OF
BUBBLEGUM PEARLS AND EXQUISITE CORPSES:
BRINGING
ART HISTORY ALIVE AT UT
By Louis A. Waldman, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor at UT
Murder,
sex, conspiracies, epidemics, revolutions, and fear of the imminent end of the
world. For some, these things which assault our senses every day in
newspapers and on television are unsettling signs of an increasingly turbulent
and tormented twenty-first century world. But for me, as a teacher of Italian
Renaissance art, they’re all in a day’s work. For, as I’ve been revealing
to my students at the
In fact, my
goal in teaching my undergraduate classes at UT is to help my students
gain the skills and visual literacy to understand the great works of Western
art--from Michelangelo to last week-- in many of the same ways men and women
five hundred years ago saw them. Students are always surprised to learn
that, when one learns about the ideas behind the art of earlier times, they
become as meaningful to them as the lead story in this morning’s newspaper.
And in my courses, we learn to look at works of art not “only” as
beautiful things from the past, but as stories about people, and as messages
created by people who had a great deal to say about themselves.
The
messages of art are infinite, and every generation has discovered its
own ways of interpreting them. Any work of art--whether it’s the Mona Lisa or a Bevo T-shirt--is a text
we can read in order to explore a specific cultural and intellectual moment, and
to understand something about the people of that time. And in learning
about the ideas and belief systems of other places and times, students
invariably realize that they’re learning something about themselves. Our past makes us who we are--and it can have
a lot to do in determining where we are going in the future.
The
ability to think critically is one of the most important skills I try to
help students develop. In fact, I
consider it the core of my craft. To do
this I focus on getting students involved in thought-provoking activities. My students get a feel for what was “on the
radio” or in the air at the time by listening to music, or reading poetry or
philosophyfrom the periods of art we study.
And sometimes I like to make connections that are a bit surprising, so
that students can realize how much of a role creativity plays in the study of
art history. I’ve discovered a very silly 1930s “Flip the Frog” cartoon,
which actually helps us have a serious discussion about Rococo painting and the
courtly genre of the fête galante. Recently, to help students discover their
own favorite works of art, I passed out ballots so the students could vote on
which of a half-dozen objects in the Blanton Museum’s collection we should
restore; the results were tallied and sent to the curators, who will use them
in making decisions about which works will be shown in the new Blanton when it
opens next February.
Sometimes
the best activities for discussing lofty ideas in art involve very
mundane objects. Over the years I’ve passed out crates of Necco wafers (or
Smarties) to illustrate the controversies over the Eucharist during the
Counter-Reformation (“How did you feel when I stood up and ate one Smarty in
front of you all?” “And did you feel
differently when I passed out hundreds of Smarties so we could all partake of the ‘Sacrament’?”). I also like to have my undergraduate class of
250 students fashion their own irregular “Baroque pearls” out of bubble gum, in
order to think about how how seventeenth-century artists found creative
stimulation in irregular, “picturesque” objects. When we study Surrealism, I pass out folded
sheets of paper and we play a game that the Surrealists themselves invented,
called “Exquisite Corpse” (Cadavre
Exquise). In a “Corpse,” each person helps draw a figure on a sheet
of paper, which is folded so that no one can see the parts of the figure drawn
by the other students. The weird and
wonderful drawings that result were prized by the Surrealists themselves,
because their very irrationality seems to tap into the unfathomable depths of
our unconscious minds.
As
in the game of “Exquisite Corpse,” all my classes emphasize dialogue,
collaboration, and teamwork. I have
become convinced, after so many years of teaching, that the better we all communicate together in class, the more
each student’s originality is actually free to emerge.
My
favorite illustration of my view that teaching should be a collaboration
between teacher and students comes from Renaissance Italy. According to an early biographer,
Michelangelo once supervised a novice sculptor who was carving a figure for the
tomb of Pope Julius II. As the young artist worked, the old master would look
over his shoulder, suggesting that the beginner might want to chisel off a
little marble in one part, or use the drill to define a detail on another.
The beauty of the result astonished the young artist, who turned to his
teacher brimming with pride and excitement. “You have given me a skill,”
the student beamed, “that I didn’t know I had.” At the end of the day, if
I can help students bring out and develop critical thinking skills they didn’t
know they had, then I’ve helped accomplish something that will deepen and
articulate their passion for learning over the rest of their lives. And
where passion leads--understanding will always
follow.
Many
future teachers take my classes each year, and I enjoy passing on the
lessons that I have learned from the great teachers who have given so much to
me. My advice to young teachers is this: Love your subject, love
your subject, love your subject! Be unstinting in your enthusiasm to help
students think critically and passionately about art, and you will empower each
generation to make the past its own. If we will only learn to listen and look,
we can learn to converse with the
dead. Sometimes their speech may be obscured by the distance of centuries,
but if we work together at understanding the language of art, my students
learn that that it can become our language too.
Louis
A. Waldman