ABSTRACT
We have lost something in the age of nano-sized laser pointers. I suspect that (along with their doctoral “sheepskins”) young art historians now get secret surgery that implants beams into their digit fingers. In my memory, when I recall Annemarie Weyl Carr over the long trajectory of our overlapping teaching careers at Southern Methodist University (SMU), during which we regularly team-taught, I think first of changes in technology as they affected her teaching. Our Jules Feiffer heroine, Annemarie-slim, long, liquid in movement, ethereal, always literally reaching upward-started teaching when the dominant teaching technology included a wooden rod the size of a billiard cue that she carried to point to a particular section of a slide projected onto the classroom screen which she wanted us to observe. No, I am wrong: she did not “point.” Rather she attached the rod to her hand like an extra appendage as she strode, swiveled, and leapt up to bring us to see what she saw. We saw, of course; but we saw also what she couldn’t see: herself, making all those bits of images not just meaningful but also enhanced by concentrated beauty. She and the stick: one. Then the intermediate years, when she buried a telescopic metal pointer in her capacious purse and would suddenly whip it open like a wizard’s staff to extend full length. This instrument still had the same effect: she twirled from podium to screen image. Then the last decade of our final joint teaching years, when pixels replaced slides and the piercing laser-red (why red?) pointer fiercely played across the image to concentrate
a mini-object on a key ring. No need now for Annemarie to move from the podium, though sometimes inspiration absorbed her so that she turned away from our students to engage the screen, almost melting into the image she herself was then seeing anew. Even when she lectured with hands perched on the podium, she always seemed about to take flight.
