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Billboard Art
2008-12-19 00:11:00
Administrator's Note: Whenever one of my students submits a final paper as outstanding as this one, I wish others could read it. Happily, this blog also functions as a forum for introducing ?guest? essays by promising writers. Patricia Correa is a Corcoran College senior majoring in Fine Art. Her exhaustively researched essay on the use of billboards as an artistic mode of address reveals many of the ideas that began with conceptual art have been extended by contemporary artists. We discover that ?billboarding,? as tactic or theory, is immersed in semiotics, temporality, intervention and socio-political activism. I found Patricia's essay to be particularly informative and insightful, so it is a pleasure to share it with you here.Billboard s are defined broadly as any large outdoor printed (or projected) sign. Artists? Billboards have been a key medium or vehicle to explore and express the ideas and strategies behind the most important art movements over the last fifty years: co...

Billboard Art
2008-12-19 00:11:00
Administrator's Note: Whenever one of my students submits a final paper as outstanding as this one, I wish others could read it. Happily, this blog also functions as a forum for introducing ?guest? essays by promising writers. Patricia Correa is a Corcoran College senior majoring in Fine Art. Her exhaustively researched essay on the use of billboards as an artistic mode of address reveals many of the ideas that began with conceptual art have been extended by contemporary artists. We discover that ?billboarding,? as tactic or theory, is immersed in semiotics, temporality, intervention and socio-political activism. I found Patricia's essay to be particularly informative and insightful, so it is a pleasure to share it with you here.Billboard s are defined broadly as any large outdoor printed (or projected) sign. Artists? Billboards have been a key medium or vehicle to explore and express the ideas and strategies behind the most important art movements over the last fifty years: co...

Another Evil Twin
2008-12-10 00:30:00
Adminstrator?s Note: A reader of this site recently commented on a piece I wrote earlier this year (?Nice post?) and there was a link attached to a site called ?AutoRewrite.? For a fee, this site provides a service whereby one can basically ?disguise? an essay through a re-write (use of synonyms, rearranged syntax, alternate grammatical structure) to produce a ?new? essay. Obviously, such sites fill a need, however suspect. As an investigative inquiry, I submitted an old essay to the service and have posted the result below, verbatim, as I received it ? apologies please for the grammatical errors, misspellings, etc.Obviously, bloggers create in the vaporous Ethernet and have no idea where our words might end up. One can only hope that the small protections of rights such as Creative Commons will deter unscrupulous individuals from plagiarizing or stealing our intellectual property. However, this new wrinkle gives one pause ? if anyone can simply copy a post, run it through a fi...
More About: Evil , Twin

Another Evil Twin
2008-12-10 00:30:00
Adminstrator?s Note: A reader of this site recently commented on a piece I wrote earlier this year (?Nice post?) and there was a link attached to a site called ?AutoRewrite.? For a fee, this site provides a service whereby one can basically ?disguise? an essay through a re-write (use of synonyms, rearranged syntax, alternate grammatical structure) to produce a ?new? essay. Obviously, such sites fill a need, however suspect. As an investigative inquiry, I submitted an old essay to the service and have posted the result here, verbatim, as I received it ? apologies please for the grammatical errors, misspellings, etc. [Curious changes were made, for instance, ?curator? was changed to ?conservative?.] I encourage you to ?check? their re-write with my original (use the link below) and I welcome your comments. Obviously, bloggers create in the vaporous Ethernet and have no idea where our words might end up. One can only hope that the small protections of rights such as Creative Comm...
More About: Evil , Twin

Making A Piece About Making A Piece
2008-11-26 05:16:00
It is clear that there are associative procedural similarities between curatorial practice and studio practice. Both actions involve, or theoretically ought to involve, an appreciation of the relevance of art history (past and current) and the ?skilled? manipulation of material/image/context to manifest representations and/or experiences that have aesthetic and/or intellectual resonance in contemporary society. The essentially ?positivist? hope is that such endeavors advance society culturally through ?progress? and that one can ?learn? from the trial and error of history. This might be as hopelessly romantic as it is naïve. If we can learn anything from or about history, it is that ?History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in the textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.?(1...
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Making A Piece About Making A Piece
2008-11-26 05:16:00
It is clear that there are associative procedural similarities between curatorial practice and studio practice. Both actions involve, or theoretically ought to involve, an appreciation of the relevance of art history (past and current) and the ?skilled? manipulation of material/image/context to manifest representations and/or experiences that have aesthetic and/or intellectual resonance in contemporary society. The essentially ?positivist? hope is that such endeavors advance society culturally through ?progress? and that one can ?learn? from the trial and error of history. This might be as hopelessly romantic as it is naïve. If we can learn anything from or about history, it is that ?History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in the textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.?(1...
More About: Piece

