Those Who Could Have
Ted Taylor
Teachers, as a rule, don’t like George Bernard Shaw. They have been struggling
since college to overcome his libelous dicta: “Those who can, do; those
who can’t, teach.” The indictment hangs heavy on them, suggesting that
their entire careers are only small consolation prizes for the better lives they
couldn’t quite achieve. One can only speculate what acid bon mot Shaw would
have aimed at teachers who teach how to teach.
Not surprisingly,
no one at the recent opening of the University Council for Art Educators members’
show, RETROvision, mentioned Shaw all night. No one had to. The work on exhibit
was sufficient rebuttal.
The title of the
show was interpreted in various ways. Some of the twenty-eight participating
teacher/artists chose to exhibit work which was based on earlier models, constituting
a quasi-historical view of the art scene as it existed when UCAE was founded
thirty-five years ago. Sylvia Corwin seemed to reference artists like Marsh and
Bishop in her images, which manage to be both reverential and accomplished in
their own right. Similarly, Prabha Sahasrabudhe gestured toward the legacy of
Burchfield and even Remington while still managing to articulate a thoroughly
contemporary energy of his own. Other artists interpreted the title as encouraging
a fusion of their own work with iconic images of the past; Yardena Youner, for
instance, superimposed details from Guernica over her own photographic image
of Roman ruins in Israel, a particularly apt juxtaposition for a society wondering
if war will become a perpetual condition. Pearl Greenberg took a similar approach,
using modern materials to revisit the ancient craft of mask-making. Most of the
artists saw the title as inviting a retrospective of their own works. Nadine
Gordon-Taylor, for instance, displayed two images of what might be called revisionist
anatomy from the eighties and two more recent super-realist images from the late
nineties, allowing a glimpse into the impressive evolution of her art. Ron Topping’s
etchings maintained a consistent figurative vocabulary while evolving into an
exploration of mythological potential. Natalie Schifano displayed the growth
of her skills as a printmaker, from the early exuberance to somber eloquence.
What all the work
has in common is that the artists chose the classroom over the studio. They spent
their lives preparing others to teach and make art at the forfeiture of their
own time and energy to create. RETROvision is ultimately less about the art on
the walls than about art that might have been. The sacrifice was the artists’;
the loss was our own.
RETROvision is at the Manhattan Borough President’s Office of C. Virginia
Fields, One Centre Street. May 2 – May 27 2003
