Process Boards and Polariods with a Side of Corn

Greetings Everyone, It has been quite some time, I’m aware, but this is the life of a teacher/student.  Finally I am getting some images up to show something a Project Zero teacher/friend of mine suggested and some double-ended art making that recently occurred. 

About a year a go I wrote about film making as an educational tool and the unit has come around again.  This group of students is very good about staying on task and while they were making their sets and characters, I ran around the class with the Polaroid to take photos of the process.  My reasons are two fold.  1. To be a bit of a goof ball (the charm of being a middle and high school art teacher is that it is in the job description to be a little corny), and 2. To document the students’ progress and post it on their semester process board. 

The idea of the process board is to help the students visually see where they start the term and how it progresses along.  Not only is it a history making device, I believe it helps students make connection between experiences they have, what they learn, and what they accomplish.  Hopefully in the future this will reinforce their ability to call on prior knowledge when approaching current tasks.

Enjoy the corny photos!
Devin

Idea Generator

So I am playing around with this, check it out, try it out.  Hopefully something great or at least entertaining comes from it.  If you are so inclined, comment with some feedback.

Intellectual Review

I have been working, somewhat sluggishly, at developing myself more as an artist these days.  The entire Autumn was dedicated to first figuring out what kind of art I am going to make now that I have returned to the USA and then pushing that concept into a body of work.  In this regard things are going well.  I decided upon taking a class at the local art school to get some expert advice and take advantage of working at a studio instead my flat.  The expert advice came in the form of a discussion with my teacher, Kevin Archer and then I followed it up with a phone conversation with my friend and artist Charlie Kerns, or Beijing Charlie as he goes by  when he was traveling in China where we met.  They made two similar suggestions, one was to write about art that I like so that I can zero in more clearly on what interests me and then make art around those things.  Make what I like my own.  The second was to read art critiques from well known magazines and analyze the writing of the article and then write about my own art in the same way.  I have also made an active effort at making connections between ideas and I saw these two suggestions as a creative thinking tool as well.  So what follows below is a diary entry of my exercise of the first idea and then a short auto-critique of my own work.

Anish Kapoor
I first got a close up view of Anish Kapoor's work in Seoul although at that point I didn't really know much about him.  I just felt the trick of the eye that he was playing with were pretty neat, interesting, entertaining.  The way there was the appearance of a swirling vortex disappearing into the wall or the floor brought a smile to my face and led to many "How did he do that" moments.  In Beijing I got a much closer look.  There was one very large piece installed in the main room of Galeria Continua; that piece - Very Yes!

The entire art was constructed of mist and air.  Nothing more than a column of fog from ceiling to floor; how stunning.  I have the same appreciation for this piece as I do for something of James Turrell's  The art itself plays with the necessity of needing a thing to make art.  In these cases it is like music.  It only exists in a dynamic state.

Here my mind takes a step on its own (the creative thinking bit).  When we look at great art 'in the flesh' we normally stand in front of it for a few moments and more often than not it comes after seeing hundreds of other great works of art.  The moment we spend with it is fleeting.  The work of James Turrell and this of Anish Kapoor's highights this fact in a more direct way.  The memory we have of seeing something iconic  as Starry Night remains only a mental function.  This work of Kapoor's is vision in and of itself.  This is the strong attraction for me.
This is also why I like traditional Chinese and Japanese painting so much.  There is a delicacy that is almost ready to disappear before the eyes.  This is connected to my desire not to make more stuff.  I am very discerning about what I will hang on my wall.  When I make work I prefer to display it online or in a gallery space so that one can experience it for just a short moment.

But back to Kapoor.  I should read an interview to understand better why he makes work (the following quotes are from Kapoor during a BBC interview).

"A good work has the potential to promote a whole series of meanings, none of which are exclusive".

"The job of an artist is to excavate meaning, not to deliver it."

And her is a thought for the reader to put together - Anish Kapoor, James Turell and Yoko Ono - ephemeral and impermanence.

Auto-Critique
This work was created as the final to a series of four that were executed by myself and guided through the process by Kevin Archer, an Atlanta-based artist teaching at SCAD.  The work reflects an extension of imagery that I have been working with in one way or another for the past three years.  However, this series in particular serves the most effective summarization of the multitude of influences that may on the surface seem contradictory but are united by narrative and experience.  Similar to images one finds in Japanese comics or Chinese landscape paintings, the eye of an octopus gazes directly at the viewer and a tentacle hovers along the upper edge of the painting, lazily reaching across the surface with a mild, menacing intent.  Along the left hand side of the painting are three Asian-rendered trees which are a product of my years studying traditional Chinese painting and modeled after the three pines outside my flat.  The work is simultaneously open and closed; there is little depth and in the one space where to painting surface opens the viewer is halted by the large eye of the octopus in the receding space.  Despite this closed space, the large, black semi-sphere acts as the punctum to where the viewer enters the painting.

