Experimenting with the Louvre Image

Though I'm still very much drawn to the bricking idea (described on my 2/11 posting) I'm going to indulge in a little visual experimentation with the Louvre image (also from 2/11).

I have to pause for a moment and get pedagogical, though: I sincerely believe that exploring my visual options--even though a lot of it involves simply messing around with iPhoto or Photoshop--is getting me to slow down and think through what I'm trying to say about underground Chinatown, based on what we've been learning about it. Creative scholarship (aka "arts-integrated learning") involves using the process of creative composition to think more deeply and multi-dimensionally about your subject.

For me, this means deciding what image I should place above the Louvre pyramid. The original photograph is a shot taken in the lobby of the Louvre (at least that's my recollection of what that would look like) looking through the Pei pyramid to the Parisian building above it. What I want to do is replace the Parisian building with something from OKC, to give the viewer a sense that s/he is underground looking through a Pei pyramid at OKC. In other words, I'm trying to create an image in which the underground survived as part of a utopian Pei plan for OKC. Make sense?

OK, so choosing the image means doing some additional research about what social/historical/economic influences might have led OKC leaders preserve the "underground Chinatown" area, and why. This is just one way that creative scholarship entails digging more deeply into a subject DURING THE LEARNING PROCESS itself, not just as a groovy flourish at the end.

After writing the above, it's occurring to me that the first thing I'd actually like to try is not the utopian approach but something else: I'm interested in the way the pyramid photo seems to place the viewer belowground, like someone buried there. A ghost of the Chinese underground, perhaps. I remember reading that some believe a burial space was part of the underground. Ghosts figure prominently in much of the Chinese literature I've read, so perhaps this can give me another way into the artwork, another way to transpose the OKC-underground heritage with Chinese heritage.

I must confess I feel way out of my depth in many respects: I'm not a professional scholar of Chinese culture, or even of OKC history for that matter. So I'm a little fearful of creating something that might seem to be too naive or superficial to a better educated audience. But the beautiful thing about this quandary is that it places me squarely among most of my students: we're asking them to take courage, to do the best they can in the time we have together (just 3 weeks!) and to know that we'll consider them successful for generating works that enable them to explore and interpret and especially to pique their own curiosity for future inquiry. I mean that sincerely. So I must find comfort in that myself. I must walk the talk.