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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2005-06-02; Arts Commission; MinutesARTS COMMISSION MINUTES Present: all except Felicia Shaw Guests: Carolyn Grant, Executive Director, Museum of Making Music Meeting called to order at 8:01 a.m. Minutes of May 5 approved without change. n Carolyn Grant presented information about the Museum of Making Music located in Carlsbad. The Museum exhibits the changes in the industry of retail music sales in America. It maintains a permanent collection of instruments and artifacts, an inter-active area and a gift shop; it conducts tours of the museum and holds performances by professional musicians; it operates programs, including New Horizons Band for adults, Music Ventures standards-based K-8 educational activities, Family Activity Days and a variety of workshops and clinics related to the music field. Volunteers and interns are critical to its operations, and tourists rather than residents are the majority of its visitors. Strategic objectives for the next few years are to refine and expand programming, build awareness toward perception of the museum as a tourist destination, become a cultural asset and leader in music education, and tell the story of the music products industry. Chairman Hill asked what the Museum's viewpoint is concerning Carlsbad's future. Ms. Grant responded that North County has no hub for music, the arts and cultural experiences and she believes that Carlsbad could become that hub given some of the excellent organizations developing here, like New Village Arts Theatre, the Carlsbad Music Festival and the Museum. She encourages collaborations among such groups, such as the partnership the Museum made with the Music Festival in presenting some of its programming. Commissioner Juncal suggested that ArtSplash might offer a good opportunity to collaborate. in The Commissioners discussed the article, "Ten Lessons the Arts Can Teach Us" by Elliot Eisner (see attachment) on how the arts can be used to achieve more effective learning skills. Chairman Hill posed the questions of how the Commission could communicate this message to the community and suggested that Commissioners serving on the grants panel in the autumn review it then with regard to connecting points in proposed projects. IV. The Commissioners discussed changing the meeting time. Each member was polled concerning relative ease or difficulty of convening at specific times of the day. A new meeting time of 9:00 a.m. was proposed, moved, seconded and unanimously passed. The Commission directed staff to change the room reservation time and the meeting time noted on the City website to reflect the new time. Public Comment Carolyn Taylor announced that this is her last meeting as observer for the League of Women Voters. She noted that it is a difficult feat to serve in a role that is only advisory, as the Commission does, but urged the members to continue to advocate, especially for a community arts center which is sorely needed. She also noted that there seems to be little connection to the School Board, and that they and the public need to hear the arts education issues the Commission has been discussing. Committee Reports Rita Francis attended "Beauty and the Beast" by the Carlsbad High School Drama Club and found it very impressive. Barbara Iserloth amended her May report to include that Judy Poole is attempting to form a SUAVE program here for Carlsbad schools. She also went to the COAL Children's Art Show and was very impressed with the quality of the works on display. Ron Juncal has been creating freestanding rock sculptures at the Tamarack Beach lagoon outlet that have attracted attention, including Good Morning America which plans to air a segment on July 15tn about the activity. Gary Hill also saw "Beauty and the Beast" and agreed that it was of excellent quality. He will be attending the University of Massachusetts Arts Management Conference June 20-22 and hopes the "Creative Community" section will provide some guidelines on cultural development. He has asked Ms.Shaw to work with Ms. Carrillo to develop a presentation on the San Diego Arts and Culture Commission to capture their information on education. Ms. Carrillo added that together they can provide both city and state overviews of current activities, issues and strategies. Manager's Report Peter Gordon reported that the Opera Competition was not held due to a lack of entrants and the Sister City Committee is revamping the project. The exhibition "Painted ladies" opens with a reception for the artists on Sunday and all Commissioners are encouraged to attend. The show is an interesting mix of very different painting styles on the theme of the female figure. He distributed the new Jazz Concert Schedule postcards and noted that the series has left Magee Park because the growth of the audience now exceeds the park's capacity, but it is the intention to return to the northwest quadrant when possible and that new parks being planned now will most likely bring other changes of venue in the future. He announced that the Carlsbad Friends of the Arts will present a check for $28,000 to the City Council on June 14th for TGIF Jazz in the Parks and Three-Part-Art. The Jazz Program has been expanded this year by 16 pages due to the interest of advertisers. The concert lineup has several nationally touring acts from outside of our region. He noted that the Arts Office appreciates the talent of local musicians but also values the opportunity to bring new music influences to our audience. Mr.Gordon distributed the 2005 Community Arts Grants guidelines to the Commission and requested that they review it for any changes they would like to see in 2006. Suggestions should be provided at the next Arts Commission meeting. The meeting was adjourned at 9:22 a.m. Ten Elliot Eisner Lee Jacks Professor of Education Stanford University The organizers of this meeting have assigned me a particular topic. I have been asked to "discuss the intellectual, cre- ative and developmental skills students can gain from learning in and through the arts, the