Dusk to Dusk Panel with Professor Hunter, Professor Schweitzer, and artist Matthew Day Jackson
Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2012
This past wednesday Professor Hunter of the Comparative Humanities department and Professor Schweitzer of the English Department joined with artist Matthew Day Jackson to present a panel discussion about the current exhibit in the Samek Art Gallery, “Dusk to Dusk.”
Each panelist brought up very interesting points that made you think about art in a new way; however, one of the most interesting parts of the panel was speaking with the variety of majors which attended and seeing how the panel affected each of them differently. You have to step out of your comfort zone and learn about something completely new to truly see the world. I spoke to a student who attended the panel, and she said that the panelists made her think about the entire exhibit differently. Being a chemistry major, she isn’t used to thinking about art, but she said that she would take the ideas from the panel and try to incorporate them into her daily life.
Matthew Day Jackson is on a drag racing team, and he is the fourth generation of car racing in his family. He learned how to create by going to his cousin’s shop and fixing car parts. His family was able to create, and he believes that being able to create makes you powerful. According to Matthew Day Jackson, power, speed, and faith are major themes in American culture. He enjoys building for drag racing because everything is “purpose built”. He even went so far as to say that our bodies are tools for sensing the world. Everything has a purpose.
The other panelists didn’t argue that these weren’t major themes, but they did argue that we needed to take a step back and look at the world without only worrying about power and speed. They summarized all of this with one word. Noise.
Step away from the “purpose built” and appreciate the things that have no specific purpose. To a chemistry major, art may not have a purpose, but this panel encouraged everyone to embrace the silence of a gallery, to think about why everything is placed there and considered to be art.
One quote that stuck with me after the panel was stated by Professor Schweitzer: “We don’t see things in our quotidian lives. We don’t see them, we use them…Something only has value when we can make use of it, all value is use value.” An art exhibit is a place where nothing seems to happen. Things slow down. The art stays there, and it will outlast our patience.The museum takes something out of context, and then displays it in no context. We learn to see in art museums, and from this we learn to focus, and to see a face for what it really is. He argued that if he was to put his cup on a stool and place it in the middle of the gallery, then people visiting the gallery would take the time to actually look at the cup for more than its use value.
This issue of use value is particularly interesting. Most people only view an object for what it can be used for, and don’t look farther than the basic, most obvious, answer. It is this idea that has troubled me since the panel, and I have tried to take the time out of my life to look at things for more than their obvious use value, but it is incredibly difficult. Bucknell students are very busy, and it is difficult to change your routine once it is established. Students attend lectures that make them think differently, and leave with the motivation to change something in their lives. The reality is that only a few of them, if any, will really make these changes. Most likely they will think about them for a few weeks then will slip up one day and blame it on something, slip up the next day with another excuse, and so on until they just stop making excuses. I saw this exact same thing happen when a speaker came to talk about girls being nice to other girls, since they usually aren’t. Everyone left filled with emotional stories about love and how that changes your life for the better, and how no one deserves to be teased, and most people truly thought of trying to be nicer people. The next day you could see a significant change in the mood of girls on campus, but it slowly went back to the usual catty girls teasing others.
We all want to change, and know that we really should, but it is very difficult. It has to become a routine, and we need to force ourselves to keep with it until it becomes second nature. I know that every student left that panel with different thoughts about design and viewing art. After a few days I know that most of the students were still thinking about art differently, and trying to step back from our busy lives to see things differently, and I hope that these new thoughts become a new part of their routine so that they remain with those students.