Interlochen Center for the Arts
The Artist as Revolutionary
Good evening, faculty, staff, students, parents and friends, both here and joining us at home through this first live web stream of an Academy opening. On behalf of the entire Interlochen community, our Board of Trustees, and our Academy alumni, friends and family, welcome to the first program of the 48th year of Interlochen Arts Academy and the 83rd year of Interlochen Center for the Arts.
This evening, we arrive, ready to teach and learn; to create or interpret millions of notes, words, dance movements, mix clay, oil paints or weave fibers; to tell stories through words and film and express ourselves through more than 250 presentations of your work. You will share experiences and collect memories in the company of some of the most talented students from around the country and around the globe. You will be challenged by an artist-teacher faculty and dedicated staff of a quality rare for an American educational institution. You are about to begin an experience that will forever shape your life, your role in the arts as creator, advocate or revolutionary, your leadership as artist citizen, and friendships for the rest of your life. This is Interlochen Arts Academy, the most amazing high school in America, and we welcome you here.
A theme at the Academy helps to focus our interdisciplinary work and collaborations as a community and started two years ago, when we chose the theme the artist as citizen for the year. Throughout that year we explored the civic and social duties we have as artists to our society and the greater good.
The genesis for this year’s theme - the artist as revolutionary--came from a change in calendar. When we were offered the chance to produce Alan Menken’s musical "A Christmas Carol" we decided to move it to December, which makes more sense than May! But that meant moving the traditional December ballet to another spot in the year. And that is when Wendy Masterson in our dance department suggested that we do something entirely different in ballet and celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Ballet Russe. Octavio Mas Arocas and the orchestra program got excited, and then the conversation grew and other arts faculty and then academic faculty wanted to participate, since the period surrounding the Ballet Russe, in the early third of the 20th century, was one of the greatest artistic revolutions of our time, as well as in politics and literature and science. Tonight we start a thought process of the role of those artists who choose to take what IS, or the status quo, in their art to a new place, pushing the boundaries of the arts and creativity, in new, daring, exciting, risky and controversial directions.
Of course, artist revolutionaries are not necessarily those who tear down all walls and work only in edgy or incomprehensible genre that tear at our artistic understandings or aesthetic sensibilities. Certainly there are those who do that, and we need them as much as we need those artists who incrementally push the walls of convention—and redefine the box in which the arts live, with smaller but no less important steps. But those who take giant steps—sometimes even by accident or experimentation—take bigger risks, for they often take a quantum leap with a conceptual grasp of their art far beyond their peers. Sometimes their journey is lonely, for they may be far ahead of their profession. But eventually others will join them—and then of course as that revolution becomes acceptable, someone will push the boundaries and the artistic revolution begins all over again. Revolution in the arts is a never ending cycle. Little did I know that my summer vacation would run headlong into three experiences that challenged me to think about the artist as revolutionary in interesting ways.
This August Julie and I traveled to New York City to visit our daughter who lives and works there. While there we first went to the revival of Leonard Bernstein’s remarkable music theater piece, West Side Story, now more than 50 years old. This incredible collaboration between three artist revolutionaries, composer Leonard Bernstein, choreographer Jerome Robbins, and a relatively unknown lyricist named Stephen Sondheim, produced a piece that redefined music theater, using Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as the foundation, changing Romeo for Tony, a Polish immigrant, and Juliet for Maria, a Puerto Rican girl newly arrived in America--set against the backdrop of clashing street gangs on the city's West side.
When WSS debuted in 1957, its hot pulsing Latin and jazz rhythms in a near operatic score, incredibly complex relationship between the composition and the choreography, and a raw contemporary topic that came at a time when the typical music theater audience was anxiously awaiting the happiness and artistic safety of yet another Oklahoma or South Pacific. What they got was a dose of urban reality and pathos that nearly brought Broadway to its knees, no overture but instead a darkened stage and an anguished jazz lick with gang members snapping fingers, no happy ending, rather, a death under a highway overpass. It would not really be until Hair and Godspell a decade later, that music theater would again explore the genre the way that these three revolutionaries pushed the boundaries with West Side Story.