On Pedestals
2008-11-19 16:14:00
One of my students alerted me to Christopher Knight ?s LA Times piece on an exhibit by sculptor Jason Meadows. Meadows invited some fellow sculptors to show work and he made pedestals for the resultant sculptures. As a ?meditation on the pedestal in the age of late Conceptual art,? Knight?s essay touches on Constantin Brancusi and the pedestal controversy. Knight, as ever thoughtful and gently provocative, asks a few questions that indicate our contemporary anxiety about ?sculpture in the expanded field? and whether we need to worry about pedestals. Rhetorical or not, I came up with some answers to these questions and want to share them. Christopher Knight?s questions are followed by my ?answers? in italics:Question No. 1: Is a pedestal made by a sculptor the base for a work of art, or is it another sculpture?Neither: it's a comment on the pedestal as art theory. As theory, it assumes we are aware of art history and plays off of our recognition of the advancement of Modernist ...
More About: Karl Marx

On Pedestals
2008-11-19 16:14:00
One of my students alerted me to Christopher Knight ?s LA Times piece on an exhibit by sculptor Jason Meadows. Meadows invited some fellow sculptors to show work and he made pedestals for the resultant sculptures. As a ?meditation on the pedestal in the age of late Conceptual art,? Knight?s essay touches on Constantin Brancusi and the pedestal controversy. Knight, as ever thoughtful and gently provocative, asks a few questions that indicate our contemporary anxiety about ?sculpture in the expanded field? and whether we need to worry about pedestals. Rhetorical or not, I came up with some answers to these questions and want to share them. Christopher Knight?s questions are followed by my ?answers? in italics:Question No. 1: Is a pedestal made by a sculptor the base for a work of art, or is it another sculpture?Neither: it's a comment on the pedestal as art theory. As theory, it assumes we are aware of art history and plays off of our recognition of the advancement of Modernist ...
More About: Karl Marx

R.I.P.Mitch Mitchell
2008-11-14 00:36:00
Mitch Mitchell died yesterday. He was the original drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the three albums they made together in the 1960s. He was 61.I was ?taught? how to play drums by Mitch ? I listened to his every flam and rim-shot under my headphones as a teenager. Trying to keep up with Mitch on songs like ?Manic Depression? or ?Cross-town Traffic? was nearly impossible. But I eventually was able to mimic his style of explosive percussion that served me well in many R?n?R outfits.You can hear Max Roach?s influence in Mitch?s playing. He was quite the anomaly in rock as he was basically a jazz player who learned to adapt to those towering Marshalls that Jimi favored. Mitch was also one of the first drummers to work with double kick drums. With Mitch?s passing, all of the original Experience players are now gone.

R.I.P.Mitch Mitchell
2008-11-14 00:36:00
Mitch Mitchell died yesterday. He was the original drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the three albums they made together in the 1960s. He was 61.I was ?taught? how to play drums by Mitch ? I listened to his every flam and rim-shot under my headphones as a teenager. Trying to keep up with Mitch on songs like ?Manic Depression? or ?Cross-town Traffic? was nearly impossible. But I eventually was able to mimic his style of explosive percussion that served me well in many R?n?R outfits.You can hear Max Roach?s influence in Mitch?s playing. He was quite the anomaly in rock as he was basically a jazz player who learned to adapt to those towering Marshalls that Jimi favored. Mitch was also one of the first drummers to work with double kick drums. With Mitch?s passing, all of the original Experience players are now gone.

