One Quality of Inaction (visual metaphor for Speak)

Super Cool Person Making Stuff On The Internet

Alright, so here's an Art Ed resource that you probably won't find described that way anywhere else so pay attention! :-)

http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart

This is Vi Hart's YouTube channel. I found her because I'm a compulsive reader of The New York Times and they did a profile on her a while back.  What's Super Cool is that she's not an Art Ed person and she doesn't even identify as a Visual Artist but she is a full-fledged Visual Thinker (among her many other Modes of Thought).  She's a Mathematician and a Musician and a Maker of Videos and if you're ever stumped for ways to cross-disciplinize some basic math ideas in an arty way, her videos just might be the seeds to get your arty ideas growing. (Not to mention being great examples of lo-fi, smart, engaging, internet-era video making.)

Art Ed Visual Metaphor Statement

I tried to let my Art Ed metaphor reflect my beliefs from the bottom up.  I’ve been experiencing a revival of my interest in film/video as an art form—partly, I think, as an outgrowth of my field assignment this semester where half of my time has been with a photography class.  It’s my belief that the best kind of art education provides a model of learning in which students are allowed to capitalize on their strengths and interests—to develop and grow by following their muse.  My muse was leading me toward learning a little about Adobe’s After Effects video editing software, so I took this assignment as an opportunity to follow it.  Further, my tastes often lead me toward neatly bundled conceptual packages, so I decided to use my “teacher”—the instructional video—as the material for my own creation.  This allowed for a layering of perceptual experiences with the first layer being the “on-screen” instruction and modeling being demonstrated by the source material (teacher) and the second layer being the “off-screen” learning being modeled by the source material’s manipulator (student: me).  I made an effort to exaggerate the techniques being described by the narrator and delayed and prolonged certain effects after the narrator had moved on so as to simulate the play between observation and experimentation as it occurs in the art classroom. 

3 Artists addendum

So I forgot to tie my three filmmakers together with a Big Idea, but no worries.  With cinema there's one big idea that's never too far away no matter the project and our biggest local film fest captures it exactly: True/False.  Cinema may be the closest we get to a pure expression of reality (though interactive media, most broadly explored in "video game" format is perhaps a hint of something even closer), but it is still--in the words of Pier Paolo Pasolini--"a certain reality."

Danse Serpentine offers an easy entrance to this idea.  The goal of the filmmaker in coloring his/her print was to get a closer rendering of the spectacle of Loie Fuller's dance work than could be achieved through the mere mechanical works available to him/her at the time.  But does this extra-mechanical rendering--the hand coloring of the print--somehow make it less documentary?  Must an image be produced by a mute machine to be called documentary?  Aren't we kidding ourselves by trying to make that distinction?  Machines, being man-made, create images that are man-made.  To tinker with a machine's image only adds another link to the chain of extraction (or abstraction).

By the time Orson Welles made F for Fake, he had already become something of a myth.  Unable or unwilling to do things through the studio system, Welles scrambled from project to project using his credibility--his obstinacy and artistry--to secure independent funding for his projects.  But in an irony that he seems to have been fully aware of, he devoted inordinate amounts of time fighting the strings attached to the money that he'd secured through such a thorough demonstration of his willingness to fight against any and all such strings.  He was burning the candle at any and every end he could come to.  F for Fake is a magnificent expression of the corner that he'd painted himself in but it also must be taken with many grains of salt.  I don't want to give anything away but by the end of watching the film it becomes clear that Welles notion of illusion extends well beyond the trompe l'oeil of clever editing.

Finally, something that I really love about Terrence Malick is the respect for cinematic spectacle that he seems to share with the neo-realists of the 50s and 60s.  Although The Thin Red Line wonders broadly from the novel its based on (which was, in turn, based on the experiences of its author James Jones), it strives to get the details right--from the yellow grenades to the Japanese's deep jungle camp.  Malick seems to be concerned with capturing reality on multiple levels: as the details experienced at a particular time and in a particular place (which, in this case, are faked/recreated), as the reality of a particular set of people engaged in the process of recreating that particular time and place (the actors retracing the events of the script/novel: real people experiencing more or less real emotions and circumstances), and as the reality of the conveyance of these details and experiences into the lives of the audience (by way of the director's agenda: in Malick's case, his commitment to his particular philosophy and aesthetic).  All of these things can be said to be realistically or honestly represented but the viewer gets nearer or further from the "truth" depending on which lens of reality is being examined.

On Film: 3 Artists

This is perhaps a bit wide of the box, but film has really had my interest of late and there are a lot of filmmakers that strike me as visual artists and really, why on Earth should a moving image be any less of an art object than a still one.  So, here goes…

By way of transition from the staid and true art of the museum world, here’s something I came across in the Pompidou:

Mesmerizing isn’t it?  The Pompidou’s info card has this listed as Anonymous, although the dance and costume are attributed to Loie Fuller.  A quick Wikipedia search shows that Fuller was known for her innovative use of stage lighting to create effects of illumination in combination with her costumes.  It seems that the filmmaker here painstakingly and lovingly hand colored the film in an effort to mimic the effect.

