Myths of the Academy | Vol. 1 - Faculty

Vol. 1 – Faculty

April 4−18, 2016 CURATED BY RICHARD FLETCHER GEOFFREY HILSABECK, DANI LEVENTHAL, BRETT PRICE, LIZ ROBERTS, GEORGE RUSH, SUZANNE SILVER, RYLAND WHARTON, AND CARMEN WINANT Project funded by the Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Award

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Richard Fletcher The Academy – minus Plato There is an anecdote about one of Plato’s students who jotted down all of his teacher’s lectures in the Academy. When he lost all of his written notes on a sea-voyage, he returned to tell Plato that he now knew from experience the truth of the philosopher’s claim that one should not write in books but in men’s souls. While we know very little about Plato’s teaching methods in the Academy, this anecdote offers us some intriguing, if ambiguous, evidence. On the one hand, it locates successful pedagogy not in Plato’s dialogues, but in the master’s oral teachings. On the other hand, it implies that the dialogues played a pivotal role in the Academy since it was recorded in a commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus

by Hermias of Alexandria, who lived in the 5th century CE, as an exegesis of a specific passage of Plato’s written text (Phdr.

275c). Either way, the anecdote distills the myth of the Academy and disseminates the idea of Plato as the dynamic professor of philosophy for his students and as an influential author for future generations of scholars and philosophers.

If we return, however, to the passage in Plato’s Phaedrus that generates this anecdote, we may find a potential middle-ground between these two models for the Academy, one that seems to bypass Plato’s professorial authority as either teacher or author. The idea of writing a lesson in the soul is first raised in the Phaedrus when Socrates tells the myth of the invention of writing by the Egyptian god Theuth and its criticism by Thamus. Socrates prefaces the myth by describing it as ‘the tradition heard by our forefathers’, adding the caveat that ‘only they know its truth’. While it may have been the ensuing discussion of the myth by Socrates that forms the lesson that Plato’s student took to heart, it is equally possible that the anecdote highlights the myth as a form of discourse that somehow exists between Plato’s written dialogue and his oral lecture. While scholars have debated the philosophical content of Plato’s myths (e.g. how the myth of Er relates to themes of justice and the good in the Republic), they often agree how myths highlight the process of transmission of philosophical lessons (e.g. the myth of Athens and Atlantis in the Timaeus-Critias or the myth of Diotima in the Symposium). Could this anecdote offer tantalizing evidence for the use of myth in the curriculum of the Academy and for a scene of teaching that operates somehow beyond the authority of Plato the teacher and author?

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It is this question that is the basis for the project and exhibition Myths of the Academy. On receiving one of the generous Ronald and Deborah Ratner Distinguished Teaching Awards in 2014, I set about developing a project that substantially expanded my exploration of the dynamic between Classics and Contemporary Art as a pedagogic environment for my students at Ohio State. I am a firm believer in the uncanny power of artists to break down academic stalemates. By taking what they find interesting and works for them for their own creative practices and research, artists can offer unexpected and often radical proposals in their research. This project came hot on the heels of my collaboration with the artist Paul Chan and his positing of a hypothesis of art’s inner law of cunning via a new reading of the controversial Platonic dialogue Hippias Minor. I also had in the back of my mind the upcoming exhibition about the legendary Black Mountain College at the Wexner Center for the Arts in the Fall (Leap Before You Look). This context generated the basic framework for the project that took the question about the potential role of myth in Plato’s Academy and expanded it to the specific role of artists in the contemporary research university and the idea of art school in general. I invited a group of four artists and teachers (Dani Leventhal, George Rush, Suzanne Silver and Carmen Winant) to read and think about Plato’s myths with me in a series of reading groups.

The four artists in turn invited a collaborator (Brett Price, Liz Roberts, Ryland Wharton, Geoffrey Hilsabeck) who would work with them on the broader questions of art, research and education. Each set of collaborators (Dani/Brett; George/Liz; Suzanne/Ryland and Carmen/ Geoffrey) would then produce works for an exhibition that I would curate in Hopkins Hall Gallery. Then students from my Classics 2220: Classical Mythology class would be set an assignment that required them to engage with the Myths of the Academy exhibition.