Report on the Infinite
2008-11-02 02:43:00
Roman Opalka?s artistic practice is either an undertaking of resolute heroism or an obsession bordering on insanity. Since 1965, Opalka has been inscribing a progression of numbers on canvas. The canvas size is always the same (196 x 135 cm), as is the brush (size 0) and the pigment (white acrylic). There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that the idea came to Opalka while waiting for his wife in a café. If true, this story attests to the fact that the most ?successful? ideas are ?ludicrously simple? or, at the very least, simply ?inevitable.?(1)I want to discuss Opalka?s work from three theoretical vantages, two of which have to my knowledge not been previously suggested as ways to interpret his project. The one theory universally addressed is the idea that Opalka?s counting represents his comprehension of his mortality, that this is his way of ?marking? his time on earth. I would add to this that his work ought to then be considered as truly time-based. This term has become ...
More About: Report , Sol Lewitt , Infinite

Report on the Infinite
2008-11-02 02:43:00
Roman Opalka?s artistic practice is either an undertaking of resolute heroism or an obsession bordering on insanity. Since 1965, Opalka has been inscribing a progression of numbers on canvas. The canvas size is always the same (196 x 135 cm), as is the brush (size 0) and the pigment (white acrylic). There is anecdotal evidence suggesting that the idea came to Opalka while waiting for his wife in a café. If true, this story attests to the fact that the most ?successful? ideas are ?ludicrously simple? or, at the very least, simply ?inevitable.?(1)I want to discuss Opalka?s work from three theoretical vantages, two of which have to my knowledge not been previously suggested as ways to interpret his project. The one theory universally addressed is the idea that Opalka?s counting represents his comprehension of his mortality, that this is his way or ?marking? his time on earth. I would add to this that his work ought to then be considered as truly time-based. This term has become ...
More About: Report , Sol Lewitt , Infinite

Mining the Vain
2008-10-27 22:43:00
In the late 1970?s, artists began to investigate the institutional validation of art by art museums and galleries. The investigational methods used by these artists included appropriation and ?site specific? installation that raised questions about both site-specificity itself and the historical imperative of museum practice.(1) Their body of work followed a trajectory begun by 1960?s interventionists (Daniel Buren) and conceptualists (Mel Bochner, Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke) who initiated an ?analysis of the discursive framing devices? and ?institutional conventions of exhibition and display.? Sometimes referred to as situational aesthetics, this movement considered the ?mode of address? within the sites where the public encountered art in its allocated spaces and how this institutional environment affects one?s perception and experience of art.(2)Certainly it is always beneficial for solid art museums to acknowledge conceptual art and, although a safe exhibition bet in ...
More About: Mining , Vain

Mining the Vain
2008-10-27 22:43:00
In the late 1970?s, artists began to investigate the institutional validation of art by art museums and galleries. The investigational methods used by these artists included appropriation and ?site specific? installation that raised questions about both site-specificity itself and the historical imperative of museum practice.(1) Their body of work followed a trajectory begun by 1960?s interventionists (Daniel Buren) and conceptualists (Mel Bochner, Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke) who initiated an ?analysis of the discursive framing devices? and ?institutional conventions of exhibition and display.? Sometimes referred to as situational aesthetics, this movement considered the ?mode of address? within the sites where the public encountered art in its allocated spaces and how this institutional environment affects one?s perception and experience of art.(2)Certainly it is always beneficial for solid art museums to acknowledge conceptual art and, although a safe exhibition bet in ...
More About: Mining , Vain

Chalkboard Talks
2008-10-16 02:35:00
I was invited to participate in a "thematic conversation" that the "Floating Lab Collective" has organized as part of the "Close Encounters" exhibition at American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center. The conversation participants also include Kathryn Cornelius, John James Anderson and Welmoed Laanstra, and our topic is "The Intersection of Art and Society".I must admit I am looking forward to interacting with the tables and chairs specifically constructed for the talks that are "painted in blackboard paint so they can be utilized as a recording surface." The event begins at 1:00 pm - call 202-306-5643 for more information.

Chalkboard Talks
2008-10-16 02:35:00
I was invited to participate in a "thematic conversation" that the "Floating Lab Collective" has organized as part of the "Close Encounters" exhibition at American University Museum at Katzen Arts Center. The conversation participants also include Kathryn Cornelius, John James Anderson and Nick Karvounis, and our topic is "The Intersection of Art and Society".I must admit I am looking forward to interacting with the tables and chairs specifically constructed for the talks that are "painted in blackboard paint so they can be utilized as a recording surface." The event begins at 1:00 pm - call 202-885-1300 for more information.

