"From Giotto to Jesse." - art history

It seems to me that the handicap of the available textbooks (even the newest) is their objective, dispassionate tone, as if all works were equally interesting (or uninteresting), important only as they further a too neat narrative. Once an artist is superficially discussed, he/she rarely reappears. Because of the infinitely large numbers of artists surveyed, there is no time to go into detail with any. A text's format usually favors sweeping generalizations and avoids confusing detail. History is made to appear as an absolute, closed set of sequences that can be memorized. Artists' careers and lives are trimmed or sanitized with an eye to something considered more important, historical development. It's like clarifying the broth for a chicken soup. Some (maybe quite a few) students like such nourishment, perhaps because they are so familiar with it.

There is another type of student who wants to "engage" deeply with whatever they are learning, wants learning to be passionate, personal, varied in its presentation, and subjective. They would rather learn a subject in terms of its complexity and relationships, synthesizing and integrating it into what they already know. This dichotomy in learning approaches is, of course, at the heart of the educational psychology research on "left brain/right brain." Most art history is written from the "left brain" by historians about a subject that is gloriously "right brain." If art history can instead become an ambidextrous study of the creative artistic personality in its varied manifestations across historical time, it would be, I think, a better discipline. Such an approach would allow each reader to seek within art history clues to their own creativity, to see in the personalities and working habits, in the interpersonal relationships, and in the historical and art historical influences of a selection of artists some indication of how humans like themselves have responded to and coped with the social, economic, and personal circumstances of their lives.

After more than five years of trying different approaches to beat the problems inherent in teaching introductory surveys (the most extreme being the semester I taught it in reverse chronological order), I have recently adopted an approach that I believe is both conducive to my principles and effective from the point of view of enjoyment and retention. This has meant structuring the semester as a series of topically focused lectures on particular aspects of the chronological unit under consideration. I think of these as the type of talk I might have given a museum audience on a Sunday afternoon: entertaining, scholarly, and personal. I make no attempt at a global or universal perspective. I treat the material from an engaged position, one that I identify as such. Although I discuss broad issues, I make no attempt at survey coverage, preferring instead an in-depth treatment of a particular facet of it.

The level of information is sophisticated, closer to what might otherwise be discussed at the intermediate or seminar level. It is my conviction that students are more apt to retain those things they know the most about. I discuss primary material and recently published secondary sources. I assign outside readings from these sources to stimulate class discussion--even in the large (sixty-student) classes where my style combines the presentation skills of a multimedia performance lecture with the question-and-answer flow of the Oprah Winfrey show. Students seem to like the casual atmosphere and their nonpassive role. From the right side of the brain, so to speak, I focus, as an artist might, on "what matters to me in all of this?" I include the "shock" of Karen Finley's performances, the legal controversies surrounding the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition's X Portfolio pornography trials in nearby Cincinnati, and Jesse Helms's and Newt Gingrich's attacks on public support for the arts through the NEA and NEH. I use today's popular culture to illustrate my points from the Renaissance forward; for instance, I compare such celebrities as Madonna and Michael Jackson not only to the "celebrity" artist par excellence, Andy Warhol, but to Lorenzo Ghiberti, when I discuss his self-portrait and autobiography. My aim throughout is to show how interrelational history is and why we should care about it.

To set the mood and to help the students understand changes in artistic style, I use music in every lecture. They seem to have an easier time hearing differences and changes in musical form. I'd use video even more than I already do, if I had the time and technology to edit cuts. This spring I returned to using Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages as a complement to my lectures. In other years I tried several of the other available texts. Last fall I tried not using a text, relying instead on a typed study guide illustrated with photocopies arranged in collages to visually recall the interconnections of the topic. Having a traditional text seemed sometimes to interfere with my efforts to forge a new path through the material, and when you have a text showing large numbers of artists and works, the temptation is always to include too many of them in your presentation. Moreover, students have a tendency to judge as irrelevant any works shown in lecture that aren't in the "text," even if the in-class discussion should have established new priorities. I found, however, that the absence of a comprehensive text was reflected in the students' performance on the exams. Students mistook the absence of a text as my endorsement for not needing to know "facts." I worried too that they might have been missing the big picture. One advantage to placing a survey text in their hands is that it frees me from feeling the need to "do it all." If they want to know more about the big picture, the information is readily at hand.