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Mr. MOTHERWELL. There is a bit, but you see it is always economically motivated, so it has its built-in probability of distortion. In consumer goods, for example, the Bauhaus of the twenties, which took the position (natural in Germany of the inflation of the twenties) that there is not room for many artists in society, that an art school could perform a more, in the best sense of the word, "reasonable" function by training first-class designers, such as the Japanese have developed over thousands of years; that is, instinctive awareness of what is proper to the object. So that now modern radios and household appliances, for example, after many, many years, have become much more agreeable, clean-cut, related in form to their purposes, as the Bauhaus taught.

On the other hand-I happen to be an automobile nut-I am always amused at the desperate effort of Detroit to deal with European cars, to make "smaller" ones, or whatever that they think is the attraction of European cars, when it is evident to anybody who loves cars the attraction of the European cars is they are made by a single man, such as Porsche, in terms of given limits, a thing that has the built-in integrity of what it is. While our instincts, built on forced mass consumption, are for a guess as to what a mass of people are going to want everything is thought of that way. If the young cry out for anything, it is for men of integrity, but not in the sense of paying bills merely; no, men with integrity in the sense that they will not act against their feelings. This is more exceptional in English-speaking industrialized society than in others that are more "primitive" than

we are.

It is also a problem of doing things on an enormous scale, which needs in turn enormous capitalization. Maybe we don't need to be so damned rich if each moment were more agreeable.

Mr. HANSEN. You make reference to France, and our chairman also has made reference to the difference between our own society and that in Japan in this respect. Are we the worst or among the worst? Is this a necessary result of technological advance, or are there some other examples of countries of people around the world who have been able to achieve technological progress without destructive consequences that they have seen in this country?

Mr. MOTHERWELL. That gets into a realm that is pretty much beyond my field. America had a potential advantage, which has turned out in many ways to be a disaster, of not having a long tradition. Certainly, a great deal of the beauty of a culture, like Japan, is something that developed over many centuries, and over centuries in which change was very slow; whatever had been achieved was deeply engrained in the society as a whole and in the individual, so that only something radically going wrong would bring about drastic change quickly enough to damage accumulated values.

We started from scratch, and sometimes, when I meet European artists and intellectuals who have a horror of "Americanization" in Europe who guard the esthetic, and other things, I point out what we have is the concomitant of an unbridled technology which they also will encounter; and, moreover, they must rememl er tha: what America largely is, is the invention of the poor people of Europe, given space and materials and money and time. This is what is meant by an "American."

Mr. HANSEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Motherwell.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Mr. Scheuer?

Mr. SCHEUER. This has been an exhilarating morning. I couldn't agree more with my two colleagues. We owe a collective debt of gratitude, and I am glad your predecessors are still here, to all of you.

Mr. Motherwell, you mentoned in your testimony that we don't have to be so rich. I quoted Senator Muskie before as saying, "We may have to hold down our standards of living to hold down pollution."

In effect, aren't you saying that we can only maximize our richness, the real pleasures in life if we control our material production, if we control the exploitation of the countryside around us? Are you not trying to say that what we should be trying to do is maximize our richness, our satisfactions by perhaps moderating the production of goods and services and therefore achieving a higher quality of life?

Mr. MOTHERWELL. Yes. In my opinion-and I am certainly no economist-emotionally speaking, I mean to use it as an emotional metaphor, we have a kind of laissez faire going wild. Esthetically speaking, the small businessman is often oddly more guilty than the large corporations. I mean, the guy who opens the corner drugstore or builds his own gas station or builds his own little business who is often more monstrous than a larger corporation, which, after all, does often employ architects and designers, and so on. But as long as it is a tacit assumption among us Americans that material well-being is alone deeply fulfilling, rather than, as it should be, the sine qua non of what is deeply rewarding, we have a problem.

We are essentially in a senseless situation, of which everyone who does not have a vested interest, who is self-employed, like myself, or young enough, is fantastically aware, and regrets, and feels helpless and futile at the same time. But if there is an "establishment," which sometimes I doubt, it seems to be a question in the case of individuals of thinking that somebody else is really the establishment; if there is indeed any establishment, it is certainly going to fall apart if it does not pay some greater heed to human feeling and sensibilities. We are marvelously educated now; we have succeeded largely in making men intellectually free; and once intellectually free, they will make themselves in their daily lives free from what they resent and feel repelled by.

But I am the eternal optimist.

Mr. SCHEUER. And what role will you see the artist playing in this effort to give the establishment an ecological and environmental conscience? What role do you see the artist playing in this education process that we are talking about today?

Mr. MOTHERWELL. It seems to me, you know, art is really very ineffective as a political instrument. I think art has rarely changed anything socially or economically. But it does have one extraordinary quality. It does reveal what the potentiality of what the human spirit really is.

When I listen to Mozart, then I know what a man is really capable of. Instead, we use the concept of the most ignorant and simple-minded member of society as sort of a "practical" yardstick by which everything is measured.

I think of polls-they show so many tens of percent, for this or that. There are perhaps 3 percent on the whole who are even aware of the implications of what is being asked!

Mr. BRADEMAS. I would just observe, with respect to what you just said, that one part of this bill provides for grants to the mass media for the purpose of educating about environmental problems. And as I say that, I am struck again by what Dr. Sittler says or by what one of my Democratic county chairmen in Indiana said when I asked about a political development. He said, “Well, John, a lot of things depend on a lot of things."

