Building Public Will For Arts And Culture

Inspired By A Fiction Of Your Creation

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In the closing plenary of the Arts Midwest/Western Arts Alliance conference, Arts Midwest CEO Torrie Allen spoke to Theaster Gates about a number of topics. What caught my attention was Gates’ fabrication of the Yamaguchi Institute.  You may have heard this story already. Gates claimed that his ceramics mentor was a Japanese immigrant, Shoji Yamaguchi, that moved to Mississippi in search of a fabled “black clay” with which to make his pottery. Yamguchi marries a black civil rights activist and begins teaching black people how to make pottery in the Japanese tradition..

The whole thing was a fiction created by Gates but bolstered by Gates hiring an actor to play Yamaguchi’s son during a showing of Yamaguchi/Gates work. Gates admitted the truth of things some years ago, but in his discussion with Allen a couple weeks ago, added some nuance.

Gates in fact had traveled to Japan and studied how the Japanese made their ceramics. He says people in Japan felt he was a hard worker, but was pretty bad at making pottery. Finally one of the masters notes Gates is trying so hard to make a Japanese tea bowl and failing, perhaps he should try making a Mississippi tea bowl. Gates said that made him recognize that “maybe there is something worth mining in my own history.”

Yamaguchi was Gates attempt to create a context that connects his cultural roots with that of the Japanese craft. He says that he created a Yamaguchi as “a way of…creating an imaginary and psychic value for the history of where my people are from.”  Gates said in the process of making up Yamguchi and the discipline he embodied, he decided to adhere to the Yamaguchi way and his pottery improved. “I actually became a better potter because Yamaguchi showed me the way.”

Gates says this type of myth making helps to create hope when it feels like so many forces are moving against you. He also said inventing Yamaguchi filled a vacuum of leadership in his life.

Gates also talks about how the Yamaguchi Institute hosted dinners where people from the community could have conversations and exchange ideas to create relationships across economic and racial lines. It sounds like there was a good chance it was a predecessor of the On The Table movement that originated in Chicago and spread across the nation to other communities.

This is a really fascinating story because essentially Gates created a fiction through which to focus his own self-discipline and provide himself with hope and guidance.

The Originality That Is Sought Is Not The True Originality

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h/t to Artsjournal.com (I believe) which linked to an article about creativity from the Chinese perspective, or at least perspective of the philosopher(s) known as Zhuangzi.

This is a view that resonates with the sentiment, much hated by some arts students, that you need to master the fundamentals before you can diverge from them.    The author of the article, Julianne Chung, cites one of the many parables/stories that comprise the works attributed to Zhuangzi, (you may know the famous “Am I a man dreaming I am a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I am a man.“), in which a wheelwright speaks about true mastery and understanding is earned through long, patience and experience and thus books only contain the “chaff and dregs” of true knowledge.

Chung’s discussion of this view leans toward the “99% perspiration, 1% inspiration” approach to creativity. While this may sound like a endorsement of learning by rote repetition, it is clear that observation and reflection are important components of this process.

Of course, being a Daoist philosopher, one of Zhuangzi’s underlying ideas is the true Way can not be actively sought and Chung reflects that in her commentary:

…de-emphasising originality might ironically result in greater creativity. This is because striving for originality can actually be counterproductive when it comes to achieving genuinely fresh results: if we focus on the task of achieving something original, we’ll explore only the range of possibilities deemed sufficiently likely to yield that result, leaving out a lot that could have contributed to achieving something original.

But imagine instead that we worked with the idea that creativity wasn’t about novelty. That doesn’t mean we’d have to give up the value of originality entirely, but rather see it as one of a range of possible outcomes. Casting a wider net in this way might hence make creativity (whatever it involves) easier to achieve.

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This alternative perspective on creativity might help us to see it as an everyday phenomenon in which we all participate – rather than an extraordinary talent or gift that only a few enjoy. And it might also allow us to make sense of the idea of living creatively: of an integrated life, lived spontaneously, in which all of life’s contrasting aspects can be arranged to form a rich and variegated whole.

The concept that an original product is one of many possible outcomes seems to be a more constructive approach than always striving for novelty and viewing anything that is not as lesser.

Long time readers will likely recognize that the suggestion embracing this perspective may help a broader range of people view creativity as something everyone has the capacity to participate in is very appealing to me.

Going To A Museum To Gather Information

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I saw an article about an interview with Kimberly Drew on Slate that I really liked. Drew had a book come out, This Is What I Know About Art .

What grabbed my attention was Drew defining a museum experience as information gathering in the same sense as entering a library.

Museums fall within the larger field of GLAM—art galleries, libraries, and museums—where you’re not supposed to go there knowing everything. That’s the myth of museums. You don’t have to know every single book when you go into a library. You go to a library to gather information, and we should be looking at museums in the same way. We go into museums or enter museum websites to garner information, and hopefully we leave knowing more than what we came in with. But somewhere along the line, it became like, “I don’t get it,” or, “If I don’t know this, this, or this, then I shouldn’t go.” That’s one of the greater barriers to access

Drew is pretty passionate about museums. In the conversation between her and the interviewer, there is a fair bit of discussion about all the expectations of what an experience is supposed to be that weigh down the experience. They say that not only can’t a museum account for all contexts influencing how people are interacting with art, sometimes the person who normally spends hours in a gallery is coming in to get out of the rain for a half hour or because they feel like getting out during their lunch hour.

