Caves to Cathedrals

I have just returned from the annual meeting of the College Art Association, and on the plane trip there, I read an article in the Harvard Magazine on how “visual, audio, and interactive media are transforming the college classroom.” Sadly, I am not at all surprised that the article makes no reference to the leadership of those in attendance at the conference.

The skills of art history – namely, the analysis and interpretation of images – should place us at the vanguard of the new visual pedagogy.  But while scientists and historians are demonstrating a passion for presenting their materials visually, at CAA, when art historians presented their own work, they showed surprisingly minimal concern for the visual presentation of their objects and monuments.

The rooms at such conferences are generally deeper than they are wide, with most attendees at a fair distance from a small screen adjacent to the podium, yet speakers seldom made an effort to maximize the visibility of their images.  I saw too many slides with jarring white backgrounds or distracting cloudy blue backgrounds.  Text competed with image to the clear disadvantage of the object or monument represented.  And the temptation to overload slides with multiple images was not quashed by the necessary diminution of each individual image.  Even if a speaker sensibly limited a slide to one image, he or she would neglect to expand the image to fill the slide, leaving useless blank space, or would neglect to crop the photo so that a grey sky or some other empty space crowded out the work of art.   Speakers spoke of details that attendees had no chance of seeing, and their images became elevator music for the eyes.

So it is with sadness that I read the enthusiastic words of professors from a variety of other disciplines about the importance of training students to look.  In the article linked to above, professor of History, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues

“We have a very visually oriented group out there.  But they are not necessarily savvy at analyzing visual images.  They absorb it, they’re used to it, they expect it, but it sometimes fades into the background like wallpaper.  I’m trying to make them more aware of the things they constantly consume.  You have to teach people to look.“

In the next paragraph, I find echoes of my teaching philosophy:

“Indeed, if images and soundtracks are the future of pedagogy, then teaching the young to look must become a high priority. This is yet another area in which technology has outpaced the human capacity to cope with it. People believe—complacently—that they know how to read, but can they really see? Engaging with images in a sophisticated and critical manner is an uncommon skill, even among the younger generation that has grown up with them. Educational institutions have evolved an advanced verbal culture, but sounds and images occupy a far more primitive academic habitat. Librarians deploy powerful tools, for example, for cataloging books and words, but the intellectual technology for classifying images lags far behind. Professors of the future will need not only to expose their classes to pictures, but to teach students how to question them.”

How can there possibly be no mention of art history?  Sadly, I think that we have only ourselves to blame.  Art historians should provide models for the incorporation of visual sources into teaching.  We should be among the most sophisticated in our use of technologies that make our monuments and objects more visible.  We should lead in this task of educating students to prolong their looking and to articulate what they see.  And yet other fields pass us by and put us to shame.  We lose our chance to make art history relevant and essential to the future of liberal arts education, as others take up the task that should most naturally fall to us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 12.51 and is filed under Teaching Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.