Point of View

Over the past week I have been writing an additional supplement for my grade eleven students about how to analyze art.  The course they are studying requires that they pay the most attention to the study of art, which I find quite fascinating  especially for a high school student.  They will be assessed most heavily on their research and exploration.  While they are required to make art the importance is on what they think about and what I can find in their sketch books.  In my graduate studies I happened upon a course which discusses the fundamentals of analyzing a work or art.  In brief there are two main types of analyzing, formal and stylistic.  formal deals with how a work or looks and stylistic is about interpreting its meaning.  for the longest time I felt that what critics were interpreting in art, while entertaining to read was based so much on just one's subjective opinion.  Ultimately I have trouble with subjectivity, at least as it being the sole basis of evaluating a work of art.  There is such a thing as good and bad art, but this good and bad is difficult to pinpoint and left me the weaker of the arguments.  Another thing I find quite annoying in art is that shock and/or entertainment value seems to be how people immediately recognize a work of art as good or bad.  I myself am guilty of this but I have gotten better at enjoying the immediate pleasure derived from an eye catching work of art but also forcing myself to look deeper to see if the piece is really of value.

Let me tie this together now.  Through my re-review of stylistic analysis I was able to put together two practices I have encountered over my work as an artist and art teacher.  What we have already been talking about, stylistic analysis and what a colleague of mine dubbed 'The Idea Generator'.  Let us talk stylistic analysis first.  I am actually going to write about more specifically contextual analysis.  The idea that one adopts a certain standpoint when interpreting a work of art.  The common contexts I have come across are Marxism and Feminism.

Let's start with Marxism.looking at the work of art from the standpoint of artist as worker and patron as gentry.  I told my students to ask questions like 'What does this work say about the life of the artist versus the select public that enjoy it?'  However, I feel this does not go far enough and I have individually substituted the artist as creating a product and the public as consuming that product.  So when we look at a work of art, we are the consumers, how does it influence us when we consume it?  I am quite pleased that art is now more in the public realm than before and we can even ask 'How does the public consume the art?'  How does it influence our clothing, our food and our computer games.  I'm not a gamer but I am aware that a lot of popular music is now used for the soundtracks.  So next time you are at the gallery ask yourself "When will this show up in my breakfast?'  Have a look at Takahashi Murakami's work with LV to get the idea.  Feminism works in a similar fashion only we are reading the art from a woman's point of view.  Ask yourself "What story does this work tell?" "How do women understand this?" "What is the role of the artist in relation to their use?"  Beijing based artist Megumi Shimizu has a performance piece where she reverses Yves Klein's blue model work with red and a boy, and when I saw it that boy must have just been eighteen.  The reason I am writing about this as a creative thinking skill will become apparent soon.  We are putting ourselves in a context or a perspective and applying thinking skills from those perspectives to imagine meaning.

The Idea Generator - I read that Bob Dylan book a few years back.  In it he discussed placing himself in a character's position and then writing from that position.  I've seen art teacher Richard Todd do this and he even made a graph for it.  Take a concept and brainstorm what that concept means from and old/young position, a old/new position, mother/father, student/teacher, commercial esoteric, analogue/digital, baby boom/generation y.  Really two terms that are unlike in some way.  The IBO does this when they ask students to think from different areas of interaction.

So try this for me.  Seize on a thought you find interesting.  The run it through different contexts to see what new comes about.  Add interpretation and also new meaning.  See where the contexts take you.  If you are an artist, make art about it, if you are a thinker build a syllogism around it. See what becomes.