arts in general education and the current reform movement." First, work in the arts teaches chil- dren to pay attention to qualitative rela- tionships; attention to such relationships is critical for creating a coherent and satisfying piece of work. How qualities interact, whether in sight or sound, whether through prose or poetry, whether in the choreographed move- ment we call dance or in an actor's lines and gestures-these relationships matter. They cannot be neglected, they are the means through which the work becomes expressive. One of the most interesting and edu- cationally important features about working with qualitative relationships is that deciding how they should be composed depends upon somatic expe- rience, that sense, as Nelson Goodman (1978) called it, "of Tightness of fit." Is this the right word to use here? Does this passage in the painting work? Does this section need a smoother transition? Is this color too raw? Questions like these, which are crucial in the arts, can- not be answered by appealing to formu- la; their answers must be found by appealing to what can be felt. Now reliance on somatic experience to know that something fits is not limit- ed to the arts. To the extent to which the actual practice of doing science is an art, it too requires that judgments about the Tightness of an idea or theory be determined, at least in part, by somatic experience. In the arts—and when fields of study and practices are treated as arts-the somatic experience of rela- tionships is a central basis for making judgments. What is striking is that so little in the school curriculum affords children the opportunity to make such judgments. The school curriculum is heavily weighted towards subject matter that gives students the illusion that tightness means correctness and that getting things right always depends upon fealty to rule; spelling, arithmetic, writing as they are usually taught are largely mimetic or rule abiding. Not so the arts. The arts are What we have in the arts is a cognitive use of the emotions. In this domain it is judgment rather than rule that prevails. most conspicuous in their insistence that relationships are central and that good relationships are achieved when the mind works in the service of feel- ing. As Israel Scheffler (1977) says, what we have in the arts is a cog- nitive use of the emotions. In this domain it is judgment rather than rule that prevails. Second, the arts teach children that problems can have more than one solu- tion and that questions can have more than one answer. If they do anything, the arts embrace diversity of outcome. Standardization of solution and unifor- mity of response is no virtue in the arts. While the teacher of spelling is not par- ticularly interested in promoting the student's ingenuity, the arts teacher seeks it. Third, the arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world. This too is a lesson that is seldom taught in our schools. The multiple-choice objective test is an encomium to the single correct answer. Thaf s what makes the test "objective." It is not objective because of the way the test items were selected; it is objective because of the way they are scored. It makes no allowance in scoring for the scorer to exercise judgment, that's why machines can do it. Reflect for a moment on the covert lessons such tests teach students. When there are multiple ways of addressing a problem, a child's individ- ual signature can be affixed to the work. It also enables the child to say, "Here I am. This is how I see it." It is ironic that at a time when educa- tional reform pushes more and more towards standardized assessment, uni- formity of program and homogeneity of aims, a field that pro- The greater the vides balance to such pressure on schools priorities should be regarded as marginal. to standardize, the From my per- greater the need for sPeCtive ** greater the pressure on the arts. . . schools to standard- ize, the greater the need for the arts, those places where individuality and productive surprise are celebrated. Fourth, the arts teach children that purposes in complex forms of problem solving are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. In so-called rational approaches to prob- lem-solving, tike standard paradigm holds that goals and objectives must be clear and that once clear, means can be designed to attain those goals. Once means are implemented, evaluation pro- cedures can be used to determine if the goals and objectives have been reached. If they have not, new and more effective means can be used to recycle the process. It's all very tidy. It's all very spic and span. Action is thought to fol- low purpose, and while means may Learning in the arts vary, objectives do requires the ability The problem and willingness to with this model is surrender to the that this is not the way life works; and unanticipated it's certainly not the •I_M«.- /• .i_ way work in the arts Possibilities of the proceeds. Purposes, work as it unfolds. as James March (1972) reminds us, evolve, they grow out of action, action does not always follow purpose. Learning in the arts requires the ability and willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibil- ities of the work as it unfolds. At its best, work in the arts is not a mono- logue delivered by the artist to the work, but a dialogue. It is a conversa- tion with materials, a conversation punctuated with all of the surprises and uncertainty that really stimulating conversation makes possible. In the arts one looks for surprise, surprise that redefines goals; purposes are held flexi- bly. The aim is more than impressing into a material what you already know, but discovering what you don't. Fifth, the arts teach children that despite the cultural bias that assigns to literal language and number a virtual monopoly on how understanding is advanced, the arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. Put simply, the limits of our language do not define the limits of our cogni- tion. As Michael Polanyi (1966) says, we know more than we can tell. The reduction of knowing to the quantifiable and the literal