There’s a great saying that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result. Sometimes it is that notion of making or creating change in the art, some compelling inner force, that requires us to deliberately NOT do the same thing yet again. Revolutionary movements in the arts are usually a reaction to what has come before, an act of radical departure that challenges us to rethink the art and not simply get better at doing the same thing in the same way.
Such was the case with our visit to the 50th anniversary exhibition of the Guggenheim Museum, which brought together some of the great contemporary art works that appeared in the museum’s opening show in 1959, as well as a fantastic exhibition of the work of the architect of that museum, Frank Lloyd Wright, who died 50 years ago this year, just before the Guggenheim museum opened.
If anyone pushed the notion of thinking outside the box, it was Frank Lloyd Wright, who rethought the very idea of the box in architecture. Before Wright’s work, houses were essential boxes, square framed houses that even with ornamentation added in various architectural periods still were the same form of post and beam architecture used since Grecian times. Wright first explored opening up the corners and sides of his buildings with unique windows and the use of lighting effects both natural and electric, extending rooflines far beyond the traditional corners of the box, adding cantilevered porches and decks and using atriums and unusual shapes of rooms, building his houses with the natural elements found in building sites and the environment, and eventually unusual shapes like the Guggenheim, which is entirely round, to completely rethink the notion of the box until there wasn’t a box at all. To see this museum, sitting on Fifth Avenue among a bunch of late 19th and early 20th century boxes, is still a controversial sight 50 years later, as jarring in some ways as the buildings of Frank Gehry or Santiago Calatrava today.
And then, to beat a good old 95 degree day in New York, my family and I spent the afternoon wandering the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And, coming after West Side Story, and the Guggenheim, I was struck in gallery after gallery, room after room, of the remarkable number of artist revolutionaries there have been throughout all recorded time, from the painters in the Chauvet caves 30,000 years ago to incredible pottery, glass, frescos and jewelry from 4000 years ago to an exploding array of artists in every culture, in each millennium, each century, each decade, and within decades, who choose to react to life - social or political movements, the environment, war, love, religion, color, form, expectation, sound, words, to create the arts that are the soul of our expressions as humans.
Thanks to John McKaig let’s take a quick view of just a few revolutionaries in the visual arts:
Michelangelo Caravaggio , a late Renaissance painter was a troubled, tormented genius, produced images that were diametrically opposed to the established canon of the Roman Catholic Church, even though they were commissioned by the leaders of that church. His images are sensitive yet dramatic depictions of organic, imperfect, gritty human events - not populated with angelic, stylized saints and prophets in heaven.
French painter Claude Monet’s early work in the late 19th century was so shocking that the Dutch police arrested him in 1870 for "revolutionary activities". His paintings inspired the derision of critics (this painting was called crude and brutal), and was thought to be the antithesis of proper academic painting - which was a good thing, as it turns out. His later work was on the conceptual and spiritual level of the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S., forty years before their work was first shown. The seminal genius of modern art, Pablo Picasso, was the artist who produced the first cubist painting, taking light, plane, angles, perspective and developed an overpowering range of work in almost every media that promoted his ideas that art should be developed from truly personal experiences, and by an artist working within the lineage of his artistic ancestors. His work was both personal and rich with social commentary, and validated for all modern artists the idea of taking influence from whatever each artist experiences.
A contemporary of Picasso in Revolutionary Russia was Liubov Popova (1889-1924), who in her short lifetime produced an immense body of work in painting and design that promoted the idea that new forms of non-objective art could advance and re-organize society for the benefit of the common man. Her prolific career was the inspiration behind modern graphic and product design, first widely promoted by the Bauhaus school in Germany in the 1920’s.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was deeply influenced by the development of jazz music during his time working in Paris, London and New York - as well as by the rapid growth of modern urban life. Those influences pushed Mondrian to create gridded images that were symbols of the vitality and improvisation all around him. He was the first to embrace a personal code of development that also included the idea of making the image completely self-referential - that is, each compositional element relates only to another element in the painting, not to any element or idea outside the boundaries of the painting.
