Art Education
College of Arts and Architecture
School of Visual Arts
My Days on the Varsity
By Ken Beittel © 2002
In April of 2002, the Art Education faculty asked me to reflect on my years at Penn State, on the occasion of receiving an Alumni Achievement Award.
Whenever I meet Ed Mattil, who received his doctorate from Penn State the same time I did, in February 1953, and who was hired with me by Viktor Lowenfeld later the same spring, and was to be my colleague and department head for many years, I remind him, "We were on the varsity together!"
And since I believe there are no accidents, I certainly think it no mere coincidence that my birthdate is March 21, the same as Viktor Lowenfeld and Johann Sebastian Bach, two mythic characters profoundly influencing me. The years, of course, differed: Lowenfeld, 1903; me, 1922; Bach, 1685 (although I think Bach and I were also contemporaries).
All memory exists in the present moment. One of my favorite thesis titles among those I have advised is Mitsuie Nagamachi's Teaching in the Eternal Present: Art Education as Radical Support of Art-Making. That pretty much sums up my tribal identity with Art Education. Having said in 1940 when I graduated from high school, "I don't know what I want to do, other than art, but I know I don't want to teach," it took two years of college and four years in the army in World War II to come full circle and embrace Art Education. In the meantime, I had married and had no clue on how to serve society. When I went back to Carnegie Tech for my junior year and had a hard time adjusting generally, and disillusionment with most of the Painting and Design curriculum, I decided to try Art Education, a major with all of three students in it, including me.
That was a momentous choice, for it led me indirectly to Lowenfeld and Read, and to a required course in pottery, about which I knew exactly nothing. I met Lowenfeld in 1947 when I enrolled at Penn State to work off mandated education requirements so I could take more studio courses back at Tech for my senior year. It so happened that Lowenfeld had been hired for the summer by Amy Gardner, head of the Home Arts Department, to teach Mural Painting, a course which was actually held at the Greer School in the country near Tyrone. That summer Lowenfeld and his wife and son were living in a cabin at Black Moshanon State Park, where he was writing the draft of Creative and Mental Growth. I met Lowenfeld when I heard him lecture on the murals that had been done under him that summer. Included was one by John Biggers, who followed him up from Hampton Institute, where Lowenfeld taught. Immediately I fell under Lowenfeld's charismatic intensity and deep sense of mission. It was then that I was certain I was making the right career choice. In the ministry, they would say that I "got the call."
From the summer of 1951 through the fall of 1953, I was in residence at Penn State working on my doctorate, minoring in Clinical Psychology. In summers prior to 1951, I had come to Penn State, away from my teaching job at Winthrop College in South Carolina, then an all-girls state college where uniforms were still worn, to earn my M.Ed. During these summers my bonding with Lowenfeld intensified. I'll never forget how when he saw me in the hallway once on my return to Penn State, he left his lecture class in the middle of a sentence and came out to embrace me with, "Ken, so gooood to see you!"
When I came to be on the faculty at Penn State, I taught research and the pottery studio, as well as graduate seminars and an occasional introductory crafts class. I also taught a theory class on art appreciation, for I had done my doctoral thesis on a related topic and had developed what I thought, and still think, is an art education approach to responding to art. In those days, Art Education boasted studios in pottery, printmaking, jewelry, and sculpture, all listed as for art teachers though they served a broader group of students. This was at a time when Studio Art had only oil and watercolor painting, drawing, and costume design.
I never claimed that I knew anything about the public schools. I always said there was an art education for all levels, and I early designated mine as "higher education." Besides, I thought the two most desirable levels to teach were preschool and graduate.
Yeats has said that the quarrel with others makes good prose, while the quarrel with oneself makes good poetry. Another poet, W. H. Auden, distinguishes between poet and historian. When the poet gets up to speak, he says, everyone says, "That's the way it is." But when the historian speaks, everyone jumps up and says, "That reminds me of a story."
So I cannot claim to be a historian. I know all too well from my years in research that there are no such things as simple facts. Context is all, and contexts are endless. As post-moderns, we accept the fact that nothing is pre-given, and we remain skeptical before all meta-narratives. Like it or not, I am forced into a poetic stance. So it was, as later words will reveal, that my mature research, culminating in the Drawing Lab, led me to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and, yes, to art itself as basic research into what Bachelard called the phenomenology of the imagination, where one must be in the state being studied to understand it at all. It is a small step from here to Blake's "all that is, is holy," or Corbin's "everything deserves a divine hermeneutic."
So, as someone early in my career pointed out, "Beittel is a mystic," and happy to be so. I know that Stephen Hawkins says, "Mysticism is for those who can't do the math." But, hey, his math is mystical enough. How about a universe that is finite but has no edges, or the multi-verses thought to be on the other side of black holes? I know a Jewish healer who tells me that the proper translation of the first verse of Genesis is: "In the beginning created God, heaven and earth." And who can say what "in the beginning" as subject refers to? But more on mysticism and the mystic heart later. In the early days I was but a journey-man mystic. I even wrote about using science to show how mysterious art is. Growing up as the son of an impassioned, mostly self-schooled fundamentalist minister, I had heard enough fancy phrases to be hungry for more disciplined language and more precise referents.
