Here's a link to my curriculum prezi!
http://prezi.com/z8laj4eowtda/look-here-telling-stories-with-photography/
Brain Imaging Center & Art Dept.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
a letter from Niagara Fishbowl (in the making)
"Ambitious," he said through grinning teeth as the other one flexed his tape measure and sighed, "so far so good but not much further," and I know you were thinking "quixotic is what he really meant" but I have to tell you, I too am suspicious of your pride. So many weeks and hours of slow, slow labor under the vague notion that it will somehow make me strong. I suspect you fear the trials still ahead, when fire will stop forever my growing, and water will explore my every resolve. If you and I survive--if we come out intact--I'll become your most ambitious success but you'll still need someone to tell you that you're proud and ambitious.
play reflection
How are the 2 artifacts ( structure and photo) different? similar? &
How does your vision translate from 3D to 2D?
For me, sculpture is always a very tactile, trial-and-error experience, even when I think that I can see what the structure will look like in my head, I have to build, look at the result, and either modify, remove, or continue, and this was my experience with the paper sculptures as well. Photography also involves a lot of trial and error but it's not additive--or, at least, not in the literal way of sculpture. So, as maker of the two artifacts, these different making experiences influences my viewing experience: the sculpture--despite being the result of collaboration--seems more controlled: whimsical where we wanted it to be whimsical, sturdy where we needed it to be; meanwhile, the photo was chosen deliberately for its formal elements (contrast, rhythm, emphasis) which give it sturdiness and structure, but paradoxically, represents the fortuitous, less controlled circumstances of its making.
Does this process change the way you SEE the structure?
Yes and no. I think that I mentioned in class that with sculpture I tend to think a lot of about areas of light and shadow and those elements came very strongly into play in the photo. On the other hand, I hadn't been thinking about the play of different colored lights and the opportunities that the different plains would offer for contrasting those colors and that became very important in the photo.
Synthesis of PLAY experience (Symphony)
Why do artists play?
To see things in new ways and to explore new possibilities. In this experience, my photo does not describe the initial structure but instead uses that structure as a canvas to record the play of color and light.
How has playing with paper reinforced the importance of play?
Often, when we're making art, paper is just a surface on which we record our creativity, so it was in the spirit of play that we cast aside our pencils, pens, markers, crayons and let the paper speak for itself.
What did you learn about play in this class?
Sometimes, to really get into the spirit of play, we have to be willing to let go of our creations repeatedly and be ready to turn them into something new.
heuristic's ball
Boy, oh, boy. If there were one
assigned reading that we've done for this course that I could sign my name to
with an unequivocal endorsement, it would be Eisner's sixth chapter. This
chapter thoroughly describes my feelings toward the madness for "standards"
in our public education discourse (and my feelings toward those
"standards" go a long way in explaining my move from English to
Art--though, I should add, not all the way).
Even so, there was a moment in the chapter where I began to wonder if Eisner's stylistic choices were hurting his argument--specifically, the section that begins on 168, titled "Conceptions of Standards" Here, Eisner seems to lapse into the page-filling, mind-numbing, Freshman Composition technique of pulling out the dictionary and reporting on what is there contained. And even though my mathematician friends have amused me with tales of how Bertrand Russell filled 500 pages to prove that one plus one makes two, I couldn't help but marginally notate Eisner's statement that "a third meaning of standard is a unit of measure. Units of measure are the result of arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric that can be applied to describe matters of amount" was "a little flip."
But then I read Pink's chapter on Play, wherein he quotes James Paul Gee as saying (in defense of video games) that "learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them" (p 193) and that got me thinking about my own long history as a video gamer and whether or not I felt this was an accurate appraisal and what it may mean to my perception of learning and standards.
I couldn't tell you when I start playing video games. My parents had an Atari before they had me. I do remember the day they bought a Nintendo as one of the happiest in my life and I have owned every succeeding generation of Nintendo platform since (Wii being the fifth) and many other non-Nintendo platforms as well, so that should tell you a thing or two about my relationship with the format. But it's not the whole picture.
You see, I'm not only geeky, I'm obsessive. Along with that Nintendo, I begged a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine out of my parents. My parents--thankfully--indulged my inclination to spend hours not only playing, but reading about video games. I couldn't tell you how many subscription renewals it took for me to realize that Nintendo Power was largely a mouthpiece for the Nintendo Corporation but the realization somehow sullied my enthusiasm for passing on their reviews and secret strategies to my friends and classmates (as had become my custom). So, I switched to the edgier, independent Electronic Gaming Monthly, whose website eventually evolved into gamespot.com which gets top billing from Pink on p 212.
I won't bore you with the tale of how I suspect these habits of information gathering and dispersal eventually evolved into real-world, grown-up skill sets--partly because I think that lens demeans the continuity of play--suffice it to say that for years, I devoted a significant amount of time to gathering information about video games and even today I draw on that knowledge base to enhance my experience as a gamer--even though I rarely play through even one game a year from beginning to end any more. So, yes, maybe there is enough variety and room for discovery in video games to warrant the appraisal that "when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom" (p 193).
