Teaching Thursday. Growing GIS Pains

The first major project that my Migration Architecture students have to complete is a spatial analysis of sixteen blocks in Philadelphia. Located in the southeast quadrant of William Penn’s city, this is both the colonial core of the city but also the epicenter of the African-American, Russian-Jewish, Greek and artist enclaves. Our goal is to create new digital data. We will digitize all the 1916 buildings (based on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map) and connect those buildings with their occupants (as listed in the 1920 US census). The students will also analyze the buildings that still survive and create a neighborhood narrative.

Learning ArcGIS is a central component of the class but it is not the subject of my lectures. I have created a sequence of exercises that the students can perform on their own with the help of Lynda.com tutorials. Their first challenge was to understand the complicated file structures of ArcGIS. This is the first stumbling block. The second challenge was to perform a georeferencing operation. Although pretty straightforward as operations, they were extremely difficult for the students. The problem was not the directions from the tutorials or the commands within the software but the inability to right-click on things, or manage files in ways that digital natives have learned to do. In other words, the problem was ArcGIS complicated file structure. 

Although everyone carried out the georeferencing tutorial, only about half of the class managed to successfully georeferenced a Sanborn map. And from that half, no one followed my instructions of keeping all their operations within a distinct file. The problem with sequenced digital assignments is that you cannot stop and make the students repeat the exercise when they have collectively failed for three reasons. One, the students get frustrated. They have already performed that operation and feel that their time investment alone was worth it. Having the students repeat the operation is, therefore, demoralizing. Two, the assignment must continue into the second phase of data manipulation, so that the project can be completed at the planned time. Three, the project is collective so the data produced by each student will ultimately be used by all students. The early mistakes of one student affect the final study. Quality control must be maintained sequentially and cannot be enforced punitively by a bad individual grade.
I resolved the discrepancy in quality of georeferencing among the 16 students by fixing their mistakes myself. This way, for their next assignment (digitizing) they can be on a common ground and we will not have any compounded error. The advantage of handing them a georeferenced Arc Map is that I can assure that they will not complicate the various settings.

Managing software learning in the classroom is tricky. I did not want to turn the classroom into a class on software. In class we cover theories, methods, and history. The software learning happens over the weekend as the main homework assignment. My students were practically up in arms when they realized that the only place they can do their assignment is at a particular GIS lab in the library that is used by other students and classes. They hated the idea that they could not simply download the software on their computers and do their homework at their dorms.

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Teaching Thursday: Graphic Novel Migration Architecture

The first week of my Migration Architecture class is over. With the anxieties of a new class and a new group of students waning, I am ready to talk about it. The class has three objectives, to introduce students to spatial analysis as a discursive tool, to explore the inherent tension between migration and architecture, and to compare the American melting pot of the 1920s to migration today. The ingredients are part GIS, part graphic novel, part civic-engagement, and part forensic archaeology. Yes, a crazy combination that tries desperately to throw the students into hands-on spatial representing and analyzing their own constructions. Yes, I’m terrified of what might happen if the students don’t follow the tutorials on georectification or geocoding. Teaching software to undergraduates, I have come to believe, is equivalent to teaching them how to write or draw. But I don't quite know how to do it right yet.

The first GIS exercise of the course begins next week. The students will take over data generated by my 2016 Summer Hackman scholars, Lizzy Wood and Cassie Garrison. We will take 16 blocks of ethnic Philadelphia, map all the buildings and link them with their occupants listed on the contemporary census. Rather than giving the students a handful of terrific books and articles on Philadelphia’s ethnic melting pot, I have assigned them a graphic novel, the re-issue of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, which takes place in Bronx tenement in 1930. I have never taught the graphic novel, but I have participated in readings and seminars of a graphic novel course that my colleague Kerry Sherry Wright teaches at F&M’s English Department. The second graphic novel that my student will read is Joe Sacco’s Notes from Gaza, which dramatizes Sacco’s investigation on the events of Rafa and Khan Yunis refugee camp in Palestine. The Arab Comic exhibition that just opened at the Phillips Museum adds another point of reference for the students.   

Today, we discussed the three stories of Eisner’s Contract with God. We asked a simple question. What is the architectural dimensions in the book’s narrative. Visually represented in a graphic novel, those spaces are not just implied but a parallel narrative to the words. We talked about the history of tenements from the double tenement of the 1830s, the railroad tenement of the 1850s, and the dumbbell tenement of the 1879 legislation. Through Eisner’s illustrations, we could reconstruct the entire architecture, from the stoop to the superintendent’s basement apartment. In the initial discussion of the books, the students were a little dumbfounded by my questions. Professor, what do you mean by the architectural narrative? Going through the graphic novel and comparing one illustration across the other, the students realized that the novel gave a fairly complete vantage of most of the architectural studies. The subject of the stories was kind of rough, involving rape, suicide, theft, domestic abuse and promiscuous sex. The students were able to handle it. No trigger warnings were necessary. At the end of the day, I was relieved that this graphic experiment worked out OK.

Eisner was one of many elements introduced. In just one week, the students have analyzed archival city maps at our Library Special Collections, were lectured on the architecture of the Jewish diaspora from the Temple of Solomon and the Tower of Babel to the Roman ghetto and the Russian pogroms. They learned about space, time, and form in archaeological analysis. And they also created a house database of family residence across three generations (the houses of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents) -- here they learned how difficult it is to get data even in your own family; they also learned of the great migration history that each student has brought to the class.

Greek Arts and Crafts Digitally Curated

Greek villages have been experiencing a continuous (and occasionally dramatic) process of abandonment since 1893. Intellectuals of the 1920s (Angeliki Hadjimihali, Antonis Benakis, etc.) responded to this crisis by collecting Greek arts and crafts, establishing museum collections, and writing the first scholarly monographs. The Benaki Museum, the Ethnographic and Folklore Museum of Athens, the Stathopoulos Room at the American School of Classical Studies, the Nauplion Folklore Museum and many others testify to this first wave of scholarship.

In the 1960s, Greek village communities began their own efforts to save their arts and crafts by establishing local village repositories. Taking stock of what happened to prestige villages like Metsovo or Monemvasia, these communities imagined their folk heritage as a possible generator for small-scale tourism. Prestige villages are the product of capital investment and philanthropy by particular patrons (whether Greek or non-Greek). That magnitude of operation is rarely an option to every Greek village.

