Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

And now, a moment of shameless self-promotion

File this under shameless self-promotion, but during one of my perusals of e-learning blogs/ sites today, I came across The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog’s entry, Librarians Point to Google Scholar from July 26 — snooze…: joke, right? Google scholar has been around for ages already! Naturally, though, I had to take myself on a spin, and came across this delightful (to my ears) excerpt from Johanna Drucker’s review of my book:

It would be too bad if the apparently narrow focus of this book–five years of post-World War II German art, represented by relatively obscure artists such as Ernst and [sic] Wilhelm Nay–caused it to be overlooked. Inside the deliberately circumscribed limitations of her topic, Yule Heibel makes a profoundly sophisticated contribution to scholarship on post-World War II art history. Concentrating on German artists’ and critics’ efforts to reestablish viable cultural practices, she turns her evaluation of the relatively minor painter Nay into a discussion that has implications for a great range of visual art produced after 1945. This is because the major issue in this study is the concept of artistic subjectivity as a battleground for ideological debate. In the post-1945 era of reconstruction and subsequent Cold War politics, ideas of the arts and the individual artist were freighted with heavy burdens of expectation. Both were to manifest the value-laden aims of the moment–to participate in healing, recovery, and renewal–while assuming the appearance of being mere aesthetic expression. Heibel achieves an exemplary integration of theory-based conception and philosophical analysis, bringing both to bear on a tightly focused study of particular artists and works in their interaction with specific historical circumstances.

The concept of subjectivity that is central to Heibel’s discussion is centered in philosophy rather than psychoanalysis, and she eschews conventional Freudian and Lacanian constructions of subjectivity, with their by now commonplace (in art history) formulas of identification, negation, and fetishism as mechanisms through which to examine the seductive effects of images in their replication of mirror stage activity or presymbolic conditions. Instead, her paradigm foregrounds the dialectic of subject/object relations. She contrasts the positions of Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno and their articulations of two radically different… [Unfortunately, not more, since this is an excerpt that points to subscriber content...:-(]

Ok, full disclosure: I count Johanna as a friend, and I admire her work tremendously. But I didn’t put her up to writing the review, and others who I don’t know wrote similarly interesting things. So, allow me to bask a bit in reflected glory from a previous life…

What do I call this? Feminism on the side?

Darren Cannell has an informative blog called Teaching and Developing Online. He’s my source today for a bunch of links related to e-learning, several of which follow: here he links to an interesting abstract for a paper called Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication by James Farmer and Anne Bartlett-Bragg. Anne B-B, incidentally, is one of the few female voices I’ve seen in this environment (aside from Catherine Howells of Ida Takes Tea). This e-learning climate is just about as bad as the situation Shelley has described often and describes most excellently right here: it’s almost all male. Is this why I can’t get this Arianna Huffington post out of my head right now: Women “Losing The Gender War In The Caring Professions”…, which points to this story in The Guardian? The paper reports that, according to a Brunel University business school report authored by Dr. Ruth Simpson, men get more respect for their “caring” work than women do:

“While the caring performed by a woman is often devalued as a ‘natural’ part of femininity, the emotional labour performed by men is often seen as an asset.” [More...]

So, women aren’t “good enough” for tech, and women aren’t “good enough” for “caring” if and when the men decide to exercise themselves in that field. Gee, kinda makes a person conclude that women aren’t …good enough?

This is a formula for disenfranchisement, and it’s therefore profoundly anti-democratic, fascist, backwards, and regressive.

Anyway…

Another pointer from Darren, this one to James Farmer, How NOT to use blogs in education. It’s a summary of the longer paper linked to above. I found the comments to this entry useful, especially since several included links to additional articles, and there was significant pushback and discussion over, among other things, the usefulness of blogs as tools for individuals or for groups. This is interesting for teaching, because as a teacher you’re dealing with the development of the individual, but (unless you’re a private tutor) you’re also dealing with a group dynamic. So, it’s an interesting problem of cohesion (which suggests following some purpose [?] — in teaching? — and hierarchy and control, vs a more …organic?, holistic? …nah, weasel words… — a more self-reflective development based in the individual’s willingness to learn, stretch, develop. (That this then raises other questions about assessment and so forth is a different matter.)

On the other hand, in Colorado it’s possible to go to the mall to go to high school: Digital School at the Mall Available to Homeschool Students. Fries on the side…