school of things

“Reduced to their lowest common denominator, photographs are usually the concrete results of a photographer’s response to a stimulus - a photographer being defined as anyone who is prepared at a given moment to respond to a stimulus by using a camera. The immediate stimulus is usually the visual perception of something (the subject), but the full range of emotions, associations, and memories (including memories of other photographs) that the subject evokes are part of the stimulus complex and will all affect how the photographer actually perceives the subject - and hence whether and how he will choose to photograph it. Perhaps the most puzzling element of the stimulus complex is the desire to make a photograph in the first place. In recent years, theoreticians of photography have advanced a great many speculations about why people feel the need to make photographs: to endow the moment recorded with a sort of deep-frozen immortality, to fragment experience into manageable pieces, to - insulate oneself from new experiences (like travelers who never really look at anything-they just take photographs), to analyse episodes of life, to exercise a form of voyeuristic aggression, to transform experience into objects (photographs) that can be possessed and hoarded like money, to learn about the structure and meaning of the world, or simply to make aesthetically and intellectually provocative images.”

— Richard Whelan ‘What is a photograph?’ from the introduction to Double Take, 1981

“When we view a photograph, what we perceive with our eyes in the present is the visible echo of something that no longer exists. Something similar occurs when we look at a star like the sun, tra albe e tramonti - between dawns and dusks), whose light always and necessarily reaches us after a delay; most often after it has already been burned out for millions of years. And so perhaps the photographic image does not reveal the succession but rather the relationship of coexistence between past and present. The photograph is simply the point of transition - or, as Luigi hoped, of equilibrium - between inside and outside, invisible and visible, between that which is excluded and that which is included in the framing of the shot, between personal memory and history between microscopic and macroscopic.”

— Adele Ghirri

“This is a book about how we see. How do we see the environment around us? How do we see its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures? How do we see where we are in the environment? How do we see whether we are moving and, if we are, where we are going? How do we see what things are good for?”

— James Gibson, ‘The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception”, 1979

“The Letterist International invent a new kind of knowledge, a street ethnography, whose primary method is the dérive. What the dérive discovers is psychogeography: the lineaments of intersubjective space. In place of the chance encounters of the surrealists, they create a practice of play and strategy which invents a way of being, outside of commodified time and outside of the separate disciplines of knowledge including geography. Henceforth the city will not be a site for fieldwork but a playing field, in which to discover intimations of a space and time outside the division of labor. The goal is nothing less than to invent a new civilization which will make a mark on historical time with the grandeur of the Temple of the Sun.”

McKenzie Wark - The Beach Beneath the Street, Verso 2011, p28

With his eyes closed, he was overcome by a strange inability to visualise anything. He tried to tell himself the names he knew for each thing in the room, but he couldn’t picture anything; not even the plane he had just seen landing, though he might have recognised in his mind, probably from earlier experience, the screeching of its brakes on the runway. He opened his eyes and looked for a while at the corner where the kitchen was: he concentrated on the tea kettle and the wilted flowers drooping in the sink. He had barely closed his eyes again when the flowers and the tea kettle were unimaginable. He resorted to thinking up sentences about the things instead of words for them, in the belief that a story made up of such sentences would help him visualise things. The tea kettle whistled.

— Peter Handke, from ‘The Golakeeper’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick’

AGAINST THE RUIN OF THE WORLD, THERE IS ONLY ONE DEFENCE - THE CREATIVE ACT.

— KENNETH REXROTH

“Ordinarily, in times of idleness, he would stroll into town. But when concentrating on his work, he usually went to the outskirts - out into the wilderness; thus far, he had adhered to this rule. But did he actually have any rules? Weren’t the few that he had tried to impose on himself constantly giving way to something else - a mood, an accident, a sudden inspiration - that seemed to indicate the better choice? True, his life had been oriented for almost twenty years toward his literary goal; but reliable ways and means were still unknown to him. Everything about him was still as temporary as it had been in the child, as later in the schoolboy, and still later in the novice writer.”

— Peter Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer, 1987

Michael Rosen ‘School rules: the 10 elements of successful arts education’

 “[…] My own view is that the arts are neither superior nor inferior to anything else that goes on in schools. It’s just as possible to make arts-focused lessons as weak, oppressive and dull as other subjects. It’s just as possible to make those other lessons as enlightening, inventive and exciting as arts work.

The key is in the ‘how’ – not whether arts education in itself is a good thing but what kinds of approaches can make it worthwhile for pupils. We should think in terms of necessary elements. Pupils should:

1. have a sense of ownership and control in the process of making and doing
2. have a sense of possibility, transformation and change – that the process is not closed ended with predictable, pre-planned outcomes, but that unexpected outcomes or content are possible
3. feel safe in the process, that no matter what they do, they will not be exposed to ridicule, relentless assessment and testing, fear of being wrong or making errors
4. feel the process can be individual, co-operative or both, accompanied by supportive and co-operative commentary which is safeguarded and encouraged by teachers
5. feel there is a flow between the arts, that they are not boxed off from each other according to old and fictitious boundaries and hierarchies
6. feel they are working in an environment that welcomes their home cultures, backgrounds, heritages and languages into the process with no superimposed hierarchy
7. feel that what they are making or doing matters – that the activity has status within the school and beyond
8. be encouraged and enabled to find audiences for their work whether in the same school, other schools or in the communities beyond the school gate
9. be exposed to the best practice and the best practitioners possible or available in order to see and feel other possibilities
10. be encouraged to think of the arts as including or involving investigation, invention, discovery, play and co-operation and that these happen both within the actual making and doing but also in the talk, commentary and critical dialogue that goes on around the activity itself

