Press down for new Rolex: A tangle of thoughts on teaching science to artists
Written as a talk for the American Studies Association Annual Conference (Atlanta, 2018)
Introduction
Students of art and design walk into my classroom on day one because they need a science credit. Many are thrilled they get to do science at art school. Others are apathetic, or slightly anxious. Still others are outwardly afraid. Some have been reading Richard Dawkins since middle school. Or sometimes it is E.O. Wilson who excites them — they hope I will be just like him.
As an anthropologist, I find my positionality tremendously empowering — I exist at a school where no one doubts my “real scientist” status, a school that’s most popular majors include Illustration, Animation, Comic Art, Graphic Design, Photography, Filmmaking, Fine Arts Studio, and Furniture Design. It is this same positionality, however, that leaves me wondering: how can what I do be useful to those of you who teach aspiring social scientists?
I debated, during the past few months, whether 1) I should come to this room today to say, “I teach students to unpack artists’ research practices, especially their ethnographic research practices, and you can do this, too — let me show you how” … or if instead, 2) I should aspire to convince you that, despite the risks, recognizing and investing in the arts in our sciences and the sciences in our arts is vital if we wish “to make freedom real” — those were the words James Baldwin used in 1962 to describe the role of artists in any society. In what follows, I will focus on art and science, on the students with whom I work, and then, finally, on science as savior, as bringer of freedom to the arts and beyond.
In the present moment, already insidious conventional wisdoms have been supplemented by the even more insidious “alternative facts” — invented knowledge that can be created on demand without even tradition to legitimate it. At such a moment, does it not seem defensible to argue that we need our artists as knowledge makers? That, plus dare I say: it seems to me we need scientists to get way better at things like graphic design and mass communication. Michael Taussig writes this more eloquently than I do. Let me say only: if you want to see how the capitalists present research findings, google “IKEA Life at Home Report.” Because they’re pretty solid. Better than most of us. I will come back to Baldwin later.
One
Weird things happen at the intersections of art and science.
In 1506, approximately, Leonardo da Vinci completed the Mona Lisa. Was he doing art, was he doing science, or as art historian E.H. Gombrich made famous in 1950, was he deploying science within his art as a means of inflating the price of that art? — using science as fetish, if you will, to increase the cultural and economic value of his art long after Aristotle convinced everybody painting was manual labor and not essential to a liberal education.
This debate (about da Vinci’s identity, not Aristotle’s hierarchy) continues.
Or, in 1922 Carl Jung wrote: “Art is by its very nature not science, and science by its very nature is not art.” He was intending to make sense of his own dream when he arrived at this conclusion. And yet, at approximately the same time, Jung was proposing (as singular and recurrent-in-myths) an archetype he labelled “the artist-scientist.”
Seeker, inventor, discoverer, dreamer, thinker — the artist-scientist Jung described was academically brilliant though perhaps somewhat, in the words of my old high school buddies, “common sense dumb.” Wise yet naive, risk taking and also nerdily cautious, the artist scientist was an individual whose head was in the clouds. He represented curiosity, wonderment, and the dangers of both.
Last night, in .38 seconds, Google produced 160,000 results for artist-dash-scientist in quotes. That plus RISD’s almost decade old push to transform STEM to STEAM, adding in art and design to the already established science, tech, etc. acronym, has gone viral in the past five years. Which is to say, despite Jung’s waffling, the interdigitation of art and science is in fashion today. This does not mean artists’ understandings of science, of research, of ethnography are our own, of course.
So let me introduce you to the students with whom I work?
Two
Let’s call this my slightly Levi Straussian (though Freud would frolic, no doubt, in the symbols) attempt to gloss for you a grissaille of those students.
And note that the ethnographic present I describe here is January 15th of 2018. Further: N = 23 in my sample population, and I conducted the survey I am about to unpack using Google Forms during the first 20 minutes of the first day of an MCAD Advanced Research Methods course.
Dog or Cat? Dog say 39%, BOTH say another 39%, while four students choose cats and somebody writes in plants.
Netflix or YouTube: YouTube, they choose. At a rate of 3:1.
Music or Podcasts: Music say 78%, podcasts say 13%. Somebody writes in: “I listen to the street.”
