Quite hard going this week as I had the beginnings of a chest infection
and felt really ill on Monday and Tuesday. This is quite normal this time of
the year as students have also brought all their germs with them and staff have
also been going down with bad colds and related infections. If you can you just
get on with it, but it does mean you are not perhaps as sharp and on the ball
as you could be. I was very aware on Monday that at the end of the afternoon
session I was too tired to really push students to participate in the final
question and answer session and I let them go early.
I’m also very aware that what I’m teaching isn’t what I would teach if
it was up to me. I really feel the students need a basic grounding in art history
before we start looking at issues related to the modules. However the
Individual and Social module has a contextual element to it and my job is to
deliver this. This week I was looking at Formalism and its supporters as well
as issues that formalist thinking had problems with, such as certain sorts of
content. Perhaps I was due to the chest infection but I did find it very
hard going.
Because most students haven’t done a basic art history course such as
the Renaissance to Modernism or Modern Art from 1890 to 1960 or anything
similar, it’s hard for them to contextualise the information. For instance at
one point I was looking at the differences between Suprematist paintings such
as Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground and Ad Reinhart’s Ultimate
Paintings, but between the two time periods there is a huge mass of information
that needs filling in, not least World Wars One and Two, the Russian
Revolution, the Cold War, Greenberg, the rise of abstract painting within the
modernist tradition, etc etc. So although I try to intimate these things and
allude to them, it becomes a mess of bits. I’m sure all some students will
remember will be the point about Suprematist paintings sometimes been shown in
room corners in exactly the place you would have expected an icon to be or that
Reinhart also made cartoons. (I’m not sure I should have made as much as I did
about the influence of cartoon styles and simplifications). Because I was
struggling physically and speaking through a really sore throat, I might have
misjudged the pace or failed to emphasise the right things. I was trying to
make a point about Modernism and the idea of the signature style of an
individual (the individual aspect of the module) and at the same time open up
ideas such as the universality of geometry, Plato’s pure forms etc., trying to
open up the tensions between different approaches, but I’m not sure how well
the issues were being understood. These are only two hour sessions and we have
a break for 20 minutes. Several students have dyslexia or similar learning
difficulties, so after getting a feel for their level of engagement I have
started to embed far more links to online materials in the Powerpoints I’m now
preparing. One good thing about being ill is that I have been restricted in the
later half of the week to bed, so have managed to construct learning materials
for the next couple of sessions.
Tuesday was really hard going as I was on my own with 60 students on the
studio floor and trying to track everyone I spoke to. My feeling was that the
initial enthusiasm is starting to fade and the open plan structure needs to be
changed because as students develop an idea they need walls and spaces suitable
to construct, but instead they are either gravitating to tables or simply
starting to avoid the studio as it isn’t supporting their ideas. It’s old
fashioned but I still feel that boxing the space gives each student an area
that they mentally own and this is where they will be happiest.
Perhaps not best to be writing any posts this week, there is a tendency
to feel the glass is always half empty when I’m ill.
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