Integral Education: The CIIS Blog

Art at Play

By CINDY SHEARER, faculty member and program chair of the MFA in Writing and Consciousness and the MFA in Creative Inquiry, Interdisciplinary Arts

Many of the artists I’ve foreground in CIA 7091, MFA Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop, remind us of the importance of play in creative work—as an intention as well as something that we can attend to in art-making.

Intention, according to director Anne Bogart, asks us to consider what we are “tempting” in our work. Attending, Bogart says, allows us to consider how we want to “cultivate” receptiveness in others. Play bridges the two—it is both an intention (a way of engaging the work) and attention (a way of calling others to it). I’d like to offer four artists’ perspectives on play—and then I hope you’ll “play” with them and see where they lead you in your own work.

In the essay “Building a House,”  poet Mary Oliver tells us that “…stepping away from actions where one knows one’s measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness.” She shares that in the process of dealing with the unknown, such as building a house, she finds herself “becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from that impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery.”

Anne Bogart in "A Director Prepares: Seven Essays On Art and Theater" writes: “Every creative act involves a leap into the void.” This leap is a kind of play that asks us to engage embarrassment and also our assumptions. Bogart writes that embarrassment is “an obstruction we encounter that helps us to clarify our mission.” Bogart’s engagement of embarrassment, like Oliver’s stepping out of one’s “measure” involves reaching just beyond what we’ve already mastered—into something new. As we do this, assumptions also arise—“The enemy of art is assumption,” Bogart says—and she encourages us to question them. If we do, she tell us “you will find yourself instantly, childlike, face to face with new sensations,” inspired into play.

The Maira Kalman exhibit—"Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World)" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco—offered a living example of art at play. The exhibit included 30 years of Kalman’s work on paper as well as photography, embroidery, textiles, and an installation. Kalman refers to her work as journalism but the exhibit’s website tells us she “uses writing and drawing to render an ongoing account of the world as she sees it. Hers is a daily discipline of creativity based on photography, travel, research, walking, talking, and open observation. A serious love of distraction pervades.”

It is this serious relationship with detail and distraction that allows Kalman to play. The intention and attention to play shapes her work (text and image) and what she says (a dual relationship with the creative moment and to the larger context of her experience and contemporary life). See also this work featured in The New York Times.

Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic memoir "Persepolis," is also playful in the ways that she constructs her work. She says that she makes “frames” first. She starts with the form and then fills in. “I have one page, and I decide how many frames I want to put on it, six or eight or nine [she sketches a pattern of empty frames on scrap paper], and what I want to say in each frame. Then I sketch what I want [she draws a stick figure], a person here or a scene. After that, I take a pencil and draw them…”

Also, Satrapi’s use of an adolescent narrator allows a playful “frame” (stance or a perspective). Also, her “graphic” approach allows her to establish expectation for a comic book feel. See also this interview on the Powell's Books website.

When building her house, Mary Oliver said she “was joyous all day long.”  That’s why artists across the disciplines rely on play. Leap or step away. Engage or question, discipline or distract yourself. Whichever or whatever you frame or shape—play is a material, and you can use it often and well in your creative work.

Going Graphic: The Comics and Tragics of Mere Literary Mortals

By CAROLYN COOKE, associate professor in the Department of Writing, Consciousness, and Creative Inquiry. Her novel, "Daughters of the Revolution," is forthcoming next summer from Knopf. 

A few years ago I drew a couple of spontaneous, semi-tragic comics. One described events on the day my father died, and the other an afternoon in 1998 when my 98-year-old grandmother demanded that we visit the pet cemetery; she no longer wished to be buried on top of her husband in the family plot.

I’d worked over this material before--writing is for me a form of chewing--but it felt both too charged and too ridiculous. The visual aspects of both stories overwhelmed my desire to describe them in words. And so, with my poor spatial sense and stick figure skills, I drew them. The form--the structure of the four boxes--opened three-dimensionally; my pen moved in a new way, described a wheelchair pushed by my then-three-year old daughter up a vertiginous hill into the pet cemetery. Choosing a few visual elements and severely limiting the narrative opened both stories up. Four panels, and suddenly, the stories made sense.