I believe that if we set out the stall for the arts in this way, we won’t find ourselves trying to defend or advocate an art form – say, painting – for what are deemed to be its intrinsic civilising qualities. Instead, we will be advocating a set of humane and democratic educational practices for which the arts provide an amenable home.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that I would (or could) claim this will enable a pupil to do better at exams, avoid trouble at school or equip them with an esprit de corps. I would say, however, that conducting arts education with these elements in mind will help pupils explore their own minds and bodies, and the materials around them.

As they work, they will find their minds, bodies and materials changing and as agents of that change, they will inevitably change themselves. They will find out things about themselves as individuals – where they come from, how they co-exist with people and places around them – and they will pick up (or create) clues about where they are heading.

They will find that the making and doing gives them the vocabulary and sensibility to access and demystify different art forms of the past and present, some of which appear on the curriculum. They may find a sense of inner satisfaction, which is hard (though not impossible) to find elsewhere. And they may come out of the process feeling equipped with a will and an ability to do more.

[…]

The way to take the arts seriously is not to defend this or that art form for its own sake. Pursuing arts activities with humane and democratic principles in mind is where the benefit lies.”

“So a border is a restriction, but it also creates a protected space for experimentation. Within that border, as long as it holds, something fragile can begin to grow; on the other hand a border like that is also in its very nature the sign of a tension between inside and outside, and in this sense it contains the possibility of its own dissolution, the possibility that the pressure differential that has built up between these two temporarily separated systems will be balanced out.

[…]

“… it seems to me that it’s difficult to reach a goal simply by being goal-oriented. It would be nice if the university weren’t just something like the gateway to a career, some sort of dues paid to the outside world where you have to succeed if you want to pay your rent, if it didn’t just give you time to learn how you work, but instead time to learn how you live, to learn what matters to you and what doesn’t, if the university could be the affirmation of one’s inner life, of a far-off, remote, uncharted, maybe even un-congenial landscape with its own calendar, where those who are seeking their own way have time to get lost, time to take detours, to meet this or that person along the way, to get excited about something, to despair of something, and sometimes just to lie in the grass, look at the clouds passing overhead, and leave room for thoughts to grow. Because what I referred to earlier as the “kernel of truth” may find you where you least expect it.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck, On “The Old Child”. Bam berg Lecture No. 1 published in ‘Not A Novel: Collected Writings and reflections’, Granta, 2020

“I find it absurd to buy shoes that cost 400 euros.

It’s really not so easy to find sentences that explain who you are. But maybe it’s not so important, either. Maybe it’s more important that beyond the borders of our own skin, beyond the borders of language, and beyond the various individual branches of the arts, we are engaged in a collective attempt to make something visible, audible, or perhaps indeed legible: the forgetting that lies behind us all, the unknown that contains us all, and the inconspicuous places where our own present takes shape. Our reflections on the ways that we see, hear, and read, and our interest in the perceptions of others, are, I hope, a fore-shadowing of a world in which difference is a topic of discussion, but not a reason to kill anyone.”

— Jenny Erpenbeck ‘Not a Novel’, 2020

“I remembered what I’d read those hours before in Lemaître’s breviary, and I said to myself that it made sense about applied science journals at the end of the nineteenth century being full of articles on the possibility of colour in photographs and the possibility of building a tunnel under the Channel; since you only needed to think a little to see that the two subjects concerned the same thing: how to see in the open air and how to see underground; how to see above and how to see below. Because looking is the great subject; looking is and always has been our primary concern.”

From ‘The Things We’ve Seen’ by Augustín Fernández Mallo

“According to Dewey the main problem of the identification of what is known with what is real is that it makes it appear as if all other dimensions of human life - such as the practical, aesthetic, ethical or the religious dimensions - can only be real if they can be reduced to and validated by what is revealed through our knowledge. By assuming that knowledge provides the ‘norm’ for what is real, other aspects of the ways in which human beings live their lives are relegated to the domain of the subjective: the domain of individual taste, points of view, feelings and individual perspectives. As Dewey put it, ‘When real objects are identified with knowledge-objects, all affectional and volitional objects are inevitably excluded from the “real” world, and are compelled to find refuge in the privacy of an experiencing subject or mind’. Dewey believed that the identification of what is known with what is real was one of the most fundamental mistakes of modern philosophy and referred to this mistake as the ‘intellectualist fallacy’. Yet for Dewey this was not only a philosophical problem. It rather was a problem that lay at the heart of modern culture, which was the reason Dewey referred to it as a crisis in modern culture. In a sense Dewey’s work can be read as a response to this crisis.”

— Gert Biesta, ‘Educational Research: An Unorthodox Introduction’, Bloomsbury, 2020