is, in my view, too high a price to pay for defin- ing the conditions of knowledge. What we come t6 know through literature, poetry and the arts is not reducible to the literal. Why else would we read Charles Dickens, Elie Weisel, Arthur Miller, Tennyson of "Emily Dickinson? Their work hejps us walk in someone else's shoes. But empathic participation in the lives of others is not the only way the arts enlarge understanding. The arts help us share the distinctive qualities of experience that a work of art itself makes possible. The delicate contours of a Tang dynasty vessel, the power of a Colima effigy, the complex harmonies of a late Beethoven quartet can be experienced whether you live in London, Beijing or Los Angeles, as long as you know how to inquire into them. Learning how to con- duct such inquiries is part of what it means to have an arts edu- cation. I would go so far as to say that if the arts are thought of as carriers of meaning, and if the concept of literacy is extended to mean the ability to express and recover meaning within the cultural forms in which meaning can appear, then an education in the arts is one way to expand our literacy. Sixth, the arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties. Paying attention to subtleties is not typically a dominant mode of perception in the ordinary course of our lives. We typical- ly see in order to recognize rather than to explore the nuances of a visual field; how many of us here have really seen the facade of our own house? I suspect few. One test is to try to draw it. We tend to look at our house or for our The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. house in order to know if we have arrived home, or to decide if it needs to be painted, or to determine if anyone's there. Seeing its visual qualities and their relationships is much less common. Yet learning to see and hear is pre- cisely what the arts teach; they teach children the art, not only of looking, but also of seeing, not only of listening, but also of hearing. They invite students to explore the auditory contours of a musi- cal performance, the movements of a modern dance, the proportions of an architectural form so that they can be experienced as art forms. Seeing in such situations is slowed down and put in the service of feeling. But if you think my interests are lim- ited to the fine arts, let me assure you that I have no appetite to limit the scope of aesthetic experience to the fine arts. Reflections on the wet pavement of city streets, cloud formations, billboard posters ripped from the walls of a building and displaying the luscious surface of a collage are also candidates for the kind of seeing I am talking about. There is, however, a difference between such forms and what we think of as works of art. Works of art partici- pate in a tradition, they are invested with intention by their creators, they are a part of a social context, and they have been influenced by their history. Understanding such conditions matter. After all, anything seen can be seen from a purely formal per- spective, from garbage cans to snowflakes. The perception of works of art, and I The arts traffic in subtleties.... They teach children the art, not only of looking, but also of seeing, not only of listening, but also of hearing. include the arts of popular culture as well, require more. Seventh, the arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real. In music it is patterned sound; in dance it is the expressive movement of a dancer in motion; in the visual arts it is visual form on a canvas, a block of granite, a sheet of steel or aluminum; in theater it's a complex of speech, movement and set. Each of these art forms uses materi- als that impose upon those using them a certain set of constraints. They make certain demands. They also provide an array of affordances. Materials offer distinctive opportu- nities. To realize such opportunities, the child must be able to convert a material into a medium. For this to occur, the child must learn to think within the affordances and constraints of a material and to employ techniques to make the conversion of a material into a medium possible. A material is not the same as a medium or vice versa. Material is the stuff you work with. A medium is something that mediates. What does something medi- ate? It mediates the choices, decisions, ideas and images that the individual has. The problem for uses materials that the child is to take ., some material—impose upon those drawings/ paintings/ using them a certain sculptures—and think within the con-set of constraints. straints and affor. They make certain dances of that mate' rial the shape that demands. that image needs to take. For example, if you give a youngster a ball of plasticine clay and ask him to sculpt a tree, you'll get one kind of an image. If you ask him to draw a tree, you'll get another kind of image. What the youngster is doing is working with the structural equivalents of the idea of tree within the constraints and the Each of the art forms affordances of the material-a sophisti- cated form of thinking. This conversion process occurs not only within the material; it also occurs within the child for it is through the work of art that we make ourselves. The "work of art" is what one does when engaged in an activity in which the end view is something aesthetic. Thus the phrase "work of art" refers to both the task of making art and the result of such work. It is both a noun and a verb. It is activity whose conse- quences live not only in the object One of the great aims but also in the of education is tomaker. The work of art is both a make it possible for product and a , . , , means through Pe°Ple to be engaged which we make in the process of ourselves. The arts are creating themselves. about recreation, the emphasis on "re-creation." What is being re-created? Oneself. One of the great aims of education is to make it possible for people to be engaged in the process of creating themselves. Artists and scientists are alike in this respect. The inventive ones are troublemakers. The trouble that they make is for them- selves