The trouble is--being a relatively young medium--video games rarely live up to that potential and it can take an extraordinary investment of resources (time and money) to uncover the types of experiences that rival real world (classroom or not) learning. Video games are a multi-faceted experience, often involving scripts, art direction, sound design, play mechanics, etc and etc and etc... Frequently, a game will excel in one or two of these aspects and fail in every other regard, and probably even more frequently, a game will fail in every respect. It's difficult to say exactly why this is: either games are just too complex, relying on a sizable group of people and it can be difficult to coordinate their efforts into a cohesive, working game experience; they're such a young medium that training still happens on the job, so the error of trial and error still creeps into the finished product; or, maybe, the audience still doesn't quite know what to expect from the format and has therefore been too forgiving.
When I purchased and played games regularly, it was with these shortcomings in mind. Rather than expecting a wholly satisfying experience from the games I invested in, I curated exemplars: games that nailed the established gameplay rules within a particular genre, but maybe lacked a strong narrative or character design; games that pushed the established gameplay rules in a new and exciting direction, even if they did so a little imperfectly; even games with control systems or play mechanics that bordered on the inept or masochistic, so long as they pushed narrative or design in remarkable ways. Finding these games and exploring their strengths and weaknesses was an exercise in context discovery and coordination. It was a learning experience but it was top-heavy and I put a disproportionate amount of work into bringing meaning to the games. They seldom returned the favor. Eventually, I discovered music, literature, and art, and found they had a better track record.
(As a side note: the "young medium" dynamic of video games may provide some useful perspective on the value of Great Works notions of studying art or literature. Great Works curriculums are hobbled by bias, expertise, academic incest and all the ugly smugness that established power structures can bring. Rich Texts--as I defined them in an earlier post--provide a reliable springboard to broader studies because they've proven themselves to be reliable meaning delivery systems. The tricky thing is that Great Works curriculums are generally composed of Rich Texts. The distinction needs to be considered and maintained if we're to gather the benefits of the one while avoiding the pitfalls of the other.)
On the other hand, just as even narrow or imperfect works of art can yield unexpected, rich opportunities for meaning making that would otherwise be missed, often the unintended, jagged edges of game design yield some of the richest creative opportunities within the medium. Indeed, bucking against a restrictive, artificial, or flawed system is one major way of uncovering the creative instinct. Many a gamer has refused to merely suffer a game's weaknesses for the sake of its strengths, choosing instead to probe the rough spots for an opening--a way to bend the rules or physics or storyline into a more favorable configuration. These openings come in many forms. Sometimes they are glitches (errors in the coding or expected play sequence or game physics); sometimes they are cheat codes hidden away by programmers as a workaround to the game's finished form (cheats began their lives as ways for designers or hired testers to play through games without being slowed down by a game's difficulty, though they evolved into a way for programmers to include content changes that didn't fit the finished form as approved by the design team); sometimes they're additional code made by a third party and retrofitted to the game. This article has some good examples of this creative gaming principle at work in the online gaming world (my favorite is 'Fansy the Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad', though I should warn you that the article is written in an elevated version of the kind of teenage boy-speak that is common in the online gaming world, with cursing, insensitivity and the lot):
http://www.cracked.com/blog/
I suggested, way back toward the beginning of this entry, that my thoughts on video games and their educational possibilities provided some insight on what Eisner was getting at with his 'standards' definitions, so I want to wrap this up by returning to that. Later in his chapter, Eisner suggests: "Standards should be viewed as aids, as heuristics for debate and planning. They should not be regarded as contracts or prescriptions that override local judgments" (p 173). To contrast the notion of standards as "arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric" against the notion of standards as heuristics is a bit like comparing apples to apples, but as Eisner makes clear with his enumeration of 'standard' definitions, it is really only comparing one definition of standards because it is neither their characteristic (im)precision nor their mutability toward which Eisner is critical. It is, rather, the mix of meanings that allow that mutability, that arbitrariness to be forgot, and that is where video games come back into this...
Even so, there was a moment in the chapter where I began to wonder if Eisner's stylistic choices were hurting his argument--specifically, the section that begins on 168, titled "Conceptions of Standards" Here, Eisner seems to lapse into the page-filling, mind-numbing, Freshman Composition technique of pulling out the dictionary and reporting on what is there contained. And even though my mathematician friends have amused me with tales of how Bertrand Russell filled 500 pages to prove that one plus one makes two, I couldn't help but marginally notate Eisner's statement that "a third meaning of standard is a unit of measure. Units of measure are the result of arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric that can be applied to describe matters of amount" was "a little flip."
But then I read Pink's chapter on Play, wherein he quotes James Paul Gee as saying (in defense of video games) that "learning isn't about memorizing isolated facts. It's about connecting and manipulating them" (p 193) and that got me thinking about my own long history as a video gamer and whether or not I felt this was an accurate appraisal and what it may mean to my perception of learning and standards.
