"Culture high AND low?" (or "the Whats and Whys of Visual Culture")

 (author's note: I'm going to add some images to this post soon)

Let's get this out in the open early (not just for the sake of the class that prompted the creation of this blog):

I'm not the sort of person who makes a hard distinction between "high art" and "low art," or even between "art" and "not art."

I think it's fine to look at, for example, H.W. Janson's 101-level definition of art as (paraphased) "work of human production which is to be appreciated aesthetically rather than for its utilitarian value."

By that definition, it's easy to see that a painting by Rembrandt is a work of art - what possible utilitarian function could it serve?  It would make a lousy wall insulation, and Duchamp was only being an iconoclast when he proposed using one as an ironing board. 

What about Greek pottery?  When we admire a vase at the Met and call it a work of art, we aren't interested in its original function as a vessel used to mix wine and water.  We look at the painted figures, at the nonessential aspects of the form.  We look at, and for, the art in the object.

I'm fine with that.  I just think that we ought to be willing to do that with a more expansive range of culture.  There are nonfunctional aesthetic/formal aspects to the Coca-Cola logo, to my loud shirts, to the graffiti on the freight trains that pass by my neighborhood.

Does this mean that that logo, those shirts, that graffiti are art?  Depends on who you ask.  I don't think so.  But it means that they have aspects which can be looked at as art, in the ways in which we look at art (formally, semiotically, etc).  The colors and patterns on the shirts don't make the fabric more durable, don't make the shirts warmer.  They're nonfunctional aesthetic aspects, and as such I think it's valid to give them the consideration that we give the figures on the Greek pottery.  That consideration should also be given to African pottery and dance costumes and such, but often isn't.  More on that in a bit.)

I've been interested in using the same eye to look at "high culture" and "low culture" for a long time by now.  This interest has seen me painting using found patterns, recording hip hop while doing graduate coursework in critical theory and modern art at Columbia, and more recently teaching pre-college Visual and Critical Studies art classes to students who knew more about web design and recent manga than they did about modern/contemporary art.  And yet I think that it was only this semester, in Rebecca Bourgault's class, that I learned that the mindset I've had for so long has a name:  Visual Culture.

Teaching art using visual culture allows for the teacher to use art forms familiar to students - comic books, advertising, graphic design, traditional arts, etc.  This allows not only for art to be immediately accessible to students, but also for the students' personal and cultural experiences to be much more directly acknowledged and integrated into the class lessons. 

Sure, it may mean that we teachers have to give some level of lip-service to Spongebob and other visual culture to which we don't particularly groove, but it's sure to make art a more vibrant, meaningful, accessible subject for more students.  It will also make the subject more relevant in a school with a diverse student body, especially one with students whose cultural heritage and home life might not be at all reflected in the version of "art history" that is based mainly on Western European tradition.  Those who wish to "rise above" the tide of popular culture and instead base their artwork on Rembrandt and Greek pottery (and Stravinsky and De Kooning) are certainly free to continue to do so, but those who see art as something that exists all around us, in different ways, might find a visual-culture-based art course to be much more satisfying.

The course in visual culture and classroom diversity is quite engaging, and I'm certain that it will flavor my educational mindset and technique as my career develops.  Again, it's not so much that I've discovered a new mode of thinking about art and art education as that I've finally found the name for the mode I've been using.

This will definitely help me more fully bake my own ideas.  Hopefully that will show up in the next few months' worth of observations, posted here in notes which won't be anywhere near as longwinded as this one.