When we say that life is an art, that life can only be understood if it is approached as an artistic process, we mean that, as in theater and alchemy, something is deeply interfused through its physical forms. and to understand the physical forms accurately, it is necessary to see them with a double eye. This way of seeing is a need in all disciplines.

M. C. Richards 1

By posing the unanswerable questions of meaning men establish themselves as question-asking beings. Behind all the cognitive questions for which men find answers, there lurk the unanswerable ones that seem entirely idle and have always been denounced as such. It is more likely that men, if they ever lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions, would lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.

Hannah Arendt 2

Ideas and art are the possibility of an answer tomorrow.

Frederick Sommer 3

The visual arts, as a component of an education in the liberal arts, if not original in Martianus Capella's formulation,4 have come to be integral. Apart from being an end and a good in itself, no other discipline so perfectly and directly manifests the creation of meaning in the union of thought and thing as the visual arts. Because artworks are, as Arendt felicitously terms it, "thought-things," the facture of artworks necessarily entails both intellection and the physicality of materials, both the mind and the body, both reference to Being qua universal and to what is given in the sensa qua particular. Indeed, notwithstanding the separation of the faculties in the Kantian project, notwithstanding the aesthetic alienation that devolves from that separation in the Modernist project, the facture of and viewer response to artworks entails a uniting of the faculties; as Ruskin urged, "Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together."5 As exemplary works of affecting presence, presentations rather than re-presentations, constitutive of experience rather than referring to experience, the visual arts both engage one in the now of sensory perception so as to thematize the role of perception in the production of knowledge, and place one within a way of being-in-the-world, eliciting the possibility of alterity and the consequences of alterity for one's being. 6 As Rilke wrote of an archaic torso of Apollo:

". . . here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life."7 Works of the visual arts comprise the longest, most continuous production of extant primary documents of the ways in which humanity has conceived being human, from at least circa 28,000 BCE at Chauvet.8 That the very notion of 'art' shifts its denotation diachronically and synchronically during this 30,000 years is hardly to be unexpected. Indeed, it is precisely the point: artworks, along with all else they do, thematize possibility of difference.

Both in the education of artists per se and in liberal education approached through the visual arts, it is a necessary presupposition that one must oneself do in order to teach. Learning in the visual arts is not merely a matter of the acquisition of requisite skills, though it includes that. It is much more an acquisition of critical habits of eye and mind and sensibility, and their constant, disciplined, exercise. And that is a matter that in the end is best taught by example: by the example of working in the discipline. It is an example that cannot be too often reiterated. We are pleased to have examples the works of three Austin College faculty members, and a former staff member, for this exhibition.

Mark Monroe's two photographs, both Untitled, are works derived from one of his works in sculpture. Red roses and cracked glass punctuate the space of the images in a cyan and red-violet-magenta atmosphere. The affect of the two photographs is elegiac, dolorous.

Nancy Neergaard's work in ceramics spans vessel forms and ceramic sculpture. Neergaard's vessels-three teapots and a bowl-are small, intimately scaled objects. What is not discernible by virtue of installing these works under closed Plexiglas vitrines is the haptic pleasures of lifting-of using-these works. Only in use is the tactility of the roughness and smoothness of their materials fully apparent, and the scale of the works relative to one's hand fully appreciated. Neergaard's three ceramic sculptures of heads present one aspect when viewed frontally, and another when viewed or lit from the side. Indeed, their cast shadows of implied profiles is an elegant counterpoint to their frontal aspects.

Mark Smith's large floor installation work, 100Feet50, addresses land use and water consumption in the Dallas-Sherman corridor. 100Feet50 is divided into four sections, each section is a four by five module grid of one foot squares with objects placed on the photographs or paper squares. Plastic flowers, predominantly orange, lay on top of photographs in which orange and white macaroni and cheese, like detached flower petals, fills the sheets to the edges. Houses, identical, iconic, terracotta colored, sit on photographs of green grass. Conical plastic conifers, balled and burlaped as if for transplanting, sit on photographs of water, or more precisely, on rippling light and water in a pool. The forth grid section consists of plastic martini glasses on top of black squares of paper, with a black napkin crumpled and dropped into each glass: remnants of a dark Trimalchio's banquet 9 of the land's developers.

Timothy Tracz' digitally manipulated photographs shift space and time, obviating the presumed indexicality of photographs. The co-presence of what is photographed and artist qua efficient cause is likewise obviated: while the artist remains the efficient cause of the artwork, the role of the artist is shifted through the appropriation and manipulation of photographs made by others, along with the use of photographs made by the artist. Printing the images as inkjet prints on textured paper further removes them from preconceived notions of how photographs look, or ought to look.

Making visible the transparent and invisible preconceptions one has is essential to artworks, and to education.

Mark Monroe is Associate Professor of Art and Chairman of the Art Department at Austin College, Sherman, Texas; he received the Bachelor of Arts from Austin College and the Master of Fine Arts from The University of Texas at Austin.

Nancy Neergaard is former art department Studio Manager at Austin College; she received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Texas.

Mark Smith is Associate Professor of Art at Austin College; Smith received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kansas City Art Institute and the Master of Fine Arts from Queens College, City University of New York.

Timothy Tracz is Associate Professor of Art at Austin College; he received the Bachelor of Science from the Pennsylvania State University and the Master of Fine Arts from Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

1. Mary Caroline Richards, The Crossing Point: Selected Talks and Writings (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1966, 1973), 181.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 62.
3. Frederick Sommer, The Mistress of This World Has No Name [catalogue for the exhibition Where Images Come From: An Exhibition] (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 1987), 10.
4. Martianus Capella, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii [before 439 C.E.], in William Stahl et al., Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols., (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Martianus Capella was the first to allegorize the seven liberal arts in the form passed on from classical antiquity to the Medieval period: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music (Harmony).
5. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787], The Critique of Practical Reason [1788], The Critique of Judgment [1789-1793]; for the notion of aesthetic alienation' in Modernism, see J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); John Ruskin, The Two Paths: being lectures on art, and its application to decoration and manufacture, delivered in 1858-1859, Lecture 2. (London: 1859).
6. For the notion of works of affecting presence, see Robert Plant Armstrong, The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). I am also indebted to Robert E. Wood for much of my thought here on the functions of artworks, in particular to his "Recovery of the Aesthetic Center," 1995 ACPA Presidential Address.
7. Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," in ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 60-61.
8. Jean-Marie Chauvet, ÉlietteBrunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave (New York: Abrams, 1996).
9. See Petronius, Satyricon, xv.