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This was the plan. However, having set up the project in this way, during the first few Plato reading groups, working through our textbook Plato: Selected Myths, it became clear that we were in danger of replicating the problem of authority inherent in the anecdote about Plato’s student. As a Classicist asking artists to

engage with Plato’s weird and wonderful myths, I seemed to be replicating the model of Plato in the Academy. What had happened to the role of myth as a means by which the authority of the professor could be challenged and transcended? Besides, who wanted to play Plato? I would rather be John Rice!

As the project continued, however, the conversations moved further away from the myths and their interpretation to explorations of artistic research, art schools and art education. We read passages from Howard Singerman’s influential book Art Subjects and a recent roundtable discussion in Artforum about the crisis at the USC Roski School of Art and Design.

After these sessions, I didn’t go back to my Plato, but went on to discover Frances Stark! Furthermore, as the artists’ projects developed, their own formations and practices guided the discussion of the ancient stories. Finally, in our last meeting, we continued our discussion in a Hopkins Hall studio space, using the process of drawing to articulate and communicate our own ideas about the myths and the artists’ works for the (fast-approaching!) exhibition. The reading group, which started out privileging the Platonic text and the Classicist as teacher, had now turned into something approximating myth as a means of transmission in a collective pedagogic endeavor.

At the same time as this shift was taking place in the reading group, it was also happening in the process of creating this catalog as well. In working on this essay, I was researching the physical topography of the Academy. I was intrigued by the possible connections between myth and the pre-Platonic site of the school – e.g. the way the myth of the hero

Academus was used as a symbol for searching for philosophical truths by the Roman poet Horace, and the possible connection between the altar of Eros and the statue of Prometheus in terms of their role in myths (of the origin of virtue in the Protagoras and that of love in the Symposium). I had, furthermore, become fixated on the diagrams used to illustrate the mythic narratives in our Plato: Selected Myths book, from the whorls of the spindle of necessity in the Republic to the map of Atlantis from the Timaeus-Critias. This conjunction between fictional diagrams and historical topography lead me to invite designer Kelly McNicholas to create a logo for the project that conflated the concentric circles of the map of the mythical island of Atlantis with the position of the Academy in the North-West corner of a map of ancient Athens. Furthermore, this logo grounded the design of this two-part catalog (this volume by the ‘faculty’ and the forthcoming volume by the ‘students’), wherein for the former we have the juxtaposition of images and narratives of the artists, documenting their collaborations and research, and in the latter, the personalized images and narratives created by the students, accompanying their installation views of the exhibition.

7 In what follows in this volume and in the exhibition you will encounter a space filled with myths of the academy that embody collaborations, conversations, research and creativity. You will dream of an idea for a new ‘model’ art school (Carmen Winant and Geoffrey Hilsabeck) before descending into a dialogue of contested readings of Plato’s myths about love and the afterlife (Dani Leventhal and Brett Price). From there you will enjoy the playful tales and scenes of pedagogic context and community (George Rush and Liz Roberts) and pay attention to the knotty juxtaposition of words, ideas and their attendant errors (Suzanne Silver and Ryland Wharton). But throughout this journey, you will not be lectured to, nor given a road map, instead you will be invited to experience Myths of the Academy as a collaboration of teachers and students, scholars and artists. In the words of my philosophus Platonicus Apuleius: ‘reader, pay close attention and you will enjoy’ (Met.1.1).

Carmen Winant & Geoffrey Hilsabeck 8

THE MODEL SCHOOL We do not always create ‘works of art,’ but rather experiments; it is not our ambition to fill museums: we are gathering experience.

- Josef Albers Truly free expression and experimental thinking are civic enterprises.

- Charlie White Questions: What is the contemporary art school?

Who and what is its engine, and to what end (and with what aims)?

At what (cultural and capital) cost?

What are the stated goals, how are they met and subverted?

Why the need to do this? What makes art schools broken or dysfunctional now?