Sign-Painter
2008-10-06 22:18:00
The text paintings ?by? John Baldessari are both Modernist critique and a primer of conceptual art. Executed by a ?sign-painter? from Baldessari?s instructions, these works fulfill the basic tenets espoused by Sol Lewitt [?The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.?(1)] and Lawrence Weiner [?The artist may construct the piece ? The piece need not to be built.?(2)] in that they effectively focus our attention on the idea behind the work.For example, if we consider the physical aspects of Baldessari?s ?Exhibiting Paintings?, we can see that it consists of words painted in acrylic on stretched canvas. The work then exists within the realm of painting both through its use of traditional painting materials (paint and canvas) and its address of basic pictorial elements. Thus, Baldessari?s work embodies subtle allusions to Modernism and disjunctive relationships like ?figure-ground? that would become standard terminology in 20th Century discourse about painting, causing ?modern? pai...
More About: Sign , Painter

Sign-Painter
2008-10-06 22:18:00
The text paintings ?by? John Baldessari are both Modernist critique and a primer of conceptual art. Executed by a ?sign-painter? from Baldessari?s instructions, these works fulfill the basic tenets espoused by Sol Lewitt [?The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.?(1)] and Lawrence Weiner [?The artist may construct the piece ? The piece need not to be built.?(2)] in that they effectively focus our attention on the idea behind the work.For example, if we consider the physical aspects of Baldessari?s ?Exhibiting Paintings?, we can see that it consists of words painted in acrylic on stretched canvas. The work then exists within the realm of painting both through its use of traditional painting materials (paint and canvas) and its address of basic pictorial elements. Thus, Baldessari?s work embodies subtle allusions to Modernism and disjunctive relationships like ?figure-ground? that would become standard terminology in 20th Century discourse about painting, causing ?modern? pai...
More About: Sign , Painter

Critical Hierarchy
2008-09-28 04:51:00
There exists a hierarchy of critical theory in reference to contemporary art; a paradigm of critique, if you will, that once established on a particular artist and their work marshals further consideration and new analyses on the work. Comprehension of much contemporary art is distinctly fragile because of the hermeneutics of critique and it becomes particularly difficult when essayists overlook previous critical views. Not to say that a critic cannot ignore these previous critical assessments, but when such nuanced ?readings? of an artist are laced throughout the Web it becomes apparent that these views may have been omitted not as result of ignorance but possibly in avoidance of critical hierarchy itself.Rigorously researched critiques on contemporary artists abound in print and electronic media. Moreover, new interpretive views on an artist run the risk of abrupt dismissal or even worse become immediately obsolete if they exhibit such critical omissions, and this is all very tr...
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Critical Hierarchy
2008-09-28 04:51:00
There exists a hierarchy of critical theory in reference to contemporary art; a paradigm of critique, if you will, that once established on a particular artist and their work marshals further consideration and new analyses on the work. Comprehension of much contemporary art is distinctly fragile because of the hermeneutics of critique and it becomes particularly difficult when essayists overlook previous critical views. Not to say that a critic cannot ignore these previous critical assessments, but when such nuanced ?readings? of an artist are laced throughout the Web it becomes apparent that these views may have been omitted not as result of ignorance but possibly in avoidance of critical hierarchy itself.Rigorously researched critiques on contemporary artists abound in print and electronic media. Moreover, new interpretive views on an artist run the risk of abrupt dismissal or even worse become immediately obsolete if they exhibit such critical omissions, and this is all very tr...
More About: Critical

Use, Exhibition, Exchange
2008-09-18 22:33:00
Plato?s now legendarily odious dismissal of the painter?s ?art? as ?worthless? issued from his epistemic Grecian conditioning to accept ?usefulness? as the mitigating and decisive factor in determining relative ?value.? It is clear that a painting of a bed cannot be slept upon and, regardless of the sentiment attached to an aesthetic vision of an ?Ideal Form,? it is additionally obvious that a painted ?bed? is twice removed from that Ideal Form, i.e., the best bed that money can buy. Which perhaps helps to explain Ikea but that is another post. It is my premise that the migration of ?value? through approximately 2000 years of discourse and inquisition about it has allowed a number of cyclical ?returns? to both Platonic and Marx ist views about the valuable nature of objects for consumption or contemplation.In 1867, Marx demonstrated ?commodity fetishism? as proof that commodity objects were for both use and barter, focusing our comprehension of the relationship of ?exchange? to th...
More About: Exchange , Exhibition , Plato

