Our World as a Text

There are different literacies (p.9).

Literacy is primarily something people do; it is an activity, located in the space between thought and the text. Literacy does not just reside in people’s heads as a set of skills to be learned, and it does not just reside on paper, captured as text to be analysed. Like all human activity, literacy is essentially social, and it is located in the interaction between people (p.1).

I can’t tell you how many times in my life I have entered a public restroom. I’ve visited every state in the US excluding Hawaii and Alaska, which means a lot of road trips, gas stations, motels, restaurants, airplanes/airports, and other fine establishments. I’ve even frequented the loo internationally in Canada, Mexico, Germany, England, Turkey, etc. I’ve been in school for 21 years of my life, which obviously accounts for countless visits to the water closet, and I randomly find myself at the porcelain bowl in my other public outings such as while at the grocery or the mall. Why you might be asking is this crazy lady opening her blog talking about public toilets? Well regardless of where they are, hordes of public restrooms have one thing in common...graffiti.

We’ve all seen them - notes left by the hands of others at a specific place and time professing things like people loving people, people hating people, phone numbers, so-and-so was here, inspirational quotations, philosophical debates about life, drawings, and conversations about random topics. In fact, on campus the other day I read an extensive dialogue in the ladies room about Harry Potter that was juxtaposed with a debate about who is better, Edward or Jacob, from the Twilight books. If you think about it, restrooms stalls offer us an unexpected yet very rich cultural site. Stall writing indeed reflects particular “values, attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and social relationships”, which Barton and Hamilton (1998) put forward in their social theory of literacy (p.6). Since finishing their book, Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community I’ve found myself intentionally searching for various day-to-day ways that people use literacy in their lives, and for me, restrooms represent just one example of literacy events as a social practice.

“In many literacy events there is a mixture of written and spoken language…but it is clear that in literacy events people use written language in a integrated way as part of a range of semiotic systems” (p. 9). This quote reminded me about graffiti, which our class touched on last week and was also mentioned in areas of Barton and Hamilton’s text. Graffiti is a form of social literacy practice that I find absolutely fascinating whether it is on a building or in a restroom. I’m drawn to it because of its visual appeal and international use; for me, it’s very much a form of art. It provokes people into questions. I respect the craftsmanship an artist has to possess to manipulate her/his media as well as the thought process and the conversations, either inside the artist's mind or outside with others, that go into creating compositions and choosing locations. The reactions of those in authority and other members of the public are intriguing too.

At a point in my life I was skeptical about the value and purpose of graffiti until an eye-opening trip I took to New York City. While there, I visited an enormous warehouse covered from top to bottom in a mural of graffiti. This living work of art is called 5Pointz and is a site where graffiti artists from around the world come to leave their marks. The experience of standing in front of this massive building pushed me into a space where I could being to think of graffiti as art. The building itself is a very powerful statement about graffiti as a means for making meaning on the individual level but also the social level. The images represent the voices of souls with something to say about their lived experiences. To consider a different approach to graffiti and learn more about the 5Pointz project in New York check out the following links:

Official website: http://5ptz.com/graff/

The head (CEO if you will) of the 5Pointz project speaking about it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnZp5Iv3Dd0

GREAT detailed images from 5Pointz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxNLptLhDrc&feature=related

** All the quotation found in this entry are pulled from: Barton, D., & Hamilton, M. (1998). Local literacies: Reading and writing in one community. New York, NY: Routledge.

Visual Texts, Written Texts, & Myself

As I sat here this morning with my cup of green tea, I was attempting to figure out which of this week’s readings I wanted to reflect on for this blog entry. I had settled on writing a response to the chapter by Prior and Lunsford in the Handbook of research on writing entitled, History of reflection, theory, and research on writing. I was planning on tweezing out connections I saw between their ideas about comparative rhetorics with the work of linguist Robert Kaplan, who in the 1960s developed the idea of contrastive rhetorics that dealt with the writing differences of various cultures. I was also considering drawing some parallels between what I’ve been reading in structural semiotics with what the authors said about translation being “a site for intense reflection on writing” (p.86). But, the beckoning warm rays of the sun coaxed me outside for a walk where my mailbox foiled my original plan as soon as I opened it.

Inside was something I’ve been waiting weeks for with child-like excitement, a collection of books from Art 21, which is an ongoing PBS series that illuminates the work and issues of contemporary artists from around the globe. For weeks now, I’ve been engulfed in what I call “academic-mode” where I’m experiencing the theories, inquiries, and thick prose of scholars, and I’ve realized that I haven’t given time to my artist-self and this collection of book feed that inner space inside me. The visual world not only serves as my way into words, but it also serves as my way out of them. When I say the visual is my way out of words, I mean images give me chance to escape into a realm of feeling…of intuition…of experiencing. Whether I’m observing a visual landscape as in a painting or horses grazing in the fields or whether I’m creating a visual composition, the visual world allows me to muse within myself. In that space I can escape the demands and confines of word-laden modes of communication like reading, speaking, or writing. For me, much of visual art is about translating experiences, feelings, questions, and other contemplations into a visual form. The words of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke speak right to the conversations with art that happen in me on a deeper level, which I believe is rooted in spirit.

You must give birth to your images They are the future waiting to be born Fear not the strangeness that you feel

The future must enter you

Long before it happens.