I couldn't tell you when I start playing video games. My parents had an Atari before they had me. I do remember the day they bought a Nintendo as one of the happiest in my life and I have owned every succeeding generation of Nintendo platform since (Wii being the fifth) and many other non-Nintendo platforms as well, so that should tell you a thing or two about my relationship with the format. But it's not the whole picture.
You see, I'm not only geeky, I'm obsessive. Along with that Nintendo, I begged a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine out of my parents. My parents--thankfully--indulged my inclination to spend hours not only playing, but reading about video games. I couldn't tell you how many subscription renewals it took for me to realize that Nintendo Power was largely a mouthpiece for the Nintendo Corporation but the realization somehow sullied my enthusiasm for passing on their reviews and secret strategies to my friends and classmates (as had become my custom). So, I switched to the edgier, independent Electronic Gaming Monthly, whose website eventually evolved into gamespot.com which gets top billing from Pink on p 212.
I won't bore you with the tale of how I suspect these habits of information gathering and dispersal eventually evolved into real-world, grown-up skill sets--partly because I think that lens demeans the continuity of play--suffice it to say that for years, I devoted a significant amount of time to gathering information about video games and even today I draw on that knowledge base to enhance my experience as a gamer--even though I rarely play through even one game a year from beginning to end any more. So, yes, maybe there is enough variety and room for discovery in video games to warrant the appraisal that "when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they're in the classroom" (p 193).
The trouble is--being a relatively young medium--video games rarely live up to that potential and it can take an extraordinary investment of resources (time and money) to uncover the types of experiences that rival real world (classroom or not) learning. Video games are a multi-faceted experience, often involving scripts, art direction, sound design, play mechanics, etc and etc and etc... Frequently, a game will excel in one or two of these aspects and fail in every other regard, and probably even more frequently, a game will fail in every respect. It's difficult to say exactly why this is: either games are just too complex, relying on a sizable group of people and it can be difficult to coordinate their efforts into a cohesive, working game experience; they're such a young medium that training still happens on the job, so the error of trial and error still creeps into the finished product; or, maybe, the audience still doesn't quite know what to expect from the format and has therefore been too forgiving.
When I purchased and played games regularly, it was with these shortcomings in mind. Rather than expecting a wholly satisfying experience from the games I invested in, I curated exemplars: games that nailed the established gameplay rules within a particular genre, but maybe lacked a strong narrative or character design; games that pushed the established gameplay rules in a new and exciting direction, even if they did so a little imperfectly; even games with control systems or play mechanics that bordered on the inept or masochistic, so long as they pushed narrative or design in remarkable ways. Finding these games and exploring their strengths and weaknesses was an exercise in context discovery and coordination. It was a learning experience but it was top-heavy and I put a disproportionate amount of work into bringing meaning to the games. They seldom returned the favor. Eventually, I discovered music, literature, and art, and found they had a better track record.
(As a side note: the "young medium" dynamic of video games may provide some useful perspective on the value of Great Works notions of studying art or literature. Great Works curriculums are hobbled by bias, expertise, academic incest and all the ugly smugness that established power structures can bring. Rich Texts--as I defined them in an earlier post--provide a reliable springboard to broader studies because they've proven themselves to be reliable meaning delivery systems. The tricky thing is that Great Works curriculums are generally composed of Rich Texts. The distinction needs to be considered and maintained if we're to gather the benefits of the one while avoiding the pitfalls of the other.)
On the other hand, just as even narrow or imperfect works of art can yield unexpected, rich opportunities for meaning making that would otherwise be missed, often the unintended, jagged edges of game design yield some of the richest creative opportunities within the medium. Indeed, bucking against a restrictive, artificial, or flawed system is one major way of uncovering the creative instinct. Many a gamer has refused to merely suffer a game's weaknesses for the sake of its strengths, choosing instead to probe the rough spots for an opening--a way to bend the rules or physics or storyline into a more favorable configuration. These openings come in many forms. Sometimes they are glitches (errors in the coding or expected play sequence or game physics); sometimes they are cheat codes hidden away by programmers as a workaround to the game's finished form (cheats began their lives as ways for designers or hired testers to play through games without being slowed down by a game's difficulty, though they evolved into a way for programmers to include content changes that didn't fit the finished form as approved by the design team); sometimes they're additional code made by a third party and retrofitted to the game. This article has some good examples of this creative gaming principle at work in the online gaming world (my favorite is 'Fansy the Famous Bard Isn't Touching You, You Can't Get Mad', though I should warn you that the article is written in an elevated version of the kind of teenage boy-speak that is common in the online gaming world, with cursing, insensitivity and the lot):
http://www.cracked.com/blog/
I suggested, way back toward the beginning of this entry, that my thoughts on video games and their educational possibilities provided some insight on what Eisner was getting at with his 'standards' definitions, so I want to wrap this up by returning to that. Later in his chapter, Eisner suggests: "Standards should be viewed as aids, as heuristics for debate and planning. They should not be regarded as contracts or prescriptions that override local judgments" (p 173). To contrast the notion of standards as "arbitrary choices that create a commonly used metric" against the notion of standards as heuristics is a bit like comparing apples to apples, but as Eisner makes clear with his enumeration of 'standard' definitions, it is really only comparing one definition of standards because it is neither their characteristic (im)precision nor their mutability toward which Eisner is critical. It is, rather, the mix of meanings that allow that mutability, that arbitrariness to be forgot, and that is where video games come back into this...
