dogs playing cards: |
 |
dogs playing cards: |
|
PREFACE
You may be reading this
book for any of the following reasons: 1) your breast heaves with a love of art,
2) you harbor a death wish expressed in your desire to fight prejudice, 3) you
are part of my circle of friends and you both know I will be hurt if you don't
read it, or 4) it is required by some dust-covered professor (students of mine
who choose reason four are required to take the final). In any case, you may
encounter ideas that challenge comfortable assumptions. For instance, while I
acknowledge the good that organized religions have caused in this
world, in this
book I link the brutality that has haunted Western civilization—toward its
women, its marginalized ethnic groups, its under-classes, and its
environment—to three of the greatest Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam. Because the largest oppressed group is women, I give them the most space.
Further, while acknowledging the strengths of capitalism, I suggest that it is
erroneously regarded as democracy's conjoined twin and that it can be one of the
mechanisms by which this brutality is implemented. Some suggest that our
salvation lies within these very entities—and some of them make their suggestions with
varying degrees of violence. I must disagree.
My argument
is limited to the West, wherein lies my expertise. The same themes as they occur
in the East, while equally important, are someone else's book. Challenges such as those in Dogs
Playing Cards appropriately come from a university professor. A university's
first mission is to test its students' most sacred beliefs by exposing them to a
diversity of views. Any institution of higher education, so called, that sets
forth a monocular view, an `immaculate conception', of truth is an affront
to the free marketplace of ideas. Universities bankrolled by religious
organizations are often guilty of this. These moral gatekeepers rob their
students in the worst way universities can—they not only deny their students
the opportunity to test their deepest beliefs, but they seek to entrench them. Such
lack of faith speaks poorly of philosophies thus sheltered. It dictates that
professors who espouse views contrary to those philosophies—no matter how
brilliant those scholars might be, no matter how respected—will not be heard
within those institutions. Such fear of free speech emerges from the suspicion
that one's philosophy cannot withstand critical examination, that followers will
`fall away', seduced by the Pied Piper of Paralogisms. The result is a body of
alumni who may know the `how' within their fields of study, but precious little
`why'. They are the worse for it.
While the
university itself must strive to be ideology-free, professors within the
university should openly express their biases—so long as their students feel
safe to rebut them. If the university has done its job, it has obtained a
thoughtful faculty who represent an ideological cross section. Such a faculty
will expose students to a variety of views. When the students then construct
their own ideologies, those ideologies will be informed.
In this
course oppression is gauged from an art historical database and viewed through
the lens of art education. Art education encompasses both the visual and verbal
records of Western civilization from prehistory to this afternoon. Humans made
art for tens of thousands of years before they wrote and, following the advent
of writing, the visual image continued to function as a societal mirror
revealing truths that defy the printed word. At the same time, the power of the
printed word is self-evident. The lens of art education covers both.
The
culturally-created line separating art from the rest of life meanders at will
across the cultural landscape. Often I discuss oppression in its many guises without mentioning art directly. The
messiness of this approach reflects the
nature of our topic—art has no borders. My research starts and ends with art but I
found that, to make my inquiry meaningful, it was necessary to paint an
extensive backdrop. By thus contextualizing art, instead of
studying it in a cultural vacuum, we can understand what it means. One might say
the pieces of this story form a sprawling cultural quilt that is sewn with
the thread of art.
In recent
years a heartening
number of works have been published which analyze the contributions of oppressed groups to the West's visual art
heritage. This is not the case in art education (under which label I include
training programs for adults as well as programs for students in the schools).
We are only now beginning to see literature—still in articles more than
books—in which art education's potential as a cultural force in general is
linked with the dismantling of oppression in particular. The two
most important periods of the human story to study, if one wishes to remedy
societal oppression, are the dawn of history and the present. It is at the dawn
of history that oppression began, and its under-girding has changed remarkably
little from then to now. Our task is the perennial one—to
dismantle this under-girding as it exists in our time. Consequently, most of this
book is devoted to the
present.