Although there is no official count, there are hundreds of these repositories, lovingly curated by village elders and intellectuals. They typically occupy a room of a "community" or "cultural center" (πνευματικό κέντρο) often a preserved abandoned house. These ad hoc museums are the most interesting manifestations of local curation and civic engagement in Greece. What is sad about them, of course, is that they will never function as proper museums. First, they have no financial resources or staff, and second, they are too remote and ordinary to solicit tourism. It's important to note that since cultural heritage is managed predominantly by the Greek state, there is little know-how on the interworking of heritage management by the Greek citizens (no educational programs, or vehicles for experimentation outside an increasingly bankrupt state). As a result, the citizen curators of village museums tend to range from idealistic to impractical or fatalistic. The passion for this civic philanthropy, moreover, is ending with the current generation of retirees. There are no indications that anyone under 50 shares their passion or the local links to a particular village. Younger Greeks tend to think more globally, about the environment, globalization, a multicultural Europe, neoliberal economics, etc. 

So what will happen to these local museums?

In the last few years, a group of American and Greek students have been studying late medieval and early modern villages in the area of Lidoriki. In Summer 2016, we turned the Lidoriki Folklore Museum (above) into a photographic laboratory. A group of students from Maryville University (St. Louis), Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster), and the National Technical University (Athens) inventoried 138 objects. The objects were photographed professionally, and a smaller sample (about 12) were photographed three-dimensionally. The students presented their research at the Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Francisco this month: Shelby Beiermann, Sara Loynd, Austin Nash, Nicole Thompson, and Elizabeth Wood, "Artists at Aigition: Documentation, Design, and the Investigation of Rural Villages."

Following the first scholarly presentation of last summer's season, we proceed with the next phase to curate a digital museum for the 138 objects that we have recorded. Franklin and Marshall student Lizzie Wood was one of the two students that photographed the objects of Lidoriki. The picture at the top shows Lizzie brainstorming on how to photograph a wool military coat. This semester, Lizzie is embarking on an independent study to create a digital museum of the 138. Shelby Beiermann has already processed some of the images into 3D models. See, for instance, two wool spindles [here] and [here], a tsarouchi [here], a scale weight [here], and a bugle [here].

Lizzie will have to sort the material and write informative entries for each piece, while also learning the software Omeka with which she will design a digital exhibition. If this works well, we hope it becomes a model for other local folklore collections throughout Greece. Next summer, we hope to also tackle some of the more established folklore museums with this technology. We plan to 3D-model objects from the Angeliki Hadjimihali House, a folk arts museum operated by the city of Athens.

Thinking Architecture

Taking advantage of the student "reading days," the period between the end of classes and the beginning of finals, I have been reviewing some new books that might be used as textbooks for introductory classes. Although, teaching free for a whole semester as I go on sabbatical, I am capitalizing on the teaching buzz of this semester to plan my capstone seminar in Fall 2013. This browsing period has proven to be extremely productive in that I have found two brilliant new books that I would wholeheartedly recommend to any novice or teacher of architectural history.

During the 1960s, teaching architectural history witnessed its greatest calamity when two academic disciplines bifurcated. Schools of Architecture and Departments of Art History decided to part ways, a rather unfortunate divorce for architectural historians who served both communities. In the 1980s, the golden decade of post-structural theory, School of Architecture took a dive into deep theory. The same can be said about art historians dealing with visual texts. But architectural historians that had no relationship to contemporary architectural practices did not. Interestingly enough, both are now in crisis. The high theorists of architecture our spinning their wheels, while the positivists art historians are losing their audience by the minute. 

Colin Davies has written the first textbook that has successfully bridged the gap between the anti-historical theorists and the anti-theoretical historians. Thinking about Architecture: An Introduction to Architectural Theory (London, 2011) is a phenomenal accomplishment. In just 150 pages and organized around eight themes, Davies has interjected history with the passion of its internal hermeneutic tradition but has also tamed the seemingly incomprehensible "architecture speak" (or theory light) still dominant in schools of design. Each chapter is divided into coherent sections with obvious primary sources for the student and a very economical number of monuments that most efficient illustrate the point. I have embraced the book for its clarity and sophistication and its classroom-friendliness. 

Another new book that I absolutely adore is a little collection of essays on the architecture of the home. Edwin Heathcote is the architecture critic for the Financial Times and his essays originate from those pages. His little book, The Meaning of Home (London, 2012), takes the reader through a philosophical tour of every nook and corner of a home. Each essay is a few pages long but rich with evocations on historical meanings. It makes an ideal textbook for a class on the philosophy of houses if supplemented by an investigation of the textual comparenda that it brings to the reader (literature, philosophy, film, etc.) But it also makes an inspiring read for anyone interested in the cultural power of houses. This book fits well in Christmas stockings (but beware of ugly cover).

I also reviewed Alexandra Lange's, Writing about Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities (New York, 2012). The book is intended as a handbook on writing contemporary criticism. It takes six classic texts of criticism and analyzes them as strategic documents. The texts are Lewis Mufmord's "House of Glass," Herbert Muschamp's "The Miracle of Bilbao," Michael Sorkin's "Save the Whitney," Charles Moore's "You Have to Pay for the Public Life," Frederick Law Olmsted's "Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns," and Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." The collection is a wonderful idea and I can imagine how it could be used for a writing seminar on criticism. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out any other objectives and found it difficult to incorporate it in any classes that I teach. Lange gave a seminar at Queens College this last semester on What to Do with an Art History Degree. I would have loved my students to attend since, outside of New York or Los Angeles, few consider a career in architectural criticism.

Icon Workshop

My class on Medieval Art and Architecture congregated at the Phillips Museum yesterday afternoon for a workshop on icon painting by Dorothy Thayne, F&M artist in residence. The drawing, or "writing" of icons involves a fascinating process of "layering veils." Using her own work, Dorry demonstrated the spiritual process of making icons.

Teaching medieval art, one encounters the topic of devotional practices that modern students do not always comprehend. Seeing an icon painter perform the process best illustrates the technical dimensions of pigment layering, as well as, the symbology. It was a priceless experience.

The workshop took place in the Dana Gallery of the Phillips Museum, where we are currently having our faculty show. Dorry's two icons are part of the exhibition.

The demonstration brought devotional art to life. We learned how the wood is like the tomb, and the fabric on top of the wood is the shroud. We learned about the different spiritual lights that are layered on the icon. We learned about light and shadow, pigments and their hierarchy of coarseness. We learned about tempering the material. We also learned about typology (the Theotokos Eleousa, etc.) and the reasons why an icon-painter chooses the types that she works with.

