To lend and transform

Maxine Greene often writes of the aesthetic encounter as "lending a work your life." What does it mean to lend your life to a work of art, or for that matter, an experience?

It speaks of  a temporary status as a loan implies a repayment or a giving back at some point. It may speak to the loaner’s giving over and doing without during the period of the loan. Yet at the same time, ownership is never questioned, is never transferred.

Can the act of loaning change the object that was loaned out? In some cases, the loan results in an expansion or increase in the object as when interest is paid. Greene seems to apply a sense of transformation--really, creativity--through the act when she writes:

In some fashion, as one attends, one lends the work one's life. Or one brings it into the world through a sometimes mysterious interpretive act in a space between oneself and the stage or the wall or the text (2001, p. 128).

So perhaps in lending a work of art your life, you are creating through the interpretive act another entity that isn't solely owned or connected to you and yourself or to the artist. It is an added dimension to the work of art and I would think, the loaned life of the attender. It is earnings on the loan, but it's a yield that is specific to the loaner and the work of art.

Just trying to work this through...

Disappointment as validity

I have recently submitted a draft of my dissertation chapter devoted to "data collection and analysis." This is the chapter where my research question is answered--what does Maxine Greene mean when she uses lived life in her writing? And the answer was not what I had hoped for at the start of this process.

It had been my hunch--maybe even my desire--at the start of this journey that lived life in Maxine Greene's writing would designate the time and place in which the individual is fully conscious in the existential sense of coming to be as a result of reflective practice. I had thought and wanted lived life to be the already reflected life that poised the individual to consider alternative realities. But my analysis kept on questioning at what point consciousness/the consideration of alternative realities emerges within lived life. The analysis was showing me that consciousness was occurring after lived life had been established. In the end, lived life was somewhat analogous to the pre-reflective state of Husserl's life-world and Merleau-Ponty's primordial silence. Somewhat analogous.

My interpretive work revealed to me that though lived life occupies the realm of the pre-reflective state, it is distinct from the other sensibilities that name the state life-world or primordial silence. In the end, for me, lived life in Greene's writing is fully connected to the idea of personhood and the essence of being as tied to action. The lived life is distinct to Greene's philosophy.

I stumbled though with trying to comprehend just what the pre-reflective state is in an existential consciousness. I eventually was able to conceptualize physically through a gesture/physical state that is linked to the moment prior to going on stage, to singing a song, to applying paint to a canvas. For me, it is the body lifted out of its gravitational pull into the hips (for women). In this place, the body can go anywhere: forward, backward, upward or downward. It's the moment before the choice of movement or direction has been decided or communicated to the brain.

It was interesting in talking about this process and discovery this week with a colleague at work. When I described to her my difficulty in comprehending the pre-reflective, she stated easily and eagerly "well, that's what most of life is and how we operate--in the pre-reflective." It was then that I realized that I have been living in a hyper-activated state for a few years now. The dissertation has me thinking and reflecting at every moment of repose (my morning showers are especially reflective). My new job has me analyzing and assessing the best course of action with everything I do. Even house chores have me thinking about the most time-efficient way of feeding the cat while thawing the turkey sausages and gathering the recycling for pick up the next morning.

I titled this post "Disappointment as validity." The idea of triangulation with hermeneutical work can be challenging. The researcher has to be cautious in regards to confirmation bias--not allowing the interpretation to play out as I would want it to. And so now that lived life isn't what I had thought and really, wanted it to be, I feel that I have brought a valid viewpoint to bear on my answer. And so my disappointment is my validity.

The action of art: Rosenberg & Greene

I have been reading Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" (1952). This essay manifests a moment that I take for granted. It's a moment distinguished by a uniquely American contemporary foray into modernism. I have found a couple of gems from this essay that speak to me:

"What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
Here Rosenberg might be providing an entry into the idea of the creative act. Notice that I use the word "act" here, a term/idea that is common in 2011 but may have its provenance with Rosenberg. (This startles me. Wow.) This brings to mind the active state that Greene and others ascribe to the doing of philosophy. It is dynamic, engaging, active, something fully realized.