Use, Exhibition, Exchange
2008-09-18 22:33:00
Plato?s now legendarily odious dismissal of the painter?s ?art? as ?worthless? issued from his epistemic Grecian conditioning to accept ?usefulness? as the mitigating and decisive factor in determining relative ?value.? It is clear that a painting of a bed cannot be slept upon and, regardless of the sentiment attached to an aesthetic vision of an ?Ideal Form,? it is additionally obvious that a painted ?bed? is twice removed from that Ideal Form, i.e., the best bed that money can buy. Which perhaps helps to explain Ikea but that is another post. It is my premise that the migration of ?value? through approximately 2000 years of discourse and inquisition about it has allowed a number of cyclical ?returns? to both Platonic and Marx ist views about the valuable nature of objects for consumption or contemplation.In 1867, Marx demonstrated ?commodity fetishism? as proof that commodity objects were for both use and barter, focusing our comprehension of the relationship of ?exchange? to th...
More About: Exchange , Exhibition , Plato

Things Under Erasure
2008-09-09 21:23:00
Last Sunday I had the opportunity to discuss my work with my colleague and friend, Dr. Lisa Lipinski. The subject of our talk was my text-bisection practice and my current Song for Europe installation that is in The Athenaeum. Dr. Lipinski?s skillful preparation of her succinct questions and her collegial support allowed our talk to unfold effortlessly. Our conversation ranged from the difficulty in describing my work (neither ?drawing? nor ?painting? but uses media of the former and inhabits critical positions of the latter) to how it differs from the work of earlier conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. One question that proved fruitful was how I came to this technique of text-bisection. I recounted my discovery of Jacques Derrida?s expansion on Martin Heidegger?s ?unique device? for acknowledging a word?s ?inaccuracy? by crossing it out.(1) Derrida extends this idea of sous rature - placing the word ?under erasure? ? to all words. Thus, my text-bisec...
More About: Things , Erasure

Things Under Erasure
2008-09-09 21:23:00
Last Sunday I had the opportunity to discuss my work with my colleague and friend, Dr. Lisa Lipinski. The subject of our talk was my text-bisection practice and my current Song for Europe installation that is in The Athenaeum. Dr. Lipinski?s skillful preparation of her succinct questions and her collegial support allowed our talk to unfold effortlessly. Our conversation ranged from the difficulty in describing my work (neither ?drawing? nor ?painting? but uses media of the former and inhabits critical positions of the latter) to how it differs from the work of earlier conceptual artists like Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. One question that proved fruitful was how I came to this technique of text-bisection. I recounted my discovery of Jacques Derrida?s expansion on Martin Heidegger?s ?unique device? for acknowledging a word?s ?inaccuracy? by crossing it out.(1) Derrida extends this idea of sous rature - placing the word ?under erasure? ? to all words. Thus, my text-bisec...
More About: Things , Erasure

A Song for Europe
2008-08-16 03:21:00
It began with a song ? A Song for Europe .At an empty café, a singer recollects a faded love affair, projecting loss in elegiac melody. Remembering ?moments lost in wonder that we?ll never find again,? he realizes how his world has become ?a shell full of memories.? He has nothing to share with his now forsaken love except ?yesterday,? his obsessive reveries doom him to retrace an endless past, trapped in the decadent European settings that now only mimic romance.More than homage to a passionate lover, these lyrics become for me an allegory of a waning Western culture. The once proud and wondrous Europe is passé, past its prime and out of step with the brave New World. Ideas and methods once cutting edge are now ridiculed as traditional; the grand narratives of Old World history now devalued as ?constructed.? No center, its languages suspect, its relics encased in dusty institutional displays, its art defaced and mocked.So was begun my memoriam to this "old world," an investigat...