When I first came to Penn State, University faculty members who had taught me as a doctoral student warned me how hard it would be to teach at the same university. I promptly decided it would take me three years to find out whether I really fit in, so I gave myself ample leeway to ride out initial ups and downs. In the meantime, at home I read all seven volumes of Proust's great novel, developing the patience to absorb sentences that went on for three pages without a period. That gave me great distance as I began to advise doctoral students often much older than I. In those early days, I could not yet chair doctoral committees. At that time, one had to be a full member of the Graduate Faculty, not just an associate member. So until 1955, I advised thesis research but got no official credit for it. But I got valuable experience and established relationships with other University Graduate Faculty members.
I certainly never sat down and said: "What I'd like to do is chair and/or be thesis advisor for 150 or so completed doctorates, and, furthermore arrange it so that I saw to completion 13 doctorates for each of two years." Destiny does not come with that kind of preview, nor would I have thought it desirable to wish for such an outcome if it did.
In those years of the fifties, several epiphany-like events occurred that largely affected my life. One of these surfaced when I went camping on Cape Cod during a spring break. Spring is slow to come to Cap Cod, and to make matters worse, a rainy spell moved in. Life in the tent was not that inspiring. At least Thoreau had a cabin. But the main point of this episode is that I turned to read a little booklet that my younger brother, then a graduate theology student at Yale Divinity School, had given me. When I received it, I thanked him but put it aside as one of those books of religious inspiration I earmarked for some vague future perusal. It was an early translation of Martin Buber's I and Thou.
As I read it in my tent, the pages could not have been more alive if it had caught on fire. . . as indeed it had--Holy Fire! The three "primary words" pointing from things, people, and the mystery, to art, to love, and to the Divine, sank deep within my being and changed my life forever. The way of true dialogue, with its potential existent within every encounter, became my constant guide and purpose.
Secondly, I established a pottery studio in 1958, when I moved to the country in a small village at the foot of a mountain, where I bought a two-acre site with a small stone house and outlying buildings that I could convert to a pottery compound. Lowenfeld knew I was searching for a place and had learned this one was available. This move almost caused an existential crisis in my first marriage, for I had to brave it on my own at first.
I was aided in this venture by a doctoral student of mine who had just completed his thesis and was already engaged in further research with me. This was Bob Burkhart, a creative, enthusiastic, and somewhat erratic personality. Our families became intertwined as he and his wife and small son came to live with us summers in one of the small sheds we made over. We hauled bricks in rented trucks and built a stoneware kiln that first summer of 1958. We also established a legal partnership called Four Hands Pottery. From 1958 to 1962, Bob and I worked closely on pottery and research. He participated in the first two grants I received from Washington, the first with the National Science Foundation, the second with the U.S. Office of Education.
Bob also taught me much about the uneven development we all partake of, which is all the more pronounced in very creative people. I had to be the disciplined and balancing center in our teamwork. And it was true teamwork, true community, and true discovery and pushing of boundaries.
Among Bob's uncanny achievements was his ability, while walking over a patch of clover, to bend down quickly and come up with a four-leaf clover. "How do you do that?" I would ask, and he would say, "It stands out from the pattern." But I saw no pattern, just a unified field of texture.
Bob came in full-time residence in 1961-62 to participate in a grant from U.S.O.E for experimental research. For this I had a team of three grad assistants, plus Burkhart as a research associate. After this, Bob's family broke up and we parted ways. From 1962 to 1964, I received still another grant from U.S.O.E. for continuing experimental research. This time I had two grad research assistants. Immersion in these carefully controlled and measured experiments led me step by step to an "alternate path," as I called it, meant to move closer and closer to the center of the creative process in art.
If one carefully studied this series of outside grants, it would suggest how these researches fit into my progress toward the Drawing Lab. We began by searching for predictors of creativity in art. Then we saw experimentally how "self-reflective process feedback" enhanced that creativity. At the same time we discovered the strategic way of working we named "Divergent," a way of organizing one's work that could stand independently beside the earlier described "Spontaneous Strategy." Those paralleled what in other psychological terminology were called the "Planning" and the "Means-Ends" strategies, matching our Spontaneous and Divergent labels. We then experimentally learned how flexible these strategies were. They were learned and chosen and could be altered at will, but people settled on one or the other out of personal preference and prior conditioning.
Soon, however, I was led to grasp profoundly and forever the innate order and lawfulness within each person's life and work; and I moved, in the reverse order from classical science, from group experiment to individual case study, and the Drawing Lab was born.
Other major events took place during those earlier years. I took the first of my four sabbaticals in 1959, devoting myself to a full semester of pottery making. As I prepared to come back to teaching, I contracted infectious hepatitis from contaminated seafood I had eaten down in the Del-Mar Peninsula, where I did a short residency at Princess Anne College. I became weak as a baby--actually weaker--and had to be hospitalized, which delayed the resumption of my duties for several weeks.
