art art art art art art art art art art art art art art

Dear Colleagues Across the Curriculum,
 
      ART: what good is it?
 
Makes me wish for a discipline-wide
conversation about ways that the arts
and humanities help us address the
crises of our time.  Catherine Reid
(to Graham Paul)  *
 
BLASPHEME (as opposed to Eupheme)
 
In the best sense: talking out of the pox,
say. Talk that’s going to sound like hello
or probably hell for crying out loud, how
could it sound otherwise talking beyond
common and uncommon sense—beyond
the literal and the metaphorical, beyond
logic and illogic, beyond rational and
irrational beyond  goodies and weasels,
speaking in tons of angles out of 3
sides of the mouth at once.
 
Heresy to the conscientious.
Ludicrous to the hip & savvy,
 
Blaspheme! BLASPHEME!
“you don’t have to put on the red light!”
 
               ********
 
ART ART ART ART  ART ART
ART ART ART ART ART ART
the words former Black Mountain
potter and poet, MC Richards uttered
in front of the (now) work office Log
Cabin. Kept repeating the word, she
said, to try and hose it off from
all its stuffy hoity-toity connotations.
art
art
art
art
and reclaim it for practical use and
personal growth of the kind Catherine
Reid urges on the Fine Arts & Humanities
division
 
ART  - I.E. ar  “to fit together. Join. Junction”
"Articulate" (a butcher’s term: to divide the
beast neatly at the joints with minimum of
blood and gristle) and "arthritis" are kin.
As are "order," "ordinary,: "primordial,"
"inordinate ," "aristocracy," "read," "riddle,"
"arithmetic," "rite," "ratify" and, my favorite
at the moment:
            
             INERT, INERTIA
               literally: Not Art.
 
For the sake of argument and maybe the
promotion of Catherine’s concerns if not
agenda, I want to divide ALL ART into
               
                          2
                      /        \
     Inert ART          Ert ART
   (not-art ART)      ART ART
 
For the sake of argument may we say
inert art serves the status quo, strokes the
popular common sense, fits in with the
fashion and the styles and the bias and
believe system of the times, convention,
community, custom, culture.
 
Call it SYMBOLIC (literally throwing
together, gathering) –reinforcing, system
self-validating.  Or DIABOLIC: that too,
throwing across, apart. Art that unsettles,
un-fits what’s been fit.  Destroys.
 
Symbolic/Diabolic: inert because working
within the box, bubble, cave, culture,
custom,convention, gathering and
dispersing it’s play to make known.    
  
           Ert-Art (ART-ART)
Art for Art’s sake say, not “society’s” or
works progress programs  or Blue Ridge
Parkways or  D.C. Malls or Pelicans
& Polar Bear preservation, or  sustainability
in our own terms of desire.
 
“AESTHETIC”: (the view:  to describe)
 
“ETHIC”’ (to assess, evaluate, judge
what Twain calls “the damned moral sense”
seeing as it is “damaged,” biased,  system
or species self-serving, instrumental, not that
 there’s anything wrong with  that: just
describing here. Not judging)
 
“PARABOLIC:  to throw “beyond”
 
ART (ert-art, art-art) is  blasphemous to the
euphemistic    How could it be other wise? 
Out of the pox for crying  out loud. Un-
rationalize-able.  Illogical. Irrational.
              Or what good is it?
 
                 **********
* From Catherine Reid to Graham the FAH divisioin: :

makes me wish for a discipline-wide conversation
about ways that the arts and humanities help us
address the crises of our time. 

It seems as though many of the current emphases on
campus—sustainability being the biggest one—tend
to originate in or be associated with ENS, with FAH
often seen as the fluffy sister up the hill.

 I’d like to see us reclaim or more publicly celebrate
the strengths of our various departments—
art,
language,
sculpture,
song,
narrative,
history,
 philosophy
(along with thinking, feeling, wondering, shaping,
chronicling, provoking, re-visioning, etc.), all of which
help us deal with the challenges of our lives.

More specifically, I’d welcome conversations that might...
become a framework for a longer conference [ongoing
conversation?] with a focus on “Ethics and Aesthetics”
or “Art in the Service of Justice” or “The WPA as a
Model for Today.”

With some collective brainstorming, we might come up
with a better idea of the work of the fine arts & humanities,
especially at a college where our students already embody
both CCC laborers and WTO activists.

How can we encourage the next Lewis Hine or Dorothea
Lange, who will document our times in a way that elicits
 immediate action?  How can we emulate the kind of
collaboration that nurtured the Federal Writers or
Federal Theater Projects?  How can we best celebrate
the way FAH brings together heart and mind—both of
which we’ll need to lessen some of the threats to our small planet

I welcome your thoughts.

Thanks,Catherine

p.s. My list also includes: “resilience and the role of the arts,”
“the moral significance of wonder,” and “the other triad:
story, heart, art.”