End of year thoughts

In the sixth-century the following was written in the Visnudharmottara.

A king asks a sage about the meaning of art:

"Oh Lord of men," replied the sage,

"he who does not know properly the

rules of painting cannot discern the

characteristics of images."

"Then please narrate the rules

of painting," replies the King.

"Without a knowledge of the art

of dancing," says the sage, "the

rules of painting are very difficult

to understand."

"Then please speak to me about the

art of dancing … "

"The practice of dancing cannot be

understood by one who is not

acquainted with music. Indeed

without music, dancing cannot exist

at all."

"Tell me then first about music … "

"Without singing, music cannot be

understood," replied the sage. "He

who knows the rules of singing

knows everything properly."

As the sage continues you come to realise all is connected and that the arts feed off each other. They of course also feed off our whole life experience. A sense of balance comes from our peculiar ability to walk on two legs, our sense of rhythm comes from the constant heartbeat that lies beneath our chest, our feeling for the dark and light from our experience of the turning of the Earth away from and towards the Sun every 24 hours. A Guardian review this week of ‘The body in Indian Art’ reminded me of visiting the ‘In the Image of Man’ exhibition years ago at the Hayward Gallery. Indian art is about totalities, it doesn’t separate the body from the mind, doesn’t have a legacy of Christian bodily evil. Perhaps this is where our obsession with categorising things comes from. Sex and spiritual transcendence are close companions in the sensuality of Indian religious art, the body maintaining its centrality to experience. If the body is neglected or put at the command of a separate ‘mind’ this I believe only leads to repression and eventually some type of madness.

My recent venture back into working full-time on the fine art programme has convinced me that we have been getting things wrong. (See last post) I am reminded again of the time I spent with an Indian sculptor, he taught me much in the period he was over here, perhaps more than I knew at the time. In particular he told me that when he was working with his ‘master’ he was introduced to a method of understanding where the seat of the sculptural experience lay. He was first of all blindfolded, then introduced to a large stone carving by feeling it. He had to feel the forms of the sculpture and speak as he traced its forms with his fingers and every time he felt a significant change in the sculpture’s dynamics he had to explain this to the master. Sometimes the master would confirm his findings and at other times the master would retort that although there was a change it was not significant. He did this several times and several different sculptures were used, each time the master would also recite particular passages from scripture, intone lines of poetry or hum a particular rhythm that would be used to guide the young artist towards the wider consequences and meanings related to the sculpture that was being experienced. Gradually the young sculptor built up in his mind an understanding of the ‘touch’ of great sculpture. He grasped what it was for one form to meet another, how the rhythm of the hand-feel corresponded to the ‘life’ of the sculpture and how strong and weak joints feel. At the time I was very impressed, and more so now that I am older and look back upon the failure of atomised educational theory.

When I go back to work next year I will be presenting two new modules to the first year students and then moving immediately into assessment preparation for 2^nd and 3^rd years. I have tried to adjust my presentations to account for something more than what the modules aspire to, but I wont be available very often to personally explain or give advice as to what I meant because of my administrative duties. Perhaps what I resent most of all is the time taken away from students by the assessment process. What my old friend taught me was how important the ‘master’ / ‘student’ relationship is. Sometimes we forget how experienced we are, I have in my time looked at thousands of art works from many different cultures and spend many hours contemplating their meaning and how they were made. On top of this I have years of my own practice behind me and this is communicated at its best in a ‘one to one’ situation, where I can show what something can be, where I can demonstrate by miming or humming a tune or linking in a particular piece of music or poetry or simply pointing out something about life and how art can be made to reflect it. Life experience is something we don’t value as much as other cultures, as I was told when I went into phased retirement and questioned why my salary was so low, “We don’t value experience”. A strange phrase but one that is a product of a managerial culture, a culture whereby the people who make the decisions don’t have to be able to practice what is at the core of what is being taught. Once computers became readily available what they seemed to be used for more and more was the collecting of statistical information, each human contact reduced to number-crunched data and here perhaps lays the problem. In order to make decisions people need information but the only information that appears to count is quantitative. Qualitative information is either collected as sound-bites or simply ignored, but only in those ‘one to one’ moments of human contact will authentic communication take place and those moments are becoming few and far between. 