(Are we designing an art school? An art residency? A college? A curriculum? How is what we’re doing right now art? How might we make the project itself -- the school, as it were, art? )

To consider: -Private vs. public education -Administrators as artists, artists as teachers -Curriculum requirements (accreditation?)

-Pressing demands of professionalization (jargon, theses, uniformity) -Gender, race/ethnicity, age -What do artists have to offer in school construction?

MISSION STATEMENT ATTEMPT 1: This is a place where people can have the kinds of conversations that they have in the myths and dialogues -- telling stories about love, virtue, art -- conversations that are inherently creative, are demonstrations of skill and learning but also curiosity, intuition, and personality. At this school one does not “work,� one enjoys the social activities of conversation, debate, lecture, and performance; one talks rather than works; space is created for the kinds of talking that Plato dramatizes in the myths and dialogues: participants tell stories about origins and meaning. These stories are creative, they demonstrate skill and learning but also curiosity and personality.

One talks rather than works.

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MISSION STATEMENT ATTEMPT 2: This school starts from scratch, does not rely on existing institutional models. We propose new professional, creative, administrative goals and sustainable systems in the process. We reexamine the conventional mold in order to approach art school as we would an art project itself.

We are built on these founding pillars: 1. Artists must be interested in being interesting, not being famous.

2. Active diversity between artists (in both discipline and personal background, etc.).

3. Peer to peer review is critical; (non-hierarchical) conversations are essential.

4. Rotating mentors; emphasis on meetings, discussion (rather than 16-wk coursework).

5. Strong emphasis on visiting artists and scholars of all kinds (seminar model).

6. Ideas not trends.

7. Question-asking imperative; de-emphasis on “expertise” and professionalization.

8. Geographic de-centralization.

9. We hire instructors of artistic integrity and principle.

MODEL ARTIST RUN SCHOOLS: Mountain School in LA, Black Mountain College, The Public School in LA, Trade School, School for Creative Activism, Bruce High Quality Foundation, NY Arts Practicum, SOMA (MX), Open School East (UK), Islington Mill (UK), The Silent University (UK), School of Global Art (UK), Skowhegan, MASS Alexandria and Ox-Bow residency mode.

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NOTES: -Short, medium-specific courses (one week, full day?) led by a practitioner of that medium.

-Class is made up of artists, writers, etc.

-Four-week term with four different courses?

-Symposia and performances at night.

-Shared meals [essential for creating relationships but does require a space].

-Questions posed and answered in performance and discussion.

-Exhibiting/performing art made during the day.

-Occasional lectures. Get a certificate at the end.

-Leader is always also participant.

-One “course,” on one medium, a handful of people.

-Agree on mutually convenient time and place.

-Choose someone to lead it. Eat our shared meals out but somewhere cheap (so wouldn’t need a space of our own).

-Organize a culminating event (party) as a kickoff. We exhibit and perform our work from the week, participate and document, bring in outsiders to perform and speak.

Avenues to pursue: -Location scouting (on the ground, digital scouting) -Design and layout of building (space as thinking) -Research existing models: what works? (see above list of artist run art schools) -Reach out to potential $ (grants and donors) -Survey potential mentors, involve them directly in ideation ADULT-ED POSSIBILITY?: The school is not for “art students,” or at least not primarily or exclusively. It’s for teachers, nurses, stay-at-home parents, waiters, actors, bankers, everyone.

Adult-ed.; possibilities of social purpose: to educate more people in the beauty and purpose and meaning of form. Aiming to connect people to the arts and humanities, which for a variety of reasons have become distinct from their lives and their self-understanding; to educate them in what is happening now in art (and writing and dance, etc.); to do so in a way that is historically conscious and as un-theoretical/on-the-ground as possible, to do so through the practice of making art. This is a possible core curriculum, which is accompanied by lectures/ performances by major artists, critics, etc. In other words: educating a broad public in what is happening now. Perhaps then the core course then is not in drawing, color, etc. (democratic but also contemporary as it was at Black Mountain College), but something like “artistic research,” as Francis Stark talks about -whatever is most fundamental and relevant to art-making now.

