Educated Overmastery

[Dave Monroe]

Educated Overmastery
October 28, 2008 · No Comments
Periodical: Lapham's Quarterly, Fall 2008
Exhibition: Light Seeking Light, Western Bridge
Literature: The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon


The fall edition of Lapham's Quarterly examines various understandings
of learning.  William Deresiewicz's opening essay in "The Hypothesis"
section (originally published in The Disadvantages of an Elite
Education) briefly dissects the American Ivy League educational
system.  Deresiewucz describes the instance of being unable to make
small talk with (none other than) his plumber at age 35 as the
catalyst for his realization that the education he experienced at Yale
and Columbia was lacking:

"It's not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of
my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach
you is its own inadequacy.  As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia
have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to
flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do
for them." (Lapham's Quarterly Fall 2008, 23)

Having only attended state universities, I cannot support or deny this
statement, but it brought to mind the title of Western Bridge's
current exhibition Light Seeking Light.  Referencing the famous
anti-academic words from Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, somewhere
between Deresiewucz's essay and the exhibition is the element of
overmastery.  The easiest piece in the exhibition to overmaster is
Mary Temple's Raise.  Upon first glance, the brain assumes the art is
made of paper cutouts, strung along the windows in an unseen location.
 Few would fail to notice the perceptual inconsistencies of an
immobile shadow upon closer inspection, but in an age when the general
public has been found to spend an average of 3 seconds or less with
works of art in a museum, overmastery is natural: we like something or
do not like it.  We momentarily engage or do not engage at all.  Like
the student who has lost the desire be challenged, the viewer who
overmasters an image will not realize what is being missed.

Thomas Pynchon's Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49 demonstrates the
problems of overmastery of the image as she seeks the meaning behind
the W.A.S.T.E. symbol throughout the novel:

"Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to
end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues,
announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which
must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which
must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly,
leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back."
(Pynchon 76)

The W.A.S.T.E. symbol is not understood through Maas's relentless
research (or possibly at all).  In The Crying of Lot 49, the
traditional end result is not necessarily significant; seeking it
vehemently may lead to obscure understandings.  While the same is not
always true in art, it is worth considering the looking process before
beginning to step away from a work and before the moment is dismissed.

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