UNCG - MLS610C-81 Global Arts Unit 1
Comments under this header are responses required in Unit 1.
My semifixed-feature space before Unit 1...
posted by Y @ 11:56 PM
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Saturday, August 26, 2006
My semifixed-feature space before Unit 1...
8 Comments:
Video: Collage.
Video: Class Intro
Questions to consider and answer:
1) Is art a universal language? Among educated people, art is generally wished to be thought of as a universal language.
2) Does our own personal lens or cultural viewpoint affect our capacity to truly appreciate another culture’s art? Yes, unless you have developed what I call a "Roman Numeral" viewpoint -- the ability to understand/see things under their broadest heading, e.g. "Art."
3) Is a translation process necessary? Yes, for most people. A big clue is to be conscious of where objects/people/things are placed -- in the culture's immediate surroundings or apart in a revently held setting.
4) What are the most basic globally shared human experiences? Birth, thirst, hunger, nakedness, fear, belonging, and death.
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Q1: From where you stand (or sit) right now, how would you describe the place of arts in US culture?
Short answer: Unfunded, sparsely supported, floundering, trapped in post modern confusion and briccolage, and over populated with rank Suzie-and Sam-homemaker amateurs.
As Dissanayake notices, "One could suggest that the complexity and ambiguity of the word 'art' derives from the complex and ambiguous status of the concept of art itself in modern Western civilization...[f]or no other society or group of human beings has ever held the view (one could call it ideology) of art that now prevails..." (_What is Art for?_, p. 40). Curiously, Dissanayake discusses art from the critic's viewpoint and the perceiver's viewpoint but not from the viewpoint of the artist/creator. It is curious to imagine how she would respond to what I'm famously known to say when I hold an artist's brush between my teeth, "It's art when, and if, I say it's art."
Q2: In your view, which art form best reveals the “heart of America?” Reruns of the sitcom, "Friends."
Unit 1 Lesson 1 assignment:
Web link: Go to http://maps.google.com, and type in your address. After you have located your house, click on the button at the upper right that reads “Satellite” to turn on the satellite image display.
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About ten or twelve years ago, I met a woman at a summer resort who was talking about how the company she worked for was negotiating purchase of Russia's surveilance photos. The reason they photos were in such hot demand was because of the effort being made at the time to give every road and building in North Carolina a street and numerical address. This was because the Emergency Services had just gotten 911 and call tracing capabilities but without street names and numbers, the physical location of rural callers was almost impossible to find. Any way, time marches on and when maps google came online about two years ago or less, Vice President Dick Cheney was the first voice of dissent. It seems that he was horrified to think that terrorists could locate the Vice President's house from outerspace and also zoom in for a look as close as his rooftop. Since then, photos of sensitive installations around the world are blocked out on maps Google images. The funny thing about this to me is that the images are not "real time" but in some cases are satellite photos taken some dozen years ago. To check this out, pick an address where say, ten years ago, there was no development or mall. If the address still shows overgrown tree canopies rather than rooftops and parking lots, then probably the photos were taken a long, long time ago and in a different political atmosphere.
The incorporation of maps Google into the first week of my "Global Arts" course was a brilliant move on my professor's part. All week we've been discussing and reading materials designed to make us consciously aware of where we are so that we can begin our global virtual tour with our lenses clean and out minds open to what other cultures can show us. Finding myself at my spec on the surface of the globe was startling, chilling, and enticing. I especially felt this way when I zoomed out from my address to view "me" from a perspective 500 miles up in Space. whew!
Unit 1 Lesson 2
We have a video on our classroom Blackboard that shows several pictures in slide show format.
The five or so pictures are of people, infants, crawlers, to teens. The questions asked about the slide show are:
• What images of childhood come to mind when you look at these photos?
- I’m sorry but no images of childhood come to mind. Honestly. And this is a bit worrisome!
• If you have children or grandchildren, what memories do these pictures awaken?
- Sorry, I don’t have children or grandchildren.
• What makes you laugh?
- Excellent puns, as in Monty Python, and parents out in public with children.
Unit 1 Lesson 2
The Discussion Forum is on our class' Blackboard site. I'm reposting here what I answered there.
