While I was thinking about where the drawing should go, I was also thinking about what the drawing should be. I was interested that it was going to be in the Honors College, where the curriculum is influenced by great books of Western thought that have fueled the so called "Great Conversation." (See the "new five foot shelf" Ruppersberg link.) As my work for the past decade has almost exclusively considered the relationship of word and image, I was anticipating that one or several of those books would be the basis for my commission. I first visited the Estess Family Alumni Library inside the Honors College on January 10th of this year. Here's a short list of books I wrote down in my sketch book:
Michaelangelo the Painter
Collected Work of John Stuart Mill
Selected writings of Lord Acton
Collected Works of James M. Buchanan
Selected Writings of Sir Edmund Coke
etc.
I hadn't previously read one word in any of those books, nor had I heard of some of the authors. And I wasn't aware, for instance, that Sir Edmund Coke was responsible for a sentimental quote I'd heard my entire life: "A man's home is his castle." My experience in the Estess library underscored my insufficient education, and maybe provided a reason as to why the best I could ever hope for in my conversations was "good." This wasn't feeling like where the source for my drawing was going to come from, but I wasn't ready to give up yet.
1 comment:
Randy—
The books in the Estess Library (and in any Great Books program) contain many volumes that are truly awesome. And inspirational. And astonishing. Indeed, great. Others (even the same ones) may be emperors without clothes, and the Academy itself the royalty that refuses to admit its bareness.
But the (so-called) Great Conversation is not an admonition to greatness. Rather, its curriculum says to decades of Honors College freshmen: these guys (sadly, they are mostly male) can be brought down to size without dismantling their power. In other words, the greatness _is_ the conversation, the removal of the books from the self to read them _and_ ask questions of them. As monologues, they are merely the aesthetic of five feet of gilded spines. Brought down, they spur discourse, interaction.
Your work asks this same kind of participation. You thrive on questioning, on conundrums.
Your first reaction to these Great Books is like a freshman's: defensive, deprecating. When we get to hear your real-time comments I hope to find you further along, like Honors students a few months into the Human Situation—a point where questions and conundrums are comfortable uncertainties, where Leibniz can be challenged, and Augustine can be seen both in stumble and epiphany.
I love that space at the Honors College and think your work will thrill many great conversations there.
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