Simultaneously and quite unexpectedly, Lowenfeld had a stroke as he rose to address the University Senate. He immediately lost his powers of speech. I remember taking him a carved and decorated pot for him to hold. I went away feeling we had communicated at a basic level--in a tactile way through the pot, in a spiritual way through the eyes. But he never recovered. He died later that same spring.
That was when I found I was the only faculty member in Art Ed who could be a doctoral committee chairman and thesis advisor. Ed Mattil, director of our graduate program, was an associate member of the University Graduate Faculty and, by the rules then, could only be a committee member. The Graduate Dean, H. K. Schilling, a physicist with deep interest in religion, had stringent rules on the necessity for research accomplishments as a criterion for full membership, and he guarded the gates fervently.
By this time, Lowenfeld's name and influence drew students from everywhere to Penn State. Ed Mattil was very successful in getting us a full roster of graduate assistantships. They became the core of an ample resident body of doctoral candidates that could in turn populate a full curriculum of graduate courses.
In the years just prior to 1960 and Lowenfeld's death, Penn State and Ohio State had exchange art ed sessions at each other's institutions, so I got to know Manny Barkan, Jerry Hausman, Ross Mooney, and others quite well. I also got to know New York art educators because I accompanied Lowenfeld to Victor D'Amico's Committee on Art Educator of the Museum of Modern Art. Lowenfeld was a committee member and I was an associate member.
In still another stroke of good timing, I was invited to represent art at curriculum reform conferences. The first took place in Minnesota, but soon after I was frequently invited to Calvin W. Taylor's Creativity Conferences in California, Utah, Niagara Falls, and elsewhere. In addition to giving papers on research, I got to know, and often befriended, participants like J. P. Giulford, E. Paul Torrance, Carl Rogers, Frank Barron, and Timothy O'Leary.
One never knows what unseen forces guide one's destiny. Certainly it seems like timeliness was built into my path, beginning with my 6 a.m. birth on a snowy first day of spring; continuing with my miraculous rescue when I was wounded in action in World War II and left behind by a retreating army; and running throughout a history received in gratitude as a gift of grace.
The decade of the sixties, when I was in my forties, was an extremely rich one. In addition to the events already described, there are others equally as significant. The "Red Book" Conference on structure, curriculum, and identity of Art Education took place at Penn State in 1965. It was a heady interdisciplinary venture. I had the honor, in addition to delivering a paper, to chair the discussions held with the distinguished panel of guests: psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, artists, art critics, curriculum specialists, researchers, and, as the ads say, much, much more. The art critic Harold Rosenberg said the conference was so highly structured that he felt like an item of food being processed in a factory. When quizzed about art, Alan Kaprow rattled his pipe in an ash try and pronounced "that's art!" It was a fertile and heady time, when art ed flexed its muscles in the company of older and more established disciplines. Ed Mattil was the guiding hand behind the planning and execution of this multidisciplinary event.
In 1967, my life took on another significant influence when, on my second sabbatical, I went to study deep tradition with a master potter, a porcelain maker, in Arita, Japan. This man, Manji Inoue, has since become one of Japan's "intangible cultural treasures." In six months he paced me through six years of apprenticeship, not for mastery, but for scope, feel, and understanding. I was exposed to the Zen attitudinal commitment and spirit that pervades his traditional way. I learned methods that were echoes of discoveries centuries old from China and Korea. And I developed a view of planetary tradition as my own contribution: How by standing within a local tradition one is readied for an inter-traditional view. I see now as well that it is by standing within a local religious tradition that one is grounded and able to engage in planetary inter-spirituality, one of the great needs of our time. There is one summit with many paths.
In pottery, I learned ways of working I never would have discovered on my own. Though it caused me integration problems at first, it promoted me to an advanced amateur standing in an ancient and timeless art. It led to the structuring of my own teaching of pottery and also to the publication of my book, Zen and the Art of Pottery, in 1989. It is fitting now, at this moment, that I am writing this in my pottery studio. Here things are not about theory and reputation, but about deep practice: practice that has about it the air of a spiritual discipline.
Again, thanks to Ed Mattil's administrative skills, I received a grant from the Vice President for Research to acquire a Japanese pottery study collection. I was entrusted with an outright check and told to "keep books." My magical letter of introduction concerning my mission got me, and often my teacher, into pottery studios and collections otherwise inaccessible. I acquired pieces that have probably increased in value fifty-fold. These are now part of the permanent collection of the Palmer Museum of Art.
Ed Mattil also set aside funds to bring Manji Inoune to Penn State to teach with me for a full academic term in 1969. Then Inoune Sensei returned again on his own in 1976, when he learned that I was teaching an advanced course in porcelain, embodying the methods I had learned in Arita. Space will not permit all the incidents I could relate about these visits and the cultural challenges and opportunities that came with them. Other memories on this and other pottery topics are summarized in my 2001 "A Potter's Manifest-O," which I wrote for the local Potters' Guild, of which I was a founding influence. A Town and Gown article, "A Master Potter," by Larry Jordan, my great nine-year pottery apprentice while he was at Penn State, details much of my life in pottery.
