A couple of years ago I was preparing for my first semester of full-time teaching in six years after stepping down as art department chair. An upper division Multimedia course was on my schedule for Fall. I had taught it before, but it had been a long time. I was trying to figure out how I was going to approach it – technology and new media practice in art had developed significantly, and the course’s most recent iterations didn’t suit my particular orientation, which tends towards the use of technology as a means to an end, not the main act.

In one of those split-second decisions that come straight from the gut, I looked at the blank page of the syllabus I had been trying to write and in the center of the page typed: “The art object is a container. What is it a container for?”

Though I later added some other text, I kept this simple statement as the central question of the course, emblazoned in the center of the page. It was an open invitation to my students. It was in fact a clarion call, defining a collaborative experience for us all that would circle around this inquiry rather than technical skills or more conventional knowledge-building.

I came across a hard copy of that syllabus as I was packing up my office at the university last month and was struck by the bold open space holding those two sentences. Usually syllabi are packed with information – lengthy course descriptions, projects, calendars. But this one contained just this question, this challenge: THIS is what we will be working on for the next four months together.

I was packing because my department is moving out of the building that has been its home for fifty-two years, twenty-one of which I have been around for. I placed the contents of my teaching life in cardboard boxes – a mix of art books, articles, old syllabi and notes from over the years, as well as small gifts students have given me like thank you cards, or the occasional treasured artwork. I packed joints fabricated in our makerspace, living hinges and other samples for class demonstrations. Finally, I threw the riff-raff of office supplies from my beloved old 1960s metal desk (that according to the powers that be can’t come with me) on top of some files, sealed all the boxes up with tape and labeled everything with my name and new office address.

My last day in the old building felt like a series of nested Russian dolls: each course, each lab, each studio, the gallery, the building. Each was a container of memories: class discussions where I could sense all the students wordlessly reach a new understanding in unison; students in my office, sometimes in distress, other times just coming to visit; the intense energy of a critique; the optimism and community of advising days; and the synergy when a student’s voice suddenly comes through so strong and clear in their work it almost knocks you off your feet. All of these moments generate from the day to day rough and tumble and shared journey of living in a laboratory for creativity. Some of us come for a few years, and a few of us come for much longer. All the rooms in the building are containers that developed me as a teacher, and as I walked through the halls one last time all of them were filled with ghosts. And boxes.

The containers of life hold many things, but I am in the business of teaching art so my primary interest is the spaces that hold our creativity, and the containers we construct as creative people. The art building is a container, but so are my house and my garden. And I have come to understand that artworks are containers that artists create to share something that they see or feel. Periodically throughout that semester in Multimedia I would call out to the class while they were working, “What is art a container for?” And students would shout out their responses. By the end of the semester the consensus of student answers was, “Experiences!” On the face of things this might seem like an overly simple answer, but it is a word that in fact holds multitudes.

Years ago, when I still lived in New York City and was a grad student, I went to see Douglas Gordon’s video installation “Play Dead; Real Time” at Gagosian Gallery. It was one of my first genuinely transformative experiences with a contemporary video work. The gallery held two large screens and one smaller monitor showing silent film of a circus elephant walking in a circle within that same exhibition space, suddenly laying down and playing dead, and then struggling to get up and return to its feet. The life-size screens glowing in the dark room were mesmerizing; the camera circled around the edges of the space like a satellite, framing the elephant’s tree-stump legs as they lumbered forward in a narrow orbit and then periodically collapsed.

The piece captured a poetry and pathos that is hard to describe in words. The gentle circus performer plodded through the unending loop of its existence. The large projections emphasized the scale of its enormous body, and the silence of the footage seemed to rob the audience of the opportunity for emotive reactions to the elephant’s repetitive reenactment of its own death. The video sat somewhere between a Buster Keaton silent film and a Noh theatrical performance. The gallery was filled with viewers who stood in reverent silence watching this unending spool of time and fate. Was it a Sisyphean struggle? Or was the artwork calling us to the cyclical nature of our own human lifetime and ultimate demise? In the end, the piece resonated far beyond any words that could be put to it.

I was so affected by the artwork that I wanted to see it again, and a week later I took my son who was about 18 months-old with me back to the gallery. Hand-in-hand we entered the space filled with a silent crowd watching the elephant lumber through eternity. My son stood enraptured. The animal was so elegant and ungainly. He had not yet been to see a movie in a theater, so it was his first encounter with the power of images at large scale and he was stopped in his tracks. Then the elephant stopped and slowly fell down onto its side, playing dead. Without any words available to him to describe his experience, my son burst out belly laughing, unable to stop. As the elephant began to rock back and forth to get up, he laughed even harder. His energy sent ripples out into the crowd and others started tittering and then laughing full-heartedly, knocked out of their prayerful stance by his spontaneous response.

The container of the piece held so much, and it held different things for everyone who came to it – even my young toddler. It held space for sadness and contemplation and wonder, and the hilarity of a child seeing an elephant pretending to die.

I saw that piece several more times in other venues over the years, and it never had as much power as it did in that original Gagosian space where it had been filmed, and where it felt like it had been designed in conversation with the architecture. Nonetheless the work remains a touchpoint for me when I think about what the container of art can hold.

I have at times – from outside the field of art – heard creativity referred to as a “black box,” but I’ve been inside that box all my life and none of it has been hidden from me. The space of creating is a kind of secret space, though, in the sense that the alchemy of creation and the development of personal expression in that arena does not align with the logic of the data-driven or mathematical reasoning we prefer these days. What happens in the creative classroom is hard to describe, just as the power of that Douglas Gordon piece eludes traditional logic. It is in fact developing the ability to embrace dissonance and non-rational pathways to meaning that is the key to creativity and innovation. Artists are innovators of visual language, and in stepping away from the sharper categorical distinctions that textual language offers, we build alternative modes of expressing human experience.

The beautiful part of understanding art as a container is that as a viewer you get to unpack it. It’s like a beautifully wrapped gift that gets handed to you. Sometimes you don’t really understand it, or it doesn’t speak to you. But in the best moments, as you unwrap the work something unfolds inside of you, and for a period of time you get to live another person’s experience. The specificity of the artist’s deeply considered expression provides us a light to shine deep inside ourselves.

The container of the art classroom is like that too. In that shared space teacher and students wrestle with creative expression with deep vulnerability and lots of courage, forging students into embodied innovators of visual language. It can be a painful process to mold ideas, feelings and inner stories into form and image, and designing learning experiences for students in the laboratory of the art classroom has taught me many things, the most important of which is a deep understanding of how our creativity develops. It takes tremendous fortitude, but students who develop in the intensity of a creative discipline leave with the gifts of discernment and confidence, ready to use their voices.

In this moment of great change in our world, it may be helpful for us to think about what happens inside the box of our creativity, and how to cultivate it. As forces much larger than ourselves feel like they are trampling the sandboxes in which we have always played, let’s take the time to make sure we build new ones. Young people in particular have been the unwitting subjects of our culture’s technological experiments and have born the brunt of our acquiescence to having our attention stolen from us. After decades in the studio and the classroom, I feel like maybe it’s time to articulate my experience and thoughts about human creativity in a more public space. It is a moment when what is important about being human is under a magnifying glass, so it seems timely to venture out of my box. I hope that this blog – a container of its own kind – will be a resource for others who are thinking about some of the same things. I am going to treat this like a studio space, where the creation of work is an open-ended process and I get to discover what it is I’m doing along the way. I hope you’ll share your thoughts with me as we go.