I studied art in art school a long time ago, and had the one great professor there. (That’s as many as anyone deserves to get.) Larry Bakke, was the man’s name, and he had a rumpled suit, a dark scraggly beard, and gravelly voice, which he attributed to shouting at the students who insisted at sitting at the back of the auditorium for no goddamn reason at all.
He had one rule. Do not read the Daily Orange in his class, the student newspaper. He didn’t like the rustling sound it made when people turned the pages. He wondered how people could read a paper he could finish in three minutes for a full hour, too, but it was the rustling that drove him crazy.
One class later, he barked at someone hidden behind the DOs unfolded pages, “You, in the second row, leave now! My TA awaits you outside with your drop slip!”
God I loved this guy. My very own art-school Paper Chase inspired bastard.
He was about the idea of cultural literacy, the ways in which high culture infected popular culture and the ways in which culture was the lens through which we saw the world, the way art became reality.
He was into Andy Warhol and Marshall Macluhan. He introduced me to Joseph Campbell, the heroes journey, Carl Jung’s archetypes and the shadow.
Bakke states his thesis during his first lecture of his trilogy of interlocking courses, Art History–mandatory for all art-school students, Aesthetics and Advanced Aesthetics, optional. Bakke told us that while art in the nineteenth century was about nature, and retinal depictions of the human and natural world, art in the twentieth century was about art.
Full stop. Art was about art, had been since the turn of the century more or less, and if you didn’t get that, you were simple. Bakke would teach us the language of art, so we could do more than grunt about whether we liked any a given piece or not.
He had a complex lecture whose punchline was the the Star Trek episode Who Mourns for Adonais. This little bit from wikipedia perfect illustrates what Bakke is talking about.
The title is a quotation from the poem Adonais by Percy Shelley lamenting the death of John Keats, which is loosely based upon A Lament for Adonis by the Greek poet Bion. A part of the episode is shown in a scene in X-Men: Apocalypse.
So we see this theme, echoing down the centuries from ancient Greece, in a poem and another poem centuries later and then in Star Trek and then that episode turning up as a bit of window dressing in a big budget Hollywood film decades later.
Bakke’s thesis was that art was used by the powerful as a kind of weapon, to subliminally shape and control thought, and if you were ignorant of this, of the referents, of the weight of these traditions and this history of this language we all know, if only subconsciously, you were dangerously illiterate.
So you could be manipulated by art. Or you could understand it, know it, place it in context, appreciate the echoes. Get the bigger picture.
Art was important. He would show us, later on, clips from nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, and show us, again, how its imagery would be re-used at the end of Star Wars.
And now, as a writer and, uh, artist I guess, I find myself locked in a conversation with Science Fiction itself. The genre in which I have read one thousand or so books.
I am peering inward at the world SF created inside me. It’s unexamined assumptions. The genre’s lies and omissions and cultural blinders. The genre’s promise and positivism and relationship to progress and our technological future. Alongside the unfolding of history, the world SF helped make.
I’m currently beset by a supply side pulp hero spacemen falling in with progressive anthropologically sophisticated gender fluid utopian. Both stuck in the here and now wondering who the hell they are, where they came from, and what in the name of fuck all they are to do with the rest of their lives… knowing now what they learn from each other.
I don’t know if I’m shipping fan fic or doing the Alan Moore thing of reimagining fictive universes so deeply that I am making art about art. ‘
Or really if there is any difference between the two.
God I hope this one makes it through the meat grinder. Wish me luck.
