(dis) continuities Drawing Project
This is a drawing animation project, inspired by the philosopher Maxine Greene.
This work was inspired by the philosophy of Maxine Greene, who famously said, "I am what I am not yet.".
As I sat down to work on the first drawing of this series, early on a Saturday morning, I thought about what Maxine Greene had said a few nights before, during a lecture at Teacher’s College, about seeing things large. The more you pay attention, the more small things matter, they gain in significance. In describing what it means to see things large, Greene writes, “To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead.” (Greene, 1995, p.10) I became absorbed in the intricate interwoven structure of the plant in front of me, which grew steadily more complex and mysterious, the harder I tried to understand it.
This experience was not new, though I hadn’t had it in a while. It was how I understand what Greene describes as a state of heightened consciousness, attributing this concept to Alfred Schutz, “what he (like Thoreau before him and Camus) chose to call wide-awakeness” (Greene:1994, p 436) The resonance Greene’s “wide-awakeness” has for me personally sends me back to my own adolescence, sitting on the banks of Walden Pond, in Concord Massachusetts, next to my bicycle, reading these words; “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” (Thoreau:1910, p 440)
After making almost twenty drawings of plants, I needed to introduce a new element in order to create a dialectic tension in the evolving work. As Greene writes, “There is, after all, a dialectical relation marking every human situation… This relation exists between different, apparently opposite poles; but presupposes a mediation between them.” This mediation is “something that occurs between nature and culture, work and action, technologies and human minds.” (Greene: 1988, p. 8) A man-made element, in contrast with the plant forms, seemed right, and I eventually settled upon a jumble of power cords and computer cables that created curious visual rhymes in juxtaposition with the grasses and flowers I had been drawing.
The individual drawing, plant, knot or cord is less important than the patterns and continuities that emerge as the drawings are laid out in various arrays. In observing any particular array of drawings (one of many possible series of choices), the eye and mind connects lines and spaces from one square to those in the others, forming new, unplanned visual pathways. The continuity created in the viewer’s mind between a blade of grass and an I Pod cable is both random and intentional, designed to de-stabilize the work, to confound expectation of subject matter as a viewer moves from one square to the next. These imagined connections are the true subject of this piece, the way our minds create and hold onto threads of meaning that exist only in the individual imagination.
References
Baldachino, J. (2009). Education Beyond Education: the Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang.
Greene, M. (1988). The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (1994). “Epistemology and Educational Research: The Influence of Recent Approaches to Knowledge.” Review of Research in Education. Vol. 20. pp. 423-464.
Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, The Arts and Social Change. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.
Thoreau, H. (1910). Walden. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, Publishers.
As I sat down to work on the first drawing of this series, early on a Saturday morning, I thought about what Maxine Greene had said a few nights before, during a lecture at Teacher’s College, about seeing things large. The more you pay attention, the more small things matter, they gain in significance. In describing what it means to see things large, Greene writes, “To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead.” (Greene, 1995, p.10) I became absorbed in the intricate interwoven structure of the plant in front of me, which grew steadily more complex and mysterious, the harder I tried to understand it.
This experience was not new, though I hadn’t had it in a while. It was how I understand what Greene describes as a state of heightened consciousness, attributing this concept to Alfred Schutz, “what he (like Thoreau before him and Camus) chose to call wide-awakeness” (Greene:1994, p 436) The resonance Greene’s “wide-awakeness” has for me personally sends me back to my own adolescence, sitting on the banks of Walden Pond, in Concord Massachusetts, next to my bicycle, reading these words; “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” (Thoreau:1910, p 440)
After making almost twenty drawings of plants, I needed to introduce a new element in order to create a dialectic tension in the evolving work. As Greene writes, “There is, after all, a dialectical relation marking every human situation… This relation exists between different, apparently opposite poles; but presupposes a mediation between them.” This mediation is “something that occurs between nature and culture, work and action, technologies and human minds.” (Greene: 1988, p. 8) A man-made element, in contrast with the plant forms, seemed right, and I eventually settled upon a jumble of power cords and computer cables that created curious visual rhymes in juxtaposition with the grasses and flowers I had been drawing.
The individual drawing, plant, knot or cord is less important than the patterns and continuities that emerge as the drawings are laid out in various arrays. In observing any particular array of drawings (one of many possible series of choices), the eye and mind connects lines and spaces from one square to those in the others, forming new, unplanned visual pathways. The continuity created in the viewer’s mind between a blade of grass and an I Pod cable is both random and intentional, designed to de-stabilize the work, to confound expectation of subject matter as a viewer moves from one square to the next. These imagined connections are the true subject of this piece, the way our minds create and hold onto threads of meaning that exist only in the individual imagination.
References
Baldachino, J. (2009). Education Beyond Education: the Self and the Imaginary in Maxine Greene’s Philosophy. New York: Peter Lang.
Greene, M. (1988). The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Greene, M. (1994). “Epistemology and Educational Research: The Influence of Recent Approaches to Knowledge.” Review of Research in Education. Vol. 20. pp. 423-464.
Greene, M. (2000). Releasing the Imagination. Essays on Education, The Arts and Social Change. San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass.
Thoreau, H. (1910). Walden. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, Publishers.