Exemplars

Jim McLaughlin is part of a research team working with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) to study the connections between learning in the arts and learning in other content areas - mathematics, literature, writing, and world languages - in twelve Chicago public schools. But he is not only a researcher. He is also a learner. He recently participated in a poetry writing institute led by established living poets. (It would be hard to have the institute led by established dead poets, but poets are a mysterious lot, and we shouldn’t place that option outside the realm of possibility.) As Jim explained, “There were some striking features of the experience. One was the chance to work for three hours every morning with a published poet – in my case, Malena Morlling. In our group of 12 people from across the country, she was gentle with us emotionally, yet forceful in terms of her suggestions and questions. Also, the eight invited poets held ‘craft talks’ to discuss how they were thinking about writing poetry.“

Central to the institute’s methodology was having the prestigious writers publicly perform and explore poems that had had a formative influence on their own development. The choices were often surprising. For example, one highly extroverted poet’s literary model was the famous introvert Emily Dickinson. Another poet who writes raucous, sometimes shocking verse chose to read a quiet poem by Rilke about animals. Each writer then explained how their “absent mentor” had influenced them.

What is so brilliant about this approach is that it treats examples of great poetry as living, breathing, working expressions. They are, after all, called WORKS of art. We need to let them work. To see how they operate, to see the relationship between their parts, to see their relationships with other works of art. To see how they have moved others across time and space, and how contemporary artists form personal relationships with the work.
All too often we treat exemplary artistic works as if, to use Edith Wharton’s harrowing phrase, they had been “embalmed and enameled”, cut off from the living stream of human discourse. Individual artists are canonized as artistic saints (within the confines of the Western canon), and their works are reduced to relics and fetishes (often sealed in glass cases). Art appreciation becomes the equivalent of worshipping the preserved fingernail of a holy martyr. What this worshipful attitude deprives us of is the dynamism of the work itself. What are the questions and problems the work is struggling with? How might we address those same questions today? What are the larger bodies of not famous works that idealized and idolized works grow out of, either as ultimate expressions of those bodies of work, or as ultimate refutations of those bodies of work, or perhaps as both?
I remember how my childhood aesthetic imagination became magnetized to the Great Paintings in my World Book Encyclopedia. Now, whenever I encounter the originals of any of those paintings in a museum, I really can’t see the painting at all. I only see its famousness. Mona Lisa is smiling because she knows she can hide in plain site. She has grown invisible through familiarity.
The walls of many Chicago Public Schools are hung with prints of great paintings provided by the Art Institute of Chicago, with funding given almost twenty years ago by Sears, Roebuck and Company. The paintings may be deep, but the repertoire is narrow. The same prints in every school for almost two decades. They remain to this day the only exemplars of great art in most public schools. As someone who visits hundreds of public schools, I may love these works individually, but I am sick to death of seeing them. They have joined the Mona Lisa, hiding in plain sight. They exemplify the banality of greatness.
The problem with embalming and enameling works of art is that this creates an illusion - that these works have always hovered above us in some unassailable ether of eternal Platonic greatness. That nobody made them. That they just exist, have always existed, will always exist. Since the advent of mechanical means of reproduction (the printing press, recorded music, photography, film, mass production of furniture), we have been relegated to the role of audience, segregated to one side of the artistic equation, unfamiliar with the acts of composing and performing, of carving and marking. We consume art with no clear conception of the means of production.
But Jim has resisted passivity. He has reclaimed his place as a maker, under the tutelage of other makers, living and dead.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org