Week Six- The Penetrative Imagination

As a young man John Ruskin had to rewrite the history of art in his head after walking into the Scoula di san Roco in Venice and experiencing the Tintortto's painted onto the walls and ceilings. He went outside and lay on a bench to come back to himself.  His experience formed part of a chapter in Modern Painter Three called the penetrative  imagination.  Here he talks about seeing beneath the surface of things to the reality of what is really there, what constitutes them.  In terms of the crucifixion I projected onto a building in Sheffield on Saturday he was talking about the truth of the bodies and the flesh the spirit and the corporal.  Sat in front of this painting at the Scoula, Christs bowed head is very human,  totally present, Tintoretto paints what is actually there, the truth of the fragility of our bodies and our mortality. 

Since my meeting with Laura last week I have constructed a line which starts at Ruskin within his writing on the imagination.  I am not sure where it goes next but we decided I should read some Dewey and some secondary texts on Dewey which I have started.  I am enjoying them but its slightly depressing that so little has seemed to change in the 80 or 90 years since he was writing in what is actually valued in education.  As I dart around in my reading the theme of failure seems to be coming up more than I expected.  Its not a reframed failure that turns into good art, or as Samual Becket put it ' Fail, fail again fail better.'  It the big failures of Marxism, of the politics of resistance , of social science to understand anything, of any type of intervention in the world that actually makes anything better.

Art carries enough failures and enough inadequacies of its own.  It is riddles with elitism, class , power, colonialism, appropriation and the fact that for it to be art most people feel it needs to be useless. I think art ended before history and it may end before the end of the world which will surprise everyone.

We have had a paper accepted for Aera .  It's for our project about feeling Odd in the world of education.  Me and Kate Pahl are presenting with Maggie Macclure so I have been reading a few of her papers. Its really refreshing to read something that is so well written and reflects what I feel I have taken from all my personal encounters with Post - structuralism and my newer encounters with the New Materialism.  What is very apparent when I'm reading though is that of all the things I feel guilty for the failure of method within social science research is not one of them.  I do not carry the sins of the fathers and I'm not complicit in it's failures. I realise that much of what I'm reading in terms of the newer publications is reacting to challenging established ways of thinking and doing research and this is making me wonder if I'm part of the problem or part of a solution.  In a strange way moving into the world of research is affirming my identity as an artist in a way that I didn't really need before, I just was one even though often it didn't feel like that.