Double Lives
By Jenae Cohn
May 15, 2007 9:38 p.m.
They’re everywhere.
Some scrawl equations on the blackboards of CS 24 while others hide behind stacks of history textbooks on the top floors of Bunche. While they may carry the same leather briefcases as the other professors at UCLA, their lives are not confined to the ivory tower: They’re artists, too.
Professors who pursue the arts aside from their main areas of academic interest flourish on UCLA’s campus and provide a model of how academic lives can be balanced with interests in art and culture.
“I think the future lies in bringing things together that are often far apart,” said James Gimzewski, a professor in the chemistry department. “There’s an increasing movement for people to not mentally separate the two lobes of the brain in an artificial way and focus on one side or the other side.”
Gimzewski, a visual artist and poet, along with Makela Brizuela, a professor in the Spanish department and tango dancer, and S. Scott Bartchy, a professional jazz pianist and the director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, are three examples of professors who recognize the value of fusing academic interests with artistic pursuits.
Gimzewski and Bartchy claim that their artistic interests stemmed from childhood.
“As a kid somehow, I don’t think I really differentiated between what art and science is. They both inspired me as a kid, and then my education separated them,” Gimzewski said.
For Bartchy, his academic and musical interests were not formerly separated in school, but he knew his love for music was intrinsic to his life all the same.
“I guess you can say I was making up little melodies when I was 3 or 4 years old,” he said. “I’m left-handed, so when I was in the fourth grade, my teacher was pretty perceptive to see that a lot of the music we used wasn’t really giving my left hand that much exercise, so he introduced me to boogie-woogie and … I really could rip that stuff out.”
Brizuela, on the other hand, came to love the tango in her adulthood.
“When I was finishing my Ph.D., I started missing my country a lot, crying every time I was hearing the tango music because tango is from Argentina and I’m from Argentina,” she said. “So I decided to start seeing what it’s like. … I started flirting with tango, taking classes, and then I got to like it more.”
As the three professors entered academia, maintaining the balance between their artistic interests and their careers became more difficult.
After graduating from Harvard Divinity School, Bartchy came to California to begin his time as UCLA’s first director of the Center for the Study of Religion. However, finding opportunities to play with illustrious musicians as he did in his young adulthood, such as Carmen Cavallaro and Chick Correa, became more difficult as Bartchy’s career grew more demanding.
“I thought it would be easier. I mean, L.A. and New York are the places for … jazz musicians,” Bartchy said.
“So I thought it would be easy to find people. What I was looking for was a Monday night once a month or something. But the people who play at the level I want to, that I do, they were the ones that came to L.A. precisely to play for six nights. They were here to be seen, to be heard. That was very frustrating to me for a number of years.”
Brizuela, on the other hand, found many opportunities to dance in West Los Angeles studios but was afraid of the ramifications of dancing on her career.
“People have very structured ideas about how a person’s life should be,” she said. “My life is not the way that the lives of people generally are, and that caused me, I think, not to be taken as seriously as I wanted to.”
Gimzewski assessed this lack of respect for a fusion between an academic life and an artistic life as being similar to his visual artwork with Design | Media Arts professor Victoria Vesna.
“There’s a resistance. There’s the old brigade,” Gimzewski said. “This university is very strange: It has a North Campus and a South Campus, like separate entities. The humanities have a great role to play, and artists have always had a big influence when new science appears.”
While each of the professors recognizes that their academic careers primarily drive their lives, they still find ways of making time for their craft.
“I don’t need to do science for 24 hours. I can do it for 10 hours, take a couple of hours to do artistic things,” Gimzewski said.
Brizuela similarly finds her tango dancing regenerative.
“I’m a linguist and I’m very fascinated by communication and the power of communication … and I think that’s what tango is: to be communicating in a very close embrace,” she said. “It’s very intimate, very passionate, and you have three minutes of ecstasy.”
Not only has art been a personally fulfilling experience, however, but the professors assert that their art has improved the way they’ve taught and thought.
“Tango improved my academic life,” Brizuela said. “(It) was a sense of really doing what I love to do, and that makes me a better teacher, because when I come to the classes, I’m happy and I laugh.”
With a drive to invent, create, and express, these professors have found outlets in the arts to enrich their careers and lives.
“I was getting so into my mind that I found out I’m more than a mind,” Bartchy said. “I’m a human being with feelings.”
