Public presentation and the liberal arts. (Perspectives).

FIVE STUDENTS HERE AT OXFORD draw and paint almost every Friday night in the basement of Phi Gamma Hall, sometimes till past midnight. They've created some beautiful sketches and paintings. They paint in a cramped space by the great furnace in the basement; they paint together in silence. Thinking about "public presentation," I asked one of these artists if he thought art such as what he was doing was a public presentation of the self, and he said, "You really present it because you are a part of the creation of it."

Art as presentation

What is an artistic creation without its creator, its presenter? I see a play. The immediate creators are the actors and I see them embodying characters that come alive, but do I not at the same time see the director's hand, and the set designer's, and the hand of the author as well? I hear the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra play Beethoven. I hear Beethoven himself, too, and not only because without him there would be no symphony. Do I not hear his human voice, embodied in the symphony?

Richard Eyre, artistic director of London's National Theater tells us that what he likes about the theater is precisely what some people dislike about it--its immediacy and its fallibility. He could be talking about music or dance, when he says of theater: "I like the fact that it only ever exists in the present... I like the way it thrives on metaphor: A room becomes a world, a group of characters becomes a whole society. Above all, I like its dependence on the scale of the human figure and the sound of the human voice."

In the New Testament John says the Word was made flesh. Can we also say that flesh has the possibility of becoming Word? That, for the artist and his audience, matter can become spirit?

Liberating arts

The liberal arts are the freeing arts--liberal, coming from the same root as liberate. It would be wrong, as all of the performing and plastic arts plainly show us, to think that the study of the liberal arts frees us from matter or flesh so that we can become spiritual or unearthly. Rather, the liberal arts free us from the limiting belief that spirit and matter, word and flesh, are separate and competing and can operate in our human lives independently of one another. For the best example of this, we have only to see students on stage, acting in a play, singing or dancing, or giving a speech, to know that the mind, the spirit and the body are all before us in performance. To a lesser degree (because there is less conscious recognition of this fact) the liberating aspect of the liberal arts is evident in every student classroom presentation, in every response a student gives to a question, and in every student lab experiment. Each public presentation by a student is a potential act of liberal art.

The free mind, or, more properly, the free self, manifests itself personally and individually in presentation as it draws from and synthesizes what new things it has learned, appropriating them for itself and expressing them uniquely. For both students and teachers, the presentation of the self is the incarnation of the liberal arts both within the individual and before the community.

The transformation that we hope students achieve in their education happens through study, hard work, and practice, but it is not complete until, perhaps at certain points along the way, the learner can articulate what he or she has learned and who he or she has become. In an academic setting this is done before others who are involved in the same transformational process.

One hundred and fifty years ago the graduation ceremony here was preceded by three full days of student debates. These debates were a community affair; all attended. The debates by seniors were meant to sum up all they had learned at Emory and to show, through public presentation, that they had really learned it and made it their own. In these debates, students synthesized what they had learned and then presented that in dialogue form--not merely proving what they had learned, as an exam might, but exemplifying and modeling the free mind and body. They were recreating and reasserting the value of liberal arts study before the community. And in a sense they were recreating and reaffirming the collegiate community itself. This act could not have been done in the library with a book, or in a laboratory by oneself, or in a classroom, where the constraints of hard study and skill development are emphasized and prepare us for public activity. The telos or end of liberal arts study demands an act and a community to enact within, not just a mind, and not just an individual body.

Performing arts as liberal arts

It should not take much of a step to see the importance of the arts, and especially the performing arts, in the liberal arts college.

The performing arts provide the opportunity for a truer understanding--because embodied--of the whole educational endeavor, which includes the whole human condition and the contingent world. Carefully studied, practiced, submitted to critical comment, the performing arts, not narrowly conceived, are the most obvious tool for understanding different modes of perception and for incorporating new thoughts and feelings.

The idea that public performance is only for a small segment of the college population is unfortunate and ought to be dropped. Neither should the boundaries of a student's public presentation be limited to one field of study. At the same time, opportunities for public presentation in music, drama, dance, the studio arts, and photography, ought to be increased.

As our collegiate community becomes more a microcosm of the national and the world community, and the diversity among us is recognized and explored, the freeing of the self from ignorance and the presentation of the self in community will epitomize the learning that goes on, just as the debates of a century and a half ago may have for the early Emory community. This reemphasis on individual synthesis and public response within the community of learners, is particularly timely as the movement that acknowledges individuals as unique beings with valuable assets gains momentum and challenges the notions of conformity and unvarying standards.