Significant here, in passing, are the communal ventures I was able to engage in with my advanced pottery classes. We built climbing wood-fired stoneware kilns, nobori-gama in Japanese, on local hillsides for two summers in the early seventies, plus one more fully developed one on my property in Shingletown in 1974. Here the I-thou of Buber's philosophy flowered into true community, where the adequate and full participation of each member fed the shared communal goal. The bonding that occurs under such circumstances is a wonder of the human spirit when it is blessed with something I can only call divine.
I was also blessed by three extensive one-artist museum shows: in 1977 and 1985 in the Palmer Museum of Art, and in 1978 in the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. Then, in 1980, I was honored with two one-artist shows in Japan. The first was for the opening exhibition at the newly completed Saga Museum of Porcelain and Ceramic Arts in Arita, Japan. The second was at the Iwataya Department Store Gallery in Fukuoka, Japan. I had a sabbatical leave for these shows. I was sponsored by the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies and by the College of Arts and Architecture of Penn State, and by the U.S. Embassy in Japan.
Again, all I can do here is report the bare facts on these Japanese shows. Much lore surrounds them. One example may suffice. A simple bowl made of native clay I dug in nearby Alan Saegar State Park was purchased by a Japanese calligraphy master who was about to retire to a mountain retreat. It was to be his only bowl for his daily ritualistic meals. In honor of his acquisition, he appeared at our hotel in Fukuoka with three calligraphies he made to celebrate the occasion. His name was Otsubo, which interestingly means "large jar." The bowl was thrown on the wheel, then stamped on the side with some of my bisque stamps, had a hand-rolled rim and a hand-carved foot. It was dark in color, covered with a wood-ash glaze, with something of the color and spotting of a fallen rhododendron leaf found at the source of its clay.
Now I need to pick up my narrative back in 1967, when I returned from my first trip to Japan. I had left the graduate student body in a healthy, more autonomous, self-organizing state. That was all to change when a new professor joined our faculty. He had other ideas about what graduate student and faculty relationships should be like. Suffice it to say, without entering into any judgment, that he made my role more difficult for a while and fostered a research orientation moving opposite to my personal line of growth. There were growth challenges as well, which did motivate me despite the agitation they caused. The latter was sufficient enough that for the first time I wondered if I should leave Penn State. But though there were places that wanted me, none could offer the rich climate I enjoyed where I was.
Growth often comes from unexpected sources. I was part of a team that taught together a course called Arts 2, which dealt with the creative process in art, music, and theater. We even had theater graduate students as a small repertory group of performers. As part of the course, we had students select a three-week period of hands-on work in one of the three arts areas. So it was that I had a small group doing serial drawings, taking to an individual setting some of the process-recording and process-feedback methods I had used in my experimental research.
The doors of my perception were powerfully cleansed, for I saw with a clarity I had only intuited before, the extraordinary lawfulness and holographic unity of each individual's path in creating art. It was clear that to understand all was both to forgive all and to love all.
This insight rounded out a manuscript I was preparing, which appeared in print in 1971 as Mind and Context in the Art of Drawing. Its writing pre-dated the Drawing Lab, but it definitely foreshadowed it.
Another epiphany-like experience also occurred around this time in the late sixties. I was tiring of having to argue with mechanistic, often imperialistic, scientific minds about the direction of my research. For one thing, I lacked a clear philosophical, language-based position that enabled me to engage scientistic and positivistic orientations without sounding defensive.
One bright, sunny day, I was in Bellefonte waiting for my International Harvester Scout station wagon to be serviced. I was in the habit on these occasions of walking up to the old Bellefonte Public Library, then in an old stone house, where I read or studied or wrote during the hours of waiting. On this day, I happened to find Stephen C. Pepper's World Hypotheses, in which he presents what he calls four cognitively adequate world views, along with the controlling metaphor for each and the criteria by which they endorse what is true.
As I read about contextualism, a blinding Damascas-like light struck me from my horse. I had found a language and an orientation that leveled the playing field between me and other world views. Henceforth, I never argued in the language of my opponents if they were from another worldview—and, of course, they usually were. The amount of grief and political and philosophical nonsense this saved me from is enormous.
It is easy to feel with contextualism that a ruling metaphor of action fits art perfectly, as does the idea of open and endless contexts of meaning and of textures with their qualitative wholeness and their multiple strands ready for description. Had not Langer affirmed that art is a whole held together only by activity? Further, she said art is a model for the miracle of life itself. I was a born-again researcher. An open horizon was before me.
Not long after this a grad student named Charlie Steele came to me with a proposal. He wanted to take what I learned from my experiments and apply it to public school settings. I knew enough about research to realize that the knowledge needed for application was harder to come by than the knowledge from the experiments themselves. Nevertheless, I explored the idea with him. We decided to make a film addressing the topic. I even got support from the College of Education to make such a film. This turned out to be one of the few grants I didn't get to use. The film never got made.