To bring this blog entry full circle, which might prove to be problematic, I want to go back to Prior and Lunsford’s chapter 5 in the handbook. Even though Prior and Lunsford ascribe to a theoretical understanding of writing that is a “multimodal phenomenon”, which I agree with, as an artist I’m at times frustrated with academic dialogues about multimodality and visual literacy (p.82). Discussions of multimodality and visual literacy sometimes feel like a double-edges sword to me. I think it feels this way because in my head I’ve acquired competing narratives from the writing worlds I have encountered including composition theory, tutoring writing, my own writing, and my experiences learning about and creating visual artworks. Even though there is a push to extend the definition of writing to include other semiotic modes of communication, I wonder, like other scholars such as Kress & van Leeuwen*, if the verbal mode of communication is still viewed and honored as the most complete means by which to communicate, and how this affects other modes of communication?

I'm often disheartened when I stop to think about how frequently I've hidden the artist side of my identity...or only let it out in very small, digestible doses particularly in the academy but elsewhere as well. I silence myself for others and try to adapt myself to fit into other modes of doing and meaning making. When I think about my struggle to fit within others ways of doing I'm reminded of Min-zhan Lu's* text From silence to words: Writing as struggle. Even though this work is about her struggle to become a writer in the English language, I can relate to the main idea of feeling unable to communicate in one way but being required to. Overtime I've become bolder with respects to showing my artist identity, but many times I feel that I'm only ever given full permission to bring out that part of me in contexts with other artists. I’m also often left wondering: 1). where do creativity and imagination go when we start thinking about visual literacy as a set of skills one must acquire to understand today’s ever-changing, globalized world; 2). how has applying the term literacy to the visual changed the study of it and in what ways?

* The work I’m referring to here is their 1996 work Reading images: The grammar of visual design.

* Citation for Lu's text: Lu, M. (1987). From silence into words: Writing as struggle. College English, 49(4). 437-448.

Texts as Graphic Marker of Culture

The history of writing has marked the interplay between linguistics, socioeconomics, and the forces of technological change, an interplay that will shape the future of writing. (Schmandt-Besserat & Erard, p. 19)

The above quote acts as a summary of the chapters I read for this blog entry because speaks to the social and cultural forces that shape writing’s purpose and meaning. A couple of things struck me after reading the first three chapters from the Handbook of research on writing. The first thing that I was struck by was how refreshing it was to see a historical perspective, especially from the first two chapters Origins and forms of writing by Schmandt-Besserat & Erard, and History of writing technologies by Gabrial. Constantly being surrounded by lengthy academic prose in graduate school has to some degree skewed my view of writing. If someone was to ask me about writing, I believe I would find myself picturing initially recalling notions of authentic voice, process, audience and context for writing, references, multimodality, etc., but I don’t think I would have initially thought of the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and China. To read a historical account of writing that stretched all the way back to antiquity was energizing and highlights writing as a labor intensive processes.

The second point that I was stuck by really isn’t a single point rather the whole content from Chapter 3, History of typography. Even though this chapter documents the early inventions of typology, I found it fascinating to read because of my personal experiences with typeface as a visual arts student. One of the amazing things about different fonts is how they create an atmosphere and rhythm. How we choose to present something changes how a viewer interacts with it and typeface is no exception. The individual letters line up side-by-side to create words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and then pages. Even though fonts are small things they are powerful tools that shapes our contemporary global visual culture. One such example can be seen in a documentary I was a number of years ago in 2007 called, Helvetica. Helvetica is typeface that lacks the fancy embellishments of other typefaces. What is amazing about this particular typeface is how prevalent it is in our contemporary world. We can see it all over our visual landscape a few examples include logos from BMW, Lufthansa, Post-it, Staples, and Microsoft.

Check out the following links to learn more about this documentary: Official Helvetica Trailer // Film's Official Website // Short Clips from the Film

Texts are Creative Endeavors

How can we make people more productive and more creative? (p.109)

Writers are products of educational systems. (p. 110)

No one seems to agree on what the goal of good writing is anyway. (p. 111)

I pulled the above quotes from Louis Menand’s article, Show or tell should creative writing be taught, which I found to be rather a compelling discussion about writing, because it offers very thought provoking ideas as well as questions to dialogues surrounding writing.

What was particularly refreshing about this article was reading a piece that touches upon writing as a creative process. For me at least it seems like notions of creativity and imagination are often left out of academic discussions about writing…well at least those I have encounter. By discussions I mean the verbal exchanges I have witnessed and those I have been part of as well as the arguments I read about. Creativity & imagination are seldom, if ever, examined in depth. These concepts seem to be isolated to conversations about creative writing and aren’t brought up in other forms of writing such as academic prose. As products as well as producers of educational systems, how might our perceptions/conceptualization of writing be different writing was taught from the perspective of a creative writing vs. an academic, prose-based perspective? How might practices/skills from creative writing enhance how we approach writing in other settings?

Can creative writing be taught? This was the second part of Menand’s argument I found intriguing because it parallels my experiences in the visual arts as a student, a teacher, and an artist. Regardless of the area within the arts be it writing, visual, musical, can creativity be taught? I would have to agree with the statement Menand make “you can’t teach inspiration, but you can teach craft” (p. 111). I can teach someone how to: clean a paintbrush, mixed colors and color theory, stretch a canvas, apply paint in different ways, and so on. I can teach about the histories of art, philosophies of art, and critiques of art along with various artists' works, styles, ideas, and theories. But the individual immersed in doing, in creating is the one who has to find the inspiration, creativity, and imagination from whatever source(s) they come. The creative process is a highly personalized venture. The individual must transmute their ideas through their chosen media into an object, which can serves as a lens into view and understand our human experiences.

I think what makes creativity and imagination difficult, if not impossible to teach, is that they are slippery concepts. They don’t possess universal definitions. They are to some degree highly individualized and mean different things to people. They vary across time and space. They don’t have right answers requiring people to live with and navigate through ambiguities.