Perhaps this is the same somebody who explains their/her/his need to save money when 20 of 22 classmates hypothetically opt for an international vacation rather than a new t.v.
Almost entirely 20 to 23 years of age in my junior- and senior-standing as pre-rec courses, when asked to select form or function, these artist-students are unlike their postmodernist architect, artist, and designer foremothers and forefathers. They are, instead, evenly split. Except for the single “I reject your binaries and I’ll prove it” student who writes in that form is function.
The students with whom I work prefer Indie music to pop music, comic books to comic strips, ninjas to pirates, urbanity to rurality, and summer to winter. 61% of them agree: doing dishes is far worse than doing laundry.
Just like American museum goers today, these art students overwhelmingly prefer modern art to classical art. They are also especially likely to consider today’s museums ir [.] relevant. As artists. They bemoan the whitewalling practices of galleries with an ease that matches their social science student peers who bemoan the racisms and classisms in urban renewal projects and gentrification.
School-wide now: Similar to the rates at institutions of higher ed in general and despite popular tropes conflating artistic genius with mental illness, 15% of MCAD’s 2018 incoming students registered as having a disability with Disability Services.
Lastly, 33 percent of MCAD’s still too white, too affluent, too Midwestern incoming students in 2018 identify as genderqueer or non-binary. Once again: one third of incoming students identify as non-binary. This is at least seven times the rate of non-binary students enrolled in R1 universities today. From U.S.-based, historically emplaced gender constructs, at least, MCAD students have in large part emerged. [2:50]
Three
Still reliant on survey data, I begin to approach the topic at hand.
A. About what do you think when you hear the word research?
B. If research was a color, what color would it be and why?
C. If research was an object, what object would it be, and why?
We can come back to your answers, if you wish. The students with whom I work say, collectively…
A. I think about:
Sherlock Holmes, how-to videos, papers, busywork, gathering information, science, thesis statements, PDs [sic], bibliographies, books, books, books, online articles, playing follow the link, hopping from link to link, combing websites, first Google pages, monotony, scouring. Also: the last time I took this course.
Parenthetical: Maybe we are not here today to say I teach ethnography to save research, but: I teach ethnography to save research.
Skipping research as color (green), picking up at C. research as object. Here’s what the students say:
Research would be an encyclopedia, obviously, because it reiterates, and it categorizes.
An animal herd, ever growing and changing just like our knowledge.
A big box of many things with a story to tell, to be assembled by you.
Research would be a charger: both ends need to be connected, on one side to good information, on the other side to someone who is good at synthesizing.
A magnifying glass, a magnifying glass, an all seeing eye, a computer, a library, a computer, an inter-library loan system, a computer, a sponge or a rock but not both because you get out what you put in — you can either work to absorb or fail to absorb…
Research would be a highly polished stone, somebody else explains: pretty when finished, admired by all, yet created under stress and extreme effort.
Finally: a Grecian urn: heavy to pick up, hard to look into, but ultimately worth having.
This last ranks among my favorites. In contrast, I, teacher as activist, instructor of ethnographic methods, scientist at school of the arts, and saver of research, believe I design courses to deconstruct answers such as this one:
“Research would be a highlighter. This is because our research is really just finding the parts of texts that we’re interested in and synthesizing our own ideas from that.”
Here I am reminded of John Kenneth Galbraith’s witticism, “when faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.”
Now, a quick comment on patterns: I suspect that you heard in the above an emphasis on literatures and texts as data. After books, computer, link, and library, the concept you heard most frequently was that of synthesis-slash-reiteration.
A significant number of the 20–23 year old students with whom I work come into my classroom believing science is for digging up sources to prove what you already think. They believe this not because they are unintelligent but because they are of the present. They are agents, yes. The limitations on that agency, I would argue: years of education during which they have learned research means reading, summarizing, synthesizing, reiterating. Their world (which is also our world) is absent null hypotheses, absent multiple hypotheses (I’m channeling TC Chamberlin there), and along with these, absent expectations for the kind of research that can bring surprise and epiphany.
