Author: Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.
Subject: Giving measurements to the intangible value of art, technology and education is a difficult task, especially when one is in the middle of the processes, as it were. One may have only the beginning and end of a lifetime to go by, and these are hard to see.
Statistics: 2284 Words. PP990707 ©1999 Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.
Human Structural Intellectual Capital, or HSIC, is a string I made up a few years ago in my study of the relationship among art, technology and education. Engaging these three activities are my favorite ways to pass the time. Whereas they say most people are obsessed with money, food and sex, I am obsessed with art, technology and education. To most people, therefore, I may be a bore, yet I do find my entertainment in thinking about HSIC as much as money, food and sex.
To rationalize this state of my affairs is not my intent here, nor do I want to compare my interest with those of other people. Most people compare themselves with other people because money, food and sex are quantitative in the matter of what proportion people believe they are successful. At least, I guess this must be true, but I am satisfied that I have enough. I believe it is neither necessary nor healthy to compare myself with another person as regards the commodities that money, food and sex have come to be in our society. My intent is to rationalize art, technology and education, my three healthy interests for my life's time. They draw me away from the usual concerns and recreational activities that I see most people appear to have.
My rationalization is of course an intellectual activity, as compared to the emotional activity that defines the origins of art. And there is a structure for it. The way of the artist is more emotion than science, whereas technology seems to be all science and little art. It may be true, however, that there is art in technology, but as art and emotion are linked, the arts can not be measurable contributors to the science of technology.
Yet it seems to me that when you add education to the formula, you find that you can restore a relationship between art and technology. My view is that education is the bridge between production and livelihood, art and technology and virtue and reality. Those three pairs are the basis for what I call my Perfect Studios.
In the domain of expertise with which I associate, the art, craft and design of printmaking, the Perfect Press is where I find intellectual and structural education to be at its best. This is why, as I prepare for another visit to a leader in an industry that I think is closest to education (Safeco, in the insurance and securities sectors) I think of measurement using printmaking as a guide. My current guidebook for my strategic planning--the technology if you will--is currently Dr. David Viscott's book, Risking I read his book and translate it to fit my needs.
Education is continuous and lifelong. I received as good an education as one could get in the 'Sixties in the region where I grew up. My college--a state college in central Washington--prepared me for lifelong learning. In this sense, college works for some people who, like me, never found a permanent niche in society where they could rest forever assured of a secure and permanent economic position. "I'm a man of means by no means," as the song goes, and I found it better to keep learning how to survive. This is clear to me now--35 years after I graduated from college: Six years as a student in two colleges (and another 19 years as a professor) were like quick-and-dirty one-year workshops on how to keep studying to earn the prizes life has to offer winners.
I also learned the price of failure. But that's another story. When I found Dr. Viscott's book in an alley sale (a story told elsewhere under the title, Everything I ever needed I found in my alley) it was another opportunity to learn more and get closer to my goals. In my book, The Art of Selling Art., I described my goals and how I set them. have also established how goal setting does not necessarily turn a loser into an achiever. Goals are like ghosts--they don't really exist in our world, yet people have spoken about them for all of human history as if they might, or that they do exist. (Maybe there should be a word in our vocabulary spelled Goalsts. My third book in the Perfect Studios Trilogy would be, then, Goalsts in the New Machine: Between Virtue and Reality).
To illustrate this, picture life as being like a football field on a foggy day. Imagine you have gone out early one morning for a long walk in a strange town where fall mornings are cool, damp and foggy. Seattle is such a place, and also those islands around Puget Sound. Perhaps you are in a very small rural community. You come to a football field next to the local high school. It is early--too early for anyone to be about. You wander across the field. It is so foggy that--standing around the fifty-yard line--you can barely see the goal posts on either end of the field. The lines that mark off every ten yards march off into the fog toward each end of the field, but the goals are barely perceptible through the thick fog.
Dr. Viscott suggests that it is necessary to measure risks and progress toward goals in a life made more interesting by taking risks. So when you measure your progress toward your goals you need to take steps toward them, yard by yard or step by step, without a really clear image of what the goal is! One goal is the future, the other goal post is the past. You turn your back on the past and lean toward the future.
If, on this imaginary morning stroll, you were not alone but instead you were a football player in a game, you would have an advantage. Even on a very foggy field you would know in what direction you are supposed to go. There is a diagram of the play, for one thing, you memorized like a roadmap. You have a team, a coach, referees and also those lines on the ground to guide your moves. These things aren't true for me. I have no team, no coach, and no lines drawn that I can use to map my direction and measure my progress. Instead I have books and poetry, art and science and the general ideas that my education provides.