Presentation as method

A new aesthetic that places public presentation and the arts at the highest level of the education we provide implies some changes. The method of learning that entails a teacher passing on subject matter to a student, who then presumably knows that subject, is an ineffective method because communication of a one-way sort leaves the learner within the boundaries established by the teacher and without a way to incorporate that subject matter into the sinews and tissues of his or her mind and spirit. Even dialogue within the classroom can be a thinly veiled or unwitting way for the knowledge of the instructor to limit the boundaries of inquiry and expression of the student.

Creativity and leadership for whatever purpose are learned by practice, with direction and encouragement, by modeling, and by surviving the stress of it all--to arrive at a point of personal discovery and accomplishment. A large corporation, Binney and Smith, the makers of Crayola products, recognized the value of creativity when they put a line on their employment application asking job seekers to list training they had had in music, drama, dance, or the visual arts. "An education in the arts," stated CEO Richard Gurin, "cultivates strong leadership and creative vision--two key characteristics at the foundation of success in today's business world."

State of the arts

Mortimer J. Adler, editor of the Great Books series, says the "the non-verbal arts directly affect more human beings and affect them more powerfully than do the great books," although, he continues, "they do not instruct us concerning what is logically and factually true or false."

Trends and statistics can be confusing, and finally one must follow his or her sense of what's best, but it is obvious that colleges and private schools across the state of Georgia and in many other parts of the country are building more and better performing arts centers. Communities like Atlanta are building, or raising money for, theaters, studios, museums, and concert halls, and more and more students want the arts as a part of their curriculum. The brightest new lights are no longer limited to Broadway; 90 percent of American theater is outside New York. The finances are there for the arts, too: In a given year the theater in New York that sits at the corner of Broadway and 53rd typically sells more tickets than the Yankees and the Mets sell combined. The NEH, in a report a few years ago, calculated that Americans spent in one year $3.7 billion attending arts events, while they spent $2.8 billion for sports events. In contrast, thirty years ago, people spent twice as much on sports as the arts. Residents of Washington, D.C. are three or four times more likely to have been to a gallery or museum than to have seen one of the major professional sports teams in residence there. Corporate contributions to the arts have increased dramatically, especially as younger men and more women take the helm.

The arts are even now a legitimate career for many people--about 1.5 million. During the 1980s, the number of people who made their living as authors, painters, actors, and dancers increased 80 percent, three times faster than the growth rate for all occupations and well above the growth rate for other professionals, according to University of Maryland sociologist John P. Robinson in his book, American Demographics. While this trend is encouraging, it hardly compares with Western Europe and Japan. Three hundred new museums opened in Germany in the 1980s. The arts generate $25 billion annually in the United Kingdom. More people each year attend arts events in Tokyo than attend them in all of the United States. Large, well-attended arts festivals in Europe have grown from a few dozen before World War II to more than 2,000 in 1990.

Although I am opposed to jumping on a bandwagon, when I see signs of an educational and spiritual movement toward free expression and appreciation of the value of art, when I see that there are new opportunities and alternatives to our present understanding of liberal arts education, and when I recognize that yearning in myself and my students, I am encouraged. I wonder if, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our egos, in spite of our perhaps well-intentioned but limiting conceptions of how students learn, we might begin to find a more central place for public presentation in higher education institutions.

Embodying knowledge

The subject matter of all the liberal arts (mathematics, science, history, philosophy, and so on) is historical; yet approaching them is a timeless, ever-varying activity. The liberal arts are only limited by the boundaries of the depth of the human search for meaning and value. The creation of significant knowledge, lasting knowledge, originates in "texts," but it is completed only in a response. That response is individual and personal because it is embodied, it is in the "flesh." It is therefore unique to each individual. Yet, it is also the result of study, learning, and practice, so it is also a common endeavor and part of our common heritage as questing human beings.

Knowledge is common because it is not fully embodied until it finds expression that allows for response. Apologies to Plato, but the idea alone of a great painting is not ultimately worthy of attention; and a great painting hidden in an attic can only represent unrealized potential. I side with Aristotle. Only students who present their understandings complete their project in the liberal arts. Jean-Paul Sartre claims: "To express and to be are one." And one other thing: One cannot simply present the material; one presents him- or herself along with it, and the learning self develops as the presentation of the self develops, or else there is no liberation. Presentation is an incarnation; it is the telos that finally epitomizes, without doubt, the unitary and true nature of the liberal arts.

The performing arts are, I contend, both the tool for honing those skills and sensitivities necessary for this endeavor and the capstone of a liberal arts student's education, the fullest expression and embodiment of--even, finally, the best symbol for--the liberal arts.

CLARK LEMONS is professor of English at Oxford College of Emory University.