Leonardo

Light: The Fire LessonAuthor(s): Edward WestSource: Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons inArt/Science/Technology for the 1990s (1990), pp. 271-272Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578620 .

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CLASSROOM LESSONS

Light: The Fire Lesson

Edward West

Mluch education has become passive, where the student is simply to watch and the teacher is to perform. We need more balanced curricular models and we need to reassert that learning is most effective when it encourages the student's active involvement in the line of inquiry. The student's curiosity and active participation should be developed in the discovery process, because they are crucial to learning. The Perception and Notation cur- riculum affirms that active experience can restore art to life by amplifying the perceptual abilities of students while educating them in their notational choices. (See "Percep- tion and Notation: A Core Curriculum in the Arts" in this issue of Leonardo for a report on the full curriculum.)

The curriculum assumes that any aspect of experience can pertain to art; therefore comprehensive literacy (in all its various meanings) is key. In the past, skill has been the most tangible goal of studio training. Scholarship, a long- range goal, has often been subordinated to technique and style. Scholarship as a vital activity is included in the Percep- tion and Notation curriculum as a link not only to art history courses but also potentially to the full resources of the university represented by the humanities and sciences. Activating the students' full awareness and utilizing that awareness in the creation of art is the goal of the program.

To this end, assignments are multifaceted. To complete a unit of study, students must perform in a variety of arenas, not to show skills but to reinforce the development of lateral thinking, so that they, moving as perceiving beings, alive in their awareness, can seek the resources of history and sci- ence as a means to understand the range of interdisciplinary issues associated with cognition.

Notation of this understanding may assume many forms, dependent on the line of inquiry developed by each in- dividual in response to his or her experience. We want students to be active, as in a scavenger hunt, in finding answers to questions that have evolved from their individual inquiries.

Within the Perception and Notation curriculum is a course I teach called Light. In this course I try to reveal light as a primal force, a force fundamental to our existence. To allow the student to encounter light as primal, fire is used as a subject and as a notational vehicle. In the 4-week lesson concerned with fire, the student reads myths concerning fire (e.g. The Golden Bough [ 1 ], the myth of Prometheus [2], and so on). Literary references are encountered in such sources as Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, and vocabulary is reinforced as the students create their own dictionaries. In addition to the readings, film is used to illustrate the link between fire and myth (e.g. Yeleen [Brightness], a film depicting African magic associated with fire). Students are to contribute their individual research to the class and thus create a common resource. When asked to bring in images of fire, a student may as easily supplyJ. M. W. Turner's 1834

? 1990 ISAST Pergamon Press pic. Printed in Great Britain. 0024-094X/90 $3.00+0.00

painting Burning of the Houses of Parliament as the Fire Insurance of America's visual identifica- tion of burn marks. The idio- syncratic nature of individual selections is balanced by the contributions of the others in the class. Students are respon- sible for developing a line of inquiry as the lesson of study progresses, thus they move towards their ultimate nota- tion.

Students are given a writing assignment (a narrative taking the form of a journal entry)thin the Perception and VWithin the Perception and

concerning the memory of fire. Notation curriculum is a course The student's memory, as a called Light. The course includes a vital record of personal experi- lesson on fire, which the author ences, can be fundamental to here discusses. the development of a line of _ inquiry by the individual. The narrative, meant to reinforce writing skills, may also help form the images used in the visual assignments.

The student's personal experiences are balanced by an objective study of combustion and by the introduction of concepts of color temperature that are subsequently re- inforced in other areas of the course.

Events are staged to provide students with an experiential base. Students are asked to extrapolate from these events both visually and verbally. The event may be, for example, a demonstration by a chemist or a ceramicist. Available resources provide the direction pursued.

In the studio portion we ask the students to write, draw, perform, experiment, sculpt or utilize any other skill as- sociated with the concept of notation. We hope that stu- dents, when guided, can through a pattern of validated independent choices evolve into confident, self-directed individuals.

Students are asked to model for figure-drawing sessions or to stage an event with fire (stringent safety precautions are observed). This not only supplies the class with models but allows students to participate in each other's imagery. It is a goal of the Perception and Notation curriculum to teach students to actualize their ideas physically. Links to theater, performance, public speaking, teaching and so on are in- tentional. The freedom to move is imperative for an artist.

Edward West (educator), School of Art, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, U.S.A.

Received 26 September 1989.

LEONARDO, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, pp. 2271-272,1990

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This sensation must be fostered in a culture whose passivity has become a characteristic attribute.

Studio sessions also entail using fire as a notational tool, i.e. as one would use a pencil. The question of what is the proper tool can most successfully be answered with an awareness of the full range of tools available. Burning, heat and smoke are suggested as means of imaging.

The lesson continues with the stag- ing of a bonfire or a controlled burn on a scale that will show fire's energy force.

Fire is used also to stage shadow plays (a notational tool that will be used again in the Time course, where sha- dow plays are linked to the beginnings of the motion picture). The cave analogy is made available to an art audi- ence that may not encounter Plato's work in the course of their studio study.

The lesson concludes with an inves- tigation of pyrotechnics and the crea- tion of fire pieces (catherine wheels, burning effigies, fireworks and so on). A broad spectrum of drawings, writings, readings and viewing experiences pre-

cede the creation of these final works. We hope that students will seek to syn- thesize their experiences by coalescing their lines of thought into cohesive re- sponses to the topic at hand.

References

1. SirJames George Frazer, The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1922).

2. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, J. Scully and C.J. Herington, trans. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).

272 West, Light: The Fire Lesson

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