A few video game companies have figured out
the perils of spreading themselves too thin and have begun, instead, to put all
of their efforts into expanding and refining relatively few titles. Instead of becoming the odd addition to one
gamer’s library to fulfill this or that need, they want their games to appeal
to as broad of an audience as possible and be, as much as possible, all things
to all gamers. This means releasing two
or three games a year—at most—instead of a dozen or more. Blizzard does this with their Warcraft,
Starcraft, and Diablo games. Rockstar
does this with their Grand Theft Auto series.
Bethesda does this with their Elder Scrolls games. The games that have resulted have given rise
to a whole new genre, the sandbox game. Sandbox
games typically allow players to invest 50+ hours and to choose, to some
extent, their character’s role in the story/game world. These games also have tremendous replay value
because the choices made by the player have an effect on game events and
outcome, meaning that one player’s experience will be very different from
another player’s. On the surface, this
sounds like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel but the choices are far more
subtle and numerous and the sequence of choices and effects isn’t linear,
closer to a large equation that will yield different results depending on the
order in which the various components are filled in and solved than a sequence
of multiple choice questions. These are
the games that probably come closest to rivaling real-world learning.
But because these games are so huge,
powerful, and well made and encourage gamers to spend tremendous amounts of
time exploring the ins and outs of their sandbox worlds, they are more or less
devoid of the sort of raw creative experiences that are facilitated by their
imperfect, frustrating cousins. It’s
probably possible to find the rough edges if you search long and hard enough,
but few gamers are going to be motivated to push past the already rich and
seamless gaming experience to uncover the unintended rewards of bending a game
that’s already so malleable.
Well-made “standards” could and should be like
these well-made gaming experiences, they should offer such a breadth of
learning and a variety of possible outcomes that the average student receives a
rich and rewarding experience from their time spent within the curriculum. To create such experiences, the programmers
and designers of these games imagine a fully-realized world and do their best
to anticipate the variety of interactions that would be desired in and
facilitated by that world.
Superficially, such a world as realized in “standards” form veers
perilously close to the bewildering array described by Eisner on p 171-172 but
we’re living in the age of Wikipedia, of crowd sourcing, GUIs, searchability,
etc. Why should our idea of “standards”
be a static, periodically updated PDF file?
Is it really desirable to reduce our desired educational outcomes to a
set of elliptical sentences that fit snugly in rigid, sequential boxes?
Eisner suggests somewhat ambivalently that “standards”
could be useful, but I’ll do him one better and say that “standards” should be made useful. I think we need something like standards, and, following Eisner’s suggestion,
we need to start treating them as
heuristics rather than contracts. There
are already a variety of resources for sharing lesson plans and teaching tips
online, but our profession would benefit from a centralized, professionally
monitored and organized resource that offers the best in practical and expert “standards”
and practices. Our “standards” should be
crowd sourced and broadened to reflect the wealth of learning opportunities at
work in classrooms and they should allow students and teachers to confidently
follow their curricular inspirations while receiving additional ideas and
feedback from their peers and other experts in the field. Such a database would never achieve a final
form, but would instead be persistently renewed and, especially so by the students and teachers that continue to bump up
against the rough edges of even this rich educational environment. The opportunities for raw creativity will
never go away because technology and cultural conditions will continue to
evolve. Unlike the worlds imagined by
sandbox game programmers, the world being addressed by such a resource—the real
world—will never become static. It’s
time we stop looking for standards that are.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
the light/tunnel ratio continued
(The end of my last post probably felt a little abrupt--especially given
the grandiose title and introductory image. As has become the case
with the reading that I'm doing for this class, I spent a little too
much time "chewing" and neglected to leave myself enough time to
adequately cull and transcribe the thoughts that formed in the process.
So, with this post, I'll attempt to continue the train of thought where
I left it at the same time that I integrate the additional freight
picked up from the interceding reading. [How's that for metaphorical
thought? And that last bit rhymes!])
When Serra made that comment about art not being democratic, he was in the midst of a very unpleasant episode in which his work had been rather violently rejected by his audience. This was before his process of work-making had brought him to the point where curves came to figure heavily in his repertoire of techniques (PING Eisner, p 114). Though he was perhaps already on his way to that point, because Tilted Arc (PING Dustin)--the much maligned piece in question--was, in fact, a slow, stately gradually described curve. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite curvy enough and some very loud voices decried it an unsightly gash, spoiling their public ground and their vista.
