Keynote Speech Delivered at the Bridge Film Festival 2012 Upper School Student Committee Screening Event, April 5th, 2012
THE IMPORTANCE OF ART / ART EDUCATIONby Yuval I Ortiz-Quiroga
Visual Arts Department Chair
Brooklyn Friends School
I want to thank the Bridge Film Festival Screening Committee for inviting me to speak today on the importance of art and art education. This year’s screening proceeds will benefit the organization Art Start, which provides Performing and Visual Arts education for homeless and at-risk youth in the city. On that note, I want to start by saying that the two main points I make today about art education apply equally to Performing and Visual Arts, but given my field and experience, I will draw only form the Visual Arts.
The two main points I want to make are: 1) the arts, especially creating art, helps us develop the skill, I believe necessary within a democracy, to hold on to two or more contradictory ideas simultaneously and 2) by making art, we enter our ideas into the world;this gives potentially everyone a meaningful way to engage with the world.
New York City - Statue of Liberty - Liberty Enlightening the World Deutsch: New York City - Freiheitsstatue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)So about contradictions: I see the Statue of Liberty almost every day, often more than once in one day, when I am on the subway, the F line over the Culver Viaduct, between 4thAve/9th St. and Carroll St. As an immigrant, this symbol, this colossal sculpture that will turn 126 years old this coming October, brings out the sentimental in me. For those of you who know me, this is not an easy feat; I’m not particularly known for sentimentality. I came to the United States on a red-eye flight that landed at JFK on the morning of September 10, 1998. I had just turned 19 years old and knew not one person in this country. I had a student visa to attend an Ivy League university. My experience of migration in many ways was very different from those who arrived by ship and actually saw the Statue of Liberty on their way to Ellis Island. And yet daily, for a few seconds when I see this sculpture in the distance, I think about the power of art to transport us, to elucidate meaning, to become a stand-in for places, people, and ideas that shape our reality every day.
Quite often, because of my intellectual disposition and educational background, I also think about the opposite idea. In this particular case, I think about the history of immigration and immigration policy in the United States. For the many thousands of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island every year, there were many who simply bypassed the system altogether because of their wealth or status. More strikingly though, many thousands who did go through Ellis Island were sequestered, detained, and ultimately prevented from becoming a part of this society. They were kept in a facility on the island under brutal conditions; indeed many died there. Yet, Liberty Enlightening the World, its official name, continues to symbolize the highest ideals of democracy and pluralism. How do we make sense of these contradictory realities? How do I make sense of these contradictory thoughts and ideas?
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| New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC (The Ungovernables) |
Let me turn now to a recent exhibition here in New York. The New Museum of Contemporary Art organizes a Triennial ‘Generational’ exhibition. That is, curators assemble what they believe is a snapshot of the state of the art world with an eye towards artists who are in their late 20s and early 30s. Currently, the second issue of this exhibition, titled ‘The Ungovernables," is on view. The title refers, literally, to the colonial idea of native peoples as ungovernable. Ironically, it refers to the notion of this generation of artists as both rebelling against the monetization and corporatizing of every day life as well as questioning the very idea of governance. Within this exhibition, there is a work of art by the Vietnamese-born artist Danh Vo that addresses these contradictions I just spoke of. Danh Vo has recreated the very thin copper exterior of the Statue of Liberty, cast by hand, and presents it in pieces. It is titled “We The People.” Here are a few images of the work as it was installed at the Kunsthalle in Kassel Germany. And here’s a view of the piece at the New Museum. This work can be read as both destructive and creative gestures. It embodies and problematizes, all at once, the ideals of American democracy. Holland Cotter, in a review in the New York Times, asks: “Will the American people ever be a ‘we’ instead of an ‘us and them’?” This question hints at the possibility of healing and reconciliation at a fundamental, not just political, level.
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| Memorials by Matt Otto |
So I turn to an artist I like greatly who has used visual art precisely for this purpose, Maya Lin. She was a senior at Yale, majoring in Architecture and taking a class on Funerary Architecture, when she entered a design for a competition for the National Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in D.C. She won the commission and her design was eventually built, but in the intervening years, between the announcement of her selection as the designer and the completion of the memorial, she was dragged through a national culture war of sorts. There were protests and congressional hearings. Eventually her design was altered, though the heart of it, shown here, remained intact. Ultimately the memorial has been lauded as one of the finest examples of understated and powerful healing through visual art. It is simple, a descent onto lower ground, and granite walls that list the 52,000 American fatalities listed by date; its surface is reflective; visitors, often relatives of those who died, literally see themselves as part of the fabric of the conflict and the lost lives. And yet, the United States has been involved in military conflict, sometimes reactively, sometimes proactively (or preemptively) pretty much non-stop since the Vietnam War. We do not know how this memorial, not unlike the Statue of Liberty, will be interpreted by generations to come; much depends on how world history unfolds. Holland Cotter, whom I quoted earlier, goes on to connect the work of Danh Vo, a Vietnamese too young to remember the War, but definitely shaped by its aftermath, with those of others in the "Ungovernables" show by stating: “Uncertainty is an existential searchlight that Mr. Vo, and many of his peers, hold high on a hunt for new ideas and procedures.” This "hunt for new ideas and procedures" is indeed the second point I want to expand upon with regards to the importance of art and art education.
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| "JR" by What What |
In order to do that, I will introduce you to JR. He was a ‘street kid’ in Paris before gaining prominence. He was a graffiti artist, climbing buildings and structures all over Paris to write or tag. Then he discovered photography and something changed. He started by engaging the people around him and then eventually people all over the world. What he is most known for is taking close-up black and white digital photographs of ordinary people and printing them in a massive scale. He then pastes them onto the sides and roofs of buildings, on walls, steps, and structures. People in those locations literally see themselves reflected in their communities. These acts and the resulting visual experiences, both for the viewers and the artist, are among the most powerful I’ve seen or heard of. They’re powerful because they use simple materials, paper, ink, and glue (not unlike the copper for the ‘We the People’ piece, or the granite below ground for the Memorial.) They’re powerful because they use procedures that are novel, that allow us to hold two contradictory but equally valid ideas at once. They use processes that subvert advertising and propaganda, or that subvert ideas of democracy, or that subvert ideas of what war memorials ought to look like. And these simple materials, novel procedures and processes, give voice to people who are often not heard of in the mainstream, artists and non-artists alike. This, for me, is the value of an organization like Art Start and the power of art and art education.
