POST #53: Renee Kahn’s Rules for Effective Public Speaking

A couple of posts ago, I talked about teaching art to “minors” in the Junior High Schools of the South Bronx. But, sometimes it’s just as tough to reach an audience of sophisticated adults, even though they’re well behaved, seemingly eager to learn and capable of sitting still for more than five minutes.

I like to think that my years in the public schools of New York City made me a good speaker. It was a question of survival. I am now fearless in front of an audience, no matter how large or small, socially important or academically advanced, I know I can hold them, keep their interest, teach them something and entertain them at the same time. My twenty-two years of lecturing at the University of Connecticut in Stamford certainly helped. One student wrote in his teacher evaluation that I “made a boring subject interesting.” (I never thought art history was boring). However, I know plenty of people who taught for as long as I did and are twice as knowledgeable as I am who are dreadful teachers and public speakers. They are ‘tone deaf,” blissfully unaware that they are putting their audience to sleep.

I recently attended a lecture by a prominent political scientist with top academic credentials: a Ph.D., years of teaching at a famous university, numerous books and articles and lots of personal charisma. His topic was unfamiliar to me and I was looking forward to learning something. But the minute Dr. X took out a stack of notes and began to read them, I knew it was going to be an ordeal. Escape was impossible; I was sitting in the front row and would have had to cross in front of him to get out. An hour and a half later, I was finally able to reach the door. The problem with listening to a talk that is being read is that you can’t go back over anything you missed, the way you can if you are reading a book. When you deliver something verbally, off the cuff, you automatically simplify it as you would in conversation.

So here are Renee Kahn’s rules for keeping your listeners awake (and learning)

Rule #1: NEVER read your speech - unless of course it is some kind of scientific paper that has lots of formulae and requires total accuracy. If you don’t know your subject well enough to speak with just a brief (VERY brief) outline, you shouldn’t be giving the talk at all. Besides, you are much better off missing a couple of points than you are boring your audience to death. If you must, make as few notes to yourself as possible and print them in large letters you can read without your glasses. If you have a lot of technical information to impart, prepare a handout.

Rule #2: Like (or act like you like) your audience.  Come in smiling, crack a joke, don’t show fear. Interact with the audience constantly. Look at them; gauge how things are going and be prepared to improvise. That’s one of the reasons not to read your speech (Rule #1); if you aren’t looking at the faces in front of you, you can’t tell if you are getting through. Start with something funny; it puts everyone at ease. You can almost hear the sigh of relief when your audience realizes they’re in for an enjoyable experience.

Rule #3: Keep your visuals to a minimum. It’s not that your material isn’t worthwhile, it’s that people’s capacity to absorb it tends to run out after about 20 or 25 images. It all becomes a blur after that. I remember attending a talk on Rhode Island pottery at a local historical society where the speaker marched in with two full trays of slides and promptly proceeded to show all 240 of them. I thought I would die and to this day, have trouble looking at images of Early American pots. Visual overload sets in pretty fast.

Rule #4: Watch your audience constantly for signs of boredom and then react accordingly. Speed up, condense, eliminate, crack a joke, walk around the room. That takes us back to Rule #1, why you should never read your speech.

Just remember, lecturing in public is the intellectual’s form of stand-up comedy.

POST #52: THE NEW MAN IN MY LIFE

In an earlier blog, I referred to a remark my late husband (a Clinical Psychologist) had made about my work. He claimed I suffered from “only child syndrome” and the need to create “company” on my canvasses was the result of some existential loneliness. Well, guess what? In my latest effort, I’ve come up with a man to protect me and keep me company. He’s a bit of a slob and not my type, but hey, when I need him, he’s there. That’s more than you can say for most men.

I have to thank the ace graphic designer Bob Callahan for finding Herman for me. Callahan likes to occasionally amuse himself by putting (“virtually,” not actually) my artwork in all sorts of high-class places like the Louvre, or the Neue Gallery. Of course, my work looks great in big, fancy galleries and who knows, maybe someday, if I live long enough (like another 100 years) it might get there. One day, Bob e-mailed me a photo of Herman (that’s the name I gave him) admiring one of my well-endowed maidens (nothing like virtual reality). I decided I needed him in my life so I took the photo Bob sent, copied it onto a sheet of acetate and used my overhead projector to create a life-sized figure with his back to the viewer. I then copied the image onto a large piece of canvas and painted it in oil. Herman came out great; he was Everyman, the universal Zhlub*: thirty pounds overweight, sloppily dressed; even the creases in his saggy pants looked real.