A Song for Europe
2008-08-16 03:21:00
It began with a song ? A Song for Europe .At an empty café, a singer recollects a faded love affair, projecting loss in elegiac melody. Remembering ?moments lost in wonder that we?ll never find again,? he realizes how his world has become ?a shell full of memories.? He has nothing to share with his now forsaken love except ?yesterday,? his obsessive reveries doom him to retrace an endless past, trapped in the decadent European settings that now only mimic romance.More than homage to a passionate lover, these lyrics become for me an allegory of a waning Western culture. The once proud and wondrous Europe is passé, past its prime and out of step with the brave New World. Ideas and methods once cutting edge are now ridiculed as traditional; the grand narratives of Old World history now devalued as ?constructed.? No center, its languages suspect, its relics encased in dusty institutional displays, its art defaced and mocked.So was begun my memoriam to this "old world," an investigat...

Signs that Supplement
2008-08-08 23:46:00
?The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor to a historicism. It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium. That Plato, for Husserl, was the founder of a reason and a philosophical task whose telos was still sleeping in the shadows; or that for Heidegger, on the contrary, Plato marks the moment at which the thought of Being forgets itself and is determined as philosophy ? this difference is decisive only at the culmination of a common root which is Greek.?(1)In continuing his analysis, Jacques Derrida does clarify that both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed two differing ?archaeologies? yet both responded to Greco-Platonic philosophy by engaging in a ?reduction of metaphysics.?(2) Their aim, as is Derrida?s, was a (re)interpretation (we might also cal...
More About: Signs , Supplement

Signs that Supplement
2008-08-08 23:46:00
?The entirety of philosophy is conceived on the basis of its Greek source. As is well known, this amounts neither to an occidentalism, nor to a historicism. It is simply that the founding concepts of philosophy are primarily Greek, and it would not be possible to philosophize, or to speak philosophically, outside this medium. That Plato, for Husserl, was the founder of a reason and a philosophical task whose telos was still sleeping in the shadows; or that for Heidegger, on the contrary, Plato marks the moment at which the thought of Being forgets itself and is determined as philosophy ? this difference is decisive only at the culmination of a common root which is Greek.?(1)In continuing his analysis, Jacques Derrida does clarify that both Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed two differing ?archaeologies? yet both responded to Greco-Platonic philosophy by engaging in a ?reduction of metaphysics.?(2) Their aim, as is Derrida?s, was a (re)interpretation (we might also cal...
More About: Signs , Supplement

De Magistro
2008-08-01 18:00:00
Knowledge contains within it the essence of pedagogy. It is the ?passing down,? either through the presence of speech or, in an author?s ?absence,? the written word, where teaching begins. Teaching philosophies vary, from Plato?s suspicion of teaching (and writing, for that matter) in defense of the Socratic dialectic (1), to the assumptive dismissal by St. Thomas Aquinas of the human ability to teach in support of his theology. However, it was the Aquinas essay, ?De Magistro? (?On the Teacher?), which focused my attention on the matter of pedagogical knowledge and its revelation through the interaction of study.(2)Aquinas grants that ?if humans can teach? it is through the use of ?signs and symbols.?(3) He further states that without knowledge of ?the things themselves? (and here we must avow that these ?things? also include such ?intelligibles? as ?beauty? and ?truth?) we cannot ?understand? the signs. Willingly comprehending that Aquinas means ?signs? to be the words we use ...

De Magistro
2008-08-01 18:00:00
Knowledge contains within it the essence of pedagogy. It is the ?passing down,? either through the presence of speech or, in an author?s ?absence,? the written word, where teaching begins. Teaching philosophies vary, from Plato?s suspicion of teaching (and writing, for that matter) in defense of the Socratic dialectic (1), to the assumptive dismissal by St. Thomas Aquinas of the human ability to teach in support of his theology. However, it was the Aquinas essay, ?De Magistro? (?On the Teacher?), which focused my attention on the matter of pedagogical knowledge and its revelation through the interaction of study.(2)Aquinas grants that ?if humans can teach? it is through the use of ?signs and symbols.?(3) He further states that without knowledge of ?the things themselves? (and here we must avow that these ?things? also include such ?intelligibles? as ?beauty? and ?truth?) we cannot ?understand? the signs. Willingly comprehending that Aquinas means ?signs? to be the words we use ...