Fine Art Year 1 Week 7

I mentioned last week that I would be doing more workshop based contextual studies sessions and these have started. Monday's session was about unpicking a given text. I set out 4 tables, each one with 5 chairs and on each table placed  5 copies of one of the texts that students can chose to give a PowerPoint presentation on. Each group of 5 had to decide who was going to read the text and annotate it, one student had to conduct a very close reading and underline and annotate one particular section of text, another had to skim read and try to sum up the text by skipping through it and highlighting what seemed to stand out. Three were sent off to the library to make initial searches about the text, one to research the time period and general history (all the texts were from the 1950s or 60s), one to research art of the time and one to research responses to the text. The three library researchers had to return within an hour to report back to the two readers. The whole group then had to form some sort of conclusion as to what each text meant. This was to force them to get to know at least one text and it demonstrated 5 different activities that could go towards the development of their individual PowerPoint presentations. At the end of the session, I asked them to compile all the information and working collaboratively put a presentation together for me next week. This will give each group a chance to practice their delivery skills and should highlight flaws in presentations, flaws which can be avoided when they present the PowerPoints for real.
All the students were given a basic PowerPoint structure to work to. This is it.

The texts were taken from:Harold Rosenberg: Action PaintersClement Greenberg: Modernist PaintersLucy Lippard: The Dematerialization of the Art ObjectSusan Sontag: Against Interpretation

Tuesday was again catching up with students that hadn't been seen and I was working my way round both studios seeing students one to one and asking similar questions to last week. There is some very interesting work being done and students seem fired up by the idea of entering strands, hopefully they wont be disappointed when they are allowed to specialise. Some are clearly painters/sculptors etc but quite a few have too little previous experience to decide and therefore can tend to opt for painting as it is the one area they have already experienced. We shall see.

Fine Art Year 1 week 3

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. 

Fine Art Year 1 week 2 Contextual studies starts

I’m teaching contextual studies on Mondays in a separate room with facilities for projection and tables set out so that students can write and take notes and I am in the first year fine art studios on Tuesdays.

The students would have had an introduction to the ‘Individual and Social’ brief on the previous Thursday and will have made a start thinking about how this new focus can be added to the work done under the umbrella of the ‘Transformations’ brief. (The two briefs can be merged together, but we pick out the learning outcomes separately at assessment).

I take two groups of 20 on Monday, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, on Tuesday I’m on my own with 60 in the studio all day.

As Monday was the first contextual studies session I used it as a rambling introduction to what this aspect of the course is about and how I thought as students they could use history and theory.

The talk opens with a series of questions as to how and why we might think about art practices.

By working through several definitions I was able to hopefully engage students with questions as to how they thought about their position as artists now. The issue being that we are taking them seriously as artists and that we are there to help them find meaning in their own lives as young artists. 

The talk opens with a series of questions as to how and why we might think about art practices.

By working through several definitions I was able to engage students with questions as to how they thought about their position now.

 

The idea that they were agents who worked to help the rest of humankind ‘see’ what’s out there seemed to chime with several students, but some found it a bit disturbing that certain definitions of art might point to the fact art was useless. (I introduced Kant's term 'disinterested interest' in relation to aesthetic judgement.)

 As I introduced a few other approaches, most students warmed to the idea of art being something whereby perhaps a baton was passed on from one generation to another. Each new discovery or approach being taken up by the next generation and developed further. However it was also good to see a couple of students from different ethnic backgrounds in the audience and I had the impression that they were pleased to see that non-western contexts would be examined.

The concept of timelines and how these can help sort out information and yet also distort it was then introduced. The fact that art practices, or things that we can think of as being similar go back 30,000 years or more is a powerful one and I felt students were energized to feel that they were part of a long, noble tradition of some humans looking at the world and helping others to think about it.