My next step was to glue the painted Herman onto a piece of foam core and cut him out. I have to say, the result was so realistic that you could swear he was actually in the room. My immediate reaction when I came into the studio at night was to jump back, thinking there was someone there, looking at my work. When I realized it was only Herman, I relaxed, knowing I now had someone to protect me; like a dog; he would scare away intruders.

All my friends love Herman and insist that I photograph them next to him. He’s like one of the painted figures at a carnival with a hole for your face or maybe he’s actually a Golem, arisen to protect the Jews of Prague (in this case Renee Kahn in North Stamford). I’m not quite sure I need protection, but it’s nice to know he’s there and he that he admires my work.

Herman is happy to pose on request. Just let me know and I will make an appointment.

*Zhlub

A crude person lacking in social skills along with insensitivity and a lack of manners, oaf, nebbish 

POST #51: TEACHING ART TO MINORS

The recent death of Bel Kaufman, author of the best seller, “Up the Down Staircase,” brought back lots of memories of my days in the New York City public schools. After graduation from college, (an art major) I got a job teaching art to 7^th, 8^th and 9^th graders in the Junior High Schools of the South Bronx, not the easiest way to earn a living. If nothing else, the experience made me an exceptionally good public speaker; if you can hold the attention of 30 twelve to fourteen year olds, there is no audience you can’t handle – although I have to say the worst group I ever addressed was a DAR luncheon in New Canaan. My inner city delinquents were nothing compared to that bunch of spoiled, elderly brats. I ended up doing “stand-up” comedy to get their attention, a skill I acquired during my years at Herman Ridder Junior High School in the Bronx.

The problem wasn’t so much the students; they looked forward to their one hour of art a week, although it had about as much relevance to their lives as Ivanhoe or Algebra. It was the system that drove me crazy. I taught thirty classes a week, each with over 30 students, close to 1,000 pupils in a subject that required individual attention. To say that I was a basket case at the end of a day would be an understatement.

The days flew by in what seemed like seconds. I felt like that character in the old German classic movie, “Metropolis”, who struggles to keep a giant, clock-like mechanism from exploding. If I let my guard down, chaos ensued. Scissors flew, art supplies disappeared, never to be recovered, fights broke out. Charges of m------f------------- rang out. My best friend who taught in an All Girls Junior High (worse than boys at that age) used to break up battles with an upturned chair, lion-tamer style. All it took was one emotionally disturbed child in the classroom, and all learning stopped.

Strange as it may sound, the really hard part of the job wasn’t the students. They were tough, street-hardened but basically lovable. The problem was the workload and the administration (isn’t it always?) with their bureaucratic requests, none of which I ever completed to their satisfaction. My lessons plans were always late and incomplete, my attendance sheets never totaled up correctly, and so on and so forth. Despite my neglect of proper paperwork and procedure, my children turned out gorgeous artwork and the halls of the school were filled with their efforts. Just hand them a crayon and a piece of paper, and, within minutes, something wonderful appeared. I learned to be a performer, a magician, to excite them about their ability to create beauty out of their own heads.

I lasted at the job for six long years. During that time, I did practically no artwork of my own. My only hope for escape (and to be an artist) was to marry and get pregnant (things usually happened in that order in those days.) The minute the pregnancy test came back positive, I handed in my resignation. As I walked out the door of J.H.S 98 the Bronx for the last time, I made two solemn promises to myself:

1)    No one was ever going to say “go f---- yourself” to me again, and…

2) I would go on Welfare before I would go back to teach in a New York City public school .

POST #50: ALL BOXED OUT

A friend of mine, a theater Lighting Man (as opposed to a Sound Man or a Prop Man) slept on my living room couch last week after lighting a local performance – it was easier than driving back to New York City at 1 a.m. and looking for a parking space. In the morning, I dragged him up to the attic to look at the 50 or so wooden boxes I have stored there. These are not the cardboard ones I talked about in Post #18, but plain, black, wood shadow boxes, 18”x14”x3”. I bought them from a supplier in China and filled the interiors with black and white images of buildings I had photographed in my walks around Downtown Stamford and the South End. Once I established a make-believe streetscape, (not a real one) I could put my cast of true-to-life street characters inside, creating a De Chirico-like dreamscape. I was able to create depth in the shallow space by using false photo perspective; no color, all shades of gray. Unlike my cheery, original set of supermarket boxes populated by a hand-drawn, satirical cast of characters, these were somber and expressive. I don’t remember what was going on in my life at the time, but it couldn’t have been good.