(Photos by Maureen Lane)

Tombstone Project

"Master Builders of Lancaster," my methods seminar on architectural history had its second meeting. Last week, we spent sometime in Lancaster's cemetery, where students took measurements of assigned graves. Using their measurements, they were required to build a 3D-model of their tombstone. The exercise was intended to teach students basic tools of documentation (measuremnt), as well as, to learn Google Sketchup. The results were amazing. One thing I've learned about my students is that if you give them practical tasks, they make great leaps. Here is an example of a 3D model. Students with no previous training in 3D modeling, learned how to use the software and construct virtual realities.

Architecture of World Religions

The first third of my History of World Architecture focused on antiquity (prehistoric to late Roman). During the second third of the class, we turn our attention to the architecture of the major global religions from monotheism (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) to the religions of India (Buddhism, Hinduism, Janism), the philosophical traditions of China (Confucianism, Daoism) and Japan (Shinto, Zen). My students are now studying for their second exam and I have prepared the following graphic lists to organize their studying. The last third of the class will be devoted to the western Middle Ages (Carolingian, Romanesque, Gothic). Stay tuned.

Monument List

The latest manifestation of my History of Architecture class includes a global perspective and lots of drawing exercises that include measuring columns, constructing orthographic documents, crafty tools that diminish the distance between the sacred canon illustrated in our textbook and the profane vernacular that surrounds us. The first exam is slowly approaching before Fall Break and covers Neolithic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Aegean, Greek and Roman architecture. Rather that handing out my usual list of monuments to memorize, I've decided to step up my game. Since I'm making students communicate through drawings, I've decided to create a graphic handout. My goal is to convince them that drawings have less to do with skill or beauty but with communication. By seeing my drawings, they realize that although a little better than theirs, they are not masterpieces. What separates their drawings from mine is a bit of practice.

The hand-drawn sheet contains a richness of information that a Word-Processed list cannot replicate. More importantly, the hand-drawn sheet immobilizes the students from their natural habits of manipulating digital information (cutting-and-pasting, googling instead of reading, etc.) The monuments are selected from our textbook, Moffett and Woodehouse, Buildings Across Time: An Introduction to World Architecture. I do these sketches quickly on the train and they highlight issues that I have covered in lecture. For instance, we spent some time in class unpacking imbedded proportions in the classical buildings on campus. The students tested Vitruvius by measuring their own bodies, their bodies in a Doric colonnade and the bodies in relation to the parts of an Ionic base. When they meet Robert Stern in person next week, they'll have a different apprciation of his architecture by having actually measured the proportions of Stern's Ionic base.

The handout is drawn in pencil and then Xeroxed. Unlike these scanned images, the Xerox copies are crips and punchy. I enjoy the qualitative difference between the analog and digital versions. When I assign drawing exercises, I handout special paper. Most of them approach the thicker stock with greater reverence. The change in weight, texture and quality destabilizes the notion that a print-out is a portable version of a computer generated file (that costs 10 cents). Students know that something is special when crafted by hand. I've been amazed by how much my students appreciate (even fetishize) drawings and the process of generation.

Pointy Students

I get depressed as I write letters of recommendation for students applying to Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. In trying to sell an extraordinary package, I realize my academic contribution to the economic polarization of American society. James Atlas spelled it out succinctly in his Sunday New York Times opinion piece called “Super People.” Indeed, the academic arena is devoted to the cultivation of a new class of individuals that are groomed from young age to achieve in all the registers that spell out success. Since collegiate success is the surest indicator for economic mobility, whatever humanistic endeavor we accomplish in the classroom translates into hyped market value. Our academic goals have long transitioned from the Enlightenment notion of Bildung to the instrumental notion of Academic Excellence. The former was intended to construct a full human being with the very critical faculties necessary for citizenship in the nation-state. The latter is intended to teach students how to excel above the socio-economic mean, how to accumulate and replicate power. Whether measured by SAT scores or peer-reviewed publications, academic excellence cannot be dissociated from what actually is going on in American society and its reflection in college admissions. Quantifiable relative value works in the marketplace and, for that very reason, we use it in our classrooms.

Civic service and other explorations into the human condition (the subject of the humanities, after all) become creators of surplus value in a pool of already perfect people. Extraordinary experiences are strategically acquired by the Super People to boost their perceived value. So how will a Super Person stand out in their college or graduate school application? They need to have a spike in their profile, choreographed by an extraordinary value-free "humanistic" experience like building refugee centers in Bosnia or volunteering at day care centers in Guatemala. Admissions officers have a special word for these people, they are “pointy.”

Like most liberal arts colleges, Franklin & Marshall specializes in the cultivation of “pointy” individuals who will excel in post-graduate arenas. We, the educators, have been very disingenuous in maintaining the Bildung myth, while inflating the market with seemingly value-free collegiate experiences. We all aspire to cultivate full individuals with humanistic depth and breadth. But we should all realize that our actual role in the dynamics of American society is the fabrication of spiky profiles, a strangely subverted ideal. There is nothing that I love more than creating Pointy students, but it depresses me to think that Pointiness is the single most operative capitalist value in the marketplace of the liberal arts college.

Great Learning Great Teaching Video

During this last academic year, F&M was celebrating scholarly collaboration between teachers and students. See more about this on the official website here. My work with Bonnie Halloran (whom you've already read about) was part of a little promotional video that was featured in last week's Common Hour. In some way, this is also the first public promotion of the Georg von Peschke exhibit scheduled to open at F&M and travel to Bryn Mawr in Spring 2013. I'm still a little shy about it, but at the same time, I cannot help from promoting the promotional (cue: 3:38 min of video).

Great Teaching, Great Learning from Franklin & Marshall College on Vimeo.

The Chair Project

Carol Hickey, professor of architectural design at F&M, teaches a studio every Spring, and I've had the pleasure of serving as a regular guest critic. The culminating project for the class is a chair. And this year, the assignment was a child chair. As part of the critic process, the students carried their life-size cardboard chairs to the daycare affiliated with F&M and had three sets of children evaluate the designs by simply using them.

This was an amazing experience. As you can imagine, both kids, students and faculty had a fabulous time. Some chairs did not make it through the day and many experienced significant "modifications." Many thanks to the staff of College Hill Children's Center. The building itself is a spectacular ca. 1910 brick factory renovated in 2008. I'll have more to say about that in a later posting, stay tuned for a Lancaster installment of steel beam vernacular.

I made quick sketches of the 16 chairs (left). Congratulations to the students for completing their studio semester and allowing the kids to test their designs. I had fun spending my day in daycare.