When research means reiteration and specifically, the reiteration of texts, are we surprised that science means monotony? And when science means monotony, are we surprised by the salience of presidents who assert “truths” based upon bravado and no knowledge? Equally importantly: Are we surprised by a hyper-commodified arts industry. This brings me to:
Four
Forty years after Jung’s archetypes, picture James Baldwin. In 1962 Baldwin published a still relatively unknown essay titled “The Creative Process” in which he wrote “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”
Let’s talk about 1962 for a minute.
John MacQuarrie translated Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time into English for the first time this year.
And fittingly, this was the same year that Andy Warhol created his series of Marilyn Monroe silkscreens titled Marilyn Diptych, a work that “fused [Warhol’s fascination with] both the cult of celebrity … and death” according to Sarah Jenkins.
Iconic status, celebrity glamour, ubiquity via repetition. These were Warhol’s purported signifieds, though art critic Jonathan Jones has written more bitingly, “turning art into a mass-produced commodity, and the artist into a brand identity, Warhol at his worst anticipated what have become routine artistic strategies in a smoothed-out global art machine.” I suggest in passing here, that we might add this “smoothed-out global art machine” a machine that functions (especially since 2007/8) like Swiss bank accounts functioned historically, to our list of today’s crises-slash-emergencies.
1962 was also the year in which Claes Oldenburg created from canvas, foam rubber, cardboard, and acrylic paints his oversized, soft sculpture: Floor-Burger.
Pura casualidad, but interestingly nonetheless, 1962 was the year in which, in Jalapa, Mexico, Mexico’s most famous still living, most expensive still living artist, Gabriel Orozco, was born. Orozco is renowned for conceptual art plus readymade mash-ups: an oval billiard table that doubles as a Foucault pendulum, a four sided “Ping Pond table” that endeavors to, in Orozco’s words, “transform reality with its own rules.” Back to 1962.
If this were a screenplay, I would write here:
Interior. 1962. Galleries throughout London and New York City
Smash cut to: Pop art.
Obsession with the relativity of beauty became, in 1962, somewhat suddenly, certainly famously an obsession with the relativity of truth. Again: “Nothing stable under heaven,” wrote Baldwin.
In Roland Barthes’ words: What pop art wanted was “to desymbolize the object” — The pop artist, Barthes argued, “does not stand behind his work … and he himself has no depth: he is merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.” Warhol and Oldenburg’s works, along with Barthes critique, arguably mark the beginnings of an awareness of postmodernity in the arts. Later Orozco’s work would belong to that same movement.
But now I want to show you something else. Baldwin, in that year, declared utter instability. He wrote, too, “The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” Can you hear Baudrillard? — Something like: “The secret of theory is that truth doesn’t exist?”
But unlike the postmodernists, Baldwin arrived somewhere else entirely when concluding “The Creative Process.”
“In the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos,” he wrote, “so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history. We know, in the case of the person, that whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it…”
Just as the authors of this year’s conference theme described the power of scholars to effect change, Baldwin wrote of the centrality of artists to saving ourselves from ourselves. “Societies never know it, but the war of an artist with his society is a lover’s war,” Baldwin explained, “and he [the artist] does, at his best, what lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real.”
Five
“…To reveal the beloved to himself and, with that revelation, to make freedom real,” Baldwin said. I wrote Ben Chappell in January of this year to say, I teach ethnography as part of my own commitment to sustaining educated democracy. I was thinking of Baldwin when I wrote that, and feeling like an activist. I was thinking, too, about the student artists with whom I work, each one of whom aspires to become a mass communicator from within the arts. Mightn’t the tools we use as ethnographers serve as their tools in their efforts to, in highly public spheres, throughout their lives, “reveal the beloved to himself” (whether that beloved is a world with increasingly singular, socially unjust ideological commitments, or a nation-state, or a community or subcultural group, or something even smaller)?
What happens to art, to social critique, to social change in a world in which artists’ works are, from the beginning, ethnographically informed? And then the question that matters most: In a hyper-commodified arts industry, one without clear commitments to ethics and/or scientific rigor, are there ways to ensure artists working at the intersections of art and science practice “good science”? It is this question I cannot yet answer.
But in the present: I aspire to live in a world of Sonya Clark’s rather than Damien Hirst’s, and I think teaching ethnographic methods to artists (and to everyone) is the path to that world. Some other day, I will show you what I mean.
Dawn
January 2019
