Art Ed Lecture #1: Sam Seidel

On my second day of work at a certain mural-making establishment.  Just fulfilling a years-in-the-making dream.

Anyway, Sam Seidel.  This guy wrote Hip Hop Genius.  He taught first in a prison, where he connected with his students by showing some vulnerability--rapping in front of them.  He then built several unconventional, music-based art ed programs that were all about the power of language (or as he would say, "slanguage")--not as a handy mnemonic device, but as a tool to brand and rebrand, to create an image and culture.  Here's a still from a stop-motion video promo he put together with some students:

He was also tiny and uniquely charismatic.

Some memorable concepts, moments, quotes, activities here below:

Programs he started (in Providence):
AS220
Broad Street Studio was a kind of music lab he created with some youth--a place where they had around-the-clock access to recording studios and equipment, a place where they could make art and build community.

"What happens if you institutionalize 'toeing the line'? Can/should we?" This seems like a natural continuation of the question I posed when I toured MICA's Community Art program.  Or a question to ask of any type of shared (and of necessity somewhat canned) curriculum.

"It is presumed that urban schools are broken. (They) are not broken; they are doing exactly what they're designed to do." Replicating the status quo.  Keeping power in the hands of those who have it.  Cynical, but worth a thought, and not necessarily, in my experience, untrue.

The idea of code switching--he talked about three layers or levels of vocabulary, and the need to almost translate between them.  For instance, in a bio classroom, students use/learn
1) science English
2) classroom English
3) street English

...and he took that concept to create some really interesting linguistic ...um... variations.  Most of them collaboratively, with his kids:

Hip Hop --> Flip Hop (as in, flipping the conventional meaning of a phrase--or really, anything--on its head)

"words/matter, word/smatter"

"Hateration gets no toleration"
"Hug Lyfe" (in t-shirts, with the gothic font)
"at risk --> beyond risk"
"show and prove"

So we did an activity in which we took words with pejorative connotations and "flipped the phrase".  For instance:

"ADHD" became "All disorders have dreams" and "Artists dream in high def"
"Minority" became "MYnority" and "humanority"
"Refugee" became "world citizens" and "unizens" (even though that last one sounds a bit like contact lens solution)
"Illegal" --> "I Legal" or "Ill Eagle"

Some of my own play with words following:
Authenti/City
Synchroni/City
Analyze/Anal Lies
...you know I'm just looking through the pedagoggles.


To read:
"The Rage is Back" Adam Mansbock, on graffiti
"Unspeak" Steven Poole
"Word on the Street" John McWhorter

A Song For These Times

http://birdiebuschmusic.bandcamp.com/track/south-philly

A Small Collection of Big Thoughts

Finished my little winter book yesterday morning.  Here are some things that came out of this time of contemplation:

"Open your horizons and see all the options you have.  Then you will truly be fortunate." --A fortune cookie I got in mid-December

"Never let your fear decide your fate" --that song that got stuck in my head around Christmas time at the frame shop

"There's so much we can know without knowing" --to the rhythm of my footsteps in Newark

"Yes, the world does fall apart...but not in the way we fear"
"The greatest gift we can give one another is wonder"
"Why write what you know?  Instead, write what you FEEL"  
"You can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first" --a few TED talks in January

"I've been thinking about our fortune/and decided that we're really not to blame" --Moody Blues, early February

"I wish that I could take you to a bridge/We could see that everything was water/Underneath the bridge" --Birdie Busch

"My alone feel so good, I'll only have you if you're sweeter than my solitude" --A friend's blog

"People come in and out of your life like an accordion.  Don't try to stop it breathing" --a thought on the way home from the Crane art gallery on the Ides of March

"You can't be fully present when you're waiting for something" --a quote on the wall of my new bedroom

"I think it's alright/if I feel both heavy and light" Birdie Busch, from the song "South Philly", which is playing right now.

...and now it's time to turn the corner into spring.

On Being Native

I just finished Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux...ostensibly a (probably not so fictional) story about a down-on-his-luck writer who picks up his life and moves to Hawaii, where he takes up as manager of a quirky hotel and relates a whole bunch of sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, sometimes tragic stories of the different guests who pass through the rooms, the beaches, the allusive (and perhaps aptly named) bar dubbed Paradise Lost.  The reviews on the back cover compare it to Canterbury Tales, call it a tropical Decameron--but it seems to be about much more than that.

There was a sort of Hitchcock-Rear-Window-esque voyeurism to the at first seemingly unrelated stories--full of closed doors and private anecdotes.  It plays with this idea of the secret, with the dichotomy of inner and outer--exploring outside and inside a hotel room, outside and inside a so-called paradise, outside and inside the human psyche.

And as I was reading it, after many travels of my own which felt in some ways to be a way for me to edge so far beyond my comfort zone that I would discover things previously unknown to myself--and in some ways a way for me to run away--it took on a strong undercurrent about being native to a place.  Even after years of existing with his new family and friends in Hawaii, Theroux was still simply existing.  Everyone trailed his own meandering history behind him, and the blindingly bright, stiflingly warm sun around the whole crowd seemed to illuminate even more starkly the fact that no one was really able to break free of his own mental hotel room walls.