Instead I told Charlie it was necessary to be immersed in ongoing inquiry to understand what I was learning. Conditions again, as if by magic, fell into place. I was given permission to use a large, unused room, not a classroom, on the first floor of Chambers. There we developed the prototype for the Drawing Lab. It was basically a small private studio space enclosed within the bigger room, with a drawing table of a height suitable for standing or sitting on a high stool. The drawing table was attached to the right wall of the enclosed studio. This wall rose above the table and had a small window through which an observer on a platform behind the wall could unobtrusively watch drawings develop by means of a front-surface mirror mounted at a 45° angle above the drawing table. From this vantage point, process shots tracing a drawing's development could be taken with a 35 mm camera. The front-surface mirror solved the refraction problem of double images that a regular mirror would have caused.
As I said, the observer mounted an out-of-sight platform behind the wall to be at a height to operate the camera and view through the window. Through my earlier experiments, I had acquired a German Robot Camera that could automatically take shots at regular chosen time intervals, at settings anywhere from micro-seconds to many minutes apart. This camera had a magazine that could hold up to 100 feet of film. And, as luck would have it, Charlie had the darkroom skills to take care of the technical photographic details.
I obtained a new small grant to cover the cost of film and developing, and we advertised for participants who wanted to try their hand at a series of drawings without instruction or imposed conditions. And we offered them a $25 honorarium if they came once weekly for an entire ten week term. It turned out that some came for as many as three terms. We especially welcomed those who had never studied drawing, but we accepted all volunteers.
Inside the inner studio we placed a complex, many-sided assemblage-like still-life mounted on a wheeled cart so that it could be moved and turned at any angle. This was a construction put together for my earliest experiment when Burkhart was my associate. Though this still-life was complex enough for repeated use, it was also a constant point of reference that allowed an observer to be aware of nuances, departures, and symbolic overtones. But it was not a required subject or stimulus. The artist could draw whatever she or he wanted.
Our ritual as observers was simple. We recorded in notebooks anything we saw, heard, or intuited, in a kind of "field-notes attitude." When the artist returned the next week, we began with a feedback inquiry in which the artist, in a darkened room, reviewed process shots projected on a screen. This session was recorded. We were nurturant participant observers trying not to direct the artist's stream of recall and insight. We projected the processes as negative film, finding the reversal of values to be both practical and a deeper psychological and spiritual advantage for the newness and trance-like state it invited.
So was born the Drawing Lab. One might say it rounded out my symbolic search for the teacher, for the artist, and for the developing spirit and evolving artistic consciousness of all of us. It was the key that opened up more doors to my own growth in understanding the creative process than anything I have ever experienced, short of my own full immersion in art, or, I should say, paralleling that. It led to my answer--even "final answer"--to how I define teaching art: Teaching art is a depth hermeneutic of an other's self-formative process through art according to a common tradition. I'll leave this now to stand as stated, but I need to add that a great number of pages would be needed to even partially unpack it.
The major findings of fifteen years of study in the Drawing Lab come down to four big statements or pointers. Again, I can only hint at them here, because this is more an autobiographical than theoretical paper.
To begin with, I had previously determined that three general conditions needed to be present to create art: (1) What I called "artistic causality"—which simply means that one must claim the artist's "I am" identity; (2) "intentional symbolization," or the desire to express something, not necessarily a clearly identifiable mental intention, but often a deeper and partially hidden impetus toward meaning; and (3) "idiosyncratic meaning," or the uniquely existential flavor arising from one's particular life-word--often as strange to an observer as though the artist were an "E.T." These conditions are thought to apply to all ages and all levels of training.
Now I will return to a sketchy summary of the four big findings from the Drawing Lab.
(1) It is impossible not to create in such a nurturant environment--even if one intended, as has happened, to copy something. A free being must become something new, even if unintentionally.
(2) Creation is not discretely tangible, like cabbages or battleships, but a psychic phenomenon approachable only through a phenomenon of the imagination. By this I mean that the phenomenologist must inhabit the same space and qualitative time and presence as the artist, or else the true psychic event of creating disappears from view.
(3) Description and expression of what occurs under these conditions cannot be adequately interpreted through a priori theories or philosophical positions. We, as researchers, are part of the universe we describe and affect it--perhaps quantum physics would even say we cause it to some degree. Though contexts are endless, we can discern a cycle, which we have called "the art of qualitative thinking," which moves naturally through the four moments of expressing, distancing, interpreting, and renewing. Creating therefore takes on a wave-like structure, one cycle flowing into another. As this movement evolves, a directionality and evolution are implicated.
(4) The interpreter goes through a similar cycle of self-searching, which requires the interpreter also to change in a directionality paralleling what the artist is going through. These are not simplistic pointers. They arise out of presence, out of action, out of endless contexts. Much space would be required to do them justice.
The history of my days on the varsity is far from linear. Various thematic events--teaching, research, pottery, Japan, the Drawing Lab, my graduate seminars, doctoral committee meetings, communal ventures--these are like individual but interacting "serials," events that stand above one's time-line, or like stories within bigger stories. Taken together, interwoven as they are, they form a tapestry rather than a history.