because what they do is generate problems. The generation of those problems creates disequilibrium in their homeostatic system, which is a motivat- ing force in trying to resolve that prob- lem. In that process of resolution, the individual gets redefined by the quali- ties, ideas and skills that he or she develops in trying to cope with those problems. With the arts, we have a set of activities that deal with the problem of trying to create qualitative relation- ships that satisfy some image of aesthet- ic virtue as the youngster sees it. How does the remaking of ourselves occur? First, works of art often de- familiarize aspects of the world by recontextualization. Marcel Duchamp's urinal entitled The Fountain and placed in a museum, represents an invitation to see, in a new way and, in the process, calls attention not only to the work itself but to what counts as art. A second source of remaking is that works of art focus attention on what would normally go unseen. When the arts are well taught they can reframe the student's perception of the world. This reframing can take place from the "lessons" that the works of others teach, as well as through the students' efforts to reframe them on their own. The arts provide permission for such reframing. Although new theories in science also represent a reframing, in science we usually expect some corre- spondence between a scientific repre- sentation and what we refer to as reali- ty. In the arts the scope for a "no holds barred" imaginative reframing is not constrained by such expectations. An eighth lesson the arts teach has to do with the nature of discourse about art. Talk about the arts makes some special demands on those who speak about them. Think, for a moment, about what is required to describe the qualities of a jazz saxophone solo by John Coltrane, the surface of a painting by Helen Frankenthaler or the expres- sive character of a bronze sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. The task is not to replicate in language the qualities these works possess because clearly no such replication is possible. It is rather to imply through language qualities that are themselves ineffable, hence the trick is to say what cannot be said. It is here that innuendo and connotation are among our strongest allies. It is here that that most powerful of linguistic capacities, metaphor, comes to the res- cue. Using metaphor, Suzanne Langer (1952) reminds us, is a way of saying something one way and expecting to be understood in another. Metaphor adumbrates, it does not translate. When children are given the oppor- tunity to describe, discuss and interpret what they see, when they are invited to disclose what a work helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capaci- ties to find the words that will do the job. This is a job that is well known to them for it emerges in the neologisms of toddler talk and it appears in the ver- nacular poetry we call slang. Criticism in the arts is not only a way to describe what you have seen, it is also a road to sight. The critical act, the task of trying to articulate what is before us, is also a way of discovering what is there. Ninth, the arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other sources and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. Consider the experience we Criticism in the artsundergo in the pres- ence of a truly great is not only a way to piece of architecture, , ., , .Frank Lloyd descnbe what you Wright's Falling have seen, it is also Water, for example, . or music such as a road to **&*- ^ Beethoven's critical act, the task "Hallelujah Chorus" from Christ on the of frymg to articulate Mount of Olives. what is before us, Some works of art have the capacity to is also a way of put us into another world, bo starring is the journey that we there. surrender to where the work takes us. I am fully aware that such experi- ences are not the common stock-in-trade of the average eight-year-old. As one of my former painting teachers once told me, great works of art require great audiences. Eight-year-olds typically are not yet great audiences, but we wish to help them be. We wish to help them s learn how to read—and create—such images. In short, we want to help them acquire the forms of literacy that will give them access to such work and to the joy, delight and insight they make possible. If this is elitism then we should try to expand the elite. I have been describing what the arts teach by identifying some of the cogni- tive processes they require, but I have been describing these processes as if they functioned independently. They do not. They interact. What this means, for example, is that attention to nuance must be addressed at the same time one is attending to matters of composition, that purposes must be treated flexibly while one is attending to matters of technique, that thought in language and thought in image function simultaneously. Far from being simple, the creation of an image, whether visual, musical, choreographic or dramatic, is a complex form of human achievement in which everything affects everything else. Such educational achievements have deep importance and they take time. We are all too eager to attain education- al ends that might not really matter. The national preoccupation with "world-classness" in this or that subject "by the year 2000" typically pushes us toward short-term goals, not lasting effects. We are too The lessons that the eaSer to settle for attention to symp- arts teach require toms and to problem- time, attention and atic Proxies for <luali-ty education. skilled teachers ... We need to learn how to take a longer- term view and to be held accountable for more than the merely measurable. The lessons that the arts teach require time, attention and skilled teachers who know what they are after. We are after much more than what can be displayed on the refrigerator door. When that image dominates the public's conception of what the arts are for, the arts will remain marginal, and when that image dominates the teaching of the arts, they should remain marginal. A tenth lesson the arts teach, and