This is obviously applicable to all disciplines and their respective audiences. Along those lines, Drew acknowledges sometimes timing is everything. She says despite there being hundreds of visual arts related blogs out there before her’s, when she started her Black Contemporary Art Tumblr page, it aligned with a need from people who were passionate and curious, but didn’t have the resources to learn and were alienated by the way art was presented in museums and galleries.

Based on this, Drew is an advocate for providing different paths which allow people to interact with your organization: website, blog, video content, etc., as an accompaniment for the physical experience you offer.

There is a recording of the full interview from which the article is excerpted if you want to absorb the whole conversation. (There is also a transcript, but it is auto-generated by software and attributes Drew’s words to 4-5 separate speakers which gets confusing.)

The Man Who Decided To Raise Artists Instead of Chickens

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It was with some sorrow that I learned this week that a great man who has literally been part of the grassroots effort to provide arts experiences to young people died last week. Albert Appel who, with his wife Clare, founded, or he might say floundered, into establishing an arts and music camp just turned 98 on July 5. A tribute to his life appears on the Appel Farm Arts and Music Campus website.

When I say he was literally part of a grassroots effort, it is because when he and his wife started giving music lessons to neighbor kids back around 1960, he was running a farm with 20,000 chickens, feed crops, and other animals. Gradually, the chickens began to be replaced by children. Again, literally. When I worked on the concert presenting side of the organization back in the early 2000s, two of the camp dorms were still refurbished chicken coops and were referred to as North & South Coop.

Albert, and his wife Clare, who had passed away before I started working there, are an admonishment against making assumptions about the artistic interests and capabilities of farmers. Albert trained to be a farmer, but he also played violin. He actually met Clare when friends told him they needed a violinist to fill out their string quartet.

The way Albert liked to tell it, he and Clare started the camp because kids would come over for music lessons and would never go home so he started charging their parents to let them hang around his house.

When I moved to South Jersey to take the job in winter 2000, I was told I could live in Albert’s house until I found a place of my own. I was given two room that used to be offices for the camp. As you moved through Albert’s house you could see that they had continued to add on to the house to accommodate camp activities. There were also some out buildings behind the house that got used. Finally, they moved a lot of the operations across the road–into the chicken coops, among other buildings. However, some of the original rooms continued to be used as living quarters for the camp counselors and staff during my tenure there.

The founding philosophy of the camp was that every kid has the capacity for creative expression. Come to think of it, working there may have serve to form my own views along those lines. A camper’s day was spent pursuing one major and two minors. The major was the area they identified as their core interest or area of experience and the minors were things they hadn’t really done, but wanted to explore. The subjects ranged from acting, dancing, music, ceramics, painting, photography, creative writing, video production.

Due to security concerns, folks like myself who didn’t work for the camp program weren’t generally allowed on the grounds past the administration building. However, I frequently helped distribute the mail and even without hearing them say it, it was clear that for a lot of those kids camp was a place they felt they could be themselves surrounded by people with similar interests versus who they had to be at home and at school.

But as I said, I wasn’t directly involved with the camp. My job was to run the operations for the concert series and music festival as well as to support the school outreach efforts. I count myself lucky to have lived in Albert’s house for a short time because even after I moved out, I would get invited to join him and his second wife, Peimin, when they were entertaining guests. Often it was groups like the Corigliano Quartet who were staying over in preparation for school residencies.

Albert would often pull out his violin to play or talk about his children’s music lessons on various instruments. Nearly all of Albert’s children play an instrument to some extent or another. His son Toby is a violist on the Julliard faculty. One story I recall involved inducements for him to practice piano. There are also a couple wild stories about Albert I heard from his kids.

Albert was definitely a character. Even though the livestock and poultry mostly departed the farm, all campers were required to work in the camp garden and the vegetables all made it to the kitchen for meals. Albert often gave the gardeners a hard time about how they were going about planting. A farmer can never really retire. He was just as passionate about creating an environment for people to cut loose with creative expression. At 80, he was pulling out his violin to play beside the campers. You would also hear the low drone of the instrument across the fields in the middle of the winter.

Obviously at 98, his death wasn’t unexpected but it is still saddening. Though at his 80th birthday party, he kept joking that if he had known he would live as long as he had, he would have taken better care of himself and he might have already made it to 90. Apparently someone was taking good care of him if he was so seriously pushing 100.

His legacy runs much deeper than thousands of kids attending arts camp over 60 years. As I mentioned, when I worked there the other nine months of the year were devoted to a concert series, school outreach programs and a pretty active conference calendar. Shortly after I left, Appel Farm started offering afternoon and evening arts classes to kids and adults and were the arts content provider for a local school district.

Now they have added a Families to College program that works with the whole family to provide an environment aligned with increasing the chances of success for college bound students. They are also involved with providing a charter school STEAM program. In a rural portion of southern NJ, programs like these can have big impacts.

I am sure there has been some positive impact on the economy of Elmer, NJ and Salem County that wouldn’t have existed if Appel Farm Arts and Music Center wasn’t there. But when we talk about the value of the arts, few would have the patience to wait 90 years, or smaller increment thereof, to see the result of giving 8 year old Albert music lessons. (Or his wife Clare for that matter, I am told she eclipsed him in passion for the camp’s mission.) And yet, there are thousands upon thousands of people who will attest to the immeasurable value of their experiences.