UC Santa Cruz - Center for Teaching Excellence

Martin A. Berger – Teaching Statement 2005-06
Associate Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture

I teach a range of thematic courses on the visual arts of the United States. Courses such as “Image and Gender,” “Race and American Visual Arts,” and “The ‘Real’ in American Culture” make selective use of photographs, paintings, performances and films to examine key themes in U.S. culture. As different as my individual courses are, two overarching goals unite them: to hone my students’ capacity for synthetic thought and to foster an appreciation for how the creation, circulation and consumption of art is linked to politics and power.

The subject of my classes is not art history per se. I use art as the medium to illustrate the role of imagery in forging individual, group, and national identities. My success as a teacher is not ultimately predicated on students’ familiarity with artworks or even with historical events, but on their coming to see the world around them through a new lens. I teach a mode of inquiry for making sense of history, but also for decoding the social power of images in our increasingly complex visual world. It is a set of skills as essential for the practice of good art history as good citizenship.

What is explicit in my classes is that meaningful teaching requires students to stretch intellectually. I want them to consider unexamined values, assumptions, and institutional systems. And yet, whether in an introductory survey class or senior seminar, if I simply explode one firmly held belief after another, I quickly lose my capacity to reach students. Instead I employ comfortable, familiar imagery (and even humor) to foster trust with students before moving on to discomforting images and difficult questions on the unspoken motivations, values and cultural workings that underpin all works of art. It is a combination that’s essential.

Having come to appreciate that students possess sophisticated frameworks for understanding their contemporary culture, I develop teaching strategies that play off of their unique abilities and insights. Rather than lamenting their immersion in popular culture (that is admittedly more distant from my own with each passing year), I embrace the opportunities their fluency affords. I take advantage, for example, of students’ expectations that contemporary advertising promotes an agenda more than traditional high art does. One early in-class exercise asks them to compare and contrast a fashion layout, tv commercial, or corporate logo with its art historical source. Students readily see that in giving the ubiquitous Sam Adams beer icon a more youthful, muscular, casual and less cerebral look than the eighteenth-century portrait on which it is based, the ad agency sought to sway consumers with an idealized picture of contemporary masculinity. Yet as we discuss the formal and ideological differences between ad and art, students come to appreciate that the Colonial version was no less disinterested. The oil painting’s depiction of a sober intellectual forcefully presenting the Patriots’ economic and military demands to the British governor only looks objective once its original context is lost. After comparing ad to painting, learning that Adams ran his father’s thriving malt business into the ground and was subsequently supported by his wife’s income, and hearing that the painting was commissioned for public display by John Hancock, the portrait becomes more complex. By the end of the exercise, students conclude that both ad and art had something to sell.

By juxtaposing contemporary and historical versions of the same subject, I help students use what they know about their own complex society to deepen their comprehension of history and of the stakes inherent in image production. I prime them to search for the nuanced ways in which people make use of imagery. After illustrating how the founding fathers used paintings for overtly political ends, I can more easily prompt students to consider what white Protestant businessmen, African American legislators, or Chinese-American railroad workers had at stake in the creation and circulation of images. By the end of my courses, students come to see that images are more than mirrors onto our society–they are also tools with considerable social power.

After building a level of trust with my students, I ask them to move on to more discomforting images and issues. I might begin by exploring the cultural functions of mid-nineteenth-century photographs of slaves disfigured with brands and whips. I will explain how such images circulated widely in the antebellum North generating outrage with the brutality of Southern white slave holders. Then I provocatively suggest that such images were comparatively safe ones for Northern liberals to consume. The photographs permitted whites in the North to establish their moral distance from slave owners and ignore what was made to appear comparatively benign–their own financial complicity in the slave system. After establishing this historical context, I ask students to compare such distant images to ones in which they have a more personal investment. I might choose an iconic photograph of the Civil Rights struggle, showing peaceful African American marchers brutalized by whites wielding fire hoses and police dogs in Birmingham, or a more contemporary news image of a person of color being victimized by police in LA. The discomforting questions ask: Is it possible that such recent images continue to offer liberal whites a means of marking their symbolic distance from “racist” whites? Might such photos tacitly discourage a thoughtful examination of the structural and personal racism that continues to plague progressive white communities?

Whereas a comfortable comparison that makes use of contemporary material from pop culture tends to encourage the participation of students who feel insecure in their knowledge of history, consider themselves expert with popular icons, or prefer non-confrontational discussions, a discomforting comparison invariably draws out those with deeper understandings of history, those inclined to verbal sparring, or those invested in the preservation of the status quo. Using both approaches, I have greatly increased the percentage of students eager to participate in my classes over the years. And more significantly, I have helped all of my students see temporally distant material as more familiar and contemporary material as more strange.

As every professor knows, the most thoughtful pedagogical approach means little if students are not prepared to participate in the hard work of learning. In over a decade of teaching, I have instructed several thousand students at six different colleges and universities throughout the U.S. At none of my previous institutions have I found undergraduates as eager to learn, with as much willingness to debate, or as accepting of having their beliefs examined as those here at Santa Cruz. If I have succeeded in opening my students’ eyes to the dangers and opportunities of images, it is largely due to their openness for exploration; it’s an openness that makes my job possible, but also immensely enjoyable. I thank them for my nomination and for their keen desire to explore.