"It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension."
I'm drawn to this because of the use of tension. In my acting training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York City in the mid 1980s, I was mentored by wonderful teachers who applied a physical approach to acting. Many of them spoke of the wonder of tension and its usefulness to an actor. My prior training had been disparaging of tension. The training would focus on being relaxed so as to be open to what a scene partner may be imparting. But at ETW, they recognized the forcefulness, the theatricality, the heightened sensibility that tension afforded an actor. It is the filled stillness that I recounted in my dissertation  of Greene's Monday evening classes. Could this essay be where tension was finally lauded?

"A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist."
Could this be the lived life?

Greene notes this essay in Teacher as Stranger (1973). The reference occurs within a chapter that highlights the new art forms of abstractions and happenings in the 1960s. Greene suggests that the spirit of these new art forms forced viewers to take on new perspectives of how they viewed art and the world around them and that the same spirit should be applied to education--students and teachers should also take on new perspectives.

But the essay also provides the gems that I found above as well as a lot of writing about consciousness and the conscious action that the new art had embodied. I can't help but to think that this essay was the tipping point of the break from the post-War/the man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit/Levittown sensibility that had been emblematic of the era.

It also sparks for me a sensation that I experienced in coming to understand these kinds of tipping points in the development of unique American art forms. It was years ago in Philadelphia at a booking conference for youth performances. The Lincoln center Institute had been invited to facilitate the conferences' professional development on the day prior to the conference. I was put in a group that was assigned to study Paul Taylor's "Aureole."

I had seen the dance performed a few months earlier at City Center's "Fall for Dance" series. My colleague and I weren't particularly taken by it. It seemed really balletic. Really traditional and usual and pastoral. We threw up our hands in a "meh" way on our walk down 6th Avenue after the performance. We were more excited by Les Grandes Ballets Canadiens as they had performed works by Ohad Naharin, whose unexpected jumps and cacophonies excited us.

But with the Lincoln Center Institute and my colleagues I cam to understand the significance of what "Aureole" was all about. What I passed off as balletic was actually ballet off-hinged. The dancers weren't traditionally turned out from the hips--their legs were perpendicular to the floor and their hips. The pastoral nature was pure movement of joy--not the tempered balletic sensibility of Tudor and others.

I came to understand that "Aureole" was a turning point in dance. What was "meh" in my uninformed viewing had been sensational in its debut. While I'm still not a fan of the dance, I truly admire what is happening within it.

These are tremendous moments. And these were occurring when Greene was, in my estimation, developing her philosophy, her voice.

Depredations of technique

While waiting in doctors' offices and customer lounges at the local speedy lube joint, I have been perusing Stella Adler's Art of Acting. The book is broken down into the individual elements that comprise the Adler technique. The text is Adler herself documenting what she and her teachers say, talk about, opine, and rail against in their technique classes.

Reading it brings me back, instantly, to my undergraduate days at NYU where I was placed in the Stella Adler Conservatory. Admission into the undergraduate drama program was by application followed by an audition and interview. At the conclusion of my comedic and dramatic monologues, my adjudicator (the head of the Experimental Theatre Wing at the time) spoke at length at how schizophrenic I was in that I could forge a career in a variety of different directions: commercial, classical, musical theatre. He was adamant that I should be placed in the Circle in the Square training program, which was the most commercial of the acting conservatories that provided training to NYU students.

Imagine my surprise when my placement letter arrived in the mail and I found out that I would be going to the Stella Adler Conservatory.

The Adler technique could be described as falling into the category of "classical" training. Classes were geared towards a life in the theatre where the good writing could be found. While I never studied with Stella herself (her classes were reserved to third-year students and I transferred out in the middle of my second year), the language of Art as Acting is nearly verbatim of what I remember of my studies with her teachers Alice Winston, Mario Siletti and Jimmy Tripp.

I'm reading Adler right now as her adage, or how I remember the adage as repeated by her teachers, was "Hamlet was not written about your mother." The adage was in reference to the idea that an actor should never rely on their own emotional memory to create a character. Instead, a character should be created from the actor's imagination as guided by the circumstances provided by the playwright's words and ideas. And it was this adage that seemed to come into stark contrast with what I encountered ten years later and 60+ blocks further uptown in my studies with Maxine Greene (Adler's conservatory was located in Carnegie Hall while Greene's lecture hall was located in Morningside Heights).