Colonial Revival (among students)

While my 1930s Architecture seminar students conduct their research on the campus architecture of William Lee, we had a chance to contemplate a new colonial revival building that was just completed at F&M's campus. The New College House was designed by Robert A. M. Stern and adheres to the traditionalism of Stern's campus buildings, anthologized in a new monograph Robert A. M. Stern: On Campus (2010).

The Stern commission has already received some critical attention in the Chronicle of Higher Education, but I will not review the debate here. Instead, I thought I might solicity my students personal opinions. Over dinner at Iron Hill, we went around and shared first impressions. I am including some of the responses below, which were overwhelmingly positive. We then proceeded to read William Rhoads classic essay, "The Colonial Revival and American Nationalism," in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 35 (1976), pp. 239-254, and asked not who embraced the Colonial Revival as our national style, but rather, who had serious problem with it. As early as 1886, for instance, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, argued that the Shingle Style is more appropriate for an American style (Rensselaer is best known for her early monograph H. H. Richardson). We then extended the discussion to broader contemporary questions, such as, the associations of slavery that an African American student might have with this style, or the associations of Imperialism that an international student from India might provoke.

STUDENTS' INITIAL RESPONSE TO THE COLONIAL REVIVAL COLLEGE HOUSE

I personally like the colonial revival style and feel that it is appropriate for the college to use. One of the attractive aspects of this style is the sense of familiarity and homey-ness it can give off. Often people who are looking at something like modernism get the impression of it being very cold. Although one might not be able to extract the exact references the architect was referring to when constructing the building, there still remains this sense of familiarity. One can recount the same design of columns and brick in our own towns or famous American landmarks. For the college student who may be away from home for the first time and in a completely new environment, seeing something as simple as a familiar architectural style can be comforting.

I think the new college house is an excellent example of colonial revival style. It truly does incorporate the defining characteristics of an elaborately decorated front door with a Greco-Roman portico and symmetrical arranged windows. The building itself is also completely symmetrical. After going on a tour of the building and learning that most of the features like the columns are machine-made woodwork I thought these building follows the colonial revival style even further. I think it’s an interesting addition to the college architecture and landscape. It definitely stands out but still in some way fits with William Lee’s original plan to put every building in a uniform style.

Colonial Revival buildings always made me feel very comfortable. It’s beautiful without being haughty, and has a sense of history attached to it without seeming too old. I think it’s maybe that Colonial Revival buildings are usually relatively simple in their design, but still have enough decoration to feel elegant and comfortable. Maybe most of these feelings are because I’m from Connecticut, where colonial revival style has always been quite present, but the style just feels very homey to me, while at the same time inspiring my appreciation for its beauty. I don’t think the feelings that I have are very unique, which might explain the continued prevalence of Colonial Revival style at colleges. If you have to be far from home and alone, it helps if the style of the buildings reminds you of your country’s roots. I’m not sure how that affects international students, but maybe that’s not who the college is aiming for.

The colonial revival style of the new college house is fitting within Franklin & Marshall College’s campus. Consistency of college architecture is grounding and can be a sense of comfort for students during a turbulent stage of their lives. This can mean that all buildings are consistently the same or all buildings are consistently diverse. Long ago, F&M chose to be uniform and is now bound to this plan, unless serious funding arises to create a more architecturally diverse campus. Even the more modernist buildings like Stienman College Center or Hackman science center were architecturally restrained to blend in. The Colonial Revival itself is very homey for native East Coast students where the style is prevalent among residential buildings. Those from a far who seek a little, New England, liberal arts college are well rewarded with the consistency of the Colonial Revival at Franklin & Marshall.

Medieval Art Connecting with Students

One of my commitments to teaching comes from what bell hooks called the openness to a multiplicity of narratives (Teaching to Transgress, 1994). The straightforward historical narrative of the textbook is one narrative; my own interpretations in lecture is another narrative. But there is also the narratives that students create with the very same material. Every semester, I try various techniques to understand those narratives by simply asking my students how the material engages with their "real" lives. Most of my students are not Art History majors, so they come to the class with different backgrounds and agendas. In the past, I have done polling, I have conducted recorded interviews, and I have made my students write short stories (see Teaching Thursdays and House Stories)

After the Dumbarton Oaks conversation on archaeology, I realized it's time to take the pulse of my Medieval Art & Architecture class at Franklin & Marshall (ART 275). On Monday, I explained to my students what went down at Dumbarton Oaks, especially the anxiety that we scholars feel over the relevance of Byzantium to contemporary America. I asked them why they are taking the class, what they thought the class would be like, what they have learned, what skills they have developed, etc. etc. The discussion was great!!! I wish I had done it more frequently in the semester. Then, I asked them to go home and consider what work of art from our survey is their absolute favorite and prepare to talk about it. Every Wednesday, we have a graded writing exercise, typically contrast-comparison or discussion about important ideas covered in the readings. This time, I gave them this question:

"This work of art ---- (Fig. --- ) in Snyder's Medieval Art is my favorite. Somehow it spoke to me more than anything else. It entered my private thoughts and actions in the following way."

Once I get permission from the students, I hope to post some individual entries. For the time being, I want to share some of the trends. Reading through all 19 entries, a number of consistent themes emerged.

1. GRAND TOUR

50% of my students made some reference to travel in Europe. Whether they have themselves been there or not, they articulated an important function of the survey as introduction to travel. More amazing than that was the realization that 1/3 of all my students had actually visited the monument of their choice in real life, typically with their parents before or after college. 83% of that sample chose a monument in Paris, and 66% chose Notre Dame Cathedral specifically. Whatever we say about the social utility of art history, we must embrace its touristic dimension. My role is not to criticize a certain socio-economic group (they are my bread and butter) but to highlight that personal site inspection is a central part of our process. One student was explicit, "I think many people in this class can't appreciate these monuments because they haven't seen most of them in person."

2. EMOTIONAL POWER

44% of my students discussed the emotional power of art and architecture. They mentioned some kind of awe and admiration. Medieval architecture and the art on its walls evokes a sublime response of power. The romantic tradition is alive. Monuments from the past, ruins and masterpieces transform the individual by some awesome power that they exercise on the viewer.

3. FAITH

28% of my students involved some discussion of their faith in their answer. Since the art of the Middle Ages is monotheistic (Jewish, Christian and Moslem) this makes a lot of sense. The class serves as a vehicle for addressing faith. Some students remembered their own religious education or lack thereof. Some students used the material in the class to access some elements of faith.

