What would it be like to
see like Rembrandt - to sense the gesture in all things, looking through to the
ugliness and squalor and finding a harder beauty in that; what was that
like? What was it like for him to walk down a street of an evening and how is
it different for you today? Can we let him suggest to us the penetrating gaze,
the love of everything alive and aging?
 |
| Rembrandt, black crayon on paper |
Even if you're
listening to 'Foster the People' in your headphones and everything is lit by
street lamps and neon ads and the subway rumbles underneath you?
Is Rembrandt's
experience and his gaze - 350 years old, pre-industrial, pre-electrical,
pre-mass-media - unrecoverable, anachronistic? Do we have entirely new eyes?
There's a saying in Torah study that if
Moses were to come to a temple today he wouldn't understand Torah, for he's
missed 2500 years of commentary.
You aren’t coming to this school to be
competent or just about good enough – this is about bringing what’s inside you
out so that is bursts in the sunlight. You are in training to be astonishing.
When I was in art
school I had a classmate - older, a returning student in his 40's - who called
me at night and asked me with a manic glee if I had started the homework for
our drawing class with Wayne Thiebaud, which was to copy a drawing by Honore
Daumier. Because he had, he had been drawing for hours, and it had
pulled him into an altered state of consciousness, as he was eager to tell me.
"The way Daumier
draws is mind-blowing," Ron said, for that was his name. "He just
scribbles until finds an edge that he likes, until he Hits something, then he
Follows it, and makes it the Thing, and you know he couldn't tell if he was
drawing it or it was drawing him. I can just feel it in my pencil! I know how
he felt!" Then he whispered intensely - "and I've been listening to
Shakespeare, Richard Burton reading Hamlet, and I'm thinking that's what
Shakespeare was doing too, godammit - he spun, he scribbled, in the meter and
the rhythm, until he Found something, the word or three words and then just
followed them." His fervor was extremely funny. "I'm thinking this is
weeeeiiird, man, I liiiike it!"
 |
| The very drawing we copied in class |
In class Ron brought in
his copied drawing and about 20 other drawings he had done in the fit of
Daumier inspiration. Professor Thiebaud looked at them all, nodded, said, 'Not
what I asked you to do … but … it will do …’ and walked on (he was a man of few
words).
This, I've felt since
then, is what homework should be about. This isn't drudgery, but a path to
ecstasy! We're not here to make you draw better - we're pushing an altered
state of consciousness!
When I went on to NYU, my
teachers were man and women of the theater of the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. They
taught about designing for a world of entertainment that economically,
artistically and technically doesn’t exist anymore - and yet their deeper lessons about design go through my
mind every day. Even if I then turned their lessons on their heads.
For the next three
years, remember this, lodge it in a protected place in your mind: It's going to
feel at times like we're forcing you to draw, see, design in our way,
the officially agreed-upon right way to be a designer, but it's really about
surpassing and flying beyond, doing the confounding, fucked-up, most off-kilter
and at the same time most profoundly appropriate thing in the world.
We're trying to train
you to do the thing we don't understand and don't know is possible.
Camus said that no
graduation ceremony is complete until the students consume the faculty.
I've been doing this
for 20 years and I'm smart as hell and you should listen to me hard – and I
want you to take everything I have, like a thief in the night, and misuse it
all to your own ends.
Your Mission
Be astonishing.
Have a great year!