Discuss: In The Silent Language, Hall asks, “What is culture?”
Response: Hall's (and George L. Trager's) seminal work, "the complete theory of culture as communication," is a brief answer. Expanding, Hall says that culture is bio-basic, "rooted in biological activities;" the proto-culture was simple at first but then "became elaborated by humans" (p.36). Because the elaborations are now so complex, it is difficult for humans to comprehend cultures outside their natal culture. The complexity of culture is why Dissanayake asks, What is Art for?
Discuss: How does he define culture?
Response: He defines culture in the terms of anthropology and linguistics, i.e. culture as communication. Architecture, literature, cuisine, family structure, speech inflections, verb tenses, and gesticulations, are some of the vehicles that cultures use to communicate; these in turn are exhibits of culture.
Discuss: Dissanayake’s takes bio-behavioral look at the arts. Hall looks at the biological roots of culture. Can you find connections or similarities between these two innovative thinkers that will help in our travels?
Response: Similarities would be the way both authors pre-suppose that the beginnings of culture are biologically based. Since their respective dates of publication, we know massive more amounts about the human gene pool, which seems to vindicate some of their statements and premises, which may have seemed quasi-scientific quacking at original publication.
Both authors noticeably slip into American ethno-centric rhetoric typical of the last half of the twentieth century. That it’s noticeable to many of us in this class is a good thing.
Discuss: What does Hall mean by the “out of awareness” aspects of communication?
Response: Where Freud found humans had a conscious and unconscious, the latter being “inaccessible to direct examination” (p. 60), Harry Stack Sullivan considered that the unconscious was obscure but “out-of-awareness” only to the individual; to the trained observer, an individual’s unconscious behavior is discernible and can be analyzed. Hall follows in the footsteps of Sullivan.
Discuss: Link your reading and your discussion to your own observations and experiences.
Response: An incident in Yokohama, Japan comes to mind. I was in a group of about six American women, one of whom was black, as we strolled through an open-air vegetable market. Our black member decided to buy us some apples so she reached over and touched some of the apples in one particular vendor’s bin. Suddenly, all the vendors were screaming at our group. Puzzled – not to mention scared, fearful, and embarrassed -- we huddled ourselves together and rushed away. Newly in-country, we interpreted the incident in several ways, not the least hurtful of all was that the Japanese vendors were discriminating against our black member. Later in the evening, our interpreter and guide apologized for what had happened but explained that in Japan it is very impolite to touch produce or loose items of food. You’re supposed to point to an item and let the vendor pick it up to show to you. The bio-basic reason for this facet of the culture: Japanese people are extremely conscious of spreading germs. The vendor’s hands are clean, whereas thousands of hands of shoppers are not. “Not Touch” signs in Japan mean what they say but not because the vendor, as in America, fears shoppers will break something.
Unit 1 Lesson 2
"Blog assignment: In _The Hidden Dimension_ (Edward T.) Hall uncovers key invisible factors in personal and social communication.
Q: How does where and how we grow up, influence how we perceive the world and ourselves in the world?"
Response: According to Hall, who references the 1930s work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, the first language that we learn (and, assuming, maintain as our primary one) allows us to express our thoughts but beyond allowing this feat, language is “a major element in the formation of thought” (p. 1).
Therefore, if where we grow up determines what language we speak, and language contributes to formation of thought, we will perceive the world and ourselves through the lens of our native language.
My interpretation of this is that perception can be tempered by learning about other cultures but our minds will always try reverting to and retrieving from and through our first reference language portal even if we learn to speak – and think -- other languages.
In this regard, each person uniquely lives through experiences – even when living through the experience moment simultaneously with other people.
"Use your personal experiences to inform how your perceptions have been affected."
I just recently finished my undergraduate degree in English, which required completion of three semesters of Spanish. It was only when my Spanish class read Pablo Neruda’s poems in Spanish that I realized that because all the foreign authors I had read for the English degree were translated, I had somebody else’s version of an original. It was like a smack in the face to realize that somebody had basically explicated the works for me – like reading predetermined opinions and Cliff notes interpretations and not knowing it.