This response was visceral. In this respect, Tilted Arc was a success. It engaged the audience as a sensual, "physical and, in a sense, erotic" (Freedman, p 96) experience. And on this level, Tilted Arc met the criteria by which Kimmelman declared Serra's work successful. It reduced the terms of viewing to the point where the audience and their roving, subjective viewfindership became the only point of entry by which to "locate themselves in the fictional realities of artistic forms" (Freedman, p 92). This idea that narrative ("fictional realities") is the dominant interpretive lens for the average viewer is supported by VTS stage theory and also by Lowenfeld's stage theory in which haptic and descriptive approaches to art production give way to representational schemata (as tends to be the development in the dominant Western tradition anyway). So, for this average viewer then, the troubling part of Serra's work is the aggressive way that it refuses to be fictionalized. Its presence is obtrusive and demanding. Stripped of all other context, the only narrative it offers is the attraction or repulsion of the viewer to its presence. In Kimmelman's review of the Serra retrospective, this quality is lauded; in the case of Tilted Arc, it proved fatal.
I've already suggested that maybe Tilted Arc wasn't curvy enough to make that achieved effect pleasurable for the audience. That evaluation is based partly on my familiarity with critical response to Serra's work over time and partly on my own responses to his works. The early, uncurving, self-supporting slabs of lead and steel have an aggressive quality. Serra could, theoretically, have made these works out of some other equally rigid but less hefty material (plastics? strong wood?), but the work required to make and sustain the pieces is ultimately part of their effect--they focus the viewer on material and process, at least in part out of a regard for personal safety. In my kitchen, I keep a postcard of Serra densely suited in protective gear hurtling molten lead into the corner of his studio. I consider his presence an icon of the visceral culinary approach to which I aspire, an approach that to my mind lines up with the early character of his work. There's a sort of brutish, take-no-prisoners showmanship in this work and perhaps this is the reason that some people have characterized it as excessively masculine (PING, Kathy).
But this is not the sort of work that has, ultimately, made a popular artist of Serra. Or, rather, it is--but modulated by finesse and the blessings of institutional savoir fair. His works still offer the viewer the same stark narrative, but the curving forms no longer push or indicate the presence of an aggressive artist. As Serra's relationship to his own work has shifted from lifting, pushing, and throwing heavy metals around to massive designs that are turned over for fabrication, the pieces have become more seductive. Great big museums like MoMA have bent over backwards to accomodate them and viewers have been provided with a "safe" space in which to fall under their influence. No more ugly confrontations; no more unwanted democratic intrusions.
So, Freedman's correct. No matter how pure the form, context and associations play a role in our experience of it. It's one thing to be invited to approach and experience Serra's work as art in the traditional institutional settings and it's another to have his work invade your space and to have to live with it on a daily basis. For me, the irony builds as I apply my own social activist lens to Tilted Arc. I see the aggressiveness of Tilted Arc as equal to that of the urban landscape into which it was installed. In that sense, it could have served as a critique or satire of the resignation with which individuals submit their landscape, their worldview, their point-of-view--to urban developers and the felicities of capital. Under this lens, Serra subverted the methods and language of the urban landscape to create a non-functional work of art--an object that exists by virtue of its desire to make its audience think and consider. But that's what I bring to the work, and Serra deliberately avoids burdening his sculpture with politics. Wisely, I think. Such considerations would derail his oeuvre.
When Serra made that comment about art not being democratic, he was in the midst of a very unpleasant episode in which his work had been rather violently rejected by his audience. This was before his process of work-making had brought him to the point where curves came to figure heavily in his repertoire of techniques (PING Eisner, p 114). Though he was perhaps already on his way to that point, because Tilted Arc (PING Dustin)--the much maligned piece in question--was, in fact, a slow, stately gradually described curve. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite curvy enough and some very loud voices decried it an unsightly gash, spoiling their public ground and their vista.
This response was visceral. In this respect, Tilted Arc was a success. It engaged the audience as a sensual, "physical and, in a sense, erotic" (Freedman, p 96) experience. And on this level, Tilted Arc met the criteria by which Kimmelman declared Serra's work successful. It reduced the terms of viewing to the point where the audience and their roving, subjective viewfindership became the only point of entry by which to "locate themselves in the fictional realities of artistic forms" (Freedman, p 92). This idea that narrative ("fictional realities") is the dominant interpretive lens for the average viewer is supported by VTS stage theory and also by Lowenfeld's stage theory in which haptic and descriptive approaches to art production give way to representational schemata (as tends to be the development in the dominant Western tradition anyway). So, for this average viewer then, the troubling part of Serra's work is the aggressive way that it refuses to be fictionalized. Its presence is obtrusive and demanding. Stripped of all other context, the only narrative it offers is the attraction or repulsion of the viewer to its presence. In Kimmelman's review of the Serra retrospective, this quality is lauded; in the case of Tilted Arc, it proved fatal.
I've already suggested that maybe Tilted Arc wasn't curvy enough to make that achieved effect pleasurable for the audience. That evaluation is based partly on my familiarity with critical response to Serra's work over time and partly on my own responses to his works. The early, uncurving, self-supporting slabs of lead and steel have an aggressive quality. Serra could, theoretically, have made these works out of some other equally rigid but less hefty material (plastics? strong wood?), but the work required to make and sustain the pieces is ultimately part of their effect--they focus the viewer on material and process, at least in part out of a regard for personal safety. In my kitchen, I keep a postcard of Serra densely suited in protective gear hurtling molten lead into the corner of his studio. I consider his presence an icon of the visceral culinary approach to which I aspire, an approach that to my mind lines up with the early character of his work. There's a sort of brutish, take-no-prisoners showmanship in this work and perhaps this is the reason that some people have characterized it as excessively masculine (PING, Kathy).