While in my mind Greene emphasizes the importance of the lived life in developing understanding and fostering multiple perspectives, Adler was adamant about the importance of technique which ultimately, in my mind, distances an actor from their daily life. I do understand the focus on technique for a performing artist as it provides a grounding to return to performance after performance, city after city. It guarantees a similar quality of experience for the Wednesday matinee attendee as it does for the Saturday night viewer. This distance that technique demands from the actor's own emotional life as provides a bulwark against burning out.

But it's interesting to read Adler in association with my close readings of Greene. In Landscapes of Learning Greene writes about the "depredations of technique" in relation to positivism and objectivity in cognition. She writes:

It must become clear again that reflection is not only rooted in experience, its entire purpose is to inform and clarify experience—or the lived world. If we add to this a conceived possibility of remaining in touch with our perceptual backgrounds and thus remaining present to ourselves, we may be better able to ward off the depredations of technique (1978, p. 17).

These "depredations of technique" were recently touched upon by Antony Tommasini in his New York Times article "Virtuosos Becoming a Dime a Dozen." In the article Tommasini writes about the numerous musicians these days who possess impeccable technique that enable them to perform the most difficult of works. He likens it to sports where records are made to be broken. This represents a new paradigm in the classical music performance world where "the first several decades of the 20th century are considered a golden era by many piano buffs, a time when artistic imagination and musical richness were valued more than technical perfection." While Tommasini never denigrates technique, you can sense a yearning for imagination and richness.

This new paradigm of the virtuosic might be rendering this quality to becoming commonplace. There is an audience demand for it. What is the impact on the art form? What is the impact on the experience of the viewer of the art form? Does the virtuosic leave space for the viewer/listener to enter into the work of art, as emphasized by Greene? Is the virtuosic an example of the depredation of technique?

Choice in lived life

This weekend has been devoted to some final notes on Maxine Greene's use of lived life in Variations on a Blue Guitar. The book is a series of lectures that Greene has given over the years at the Lincoln Center Institute where she is philosopher-in-residence. It is fitting that the writings/lectures are focused on aesthetics and teaching as the Institute is devoted to a particular kind of arts education developed under her guidance and the target population is K-12 teachers.
I think I may be finding a different sensibility regarding the lived life in these lectures/writing but more on that in a later post.

In reviewing this anthology, I was reminded this weekend of the tenet I held as an actor living and working in New York City in the 1980s and '90s. The tenet--or perhaps, justification--was the importance I placed in having a job outside of acting. It was necessary to be working in any capacity in order to pay the rent but it was also necessary to be working consistently in an institution so that I could get health insurance. I also held that it was important to work outside of acting in order to have experiences with the "real world" and with "real people" from which to draw inspiration for my acting. But then again, maybe it was just a ruse to excuse myself from not working harder at becoming a commercially successful actor.

No matter the reasons, I worked. And I worked for about eleven years as the supervisor of the TKTS booths in New York where you could buy a discounted ticket to a Broadway or off-Broadway show on the day of the performance.
It was spring of 1987. I was rehearsing a production of Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata, directed by Travis Preston (now of CalArts). It was a huge, wild production. I played the Fiancee, a mute part that was on stage for more than half of the play. The Fiancee is essentially waiting, for decades, for her betrothed to marry her. She is only seen and never heard.

With this, the physicality is paramount and I was working on developing a movement life for the Fiancee. Early one matinee Wednesday morning as I was readying Duffy Square for the matinee onslaught of Long Island/New Jersey/Connecticut/Upstate ladies who lunch, I couldn't help but to stare at a woman--who many years later I determined was trans--making her way down 7th Ave.
She was tall, gaunt, with a full face of makeup that looked like it was left over from the night before. She wore a lime-green polyester pant suit and high-heeled strappy sandals. She was smoking a cigarette in slow motion. She moved down the street without looking at where she was stepping. She was slightly unsteady, the look of a drunk trying not to look drunk. She was trying to avoid the piles of horse manure that littered the street (NYPD often used mounted police in that area) and was mostly successful but would occasionally catch the edge of a clump in her strappy sandals resulting in a near stumble.

It was the Fiancee. I had found my muse.

Though my body type was quite different from this lime-green vision, her walk and carriage became the body for the Fiancee. Her slow motion smoking became my focus of an act-long party scene that was seated around a six-foot slab of ice that slowly melted under the stage lights.

