Style

            On Monday, October 31^st, on my way up Brock Avenue, in front of the Beer Store parking lot there was a dishevelled looking older guy with a beard. He appeared to be panhandling, but he was wearing a long white coat, and written in red paint on the front was, “Collector of body parts; Frankenstein helper”.

            On College Street, just east of Brock, I passed a schoolyard where a Rubik’s Cube with legs was running. Those things are hard enough to solve without them running away from you on top of that!

            In little Italy I saw three older children walking together in costume. One of them had a real pumpkin over his head as a mask. It wasn’t staying on very well by itself and so he often had to hold it with one hand. I wondered if it was lined with something to keep it from being slimy against his face.

            When I arrived in the classroom, the attractive young woman who always sits three seats away from me in the front row, closest to the door, was already there. She usually arrives just before class starts. I commented, “You’re here early!” She explained that she’d had a busy morning. I guess that meant that she had been on campus earlier doing things she doesn’t usually do and had extra time afterwards. I took the opportunity to introduce myself, and she told me her name was Nancy. She asked how I liked the course. I said that I thought that the subject matter was interesting but that Philosophy always tends to dry things down. She asked my major and I said English, but that my other minor is French as a second language. It turns out that she was in French immersion in grade school, but she’s forgotten a lot because she’s had very little chance to speak it. I told her that I translate songs by a French singer who I think is better than Bob Dylan. That led her to bring up Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for literature and how some people don’t approve. We chatted about that for a while and then she went to the washroom. When she got back I asked her if she enjoyed writing the essay. She confessed that she’s never bullshitted her way through an essay so much in her life. She told me that she’d had two other essays to write at the same time and just hadn’t had time for the Aesthetics paper. She asked how I’d done on the quiz, just as Professor Russell arrived. I said I wouldn’t really know until I saw the marks, and then I asked him if they were posted yet. He said they’d be up later that day. I told Nancy that I don’t like being quizzed and that the professor’s questions are tricky. She argued that she didn’t find them tricky. I offered that at least the last one was. She said she never made it to the last question because she had been trying to check her answers and then the timer ran out.

            The professor said that if he had it his way he wouldn’t have any quizzes at all, but would rather expand the two essays to four and have the students’ writing on the subject matter determine their grade. Nancy asked why they wouldn’t let him do that, but Devlin said it wasn’t that he was bound by any curriculum from higher up. He could do it if he chose, but he said that the limitations of a significant portion of the students would not let him do it. Nancy mentioned how high the standards are in German universities. I said the same is true in France and offered that it’s because university is free over there and so people have to pay by doing well. Then we started talking about how university education has become a commodity and that when students pay for a course they consider it an investment that they expect to get a return on. So if they fail a course they think they’ve bought a faulty product.

            We began class with a review question, the answer to which was that the Romantic theory of creativity says that creative ideas are happy accidents. I got it right.

            Supernatural creativity is not an accident.

            The Romantic theory is the supernatural theory naturalized. Creativity is a gift.

            The Pushing the Envelope theory denies that there are new ideas. It’s just a combination of hard work and training.

            Our lecture was on the topic of style.

            We began with a video called “Shot Reverse Shot”, about the filmmaking style of Joel and Ethan Cohen. The Cohens are masters of the dialogue scene. They like to film dialogue from inside the space of the conversation. Switch to a wider lens and bring the camera closer. Looking through the long lens feels like seeing. The Cohens like to isolate individuals. They shoot and zoom in. Using wide lenses doesn’t just exaggerate the face. What distinguishes the Cohens is the non-verbal rhythm of their editing. They find non-verbal moments. They want you to laugh, but also to empathize.

            There is an old saying: “Tragedy is a close-up while comedy is a long shot.” The Cohens’ basic tool is shot-reverse-shot.

            The point of the video was to show an element of their individual style.

            We see the feature of style consistently used across different works by the same people with certain meaning.

            There are individual styles and general styles.

            An example of a general style would be a Cubist painting.

            There are regional styles and universal styles. Is the art representational, abstract or horrifying? What genre does it represent?

            Go back to the categories of art marked out by artistic mediums such as painting. The artistic mediums are the intentional actions. Style is a sub-category. Painting is a broad category in the Cubist style.

            According to Walton, categories determine the constitution of the work.

            Style categories do not determine aesthetic properties.

            There is a relation between style and meaning or value.

            Style categories are useful for historians.

            Look for common characteristics and influences.

