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...

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.

Panic & Spiraling

I was scanning "Teacher as Stranger" yesterday looking for the term "lived life" in Greene's text. I'm up to chapter 5 and haven't come across it. Oh dear. And the Amazon "search inside" feature of "The Dialectic of Freedom" also didn't find any occurrences of the term. Yikes.

My concern/panic/hive-inducing-dilemma is that I had thought the term appeared in these texts. My research methodology (I call it "practice") also assumes this.

But I did come across the term "life-world" in "Teacher as Stranger." It's a term I don't recall hearing or reading before in Greene's works. Maybe "life-world" developed into "lived life" in Greene's later texts? Another reason may be that Greene's later texts ("Releasing" and "Variations") are more closely aligned with aesthetic practice. So perhaps "lived life" is rooted in Greene's aesthetic philosophy?

And if so, can I still find a bridge between Greene's use of "lived life" and her focus on social justice? Or is "lived life" distinctly and discretely contained in aesthetics without a bridge into social justice? I hope not. Nor can I imagine such discrete applications in Greene's thinking and writing.

I had a conversation yesterday with a student. She's a distance learner in my Critical Perspectives course. We were talking about Dewey's definition of the aesthetic experience as having a conclusion or end. Yet aesthetic practice sees instead a spiraling that occurs. There is no end to the aesthetic experience. Questions beget questions. Inquiry branches into inquiry. There is a spiraling that occurs where the circulating movement of questions and inquiry expands wider and wider.

I'm spiraling.