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The school as two schools: Possible: we are two programs that constantly cross-pollinate: an art school that offers BFA and MFA degrees and an adult-ed program. Faculty and students in the BFA and MFA programs are required to teach courses in the adult-ed program; as a result of this work, students receive certification as ‘teaching artists.’ Teaching these courses is part of the funding package; it provides teaching experience; and most importantly it puts these early-career artists in touch with a lay audience for their work. Faculty mentor students not only in art-making but also in the teaching of art (how to do it, why to do it, in what contexts, with what ends). There is a strong emphasis on art-making as a civic enterprise.

Brett Price There’s the plan or road map, and then there’s the trip, which always ends up different from the initial set of expectations. For me, poetry is a process for which the resulting poems serve both as documentation and instigators of altogether unforeseen processes. So poems, when they’re alive and working, are charged with the energy of a past and also the potential of multiple futures. They’re batteries.

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I like that writing poetry is a playful and open-ended endeavor.

You can make a real mess without necessarily slashing up your daily, spatiotemporally contingent relations, though there’s always bleed.

Why anyone would do something so time-consuming without there being some semblance of real or potential risk involved, whether private or public, is beyond me. I’m of the increasing opinion that poetry, like magick, operates under the assumption of an analogous and effecting correspondence between signs and those objects, states, and processes they signify, however indirectly. But still, some version of faith or belief is required. It’s kind of like hypnotism or meditation in that sense: if you’re not a willing and active participant, shit just isn’t gonna happen for you.

You have to want the state of things, mind or otherwise, to change. And so part of reading and writing poetry is actively putting myself in that zone (hands off the wheel a bit, even as the feet work the pedals) over and over again, which itself, jurisdictionless, spontaneously combusts or seeps and bubbles subtly into many other modes of subjective experience.

As much as I love Rimbaud’s famous claim that “Je est une autre” (I is another), nothing could be further from the truth in my poems. “I” is almost always me, though writing gives me the opportunity to become multiple. I get to try out different moves and positions, abolishing “I” from its everyday references, which preps it to refer to things as of yet unknown. So the many selves a given poem conjures or represents take up residence in the other arenas of my life, transforming it from the inside out. And we, the many selves a poem helps produce, revel in our trials by fire and baths in the dew. Jiggly-rigged and low-fi, almost no profile whatsoever, our selected lines unfold in the orders we decide.

Dani Leventhal 13

DIALOGUE 9 between Dani Leventhal & Brett Price DL: What is the nature of vulnerability within the construction of narrative? Does clarity flatten something into simplicity? How can the reality of complexity appear when the narrative is crystal?

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BP: I like these questions, Dani, which is not surprising, since we’re so often, for better or worse, mentally fused. But I disagree with some of the assumptions built into the questions themselves: first off, that narrative implies clarity and, secondly, that clarity implies simplicity.

In the case of the work I’m making for Myths of the Academy, I’m trying to create a narrative that includes trapdoors and portals. And those doors actually allow for or instigate experiments that are not predetermined. So the narrative, which is more a structure or frame than a story, can somehow hold these little, controlled explosions within it.

How are you thinking of these questions?

DL: In the opening chapter of Lars Von Trier’s film, Nymphomaniac, a traumatic scene of a girl losing her virginity is layered with an absurd graphic (large numbers appear on the screen, counting, as the girl is being penetrated). The register of the moving image (horrifying) versus the graphics (humorous) are so opposed that I am forced to consider a slew of perspectives simultaneously. That is brilliant narrative work. I aspire to this.

I want clarity to be loaded with meaning rather than meek. I want to tell illustrative stories that still expand possibilities.

BP: How is this related to the Myths?

DL: Plato is sexist, and also uptight about how to behave. I’m on board when he invites the mortals to imagine who or what they want to be in their next life. I’d be a female wolf who belongs to a pack in the arctic. Or maybe Harry Dodge.

BP: Me too! Or I’d maybe be an otter.

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Liz Roberts 16

…the Platonic Academy in the accepted modern sense is a non entity, that the Academy is more a state of mind than a place.