4. GENDER

17% of my students used gender in their answer. For some, it was a political inquiry. Representations of women (Eve, Mary, etc.) in the medieval world triggered a general inquiry about the social status of women. Some students picked up on the "femininity" of some works, either because of some aesthetic quality or because of subject matter. For instance, the articulation of an emotional relationship between mother and child was highlighted in scenes of the Virgin. One students even talked about sex (the sexual implications of Mary's Lamentation scene). I should also note that the class is predominantly (83%) female, a little higher than my usual distributions.

5. STUDIO

17% of the students spoke of how medieval art relates to their own studio production. Here, the work of art inspired or communicated with them as artists. They talked about style, or techniques of drawing the human face.

6. AMERICA NOW

11% of the class spoke about how medieval art has helped them understand contemporary America. Sometimes, it was a direct lesson such a in understanding collegiate Gothic (as seen in F&M's architecture) or the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. Some students took pleasure in contrasting a medieval synthetic life with the fragmented present (lack of focus, digital media, etc.)

7. HISTORY

Only one student (6%) mentioned the pleasures of understanding the interworkings of an old culture. In other words, only one student seemed in invested in the primary culture as such and figuring out what it was all about (regardless of how it relates to the present).

These are entirely preliminary, but they give me a good sense of what my students are after. I've highlighted the major emotional connectors, but there are plenty more. In conclusion, I was amazed by the statistical prevalence of three modes, The Grand Tour, Emotional Power and Faith. I was interested in three other consistent themes: Gender issues, Studio practices, and relations to American life today. It was enlightening to learn that only one student engaged Art History as a project of historical inquiry. Only one student showed emotional interest in the factual realities of medieval society.

Finally, about a quarter of the students mentioned some kind of inter-personal engagement. 22% of the sample talked about engaging their friends and relatives with the material that they learned in class. Some of it was engaging others in the mode of "our next vacation." But other students talked about critical conversations and experiences.

Lancaster: Architecture of Faith

Although I am bursting with topics to blog about, I have been quiet on OBS mostly because I have been setting up another blog, a blog for my class "Lancaster: Architecture of Faith" (F&M, ART 271). Inspired by Bill Caraher's Public History Internship Program, I decided to turn my seminar loose in the blogosphere. I set up Lancaster Architecture over the weekend and made my students submit all of their research on the blog. This reaffirms our commitment to public knowledge, but it also lets the students share their work (both text and image) in real time. Knowing that their research is made instantly available to the public, including the communities that they are writing about, will elevate accountability and rigor. You can visit the blog here:

http://lancasterarchitecture.wordpress.com/

So far, the students have only met once. The postings to-date reflect their first assignment. Each student had to visit 5-6 churches/synagogues/mosques and report on history and architectural condition. The numbers at the beginning of each entry comes from A. Hunter Rineer, Jr.'s catalog, Churches and Cemeteries of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Lancaster County Historical Society, 1993). Within the first two weeks of the class, the students will have reported on over 100 buildings. Already, this will be the largest record of Lancaster's religious architecture available. After the first two weeks, students will focus on individual case studies and issues.

For more information about the class, see earlier postings. The class syllabus is posted here.

Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life

On April 2, the Philadelphia Alumni Writer's House at Franklin and Marshall College held a panel on the publication of Intersection: Sidewalks and Public Life, edited by F&M professor Marci Nelligan. Intersection collects six essays on the political contestation of public space, inspired by Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). Nelligan and Nicole Mauro have assembled a collection of vibrant essays that reanimate Jane Jacobs' urban criticism. The panel included performance artist William Pope L., sociologist and historian Claire Potter (the celebrated blogger Tenured Radical), and sociologist Jerome Hodos. The room was packed with faculty and students.

The event was magical for someone like me, raised on Jane Jacobs. Most incredible was to see a liberal arts college conducting a workshop at such a level of critical engagement. Having passed through many small colleges (Swarthmore, Vassar, Conn College, Wesleyan), I've become sensitized to the role that they can play in American intellectual life. As Claire Potter pointed out (from her experiences at Wesleyan), elite liberal arts colleges have changed dramatically. Competition for admission has become so fierce, that the student body is now dominated by successful test-takers. Colleges with radical traditions have a new problem. Their students have been admitted because they have done everything right (and hence taken no risks); they are the cream of the crop of no-child-left-behind policies. Liberal arts colleges have become conventional places of higher education. Paradoxically, the administrations heavily market the liberal arts brand as a places of experimentation, diversity, individualism and overall funkiness. Potter's essay "Chalking the Borders" discusses this very confrontation between critical student practices and the administration, when Wesleyan banned chalking on its campus in 2003-2003. In this case, Jane Jacobs' sidewalk (private? public?) was contested through ephemeral graffiti written overnight by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer voices.

My copy of Intersection just arrived and its contents look great. I will post comments about each individual essay, as I read them one by one. I encourage EVERY reader of this blog to order the book. It's published by Chain Links, an independent venue, and it's worth every penny of the $16.

And here are a few additional notes on Jane Jacobs. Debates over the fate of the American city, walkable environments, creative classes, etc., have brought fresh attention to Jane Jacobs, see earlier posting, When a Place Gets Boring, Even the Rich People Leave (July 23, 2008). Jacobs is newly relevant in issues of civility in the virtual community of the internet. By reading this blog, you are participating in democratic space. Wikipedia is another key example of this space. This month, the first book on Wikipedia was published, where we read the following, "Ms. Jacobs argued that sidewalks provided three important things: safety, contact and the assimilation of children.” She may as well have been talking about wikis: “A wiki has all its activities happening in the open for inspection, as on Jacobs’ sidewalk. Trust is built by observing the actions of others in the community and discovering people with like or complementary interests.” These words could have come straight out of Intersection. They are from Andrew Lih's, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia (2009), just reviewed in Noam Cohen, "Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City," New York Times (March 29, 2009).

Finally, back to urbanism. Peter Laurence, my colleague at Clemson University, is perhaps the single greatest force in Jane Jacobs studies today. Once published, Laurence's dissertation will be the authoritative intellectual biography; for the time being, see "Jane Jacobs (1915-2006): Before Death and Life," JSAH 66 (2007) pp. 5-15. Last November, Laurence organized a conference, Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the Age of Oil. The event marked the 50th anniversary of another conference held at the University of Pennsylvania, The Conference on Urban Design Criticism, where Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, Kevin Lynch, Ian McHarg, Lewis Mumford, and I.M. Pei first introduced their new urban visions. Both 1958 and 2008 conferences were sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, see Laurence, "The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955-65," Journal of Urban Design 11 (2006), pp. 147-172.

