And now...turn around...

 

A week ago at this time I was on a plane wending my way back to the United States for summer vacation. That flight is the only flight of the entire school year when I can take the long view and see the entire school year for what it has been. Not until the very last moment of the school year has ended can I see what the year has actually been—the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful. I fly for thousands of miles and can take it all in.

 

This year was a calm and steady year, maybe the calmest and most stable in the seven years in the history of the school. However, in the last couple weeks, there were some incidences that showed that even in the calmest year, one can still be surprised at the end.

You must always expect the unexpected in a school. One can never just coast to the end. On Graduation Day, that wonderful and bittersweet day when you bid farewell to the seniors, a group (hopefully a small group) trashed the office of my friend the Dean of Students. Julianne works tirelessly for the students, and on that last day, some group deemed it important to leave a good-bye that was nasty and immature. No matter how long you ponder and anticipate the road of the year, I didn’t see that coming. That sounds like the work of the seniors of the first year of the school, not this last class. And then as final exams got underway, a student exposed a cheating scandal on the math exams that revealed that a large group of boys had stolen some math exams and disseminated them. The Office of Student Life spent hours unravelling this mess, and in spite of the warnings and the teachings for so long all year about academic honesty and academic dishonesty, as we turned the corner at the end of the year, a sizable group of boys found themselves in a mess and disabused the teachings and exhortations about integrity.

Of course, these little bubbles (what else should one call them??) do not diminish an otherwise productive, healthy, positive, fulfilling, progressive school year. But it does remind one to be ready to turn and see something unexpected.

All of this reminds me of an artwork I taught for the first time in the closing days of the AP Art History course. I discovered a recent statue by a Spanish artist that proved to be an exciting statue at the end of our course and the continuum of thousands of years of art images. Look at the photo above. Take a moment to process and guess and speculate what this art work is about. The museum in London that owns this piece showcases it in a very unique and interesting way. You walk into a long, narrow room, and there is this one art work, a statue, as I said, but having his back turned to us. Of course most of the time statues face their public. Hmmm…for some reason this person is not interested in anyone or he has his back to us on purpose. The title of Maurizio Cattelan’s statue is Him, so we get the idea it is a male.

I told the class how big the statue was—about four feet tall. When I asked my class what they saw, a student said it must be a little boy. Several of them tried to guess who or what he was. From the looks of seemingly real clothes and shoes my class thought it was meant to look like a real person. “What is he doing?” asked a student and another answered, “He’s on his knees with his hands linked and he is looking at the sky. Is he praying?” The position of the body gives us an idea but it doesn’t necessarily tell us what he’s thinking.

The class enjoyed guessing what was going on—several assumed that Cattelan wants us to think it’s a real person—“Í bet they want us to stumble upon this figure in the museum and assume he is real. The clothes look real.” My savvy students decided that Cattelan was sculpting like the Duane Hanson statues of the last 30-40 years that look like real people—not any of this marble or clay or bronze business of the old days of statues.

So after we had speculated about the statue, knowing the name of the statue, guessing about the size (since all slides show art works the same size, I told them that the size is the size of a normal 10 year-old boy) and what he might be doing, I showed a photograph of the statue from the front. Guess what? I got gasps in class! Gasps are always fun because they are caught off guard enough to really have that startling inhalation of air!  Okay, cyber-class: go to Google Images right now and look up Maurizio Cattelan's statue of Him. Do it now!!

The class loved thinking about why the museum would not have the face visible from the front from the get-go. They realized that the surprise element was a big part of the experience of seeing this statue for the first time. After his gasp, Mohammad exclaimed, “It’s Adolf Hitler!” The students went from trying to piece together enough information to make a credible guess about the identity to a ton of historical information about the subject.

I reviewed for the class—just in case they had not had a strong enough World History class—that Hitler had seized power (legally, I reminded them!) in Germany in 1933 and then propelled Germany into another world war while at the same time deporting, imprisoning, torturing and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. They took all this ready historical information and looked at what Cattelan hoped to communicate in his statue. Sara asked, “Why not have the face visible from the start? It is one of the most instantly recognized faces in history?” Zein, very bright Zein, answered: “But this way you have to actually go up to him, walk around him, and only then do you know who he is. It’s a shock when you recognize him because nothing about the figure prepared you for who it is.” As we looked at the statue, realizing it is a waxwork in real clothes, Farouk asked, “So why is he the size of a little boy?” Natasha smiled widely and said, “I think it is a little like Surrealism in that part of the work is the surprise. It is disconcerting to think it is a little boy praying, and then you realize it is Hitler, one of the most evil men in history.”

I asked the class, “So you give one whole room of the museum to this disconcerting statue. Does this glorify Hitler? Celebrate this hateful and cruel man?” We thought about the history of statuary—from ancient governors beseeching the gods for help, to the Greek statues of idealized young men, to Michelangelo’s David to the strong and stoic Burghers of Calais by Rodin. “This is an odd statue in the history of art, isn’t it? Artists usually make statues of people they admire. Why, in the new 21^st century might Cattelan have made this??”

The class mulled this over, reminding themselves that usually cities and towns and countries pull down statues of controversial and hated leaders. Then Bryan, another excellent historian, commented, “Maybe the statue is meant to remind us to be vigilant, to show us what we need to be wary of.” Rami thought it had a strange connection to images of Satan in Bosch paintings or other medieval works. Bryan continued, “When we look at this, and instantly know who it is, it reminds us of the atrocities of the Nazi era.”

In my other class Eun wondered, “Why is he the size of a child but with the adult Hitler’s face?” The class debated several interesting answers—knowing that there might be more than one right answer—the best art works allow for multiple interpretations. Halima said we never think of Hitler as a child, and then Farah added, “and when does one go from the innocence of childhood to the barbarity of Nazi atrocities?” Heidi wondered if this was meant to allude to the young children indoctrinated by the Hitler youth programs. Fawzi put his two cents in: “Don’t forget that to many Germans Hitler was a great man, avenging their honor after the devastation of World War I.”

More than one student wondered why Hitler’s name is not in the title. Sammy, one of the great ‘concluders’ of all time deemed that by calling it Him it sounds like an accusation, like someone is pointing at him, and being incapable of knowing how to sum up the totality of Hitler. Don’t you just love these guys??? I mean, all you have to do, it seems, is throw a slide on the wall, and my class just takes off!

Heidi brought us back to the position of Cattelan’s statue of Hitler. Heidi decides that the statue is Cattelan’s way of telling the end of the story of World War II: “Cattelan puts Hitler on his knees, where he will forever be praying in penitence.” 

The statue works because it inspired thought and conversation. You walk up to it in this long, narrow room, thinking you have figured it out, and then you turn around, and get a surprise, at first a seemingly offensive surprise, but then perhaps a deeper, profound reconciliation of childhood innocence and the consequences of our actions.

So I can turn around now and look at the school year with clear eyes. It was an excellent year. There were some bumps at the end of the journey. We will never know which seniors cruelly mocked and trashed a dedicated educator’s office. But the cheating scandal ended with some withdrawals from the school and suspensions. More than parent thought that was a harsh consequence to the innocence and naivete of youth. Or maybe they have learned a valuable lesson about the consequences for their actions.

But, just like with Him you come to a point when you walk the long journey and then you get to turn around and see what you have. There may be a surprise, there may be reconciliation, but part of the fun of the journey is imagining the next step, the unexpected step, in the journey. I have two more blog posts to write in the next couple days before I take my summer blog vacation.