If one
chooses to remedy oppression through the arts, one must redefine art
education. Immured for too long in a cultural closet, art education must
break free of the bonds of banality. Until it defines itself as more than a
vehicle for aesthetic experience, or for a Westernized study of disciplines, in
the closet is where it belongs. Art education programs must resonate to the
lived experiences of all students by providing them a visual language
through which they can express themselves with images that demand, rather than
request, society's attention. If our artists and teachers join to change the
world, the world will change.
The
institutionalizing of oppression occurs mainly along the following dimensions:
gender, class, race, and religion. Our prejudices run deep. We pay lip service
to theories of equality and democracy, but when we apply them uncompromisingly,
we are considered radical. Note the American Civil Liberties Union's
unpopularity, to give an example. One anticipates the efforts of critics to
neutralize this book by categorizing me as, oh, an agnostic, anti-family-values,
morally bankrupt, bleeding-heart-liberal, sexually obsessed, book-reading,
devil-worshipping, nigger-loving, violence-hating, pro-thought, pro-gay,
anti-lynching, femi-nazi, sickie perv-boy. This description is awfully close,
but I also am a White, middle-class, middle-aged, middle-income male of European
ethnicity and Protestant background—a member of today's least fashionable, and
arguably most boring, demographic group. I am not even gay, although I
have often wished I were so at least I would be something.
During the
writing of Dogs Playing Cards, I was asked if such a book should be
written by a White male. After all, Giroux (1988) cautions, "When freedom
is defined by the privileged, the oppressed are victimized not only by labor
exploitation, racism, and patriarchy, but by liberal arrogance.” Lather (1991)
adds, “. . . too often [liberatory] pedagogies fail to probe the degree to
which `empowerment' becomes something done `by' liberated pedagogues `to' or
`for' the as-yet-unliberated, the `other.'”
My readers' views on this question will be the most
valid, but mine begins with the observation that I do not anoint myself a
spokescreature for women or people of Color. Then what business have I writing
this book? Kincheloe (1991) points out that we walk a tightrope between
declaring our analyses and refraining from speaking for the oppressed. Is it
enough to be aware of what Foucault labels the indignity of speaking for the
oppressed? First, I maintain that demonizing the heretofore-deified White male
is not the answer; it tilts the ship of culture too far the other way. Lather
continues, “. . . to write `postmodern' is to write paradoxically aware of
one's complicity in that which one critiques. . . . [J]ust getting on with it
may be the most radical action one can make.” I observe that we all have the
same three choices. We can speak favorably of oppression. We can be silent,
which in a culture of prejudice is a vote for prejudice. Or we can speak out
against oppression. I opt to speak out. My thesis is that the oppression of one
group by another is bad for both. I am tired not only of the oppression to which
women are subjected; I am also tired of my fellow men dropping dead a decade earlier than women from the stress of oppressing them.
The need for
this book came to me one day when I was presenting a paper to an ethnically
mixed audience of about 150 classroom teachers (three of whom were men). I
discussed themes of oppression, empowerment, and emancipation. The handful who
walked out when I linked oppression to religion indicated that I was striking a
nerve. More importantly I was struck in mid-presentation by the awareness that
some of my audience were hearing these ideas for the first time. Their responses
when I finished confirmed this. A number of Latin and African American women,
one White woman, one woman who identified herself as Native American, and one of
the three men approached the podium to thank me. As I later assembled the
content of this book, testing and retesting my motives, including this thought
and rejecting that one, I realized that I was writing to this audience. I
realized that I, a White male, could contribute to their emancipation.
I choose a subjective voice because I believe the
objective voice is a Rationalist myth. This myth, heralded for so long as the
only appropriate academic voice, is no voice at all. It poorly serves the radical
emancipatory struggle. The objective voice is simply another means by which H. L.
Mencken's “booboisie” have made us shut up. I do not wish to assume the role
of spokesperson for demographic groups, either marginalized or mainstream, but
rather to contribute to the emancipation of us all.
Riding
shotgun with my anger, careening on the bouncing buckboard of civilization, is
my hope. If hominids emerged three million years ago, and fully developed humans
100,000 years ago, then civilization, at only 6000 years old, is an infant. One
could argue that we have done well in such short time. So my anger is
contextualized to the present. We're going to make it.
 |