Artistic Thinking - Week 14

READ & REACT

Hetland Chapters 8, 11

Chapter 8

“In visual arts classes, students are taught to go beyond technical skill to convey a personal intention in the work.  Learning to Express includes making works that exemplify properties that are not literally present, such as moods, sounds, and atmosphere.  Learning to Express also means making works that convey properties such as emotions, a sense of movement, or personal meaning.”  It is important students “go beyond representation to create something with evocative meaning.”

            One teacher has students creating a portrait.  He encourages to use technique to create drama, or show the relationship between two people.  He has them create sketches, participate in critiques, look at each other’s work, and create final pieces.  “He strives to teach students to find personal relationships in their art and never teaches technique alone.”  Another teacher focuses on teaching her students how to see their work outside of themselves as something that conveys something to a viewer. 

Chapter 11

This chapter discusses the importance of play in order to allow students to explore, take risks, and be creative.  Play stresses the importance of the process, not the end product.  One instructor teaches her students several different principles of play (specifically in regards to clay sculpture):

-Experiment with expression through texture

-Experiment with tools

-Discover new techniques through play

-Focus on the process

She found that “When students are playing, they are more able to take suggestions and criticisms than when they are working on a piece that must be finished in final form.”

Another teacher also suggested that students experiment with a range of different forms and materials, even invent new tools.  They encouraged students to take advantage of accidents and let things happen.

Olivia Gude: Postmodern Principles

Olivia Gude presents elements and principles of design as the essence of artmaking.  She starts by discussing three criteria for curriculum: Curriculum based on generative themes, studio art projects based on diverse practices, and art as investigation.  With these criteria in mind, Gude identifies 8 important postmodern artmaking practices, or principles that are the hybrids of the visual and the conceptual.  

Appropriation – For students, recycling imagery feels comfortable and commonplace.  They have grown up in an environment filled with cheap, disposable images that easily can become material for one’s own creative expression

Juxtaposition – “Useful I helping students discuss the familiar shocks of contemporary life in which images and objects from various realms and sensibilities come together as intentional clashes or random happenings.”

Recontextualization – “Often, positioning a familiar image in relationship to pictures, symbols, or texts with which it is not usually associated generates meaning in an artwork.”

Layering – “Multiple layers of varying transparency will be a readily available strategy to students because it is a common feature of most digital imaging programs such as Adobe Photoshop.”

Interaction of Text & Image – “Students who make and value art in the 21^st century must learn not to demand a literal match of verbal and visual signifiers, but rather to explore disjuncture between these modes as a source of meaning and pleasure.”

Hybridity – “Many contemporary artists incorporate various media into their pieces, using whatever is required to fully investigate the subject… hybridity also describes cultural blending.”

Gazing – “By shifting the context within which a familiar advertising image is seen, students spontaneously question who creates and controls imagery and how this imagery affects our understandings of reality – and important activity of visual culture art education.” 

Representing – “Describes the strategy of locating one’s artistic voice within one’s own personal history and culture of origin.”

Principles of Possibility

            Gude explains that the “essential contribution that art educators can make to our students and to our communities is to teach skills and concepts while creating opportunities to investigate and represent one’s own experiences—generating personal and shared meaning.  Quality arts curriculum is thus rooted in belief in the transformative power of art and critical inquiry.” 

            Gude states that, “By its nature art is an open concept that is always evolving and changing.”  Art inside the classroom is no different.  “Today’s students, over-constricted by an education system that often focuses on knowing the one right answer, need guidance in reclaiming their capacities for conceptual, imaginative play.” 

            Gude defines art as a way of forming one’s self.  “Artmaking can be an important opportunity for students to further their emotional and intellectual development, to help formulate a sense of who they are and who they might become… Authentic insight into self is more likely promoted through indirect means, asking students to reflect and recall experiences through making art. 

           

Great art often engages the most significant issues of the community, calling on each of us to bring our deepest understanding and empathy to our shared social experience.