A few of the most intensely imagined novels I’ve read over the past decade (or two) have been, well, graphic: Art Spiegelman’s "Maus: A Survivor’s Tale" (The Holocaust) and "In the Shadow of No Towers" (9/11); Marjane Satrapi’s "Persepolis" (Iranian Revolution of 1979); Alison Bechdel’s "Fun Home" (a young lesbian comes out more or less simultaneously with her father). Last Saturday night, Gene Luen Yang came to CIIS to talk about his trajectory from comics geek to author of "American Born Chinese," the first graphic novel to be nominated for the National Book Award.

The quality that allows comics to handle serious, even tragic subjects, Yang says, is “intimacy.” Comics remind me inexorably of the seductive spinning drugstore racks of my youth, filled with cheap newsprint stories whose cachet consisted almost entirely of my economic power to acquire and devour them. (One working definition of “intimacy” must certainly be early experience of greedy possession.)

But the comic is also--by the very limits of the frame--a withholding medium. Roland Barthes described engagement by the reader brought about by the author’s refusal to reveal the whole story as “writerly” fiction. The reader “reads” into the text--“enters” it in an erotic and (if you are lucky enough to have this sort of imagination) a literal sense. Spiegelman’s Jewish mice, or the simply rendered, repetitive masses of veiled women in Satrapi’s "Persepolis," or the father in "Fun Home," the funeral director with a fever for restoration, are all wittily, charmingly rendered--and serious as death. The device of the frame is also an invitation to the gaze.

I thought again of these frames last night, while watching the Iranian Director Abbas Kiarostami’s brilliantly intimate film, “10.” The film consists of 10 scenes that take place entirely within a car, as a young-ish Iranian woman, a photographer, divorced, loosely veiled, drives around Tehran. Everything we know about the woman, the city and the social, religious and political culture she inhabits comes from her seemingly casual conversation within the “frame” of the car, as the woman talks with her son, her sister, and even picks up strangers, including an old woman, a young, spurned would-be bride, and a prostitute.

The narrative never enters the mind of the woman; there’s no internal monologue, no voice-over. Yet frame is, if not quite a “voice,” a definite point of view. The constraints of the film echo the cultural and gender constraints upon the woman. We see her up close, all revealing surface--perhaps more intimately than she can see herself. The constraint of the frame (and possibly even the constraint of making such a revealing film in an authoritarian theocratic country like Iran) becomes part of the power of the story. This is not a psychologically nuanced story “about” a divorced female photographer living in Iran; it is, arguably, a more difficult thing--a story about the relentless surface of the world.

In conversation with poet Brynn Saito, Gene Yang described how as a kid he was drawn to the “two-in-one” clash-of-titans adventures like “Thing” and “Rom.” He persevered in solitary authorship, becoming weirder and more singular, as writers often do. In the world of comics, however, “self-publishing” and mini-comics sold by hand at conventions are not signs of loserness, but of “awesomeness,” he said--they show that you can manage and navigate the real world as well as fantasy.

The Revenge of the Geeks has been lavishly rendered by David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s recent film, “The Social Network” (book by Ben Mezrich), which chronicles and snarkily champions the asbergersy genius of the Mark Zuckerbergs over the old-money noblesse-obligey veneer of the WASP ancien régime. Meanwhile, in another realm of geekdom, it was inspiring to hear two American-born artist-writers named Brynn and Gene discussing their respective Chinese and Korean-Japanese families’ career expectations (“any specialty of doctor is okay”) and ways in which comics, graphic novels and even traditional poetic forms can eloquently render complex experiences of class, ethnicity, gender, alienation, tragedy and yes, even comedy – to capture the heroic quotidian, and the primal struggles of mortals. 

Integral Teaching Moment: Show and Tell in the 17th Grade

By MATTHEW C. BRONSON, associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and the chair of the CIIS Integral Education Committee

We’ve talked for many years in our integral education meetings about how we as faculty can deepen learning and engage the multiple ways of knowing that are often left out of the typical “chalk and talk” classroom experience. In this regard I have rediscovered a classic technique, surely familiar to everyone from their elementary school days--show and tell.

