Reflections on the Relationships among Art, Life, and Research

Abstract

There is one major idea that underlies this paper: want to try to illustrate relationship between one's research and one's life. wish to echo Foucault who said, in an interview about his book, Archeology of Knowledge, I believe someone ... who is a writer is not simply doing his work in his books, but that his major work is, in end, himself in process of writing his books. He went on to say the work includes whole life as well as text (Ryan, 1993, p. 14). Although an active research life is composed of many parts, in end, a researcher would like to see his or her own interests, values, and assumptions about life and human purpose interwoven with themes and topics of one's inquiry so that their tapestry has a vivid pattern of meaning-for researcher and readers of research. Although we research what we are, what we think, value, and feel, others may not see patterns and connections to our lives that we, researchers, do. Then again, it is possible we have only imaged patterns. wish to take a retrospective look at my research as it relates to a larger life in art and to point to patterns that think are there. To make my points, I'll present a diagram and tell some brief stories about some of people, ideas, times, and places that have given form my research. wish, at end of paper, to point to educational research would like to see as we approach 21st century. Art Educational Campaigns have a long-standing aversion to military metaphors, and yet wish to refer to a disastrous campaign that resulted in what is perhaps most elegant visual display of information ever drawn. In 1861 Charles Joseph Minard drew a diagram that in one four inch by seven inch rectangle captures with brutal eloquence (Tufte, 1983, p. 40) Napoleon's Russian campaign of 1812. Tufte (1983) suggests diagram may well be best statistical graphic ever drawn and describes it in this way: Minard's graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening than just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: size of army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of army's movement, and temperature on various dates during retreat from Moscow. (p. 40) On receiving invitation to present Studies Lecture began to envision a graphic that would capture multivariate relationships among components of my research and inquiry in art and art education. However, wanted my diagram to be reverse of what Minard showed in his. He visualized a thick band that represented Napoleon's army of 422,000 men as it invaded Russia in June of 1812. By September, when it reached sacked and deserted Moscow, army had declined to 100,000 men. An increasingly narrower black band shows tragic loss of human life as army retreated to its starting point-arriving at Polish/Russian