I fell for Orson Welles a long time ago after seeing Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil but by a happy accident I was flipping through the channels thinking about going to bed one night recently when I came across one of his last films, F for Fake.  I was tired but I couldn’t stop watching.  Having just recently watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, I was stunned by the parallels.  Not only were the exact same themes being explored by Welles, but the style and methods were very similar.  Welles made F for Fake in 1974(!) and everything about it is shockingly innovative, from the frenetic editing to the casual blend of documentary and farcical (tumbling into fictional) elements.  Welles was conscious of what he was doing too, describing it as a “new type of film” and a “essay in film.”  Here’s a beautiful, though not quite representative passage, a meditative moment from somewhere near the middle of the film:

Finally, I missed Tree of Life while it was in theaters but I’m eagerly awaiting the Blu Ray release.  I recently made the jump to high definition with a new television and Blu Ray player and Terrence Malick’s 1998 film The Thin Red Line was one of the first I bought on Blu Ray so I just recently re-experienced it in high def glory.  It was probably the first “art” film that I ever saw because Malick is one of the few art house directors with enough Hollywood clout to still get major releases and this was two years before the original Ragtag Cinema Café would grace Columbia’s downtown culture.  Malick’s ability to continue to release to major theaters is even more remarkable when you consider that the usual fair at Ragtag is really more ‘indie’ than ‘art house’ with films that deviate only slightly from mainstream script and filmmaking conventions.  Malick as a filmmaker is very nearly a world unto himself.  He seems to focus primarily on the composition of his shots, looking for poetic imagery while his scripts operate almost independently of his direction giving the actors something to do while he moves in, about and around them.  It’s like he commissions a play and then creates his film as the play is performed, usually radically re-editing and disregarding the story as he creates something new from it through use of voice over and soundtrack.  Anyway, if you’ve never seen The Thin Red Line it’s even more dream-like and beautiful than it appears in this trailer but here’s a taste:

Speak and the Crisis of Adolescence

In reading through Speak, the aspect of adolescence that stung with the sharpest nostalgia (though we rarely associate nostalgia with unpleasantness) was Melinda's helplessness in the face of overwhelming dysfunction in the people and institutions that are supposed to serve as her caretakers.  If anything, Melinda is extraordinarily sensitive in accurately detecting the presence and causes of this dysfunction.  I suspect that few junior high/high school students truly share her gifts.  They know enough to be bitter, angry, and withdrawn--to be sure--but rarely do their observations or rebellions strike the deserving targets.

At least that was the case for me when I moved with my family from the small town I grew up with in the summer between seventh and eighth grades.  The crisis I experienced was largely the result of academic discord and disappointment.  In my home town I had ranked at the top of my academic class but the curriculums were so vastly mismatched between my old school and my new one that I found myself quickly buried beneath the workload.  If I recognized the problem, I certainly couldn't articulate it.  I floundered and did my best to ignore school and minimize its significance in my life.  This was, necessarily, a losing battle, since school would continue to be my greatest time commitment for the next five years, but--as an adolescent--the qualities of inaction were as novel a solution for problem solving as the variety of alternatives that were, as yet, a vague, unruly, and likely disappointing lot.

The misfortune of my ill-timed move and subsequent academic struggle pales in comparison to Melinda's lot but I felt I could identify with her response.  The mingling of Melinda's tragic rape with the more insidious brutalities that accompany our first tastes of the adult world is perhaps a shortcoming of the book, or, at least, a shortcoming of its role as a tool to provide insight into the adolescent mind.  Rape is abhorrent and--I imagine--extraordinarily traumatic.  So, it would not be unreasonable to expect a similar shift in personality/psychology for a victim of rape regardless of age.  The book seems to suggest a brighter horizon for Melinda at the end and the character is perhaps clever and resilient enough to proceed brilliantly into her sophomore year, but anyone who has their image of the world and their self-image strongly shaken at a formative point can probably expect to carry certain habits of mind well beyond their initial recovery.  As for me, I have little more faith in the adult world and the Deciders that helm our institutions than I did when I was 14.  The hard-earned difference, acquired somewhere along the 16 intervening years, is that I no longer think it expedient to ignore them.

This I believe...