But this is not the sort of work that has, ultimately, made a popular artist of Serra. Or, rather, it is--but modulated by finesse and the blessings of institutional savoir fair. His works still offer the viewer the same stark narrative, but the curving forms no longer push or indicate the presence of an aggressive artist. As Serra's relationship to his own work has shifted from lifting, pushing, and throwing heavy metals around to massive designs that are turned over for fabrication, the pieces have become more seductive. Great big museums like MoMA have bent over backwards to accomodate them and viewers have been provided with a "safe" space in which to fall under their influence. No more ugly confrontations; no more unwanted democratic intrusions.
So, Freedman's correct. No matter how pure the form, context and associations play a role in our experience of it. It's one thing to be invited to approach and experience Serra's work as art in the traditional institutional settings and it's another to have his work invade your space and to have to live with it on a daily basis. For me, the irony builds as I apply my own social activist lens to Tilted Arc. I see the aggressiveness of Tilted Arc as equal to that of the urban landscape into which it was installed. In that sense, it could have served as a critique or satire of the resignation with which individuals submit their landscape, their worldview, their point-of-view--to urban developers and the felicities of capital. Under this lens, Serra subverted the methods and language of the urban landscape to create a non-functional work of art--an object that exists by virtue of its desire to make its audience think and consider. But that's what I bring to the work, and Serra deliberately avoids burdening his sculpture with politics. Wisely, I think. Such considerations would derail his oeuvre.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
the light/tunnel ratio
"In Mr. Serra’s case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp." (Kimmelman's New York Times review of MoMA's Serra retrospective)
First of all (or rather, second of all--see how I snuck those two quotations up there to set up a dichotomy for my arguments before I even began to address the reader directly?), let me apologize because I never got around to finishing the argument that I'd worked up in my previous post. What it boiled down to is pretty neatly captured by the jotted note that I made while reading those first two chapters: "Freedman's approach, with its broad narrative and exhaustive citations, strives for subjectivity, while her tone works against it," the overall effect of which serves to make her argument less coherent and her history less convincing. I suspect that her goal is to provide us with a catalog of the ideas that have influenced her thinking, some of which she has assimilated or built on and some of which she has reacted against. This approach makes sense if she aligns herself with post-structuralist theory (and, to my mind, the quote from her that I used up top confirms that alignment), but it comes off as a history with a not-so-well-hidden argument as a subtext. Her book would gain substantial clarity, credibility, and readability if she would take the first sentence of chapter four (which comes, tellingly, with a citation from Eisner attached) to heart and foreground her own sensibilities, tell some stories, and generally let the reader see how she evolved into the voice that is presently speaking to them through her book instead of burying her head in the forest of erudition and Lacanian quadruple speak.
My own intention in taking so very long to work my way up to that conclusion in that past post was to provide an example of the kind of writing that I prefer: writing that demonstrates a sense of personhood and brings the reader along a path with definite landmarks that can be retraced like bread crumbs. Eisner, I feel, represents this type of writing as well. When I finish reading Eisner, I can remember various descriptions that he's incorporated into the chapter and, whether I agree with him or not, I have a pretty strong sense that I've followed the thrust of his argument. By contrast, when I finish reading a chapter of Freedman, I have to look back at the notes I've made in the margins and do my darnedest to form a picture of the chapter as a whole--and if I don't do this, I leave the reading almost completely blank.
Ironically (or does it become meta-irony, since irony is one of the favorite languages of the type of "post-Pop Surrealism" that Serra dismisses and that Freedman would adamantly defend?), the aesthetic choices that Freedman has made as a writer do not follow the standards that she advocates for both art and learning. Instead of creating a context-rich environment in which metacognitively-activated learning will be scaffolded by the materials that she presents, she has created a hermetic world in which her research and thought is presented unmediated by familiar (or uncanny) structures. And just as ironically, that great stalwart structuralist, Richard Serra, whose works appeals unmediated to each and every viewer regardless the wealth of their "imagic stores," once made the comment that "Art is not democratic."
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
TLC 8740 post in progress
First of all, it looks like the link that I posted to Laurie Anderson's Only An Expert has gone kaput, so here's another:
Only An Expert
And while we're cruising YouTube, how 'bout this one too:
The Shining Elevator Scene analysis
Ok, ok, I know, I already demonstrated my ability to derail a reading response with a tenuous analogy connecting the readings to a movie I've recently watched, but bear with me because this so totally relates to Eisner, Freedman, and Barrett...
As I read Eisner's reproduction of a student's response to the red dye creepily saturating a glass of water (p 60), I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Shining because the day prior I received reassurance that I wasn't the only Kubrick nut rattling on semi-coherently of late. Check out this article.