And there is humor within it all. At times, for instance, I get carried away with titles for my papers. Once I wrote: "How I Set Out to Do Research and Ended Up Participating in a Sacrament." Another time, for a symposium on educational competence, my contribution was simply called "Great Swamp Fires I Have Known." About the same time, when a movement was on foot to shore up grading in the College of Education, I felt I had to follow a different drummer. After intensive interviews with each member of my pottery class, I wrote an in-house article widely circulated, entitled "Unrepentant Manifesto on Being Caught Giving All A's." I even got questionable publicity when a literary critic, in his book on misuse of the English language, cited as a prime example my Art Education Journal article, around 1974, called "Formative Hermeneuties in the Arting Process of an Other: the Philetics of Art Education."
1973 saw the publication of Alternatives for Art Education Research : Inquiry into the Making of Art. In this book, I developed ways of describing creating art that grew out of my experience in the early days of the Drawing Lab. This book is still in print in a Japanese and in a Korean edition.
I had earlier received one of the first Manual Barkan Awards for my article, "An Alternate Path for Inquiry in Art Education." Later I was to write "Still Other Alternatives," an article appearing in Visual Arts Research. The word "alternative" became associated with my thought, for it seemed that I often moved away from the dominant or popular view of the field. To me, however, it was not a movement "against" but rather "toward" what was closest to the core of the art experience. I also wrote for a Japanese art education journal "To Keep the Divine Vision in Time of Trouble," a title from a line in Blake.
In a more playful turn of events, I once proclaimed at an apt moment at a national committee meeting, striking a theatrical pose, "Back to the Frills." The NAEA secretary found this so amusing that he had some bumper stickers made up. When the Board learned of this, they immediately vetoed the idea. I still have some of those outlawed stickers.
In 1974 my influence was at a popular high point. When I went to the NAEA Conference in Chicago, I felt on a real sense of mission in the kind of research I had begun in the Drawing Lab. I remember someone facetiously saying that Penn State was known for Joe Paterno and Ken Beittel. It would have been easy to succumb to what Jung calls "inflation" or what is elsewhere referred to as "hubris"--the tendency to think more highly of oneself that one ought to. Doctoral students from other universities would even follow me into the restroom (male students, in this case), or approach me as I was viewing the collections at the Chicago Art Institute, to ask my advice on their research proposals.
It was also the year when I went through an existential crisis in my private life that led, after a difficult decision, to a change in my life-partner through the blessed discovery of a true soul-mate. Fortunately, I was on my third sabbatical, beginning with the fall of 1974, so that I had the time and space to work out this major transformation. This paper is about my varsity days at Penn State, so it is not the place for many details about my private life.
I have never been able, however, to keep them neatly separate. I used my own place for educational experiences, as in pottery. That very summer, in fact, I had a communal wood-firing in a special "nobori-gama" (climbing hill kiln) built outside my studio on my two-acre lot in the country. Closely related to this issue is the criticism I often received about being too friendly with students (to whom I was not Dr. Beittel but "Dr. B."). I never thought one way or another about it. For me, it was just being myself. (Astrology buffs would find a connection with my moon in Capricorn in my Career House.) While there is a necessary asymmetry in role between teacher and student, there is none at the level of the heart.
I've been able to be present for transformative events in Art Education as well. I was influential in beginning Studies in Art Education and was one of the first editors. I was also instrumental in the founding of the Seminar for Research in Art Education.
A number of honors have also come my way, as well as a wide variety of opportunities to serve in editorial, advisory, and consultative roles. Sometimes I have had to back out of a commitment. One was when I left the advisory board of CEMREL when I learned that they did not want honest criticism but rubber-stamp approval of a course they were not going to alter. When I did so, I wrote a long letter outlining my position. But I never sent it. I just withdrew. At still other times, I could not in good conscience serve in an advisory capacity trying to force-feed teachers on the absolute necessity for simplistic behavioral objectives for the depth and complexity of artistic educational goals.
I have not been without my bouts with oppressive and authoritarian political forces within Penn State. My outspoken criticism (a lone voice from the Art Education faculty) at the arbitrary decision to take away Art Education's departmental status and move us without any input whatsoever to another college for mandated budgetary downsizing engineered by a Penn State provost probably damaged my chances to be appointed an Evan Pugh Professor. Two times I was nominated and reached the final top ten to go to President John Oswald's desk, and twice he cut me out in his final choices. I remember taking a letter one evening during the budgetary down-sizing to the Daily Collegian. The next morning the headlines proclaimed "Professor Speaks Out from Under the Tip of the Iceberg." My wife, Joan, was a great source of strength and support. She herself had a letter in the Collegian entitled "Why Poets Die Young" and she took the campaign for justice and participation to the Centre Daily Times as well.
Yet I worked throughout for harmonious relationships between the varying art interests of the University. Our transfer to the College of Arts and Architecture went smoothly. I was on the transition advisory committee. One of the early benefits of the move was my appointment to the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, for which I was not eligible in the College of Education.