My first implementation of show and tell was in a weekend intensive workshop, co-conducted with Shoshana Simons of the Expressive Arts Therapy program, on the theme of language and sexuality (a burgeoning and lively realm of inquiry currently). On Friday evening, after orienting the students to the purposes of the course and starting them on their individual inquiries, we asked them to look around their homes and personal spaces for objects that touched on some aspect of their sexual and romantic lives. Their assignment was to reflect on their own sexual identity socialization in light of the class material, and to bring these objects to class on Saturday, prepared to share with their classmates. We told them we would assemble their objects in an altar.

That same night, I started the altar by sharing three artifacts of my own. I began with a small lavender plastic figurine of Tinky Winky, the infamous Teletubbie with the triangle antenna on his head who was “outed” as gay by Christian Fundamentalists. Tinky Winky was a gift from a friend and immediately gained a place of honor on my personal altar at home.

I told the class that, for me, he represented the power of queerness to bring the dominant into an obviously irrational frenzy simply by the tiniest hint of refusing to conform to heteronomativity. I loved the irony that a television program for 2-year-olds was now being seriously presented as a means of recruiting homosexuals. This tiny little figure ignited a firestorm among Evangelicals, and yet, Tinky Winky continued to show up on the TV each week to “work” in his bucolic green meadow under a smiling sun unscathed by the controversy swirling around him.

I explained that Tinky was a model for me as a gay man in his perseverance and power, and even if he were only questioning--understandable given his missing genitalia--I would count him as a queer little brother and fellow sacred clown. 

You might imagine what I shared about a picture of my mother and father as two beautiful young people in love (my mother a virgin), embracing just after taking their vows (and years before their subsequent divorce when I was only two). A picture of me and a former Brazilian lover dressed as Carmen Miranda was fodder for reflection on gender as performance. I enjoyed showing up as a teacher and as a whole person with a history, and felt that this in and of itself was a kind of intervention in the business-as-usual of college teaching.

On Saturday morning we began with 12 students and two instructors in a small windowless room with the chairs arranged in a circle. One young woman brought a condom and shared what it had cost her to be prepared for safe sex. Many men she dated had been doubly surprised when she had whipped out a Trojan Magnum condom at the critical moment—first that she was apparently ready for sex, and second owing to the extra-large size of the prophylactic in question. This was enough to end the encounter in some instances. She spoke of the contradictions inherent in being socialized as a sexually active woman who was not supposed to want sex.

A young gay man brought a gold wedding band and explained how he had at one point intended to give it to his partner as part of a commitment ceremony. Then, gay weddings were legal in California for a while and there was the possibility of the band becoming a real wedding ring. Before the couple could consecrate the marriage, the law changed; he then broke up with his partner.

The man asked us to look at the ring: “It’s a wedding ring, it’s not a wedding ring, it’s a wedding ring. This is the story of my life as a gay man.” 

A woman in her 30s who had only recently committed to a relationship with a woman brought photos showing various aspects of her butch and femme personas. She shared her struggle as someone who was learning how to talk and behave like a “good lesbian.”

Each story and object shared had a tremendous impact on the group, and the effect of the ensemble was truly remarkable. We arranged the objects in a corner of the room and left them there for the duration of the workshop. We would dip into them from time to time for a new story, providing a thread of coherence throughout our time together. I found that the possibility of going deep was fully present for us as a group after the initial round of sharing. There were many additional benefits: people introduced themselves and bonded without the usual delay; there were many ready examples to draw from as we explicated the theoretical approaches in the class; the material presence of the objects reminded us of what we had been talking about and energetically charged the room with their storied presence.

I had a similar experience conducting the show and tell exercise with colleagues in CIIS’ Teaching and Learning Group. I asked them to bring objects that represented their personal relationship with teaching. We each presented our object, then observed the assembled altar, wrote about what we saw and heard, and debriefed as to what we had learned about teaching and learning. 