Now, being a proper fanboy, I was already aware that The Shining has been interpreted as a comment on the destruction of the Native American peoples. But since it's not one of my favorite readings of the film(PING Barrett: some interpretations are better than others), I doubt it would have came to mind if I hadn't just recently been reminded of it by this article. But far and away, my favorite thing about this article and the YouTube clip is that they provide more linguistic snd conceptual fodder for my thoughts on Kubricks's films because "the ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text" (Eisner, p 86) is important and film, which includes a temporal element, is so nearly experiential that without those intermediaries the experience can slip away. Also, it's good to know that someone else out there is watching closely enough to have called out the Times article's author on his tuxedo/top hat mix up (see article correction) and to see that Lichanos' comment on the bottom echos the observation I made in my last post about the homicidal apes in 2001 (because that helps me as I seek to balance personal and communal interpretations; PING Barrett again).
All of this serves to reinforce the notion I already held that Kubrick's work serves as what we called in my days as a lit student a Rich Text. Rich texts are works that reward repeated readings/viewings; works that grow and change as we do. The reason I've got Kubrick on the brain right now is that I got his collected works on blu ray for Christmas. I already had them all on DVD since they were among the first DVDs I bought back in high school when I got my first DVD player and some of them I had on VHS before that, so I can testify to their quality in this respect, but I don't really need to since a wealth of literature has grown and continues to grow around them. Which is the only quantitative means of determining a rich text: how many other works exist that draw on or discuss the work in question. The Bible and Shakespeare are among the richest texts extant, but, as Barrett mentions in passing, volumes of work on Magritte were likely consulted and whittled down into the encyclopedia entry that he reprints, so Magritte's work constitutes a rich text as well.
But how does that happen? How does one text become richer than another? Freedman uses two Kubrick films as examples of the type of "popular films that have postmodern forms [and] are edited in a pastiche that focuses the audience on structure and process" (p 34) and that, I suspect, is one means by which a work achieves such status--by leaving ample room for interpretation. In this sense, it is partly the medium and its handling that creates the condition. For Shakespeare, it's not only the breadth of his vocabulary and the quantity of material he left behind, but that his works are plays and lean upon the reader or theater professional or film maker to complete them. The Bible's variety of cultures, time periods, authors and styles make it an extraordinarily malleable reference point for a variety of ideological and creative ends (though, I would argue, it's a bit of a mixed bag in therms of Richness).
I'm misusing Freedman a bit though because in that passage, she's actually suggesting that these films are an examples of a new phenomenon and the two examples I've just given are very old. But I think she's misusing Kubrick, so turnabout is fair play. Freedman asserts that "no audience in a postindustrial democracy can be considered visually naive" and makes use of Kubrick as evidence for that statement but of Kubrick's and the other films listed in those parentheses, I would count none--with the possible exception of Pulp Fiction--as solid examples of popular culture in a postindustrial democracy. The reality is that the most mainstream of films in our postindustrial culture still adhere quite faithfully to the machinations of the invisible narrator. Which is not to say that she does not have a point, just that she should have narrowed her argument: given the proliferation and dominance of visual information in our culture, audiences are only as naive as they would like to be--alternatives are available. What she touches on, though, in suggesting that these are "popular" films, is the other means by which a text becomes rich--popularity--and that popularity may have little to do with any inherent quality in the material, it's just that a bigger audience results in a bigger audience response. And that bigger audience can be as much from luck as anything else. One of my favorite examples of blind popularity enriching a text is the phenomenon of film/album synchronicity, as exemplified by the pairing of the films version of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (there's a whole culture of looking for such pairings on the Internet if you care to search for it). These are wholly unrelated works of art being used by their audiences to build new communal meanings.
What has really happened with visual culture over the past century is not that it has become more sophisticated, as Freedman suggests, but that it has become more popular. Any perceived increase in sophistication is likely a residual effect of that popularity. Freedman goes on to elaborate on the new need to reassess aesthetic study of visual culture because of this proliferation with reference to Theodore Adorno's "lament" at "the collapse of the boundaries between fine art and popular culture" and she later (p 41) brings Adorno back up as a contrast with Dewey's "neopragmatist" approach, at which point she works a bit of her own aesthetic magic by using what I believe is the only first-person singular pronoun in the entire chapter. "I have always been uncomfortable with the apparently elitist perspective of Adorno's aesthetic..." she confesses. This is in spite of the fact that the very first marginal note that I wrote in this chapter was right next to the very first sentence: "active-ist."
From her first sentence, it is clear that Freedman has an agenda; that she is making an argument. Yet, her writing style has the peculiar habit of hiding her voice. In other words, right up until the imaginary fourth wall is broken by her confessed discomfort, Freedman has been hiding the narrator.
Only An Expert
And while we're cruising YouTube, how 'bout this one too:
The Shining Elevator Scene analysis
Ok, ok, I know, I already demonstrated my ability to derail a reading response with a tenuous analogy connecting the readings to a movie I've recently watched, but bear with me because this so totally relates to Eisner, Freedman, and Barrett...
