Today I received an e-mail out of the blue from a art curator hitherto unknown to me, and asking me about my ‘path’ in teaching the arts. I wrote this response:
Dear X,
Thanks for your inquiry about my life in the arts, which are by far my chief interests and great loves in human culture, and in particular the teaching. Specifically, you ask about what drew me to the “path from philosophy and rhetoric at Berkeley through graduate studies, then into teaching art history and ethics at multiple Bay Area colleges.” I had never really thought about it in those terms, and so I’ve had to reflect a bit on how to answer. Memory and self-reflection are not my strong points, and my daily focus is just on whatever it is I’m writing, regularly punctuated with thoughts on whatever striking poem, painting, song, movie, or dance I’ve encountered recently. But I’d like to try to answer your question in a way that might be interesting and illuminating to you.
Already in childhood certain works of visual art exerted a strange and powerful force. By around the age of 10 I had collected images of the bull-leaping fresco at Knossos in ancient Crete, Paul Klee’s ‘The Twittering Machine, and Picasso’s ‘Night-Fishing at Antibes’. In retrospect I can say that what attracted me to these in particular was the sense of motion rendered graceful and benign through suffusion in color. At the age of 15 I discovered Ornette Coleman, Bach, Robert Johnson, and Messiaen, where the role played by color in the visual arts was played by rhythm, harmony, and/or polyphony in music. At 16 I became devoted to William Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ and ‘Auguries of Innocence, Rimbaud, and the earlier Cantos of Ezra Pound. The spell of color and rhythm in painting and poetry somehow obscurely communicated with Pound’s dictum ‘dichten = condensare’, that is, ‘poeticizing is condensing’. At 17 I discovered the films of Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu, exhibiting what Paul Schrader called ‘the transcendental style’ and which seemed to exemplify Pound’s dictum, and Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. My central artistic loves were in place. A second kind of valuable experience was learning to appreciate the initially rebarbative in the arts. By my mid-20s I was finding Pound objectionable to the point of unreadability, and in response my adolescent dislike of Walt Whitman was transformed into a great love for the author of Leaves of Grass. In my early 20s an extensive trip to Europe left me with a great dislike of Nicholas Poussin, but when a few years later I heard the philosopher Richard Wollheim say that his favorite painter was Poussin, a few years of diligently viewing the Poussins at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City made me see the light. To have passed from initial dislike and incomprehension to loving appreciation is one of the greatest experiences in the arts.
At the same time (late adolescence) I began reading philosophy, first Nietzsche, then Wittgenstein, and then others, especially Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. I briefly went to college as an English major, but quickly dropped out as it seemed to be interfering with my education. When I returned after some years working as a carpenter and cabinet-maker, I switched to philosophy, as I felt that that was the royal, if not the shortest, road to what was most fundamental in life and thought: philosophy was radical. I was very fortunate to have had wonderful teachers in high school, especially Roberta Tom, who gave me upon graduation her bilingual addition of Aristotle’s Poetics; in college I first had the astonishing Jim Friedman, as dynamic as he was difficult, for Wittgenstein, and then at Berkeley in Wittgenstein and Heidegger my wonderful mentor Hans Sluga, who is one of my role models to this day. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, what you call my path had opened: to teach the arts and the philosophy of the arts as modelled by Friedman and Sluga. At some point in the late 1980s I read Herbert Fingarette’s Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, and then Confucius’s Analects. This provided me with Confucius’s aspiration of working ceaselessly to help one’s students. Many years later I read Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, where she describes teaching as trying to help your students gain access to beauty. So the manner of walking the path became clear: work ceaselessly in teaching so that others might experience the beauty and radicality of the arts, and perhaps induce something of the experience of learning to love what was initially uninteresting or unappealing.
While the path is fixed, my particular trajectory in teaching and its various institutions is just contingencies and accidents: I finished my undergraduate degree in philosophy at U.C. Berkeley, then immediately entered graduate studies at Berkeley in Rhetoric. I chose Rhetoric because Sluga had warned me that I was interested in too many things to do well in academic philosophy. I started writing art criticism for publication in 1990, which led me to teach art theory at the San Francisco Art Institute starting in 1995. Over time I found myself teaching more and more art history, first on contemporary art and avant-garde art at SFAI, then Modern European art, then the Classical art of Greece and Rome, and finally surveys of the entire world’s art from the Paleolithic to the present. I developed a class on Ancient Ethics at SFAI so that I might teach Greek tragedy, the Bible, the thoughts of the Buddha, and Confucius’s Analects. I was run out of SFAI in 2008 after I publicly objected to them exhibiting animal snuff films as art, and with great relief I began teaching art history and ethics elsewhere, primarily the College of Marin, the California College of the Arts, and St. Mary’s College. I gave two public lecture series at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in 2009 and 2015, which formed the basis of two short books in Spanish. In 2020 I retired from teaching to devote myself to publishing in philosophy of the arts. My aim in these ongoing publications is identical to my aim in teaching, except that with the writings my hope is that they may be of some interest and use to a few people in the future, those who wonder what humanity had achieved in the arts in its first forty thousand years.
I hope this is of some interest to you.
Best wishes,
John Rapko