To do a thing artfully is to do it with attention or purpose that extends beyond the ordinary; to do a thing artfully is to do it with care.  I believe that the role of art education in today’s public school curriculum is to provide students with a model for a type of excellence that cannot be achieved through test-taking strategies or rote memorization.  The practice of the professional artist has always involved a keen awareness of the models and methods of art creation that have come before, often with an eye toward advancing the practices or aesthetics of his/her particular medium(s).  But the methodology for achieving success as an artist or with a particular artwork has never been a strictly linear or, even, entirely logical operation.  There are many, many paths to great artistic achievement and every great artist must ultimately find their own way.  As art educators we must provide students with the groundwork on which to construct their individual paths; we must make efforts to familiarize them with models of excellence culled from art history and we must help them understand the tools through which that success was achieved.  But because art cannot be defined as one type of activity, or even any grouping or list of activities, we must be ready to extend our practice beyond the precedents of art history and follow our students as they find the mediums to which they have decided to focus their care and attention.

addendum: about poets and purification

I struggled to explain my interpretation of what Eliot felt about a poet’s role being the “purification” of the dialect of the tribe and how this applies to the evolution of visual culture this morning, so I wanted to take a second to try and explain it a little better here…

While the role of “purification” does not necessarily fall to poets alone—since writers of prose can be just as deliberate in their choice of word and sentence structure—the process of making those choices is all the more transparent in poetry  because, generally speaking, there are altogether fewer words in a completed piece of poetry than in prose and because both the author and the audience are likely to be familiar with the traditional poetic structures available to the poet and the level of adherence/caprice being used in following or diverting from those structures.  Over the course of the Four Quartets, Eliot slips into and out of various structures and deliberately quotes (or “appropriates”) past masters/masterworks, altering and juxtaposing them at his own discretion.  It is the level of care that he takes in employing his poetic tools that allow him to show concern for the “dialect of the tribe.”  He elaborates on the process at another point in the Quartets:

“…every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)…”

Eliot always took great care to acknowledge the literary shoulders on which he stood (he wrote a very famous essay, Tradition and Individual Talent, about the relationship between the canon and its contemporary workers), so he saw this “purification” as a slowly evolving and deliberate process in which the self-aware poet did their best to chart a position in the course of literary affairs and choose the right words for their particular time and purpose.

Now, here’s how I see this applying to visual culture…   Because of the way that technology and culture evolved, Eliot was in a better position to choose deliberately and understand his place at the end of that long chain than anyone working in the century preceding his own.  The printing press had been in action since the 15^th century but the early 20^th century was probably the golden age of the printed word: newspapers wielded tremendous power, public libraries were ubiquitous, television was just a twinkling in some techie’s eye, and even radio broadcasting didn’t really get started until the 1920s (Elliot published The Waste Land in 1922).  Written language, through its long course of evolution, had achieved a tremendous amount of agency.  The masses were, by and large, literate and contributing to the written collective.  This means that written culture had come a long, long way from the days when written culture was largely the domain of the lawmaking and priestly classes.

Which leads us to why this is a matter of “purification”…  Another 20^th century literary figure (and coincidentally, another St. Louis native—Eliot was born and raised there), William Burroughs, had a sort of sci-fi scenario/theory that language is a virus, that it arrived from the outer reaches of the universe and started to prey on human beings by taking control of their thoughts and actions.  I think that may be taking it a bit far, but there may be some truth in it too: if language evolved to serve a need and if that need was, for a long period of time, exploited to reflect the ends of an elite ruling class, then it is reasonable to expect language to contain some vestiges of its evolution as a tool of oppression.  At the very least, it probably took until the 20^th century for the majority of a population of a nation to be encouraged to make use of writing as a tool for deliberate and reflective action.  So, I believe that to “purify the dialect of the tribe” means to take a more perfect control of the tool of language—to do one’s part to wipe out the ostentatiousness, pedantry, and vulgarity—and to help everyone think just a little more keenly.

I believe that visual culture is now at or nearing the point at which Eliot encountered the written word.  We must try to help our students see the Photoshoped models, the smartly seductive product placements, the ideologies of perpetual consumption and unhappiness, etc.  clearly and we must try to help them see the alternatives clearly also.  Visual culture is becoming a collective.  As art educators we must help our students see the whole and plot their course.

when the going gets weird... (this I believe)*

We live in a time when rapid progress in technology is driving the habits and understanding of successive generations further apart at the same time that it is bringing the distant corners of the Earth closer together.  As Howard Gardner points out, “We should, for sure, think globally, but we should, for equally strong reasons, act locally, nationally, and regionally” (Gardner, 2009, p 18).  This puts educators in a sticky situation, with the duty to reach students who have been born into a whole new world while that world raps loudly and deservingly at the door to the classroom.  As teachers we must develop habits of mind and methods of working that reflect a far-reaching and inclusive attitude toward culture and knowledge at the same time that we evolve pedagogy capable of keeping pace with the changing needs of our students.

I believe that we in the field of art education can lead the way into this exciting new educational landscape.  As Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown point out in their chapter ‘Knowing, Making, and Playing’, recent changes in technology and culture call for a new kind of literacy—one in which context is the locus of meaning (Thomas & Brown, 2011).  Olivia Gude’s postmodern principles describe a variety of specific techniques used by artists that provide avenues of creation, play and communication through the manipulation of an object or symbol’s conceptual framework (Gude, 2004).   The techniques she describes are not new, Gude has begun the task of recognizing and describing them, but professional art practice has arguably reflected the sensibility of contextually directed meaning for nearly a hundred years now.  Art educators have the wealth of their discipline’s past century of work to draw from as they move to meet the needs of today’s students.

