Postmodernism

They are changing the principles! And it is for the better?

I feel that if not in the last post, then definitely in this one, you may be thinking that I'm stuck in the past.  This is not so.

It is absolutely necessary for them to updated, so that they are relevant to the artwork being made today, which happens to be very different from the work of 'x amount of hundred years ago' when they first felt it necessary to talk about artwork...  because thats what the elements and principles are- a vocabulary for people to talk about art.  It is important to realize that back then, the art was a scene or portrait that relied on content, whereas modernism and postmodern, as these new principles of design are coined after, artwork becomes more conceptual.

But, I think that as important as it is to update words like line, shape, color and value with ones like hybridity, gazing, text and image interaction, recontextualization, juxtaposition and appropriation... its important to remember that the first set has informed us as artists and art critics, and is an important scaffold to talk about the latter.  There are some instances where line will still be very important to a painting or drawing (in fact, these days it might be the only thing in the page) so don't forget the original principles we all know (and love?).

Gaming Theory

In class, we did a group activity where each group had to take a turn on this online-game for developing lessons, called Grow-A-Game...

found at:  http://www.tiltfactor.org/growagame/play.html

My group spun:
Game Verb: Haunting
Value: Altruism
Game to Modify: Life
Social Issue: Singing

Everything pretty much made sense together... except singing?? Is singing really a social issue?
The challenge was to brainstorm this lesson, and I think we came up with something along the lines of altruistic, or rather un-altruistic, decisions being haunting, and if you made correct decisions, you got to move forward on the board game, oh, and you had to sing your decisions....??

So, then we broke down into groups and have to come up with a game for building lesson plans.  My idea was similar to drawing names from a hat: the teacher had four bags, labeled each with one category: Materials (which would depend on your art room), Visual Culture, Socio-Political Concerns, and Meaning Making.  There would be little pieces of paper with all the ideas and options you can possibly come up with for each category in each bag, and then you simply draw one paper from each bag at random.  ...

I think what is most important when developing a lesson planning strategy is that any rules can be broken and modified at any point- that it is flexible. ..singing? really?

Theme Based Lesson Planning

The future of art education is pushing theme based lesson planning.  I find this teaching style invigorating, but so different from what I learned through school.  From what I can remember, the only experience I have that comes kind of close to this was in my high school Advanced Placement in Art class, where I had to develop work that relied on a theme (I chose self-portraits).  Other that this, I feel that the project that I did were relatively individual in relation to each other.  We might have done projects that used skills that developed on one another, like in my metals & jewelry class, or several kinds of still-lifes in succession, but that is hardly similar to the themes that we are expected to develop in college.

Theme based lesson planning, as I understand it, is a method of teaching art that directs learning beyond the art skill set.  For example, the theme might be big ideas like memory, community, heritage, or agriculture, and the concept would narrow down from there.  A notion more specific in heritage might be an exploration into your family tree where research is involved.  Then, the student might create a work that speaks to the immigration of their ancestors to America, and how it affects them now.  Or, maybe the project is about a tradition that the family has, or a special meal that they cook, and the student researches the origins of the tradition or recipe, and creates a work that communicates their connection to the tradition.  The point is that under the Big Idea or Theme, there are many routes that lessons can take, and the skills that students learn in art class are simply tools for them to create responses and explore.  

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with themes- in fact, I once read a book where the character was in an art class and the teacher had the class draw papers from a hat that said a theme that the student was expected to explore that year, and I remember thinking, 'what a cool idea! I wish that happened in my art class.'  But does that mean my art education, where we did breadth projects that developed our rendering skills and exposed us to new material, is less elite? I think there is still value in drawing from observation, and studying your face in the mirror as you try to figure out what the heck you messed up, and being told that you are going to use _( insert new material)_ today.   I think I am a better artist today because of my experience in the art room, and I wonder how future artists will work differently then the ones today do.

Surrealism

So about Surrealism...
Dali is one of my favorite artists, from his paintings, Hallucinogenic Toreador and Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, to his films, "Destino" the short film collaboration with Disney (available to watch on youtube) and the short "Un Chien Andalou" (available on Netflix).  The amount of posters I have of his works is rather alarming. 


I'm a sucker for Surrealism, but that is not necessarily the case for all students in grade school.  How do you explain their methods of reason to a child? One method would be through play.  Everyone loves to play a game, and as it happens, the Surrealists created such games for themselves as exercises in automatic writing: The Exquisite Corpse,  Question and Answer, Conditionals, etc.  These are all played collaboratively, with two/ three or more people.  Everyone is assigned one part or element of the game and the words comes together to form witty and clever statements.  


I actually played The Exquisite Corpse in a college English class, a game where each person comes up with one part of the sentence structure:


      article determinator/ adjective/ noun/ verb/ article determinator/ adjective/ noun.
ie:  The / exquisite/ corpse/ will/ drink/ the/ red/ wine.


So in class, we counted off and the professor assigned us the matching element so that the class could write several lines in order.  Here are three lines of what we came up with:

An electric Billy reads under several blue boxing gloves.
The beautiful pen bounces his horrendous frog sideways.
Two hundred ugly desks run below her pink pimple.