IN THE MIDST OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
LIVING, READING, PAINTING IN NYC
Saturday, November 21, 2020
I read a book recently, The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey, that I wish I had read while I was still teaching. The book was published 30 years ago, is still in print, and has sold close to a million copies. It is only superficially about tennis.
Gallwey’s theory is that we are each made up of two people, one guided by the brain (the ego-driven self) that has internalized all the things we are told growing up, and the other, guided by the body (the inner self) that has its own inherent needs, its own demands and requirements. It is this inner self that should be guiding us through life, but socialization and education tend to fight against it. The inner self, Gallwey believes, is endowed with an instinct to fulfill its nature: it wants to enjoy, learn, understand, appreciate, express itself, rest, be healthy, survive, and be what it is in order to make its unique contribution in the world. This self comes with a constant gentle urging; the person who works in concert with his/her inner self will be attended by a certain type of contentment.
Gallwey writes that the first rule of successful living is recognizing that this inner self has all the gifts and capabilities with which we hope to accomplish anything, and it has its own requirements to live in balance with itself. To be able to listen to this self you have to let go of all good/bad judgments (of ourselves and others). Ultimately you want to be someone who is able to let go of anything — if necessary — and still be okay. Gallwey says we need to give priority to the demands of the inner-self in relation to all the external pressures from the ego-driven self.
Gallwey arrived at this philosophy through teaching tennis. He discovered that his students learned better if — instead of telling them what to do — he simply demonstrated actions, which allowed the students to by-pass, and not be distracted by his verbal instructions. This allowed the student’s body intelligence to kick in and emulate the demonstrated movements. Gallwey also says that there is no one right way to do anything in tennis; each person should be allowed to find his/her own way based on the uniqueness of their bodies.
I stumbled on this exact same notion teaching art which, like tennis, is a physical activity. I urged students stop thinking and simply allow themselves to try different things, a process that allowed their embodied intelligence to take over. I liked to refer students to the way they doodled, since doodling is an automatic, mindless activity guided by the hand, and relies on comfortable and natural gestures.
In 1974 when Gallwey wrote The Inner Game of Tennis, Zen Buddhism was not as prominent or as pervasive in American culture as it is today; reading Gallwey’s writing the philosophical parallels between his thinking and that of the American version of Zen Buddhism is inescapable. Both philosophies are founded on the belief that attachment to outcomes is what trips us up: as he said, “the aim is to be able to let go of anything — if necessary — and still be okay.” Gallwey extends the principles of his thinking to all activities, whereas when I was teaching, I thought these principles applied only to art making.
Gallwey and I both believe that, each person is actually born right and perfect for who he/she is, and that simply allowing ourselves to follow our innate sense, the one we come into the world with (placing this guidance ahead of what society and education tells us) we can realize our potential, and fulfill our destinies. To put it more succinctly, I believe what Miles Davis said, “The genius is the guy who is most himself.”
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
When I was in college a friend said she didn’t know what she wanted to do in life. I suggested she try figuring it out through a process of elimination by making a list of what she doesn’t want. She liked the idea but was troubled that she had to resort to using such a backdoor-way of finding out something so important to her.
It did seem like the majority of my students didn’t know what they wanted to do in life. I assured them that life is circumstantial, and they would find the right path more or less by stumbling across it. My students, being art majors, were in a particular quandary because even if they knew they wanted to pursue an artist’s life they needed to figure out day jobs to maintain themselves. Professions in the arts and liberal arts do not come with a directed path the way medicine, law, or accounting does.
In truth I think the majority of people find it hard to “figure out” what they want to do, in part because the brain isn’t the right organ to consult — or I should say — the brain is probably good at figuring it out if your path is straightforward — like —”I think I’ll go to Law School,” but not so good if your options are wide open. It’s no wonder that for multiple millennia young people tended to follow professionally in their parents’ footsteps. First because they had a way in, they had a sense of what was involved in that line of work, i.e., if it was farming, they grew up on a farm doing farm work. In those days it was probably easier to figure out that you didn’t want to enter your father or mother’s trade— to be a coal miner, a grocery clerk, a seamstress, a washerwoman, a milliner, a clergyman, a financier, or whatever.
But in our day, white collar jobs don’t involve working with your hands or using your body; they are usually some form of office work, and what exactly people do in offices is pretty opaque.
Why is it so hard to think through what path you should take in life? I think part of it is that school learning does not teach you to value or possibly even recognize the skills you have. Students have a very narrow way of viewing their skills, for example, they invariably overlook their personal skills — being organized, being outgoing, being good with people, being efficient, being good with money, being able to do public speaking, having patience, having an eye for detail, being able to organize people. Whether you succeed at a job relies at least as much on these personality qualities.