Much earlier, when the arts were scattered all over the University, Ed Mattil and I represented Art Education in a series of meetings in President Eric Walker's office to project future organizational structures for the visual arts. Art Education, Art, Architecture, and Home Arts were in three different colleges. To interact with greater autonomy, we were made a separate department, no longer just a section of a large Education Department. A special advisory committee was set up to maintain open lines of cooperation between the various visual arts areas. I was appointed to that committee of three. We drew up very positive guidelines and procedures that we presented to the first dean of the College of Arts and Architecture, who promptly ignored them and created a climate of divisive political forces.
But these tribulations of institutional life are not where my recall goes without effort. I mention them in passing in the interest of completeness. Much closer to my center was the role and the art of chairing doctoral comprehensives and finals. Perhaps my being the middle of three sons in a preacher's family developed in me some of the skills for negotiation and resolution of conflict, with the steadfast hope of win-win scenarios. I could tell many tales on this theme. All in all, I greatly enjoyed my role of being a mentor to young developing scholars. It kept me growing personally as well.
I have been blessed with a sense of structure and the capacity to see larger patterns within a field of complex data. But the greatest pride came from seeing doctoral students handling questions from all comers, once they really got to the place where they knew more about their topics than anyone else alive.
Once a flustered candidate thumped his thesis draft when he couldn't get his answer out, shouting: "It's in the book!" Another time, when a candidate was set to defend his thesis in which he had explored a "big dream" through a series of paintings and interpretations. I myself was warned in a dream the night before that the out-of-field committee member was going to cause a problem. As we met as a committee prior to the defense, with the candidate absent, I invited comments. Sure enough, the out-of-field committee member came forth immediately and said, "I think it's poorly written." Being prepared, I was able to calmly say: "That's odd. I have just the opposite impression. Could you point to examples of what you mean?" He fumbled a bit, and then mentioned several unusual words the candidate had used. But he had failed to look them up in an unabridged dictionary. As he talked, it became obvious that he had scarcely read the thesis at all. Finally it came out that his wife, who had been trained in psychology, was the source of his claim. The defense itself went quite well. When it was over, I made sure the papers for signatures went to him last. When they did, he found three signatures awarding the highest rating. He followed suit.
I always felt there was merit in keeping clear a distinction between doctoral research in art education and other creative and professional achievements in art. On this point I differed with Lowenfeld, who had awarded degrees for the painting of a mural buttressed with accumulated background preparation material. To me, this was neither clearly creative nor clearly scholarly. The Graduate Dean agreed with me.
The one time I failed a doctoral candidate involved a similar issue. I had gotten the student permission from the Graduate Dean to hand-write the first copy of his thesis and to include original art. But I removed myself as chairman when he refused to include any theoretical or philosophical grounding for what he was doing, which was essentially to present an artist's journal along with some original work (not related to the text). For me, it was a simple matter of supporting a valued tradition of original inquiry. At the close of his defense I congratulated him and told him I had to fail him on principle. We are still friends.
The issue is not even about whether creating art is "original inquiry" or not. Within a different tradition I could argue that it is. In fact, as part of an all-University committee evaluating graduate degrees in art, I argued with studio art professors against putting undue emphasis on a written report. The creative work itself should be the basis for achievement, not any verbal support or reasoning, which in most cases would be neither artistically creative or verbally scholarly.
After my return from Japan in 1967, my pottery classes and my graduate seminars took on more structure. I no longer spent half a term or semester trying to tease an organic structure out of my students. I remember an inebriated grad student calling me very late one evening with, "I'm on to your fumble-and-find method, Dr. Beittel." Instead, my role became more like that defined by Buber: out of the complexity of possible choices, I presented to the student a "selective world." This was not for dependence on me, but guidance, like the image associated with my vibrational link in the Tarot deck: the Hermit, holding his lamp up to light the path, for both himself and his followers. Once I had been exposed to "deep tradition," I found structure friendly, not constraining. I saw the truth in the saying that freedom is not a resting place, but the zero point between constraint on the one hand and commitment on the other.
My transition into more structure was gradual. My seminars became more thematic, and they changed with each offering. I drew from a wide spectrum of thinkers, a list that kept expanding as my own thought had under my own research and the mentoring of doctoral students. Included were all those great souls who happened to say my own thoughts before I did: Dewey, Collingwood, Pepper, William James, Bachelard, Ponge, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Habermas, Corbin, and others not surfacing now.
Then a new participative and creative element entered my seminars. I took to meeting in a comfortable room where a relaxed atmosphere could be maintained. The room was darkened and lit with only a table lamp where the presenter of the moment sat. We "received" the thematic presentation in fullness of silent listening, not following it with critique or discussion. After a number of presentations, the house lights went up, and we took a break outside, where free informal interaction and socialization occurred. At the end of all presentations following the last break, we held our general discussion and addressed our theme again with the fruits of our participation behind us.