With our eyes toward the past century (and, indeed, the centuries and millennia before), I believe we must work toward what T.S. Eliot once referred to as a need “to purify the dialect of the tribe.”  With advances in technology, visual culture, like written language before it, has moved from the hands of the elite to become a collective property.   But all too often the dialogue is saturated with manipulation and the residual meanings of an antiquated power structure that is fighting to squeeze whatever it can from this apparatus before the reins are pulled completely away.  As workers in the field of visual culture—as artists—our tribe is truly global.  As educators our greatest responsibility is to reveal to the students that pass through our doors the rights and responsibilities that are attendant on their own membership.  By studying visual culture and the works and methods of great artists, and by facilitating deliberate and reflective art making in the classroom, I hope I will be doing my part to empower my students and to help them become respectful and effective members of the global community.

Gardner, H. (2009). Five minds for the future. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.

Gude, O. (2004). Postmodern principles: In search of a 21^st century art education. Art Education, 57(1), 6-14.

Thomas, D, & Seely, J. (2011). A new culture of learning: cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: Createspace.

*Bonus rant.  I just can't stop synthesizing.  This title is the first part of a quote from Hunter S. Thompson.  The quote popped into my head as I began to write this statement at just about the same moment that I knew I needed to lead toward the T.S. Eliot quote.  The two references together help explain my transition from a student of literary to artistic discourse and the original motives behind my desire to become an art educator.  In my time as a student of the English department at MU, the term 'text' had already come to describe just about any phenomena that would bear close-reading and interpretation.  Thus, images were a suitable subject for study and reference in the papers we wrote as students of English and I quickly spread my interests to Art History and used my understandings of each discourse as a buoy for the narratives and analyses I constructed there.  But, as I wrote and wrote and wrote I began to become dissatisfied with this relatively passive approach to visual culture.  To be an informed and critical consumer of visual culture is all well and good, but it is still only consumption.  As advances in technology have moved the elements of visual design to an integral role in the production of nearly all media--written and otherwise--the time seemed ripe to broaden our understanding of Eliot's conception of literary tradition.  The word is still vital and active but it is rarely encountered or considered au naturel anymore, nor does it need be: the visual idea is now as easily transmitted as the verbal (see my discussion of this shift in THEVERYMANY blog entry).  

The idea that literacy now involves a simultaneous engagement with verbal and visual disciplines sometimes strikes me as an anachronistic novelty.  It’s as though the high-piled evidence of 20^th century culture has belatedly triggered recognition, one decade deep into the 21^st century, that cultural artifacts have undergone a dramatic remodel.  Perhaps this helps explain the muddled aspect of English/language arts pedagogy over the last quarter of the 20^th century: film (the original multi-media recording format) was already generating a tremendous library but nobody was quite sure what to do with it and certainly some film directors deliberately shifted their productive efforts from literature over to the new medium.  Pier Paolo Pasolini provides one of the most dramatic examples, describing his transition from writing to film as “an explosion of my love for reality.”  In retrospect, Pasolini looks like a secular prophet.  His statement reflects a fundamental shift in the dynamics of authorship that occurred with the advent of film: if the author’s act of recording was motivated by a particular love of or engagement with the phenomena of life, why struggle with the intermediary any longer?  A more perfect medium had been invented.

But, of course, that interpretation is a bit naïve.  There are difficulties wrapped up with the medium of film as well.  Reality is immersive; film can only capture targeted aspects of that immersion.  And in some respects, the shortcomings of film edified the functional shorthand of language, just as the shortcomings of photography fortified the expressive qualities of painting.  Regardless, the manner of knowing and understanding life had changed dramatically and irrevocably.  Now, in the medium of hypertext, the choices to be made about how best to represent one aspect of reality or another is no longer a matter of choosing the best word only, but of choosing the best format as well.  This is what is now required to “purify the dialect” and to do it we must study, experiment, and play, in the variety of formats available and we must teach our students to do it too.

Gardner suggests that it takes ten years to achieve mastery of a discipline and I’m sure that he has a mound of theory and research to back that up (see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/opinion/sunday/26ideas.html for a recent, interesting discussion of the shortcomings of science), so the code-switching I suggest may seem daunting, but I’m not at all convinced that a standard for mastery is justifiable or necessary.  And even if it is, when one stops to consider the rapid exponential improvements in technology that lie at the heart of our changing culture, do the time frames studied really apply anymore?  It seems unlikely.

We live in weird times and when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.  Who knows?  Maybe in the next five years art will become the discipline that leads policy and pedagogical discussion.  Stranger things have happened.

