South Bear School reopens for summer 2023

In a series of online talks on the history of design that I recently gave for Drake University's OLLI life-long education program, I spoke about the Bauhaus, which began in Germany in 1919. I discussed the influences of its teachers and students, some of whom emigrated to the US, where they joined existing schools or established their own. One of those schools was called Pond Farm, near Guerneville CA, where Marguerite Wildenhain worked with about twenty students each summer. 

Iowa potter Dean Schwarz and I were among her students in 1964. He returned in later years to be her assistant, and then established his own summer school, called South Bear School, near Decorah IA. He and his wife, writer Geraldine Schwarz, compiled and edited a huge, rich book about Wildenhain's life, titled Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eyewitness Anthology (South Bear Press, 2007), as shown in illustrations here. 

 

South Bear School, Decorah IA

The senior Schwarzes have retired, but there is a coalition of younger ones who are carrying on the tradition. In the coming summer (2023), they are again offering workshops at South Bear School, and the call for registration is out. More online information is here.

the offense of telling the same thing twice

Alan Fletcher

Above Alan Fletcher [British designer], model of one of twelve proposals for outdoor drinking fountains (made in stone, one meter high), in which each fountain is shaped to form the silhouette of a famous cultural figure, through reversible figure-ground. This one is the silhouette of Albert Einstein. As reproduced in Fletcher, Picturing and Poeting. London: Phaidon, 2006, p. 103.

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Vyvyan Beresford Holland [the second son of Oscar Wilde], An Evergreen Garland. London: Cassell 1968, Page 156-157—

My next case [of how to deal with boring people] is that of the horrible habit of repetition, often known as "twicing." This is the offense of telling the same person the same thing twice. Unfortunately, everyone over the age of forty is to some extent a "twicer," because he refuses to remember to whom he has told his stock stories, and he is apt to forget any new stories he has heard. He is also apt to be much too interested in his past life to care very much whether his victim has heard his stories, so long as he can get someone to listen to them once more, particularly if they happen to be true, or were true before they were embroidered out of all recognition. And it is almost worse if he says, "Do stop me if I’ve told you this before," because one should never run the slightest risk of repeating oneself to other people. On the whole, it is far better not to tell stories at all unless either you invited them yourself or they are very short.

The remedy for "twicing" is contained in: 

Rule VI.—As soon as one is certain that a case of "twicing" is about to occur, one should interrupt the "twicer" roughly by telling him that his story reminds you of another one, and then proceed to tell him his own story, with added detail. That is, if he will let you.

familiar american icons / artifacts made strange

Above Dust jacket for Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts After the Transnational Turn. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.  Available online at Internet Archive.

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In browsing, I was struck by the power and appropriateness of this book cover (annoyingly, the cover designer goes unmentioned). The contents of the book are equally interesting, such as “William Howard Taft’s Drawers” by Andrew J. Rotter, and “Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt” by Matthew Pratt Guterl. As noted in an earlier blog post, it was a Nebraska expatriate playwright named Virgil Geddes whose job it was to assist Josephine Baker in donning her famous scanty banana attire at the Folies Bergere.

The often-quoted phrase “to make the familiar strange” can be traced to an essay titled “Art as Technique" by Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, first published in 1917. His term for the process was defamilarization or ostranenie. I myself prefer this translation of what he wrote—

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, ones wife, and the fear of war…And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object, the object is not important.

In The Novel of the Future (1968), the writer Anaïs Nin rephrased Shklovsky’s concept in a brief (and perhaps too familiar) form as follows—

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

As I have written elsewhere, I became acquainted with Victor Shklosky’s ideas during years of corresponding with American writer Guy Davenport. It eventually occurred to me that there is a reciprocal process, of equal value in the innovation process, which might be called “making the strange familiar.”

Versluis and Behrens working out the Iowa bugs

Iowa Insect Series, David Versluis and Roy R. Behrens

More than ten years ago (if you can believe it), my good friend and fellow designer David Versluis (we have both since retired from university teaching) decided to collaborate. Actually, he came up with a plan, and asked if I were up to it.

Over the years, he had amassed an assortment of (kaput) Iowa insects. His proposal was to scan those, at high resolution, and to send me the scans by email, one at a time. I had free rein. After receiving the scanned image, I had to alter it someway—major or minor—for the purpose of making a digital montage, using Adobe Photoshop. I would then send it back to him, and he in turn would make a move—and pass it back to me again.

We did this fairly rapidly, and after five or six back-and-forth sessions, we soon mutually came to suspect that the work was finished. The ones that I especially recall are a beetle, a cicada, a dragon fly, and a hornet (above, in a cropped version) that was eventually found to be not a hornet but a yellow jacket wasp. In a few short weeks we ended up with a substantial, original cluster, titled the Iowa Insect Series.

After finishing the series, it was David’s initiative to print them at large scale, and to be watchful of competitions or exhibitions which they could be submitted to. For almost a decade, they were exhibited multiple times (through his efforts) at various galleries and museums around the country. The most recent one that I recall was an exhibition last year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called Evolving Graphic Design.

However, I have just now learned from David that two of the pieces have recently been accepted for an upcoming exhibition—called Awake! Printmaking in Action, at the Ann Arbor Art Center in Michigan, which will run from April 14 through May 28, 2023.