Following 1974, I arranged, with Joan's help, to participate in a series of NAEA conventions through a four-member panel of presenters. This included Joan and me, plus two others, all former doctoral students of mine, with the individual papers centered around a theme. At another time, I also served as editor for one issue of the NAEA Journal with special invited papers for the occasion. In general, I was blessed at being in on the early stages of many exciting developments in our profession, when things were open, new, and bold.
In 1978 I had twenty-five years at Penn State. Not liking the symbolism of chairs or time pieces as awards, I wrote the vice president in charge and said I'd rather have the cost of my Penn State chair applied toward a 10-speed bicycle. Alas, he was without humor and sent a long letter chewing me out. The College of Education came through with a "Silver Sprocket Award," a bicycle sprocket mounted on a walnut plaque.
I never liked the word "retirement." Instead, I always say that I "graduated from institutional life" in 1984, at the age of 62. It was, again, good timing. The climate was narrowing and the temperament of the graduate student body subtly changing. Students came with almost too much sophistication, but also with a certain loss of innocence that often showed up as less commitment and depth. Still, I do not want to be critical here. These were only my perceptions, and they counseled me to end my days, after 31 years, on the varsity while the curve was still high and let younger professors guide the new generation whose values must always evolve differently.
The list of doctoral students that worked directly with me as pottery assistants, research assistants, and Drawing Lab volunteers is long. I will not mention names here because there are too many of them, all close to my heart. I would not want to inadvertently leave any out. It is a distinguished roster of those to whom I owe much and from whom I learned much. To those I could add many, many others who didn't serve in those specific capacities but added equally to my growth and joy. The list becomes almost endless when I think of master's and undergraduate students. I propose erecting a monument to "the unknown student," that person whose life a teacher deeply affects without ever learning about it.
I did, however, continue to interact with doctoral students after my "graduation" in 1984. I remained as chairman with all my doctoral advisees who had advanced to the research stage of their theses. The last Ph.D. I advised to completion was in 1989. There were nine in all between 1984 and 1989. I would meet them in the Nittany Lion Inn Fireside Room or at a similar University setting, since I had no office after 1984. I loved the freedom and ambiance of such places.
Though this ends my story of my official days on the varsity, two later events deserve mention here. The first took place in 1985, when George Zoretich and I were concurrently honored with one-artist exhibitions in the Palmer Museum of Art. We also each gave a talk in the museum before a large audience.
In 1991, through the good offices of Marilyn Zurmeuhlin at Iowa, and George Hardiman and Ted Zernich at Illinois, I was honored with a symposium held at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Former doctoral students and a few former colleagues gathered together and presented papers on their days at Penn State and beyond and on my impact on them. Two presenters came the whole way from Japan. It was, as I facetiously said then, an unheard-of chance to have an after-death experience while still living.
Again, the timing was magical. Though the symposium was honoring my influence at Penn State, the meeting was not at Penn State, and Penn State was not at all represented officially. One snowy morning several months before the symposium, following up a suggestion from Joan, I pulled on my boots and walked through the snow into Old Main, and up to the Office of the Assistant Provost, Grace Hampton, who prior to that post had been director of the School of Visual Arts.
I explained to her what was about to take place and asked whether there might be some way for Penn State to sponsor the publication of a manuscript I had done earlier was not at all addressed. This publication could then be Penn State's contribution to the symposium.
The idea instantly caught her imagination. She immediately set to work on ways of supporting it and was able to get help from the dean of the College of Arts and Architecture, the vice president for research, and the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies.
As chance would have it, the funds were encumbered right before a freeze on all budgets occurred at the time of Desert Storm. My wife, Joan, became the editor (a true test of relationship!) and only a few days before the symposium the first printed copies of A Celebration of Art and Consciousness were shipped express to Illinois. Grace Hampton was there in person to present it on behalf of Penn State.
Otherwise, since 1984, my post-varsity days have been spent in the field house of home and pottery studio, and in writing on topics of wider scope. In 1984 my book Zen and the Art of Pottery was published and is now in its second printing. I also have three additional unpublished manuscripts ready for review.
It has been both energizing and somewhat stressful to tell my story. I see now that I so easily become entangled in other people's stories because I have been so entangled in my own. It is appropriate that I conclude this writing on my 80th birthday. Setting down this truthful work of fiction has led to a freeing from my entanglement. Now I can close this book and put it on the shelf. Obviously, I am not my story, because I am still here and my story is on the shelf. If I were still my story, you would have to wait for the next installment. The great thing about the soul is its eternal youthfulness and the fact that there can be many stories out of the same source. Now it is so beautiful to relate to others without entanglements, in that field where being takes precedence over doing, presence over thought, and love over action, where what arises is not who I am or who they are, where we share something silent and much deeper than all the shifting forms.
We live mythic moments unaware. One of the developmental tasks of our mature years is to bring them to consciousness, so that as we age the world does not so much shrink as deepen.
I have spoken, then, more as poet than historian. "Poetry makes nothing happen," says W. H. Auden; "It survives in the valley of its own saying." But that saying celebrates that which is already happening in its own fullness of presence.
Wholeness before and wholeness after,
The end is nearest the beginning;
The circle of Hermes is love.
K.R.B.
2002