So he is kind of an instructive ecologist without knowing it.

In this subcommittee alone this year we dealt with the arts and humanities bill, and we also deal with preschool education. Now we are talking about environmental education. I think one does not have to ruminate very long to realize all kinds of interrelationships that derive from the fact that this particular subcommittee gets its nose into these various areas.

I don't find it frustrating, but, on the contrary, I find it kind of interesting, when I realize what this burgeoning experiment with "Sesame Street" can show us about how television can be used to help teach very young children.

Then I ask myself what might be done by American artists, and I don't mean only painters, of course, but musicians and poets and sculptors and dancers, and all of the rest of the artists.

We had, I remember, several years ago a luncheon here with several of your colleagues-I think Mr. Rauschenberg was among them--and talked about the idea of taking slide collections of distinguished American artists. And I am sure you would have been among them. These individual collections were enormously popular in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, because there was a starvation, literally, in those parts of the world to know what the best American artists were doing. That is instructive, I think.

I wonder if we somehow, alluding to your phrase about artists being the guardians of sanity in a society like ours, can harness our technological capacity to teach-we also have educational technology in this committee, I should tell you to communicate to masses of Americans, the kind of sense of values you and your predecessors have been talking about here.

In other words, I am gently disputing with you. And I don't minimize the potential impact of what artists can do in a country like ours. Indeed, unless you help, I think we are really in deep trouble.

Mr. MOTHERWELL. Well, if the real problem is a change in human awareness, then we know from modern psychologists and from educators that it is a very long and slow process, if it is to be done in depth and really engrained. I am glad that you are beginning. Possibly one could do it vividly in terms of, let's say, a TV campaign, like the marvelous, I think, TV campaign against smoking. But what we are talking about is a kind of awareness that has to be with real truth, or it becomes corn, a distorted or oversimplified truth.

You see calendars everywhere of beautiful landscapes in Maine, for example. The Maine landscape is indeed beautiful. But the calendar renditions of them are, to anybody having artistic sensibility, pretty awful. So it is a very-well, it is almost like my being

asked, "Can a theologian contribute to people having a great awareness of God?" Yes; but not easily or quickly.

I wish I had some concrete proposals for you, but I really don't. Mr. BRADEMAS. Well, I will just make two quick observations before stopping.

One, I noticed in the Sunday New York Times a story on the architecture of Columbus, Ind., where, "ou may know, J. Ervin Miller of the Cummins Engine Co. has helped the committees work with a whole series of leading American architects. And Mr. Miller made clear it is his own judgment that the impact of these developments may not be felt for a very long time to come in terms of actually changing attitudes on the part of the people of that community. But he is clearly committed to the view that I think you have just expressed, that it has to be very good.

So maybe at least one answer is that the contribution of artists is to be a good artist in solving the kind of environmental crisis we have been talking about

Mr. MOTHERWELL. If every man does his thing, we would have many fewer problems.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Well, that may be a good point on which to conclude these hearings.

Again, I want to express our appreciation to you for your splendid testimony, Mr. Motherwell, and, as well, to Dr. Sittler and Dr. Cole.

Unless my colleagues have more questions, the Chair would like to announce tomorrow morning at 9:30, in room 2257, we will begin hearings with the Environmental Teach-in Panel, followed by the editor of The Environmental Handbook, Garret de Bell, and other witnesses who have been organizing the teach-in.

We will adjourn for this morning.

(Whereupon, at 11:35 a.m. the subcommittee recessed, to reconvene at 9:30 on Wednesday, March 25, 1970.)

ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY EDUCATION ACT

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 25, 1970

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 9:30 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2257, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Brademas (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Brademas, Scheuer, Meeds, Bell, and Hansen of Idaho.

Staff members present: Jack G. Duncan, counsel; Ronald C. Katz, assistant staff director; Arlene Horowitz, staff assistant; Toni Immerman, clerk; Maureen Orth, consultant; Marty LaVor, minority legislative coordinator.

Mr. BRADEMAS. The subcommittee will come to order for the further consideration of H.R. 14753, the Environmental Quality Education Act.

Yesterday, we on the subcommittee heard from an ecologist, a theologian, and an artist concerning the need for Federal support for programs to encourage education in elementary and secondary schools in universities and in local communities about the whole spectrum of environmental problems.

Today we are pleased to hear from some of the leaders of the environmental teach-in which is scheduled for the 22d of April, and we look forward as well to hearing from others who have been associated with the projected teach-in.

Tomorrow, in room 2261 at 9:30, the subcommittee plans to hear testimony from distinguished educators who have specialized in the environmental field, including Chancellor Edward W. Weidner of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, accompanied by the vice chancellor of that university, Ray Vlasin. We will also hear from Dr. Clarence Schoenfeld, chairman of the center for environmental communications of the University of Wisconsin at Madison and editor of Environmental Education, and from Dr. Matthew Brennan, director of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies.

The Chair would like to observe how very pleased he is, as are the other members of this subcommittee, particularly the cosponsors of the Environmental Quality Education Act, including the gentleman from New York, Mr. Scheuer, and the gentleman from Idaho, Mr. Hansen, to note the growing involvement of both high school and college students in our country to improve the quality of our environ

ment.

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