Elsie; Ellen, my maternal grandmother; Nicole, a high school friend. I hold one side of what were once active correspondences; absent is the other side, that is, letters from me.

My letters might have ended up in the trash or in a never-opened file cabinet. They’re as gone to me as the person is. Concrete evidence of who I was and what I cared about in, say, 1985, when I still wrote devotedly to the Davenports, a Yorkshire family I stayed with for a month in 1983, belongs to the recipients.

Those long, newsy air letters could, also, have ended up in a daughter’s or son’s hands, as did the checks, diaries, and documents of Lauren’s parents and her old aunt. They could also have ended up in the hands of a stranger, who came across them at an estate sale and who knows neither me nor the Davenports nor any other person I wrote to.

Letter DressIf the stranger were an artist, she might have sewn them into a dress, as Jennifer Collier does with maps, pattern paper, book pages, and old letters and envelopes. In describing Collier’s constructions (which are not made to be worn), Craft magazine’s print version calls them “a great reminder of the way clothes get loaded down with meaning.” I look at this stitched paper dress, wonder about the origin of the letters, and think of the persons — strangers to me, intimates to the letters’ recipients — they stand in for.