This is part two of my story on art. The first part can be found here (or just look for the previous entry on my blog). Let's pick up where I left off, at the start of high school:
In my freshman year of high school, we were given three options - join glee club, join orchestra or band, or take a year long art course that featured a quarter each of drama, visual art, and music theory, followed by a quarter where we did a 3-week final project in each. Since my singing voice is so bad I don't even like to sing in church, and I have no skill in musical instruments whatsoever (long story, not worth it), I opted for the drama/art/music choice. I also figured that since anyone was able to take it, we would be judged on the amount of work we put into our art, not the quality of the final product. Our first assignment was to draw a picture that incorporated our name by spelling it out in some form. I labored over a perspective drawing of my name in a game of Scrabble. At my teacher's suggestion, I kept it black and white, focusing instead on tone and shadow. Just to make sure, because everyone else was using color, I asked him again. Black and white was the way to go, he assured me. I got a B on the project, with comments along the lines of: "Should have used color to make it more vivid." At that point, I decided art clearly wasn't my thing. After a year of drama class (another long story not worth going into), I dropped out of the arts entirely, focusing instead on creative writing and speech and debate.
At the end of junior year, I decided on a whim to support a small movement amongst my classmates to reinstate AP Art History as a class. I don't know why I did, given my past experiences with art and my fear of memorizing lots of details about artworks, but it seemed worthwhile. Besides, AP Art History was my third choice for social studies, after AP Psychology and AP Government. As luck would have it, my schedule did not allow for either of those two, and I was placed in AP Art History along with nine other seniors who had actively lobbied for the class and put it as their first choice. My mind flashed back to freshman year - I had Western Civilization I with the (in)famous Mr. Aliazzi, the toughest teacher at the school, right after he had finished teaching AP Art History to the seniors. I remember haggard students staggering out of class, clutching their Art History tomes and telling us, grimly, "Don't take AP Art History with Aliazzi unless you really want your butt kicked." This was not college, and I could not run to the school's scheduler in a panic to demand to switch into something else, so I resolved to make the best of it and soldier through the year.
Although a few of my classmates and I would come to refer to the decision to take both AP Biology and AP Art History as the "suicide combo," AP Art History turned out to be one of the best classes I took in high school if not throughout my entire education. Mr. Aliazzi, who had been kind of intimidating our freshman year, was knowledgeable and witty, if still a little blunt (a hallmark of his teaching style). He made sure we knew that we had convinced him to teach art history, instead of him convincing us to learn it, so we were going to take an active role in our learning. If a student zoned out, he would bark, "Why are you staring at me like a cow staring at a gate!?" He would commend us for our efforts to analyze everything from Greek contrapposto to Flemish still-lifes to French Gothic cathedrals, yet always challenge us to dig deeper, say more with less, and write compelling papers rather than bland ones that simply met the criteria. To this day, I remember how he would assign paper lengths:
Student: "Mr. Aliazzi, how long should this paper be?"
Aliazzi: *Pause* "Don't bore me!!"
Sure enough, that was his standard. We were to take as many words or pages as we needed to compare Early Kingdom and Late Kingdom Egyptian sculpture or North and South Renaissance tryptychs, but he always told us politely but firmly if we had blathered on. He treated us like men less than a year away from college rather than boys who knew nothing (his comments about his freshmen were always a hilarious start to the day - in one case, a freshman asked him if early medieval peasants celebrated Thanksgiving). He did not suffer fools well, but as a result, I learned more than I ever expected about art, and it really sunk in. I was floored when I scored a 5 on the AP Art History test, not just because it meant I would not have to take an art class in college, but also because it meant I actually knew enough about art to write clearly and insightfully about it.
As luck would have it, AP Art History was the final class I had on my last day of senior year. Most of my teachers had simply cancelled class so we could play outside (second semester seniors are like kindergarteners in that way), and my AP English - Satire teacher had sprung a surprise final quiz on Catch-22 on my class, but not one person in my AP Art History class expected Mr. Aliazzi to cancel class - we did not even dare ask him. With the AP Art History Exam less than two weeks away, he let us ask any questions we had, and then asked us, now that we had studied art for a school year, what we thought art was. We offered our opinions, all of which were met with varying degrees of support and criticism, then he paused.
"I'm going to try and offer what I think is a fairly good definition. Art is human spirit in sensate guise."
The room fell silent. We were unsure of what to say. For my own part, I thought that was about as close to a perfect definition as we were going to get.
Mr. Aliazzi continued, "Let me show you. Follow me." He led us to the choir practice room, and took a seat at the grand piano at the front. We had all heard of Mr. Aliazzi's piano skills - there was even a rumor that he had once played keyboard for the Grateful Dead - but we also knew he was remarkably shy about it; he only played before school in a locked room, and never took requests, no matter how much his students pleaded. "This is Bach's Praeludium to Partita Number One in B Flat," he said, and began to play. For the next two minutes, we all watched, mesmerized, as he played as beautifully as any professional pianist.
This is the piece, but it does not fully capture the experience.
It was not just the music itself, but the environment he had put us in. We were experiencing his playing under a number of emotions: first, that he was playing piano for us of his own choice; second, that we were listening to it with the words "Art is human spirit in sensate guise" still at the front of our minds; and third, that these two minutes were the final two minutes of AP Art History, senior year, and of high school. He finished the piece, then quietly said three words: "And so, goodbye." He didn't need to say anything. We understood that Bach's Partita Number One in B Flat was his goodbye to us. We left in silence, not really sure how to react but aware that we had just been a part of something truly special.
I graduated high school aware that I had little to no artistic talent but with a greater sense of what art was and had been from the Lasceaux cave paintings to the present day, as well as the lasting memory of Mr. Aliazzi's piano playing and his final lesson to us: explicitly, art is human spirit in sensate guise, and implicitly, art that fulfills this definition does not have to be purely visual - it need only be sensed.
I was off to college, safe in knowing that I would not have to earn a grade by drawing, painting, or sculpting. Part three will finish my experiences with art and allow me to offer some brief thoughts on it. Cheers!
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