Reflect upon this week’s content with regard to this idea:As teachers, we are charged with helping our students to understand and navigate the world around them. Has technology made this easier or more difficult?
One thing that stuck me watchig the videos and reading the articles for this week was a sense of fear or discomfort about the future and a sort of unease about the amount that technology has taken over our lives, espescially the parts that are reminiscent of science fiction horrors. I think this encrouchment of technology is more bothersome to "digital captives" than our "digital native students". They don't know any different! I think many students see technology for its possibilities like Aimee Mullens. In some ways, it is students that help us navigate and understand technology, and its conventions. For some of my students this tech has become so vast and ever present, that they struggle to pull themselves away and be present in the moment. I think the connects to Baudrillard and his ideas that we have lost touch with authenticity because we are so used to simulations, as well as the World of Tomorrow short film. I think it is important to help students understand that it is important to have experiences that are real and not filtered through your phone camera on selfie mode. I know I have tried to consciously not take pictures, or post on social meida when I am doing things so that I have a real memory of the experience and not just a digital one. As the students coming to us become more and more immersed in tech and sociel media, it will be more important as teachers that we help them have real phyical experiences that aren't filtered through a phone. However, for all the negatives of tech, I don't think I could go back after teaching in a 1:1 school. It is amazing that the things that students can learn about are not limited to the walls of our classroom and the funds that I and their parents have available to give them these experiences. They are no substittue for the real thing, as I have told them many times that there are some artworks that I didn't appreciate until I saw them in person. But for the students who have never gotten outside of Clarke Co., Iowa, technology gives them a glimpse that there is a vast world out there and hopfully a desire to go out and explore it someday.
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I would like you to consider how your own identity, background and personal history have shaped your values in art and art making. How does who you are affect what you respond to and what you make?
From my earliest experiences, I remember having a love of art, making, reading, and storytelling. My elementary school in Kansas did not have an art program, but my Kindergarten teacher did have an art center in her room. There were no instructions, just boxes and boxes of fabric and wallpaper scraps, yarn, paper, and a few scissors, crayons, and glue. I don't remember any artworks that I made, but I do remember the feeling of making in that space. When my siblings and I would play, we developed narratives, stories, and characters. It was all based around creativity and imagination, even if it wasn't specifically making art. My father was a photographer and always had a camera with him. He also liked to draw and would make little cartoons in our holiday cards. My first experience of art history was in my elementary TAG program. Our teacher did a unit on Impressionism, and for the first time I saw Mary Cassatt's work. I was so captivated by the richness of the colors and textures and by the people depicted in the paintings. Since then, Impressionism has always been my favorite art to look at. Now I realize, it has informed a lot of my own painting, which focuses on portrait, color, and texture. In high school, my biggest interest was trying to replicate the colors within skin, not just flesh-tone, but the the blues, purples, golds etc. The video on Kary James Marshall, gives me a new perspective on this time in my own work. For the last few years, I have rejected work from that time as being too focused on realism and lacking meaning. In the video where he talks about how to be able to get in the game, you have to be able to play like those at the highest level and the only way to do that is to "know what they know and do what they do." Looking at my work in that context helped me see it in a new light. I can see now how my love of the Impressionists and their technique with paint was coming through in my work. My first brush with contemporary art was in college, when Krit Streed showed us art21 during painting class. It was the first time I had experience artists as people and not as gods like was mentioned in the "Why are there no Great Women Artists?" article. I have found since, that I am maybe more interested in artists than I am in art. I prefer seeing work in articles, or in videos than in a museum or gallery, because I am really interested in the stories of the artists and how they bring their thoughts and investigations into their work, than I am in the work itself. I also enjoy finding art on The Jealous Curator and Colossal. I find that my taste leans toward, collage, layering, color, texture, and portraiture and these elements are the ones that carry through in my own work. How have mechanical techniques affect the notion of craft and skill in art production?
