“Undermine the harmony of the educational system.” These wise words by Carol Emmons have been sitting with me since her talk.
Art is a lot of things: self-expression, world discovery, understanding, politics, and so on. Art is not without purpose, however. It serves a purpose because it's creation was meant for something to happen. It could be a conversation or an interaction, or even to invite the audience to engage in self-reflection.
Emmons gave a talk at Lawrence University about practice, which is something I’ve struggled with for a long time. What is practice, really? When, and how, does someone…practice? The simple answer is by doing; but what happens if your mind undermines you and makes you think that all that practice amounted to nothing? These are valid questions and ones that have stopped me from pursuing things in the past.
And yet, the past is the past.
Emmons' art focuses on how humans navigate this world. Her art is interactive and thoughtful. She puts time into researching the topics her art consist of. She treats her art with care, and that care can change depending on what tone she is wishing to convey to the audience through a piece. She didn’t wake up one morning with these gifts, with these eyes for detail. She cultivated them through one word: practice.
This is where I return to Emmons' comment about undermining the “harmony of the educational system.” The educational system is, in a way broken, or at least outdated because it can keep up with a world ever-changing and growing at a high rate. We need to be able to define what practice looks like to us, separate from a learning environment. It only can do so much for a student before the artist has completely been removed or beheaded by the system masquerading as a way of ‘cultivating talent.’
In Emmons’ practice, she discovered a staple of her art: making it interactive rather than keeping to the ‘see, don’t touch’ rule that many museums and art galleries still have on their collections today. This to her was important. She wouldn’t have discovered this simply sitting in a classroom, rather than physically getting involved with her work. She needed to practice her practice.
Thanks to Emmons, I need to find ways of breaking the expected rules of the educational system within my art forms to truly grasp my full potential as an artist.
I was thinking a lot about practice as an idea too. What you said about interacting with the art reminded me that it isn't just the artist who practices, but the art itself also imparts a practice upon those who interact with it.
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