So much for football. When, in his book Risking, Dr. Viscott illustrates how people can succeed in life by taking risks, he uses the analogy of driving a car and passing a truck on a highway to create a picture for his readers. I learned from his book how to prepare, commit and complete my next pass at insurance and finance (my selection from among industries that, in my opinion, are closest to the economics of art, technology and education).
However, I am not fond of driving, nor am I fond of highways. Highways are with traffic most of the time, and being on one is an increasingly risky business. It is part of auto insurance, but driving does not afford me an attractive nor instructive analogy. So Dr. Viscott can have his analogy. I choose the studio of the printmaking artist for my vision. This limits my readership to a very small number of people, but one of the best things I learned in college--and why college works for me--is that it is only by creative writing for a small audience can a visionary person achieve big results.
It think this is similar to the business of insurance and security in the financial world. There is power to be experienced by focusing on small incremental measures, accurate focus and single-shot marksmanship. Clear, sharp thinking and accurate calculations are the rules in other words. The scattergun and big picture vision are valuable tools, sometimes, but chance and luck are not reliable for measuring for the purpose of profitable, self-sustaining business. Technology proceeds more by measures, and less by our emotions. A self-sustaining life of continuous education, likewise, is achievable if one can measure the value of what one does with it.
I am known as an artist who makes prints. In the printmaking studios we make plates, we ink them and we print. I like this analogy better than Dr. Viscott's passing analogy and it illustrates the principles of prepare, commit and complete. In his book he says preparation to take a risk, committing to the risk (acting on it), and completing the risk to passing a truck under dangerous condition. By the way, Dr. Viscott then wipes out his driver, showing how the man's death illustrates what bad preparation, lack of commitment and no follow up may affect you. In my example, making the plate, processing the plate with ink, and printing the plate to illustrate my risk-taking. We call it proofing.
Before I proceed, the reader (who is a member of that small, niche population to whom I am addressing myself) must be let in on what my goals are. I said above that art, technology and education are my interests. I have a passion to work in these areas, and to achieve this I will require people, places and things. This may be like being part of a team. It is impossible to enjoy, concurrently, the three occupations by oneself. You can not do all three in a vacuum.
Relationships and experiences are the heart and soul of art, technology and education. So far, in my striving, I have found there is only a handful of people who seem to share my interests, and few places and times where we actually see one another face to face and exercise our devotion to the three occupations of art, technology and education. One place that seems to fill my dreams you could call school, but it is more like an art studio than a traditional school because there are no rows of desks, no lecterns and bells or buzzers going off every hour.
On the other hand, this imaginary place is not a typical art studio, either, because there is teaching going on all the time amidst the practice and production of the making of artworks. But it is not like a studio, either, because you hear there is some serious work being done. And in this regard I am like a research mentor. Teaching, research and practice all happen at the same time, under one roof.
Printmaking is the perfect art medium for this school/studio/research environment to be practical. This owes to the fact that printmaking is more a technique and process routine activity than it is art in the conventional sense. Art--to the majority of people outside the community of practicing artists--is a product or a commodity. For example, people think it is a painting to buy and hang on the wall in one's home or corporate offices or a sculpture to put on a pedestal or set in a park. Art is not a process, in the conventional opinion of most people, but an object or a product. Similarly, science is a process. And technology is a product, like artworks.
In my world--the imaginary Perfect Studios, the addition of education to the pair (i.e, art and technology) puts a spark in this mixture and ignites it like a potato gun. Education gives one's life a dynamic quality akin to life itself. My vitality and enthusiasm for new ideas, new pictures, new techniques and new ways to cultivate the education I got in college all come from the mixture of art, technology and continuous education.
I need fuel and I need a spark plug--like Dr. Viscott's imaginary car engine going into passing mode. I must use my printmaking analogy, however, and not the impersonal, mechanical and violent consequences of high speed driving on a dangerous road. If I am to succeed in reaching my goal of the Perfect Studios--where teaching, research and practice are happening under one roof all at one time, continuously--I need to use printmaking and other media arts. Here we prepare by making a plate. We commit by inking the plate and readying the paper to print it on, and we complete the action by running everything through the press. In the media arts, like no other (save music) preparing, committing and completing are seamless.
I believe I have given Dr. Viscott's book a fair reading, and so I can stop writing for awhile (and the reader may stop reading) and continue my study of what Dr. Viscott says are the next steps I need to take. He lists questions that one should answer to develop a system for measuring and evaluating one's progress. It is an excellent book for me as I am preparing to revisit Safeco--the organization I believe best represents the kind of player in the team effort to move toward the Perfect Studios and fill the role of expert in HSIC art, technology and education. Later--further on my steps toward my goal--I may describe other potential team members--the Bellevue Art Museum and the University of Washington--most likely the School of Dentistry.