(And just one more little aside: if you’ve never read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, I strongly, strongly, oh so strongly recommend it: http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/  My quote comes from the Fourth Quartet when Eliot encounters the ghost of a poet that could be any--even his own. The Quartets are sequential, with references that build on each other, so reading the whole thing helps it make better sense than the lone segment, but it’s strong meat and you can probably pick and choose profitably too [although Joni Mitchell resigned from the task of whittling them down for a composition by Charles Mingus, saying that it was like trying to cut verses from the Bible])

paper proposal

I’ve recently become very interested in ancient Egyptian art.  I admire the way that their artworks—or, at least, what we know of them—blend seamlessly into their culture.  The Egyptians did not have a word that serves as an equivalent for ‘art’.   The Egyptians did not make works of art, but they put great effort into making things artfully.  Their priest class was closely related to their class of scribes and it is difficult to distinguish too finely between their scribes and a grouping of people that we might in our parlance deem ‘artists’.    Indeed, many of the strategies employed for the composition of paintings, architecture, and statuary are derived from the hieroglyphic writing system that also serves as an integral part of these works.

Alongside the admiration that I feel for the holistic achievements of Egyptian culture is an awareness of the subversive side of this integration.  The Egyptian art that we study today was almost exclusively created to serve the ends of the ruling class and was almost certainly a source of oppression for the classes of society that served them.  Literacy was reserved to members of the royalty, political functionaries, the class of priests, and the scribes, and the cultural remains that survive attest to the disproportionate share of resources that these classes enjoyed.  For the rest of Egyptian society, the impact of the hieroglyphs and their transparent integration with all aspects of civil engineering amounted to a constant reminder of their subservient and largely invisible role in society.

In my paper, I am interested in exploring the history of art education in the United States to uncover examples of figures, schools, and movements that have acknowledged the presence of social inequality in visual culture and the efforts that they have made to work against those inequities.  Even in our culture, fine art has generally been a pastime for the wealthy, subject to their patronage, and reflecting their interests.  In the early 20^th century, a variety of efforts were made to address the power struggle inherited by students of the discipline.   In his work with the Barnes Foundation, John Dewey sought to reunite the accepted cannon of fine artwork with decorative and folk works.   Margaret Naumberg and Florence Cane sidestepped the issue outright by excluding previously made artworks from the classroom and encouraging expression over craft.  In my paper, I hope to discover the range of responses to this issue and chart its course from the beginning of the 20^th century up to contemporary practices.

combo

image manipulations

THEVERYMANY

There was much of interest and much that rang true in the “Developing a Repertoire of Skills for Visual Perception and Artistic Response” chapter.  Many of the suggestions in the first three sections dovetailed nicely with the VTS work we’ve been doing with the Boy Writers over at Ridgeway.  Also, I’ve still not shaken the frustration I repeatedly experienced as I observed a field teacher (during an earlier placement) consistently send her students imaginatively cold into the work of art creation.  I particularly liked this statement from the ‘Practice’ section of the first section: “When a full and rich image has developed in the imagination, work can begin to bring the image into visual form.”  The distinction between active imagination and active creation is too often overlooked. 

However, my curiosity was most piqued by the mention of an article that challenged that challenged traditional design terminology as being insufficient or outmoded by the advent of computer graphic technologies.  And the article was written in 1996.  1996!  That was way before Photoshop became a verb (though still a whopping eight years after the development of Photoshop 1.0).  So, I looked it up…

And almost everything it had to say is still valid.  If anything, I had to stop and wonder whether we’ve already inadvertently bent some of the old terminology to cover our new understanding of pictorial space.  It may be that I can’t step far enough outside of my contemporary box to say which terms have already evolved and I kind of suspect that’s one factor that made this such a dense and difficult read.  I had to stop regularly and try to remember whether there was a slightly different nuance to words like space, shape, and texture before navigating digital displays became a daily occurrence.  But it’s also that the author is dealing with some pretty abstract concepts—things that either fly under the radar of our daily activities or that we’re still coming to terms with. 

Here, for example, is the first disparity identified (out of a total of 20):

“In the literature of art education, the traditional formal image was viewed as a whole, with stable, analog contents bound to the form.  Computer graphics were determined to be dynamic and digital, and procedures were determined to play an important part in expanding the idea of an abstract "language." Generative and interpolative procedures in computer graphics, as well as the replicability of the same image in different output modes, beg notions of what is original or unique in art. Signifiers that are appropriated (see Gombrich, 1961, for a discussion of codes and signifiers) also appear to be an important part of artistic language in both mediums. The implications are that, even in terms of its visual properties, the formal image can no longer be perceived as referring only to itself  with what has been described as  "permanent or residual aesthetic value" (Crozier & Greenhalgh, 1992, p. 83-4).”