I think the variety of approaches to skill and craft in the videos show that contemporary artists approach craft and skill in many different ways. There are also important distinctions in the role of the audience and how the artists treats them or thinks about their participation in the artwork. Andy Warhol is an interesting character because while he was very focused on the idea of celebrity and branding, his populist approach made his artwork have very different meanings. I believe Warhol's craft was in curation, or in crafting his persona. There is also a level of craft that must occur to create the precision that makes these handmade objects look mechanical even with a screen print. There is a craft to getting that even ink application that looks perfect. I couldn't help but think of Kim Kardashian when watching this segment, as I think in some ways she is the ultimate expression of the ideas that Andy Warhol was playing with in terms of celebrity and glamour. I also see connections in the ways that Warhol's work was considered low-brow in the same was that Kardashian is deemed trashy, and the ways they created a brand around their larger than life persona that they have created. Jeff Koons is an interesting contrast with Andy Warhol because Andy's outlandish personality seemed matched by his art. Koons looks like a very average dad who shops at Banana Republic in contrast to his very flamboyant and over the top artwork. You can definitely see the craft and skill in his segment, and it is clearly something he finds important in his own work. If craft were not important to him, he would just use prints of his digital collages, rather than having assistants make painstaking hand-made reproductions of them. The balloon creatures could just be purchased and displayed, but it is important to Koons to create these highly detailed, hand made reproductions of objects that you can just go out and buy. It definitely made me question why his process is the way it is. I think Koons also touched on something important when he discussed that art and being an artist are very powerful things that can be wielded in positive and negative ways, as explored through the piece "Bear and Policeman". This touches on an important reason why many people are averse or distrustful of contemporary art. There is an authenticity to Warhol and Koons that treats their audience as intellectual equals. This is lacking in a lot of the works from the formalist artists and in the works by Richard Prince. To me, Prince represents taking Koons's idea of artistic power to an immoral level. His work exemplifies to me what people don't like about contemporary art: That it is about the artists' egos, controversy, and bullshit artistry and not the artist's creative vision. While I don't particularly care for Warhol's work, I can see how he used ego and celebrity as a way to bring up others and spread the idea that they too could be artists. Prince's pieces seem to be about his own power. That this visual imagery is not art until someone with his level of power and status touches it and declares it so. Prince's Instagram piece takes away the agency of the artists he has taken from, while Warhol tries to give artistic agency to the everyday person. There is much meaningful commentary to be made about the visual culture of social media, and how smartphones have put creative tools into the hands of everyday people. Prince seems to miss all this and manage to make artwork all about him. I think it this narcissism that people reject, and not his lack of skill or craft in his work. Has formalism become acceptable to the general public? Are the public works of Kapoor and Eichelman popular because of their gimmickry or do people really respond to the abstract forms in ways that would have pleased the likes of Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg?
I think formalism is acceptable to the public as we have seen it for 60+ years. However, I don't think that means that formalism is liked or appreciated by the general public. I think there still exists some of that snobbery that was mentioned in the lecturette in relationship to Clive Bell. Even in the video of Ellsworth Kelly's exhibition, there was a starkness in the gallery and with the paintings that was somewhat uncomfortable, even from the comfort of my own couch behind a screen. In contrast, Kapoor, and Eichelman's works are in the context of everyday places which creates a level of accessibility that the Kelly exhibition lacks. I think Kapoors metallic sculptures and the fabric sculptures of Eichelman do trigger that aesthetic emotion because they respond to natural and organic forms similarly to Frankenthaler's work. In this way, I think most people can see the forms as objectively beautiful. I can imagine friends and family members saying "Whoahhhhh" when viewing these sculptures in person. I think part of this is the way that the sculptures invite interaction, as with the reflections in The Bean, and the way Eichelman's pieces transform a space. Both invite an experience rather than just an object. I had this aesthetic experience with a piece of Gabriel Dawe's work in person. I had seen his pieces in photos, but nothing compared to the way that piece glittered in the light and created optical illusions as you looked through it. It is still the most beautiful piece of art I have ever seen. I do think that Bell and Greenburg would turn up their noses at these works, although for different reasons. I think the sheer amount of selfie taking around these sculptures would immediately turn off Bell. I think Greenburg would appreciate Kapoor's work in the gallery, because it is very minimalist. I think he would consider Eichelman's works to not be self-critical, because as installation sculptures, they require that particular space to work, and therefore don't work as aesthetic pieces on their own because they are dependent on their environment. I think contemporary art is difficult for people because they don't understand that there are different reasons to make art and there are different ways to evaluate art. I didn't understand abstract art until I got to college. Prior to that, I didn't have any tools to look at it and evaluate its quality if there were no rendered objective images. It wasn't until I had seen more art and developed my eye and developed a way to evaluate ideas instead of just realism that I was able to appreciate contemporary art. If I came from a quality high school art program and didn't have those skills, how is the average person going to acquire them. This was one of the reasons that I started to rethink my art foundations course and what I really wanted to be foundational art skills. Our first unit is Artists Use Abstraction and we talk about how to evaluate abstract art. I show them the Art Assignment video and we talk about how our criteria to evaluate art has to move forward from 1870. Then we discuss how Modern art isn't really modern. We also talk about how art has context, and comes about in a certain place in a certain time. I got lots of ideas this week about how I could add to this presentation next semester. I think what was once old was definitely controversial in its time. Most people that I know of have an appreciation for art that ends around the Impressionists and Van Gough. When we talk about the Impressionists in my painting class, I introduce them as sort of old timey punks and rebels. They love the idea that when the Impressionists didn't get into the Salon, they just made their own. I can't imagine how controversial things like Dada were in their time, when they are still creating controversy nearly 100 years later. I imagine it was like rock and roll. I also wonder how accessible some of the work was at the time. Would the average person know of Duchamp or Picasso the way people might know Banksy today? Positive: One of the biggest positives from this class was starting to see the pieces from the other classes fall into place and start to see how everything fits and is connected between our classes from last year and our end goal of our research and paper. My research still feels exciting after this time and it feels very connected to my everyday teaching. The don't feel like separate things, but an extension of the same thing. I am starting to see exciting work come together from my students.
