Early Medieval Art

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.

I am back to teaching after a brief stint in the museum world, and as I will be teaching the survey of ancient and medieval art many times this upcoming year, most of my postings will likely be over at my other web site.  But I will check in here from time to time, as the spirit moves me.

In the meantime, I have discovered that a great source for photographs of church art, Sacred Destinations, now has a photostream on Flickr (only to imply that it is only more recent than when I last taught in the Spring of 2008).  I have found many photos for teaching on Sacred Destinations and always assumed that they were a travel agency, or something like that, but just by reading their “About Us”, I realize it is one individual and her husband.  Amazing.

Cross-posted at Caves to Cathedrals.

Did you know that you do not need PowerPoint to make presentations, and that, in fact, better options may exist? I have tried the MDID image viewer, but I needed somewhere to put the translations of inscriptions, so I did not consider it a useful option.

But valid options exist. Slide Rocket looks amazing, but is not yet available to the public. 280 Slides looks less amazing, but is currently available.

Both of these programs make slideshows much easier to share, as well as facilitate greater mobility (no memory stick to forget).

Please feel free to comment. Also, please be forgiving of my commentary. I am a bit shy and am trying not to feel too self-conscious. If I waited until it was perfect, I would never post this!

Cross-posted on Caves to Cathedrals.

Yesterday evening, I came across this post on 21st Century Teaching & Learning, a blog about “how to effectively integrate web 2.0 tools into instruction”. The blogger, Michelle Pacansky-Brock, teaches art history and, at least from my perspective, stands at the cutting edge of digital learning.

In this post, Dr. Pacansky-Brock shares a slideshow that she presented as part of a series on on-line teaching. I was most struck by slides 5 and 6 showing a traditional syllabus and a web-inspired syllabus. Although the more traditional among us may abhor such seeming frivolity or even pandering, looking at these two versions of a syllabus, I realized that the form of the traditional syllabus reflects the limitations of the technology of a different age. Why shouldn’t we take advantage of our technological capabilities in order to make syllabi, first, more visually appealing, and second, more interactive?

In this post, she also shares a VoiceThread from one of her classes (you may also discover other uses to which she has put VoiceThread). VoiceThread is not new to on-line educators, but it is new to me. VoiceThread amazes me, and I easily see its potential for the traditional classroom. The greatest struggle, I find, is to create autonomous learners. I ask students to spend time looking closely at works of art in order to prepare for class, but they seldom understand what this means. I also encourage them to form study groups to force them to articulate what they see; this they rarely do. The next time that I teach, I will use VoiceThread to guide the students preparation for class and to facilitate a conversation among the students about objects and monuments and thereby to train them to look at and talk about art. In turn, such preparation would permit greater depth and more meaningful discussion during class time.

Thanks to the Digital Research Tools Wiki, I have discovered two on-line tools for creating timelines. While Simile requires facility with HTML, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University offers a more accessible Timeline Builder.

I usually encourage students to make timelines, in order to manage the periods and works of art, but they seldom do. An on-line program would make this task much more enticing. To promote active learning, the students should really do the work, but I think I will make my own next time as well!

The blog, Talking Philosophy – The Philosophers’ Magazine Blog, has posted the responses of ten “leading thinkers” to the question, “Has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?”

I direct your attention, in particular, to the response of Jerry Fodor:

“I suppose so; though I don’t think that responding to such issues is plausibly a philosophical responsibility. Has Art History responded adequately to the post-9/11 world? Why should philosophy be different?”

Well, the question of the relevance of art history, in particular early medieval art history, rears again its ugly (?) head. But, in this instance, I think that art history has responded, perhaps not to climate change, but at least to 9/11. Islamic art flourishes as a field of study, and cross-cultural communication and exchange, a timely theme, forms a major topic of research in medieval art and beyond.

Personally, I have responded in my teaching philosophy. I think about the development of the skills that students may apply to our increasingly complex and global visual culture. On this front, please see my earlier posts on Looking Skills and Art History Skills.

To connect art to climate would constitute a bit of a stretch, but medieval history, at least, has intensified its study of climate and climate change in the early Middle Ages, so at least my other field has indeed responded. So, Mr. Fodor, Art History (nor Medieval Studies, if you should also have them in mind) should not typify the irrelevance of certain paths of academic inquiry!

(And yet, part of me, as you know, relishes the possibility of irrelevance!)

I have just discovered Slideshare, a site expressly for the purpose of sharing of slideshows. In the past, I just uploaded Pdf versions of my powerpoints to Blackboard. But students invariably complained about how long these same files took to download. Slideshare is amazing! You can restrict access to your slideshow, and viewers can watch it on Slideshare or download the file. You can even embed the slideshow in a blog!

If you are interested, I invite you to connect to my secret URL, where you can see the slides for my first class on the World of Gregory the Great.

According to a recent article in my undergraduate alumni magazine, the imperative to make courses relevant to the lives of students first arose in the late 1960s.  While the care of monuments provides a practical application for the study of early medieval art in Europe, the relatively few early medieval objects in North American museums would hardly justify it as a field of study in American universities, if relevance were a requirement.

The Early Middle Ages offers the point of origin for many modern-day realities- of modern European national identities, of a collective European identity, and of the Christian Church, to name but the most obvious - and the tracing of these traditions to their early medieval origin certainly constitutes a valid undertaking.  To search for reflections of ourselves, however, in this distant past seems to me a bit problematic.  Indeed, I question the need for each and every course to prove itself directly relevant to the lives of students. 

Of course, students may apply the skills acquired in an art history class, such as i have detailed in previous postings (see the category of “Teaching Early Medieval Art”), to others areas of their lives, but does that make the Early Middle Ages relevant? 

Instead, I see great value in course material that is not all about the student.  First, always seeking the relevance of the past to the present somehow denigrates the past, as if it only has meaning if it relates to us and our experience.  Furthermore, approaching the past through such a lens distorts our view of it and thereby does not do right by the past. 

In fact, the irrelevance of early medieval art (or the art of any other distant period) makes it especially valuable for the development of upper-level thinking skills.  In the study of early medieval art, students can develop their upper-level thinking skills with less interference from assumptions and biases. 

More importantly, early medieval art demands especially close looking and extended analysis, and returns that effort with the development of an aesthetic sensibility that challenges modern-day assumptions about beauty and about the power of images and the refinement of sight.

All moments of the past bear relevance, and the most obvious need not be the most valuable.

In my teaching, I privilege the close examination of material original to the period of study.  I advocate an openness to all sources, whether visual, textual, or material, and I cultivate in my students the intellectual tools - from the disciplines of art history, history and archaeology - that one needs to examine these primary sources.  The meaningful contextualization of works of art then results from the interrelating of visual, textual, and material evidence.