Some bits to remember:

"You could live in Florida with an idea, he said, 'if you are content that your idea shall consist of grapefruits and oranges'". 212

"Somehow I had taken hold and become involved with these strangers, who seemed as ferocious and simple and unreadable as savages, and in time I had learned that they had unguessable, improbable histories.  I had attached myself to them, attached myself to another past." 296

"You had to be happy to understand, and understanding made you even happier." 376

"The only place that can truly be hell is the one that was once paradise." 378

"You're a writer.  Among other things, that's a pathological condition." 382

Bees drowning slowly, pleasurably, in honey  422

"I had proved what I had always suspected, that even the crookedest journey is the way home." 424

Controlled Chaos!

A surprisingly huge weight is lifted off my shoulders now that the design for the Kalmar mural is underway.  Lots of imagery to play with, but at least now there is some semblance of order.

Speaking of playfulness, who better to look at than former billboard-painter, guru of strange and seemingly disparate objects placed together in surreal but somehow very cohesive and rather spectacular ways, and one of my more influential artists, James Rosenquist!

Some images, from the book that first introduced me to the guy freshman year of college.  Now all we need to add to the mural is some spaghetti!:

Stories

"In the end, stories are what's left of us, we are no more than the few tales that persist." Salman Rushdie

From this beautiful story of a foreign correspondent in Zimbabwe, his struggle to adopt an abandoned girl, and how it changes his focus from macro-scale change to something much smaller, but perhaps just as important.  Sounds familiar to me...

Aljira Museum

Aljira, incidentally, is the Australian Aboriginal word for "dreamtime." More synchronicity!
http://aljira.org/

Fay Ku "Sea Change"

Mermaid
Transformation
Fish, faces, bodies, bones
in tail, entail
feathers and fins

More of her work:

I dug this title, for many reasons: "Eat and Drown: The Primordial Soup Swimmers" by Kevin Darmanie

Here's one image of his work. A bit Hobbesian for me, but there you go:

Wherein Fury Takes Flight: The Time of Our Silence is Over by Alyson Pou

"This time they are whipping up a mighty wind making a decision to move" Alyson Pou

Rabbits, diving into wall

"symbolize transition and transformation"

"come out at dawn and dusk, the witching hour, the most vulnerable time of day,when things slip from life to death, from evil to good."

liminal state

Alice in Wonderland

"secret world"

Watership Down

Anna Carina Sinocchi

"The most important thing we can experience is the mysterious.  It is the source of all true art and science" --Einstein

"Some action paintings take a whole person's life.  Is that slow enough for you?" Harold Rosenberg

To Read...

Some books on display at Moore's exhibit on art and activism a few weeks ago:

Artificial Hells--Claire Bishop
Participation--Claire Bishop
The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context--Grant Kester
Education for Socially Engaged Art--Pablo Helguera

CRANE-ing my Neck

A mid-January trip to the Crane brought about some of these thoughts.
Not to mention how interesting it was to open the door after a long, howling windy walk and step into this quiet, dark, fire-lit building.


Winterdown

http://beckysuss.blogspot.com/

Crossing, passages, liminal state
The sound of the boards creaking and feeling of steps swaying the bridge
Finding yourself in a tight enclosure in the middle of the roaring white silence
Periodically some of the "objects" turn on and cycle through something mechanical
I wonder if this is how a cell feels

Istoria by Jay Walker

A hallway of magic.
Silver emerging from heads, like Cavemanman by Hirschhorn
Radiating ot
Veins trailing (ARTeries?) = trees?
Hearts connecting
Head prints
And across from all the motion and chaos and connections and patterns and stimuli--a single, lone, hooded figure on the other side of the hall.\

Indigo Arts Gallery

I spent a while looking at the prints here.

Ideas:
Trees/leaves in the wind
Palms/palmettos--time to revisit FL and Costa Rica
Mermaid as two-ended sankofa, with other life forms in tail
Abalones
Hill shapes/scales
Flat-line landscape silhouettes
Crowds of people behind wings
Sunburst with family and gnarled trees
People dancing with serpents intertwined (Darling Scarp and Krishna)
Small figures holding up woman (sleeping/dreaming?) "The city, she's not ready"
Tree leaves/canopy / sky+ocean

Ideas for some CR images:
bright, graphic
party crowds yet some overtones of solitude
foreboding sky
birds, animals
red/pink leaves, blue stems
dances, serpents
peacock feathers/clouds/palms
over a triange--Jung's archetypal shapes
lace
standing on a balcony over the chaos
or a lone person (or a brain) below it
the gathering cloud
stairs
empty spaces + vacant places
decay --> regeneration...beautiful decay!
dust clouds, smoke swirls, whorls
strong shadows--blue+purple+red, lime green
shadows more substantial than object
SLANT
disjointed lines
logic

Stuart Elster

This last one wasn't part of this exhibit, but it seems like it belongs here too.

Dharma Bums

"Comparisons are odious." 55

"The roar of the silence was like a was of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years." 71

"Mind is the Maker, for no reason at all, for all this creation, created to fall." 99

"I have all the time in the world from life to life to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry?" 122

"Why is he so mad about white tiled sinks and 'kitchen machinery' he calls it? People have good hearts whether or not they live like Dharma Bums." 132

"Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live." 137

"I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do anything I wanted." 148

"...the roaring silence of the diamond." 157

"I want my Dharma Bums to have springtime in their hearts." 204

"Let the mind beware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious." 238

"To the children and the innocent it's all the same." 244