Wooza, that’s a lot to digest.  On first read, I latched on to “replicability” begging “notions of what is original or unique in art” and it led me to think of Gude’s Postmodern Appropriation Principle. But after  a second (and third) read I think it may go deeper than that.  It may help to refer back to that magnificent distinction that I pointed out earlier, the one between active imagination and active creation.  Take, for example, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.  We think of this painting as an object—a painting—because that is the corporeal form by which the image is conveyed.  Now, if Picasso had designed the image on a computer, then it would have no corporeal form—its dimensions would be relative, palette, saturation, brightness, etc would be variable.  The work of imagination that brought it into being would still belong firmly to Picasso, but the creative product is harder to pin down, involving an interaction between the creator, the end-user, and the technology in-between.   The reality is that this has been the case for a very long time.  I’ve never actually seen Les Demoiselles in person.  I’ve seen slides, posters, etc. recreating it, so I’m familiar with it—which means that I’m familiar with Picasso’s visual idea, but realistically, I’ve never actually seen the created product of that imagined idea.  As such, any evaluations I might make of it cannot be wholly considered valid until I’ve seen the real thing.  (And, of course, this is the reason that many people claim to hate various modern and contemporary works until they see them in person: I would never ever buy a book of reproductions of Rothko’s paintings, but I’d love to own one.  Same goes for Donald Judd and most Op Art.)  However, once I’ve seen the corporeal Les Demoiselles, I may finally rest my opinion or understanding of it amongst all those who have seen it since Picasso laid down the final brushstroke.  With digital artwork, there is no comparable end-point for knowing a work.  It may be that by the standards of traditional artwork, digital artwork is never actually complete.  It never reaches a definitive, perfected state.  That’s quite the change.

Another big change is the notion of three-dimensionality.  In computer design terms, the creation of three-dimensional shapes is both less of an illusion than in the traditional two-dimensional formats and the codification of an illusion.  Ironically, even though the illusion of three-dimensionality in computer graphics is created by a complete description of a three-dimensional object (along all three axis of dimension) as opposed to the selective recording and hiding of information (as happens in the rendering of three dimensional illusions on a traditional flat drawing surface, i.e. the illusion of foreshortened objects in drawings or paintings), rarely does that complete three-dimensional description achieve realization in the third dimension (you know, the palpable, real dimension that we go about our daily business in).

Here’s one of the exceptions.  This is THEVERYMANY by Marc Fornes from 2010.  I came across it on the contemporary floor of the Pompidou and aside from its obvious eye-catching qualities, something else about it that caught my attention: the museum label said that it was designed in Rhino 3D.  That brought back some memories.  Rhino 3D was the very first 3d design software that I ever used—and that was way back in 1996!  Ha!

Rise Above

I’d really like to see (or hear) a conversation between Gude and Duncum comparing and contrasting their respective systems of seven.  I remember being bowled over by Gude’s Postmodern Principles the first time I read them and I’ve referred back to them a number of times since, so I couldn’t help but wonder as I read Duncum’s introductory paragraph just what it was that compelled him to contrast them with a system of his own.  I kind of hate to admit it, but it actually put me into a bit of a defensive mindset initially.  I suppose I’m as fond of a useful and sympathetic ideology as the next guy…

In any case, on closer inspection, I don’t think that it’s Duncum’s intention to create a competing ideology.  Though necessarily, by the logic of his own argument, that’s exactly what he must be doing: all artifacts are engaged in a power struggle for the attention of an audience.  However, I choose to exercise my share in the power struggle (“Power is equally exercised when viewers interpret images,” he tells us) and to think of their works in collaboration rather than opposition.  So there.

Sorry to be cheeky about it but Duncum’s article was a bit of déjà vu for me.  The first five principles that he offers were straight out of the critical theory branch of the college English curriculum (which , in turn, I believe have their origin in the writings of the French historian, Michel Foucault).  The last two principles were new but they didn’t quite fit with those first five either.  The first five principles offered constructs by which to examine the relationship of an image to its audience; these last two examine  the relationship between an image and another phenomena (be it sound, word, or another image).  But these quibbles aside, what Duncum offers is an idea-based alternative to Gude’s technique-based elements.  The funny thing is that I never realized how formal/technique-based Gude’s approach was until I read Duncum’s offering and I think that’s because Gude has a tendency to tie the discovery of her postmodern techniques to the circumstances (changes in culture, technology, etc) that made them useful so that the artistic ends/ideas are hard to separate from the means/technique.  Duncum teases out the psychological constructs, disentangling the postmodern mindsets from the postmodern methods.

But all of this begs the question: how are our students to use these constructs in their art making.  As a student of literature, I wound up getting pretty frustrated with the poststructuralist critical discourse: all that reading between the lines leads one to suspect equivocation everywhere.   Examining the war of ideologies potentially frees us from inadvertently indoctrinating students with our own preferred artistic ideologies, but isn’t there more to teach about art than how to be a conscientious soldier in the war of ideals?  It’s hard to attach an ideology to Rothko’s paintings, or even to Jeff Koons’s Bunny for that matter and I like to think that’s because they operate above the fray, far from the shouting and persuasion.  Duncum’s principles are useful ways of seeing and knowing visual culture, but ultimately, it may only be through the act of creation that we rise above the power struggle.