Let us assume that there was this garden…¹ The artist’s role in the contemporary university is something I have been preoccupied with, being two years out of graduate school and newly embracing the role of “academic" artist. One could argue it’s my destiny, being descended from academics (one is currently finishing his professorial career at The Ohio State University and is the reason we migrated as a sort of modern day tribe from the East coast to Columbus).

Or it could be argued that my position as emerging academic - visiting assistant professor at a couple of nearby institutions - is a twist of fate, considering I’m a high school dropout and self-imagined antiestablishment rebel. Life and education progressed from GED to BA to MFA, and here I am. Let me teach you. I have lived a little.

Institutions, educational and otherwise, propagate the ideology of the day, a state of mind. My take on contemporary dominant ideology is that it’s pushing a “sanitization movement,” homogenizing and cleansing and fear-based. Revisioning instead of demythologizing. The work I do often deals with landscape, its mediation, and how it comes to express the ideology of the time; it was with this state of mind that I approached the idea of Academic Green Spaces, and by extension, the myth of the American Lawn. “Attractively landscaped formal open spaces [...] help establish a venerable campus identity, stir alumni sentimentalism, create a strong sense of community, and curb escalating campus densities.”²

…the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death.

No wonder Americans like them so much.³ Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. In this sense the American Lawn and Academic Green Space represent the dilemma of the sanitization movement creeping into higher education and censoring the “academic” artist.

When iconic carries more weight than iconoclast, you know there has been a substantial cultural shift. In the spirit of considering this change in ideology/myths, I titled my work for the show - a revisionist replica of Ohio State University’s famed Oval lawn - after the offensive aggro on-the-road 1970’s bumper sticker: Ass Gas or Grass: Nobody Rides For Free.

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1 John Dillon (1983) ‘What happened to Plato’s garden?’, Hermathena, 134: 51-59.

2 A.L. McFarland, T.M. Waliczek, and J.M. Zajicek (April-June 2008 ) ‘The Relationship Between Student Use of Campus Green Spaces and Perceptions of Quality of Life‘, HortTechnology vol. 18 no. 2 232-238.

3 Michael Pollan (May 28, 1989) ‘Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns‘, The New York Times Magazine.

George Rush My Myth of the Academy

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When I was asked to be part of this I was psyched. I mean, a Classicist was asking me to be part of something. Who woulda thunk it. And we’d be reading Plato, getting deep into some heavy shit. I thought maybe I’d finally get it. Not that I’d tried all that hard before, but maybe now I’d get all the names and the jargon and the rules and the lessons that have been passed on from year to year, century to century and all the blood and sex and love and betrayal and power and morals and all the rest that go with what we think of when we imagine ancient philosophy. All in a few short weeks. Sort of like renting that Derrida movie and thinking you’ll get Derrida but what you get when you watch that is actually Derrida the man and not the theory. I mean you get to watch him eating cheese and describing the situation of being the subject of a movie and walking around his apartment. And it’s fascinating. And that’s sort of what happened here. I got more interested in all of us reading and talking about the text than the text. Me and Richard and Dani and Suzanne and Carmen.

We would meet occasionally at Dani’s and it’d start with hellos and catching up and gossip and me not having a drink but scarfing loads of salted nuts or some other snacks and then we’d sort of settle down. We’d have read a chapter or two of these myths. Myths! Stories about the afterlife and love and sexuality and being good and how we know what is real. And I kept reading these things and finding I really had nothing to say. I mean, sure, there they are, a great story sometimes, sometimes a bit odd and rambling. But what to do with it? I mean I don’t know the context or the references and in spite of Richard’s kind and generous walkthrough these things still seemed rather opaque and strange. And I like strange but I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t paint monsters, you know. So I would always drive off, afterwards, sort of exhausted and slipping into self doubt and questioning that I’d said anything coherent at all and wondering what sort of drivel I’d spouted and how pretentious I might’ve sounded. The usual routine. And I would think of the rest of the group and how smart and enthusiastic and clever and worldly and honest and curious they all seemed. And it reminded me of all those images in ancient Roman wall paintings I’ve seen, where people are standing around talking to each other, or listening at least. Or friezes like the one in the Ara Pacis, with all the people lined up to listen to Augustus or something. And you can sort of hear them whispering and see them nodding and their robes fluttering and they’re all pushed to the very edge of the precipice by the marble itself but they’re part of the marble too so they are sort of stuck there, in half-relief, their toes just peaking over the ledge, a hinge between architecture and sculpture, between the space of the living and the space of history.