I’ve exhibited the boxes several times in the past – at the old Loft Artist’s building on Canal Street and at the University of Connecticut gallery in Stamford, lighting them with whatever was at hand - overhead spots or floor lamps. They looked good, but were never quite “right.” Recently, I decided that what they really needed was true stage lighting. With all the tiny LED lights now available, I was sure there was some way to do that, create real “theater” out of my miniature streetscapes. My overnight visitor (the  “lighting man”) and I took a bunch of small, intense, LED flashlights I recently acquired and shone them on the boxes from all directions; like stage lighting, we created dramatic shadows from above, below and behind Some of the effects were so vivid that we both gasped when the makeshift LED’s went on.

A few weeks ago, I saw something interesting that I’d like to try with the boxes. It was at the Museum of Art and Design at Columbus Circle - a relatively new, small museum in New York City that I highly recommend.  The designer had built a false wall from floor to ceiling and placed boxes inside, flush with the wall, but providing space for unseen lighting. I thought that might be something interesting to try, or, I could mount the boxes inside larger boxes, again allowing room for dramatic stage lighting. All I need now is a sugar daddy (or momma) to pay for it and a darkened, theater-like room in which to exhibit. Maybe I can sell tickets.

I’ll try to take some decent photos so you can get the idea. That too needs a “professional.”

Post #49: Picasso and Me

In case you're puzzled by the above image, it is a "conceptual" New York gallery show featuring my latest triptych as IMAGINED by graphic designer, Robert Callahan. If only it were really so!

Picasso and Braque had a horror of theories and rationales, but between them, they came up with a new form of reality, not the realism of previous eras, but their own. They heartily disliked the shimmering, “pretty” surfaces of Impressionism. When Cezanne simplified forms (the infamous cone, cube cylinder) he was still involved in the old Renaissance struggle to depict “real space”, although in his own way, using geometric planes and the advancing and receding properties of color. When P & B began using these volumes, they had little interest in Cezanne’s goals, capturing what the eye actually saw. It was the “inner eye” that counted to them; paintings had their own reasons to exist, a life of their own; let the camera deal with external reality. Even subject matter was unimportant, especially in Cubism’s second phase, the so-called “Synthetic” period (synthesis). “Still Lives” were merely shapes for Picasso and Braque to play with. Who cared about pieces of newspaper, bowls and chairs? They were merely objects that enabled artists to create a new reality appropriate to the modern world. 

In one of my former blogs, Post # 29, I wrote about how I had taken an art workshop forty plus years ago from an elderly Hungarian emigre painter named Victor Kandell who  managed to extricate me from “copying” life, just as Picasso and Braque had done decades earlier. He pushed me into creating my own artistic reality by playing around with size, enlarging and shrinking forms, not as the eye saw them, but as the composition required. He taught me to create new shapes using transparency and overlapping. No perspective, no shading, no story line. I learned to treat my paintings as a world of their own, with bits and pieces of reality introduced only where needed. But it wasn’t until I read Richardson’s “A Life of Picasso” that I realized who had been Kandell’s “teacher” (and indirectly, mine.)

For the past few months, I have been working on a series of large, 72”x48” oil paintings. I recently finished the fourth (and probably last) one. They are loosely derived from visits to the Lower East Side when I was in my twenties. I seem to have internalized the jumbled imagery of signs, people, the El, buildings etc. It’s like free association in psychotherapy. I treat the paintings first and foremost as compositions, not illustrations and they are lots more powerful that way. I finally understand, so many years after I began to study art, what abstraction is about. 

POST #48: ART SPEAK

If there’s anything worse than academic theoreticians or art historians philosophizing about art, it’s artists trying to explain their own work. Matisse famously ordered painters to cut off their tongues because, he said, the decision to be an artist “takes away the right to express oneself with anything but a brush.” The problem is that visual images are extremely difficult to translate into words. Art is something that’s experienced, not intellectually understood.

The best an art historian can do when he writes about art is to explain how the work relates to its time, the social, technological and economic forces that influenced its creation. For example, it’s useful to know how the invention of the camera led to the ultra realistic painting of the mid-19^th century; how the artists of the period attempted to compete with and surpass this new technology that threatened their livelihood. Or, it helps to know that scientific studies into the physics of color and light encouraged Impressionism. But none of the above technical information really affects the main goal of the artist: to create something of INEXPLICABLE beauty. Art theory is only words.