Colleagues like Laurence made Clemson a place of intellectual debate (making my decision to leave even harder). For instance, I had the great pleasure to participate in Critical Practice for the Next Generation, a workshop on contemporary theory and practice organized by Laurence. It is there that I first learned the new term "post-critical," describing the architectural sell-out we are experiencing today (e.g. Rem Koolhaas, The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Intersection generates exactly the same intensity that I had last experienced in the Critical Practice seminars. And it reassures us that post-criticism has thankfully not won the day.

House Stories: Introduction

In my History of Domestic Architecture class, we are not only surveying a chronological history from Neolithic settlement to the present submortgage crisis, but we are also exploring the complexity of narratives surrounding houses more generally. We take theoretical digressions into Freud's un-homely (unheimlich/uncanny), Marx's fetish, Heidegger's being-dwelling-thinking and Alfred Hitchcock's films (where houses become characters). In order to open up the discussion, I asked all the students to write a personal narrative involving a memorable house experience. These House Stories were inspired by Studs Terkel's oral histories, by StoryCorps, by Dave Eggars’ 826 Valencia and by other interviews that I have been collecting. The result was so impressive that I am compelled to post the essays. It’s hard not to envision a published anthology sometime in the future. My class is taught at Wesleyan University Graduate Liberal Studies Program. The graduate students have a variety of professional experiences; they range from high-school teachers, to museum curators, librarians, fundraisers, physical plant specialists and artists. I want to thank the students for giving me permission to post their stories.

Click here to read all the House Stories.

The Cistercian Abbey of Zaraka in Ancient Stymphalia: 2007 Architectural Study

Around 1225, a group of Cistercian monks built a monastery next to Lake Stymphalia, on a spectacular plateau in the mountainous hinterland of ancient Arcadia. Abandoned around 1276, Zaraka provides one of the most interesting specimens of Latin monastic architecture in Greece. Its early foundation--only 20 years after the Latin conquest--places Zaraka at the beginning of a two-century long process of interchange between French and Greek craftsmen. The abbey survives as a romantic ruin; it was first investigated in the 1920s by Scottish architect Ramsay Traquair (who became a founder of McGill’s Architecture School in Canada), French historian Antoine Bon and Anastasios Orlandos (the Viollet-le-Duc of 20th-c. Greece). The abbey sits in the ruins of Ancient Stymphalia (famous in mythology for the slaying of the Stymphalian birds by Hercules), a site that the Canadian Archaeological Institute has been investigating under the direction of Hector Williams. In 1993, Sheila Campbell became Williams' collaborator in the excavation of the abbey. Campbell is the academic secretary of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (University of Toronto,) where in 2004-2005 I had a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship (I'm a proud Licentiate of Mediaeval Studies). Fruitful academic conversations with Sheila Campbell and Hector Williams led to organizing an architectural study season in Zaraka. The team came together with two collaborators. Joseph Alchermes, with whom I had worked closely in the Morea Project, was designing a field school for the architectural studies major at Connecticut College. And Anthony Masinton was a colleague of Ben Gourley, field director at the Stymphalia project. Masinton specializes in 3D modeling and visualization of British Gothic churches. In July 2007, the three of us gathered forces in Zaraka with three students. The results of our project have not been published yet but will contribute to Campbell’s monograph on the site. The short report that follows will appear in the upcoming issue of Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 8 (2008) and should be cited accordingly.

Joseph Alchermes, Kostis Kourelis, and Anthony Masinton

Architectural Survey and 3-D Reconstruction of the Cistercian Abbey of Zaraka in Ancient Stymphalia: 2007 Study Seaso

In July 2007, we conducted an architectural survey of the Cistercian Abbey of Zaraka in order to provide visual documentation and a 3D digital reconstruction of the structure. Built in 1225, the abbey is one of the most important specimens of Latin architecture in Greece. The site was excavated in 1993-1997 under the direction of Sheila D. Campbell (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto). The architectural fabric survives only partially, leaving many unanswered questions on the building’s original form. Our survey hopes to answer some of these questions and revise Anastasios Orlandos’ problematic reconstruction of 1955.

Alchermes (Connecticut College), Kourelis (Clemson University), and Masinton (York University) were assisted by three students (Constance Alchermes, Elizabeth Mandel, and Erin Okabe-Jawdat). In just over a week, the team managed to produce a complete set of profile drawings for all types of architectural blocks scattered throughout the site, as Masinton completed an EDM survey of all the standing walls. The drawings have served as the basis for a digital reconstruction of the architectural members, inserted into the spatial reconstruction. (Fig. 1) Participants in the project also traveled to western Peloponnese to document “Green Man,” a critical figured keystone from the abbey’s ribbed vaulting. “Green Man,” lost for many years, was rediscovered in the Sikyon Museum; the sculpture has recently been moved to the Frankish castle of Chlemoutsi, where it will be displayed in the permanent exhibition of a new Museum of Frankish Antiquities.

The brief but productive field season accomplished four objectives. First, it served as a new field school for Connecticut College’s program in architectural studies. Second, it facilitated a methodological conversation at the interface between traditional surveying methods and new experimental software applications in stereoscopy, geo-rectification, and digital photography. (Fig. 2) Third, the survey provided support to the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation’s digital reconstruction of Ancient Stymphalia, which will be displayed in the Foundation’s new Museum of Traditional Crafts and Environments of Stymphalia. Finally, the most important scholarly contribution of the project came in Masinton’s processing of the data in York. His expertise in medieval architectural analysis and modeling has yielded the first plausible reconstruction of the building: countless hours of data entry have enabled him to generate a realistic visualization of the building with fully user-defined navigation. Masinton will contribute drawings and an interpretive essay to Campbell’s final publication of the site. The reconstruction is available at http://www.thomasav.com/Media/zaraka.html.

The Zaraka Survey season was made possible by the financial support of York University, Connecticut College, and Nicolas Vernicos, a private donor associated with the college.

ILLUSTRATIONS (not shown)

Fig. 1: Zaraka, reconstructed elevation based on 3D digital model, interior south wall (Anthony Masinton)

Fig. 2: Zaraka, field drawing and photograph, interior south wall (Erin Okabe-Jawdat)

Teaching Thursday: Student Entitlement

I cannot count the number of times that the word "entitled" has come up when discussing today's students among other academic friends. A new study by Ellen Greenberger et al., "Self Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting and Motivational Factors" Journal of Youth and Adolescence 37:10 (Nov. 2008), pp. 1193-1204, has recently made those sentiments official. The study focused on students at the University of California, Irvine, and was reported by Max Roosevelt, "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes," New York Times (Feb. 17, 2009). Quantified in the language of social science, what seems obvious to many college teachers now has documentation.