The poem that caused my language/perceptions light bulb to burst was Neruda’s “Ode to the Apple.” In recalling this incident, I just did a WWW search and am delighted to point to laine82 in Australia’s photographic ode to a child with an apple and the text of Neruda’s “Ode” in both the Spanish original and an English translation. The site is at http://www.pbase.com/laine82/ode_to_the_apple/
[[Y Note: The self-examination aspect of the next part of the assignment caught me totally by surprise.]]
"1. Observe your informal spatial interactions this week. Be aware of your intimate, social and public conversations and journal about what you notice.
2. Record your own reactions and what other people do as well. In terms of fixed and semi-fixed feature space, look a the way your home is arranged and describe it, noting colors you prefer and other personally defining features.
3. Where are you most comfortable—in small, intimate spaces or larger, expansive places. Relate questions and personal experiences that come to mind while reading _The Hidden Dimension_."
I know I have little contact with actual humans but I painfully came to conscious awareness during the week that I have withdrawn more completely from humans than I had realized. I am slowly formulating my responses to this absolutely beneficial assignment.
Unit 1 Lesson 2, cont.
Reading for this lesson: Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language and The Hidden Dimension
[[Y Note: As stated in prior comment post, the self-examination aspect of this part of Unit 1 Lesson 2 assignment caught me totally by surprise.]]
"1 (of 3). Observe your informal spatial interactions this week. Be aware of your intimate, social and public conversations and journal about what you notice.”
First of all, what is “informal special interactions?” As indirect as it may seem, I couldn’t figure out what to do until I absorbed the definition of the term, proxemics.
Hall claims coinage of the term, proxemics, and is given credit for so doing in numerous places (e.g., see Univ. of New Mexico, Computer Science Dept. http://www.cs.unm.edu/~sheppard/proxemics.htm), as well as being the inspiration for a covey of Ph.D. dissertations (e.g., see http://sharktown.com/proxemics/intro.html and scroll down to a hot link, “A Behavioural Game Methodology for the Study of Proxemic Behaviour.”
Prior to this class (and subsequent quick searches), I’ve never encountered the term, proxemics and I feel that I should have especially since Hall addresses _The Hidden Dimension_ to architects and city planners, both being topics I normally encounter in one of my subjects of study, Lewis J. Clarke, landscape architect.
So, where Hall traces a familiar path of artistic drawing perspective and mentions the familiar architectural design tricks from Ancient Greek and Roman periods through the Renaissance, and up to more recent times, as in Lewis Mumford or Le Corbusier, proxemics was a puzzle to me.
Hall’s proxemics is “the interrelated observations and theoretics of man’s use of space.” I know Hall means “space” on John F. Kennedy and LBJ (maybe even Nixon and Ford) kinds of earth but even in an informal email sentence, my Next Theory brain reads and conceives of “Space” and “Earth” first and has to re-read to get “space” and “earth” meaning out of a text. It’s the same sort of double-take and separate meaning that has to be processed by the brain that discusses “art” and “Art.”
Hall writes quite a bit about two proxemic manifestations --theinfracultural (biologically rooted and in man’s past), and theprecultural (physiological and present) – before he reveals a third:
the microcultural level, which “is the one on which most proxemic observations are made [and this level] has three aspects: fixed-feature, semifixed-feature, and informal” (p. 101).
I have, consciously, been reminding myself and my classmates that Hall’s books were written in the twentieth century, a mention that is being interpreted as derisive (correct) and to which our professor has noted that while it is true the books are some decades old, both Dissanayake and Hall are still pertinent to us today. Therefore, it is with some irony, side-dish crow, that a little less quickly than my classmates, I finally devoured and, more importantly, digested Hall’s chapter IX, “The Anthropology of Space: An Organizing Model.”
For the past ten days or so, my work space has been turned upside down due to moving in two phases. I'm behind in everything but I finally got my desk, chair, books, research materials and two computers set up in one room -- AND I can get into it to work. Just finished doing it and it seems more than appropriate to post a picture of my "semi-fixed feature space" (Hall,Hidden,108).
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