Feb 5 2024
Roger F. Malina and Thomas Kubli
The term disremembering entered my thinking upon the death of a colleague Richard Brettell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brettell. He was a ‘refugee’ to UTDallas when he lost his job at the Dallas Museum of Art
He was one of the people who helped convince Roger Malina to move to Dallas from the south of France, an un-regrettable decision. He re-inventured me.
I searched him on line and found the wikipedia entry above. But I also found this:
Wow.. the more factual account is:
I have never shared this dismemory with anyone else on the planet, But Fred Turner did in a meeting with Robert Stern and I discussing the emergence of the arts and humanities at UTDallas.
Bretell was instrumental in the most important dismemory that triggered my interest in disremembering as a desirable activity. Forgetting intentionally or accidentally or remembering anyway.
Rick told me that Gyorgy Kepes,( an artscience hero at MIT) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Kepes ) had lived in Denton Texas. Wow. None of the written records, except one, mentioned that he had lived down the road from where I now work at UTDallas. UTDallas didn’t exist when Kepes was teaching at University of North Texas.
We then learned the term “on the other side of the tracks”; as a jew, Kepes had to live “on the other side of the tracks” with all the black people and poor white people. But he went to work at the University of North Texas, walked across the tracks, to teach white wealthier people.
Kepes was a founding member of the Bauhaus and then went on to found the Center for Advanced Studies at MITCAVS. Anti semitism was and is/can be alive and well in Texas as it was in Germany.
Roger met Kepes in 1968, introduced by his father, who asked him to help me get aculturated as a freshman at MIT, fresh from boarding school in England. My father had started the Leonardo Journal in 1968, with Kepes as a founding editorial board member.
Kepes had started the MIT Center for Art and Visual Studies, CAVS 1968. It had to be hidden in the school of architecture because the scientists and engineers of MIT though art was of little interest while architecture was useful. Art is not useful and has to be hidden, often, unlike architecture which is useful. So why does UTDallas have no School of Architecture.
Kepes, Piene and 1000 others proved them wrong at MIT until CAVS was abolished by the new MIT Media Lab which had more funding from corporations. The Arts and Humanities at UTDallas have been severely underfunded and renamed and renamed until the Bass donors donated.
So a second disremembering of Kepes, not in his biography as was his life on the other side of the tracks, or Bretell’s encounter with Texas conservative law (go to the Bois De Boulogne in Paris where freedom rings) is:
In 1968, I Roger, as an entering freshman at MIT i joined the anti-vietnam protests and we occupied the student union to protect a conscientious objector against the law. Profs Noam Chomsky, Phillip Morrison, Jerome Lettvin and Kepes cheered us on.
As night approached Kepes invited me to sleep on the floor of the MIT Center for Art and Visual Studies in case the police invaded the student union during the night. This is one reason I still exist, at least professionally.
None of this is in the official obituaries or biographies of the people I mention. But I remember.
Oops did the CAVS ever exist? I just checked their web site http://act.mit.edu/cavs/ and…the web has forgotten what CAVS did. Thom Kubli has been a prominent member of the MIT Media lab but had never heard of Kepes’s CAVS until I told him about it.
So the art of disremembering is remembering by pulling the plug on the sea of seas of memories, and finding the sunken ships. (this analogy is due to Guillermo Munoz , co founder of the Pirates of Science).
