Freedom Creates Its Own Degrees

There seems to be no relief from feeling vulnerable when one is in graduate school. Classroom performance, conferences, presentations, face-to-face field work -- all opportunities to be confronted with your own ignorance. Or maybe that's just me.
   
Ten years of studio work did not prepare me well for the relentless (and yes, sometimes joyful) social engagement that is grad school -- or at least, for grad school with a social research bent.
   
This kind of vulnerability feels different than "studio raw." In the studio, you can get naked, you can revisit every place you've been, roam and find connection, or find fear, or find grief. Or find love. In class, and in academic writing, there are the expected constraints (which many find comforting) but there is also this different raw, the raw of competition, of the pressure to encapsulate ideas and theories with coherence, of conveying what you consider knowledge in both a persuasive and an acceptable manner.
   
And because of the interdisciplinary nature of my graduate program, I am having a schizophrenic experience in school. Half my time is spent with people who are committed to exploring urban education  and the attendant (and rancorous) issues of social justice, economic disparity, and racism. Half my time is spent with art students who are becoming art educators and who seem primarily committed to exploring themselves, their field, their craft.
   
Urban educators seem, at least at this point in my endeavor, to be intensely, relentlessly other-focused, to the point of almost being entrapped by the need to explain subjective human interactions using social theory terms. Art-educators-in-training strike me, in contrast, as self-reflective and expressive. But they are also less directly engaged in thinking about how, say, poverty may grind students relentlessly down. They tend to think they have a different purpose; they are teaching, in part, to uplift.
   
As usual, I feel I am not fully a member of either tribe. Not that that is required. But it does seem to make life easier for them. Thus the different kind of raw. Its been a peripatetic life so far (though both Mark and I feel we'll be in Philly for a long time to come) and my skills are lacking. I'm rusty on what it means to situate, to become a member, to settle in. Or perhaps, in truth, I have never had those skills. But at the same time, as one of my urban ed classmates says, we all are working to avoid becoming like those who teach us. We don't want to become accustomed to settled thoughts and comforting ways of being, since education is in constant turmoil, and constant flux. And we want to be in the game.
   
Now, when I have a chance to spend time in my studio, I find I am thinking about my field work, or a paper I have to write, or a research project. I am thinking about thinking, in the place where I most want to feel unbounded. Its a strange feeling, but not a loss. We all transform, sometimes in very conscious ways, sometimes while we're sleeping. I think everyone has had that moment of realization at some point, that life has altered you, and not vice versa. Here is different, and very intense. I feel buffeted and I feel changeable. But I am wide awake.
   

Ideas as Opiates

The gentleman seated to my right on the plane was thirty-ish, white, anxious looking, and gripped in both hands a fairly new copy of 'Atlas Shrugged'. A representative sample, right there next to me! So of course I had to ask. He said he was reading it to "understand some things" but that he had his own criticisms of both the content and the writing style.
   
He also had, it turns out, a lot of criticisms about society in general, and public education in particular. Probably not so fun for him, then, to realize he was sitting next to someone who is working on a doctorate in urban education. Tough for me too, I guess, though our long and rather far-ranging talk did help the time pass. And eventually, I know I'll paint it.
   
Watching the recent debt-ceiling dance made me recall that plane ride conversation, and made me reflect yet again on how people perceive and use power, political and otherwise. Or rather, how people perceive their own powerlessness, and how they react to that feeling. And how I myself react to that feeling.

Mark and I used to live in techno-land, on the other coast, where everyone has gadgets and things hum. We used to live in an epicenter of techno-hubris, too. And now we are on the other side, in Philly. Or "reality" as I call it. And reality here is complex and messy and slow. Here, I have a student job processing quality-of-life surveys of people with intellectual disabilities, people who survive only through the largesse of the county and the professionalism of their care staff. Yesterday I reviewed a survey completed (with the help of her staff) by a middle-aged woman who is both severely intellectually impaired and a quadriplegic. She lives in a small group home and she functions however marginally in the world only because her elderly parents engage with her staff to make sure she has growth experiences...like occasionally going outside.

I have had so many conversations with conservative-types, mostly men, over the last 10 years -- people who are, by any objective measure, possessed of tremendous social capital and power. They tend to protest that their power is threatened at every turn, and they object outright to living in a social order that, through things like public education or healthcare, diminishes their domain. The Rand-fan on the plane certainly perceived things this way. Which makes me wonder about their egos, as well as my own.