                                    -Tolstoy

            “Artistic thinking is not separate from daily life, but rather can inform and enrich every aspect of one’s life.” Due to the vast amount of images our students are faced with on a daily basis, Gude claims, “All students of the 21^st century need to know how to construct, select, edit, and present visual images.” 

            I love the thought that Gude closes the article with: “If it is indeed true that our notions of the real and the possible are shaped in cultural discourses, art teachers have the potential to change the world.”

Reflect and Write – Part I

Statement: “Consider whether ALL your curriculum projects engage students in making meaning through meaningful making.”

-       What are the classroom implications for this statement?  Describe how this might relate to your classroom experiences or how you predict this affecting classrooms of the future.

If all the projects within my curriculum are engaging students in making meaning through meaningful making, then hopefully I will be teaching students not only to think critically, but also to create critically.  Students would understand how to express meaning in their work.  This would allow them to view art more critically in response.

-       Do you agree or disagree with her statement or stance?  Provide evidence to support or illustrate your thinking through examples.

I agree with her statement.  This idea of making meaning through meaningful making was implemented in my high school art class.  While it frustrated me at first, it ended up being very beneficial.  Originally, I was bothered by the fact that every piece had to have meaning.  Sometimes I just wanted to draw a building just for the sake of rendering a building realistically.  As time went on, I got a little more used to the idea.  Then in college I realized how valuable that way of thinking and creating is.  Thinking critically and creating with meaning is the way the world works.  If one cannot do this, they are missing out on understanding a large part of the world around us, thus proving this knowledge to be invaluable. 

Reflect and Write – Part II

Value 1: “Constructing self: Over symbolizing an essentialist conception of self.”

All contemporary psychological and psychoanalytic theories agree that much of who we are as individuals is created by our personal experiences and by our cultural contexts.

Invent projects in which students explore the discourses that have shaped them.

Activity – Create Self portrait projects that create awareness of how the self is formed in family and social discourses.

-       What are the classroom implications for this value? 

If I were to predict what my classroom will be like in the future, I would say implementing this value of self construction and investigating the conception of self would partner well with the notion of making meaning through meaningful art making.  Students would be using art to discuss and investigate ideas of identity, self-construction, self-conception, etc.  I think it would be valuable for students to reflect and explore the different discourses that have shaped them, specifically in family and social discourses.  No matter what the age, these ideas would be challenging for students.  Some students have never had to think about ideas and reasons behind their identity.  Ultimately, I think the projects created from this value would be rich and filled with meaning through meaning making!

Value 2: “Conceptual Engagement over making Facsimiles.”

Questions –

What strategies did the artist use to make meaning?

Can these strategies be adapted for meaningful use by students?

(Students must have unrestricted choice of materials)

Activity – Materials Based Self Portrait

Imagine a pose and non-traditional art materials for a self-portrait sculpture.  Make a collage.

-       Do you agree or disagree with including this value in your curriculum?  Is it important or not?  Provide evidence to support or illustrate your thinking through examples.

I think it is important for students to become familiar with artwork and artists that have come before them.  I think at fundamental introductory levels it might be beneficial for students to copy successful artists work.  Copying may help them understand, through hands-on work, the principles of design, or how to create meaning in art, etc.  It is similar to how when a student is learning to play guitar, they play their favorite musicians songs because it is something they have heard, like, and is already successful.  Down the road, once the student has learned guitar, they can make up their own parts. 

In visual art, after this step of copying it is important the student pushes the idea further, and creates something original, taking bits and pieces of what they learned from copying. 

-       What are the classroom implications for this value?  If adopted, what would this value like “in action” in your classroom or how do you predict this affecting classrooms of the future?

Like I said above, if I were to implement this idea of copying in my classroom, I would have the copying be just the beginning of a project, to get students hands moving and understanding the material, etc.  After that, for the final project of the unit I would have them create a piece using what they learned from copying as a diving board.  It is important for students to make connections and learn from other artists, but they also must be creating their own individual work.