the last one I will describe, pertains to mat- ters of value. The position of the arts in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important. The values the young internalize are sel- dom internalized by admonition; they permeate the environment and seep in slowly like water through the sand. Values are conveyed through the forms of life in which they participate. For chil- The position of the dren these forms of arts in the school curriculum young what adults life are made palpa- ble by the value choices that the adults around them Symbolizes to the make. Among the most important of these choices is what believe is important. schools should teach. The curriculum of the school shapes children's thinking. It is a mind- altering device; it symbolizes what adults believe is important for the young to know, what is important to be good at. It tells the young which human aptitudes are important to possess. It gives or denies children opportunities to leam how to think in certain ways. Since children are compelled by law to spend the major portion of their child- hood in school, the modus vivendi of the school, and especially the course they must run and the criteria used to deter- mine who among them is the swiftest, matters a great deal. Curriculum deci- sions, therefore, about content inclusion, content exclusion and content marginal- ization help shape the forms of life that constitute school. The school socializes in such powerful and ubiquitous ways that how it does so is hardly noticed. The value of a subject of study is not only a function of its presence in the curriculum; it is also a function of the amount of time the school devotes to it. Indeed, the most telling index of the importance of a field of study is not found in school district testimonies, but in the amount of time it receives and when it is taught in the school day and week. Add to these considerations the relationship between what is tested and what is regarded as important and you have a recipe for defining what counts in school. I want to make it clear that in point- ing out the virtual absence of testing in the arts, I am not advocating that stu- dents be tested in the arts. I do, of course, advocate that teachers evaluate the student's work, their curriculum and their own teaching so that the pro- grams they provide can be strength- ened, but that is another matter. The point here is that as a result of a collection of decisions, the general mes- sage conveyed to students regarding the arts is that they are marginal to the school's central purposes. That is a message that needs to be changed. Bringing about that change will require both educational and political initia- tives. Educational initiatives enable those who shape curriculum decisions to secure a deeper understanding of what the arts teach, and political ones bring to bear on those same individuals a collective pressure to provide the young with opportunities to have meaningful access to the arts. In my comments to you I described ten lessons the arts teach. These lessons pertained to the kind of thinking the arts promote. Far from the ornamental functions usually assigned to them, the arts practice and develop modes of thought that are most complex and sub- tle. The ability to make choices about relationships in the absence of rule, attention to nuance, the ability to exploit the unexpected, learning how to deal effectively with tasks that have multiple solutions, finding words that say what words cannot say — these are some of the lessons I have described. If I were to summarize these contri- butions in three simple terms, I would say that the arts contribute to the growth of mind, meaning and experi- ence. They contribute to the growth of mind for all the reasons I described. They afford the young opportunities to learn how to think in particular ways, ways that may be closer to the tasks of the life they will lead than what they normally encounter in school. The arts contribute to the growth of meaning because they teach the young how to access meanings that elude the impress of the literal. The arts are appealed to at marriages, courtships, religious rites and funerals. We use them in our most tender moments to express what transcends ordinary lan- guage. We also use them to walk in someone else's shoes. They help us understand what theory cannot To summarize . . . explain. The arts con- the arts contribute to tribute to the ^ wth growth of expen- ° ence because they meaning and remind us of how it feels to be alive, «penence. to be moved by what others or we have made. The arts, for all of their instrumental value, are, in the end, about learning how to be touched. They are about the enrich- ment of life. Happily our nation is seeing a grow- ing interest in the arts and what they can do for the young. Happily you are here to help that interest grow and to help make our children its beneficiaries. As someone who has been working at this task for over three decades, I'm very glad to have you aboard. Ten »' *f V Elliot Eisner The arts teacHchildren to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike dfpch of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgrnjfht rather than rules that prevail. The arts teach childremhat problems can have more than one solution and that quesa'ojjjfcan have more than one answer. c -- - ,s The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that tHfete are many ways to see and interpret the world. -' The arts teach children that inJjbmplex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed/bw change with circumstance and oppor- tunity. Learning in the aftSTEAuires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unantitipafeopossibilities of the work as it unfolds. The arts make \|v|cl the fact that neither words in their literal form nor number exhaust what we can know. limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition. The arts teach students that small differerj|gs can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling. The arts' position in trap sfhoral curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believl is mpJrtant.