Minus: I need to be more mindful of recording what I am doing in class and the conversations I have with students. I have developed a system to save any of their writing that speaks to my research topic, but going forward I need to get a better system for recording after conferencing with students. The craziness from our master schedule change seems to be under control, but my classes are going SLOOOOOWWWW. We are usually well into Unit 2 by now and we are just starting. I am going to have to make some decisions about what to cut soon to make time for my new voice instruction lessons and be able to finish our content by the semester. I will be facing the decision to cut a unit from my classes to have better and probably more quality work on fewer projects, or trying to get them to pick up the pace so we don't have to cut. I struggled a lot with comprehending the framework and how to use it. I think I will still need some more edits in the spring to make this integrate and flow with my paper. Interesting/Intriguing: My most interesting data so far has been that students don't feel like they have voice, even if they report they are confident in the qualities that add up to their voice. I am also interested in the directions students are choosing to explore and the personal narratives they are choosing to pull from. So far students have explored, their trans identity, the death of a family member, the bystander effect, body image, their adoption story, the frustration of living with crutches, and much more. I think they are starting to find their flow. Questions: As I get into my research, I find I am more interested in what is happening in my classroom and less interested in other teachers. Is it ok to drop the part of my study that was researching other teacher's practice? This is also leaving me on the fence if my study should transition from grounded theory to narrative. This week, students are starting to get rolling on their first projects. I have finally gotten to conferences with students about their project plans and discuss their ideas, which is my favorite part of the process. We have almost finished our first mini lesson on voice about artists' purpose. Each day I have been sharing a few reasons that artists choose to make art. On Monday, we should finish up and then on Tuesday we will start talking about themes.
My advanced student is interested in the artwork and history of tarot cards and is working on creating her own set. They struggle a lot with making meaning in their artwork. I think their artwork is very meaningful, but they don't see it because the decisions are so automatic and they aren't good at breaking down their thinking. When asked why they made a certain decision they often reply "Because it looks cool." I hope to encourage them to be more mindful of their choices. They are doing a lot of research on the specific cards and the meaning behind them and creating their own interpretations of the figures and symbols in them. We discussed one specific card they were working on that had a star on the characters back. The student didn't have a reason for using the star so we looked at a book from the classroom library that has symbols from different sources and cultures. At the end of the conversation, they seemed excited to add more depth to their choices in the pieces. A new student in my Drawing class is showing a lot of progress in her concepts. She struggled a lot in her first project getting off of Google images and thinking about what she wanted to express in her piece. For the project she is currently working on, she is choosing to make art about her adoption and how her parents were in the process of adopting a baby from Japan, but met her and adopted her instead. She chose a shallow image, a Japanese cherry blossom tree, to express this idea, but we discussed cropping and how she could use color to make the composition more powerful and to express the complexity of the emotions of this piece. I was happy to see her go deeper in this project even if her image was cliche. For her next piece, I want to encourage her to dig deeper if she is still stuck on shallow interpretations. My mixed media class has so many powerful voices in it that blow me away with their depth. I wish they would blow me away with their productivity as well. Two students were inspired by the slide from the mini-lesson about artists expressing the intangible and spiritual, and started having deep philosophical conversations that they both mentioned in their planning conference and in their journals. One is now making her piece about how it is easy to see the bystander's obligation to help when someone is physically in trouble, but people don't see it when someone is struggling mentally or with bullying. I struggled with how to begin my Theoretical Framework this week, but once I got going, I think I found some clarity in my direction. It reminded me that the dialogue between myself and the students was a critical reason why I am so drawn to choice based art in the first place. Going forward, I will be thinking more about how TAB supports students being about to critically reflect, self actualize, and develop more awareness of themselves and others, and I will be looking for moments when students are doing this in their journals. |
AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
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