When I taught art history, I used to warn my students to beware of writing about art that was “over their heads.” It should be simple and easily understood. To demonstrate, I would take a paragraph out of their text and ask the class what it meant. Silence. Nobody understood it. “Don’t worry, class”, I would comfort them, “I didn’t understand it either. And what’s more, the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about; he’s just filling space (that’s what he’s paid to do) and assuming you would think you were too stupid to know what he was talking about.

My favorite example of this kind of meaningless ARTSPEAK happened at a lecture I attended at the Whitney Museum, when they had a branch in the former Champion Building in Stamford. The speaker (I won’t mention his name; although it is unlikely he will ever read this blog) was a noted art theoretician, the author of several totally unreadable books on Aesthetics. I was curious to see whether he was more intelligible in person than on the page (he wasn’t.) At one point, he used a term I had never heard before in all my years of studying and teaching art: “anarchic formalism” – an apparent oxymoron. Rather than embarrass him at the worshipful Q&A that followed, I went up to him on his way out to ask what the term meant. He had the decency to blush, “I made it up," he confessed, "it sounded good."

So, the moral of this post is two-fold:

1. Never listen to artists talk about their art, or, if you do listen, don’t believe a word they say; they are either making it up as they go along, or quoting what someone else once said about their work. 
2. Avoid aesthetic theory and philosophy like the plague. It has nothing to do with art.

The illustrations for this blog come from my large Curley's Diner triptych, except I didn't know it was going to be about  Curley's until I was well into it. I created the story 'after the fact' based on what had come out of my imagination. The woman in the center is Maria, part owner of the diner. The man lusting after her is a notorious Albanian house painter, well known for his romantic escapades. But I had no idea who was going to appear until they showed up. I told you; never listen to artists explain their work.

POST #47: THE NAKED TRUTH or Beauty is in the Eyes of the Beholder

Men are always being accused of mentally undressing women. Do women do the same to men? I wonder. George Grosz, one of my all-time favorite artists, a German satirist from the 1920s and 30s, used to “undress” women all the time and his water colors of women in the street wearing transparent clothing, pubic hair and all, the way men (like himself) look at them are truly hilarious.  Throughout history, male artists have always preferred to paint female nudes. But what if women turned the tables on men and drew them nude with everything hanging out (literally)? Not a pretty sight, I’m afraid. In the 1960s, the artist, Alice Neele painted some great male nudes totally exposed, but her work was always considered somewhat prurient or “shocking.”

Many years ago, I did a series of large cardboard cutouts based on the real estate developers I dealt with on a regular basis. I thought of them as “thugs in expensive suits” but when I would get really angry, I would wonder how they would look without their clothes. It was my hostile way of getting even with them for being so arrogant and winning so often.  Out of that random thought, I created a Mens’ Bathhouse series: cut-out paper dolls of real men (not Ken dolls), about 14” high, wearing removable towels or swim trunks….very funny but unfortunately, too x-rated for me to ever show in public. (I lack Alice Neele’s guts, or should I say “balls”?)

I think there’s a reason, other than plain sexism, why we often show women in varying states of undress, but rarely give men a similar honor: naked men are just not that pretty to look at. When I began my Bathhouse series, I discovered that my limited life experience  (married to one man for fifty years) had left me without a great deal of information to draw upon so I went to the local bookstore and found the perfect swipe file, a book of a hundred or so photographs of frontally nude New Yorkers, men and women, all ages, all walks of life. The photographer had simply asked everyone he met to pose for him with clothes and without, and a surprisingly large percentage accepted. The book became a great resource file; everything I ever wanted to know about naked men, without having to become involved with them.

The truth is, most people look better with their clothes on. Unless someone spends endless hours exercising to say nothing of expensive surgery and exhausting diets, most exposed bodies are not very attractive. Often, parts that should be big are too small; parts that should be small, are too big. That’s why Mother Nature invented romance; nothing like the euphoria of a love affair to keep you oblivious to what’s actually in front of you.  Aside from wanting to even the score between myself and the thugs who always seemed to win the zoning battles, I wanted to say something about the “objectification” of women through most of art history. Why do artists paint naked women and not naked men? Maybe because women prefer to surprise you... By the way, I glued the fig leaves on just now to spare my readers unnecessary distress.

click image to enlarge