            Devlin showed the slide of what looked like an Impressionist painting on top of a Cubist painting to show how one style influenced the other. Then he showed an abstract painting to show continuity from the other two styles.

            More interesting is the application of style and what style does for meaning. She showed three Cubist paintings, each by a different artist.

            Take the classical and showing multiple perspectives, spatially and temporally. Take the limitation and exceed it.

            How does value relate to style?

            I said that that value is beyond style and that it is contained in the quality of the work.

            If Cubism influenced art history, that increases value.

            Someone suggested that style can be valuable in so far as it manifests a valuable idea, as in the Dadaist Manifesto.

            It makes the value derivative.

            Wollheim says there is a difference between individual and general style.

            The individual style reflects a process and intention.

            The general style is not a product of one artist’s process, nor is it the result of a group collectively and consciously developing a process. A stylistic category emerges from individuals with similar influences and present conditions doing their thing at the same time. General categories function as a set of rules. If the artist is able to act under those rules there is the achievement of a consistent style.

            Style is either the product of individuals or a set of norms.

            Acquiring a certain style is an achievement. Shot-reverse-shot is the Cohen brothers’ individual achievement.

            At the end of the class I asked Devlin if general style was synonymous with genre. He said it’s more like genre is a type of general style but that not all general styles are genres. I wondered where the line gets drawn and he said it’s a good question, though he didn’t know the answer. I looked it up later and found that it seems that only scholars from the school of theatre seem to make an effort to clearly distinguish genre and style.

Style refers to particular ways of communicating in particular contexts. The

manner in which something is expressed or performed, considered as separate from its intrinsic content and meaning. A regular way of doing things. A style is more local, often personal, as when we speak of Shakespearean comedy as opposed to Jonsonian comedy or Monet's impressionism as opposed to Renoir's. Genre, kind, category or sort refers to things regularly done. Genres are social and durable; they persist through changes of style.
In painting, landscape is a genre and impressionism is a style. Genre is category and style is way or manner. 
            It seems to me then that style is in flux and more fluid than genre. It’s almost like a particular genre is one language of an art form and a related style is its voice. Or genre fixes the language and style communicates it.
            After class, I went to take out the rest of my rent money and some extra and then I went to Topcuts to get a haircut. There was only one other customer in the salon, but he was being worked on by Amy. There was another stylist, but I wanted Amy, so I waited. Once I was in the chair and bibbed, I told her that I’d been thinking about doing something different. I usually have it shorter on the right and longer on the left. Maybe that’s kind of an 80s style. But during the summer, when I was riding my bike in the heat I would sometimes stop and soak my hair and then slick it back over my head to cool myself down. I’d noticed afterwards that women would look at me more when some of my hair wasn’t sweeping down over the left side of my forehead, so I told Amy I wanted it even, shorter and combed back. 
            After she was done, Amy told me that she thought it looked better that way. On my way home, again, I got the impression that I was being looked at more. 
            I stopped at the Australian Boot Company to get my Blundstones treated for the upcoming winter, but they were very busy. The guy I asked told me to come back in about twenty minutes, so I went for a walk, checking out the alleys just north of Queen and taking a few pictures as I went along. I went as far as the back of the Meeting Place drop-in at Queen and Bathurst. I’d never noticed before that they have a big outdoor patio that’s adjacent to the alley. There was a pretty raucous and loud group hanging out there. I walked back the way I’d come, and stopped to photograph some graffiti, when a guy who looked like he was on his way the Meeting Place, stopped to compliment me on my jacket. He asked where I’d gotten it. I told him Lansdowne and Bloor and that it’d cost me sixty dollars. He said that he used to have one exactly like it, though it was a lot more worn out, that he’d bought in Calgary years ago. 
            On the north side of the alley was a fenced off parking lot behind a house and in the lot was an old style Airstream Argosy travel trailer. The kind that’s rounded at every edge so it looks very space capsuley. I remembered that about three of my mother’s brothers each had one, but theirs were all silver, while this one was white. There was a guy sitting beside it in a chair, spray-painting brown what looked like a section of an artsy wooden fence. I asked him if the trailer was a living space. He said that they just keep it there to serve as part guest room and part storage unit. He said that unfortunately they couldn’t travel with it because they don’t have a car. I took a picture of it and wanted to take more, but just then the battery ran out on my camera.
            I walked back to the ABC, but they were still busy, so I decided I’d come back on another day.