As I mentioned earlier this work is about narrative, like all of my art over the past year.  I am expressing journeys I have taken, things I have learned and my shyness when asked to expose myself.  I am a cautious person by nature and do not like to talk about myself unless I am sure of it or exploring some new possibility.   From my life as an epistemology teacher I have become uncertain about everything, so talking about myself deeply rarely happens.  But the eye is pleading to be noticed, much like myself, and wants to be noticed in a sincere fashion.  I am aware I am not an abnormality, although my personality type may be less typical, this work speaks to that aspect of everyone who is like myself.  We recognize the shyness and the desire to be noticed, and also the desire not to be arrogant.  The work is small which also requires participation on the viewer to approach and engage with it.  The other works in this series are less like this, they are open and fluctuate in their perspective.  They reveal other aspects of myself, in a more bold or symbolic fashion.  Throughout all these works the viewer is invited to share my experiences but also asked to share theirs as well.

Daniel Pink, Autobiography and a Little More

At school today (I'm a teacher) Daniel Pink came to give the keynote address.  I watched his TED previous to watching him speak and I was a bit turned off because he seemed to spout the same thing a lot of people talk about regarding the right brain and creativity and the need to change schools.  The first issue here - right brain - I find annoying because recent research that I have encountered says that the brain is dynamic, not just hemisphere and I feel this description is just simplifying the complex issue of teaching.  However, his keynote address made up for what I expected to be a mediocre performance.  What I appreciated most is the data he presented us with concerning what the science and technology industries are looking for in education and how the policy makers in education are defining the system.  I will allow you to review what he said, since he said it and the information is readily available and my point here is to expand upon it from my point of view.

If you have been following this blog for the last six months you will see that I am working at creating exercises that can be employed in any situation to allow one to develop new ideas.  This informal research started out to assist my art teaching, however, upon consideration I have determined that it is applicable in many situation and I just have not worked out the details.  In fact, part of the reason for me writing this blog is so that others can try some of these concepts out and see what results can be obtained.  In this respect I am a punk/communist/Buddhist e.g. no one owns a guitar chord or idea, this should be owned by all and try it for yourself to make the best out of it you can.  Some of the exercises I have written about in the past are brainstorming plus, writing from a point of view, motion as a creative thinking skill (this one is weak but kudos to Will Percy for turning me onto an article about a motion classroom that helps students think) and story mapping.

Last night I put my money where my mouth is so to speak by employing one of my techniques (mind you I did not invent these, they came about over the course of my experiences, some synthesized, some dreamed up and some just from conclusions I've drawn).  In an effort to make my own art work stronger I brainstormed two categories to make art about and ultimately would like to combine them.  The first autobiography the second what I fantasize or dream my life to be.  I forced myself to write non-stop for a given time period for each of these categories, even if I did get off topic, and then review the results.  What I found was some thoughts that pop up once and again but I never focus on and some ideas I think about have finally been put to paper.  From there I put titles at random on the top of sketch book pages and while I may have no visual vocabulary at present and am requiring of myself that I make two sketches of each title.  What has piqued me most is that I have a problem to solve and generally speaking it is a fun problem for me to solve.  Will it make my art stronger?  I hope so.  Something nice that did come of it was my affinity for art materials and then a collage from art supply flyers that will be a drawing or painting soon.

An implied charge in Daniel's address today was that it was up to us, the teachers, to figure out how to educate students to think creatively, holistically, recognize patterns and develop systems and things people need.  Hopefully this is what I am doing, at the very least, it is what I am attempting to do.  I am beginning to consider how this work can be made into a tangible and I am looking for people who would like to collaborate with me on this endeavor. My initial thought is to create tablet computer apps (I even have some hand-drawn interfaces for these) or to work with people in a variety of industries and have work sessions where we try out some of these exercises an see what results present themselves   If you yourself are interested or know someone who might also be, by all means get in touch and let's see what can become of it.  I am going to do something bold here, I will put both my phone number and email address. - 2167540879 - china.devin@gmail.com.  This is because I am not sure if you can get the info from my blog, but I hope it shows how sincere I am in this endeavor and how much I trust humans' good nature.  Waiting to hear from you

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.