Generally speaking, most professors that I know in the Humanities care little about what people in Education have to say; many even find research on teaching to be pseudo-scientific. And I must admit; I have sat through some meetings in search of "rubrics" that were so reductive as to make no viable sense. But last year, I read a book that highlighted the divide between pedagogy in the humanities and social science on education. Derek Bok's Our Underachieving Colleges (2006) argues that most academics feel that they know what teaching is all about and categorically refuse to consult any of the expert literature. I agree with Bok that our professorial attitude of "we are teachers and know best" is doing us a disservice as we continue to operate on completely arcane assumptions about who our students really are.

Whether derived through soft science or personal experience, the truth of the matter is that entitlement and grade inflation are rampart. "According to the UC Irvine study, a third of students surveyed said that they expected B’s just for attending lectures, and 40 percent said they deserved a B for completing the required reading." The culprits for this attitude are varied and complex. They involve not only standardized testing and aggressive parents, but also academics like us whose eyes are set on tenure (i.e. positive student evaluations) and not on thorny pedagogical questions.

I have no answers here, but I simply want to note that the study has, at least, generated some interesting discussion among fellow academics. What I've learned from this interchange is that the discourse of "entitled" students is geographically limited. My own experiences at Clemson, S.C., corroborate on the regional variation. Many non-academic issues governed student behavior at Clemson, but entitlement (as I've known it in elite East Coast colleges) was not the primary one. I've found that in the South there is still a fundamental respect for the role of the teacher and the inherent value of education. Many of the students may be the first ones in their family to attend college and they fully understand how different the classroom is from life. Clemson students would not assume that my class (and my existence) was simply a vehicle for a good grade that would guarantee something useful, entrance into the professional school of their choice. Being called "sir" was not simply southern politeness, but evidence of true respect for the knowledge that teachers bring to the table.

When I asked Bill Caraher (originator of Teaching Thursday blog), what he thought about the entitlement study, he sent me the following email. With his permission, I decided to post Bill's response below. Bill, I should add, is expanding his Teaching Thursday across the entire University of North Dakota. For a fuller discussion, see Student Expectations in an Age of Anxiety.

Email from William Caraher
Thu, Feb 19, 2009, 10:33 AM

"Kostis

The funny thing here is that I never get students complaining about grades! If they don't understand their grade, they'll ask for clarification (which is only fair), but I have never heard a student ever say that they "deserved" a better grade. In fact, I sometimes have to tell the better students that they EARNED their grade... I didn't just give it to them.

It's really a cultural thing, right? I mean, suburban students from the east coast have had everything given to them -- I am one of those people -- but students from more rural backgrounds , they've had to work their entire lives on farms, at the mill, whatever. And even if they haven't had to actually do farm labor, they know that this is expected of people in the community.

And they are fatalistic. They expect things to work out sometimes and not work out other times. So, if they study hard and fail... they see this as no different than working hard on the farm and having a bad harvest. It just happens. Again, it's not to romanticize these students, but society out here is so different.

Finally, they are totally respectful. In fact, the first time I taught Greek history, I almost killed the class... I had them read the Iliad, Herodotus, Thucydides, chunks of Polybius (Polybius!!!), Pausanias, various other stuff. They just kept reading it and this was a mid-level undergraduate course. They kept reading and reading. And they didn't complain until finally, I asked them what they thought about the reading and they finally admitted that it was crushing them. I felt horrible! They assured me, however, that it was not my fault.They just needed to get to be faster readers. I was stunned.

Anyway, it's part of the reason I really like working out here. And it's not just the students. It translates to the community as well. They actually respect you as faculty and intellectuals. They might think you are full of hot air, but they at least recognize that you work for the common good of the state, the community, et c. (This doesn't however translate to good pay, but then again we earn more than most North Dakotans.)

What you need to re-invigorate you is a year out in the NorthernPlains. Although it could cause your head to explode.

Bill"

Teaching Thursday: Norman Rockwell and Conn College

On February 23, 2000, a couple of Greek architectural history grad students specializing in Byzantium took a weekend road-trip up to New England to visit Mass MoCA (which had just opened in New Adams) and the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge. The prime mover of the trip was Nikolas Bakirtzis who wanted to make a pilgrimage to Norman Rockwell's house. The other traveler (which was I) had grown up in the U.S. and was more derisive of the saccharine Americana projected in Rockwell's utopia. I was much more interested in the high art world, I wanted to see an abandoned mill now housing New York's largest minimalist works (Mass MoCA). Nikolas had grown up in Greece but had spent one year in Urbana-Champaign, while his parents had an academic fellowship at the University of Illinois. At the age of 15, Nikolas fell in love with the America he met, and Norman Rockwell encapsulated for him that experience. I was a little younger when I first met America, but I came to stay; my family had immigrated for good to Columbia, S.C. So, my American experience fermented through puberty and exploded in typical rebellion (e.g. punk rock). As I think through the Punk Archaeology project now (see earlier postings), I realize that punk was just another phase in romanticizing America and deeply rooted in the traditions it subverted. In my most recent definition, punk begins in 1935, but there will be more about that later. As we commemorate Lux Interior, lead singer of the Cramps who died last week, we are reminded that 30s swing and 50s rockabilly gave punk its basic language. See obituary, Ben Sisario," Lux Interior, 62, Singer in the Punk-Rock Era is Dead," New York Times (Feb. 5, 2008), p. A18, and Bill Caraher's posting on Punk Archaeology blog.

I have reason to think about Norman Rockwell almost a decade after my pilgrimage to Stockridge from a new perspective, that of a teacher. The interview of a Connecticut College alumna in, "The Rise of the House of Rockwell," New York Times (by Carol Kino, Feb. 8, 2009, p. AR26), forces me to ask a basic pedagogical question. What kind of enduring influence can an art history professor have? As a visiting lecturer at Connecticut College, the question is even more specifically localized. Art history's primary goal is to teach young students about the highest forms of art and culture. Vernacular expressions typically fall on the wayside. Even after postmodernism's erosion of the high-low divide, the art history curriculum remains entrenched in the classics. If anything, Connecticut College is exceptional these days because it has managed to incorporate what other programs might consider lesser. Unusual for most departments, for example, is Connecticut College's architectural historian Abigail van Slyck, a renown authority on American vernacular architecture (houses, summer camps, libraries, etc.) She does not supplement some Alberti, Palladio, Ruskin or Le Corbusier specialist, but stands on her own. And the ancient/medieval historian, Joseph Alchermes, studies spolia, decrepit houses in Greece, and other such degradations of the canon. The modernist, Barbara Zabel, studies the machine and assemblages, and the Renaissance specialist, Robert Baldwin, thinks of money, race, gender and music more than connoisseurship. Connecticut College's Art History Department may have not been so inclusive 30 years ago.