I come back to all of this because my assumption in thinking about the lived life within the aesthetic experience led me to conceive of my lime-green muse as part of my lived life as an actor. Those movements and people who serve as inspiration are the lived life I am exploring in Greene's work.
But after reviewing Variations, I'm shifting. I think it is the act of choosing I took in focusing on that woman making her way down 7th Ave. in spring 1987 that is the lived life. The lived life is how I go about making those choices, not the actual choice itself. What isn't clear to me, yet, is whether the recognition of those choices is considered part of the lived life or if lived life is the platform on which recognition and reflection can occur but only through follow-through; that reflection may not be a guaranteed element of lived life. In Variations, lived life is always presented as the "background" against which viewers/attenders/teachers/students can encounter a work of art. It is through these encounters with works of art that alternate realities can be considered and ultimately, lived lives can be transformed.

Lived life is certainly nuanced.

Textual imagery

In contemplating how this dissertation that contemplates the use of "lived life" in Maxine Greene's writings could be visualized. I did some Wordle work with her texts.

I was interested in the visual because of my intention of using arts-based research in my work. I have thought of this dissertation as an exhibition of Greene's works, her art. And I felt it necessary to "see" the works in another medium.

But I love text. Yet, how can a textual-based exhibition be visual to the reader/attender? I go back to Barbara Kruger's work and Jenny Holzer's. Their pieces, so iconic for me of 1980s New York City, provide a kind of imprimatur of how text can be visual. What's more, the text itself can embody in an explicit way instead of a covert way, how images impact our own perspectives. I am reminded of this in reviewing Landscapes of Learning recently and thinking how Marshall McLuhan may have been a factor in Greene's discussion of Ellul's "encirclement". The idea that "people are experiencing themselves being worked on by forces as invisible as they are impersonal" (1978, p. 9).

And so I "Wordled" Greene's text. It's interesting to see the words that dominate. As I suspected, the "lived" in "lived life" is mostly prevalent in her later works (though it does reveal itself in Landscapes but not in the later Dialectic). Whether I use these images in my own textual copy is still unknown. But it was diversion, it provided another angle of repose in this crystallization of a reflexive practice.


Teacher As Stranger (1973)

Landscapes of Learning (1978)

 The Dialectic of Freedom (1988)

Releasing the Imagination (1995)

Variations on a Blue Guitar (2001)

From transaction to transformation

One of my committee members recently commented on my embodiment post. In my response I started to focus on the idea of transaction. The focus arose out of a desire to promote and enhance the concept of the quality of transaction in Greene's writing. It occurred to me that the way in which we interact with the world deepens this sense of embodiment and differentiates Greene from other thinkers and writers who have commented on embodiment.

I noted that embodiment is about the constant reflection of how we view ourselves within the context of our perceived world. It is my sensibility that we are witness to transactions with the world that continue to operate within the realm of a mind/body split. I am thinking in terms of educational practice and in how we define success. We continue to assess the success of our students (and our practice) through a predominately retention/regurgitation framework. And though I'm critiquing policy with this example, policy is a means of how we transact with the world. 

Of course, this can all be viewed as a transactional dilemma: our misguided practices are fundamentally poorly conceived transactions with the world. However, does how we transact connect directly to something more profound than mere practice options? Is this why we struggle with social justice? Is this why social justice isn't just the soil (per Dewey's discussion of embodiment in Nature and Experience) but points to a more profound split? How do the bottom-line-must-dominate CEOs and the just-say-no legislative representatives and their practices sleep at night? I conceive of these practices as poor transactions. I conceive of these transactions as a fundamental split between mind and body. With that split, the transactional can never become transformational.


With Greene, I can start to chart a process by which the transactional becomes transformational. In transacting with the world, we become situated in our understandings, our processes, our angle of repose. Through reflection this situatedness becomes embodied. Our understanding signifies that union of mind and body, even relinking what once may have been split. This is what represents the lived life: the embodied situatedness of our being. It is the lived life that primes us to encounter the world through an aesthetic experience. The aesthetic represents the embodied encounter, an encounter that has the ability to be transformative because of the reflective practice that enables us to notice the new. It is the act of writing and rewriting our lived world (Releasing the Imagination, 1995, p. 147).