Photo of Pocket Utopia's Rolling Gate. Courtesy Sharon Butler

Austin Thomas is a New York-based artist, curator & sometimes salon host. When I asked her about art + transformation, she offered these thoughts about the transformative power of walking and its impact on her art practice.

“The best ideas come when I’m doing the dishes,” That’s what Tracey Moffatt once told me. (But I never really do dishes.) She also told me, “the best ideas come back” and they do. I get my ideas and do my best thinking when I walk.

After completing Pocket Utopia, a 2-year, community-based salon project in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, I’ve started organizing art walking tours called “Art Stumbles.” These tours offer up food for thought, refreshments and refreshing perspectives on the art geography of a particular place.

Until recently, Pocket Utopia was a place for showing other artists’ work, and I thought of it as an extension of my own artwork. I re-engaged my ideas by constructing a social space. I learned what it really meant to be an artist running Pocket Utopia.

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Photocollage by Quentin McCaffrey

I’m addicted to Harper’s Magazine. I started reading it in 1985 as a freshman in college and have somehow managed, through multiple moves and roommates, to keep every single issue since then. This drives my wife crazy, even though they’re tucked away in the basement. I’m not really sure what I’m eventually going to do with all of them, but it’s a symbolic lifeline to news, essays and unique perspectives that fed me growing up and, quite frankly, helped me to grow up.

This month’s issue features an essay by one of Harper’s contributing editors, Mark Slouka, and it literally made my head snap back. The essay, titled Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school, is must-reading for anyone interested in the constant debate about how the humanities have practically been forced to justify their place in education and “fit in” behind (not next to) all of the quantifying, calculating and computations that take place in school. It’s the kind of essay that’s perfect for the start of a new school year because it’s biting and doesn’t knuckle under to all of the standardized nonsense that passes for “concern” or “improvement” or, I hate to say it, “rigor” in education.

Slouka makes a remarkable case for “teach(ing) people, not tasks; to participate in the complex and infinitely worthwhile labor of forming citizens, men and women capable of furthering what’s best about us and forestalling what’s worst.” It isn’t easy. In Slouka’s “State of the Union” he describes our “horizontal world of information” that’s easily converted into product, and that the “verticality of wisdom has no place”. Basically, education has been force-fed capitalism to the point that it has no choice but to accept its criteria for “success”!

Along with undressing Thomas Friedman for blatantly sucking up to Bill Gates (a beautiful section of the essay, indeed), Slouka poses many questions that need to be asked more often, and perhaps loudly:

• What do we teach, and why?
• Is the “job” of education to help students “get ahead”?
• Do our students really need to take more and more math and science, get higher SAT scores, and gain acceptance into better colleges in order to “compete” with other students (and prospective workers!) around the world?
• Do schools have a critical role that they ignore in order to devote so much time and energy into “competing” in a global economy?

Slouka discusses, at length, the disequilibrium that exists. This is a Crisis in American Education that has little to do with the economy and everything to do with the kinds of citizens we are teaching and shaping (not “producing”). “Mathandscience”, he suggests, has become the “all-purpose shorthand for intelligence”.

Slouka ends the piece with a wonderful story about an English teacher named Marcus Eure, who doesn’t spend all of his time preparing kids for tests. Instead, his students are immersed in questions, for example,  that tackle what it means to be correct, to lie, and to be desensitized by what we see on tv and in movie theaters.

Is there hope? Yes! Read the essay. Share it with others. And have a good start to the school year.

It has been a fun two weeks with Quinn Latimer as she offered us a window into her corner of the Swiss art world. We traveled to the “Holbein to Tillmans” exhibition, visited new “roommates” Plattfon + Stampa, read some thoughts on the relationship (if any) between high culture and crime in Dresden, and enjoyed her musings about wandering the streets of Basel.

Next up, we welcome our latest blogger-in-residence, Dehlia Hannah.

Dehlia Hannah is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at Columbia University completing a dissertation entitled “Nature Vexed: Scientific Experiment as Aesthetic Form,” which examines the use of scientific methods and materials in contemporary art and the aesthetics of scientifically-mediated nature.

She is a graduate of Smith College, where she studied philosophy and chemistry, and has received an M. Phil. and a Certificate in Feminist Inquiry from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University. Her areas of specialization are philosophy of science and aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, and her work is informed by feminist and queer theory.

She is currently teaching Contemporary Civilization in the West at Columbia College.

Her posts will begin tomorrow.

Ever wanted to make a movie? This week we’re looking at DIY-style videos on ArtBabble, pulling together a potpourri of all things homemade, rough, and celebratory of the do-it-yourself attitude (adding a few of our own videos to the mix).

Paul McCarthy let’s his freak flag fly with this excerpt from the video installation Caribbean Pirates (2005). (via Art21)

The reigning king of DIY-style videos, Michel Gondry, explains it all in this conversation with Anthony Breznican (via Hammer)

Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (again) Mark Bradford lent us some of his home movies! (via Art21)
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Loren Munk–of the infamous DIY online video program James Kalm Report–is a walking encyclopedia of the history of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg art community. So when I asked him about his take on the notion of Art + Transformation, he shared his thoughts through words and video on the transformation of Williamsburg:

Until recently, Williamsburg has been the venue of choice for underground gorilla art actions. The crumbling old piers on the west side of the ‘Berg have provided generations of local kids, the homeless and the avant-garde with unregulated space to play.

In June 2005, artist Chris Martin in preparation for his upcoming exhibition, decided to throw an unauthorized “happening/photo-shoot” to create an image for a poster.  The resulting party represents the last gasp of Old Williamsburg.

Four years latter, developers have seized on this strip of coast as some of the most desirable real estate in New York City. The unrestrained construction of glass and steal apartment towers and massive throngs of tattooed hipsters, being cajoled by Borough President Marty Markowitz bares testament to the extraordinary, though not necessarily positive, transformation of this area.

-Loren Munk