The Italian painter Umberto Boccioni was obsessed with capturing movement, perhaps better called ìdynamism,” in static art. The majority of his paintings and sculptures are bold forms depicted either at the height of their momentum or in the various stages of their movement, creating overlapping images and colorful waves that indicate the progress the object has made through space and time.
My parting editorial has nothing to do with Umberto Boccioni, the futurist movement, of which Boccioni was a participant, or art in general. This fact is just something I have picked up in my four years at Wooster, something Iím not really sure what to do with. Instead of being about modern art or trivia, this editorial is about what we learn at college and what we do with it.
I was talking to a police officer once, one of those civil talks you have with people of authority when you havenít done anything discipline-worthy, but someone around you has, and the authority figure wants to ease the tension and not seem like the bad guy.
Regardless of why he was there, the officer asked a friend I was with how she liked the College. My friend replied that the College really wasnít as great as one might think. The officer seemed taken aback, maybe a little indignant really, that a student would say something negative about her own institution.
ìYou should be happy that you have the opportunity to go there,” he said, at least as far as I can paraphrase from memory. Then he proceeded to tell us about how he got into trouble when he was younger, joined the Marines and got himself straight enough to join the police force.
To that police officer, the fact that we were in college was an undeniable privilege, one that he probably thought we were taking for granted. At the same time, if he asked what I was studying then and I told him about Boccioniís ìUnique Forms of Continuity in Space,” about how a stationary sculpture could replicate the movement of a figure by creating an angular and aerodynamic fluidity of shape, Iím not all together sure he would have been that impressed.
So, here we are, stuck between the presupposed and almost irrefutable value of education and the inability to directly apply what we have learned, at least what the ìreal world” calls, to pragmatic ends. Iím not entirely sure what Iíll be doing with what I have learned about literature or art history or even microeconomics, and, gauging the responses of people who I talk to about my English major, theyíre not sure either. Even so, as I get ready to leave school and the world of liberal arts, Iím also preparing to find out, and I am not the least bit ungrateful for what Iíve learned here.
As the Dean of Studies tells a young Stephen Dedalus in James Joyceís ìA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” ìThere is an art in lighting a fire. We have the liberal arts and we have the useful arts. This is one of the useful arts.” Where my education lies is something Iím not entirely sure I can gauge yet, but I think itís fair to say that thatís all right with me, that itís just part of the adventure.