We witnessed: a family picture book with pages ripped out, a farmer doll, a pair of eyeglasses, a stone with the word “nothing” engraved in it--nothing is written in stone. My colleagues reported that it was particularly helpful to have been looking for the objects in the two weeks prior to the meeting. It caused them to think deeply about their work and sort through what was really important to them as teachers and learners.  They remarked afterwards on the moving quality of the stories and the glimpses into each other’s intimate worlds that would not otherwise have been afforded.

This activity could be adapted to a wide variety of audiences and purposes as a way of getting beyond superficial classroom routines. It has the potential to establish a more intimate rapport among members of any learning community and a more personal and critical engagement with virtually any academic content. To be fair, this is nothing other than show and tell in the 17th grade. 

Some of the best teaching still seems to come from the elementary level, in my experience. Our colleagues in kindergarten can remind those of us in higher education how to enroll the storied things of daily life as our co-teachers. 

A Remarkable Way to Know Yourself: How Eudora Welty Discovered Story

By RANDALL BABTKIS, poet, writer, and MFA faculty member

As part of our search for “the running line between inquiry and creativity,” our class this semester in Creative Inquiry Through Interdisciplinary Arts has been reading Eudora Welty's classic, "One Writer's Beginnings."

If her autobiography, "One Writer's Beginnings," will prove anything--to the dancer, the painter, the singer, the map-maker, the dramatist, the poet--it is that memory alone informs all living work and keeps it real. Which may, for people with a past, be almost a preconscious relief. Reading Eudora Welty's autobiography is a way of reminding us to remember the golden light that settles on us, a visually distinct mark.

“All experience is an enrichment, rather than an impoverishment,” Welty writes. Do you agree?

We might come to this selfsameness in art.

I used to think of art as living in a hip underground. In my story, a toddler with faulty sleeping habits and a pigeon-toed gait, faces correction by the use of a night splint to hold his feet in an over-corrected position. A boy who sticks his neck through bars surrounding an open crater of almost solid pitch at the local tar pit must corkscrew his own head back out. According to a manual of its time, consulted by my mother, resolution does not occur spontaneously in these children.

Where should I file him? In my story, he is the hero.

My mother did what doctors she consulted told her to do, she painted my thumb with the taste of winter poison to stop me from sucking it and enrolled me in summer school for kids who were bored at school. It was all of one piece: the season of childhood.

In my youth, children were more like personal property: Has that changed? My mother worked her magic and helped put food on our table and developed her way of seeing the world. She was loving, which was lucky because she never stopped pushing. An impoverished Merry Widow with tight blonde curls. Now I see that deeply, from my father's coign of vantage. The attraction to her high soprano.

As he once appeared, I am a grown man with a past of my own, which spirals out around me.

He might say that we remain situated at our present and narcissistic enough to revisit our past. Filled with a sense of wonder and truth, we place ourselves impulsively in the story of where we have been--our works of art become artifact.

Really! it is always the present moment in this world!

Yet Welty writes: "It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. Each of us is moving, changing, with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Our living experience at those meeting points is one of the charged dramatic fields of fiction."

My father is in there making the sound of a shuffling deck of cards. His imagination ran in nearly impossible directions, like the way cards flew out from between his fingers in mid-air. I think of it as another type of “spiralage,” a word Kris Brandenburger and Anne Bluethenthal sometimes use to clarify our sense of what “lineage” must look like. Even now, dead, my father's hands appear to me synaptic. And they have gone looking for other skin, other essence, other structure, other economy.

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them," Welty observes.

Is it only a re-examination of "our own poor scratched-over pages?" No, each moment has a tactile perception that is familiar, but also delicious and new. The way I walk out of here will still be me, tentative and duck-toed. But it will require ingenuity. With just a few coins I carry in my back pocket, the daily re-encounter with my mother and father is a kind of safeguard and showcase, a beautiful coin box. Quotable, memorable, experience is in it. But it is also something I shake and listen to again and again. It is somewhere in there--the inflection with which I draw another breath--it meanders until it distills and is nearly understood.