An artist friend of mine, Carmen Lizardo, tells an amazing story. She was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and came to the U.S. after high school. Before applying to college, she went to the Brooklyn Library and took an aptitude test. Her results came out: artist, artist, artist. Carmen knew nothing about art; curious, she went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the first art museum she ever entered — and she knew immediately that this was the world she wanted to inhabit. Indeed, she has turned out to be a wonderful artist.
I would love to get my hands on the aptitude test she took. It seems like every kid in school would benefit from taking such a test.
Saturday, September 26, 2020
A gripe I have with the public education system is its misguided reverence for book learning over hands-on learning. Book learning treats students as if everything important about them exists only from their neck up.
Embodied learning is at least as important, if not more so, than intellectual learning. There are two distinct ways of learning —academic learning that feeds information directly to the brain, and embodied learning which is used to acquire physical skills. Athletics and visual and performing arts are generally taught in gyms or playing fields, in art studios, and in conservatories.
A toddler does not learn to crawl or walk by being told how to crawl or walk. A toddler learns to crawl or walk by crawling or walking, just as a singer learns to sing by singing. Embodied learning is a more complex, more holistic route to knowledge, one that is less directed by the brain, more directed by the body. The two paths to learning are fundamentally different. Book learning is verbal, logical, and slow; embodied learning by-passes the logical brain and coordinates instinct, intuition and the body.
One example is the basic mammalian instinct to suckle: a kitten or a baby does not have to be taught to suckle. Locomotion is also instinctual — a baby abandoned in the wild, if she survives, will not remain on her back. By herself she will learn to turn over, crawl, walk, and run. We are born with these types of instincts — something we knew to do before we developed language. In this way we can say embodied learning is a more fundamental route to knowledge than verbal or textual learning.
This is not a topic I might have given much thought to had I not taught studio art for three decades. As an experienced teacher, I found myself constantly advising my students to “Stop thinking!” — explaining that their minds cannot solve whatever problems they were facing with their artwork — that only by doing, by trying things out physically would they find a way forward. This was news to them: a lifetime of education had taught them to value their thinking above all else.
According to Wallace Stevens, unlike the body, the brain is never satisfied. If we eat our fill, we stop being hungry, after a good night’s sleep, we feel rested and energetic. This is not the case with the brain: our brains know no limits; it constantly wants more. Our brains also lie. I subscribe to the edict “Don’t trust everything you think.” The brain is not to be trusted. But when we feel pain, have an upset stomach, or run a fever, we know it’s true: the body doesn’t lie, nor does it get caught up in fantasies, entertain illusions of grandeur, or do any of the other suspect things that our brains are constantly doing.
I will elaborate on this topic in the next posting. In the meantime, I leave you with this factoid: A Silicon Valley executive once said that he will not hire computer programmers who have never worked with their hands; he claimed that people who have failed to acquire hand skills cannot think in certain ways. (You know what they say: muscles that are not used atrophy.)
Wednesday, September 16, 2020
I have fallen well short of the goal I had when I started this blog of posting once a week. I’ve been feeling like I don’t have that much to say. I considered giving up the whole thing, but recently I figured out there is something I can talk about almost endlessly, since I’ve been doing it for the last 30 years, week after week, in my role as a college painting and drawing professor.
To teach well you need to break topics down into components, or graduated steps that students can follow. When I started teaching I noticed there were things I could do, yet could not explain how I did them; I noticed I operated on a series of (almost) subconscious assumptions that needed to be closely examined; and I noticed teaching exercised skills that I had but had no occasion to use in my normal life. Ultimately teaching grew very rewarding for me because it employed many more of my capabilities than I had ever had opportunity to use before.
Recently I sat down, and in five minutes, came up with a list of a dozen topics I could write about. They included:
- Cerebral learning vs. embodied learning
- The advantages of painting and drawing in being immediate and extremely flexible mediums
- What “process art” is about
- The counter-intuitive fact that 2-D painting and drawing mediums have surpassing capabilities to evoke space compared to 3-D mediums, including film and installation
- The difference between narrative and non-narrative art
- The difference between using symbols vs. inference in art
- The basic difference between believing your body vs. believing your brain
- The argument against an academic art education
- The importance of Formalism as taught by the Bauhaus
- The particularity of individual color sense
- Why I distrust Theory (capitalization mine)
- Why my students thought I could read their minds
- The importance of visual thinking — focusing on Einstein as an example. (Admittedly I would have to do a fair amount of research to carry out this topic.)