We then looked at the classic Alfred Barr diagram and discussed what reasons he might have had as director of MOMA to put a particular slant on the relative importance of certain art and artists. 

An introduction as to why some people/s are therefore excluded from art history was now approached and I had quite a few nodding heads from female students.

It's always someone's point of view, history being written of, by and for the survivors.

Different types of writings that students might come across were introduced and I played around with how these differing approaches might help open out different agendas and how the rise of Facebook, Twitter and other new forms of text communication was starting to reshape what is being written about art and artists.

The next aspect to open out to the students was the wide range of practices available to artists now.

On questioning most students were not aware of how the traditional practices of drawing, painting and sculpture had now expanded to embrace wide ranges of new approaches and technologies. This is obviously useful for me to know as I will have to make sure I keep feeding in these other approaches.

The issue was then raised that each art practice would need to have a medium within which to carry its messages/content and the specific nature of these mediums would influence what could or could not be communicated.

Finally I threw the questions below at the students and suggested that if they were to become engaged with this aspect of the course at the end of the day it was about each individual finding their own answers to these issues and that they would all be going on separate journeys.

I felt at the end of each of the two sessions that the students seemed genuinely excited about this aspect of the module, the good thing for me being that I was also going to be with the same students on Tuesday in the studio, hopefully they are therefore more prepared to see me as an artist struggling like themselves to make sense of my practice and not some teacher asking them to divorce theory from practice.

One final observation. I had agreed to put copies of my lectures up on Estudio after delivery of the session, but as I had over half the students taking part in one contextual session having to cope with dyslexia and similar issues, have agreed with them that my lectures will be posted up well before sessions.  It just means no last minute tweaking, which I am prone to do. I shall have to just add new stuff into the narrative on the day. My feeling is that if the slides are just bare bones, students will continue to come to sessions to get the meat and will not simply access things on line and stay in bed. 

Tuesday was one to one in the studio and mainly covered the issues surrounding interest, point of view, and other subject matter related to the ‘Individual and Social’ brief.

Students work had moved on considerably from last week, the introduction of much more meaningful content had been useful. Some students were struggling to reconcile the idea of practical ‘transformations’ with research into different content but it seemed as if most of them were more engaged because they could see that the activity was meaningful. This is an interesting issue. Sometimes we push things because they aid understanding (this is another problem with learning outcomes) for instance starting with the transformations brief is designed to help students let go of earlier ideas and ways of working and to introduce the concept of practice being driven by a process of working. However the ‘meaning’ isn’t deep enough for some students; meaning only starts when they connect directly with their own lives and experiences. Therefore if we had pushed on much further with the transformation brief on its own, students will have started to lose interest because although the brief helps develop an understanding it doesn’t tap into the student feeling tone and can therefore be read as simply a device to stop them liking or going back to their earlier work. These complexities are things to embrace as pedagogic drivers, because if we get the balance right students will be constantly moving forward and trying new things, but at the same time will feel that everything is meaningful. Get it wrong and they will stop coming in and will build up resentfulness.

Most of the day was therefore spent trying to uncover what drove individual students to want to make art and what their passions were. One thing I’m sure of is that if they can channel their obsessions into their practice this can make for a very powerful driver for the student and usually some interesting art comes into being because it comes from genuine passion and not from trying to make art. 

We have also introduced a system to ensure that we record the name of everyone we talk to and each time we do so. This will help the ‘lost student’ problem; without something of this sort in place staff naturally tend to speak to some students more than others and if that starts happening it can breed resentment amongst those students who feel nobody is interested to them because they haven't been spoken to. Typically what can happen is some students are very open and come up to members of staff all the time and pull them into conversations, however other students tend to hide away slightly and make it harder for staff to single them out, some even watching staff movement through the studio and when it looks as if they might get spoken to, they disappear for a while hoping the 'danger' has passed. This is of course about personalities and confidence, but unless you have a checking system in place, those who lack confidence can lose even more of it. The trick of course is to not offend those wanting constant attention, so you have to let everyone know what's happening and why.