As I read Eisner's reproduction of a student's response to the red dye creepily saturating a glass of water (p 60), I couldn't help but think of this scene from The Shining because the day prior I received reassurance that I wasn't the only Kubrick nut rattling on semi-coherently of late. Check out this article.
Now, being a proper fanboy, I was already aware that The Shining has been interpreted as a comment on the destruction of the Native American peoples. But since it's not one of my favorite readings of the film(PING Barrett: some interpretations are better than others), I doubt it would have came to mind if I hadn't just recently been reminded of it by this article. But far and away, my favorite thing about this article and the YouTube clip is that they provide more linguistic snd conceptual fodder for my thoughts on Kubricks's films because "the ability to transform qualities of experience into speech and text" (Eisner, p 86) is important and film, which includes a temporal element, is so nearly experiential that without those intermediaries the experience can slip away. Also, it's good to know that someone else out there is watching closely enough to have called out the Times article's author on his tuxedo/top hat mix up (see article correction) and to see that Lichanos' comment on the bottom echos the observation I made in my last post about the homicidal apes in 2001 (because that helps me as I seek to balance personal and communal interpretations; PING Barrett again).
All of this serves to reinforce the notion I already held that Kubrick's work serves as what we called in my days as a lit student a Rich Text. Rich texts are works that reward repeated readings/viewings; works that grow and change as we do. The reason I've got Kubrick on the brain right now is that I got his collected works on blu ray for Christmas. I already had them all on DVD since they were among the first DVDs I bought back in high school when I got my first DVD player and some of them I had on VHS before that, so I can testify to their quality in this respect, but I don't really need to since a wealth of literature has grown and continues to grow around them. Which is the only quantitative means of determining a rich text: how many other works exist that draw on or discuss the work in question. The Bible and Shakespeare are among the richest texts extant, but, as Barrett mentions in passing, volumes of work on Magritte were likely consulted and whittled down into the encyclopedia entry that he reprints, so Magritte's work constitutes a rich text as well.
But how does that happen? How does one text become richer than another? Freedman uses two Kubrick films as examples of the type of "popular films that have postmodern forms [and] are edited in a pastiche that focuses the audience on structure and process" (p 34) and that, I suspect, is one means by which a work achieves such status--by leaving ample room for interpretation. In this sense, it is partly the medium and its handling that creates the condition. For Shakespeare, it's not only the breadth of his vocabulary and the quantity of material he left behind, but that his works are plays and lean upon the reader or theater professional or film maker to complete them. The Bible's variety of cultures, time periods, authors and styles make it an extraordinarily malleable reference point for a variety of ideological and creative ends (though, I would argue, it's a bit of a mixed bag in therms of Richness).
I'm misusing Freedman a bit though because in that passage, she's actually suggesting that these films are an examples of a new phenomenon and the two examples I've just given are very old. But I think she's misusing Kubrick, so turnabout is fair play. Freedman asserts that "no audience in a postindustrial democracy can be considered visually naive" and makes use of Kubrick as evidence for that statement but of Kubrick's and the other films listed in those parentheses, I would count none--with the possible exception of Pulp Fiction--as solid examples of popular culture in a postindustrial democracy. The reality is that the most mainstream of films in our postindustrial culture still adhere quite faithfully to the machinations of the invisible narrator. Which is not to say that she does not have a point, just that she should have narrowed her argument: given the proliferation and dominance of visual information in our culture, audiences are only as naive as they would like to be--alternatives are available. What she touches on, though, in suggesting that these are "popular" films, is the other means by which a text becomes rich--popularity--and that popularity may have little to do with any inherent quality in the material, it's just that a bigger audience results in a bigger audience response. And that bigger audience can be as much from luck as anything else. One of my favorite examples of blind popularity enriching a text is the phenomenon of film/album synchronicity, as exemplified by the pairing of the films version of The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (there's a whole culture of looking for such pairings on the Internet if you care to search for it). These are wholly unrelated works of art being used by their audiences to build new communal meanings.
What has really happened with visual culture over the past century is not that it has become more sophisticated, as Freedman suggests, but that it has become more popular. Any perceived increase in sophistication is likely a residual effect of that popularity. Freedman goes on to elaborate on the new need to reassess aesthetic study of visual culture because of this proliferation with reference to Theodore Adorno's "lament" at "the collapse of the boundaries between fine art and popular culture" and she later (p 41) brings Adorno back up as a contrast with Dewey's "neopragmatist" approach, at which point she works a bit of her own aesthetic magic by using what I believe is the only first-person singular pronoun in the entire chapter. "I have always been uncomfortable with the apparently elitist perspective of Adorno's aesthetic..." she confesses. This is in spite of the fact that the very first marginal note that I wrote in this chapter was right next to the very first sentence: "active-ist."
From her first sentence, it is clear that Freedman has an agenda; that she is making an argument. Yet, her writing style has the peculiar habit of hiding her voice. In other words, right up until the imaginary fourth wall is broken by her confessed discomfort, Freedman has been hiding the narrator.
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