Watercolors in Moscow by Erró, 1975

I'm throwing in this link to Dirty Projector's "Rise Above" for a few reasons: first, the last sentence of my post brought it to mind; second, I think it pairs in a quirky way with this piece of art; third, it's a postmodern pop song--the band decided to try to recreate an album called Damaged by Black Flag that they hadn't heard in nearly 15 years (talk about appropriation and recontextualization!).  Here are the lyrics:

sJealous cowards try to control
They distort what we say
Try to stop what we do
When they can't do it themselves

We are tired of your abuse
Try to stop us, but it's no use

Society's arms think they're smart
I find satisfaction in what they're lacking 'cause
We are born with a chance
And I'm gonna have my chance

Rise above

Absent are the subtleties

This scene from Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio highlights the absurdity of one very small corner of Michelle Marder Kamhi’s argument (and it’s only a very small corner because she so breezily dismisses such a broad portion of the art making world).  According to Kamhi, photographers (and I take it, by extension, video artists as well) exercise “some selectivity and control, [but] the image is ultimately formed by an automatic photochemical process, which is not under volitional control in every detail.”  Later, in describing another work--Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait--she enumerates the details that qualify such works as legitimate works of art: “…its “natural” subject matter, its depictive and expressive qualities—such as the sober, intensely serious facial expressions of the young couple, their gesture of joining hands, and the aura of tranquil solemnity of the elegant bedchamber.”

Jarman’s Caravaggio paints from models, just as the historical Caravaggio liked to do, and he (Jarman and the actor playing Caravaggio both) painstakingly produces the scene he’d like to render by nudging the models into their positions—creating such effects as the “sober, intensely serious facial expressions” and the hand gestures as well—and controlling the lighting.  In painting, photography, and video controlling the lighting is, incidentally, the quickest and surest way to achieve the desired “aura.”

I recently had the opportunity to see the Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin in the flesh, so to speak.  It’s presently hanging with the rest of the Italian masters in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie.  Here, I’m sad to say, the lighting was not especially good for such a dramatic and deliberate use of chiaroscuro.  Unfortunately, the sort of bright, noisy, natural light that works perfectly for the brighter palettes of the earlier, Renaissance era Italian masters, doesn’t work as well for the father of the Baroque style.  I’m certain that the great minds running the Louvre are aware of the disservice they’re doing Caravaggio, but they have to use the palace they’ve been given and regional organization is probably the only fair (and least crazy-making) way to display the vast collection that is their charge.

For the student casually strolling down this 100+ yard gallery, such details which distract from the “natural accessibility” (to appropriate a phrase from Kamhi) of a painting are not readily apparent.  Kamhi seems to think that art can exist inside a vacuum and while the absurdity of this is most readily apparent when one considers the history of artistic patronage and the relatively limited range of subjects thus engendered in the accepted Western canon, it also extends to perception: recently cleaned paintings and a paintings properly matched to their intended lighting are easier to appreciate than paintings that have not received the same amount of attention or have been made subject to a museum’s constrictions or broader agendas.

Some quick research on Kamhi points pretty firmly to the conclusion that she is a follower of Ayn Randian Objectivism.  This had me reaching (in near knee-jerk fashion) for a book I read a long time ago by Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Jameson is an unabashed Marxist and in quickly perusing the book again the differences between Kamhi’s approach to an argument about the validity of postmodern culture and Jameson’s becomes readily apparent.  Kamhi seeks to narrow the argument—to disregard works and ways of working that are not useful to her idea of what art (and consequently, art education) should be.  Jameson, in extremely dense prose, attempts to make sense of everything that has come to represent the culture of the modern world: literature, painting, architecture, film, etc, etc.   And while Kamhi seems to think that we can go back to a “great works” approach to understanding art, Jameson positions the Modernist era as the last great stomping ground of Atlasian artistic heroes.  He argues that “in an age of monopolies (and trade unions), of increasing institutionalized collectivization, there is always a lag.  Some parts of the economy are still archaic, handicraft enclaves; some are more modern and futuristic than the future itself.  Modern art, in this respect, drew its power and its possibilities from being a backwater and an archaic holdover within a modernizing economy: it glorified, celebrated, and dramatized older forms of individual production which the new mode of production was elsewhere on the point of displacing and blotting out.”  And while this might at first sound like a bleak prognosis for the contemporary artist, it instead signifies a democratization of artistic practice.  The history of art no longer belongs to the chosen few but instead to the proliferating possibilities of a global culture.

objets d'art ed

***Google's image uploader isn't working for me at the moment, but I want to go ahead and get the text up.  I'll try to edit the images in later***

(Photo courtesy Anne Norman)

Anything you can put on a hanger:  These are the works of art.  Some of them are more traditional--the varieties you might commonly expect to see on a hanger: jackets, blouses, trousers, paintings, pottery, video installations.  That sort of thing.  Others are maybe a little nontraditional: lab rats coated in tar, definitions cut out of a dictionary and placed on a scale, hot air balloons...  Those sorts of things.  If you can figure out a way to get it on a hanger, then you've got a work of art.

(Photo courtesy Carlos Porto)

Hanger:  These are the big ideas.  They're not all the same, mind you.  Some of them are crisp and wiry but can gradually lose their shape if you put something a little too big on them.  Some are plastic and shifty, but they'll spring back to life as soon as they're freed from their present duty.  And some are those narrow little horizontal ones that are only good for hanging pants or ties on.  But they all fit on the bar in the closet and they all hold the work you want to keep and maybe even a little of the work you don't too.