Not Sure Yet

So this entry is going to be a thinking entry, at present I do not exactly know what I am going to write about, however, it will be related to my most recent creative thinking work.  I set the task for myself to first investigate any apps at apple's App Store that had to do with creativity  and when that was only so-so I looked up thinking, less that so-so  The two quality apps I found were WordMpress and Ulysses.  The reason I liked Word Press is because it gives one a variety of tones, styles and whatnot to create posters and they are generally designed to fit together so that no matter what you do it will look like good design.  This being said after you make neat posters it really doesn't do much more and if you are slick enough with Photoshop one could  do it on one's own.  Ulysses intrigued me more because because it offered writers a wide variety of tools that I suspect are going on in writers heads' as they write.  One can write and you will get different prompts for word choices, definitions and research on the spot.  My impression that it allows one to multi-task without leaving one window.  Pretty slick, but I don't write and I probably will not write.  Thinking did not present much in lines of aids for thinking but the process lead to me contemplating programs like Mind Node and then another I saw later in John Medea's talk on TED where a company structure could be mapped out and one could view not only the connections between departments but also keep track of the kinds of correspondence (in electronic form) that a member of a company has with that person.

Sine this did not push my thoughts too far forward I went onto another task I set for myself and was to watch at least two talks on TED about creativity and this time keep notes hoping to find confirmation of my existing ideas, or realize new things that others are doing, thinking about or reveal.  I watched for like the fifth time Sir Ken Robinson's lecture about schools and creativity, John Madea's discussion of design, technology, art and leadership and finally Issac Mizrahi's discussion on his own creativity.  Several things came to my mind but I am only going to discuss one right here.  As I said before this is a thinking entry so what follows is unstructured but hopefully helps me reveal an idea to myself.

Movement as a creative thinking process.
The thought process started from here.  Ken Robinson discusses in a joking fashion that university professors use their bodies as transports for their heads and that these people live almost entirely in their head.  My mind started churning and I will copy verbatim what I wrote in my notebook:  Professor - head - body is only a transport   Then can we say that action should be encouraged as thinking?  If so how can we use action as a creative thinking tool?

I am going to reach back into my history and memories and recall something I heard said in a cabin at a YMCA camp.  One of the lead male councilors was discussing his love of sport and they way he described it was like this:  When a person moves, completes an action like a dunk it is perfect artistry, the manipulation of the muscles to create in time something that is both useful and beautiful   In regards to professional sport even the usefulness of it is inconsequential.  While we make take very seriously how our favorite baseball, basketball or football team does, this has little effect on matters of the world.  So in essence that dunk is art for art's sake.  It's the creation of something beautiful simply for the purpose of performing the act.

So how do we turn movement into a tool for thinking.  Personally, I have only weak ideas.  One of my drawing teachers had the class exercise before beginning a studio drawing.  Simple Qi Gong which I am not embarrassed to say worked exceptionally well.  At times I have had my own students get up and move around to get the blood flowing, hopefully to the correct part of the brain that gets them excited about work.  I've often told them to pat their heads and rub their bellies because it feels good and moves the blood around and will get them energized for drawing, painting or even just thinking.  Most the time I get rolled eyes or laughter but the occasional student will oblige.  I've never collected research on how this works.  Another instance comes from my training in Wing Chun.  I will by no means claim to be an expert in this field, but from what I have learned we are studying movement and sensitivity, as force comes in, roll away from it and into its source, as it retreats follow it towards its source, attack the center of your opponent.  I also tell my students this, sit square to your work, focus on it, always go straight for its center.  But most of what I have just written is about approach to working not thinking.

So how? I am hoping my friends who teach drama or my friends who dance can enlighten me.  My ideas are that when given a way to think and then asking the body to speak that way, the individual will be revealed new connections, ideas and can translate that to completing a thought or solving a problem or making art.  I am anxious to see what becomes.

P.s. As I was searching for the right photo for this entry the figurative lightbulb went off over my head.  I chose a photo of someone who may be myself and friend making graffiti in Beijing.  I like this photo (which maybe someone who is my girlfriend took) because when drawing on the wall, especially bit letters, movement is quite important and it is in movement that form revelas itself, not all my graffiti is planned out, I just center myself and release.  Ah here is a key.  More exploration ahead.  And while on the subject also when playing the trombone, moving the arm is an art that effects the art of sound and Yoko Ono's word piece "When one is playing the violin, which is incidental, the sound or the movement of the arm"