Part of me did want to just punch the guy. But a greater part of me wanted to hear why he thought what he thought about his own situation in life, because I need to know how they think. Just as I need to know how the actually powerless (whether in group homes or at Roxborough High) are impacted by his kind of thinking. Comprehending how the relentlessly self-referencing see the world matters. Because, it seems, they are making all the policy decisions now.

Your Mind A Bounded Set

All the planes were late; a gusty storm in San Francisco had everyone in an anxious hover. So as we waited and waited at the over-crowded gate for our plane to depart to Portland, I slowly browsed the newspaper. And I came across a headline which gave me pause: "France May Make Mental Violence A Crime."

France is considering a non-gender specific law that would punish anyone in an ongoing relationship who engages in psychological violence, what the French Prime Minister called "insidious situations...[that] can mutilate the victim's inner self." Part of the motivation for the law is the high number of victims of domestic abuse in France, and the high rate of females deaths from domestic violence. The lawmakers see this new law as a preventative measure, for use before verbal abuse morphs into physical contact, as it so often does.

The article made me reflect on how people have evolved their thinking on what violence is in general, and specifically on what impact others' words and views can have on the intellectually or emotionally vulnerable. In my mind I pictured the people gathered at Tea Party rallies, and I recalled a woman telling me once about her family's engagement in a church where people speak in tongues and fixate on casting out devils, and I envisioned the Limbaugh listeners I have known. Lots of elephant talk, as King Crimson would say, but persuasive and repetitive and mentally engaging talk nonetheless. And the end result of this type of talk is often violence, because truly the starting point for this type of talk is violence; partners who engage in psychological violence start from a place of personal insecurity that feels as real as a physical threat, as do the Tea Partiers. And I am fascinated by threat.

We were in Portland for that city's excellent annual jazz festival, but we also stopped by the Portland Art Museum, where they had just opened a new exhibition of work by contemporary artists called 'Disquieted'. The intention of the exhibition is to show work by a range of artists who create art about the moment we live in, pieces "challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in these turbulent times."

As you enter the exhibition space, you are confronted by a sculpture by Charles Ray, a life-like sculpture of a white woman dressed in a 1990's power suit and low heels -- a sculpture that is 10 feet tall. She has her hands on her hips and she is looking (eternally) down at you with disdain as you crane your neck to look up to her. She is the misogynist's nightmare of the emasculating female boss, circa 1992. She is the embodiment of a threat, and of disquiet, for those intimidated by women in roles of authority. Charles Ray just brilliantly captured a moment in our modern times, and seeing this sculpture first set the tone for much of the rest of the exhibition, which contained many reflections on forms violence (from the interpersonal to acts of war) in contemporary life.

For better or worse, I tend to believe that persuasive repetitive language is a form of violence, and feel dismissive language (and intentionally dismissive acts in general) are also forms of violence -- because they shove a player off the field of conversation when there is plenty of room on that field for all players. And this happens a lot in conversations where the two sides don't concur, or where the subject matter under discussion for some reason makes one person feel threatened. This happens so often when talking about art with people who are not art-inclined that I have gone through long periods of simply remaining silent. And it happens too when talking about esoteric subjects with someone who is defined by their practical responsibilities. A recent conversation I had with one such acquaintance (a parent of 2 small kids) went something like this: Me: "And after that I went to a very cool lecture, given by an Astro-geophysicist, all about the process by which NASA scientists developed an assessment model for analyzing whether elements on the surface of Mars provide an environment capable of supporting (bacterial) Martian life similar to Earth life." Other: "Not to be rude, but really, who cares? I mean, why should I care? I get so tired of hearing people spending money on science projects in space when, you know, we have shit to take care of here."

So then we started talking about that person's kids' Montessori school.

I think if one is a pacifist in one's approach to living -- meaning one is not inherently competitive externally and one tends to be on the reflective or analytical side of the seesaw -- fewer outlets exist for expression that is not impinged upon, or that is not forced or forceful, or that is not a form of persuasion, and yes, even violence. But creating a wordless reflection on the threat of the larger-than-life female is a powerful thing; creating work, like that shown in 'Disquieted', which reflects the weird tumult of life around us now is a powerful thing.

And in the silence of my own studio, after months of chewing on how my own brain makes sense of what I live, and how others make sense of what they live, and on how the incompatibility in that sense-making can result in such tremendous strife, I finally finished a new painting. It is called 'The Binding Problem'.