(Photo courtesy Paul Keller)

Bar in the closet:  This is the classroom or museum or gallery or school or anywhere that works of art may be placed and displayed.

(Photo courtesy Idea go)

The closet:  This is art.  And maybe—if we’re really lucky and in the right state of mind--it’s everything we see, hear, feel, and do.


If I were to incorporate Kathryn's diary, it would probably become one of the works that goes on a hanger, which means it would probably either become a work of art about private thoughts and views or it would become something like Duchamp's Etant donnes--something worked on and kept private.

Research Topic Proposal

Background or Position Statement:

            In a lot of classrooms, printed materials tend to blend into the surroundings and be forgotten by both teachers and students.  On the other hand, students are often very interested in observing how teachers make these materials and follow closely when things are drawn/written in front of them.  I’ve seen students point to schedules that have been drawn in front of them (when prompted by a question about their day) but I’ve never seen students point to preprinted materials in this way.  Further, students this young often lack confidence in their mark-making/representational skills.  I would like to introduce more opportunities for teacher modeling of mark-making tasks and more opportunities for students to practice mark making.  I would like to link these mark-making opportunities to the planning components of our lesson plans.  These planning components occur regularly in our curriculum as a means of preparing and transitioning students from one activity to another.  The regularity of these planning components would provide brief but frequent exposure to mark-making.  I also hope that the visualization process that goes along with these activities (representing the anticipated activity) will impact our students’ ability to focus and engage with the coming tasks.

Research Questions and sub questions:

            How does increased exposure to mark-making as a component of planning activities effect student engagement with planned tasks?

a)      Does observing a mark-making task as a part of planning increase student engagement with planned tasks?

b)      Does participating in a mark-making task as a part of planning increase student engagement with planned tasks?

c)       Does increased exposure to mark-making activities increase student comfort and/or satisfaction with mark-making activities?

Related Research:

            Key Literature Areas:  Research and documents pertaining to the Tools of the Mind curriculum.  Other related research, as yet to be determined.

            Key Terms to be Defined:   “mark-making task,” “planning activity,” “student engagement”

           

Permissions:

            I will need to receive permission from my national program and local staff to make small alterations to the curriculum that they provide.  I will need permission from school administration and classroom teachers to implement the curricular alterations and gather information about the students.  I will need permission from parents to include examples of student work and observations in my study documents.

Data Sources:

                1) Student work (drawings, transcriptions) – These would provide evidence of student planning and engagement with the proposed curricular adjustments

2) Taped/transcribed informal conversation with students (recall)—These would give further evidence of connections being made between planning strategies and classroom learning experiences

3) Interviews/surveys of teachers/tutors—These would provide a baseline and evaluation of change or lack thereof, in student behavior in the classroom

4) Interviews/surveys of parents—These would provide a baseline and evaluation of change or lack thereof, in student behavior in general. (Further, this might provide data about other possible effects of the treatment—like a general increase in interest in writing/drawing activities)

5) Pictures/video of classroom activity—These could be referred to for observations of student engagement with curricular adjustments and evidence of student learning and behavior changes

Methods and Analysis:

            Data collected will be collected from the sources listed above either in the form of anecdotal observations, numerical rating, or a mixture of the two.  I will attempt to create a broad picture of classroom behavior, rather than choosing individual representative children or describe each child individually (this is partly to avoid problems related to student attrition).  A baseline for behavior will be established in the early part of the study, prior to the application of my curricular modifications and data will be collected over the course of three months after modifications have been implemented with students providing work and teachers and tutors providing feedback from continuous observation.  Parents will also be surveyed at the close of the observation period to provide additional information about possible changes in student behavior.

           

Time Line: 

            Mid-November thru mid-December:  collect initial data to establish baseline

            Mid-December thru mid-January: (break in program curriculum)

            Mid-January thru mid-April: implement curriculum changes and collect data

            Mid-April thru mid-May: organize and interpret data; assemble findings

Possible Findings:

1)  I expect that my students will become more engaged with classroom activities as a result of the mark-making and visual planning strategies.

2)  I expect that my students will be more engaged by visual representations of planning that are produced in front of them than by preprinted versions already placed and used in the environment.

3)  I expect that my students will become more interested in mark-making activities (drawing, coloring, painting, and writing) as a result of increased mark-making activity demonstrations and opportunities for mark-marking included in daily routines.

Dissemination:

I am interested in sharing the findings with my program’s national offices and potentially with a wider audience through a journal article.  I would also consider creating a presentation and sharing my findings at a conference or other professional development gathering.

Budget:

The cost of notebooks to be used as journals in the curricular modification is the only cost anticipated (these have been provided by my program for other purposes in the past).  My program already owns and provides marker boards for other curricular activities and these could be used for the teacher-modeled mark-making activities.  Writing materials are already available in the classroom.