Maybe that’s the space of myth, that place between life and death, close enough to use for your own purposes (propaganda, education, self aggrandizement), but far enough from our grasp to really be sure.

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Ryland Wharton TEACHER: Oh, well now let’s stay with this point for a minute. If I interpret what you’ve said correctly, you are saying that you cannot say that one thing is correct? That what may be correct here in our classroom, might not be correct someplace else?

JUDY: That’s right. It’s the fact that the universe sometimes revolves in the direction it is currently taking, but sometimes goes in the opposite direction. Our treatment of materials is intentionally different from that on the “outside.”

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TEACHER: Well who accepts these words and who uses them, and who tells you not to use them?

BILL: The question is–whether you can make words mean so many different things.

JUDY: The notion that language is made of words is all nonsense. I tell you–we have to start all over again from the beginning and assume that language is first and foremost a system of gestures. Animals after all have only gestures and tones of voice–and words were invented later. Much later. And after that they invented schoolmasters.

TEACHER: Are you angry now?

JUDY: Of course I’m not angry.

BILL: Most conversations are only about whether people are angry or something.

TEACHER: Suppose a historian were writing a history of the events of this class. Would he report that you were angry or maybe a little hostile?

JUDY: Yes. It’s like an old manuscript or a letter that that has lost its beginning and end, and the historian has to guess what’s its all about from what’s inside it.

TEACHER: All in all, then, the shadows of artefacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize. But what rules do we have?

BILL: Yes. Let me think about that. I think we do have a sort of rules... and I think a child playing with blocks has rules. The blocks themselves make a sort of rules. They will balance in certain positions and they will not balance in other positions. We no longer differentiate essentially between those elements which are “carrying” and those which are “carried,” between those “serving” and those “served.” Every element or component must be one that is “aiding” and “aided” at the same time, it must be both supporting and supported.

JUDY: There is no “either—or,” but rather an “and.”

TEACHER: So what?

BILL: I don’t seem to understand it all very well.

Everything seems to be everything else, and I get lost in it. That’s what I call confusion.

Judy: Yes–a muddle–but still a sort of sense.

In my experience, very few ask that critical question. To do so is to examine their own commitment, to reevaluate choices long since made, to threaten their justification for being.

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Suzanne Silver

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Further Reading Brisson, Luc, and Gerard Naddaf (1998) Plato the myth maker. University of Chicago Press.

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Chan, Paul, Richard Fletcher, Karen Marta (eds) (2015) Hippias Minor or the Art of Cunning. Badlands Unlimited and DESTE Foundation.

Cherniss, Harold F (1944) Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato and the Academy.

Dillon, John (2003). The Heirs of Plato: A Study of the Old Academy (347-274 BC): A Study of the Old Academy (347-274 BC). Clarendon Press.

Madoff, Steven Henry (2009) Art School:(propositions for the 21st Century). MIT Press, 2009.

Molesworth, Helen et al.(2015) 'Class Dismissed: A Roundtable on Art School, USC, and Cooper Union' Artforum October.

Nails, Debra (1995) Agora, academy, and the conduct of philosophy. Vol. 63.

Springer Science & Business Media.

Partenie, Catalin (2004) Plato: Selected Myths. New York: Oxford.

Phaidon editors (2015) Akademie X: Lessons in Art + Life.

Singerman, Howard (1999) Art subjects: Making artists in the American university. Univ of California Press.

Frances Stark (ed.) (2007) Primer (On the Future of Art School). Dexter Sinister.

For more information, visit: http://minusplato.com/category/myths-of-the-academy

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