Laurie Norton Moffatt, director of the Rockwell Museum, studied art history at Connecticut College but her experience only negatively encouraged her future career. In the 1970s, art historians had great derision for popular arts and that very scorn galvanized Ms. Moffatt:

"Ms. Moffatt began working there [Rockwell Museum] as a part-time guide in the summer of 1977, between her junior and senior years at Connecticut College, where she was studying art history and Asian studies. From the start she was struck by 'the incredible connection that our visitors had with the paintings,' she said. 'People would be moved to tears. People would be moved to laughter. People would be lined up around the building, waiting an hour to get in.' Yet in her college classes, she said, Rockwell received short shrift. 'If he was even put up on a slide at all, it was with great derision and scorn. It was very galvanizing for me.'"

Moffatt's Connecticut College experience begs the question. What may we be deriding in our curriculum in 2009 that will undercut some future cultural sensitivity? The case with Rockwell has changed dramatically. The turning point happened the year after my friend and I visited Stockbridge. In 2001, Rockwell entered the bastions of high art when the Guggenheim Museum hosted its first Rockwell exhibition, "Pictures for the American People," co-organized by the High Museum in Atlanta. Yet the question of inclusion has not quite been settled, as it became obvious a few weeks ago with the death of Andrew Wyeth (Jan. 16, 2009). Considered by many to be a populist, Wyeth's figurative style captured the general public but left the art world in ambivalence. The media stunt of the Helga drawings in 1986 and Wyeth's Republican politics did not help his reputation among art circles. Wyeth's death has sparked again the debate between purists and populists (where Norman Rockwell is always implicated). Robert Storr (dean of Yale School of Art) seemed to be pitched against Kathleen Foster (Curator of American Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art) on the airwaves and press.

The high-low art divide was intelligently thematized in a fantastic exhibit at my newest favorite local institution, the New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA). Its Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection prominently displays Norman Rockwell, Stevan Dohanos, J.C. Leyendecker and other illustrators as central to the American canon. In the current exhibition "Double Lives: American Painters as Illustrators 1850-1950," illustrates this very American juxtaposition of high and low art especially by artists who worked on both sides of commerce. Many American painters worked as illustrators in magazines and newspapers. N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's own father, is an important figure in this conflict, best known for his illustrations of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic Treasure Island (1911). My personal favorites from the exhibition are a drawing by Maxfield Parrish for Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and Their Gardens (1904), Lyonel Feininger's Kin-der-Kinds cartoon for the Chicago Sunday Tribune (1906) and works by the Philadelphian "Eight," John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and William Glackens (who, I learned from the show, went to my high school). I am thrilled that on March 6, the NBMAA will open a new exhibit, The Eight and American Modernisms, co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and featuring 70 paintings. If you remember from earlier postings, my interest on The Eight began with George Bellows, whose biography was written by Byzantine archaeologist Charles Morgan. I am intrigued that the NBMAA exhibition title has "modernisms" in the plural. My personal discovery of The Eight is also conditioned by the art-historical curriculum. As a student, even in the 1980s, we learned all about European avant-gardes and nothing about American figurative painters.

Perhaps, it is "modernisms" in the plural that today's art history professor can aspire to. Hopefully, our teaching at Connecticut College will positively influence the future curators of American art. Although, I suppose, negative influence goes a long way, as well.

One of the most interesting endeavors spearheaded by Ms. Moffatt at the Rockwell Museum is ProjectNorman, an internet database that will go live in November. In addition to massive digitization, ProjectNorman has sought to identify all the people that served as Rockwell's live models. For the 1958 illustration, "The Runaway" (shown above), Clarence Barrett and Eddie Locke have been identified as the sitters. Ms. Moffatt hopes to use Flickr to identify more individuals. Many of the models were from Stockbridge, where Rockwell lived from 1953 until his death in 1978. Rockwell typically took photographs of people and based his paintings on these photos. The paintings then became illustrations. Identifying the live models places attention on the fascinating and convoluted sixpartite chain of media transmission: 1) the all-American individual poses in front of Rockwell's camera, 2) a photograph of that pose is printed, 3) a painting is executed based strictly on the photograph, 4) the painting is photographed into an illustration, 5) the illustration is printed in Saturday Evening Post, McCalls and other magazines, 6) the magazines are shipped by mail to millions of all-American readers back to the reality of Main Street. Speaking as an archaeologist, the materiality of this transmission, tracing it back to the original daily life elevates the illustrative process of American life to the highest chambers of art and theory.

Roland Barthes or Walter Benjamin could really have a field day with ProjectNorman. In contrast, they might have less to say about some contemporary high art. For instance, the most recent exhibition that I saw in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Marlede Dumas' retrospective Measuring Your Own Grave left me disapointed. See Peter Schjeldahl, "Unpretty Pictures: A Marlene Dumas Retrospective," New Yorker (Dec. 22, 2008). Dumas has been discussed in relation to figurative artists like Francis Bacon or Lucien Freud; I was interested to see the intersections between the figurative and the abstract. But ultimately, I prefered to see the Francis Bacons downstairs.

A nice treat at the MoMA, however, was a small show on the Esquire covers by my favorite Greek American George Lois. The exhibit focused closely on the steps of manipulation. As in the case of Rockwell, there is a clear sequence of photographing a model and basing an illustration on the photograph. Some of Lois' famous covers include Andy Warhol swimming in a soup can (Esquire, May 1969), or a composite face of Bod Dylan, Fidel Castro, Malcom X, and John F. Kennedy (left, Esquire, Sept. 1965). To read more about the show, see Charles McGrath, "Cover Story: The King of Visceral Design," New York Times (April 27, 2008). Lois, famously created the "I Want My MTV" ad campaign. For further reading, see Lois' book Iconic America (2007), co-authored with Tommy Hilfinger, and Kurt Andersen's interview on Studio 360, "Rosenquist, Still Lifes, Jingles" (Apr. 28, 2008).