Willem De Kooning (1904-1997, whose work epitomized the work of the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, and his series of images of "women" as well as his later, more graphic images of bold lines and swirling calligraphic passages are considered the grandest combination of primitive influence, pure drawing, and personal spiritual expression.
Milton Avery was an influential mid-20th century artist and teacher whose ideas were crucial to the advent of abstract painting in New York during the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. His students included such seminal and revolutionary artists as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman. Avery’s contemplative compositions foreshadowed the development of the highly influential Abstract Expressionist movement in the United States, and was seen as revolutionary by both traditional and avant-garde critics and painters.
Each generation creates new revolutions, and we certainly have one today in architecture. Architect Zaha Hadid’s work encompasses seemingly disparate influences such as computer circuitry and organic animal and plant forms into a truly revolutionary style that is now sought by the leading cultural and governmental institutions in the world. She is the only female winner of the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, and pushes the thinking of young architects by regularly teaching, at Harvard, Columbia, The University of Chicago and the Ohio State University. Her designs are large-scale sculptures – treating the building as an oasis of form amidst its surroundings.
Finally, some of the most striking new work comes from one of our oldest living artists, Louise Bourgeois, now 98. Most likely the most influential sculptor in modern times, Bourgeois has produced thousands of sculptures and site installations that explore a range of personal imagery based on her re-working of ideas of family, sexuality and women’s role in modern society. Her mastery of all sculpture media and relentless development of imagery has often challenged the standards of accepted large-scale sculpture being produced by her male contemporaries, thus marking her a true visionary and revolutionary.
Perhaps the artist as revolutionary is most easily observed and perhaps understood in our newest 20th century art form, motion picture arts, in part because this discipline of artistic synthesis arrived at a time of remarkable technological advances, during a century of extraordinary change in our way of life and in all the arts.
French magician, stage designer, and visual artist, George Méliès, paved the way for cinema to become fantastic, boundless; he is credited by some as the inventor of the film narrative, opening the use of film cameras to the world of fiction and not simply to reproduce or mirror life as it existed. Building the first permanent studio, he used skills he honed in the theater. Trapdoors, scale, mirrors, and puffs of smoke, he translated and modified for camera, methods of special effects that are still used today; double exposure, matte paintings, forced perspective and, more over, visual storytelling. Watch this short cut from his 11 - A Voyage dans la Lune/Trip to the Moon, and you will be amazed that this film premiered in 1902.
So, what does all this mean to you, our Academy students in this 48th year, and to our entire Academy community? The Academy is a remarkable school really unlike any other in the country, and we are proud of the work that is done here. But that does not absolve us, students or teachers, from challenging ourselves to make the incremental changes in program, pedagogy and experience that keep the Academy fresh and vital and at the forefront of arts education. We do this not because we are different, but because we want to be better each year at being different.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright, who challenged the notion of the box, I hope we are prepared to take inspiration from the artists we will study this year who were revolutionaries in their time. I hope we will be prepared to look at the definition of our box of learning in the arts, and push against its four walls-the walls of pedagogical convention, professional expectations, consensus and status quo, and the highest wall, the fear of change itself.
Perhaps the greatest limitation to creating new ideas, of revolution, is that fourth wall, the fear of change, the deep paranoia and fear that surrounds human beings when we think about making changes or doing something different- and certainly being the first to do so-to break the mold, to take risks, to ask why. We must remember that revolution in the arts is a required force in the evolution of the arts.
Why is this important? Because you, our students here tonight, are the artists who will be the revolutionaries of the future. The foundation and experience you receive here will help you to bend and blur the arts until you create a revolution that will challenge future generations of artists, and artist teachers. Our work this year will help you ask the question why, so that you can eventually ask an even more important question, why not? As we look at the revolutions created by Academy alumni who have come before you, we have boundless expectations for YOU as you begin to learn how to bring new revolutions to the arts in our lives. I welcome you back to an exciting year, and wish you well as we continue the revolution in learning in the arts that is Interlochen.
Additional remarks from the 2009/10 Academy Opening Convocation of the 48th Year