Ten minute portraits: An ice breaker

Police Identikit portrait

One ice breaker that I used to use when working with first year degree students, especially when the 'A' level curriculum was focused on portraiture, was to use the idea of alternative interests. We might get as many as 10 students all wanting to focus on portraiture because of their previous experience during 'A' level and we were having to accept the fact that fewer and fewer students would have done a foundation course, so we had to think about how to acknowledge the difference and yet still get the students to move their thinking on. This ice breaker helped because it took the idea away from making art and it simply asked students to think about how other people might 'see' the world. Once the role had been decided, they then had to think about how the interests of that role might shape or change an approach to portraiture. For instance a police officer might rely on an identikit process to develop a portrait, whilst an archeologist might use specialist visualisation techniques used by their profession. E.g. types of approaches to drawing as detailed in this post. 

This is how this very brief activity was set out:

Ten minute portraits:

Taking on the role of a professional who is not an artist you need to gather as much information as possible to build your portrait.

 

Example: You are a clothes buyer: you therefore need to get as many facts from your subject as possible in relation to this in 5 minutes. Names of clothes brands that the person wears, do they buy second hand clothes, what look do they aspire to, sizes of body/shoe etc. number of times they buy clothes a year , what clothes budget they have, how long do they wear clothes for, till they fall apart or till they are out of fashion, what do they look for in other people in relation to clothes they wear, do they differentiate between work clothes and play clothes, do they think their clothes express their personality and how…etc.

 

Examples of other roles you might take:

 

Police officer/detective

 

Medical professional/dentist/physiologist/

 

RSPCA officer/animal rights activist

 

Alien tracker/conspiracy theorist

 

Survivalist/eco warrior

 

Cook/Great British Bake-off fanatic

 

Gardener/florist

Janet Haigh

 

Religious missionary/local vicar

 

Architect/interior designer

 

Book seller/author in search of a character

 

or

Travel agent, potential landlord, sports fan, film agent/screen test advisor, psychologist, obsessive collector, clubber, real ale nerd, geographer, town planner, film buff, pest control expert, car nerd, body builder/gym fanatic, insurance claim researcher, tarot card reader/predictor of destinies by reading tealeaves, astrologer, heating expert, make-up professional, hair dresser, life coach, manager wanting a particular employee, games or music fanatic, DIY expert, person obsessed with cleanliness, political activist, family historian, a you are what you eat dieter, etc etc

 

 The issue is 'walk a mile in my shoes', or can you use someone else's thought processes in order to re-see the world from another point of view?

Once you have immersed yourself into their world, can you take the next step and develop a way of making images that would make sense to ... a gardener, a cook, a police officer etc etc.?

These short exercises were developed initially for the Foundation course's 'Morning Drawing' sessions, whereby every morning we would kick off the day by getting students to think anew about something. 

See also: 

Morning drawing

Preparing for a module and using eStudio

As part of the preparation for the Collaborative module I'm looking at how students might access the introductory PowerPoint on line.

Click here

One option is using SlideShare, which you can check out using the click here link above. I'm still wrestling with the new eStudio technology and have not yet solved the issues surrounding embedding web-links. However the first step has been taken and I'm now familiarising myself with this type of file sharing.

I also had a meeting this morning with another tutor who will be sharing the delivery of the module. This was very interesting pedagogically as we began to unpick all the elements I had initially designed as studio workshop sessions. In particular if collaborative practice is to be embedded deeply into the module, it has to start with the staff team. We decided that my initial workshops were perhaps too ‘directed’ and that they didn’t allow for enough ‘learning’ and were not clear enough as to which aspects of collaborative practice we were trying to highlight. We have therefore decided to start again and to rewrite the workshops, each one giving the students more responsibility and also making them take on board particular roles; for instance artist and audience, artist and technician, artist instructor and instruction interpreter, artist as group orchestrator etc. The good thing is that we have time to get these workshops re-written as the module does not start until October.

One task we will still use though is the artist and curator session. Below is the current rough draft and will be finalised within the next couple of weeks.

Curation as a collaborative practice

The miniature gallery

Curators

Working in teams of 4 to 5 (Please keep to your designated  C, M, Y or K group for this workshop) you will curate the work of 4 or 5 other students who will also be operating as a curatorial team using your work.

You will develop a unifying concept for an exhibition that will be sited within the studio using a miniature gallery and will be designed to change an audience’s understanding or reception of the works displayed.

Curatorial decisions can be driven by aesthetics, logic, theme, interaction or any other unifying factor decided upon by the group.

Exhibitors

Exhibitors must relinquish any direct control over the artwork that they are providing for curation. All that is expected of you as an exhibitor is to learn from what the curatorial team have done with your work. You are allowed to ask questions as to why work has been presented in the way it has, but not allowed to criticise the curatorial team.

All students are required to donate at least one miniature piece of work to a curatorial team.

C & M You will install in the morning and the exhibition will open at 11.15am. Viewing, 11.15 to 11.35am. Group C will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11. 40 to 11.50, group M will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 11.50 to 12.00 noon.

Y & K You will install in the afternoon and the exhibition will open at 3.15pm. Viewing, 3.15 to 3. 35pm. Group Y will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3. 40 to 3.50, group K will answer questions as to their curatorial decisions from 3.50 to 4.00pm.

Preparation and research suggestions:

You need to have made a basic miniature gallery. This can be as simple as a cardboard box or carefully made in the machine shop. Make a careful decision as to the colour of the walls/floors. You will need a good camera/mobile phone capable of taking images of small objects and keeping them in focus.

Fixings and fittings are vital to exhibition curation. If this was a ‘real-size’ exhibition you would need to consult with Richard Baker, who has plinths and certain tools and equipment that would be needed, however you cannot drill into the floors as they include under-floor heating elements and any changes you might make to the wall surfaces would have to be easily and quickly removed, so that the next group of curators/users of the space were not inconvenienced. Therefore by using a miniature gallery you don’t have to worry about those issues, however, you don’t want work falling off the walls of your miniature gallery, so do think carefully about how to attach work to walls or how to present floor based or video work.

Take some time out during the week beforehand to develop a group curatorial stance.

Look at how, why and most importantly what contemporary curators have been doing.

This is a very basic guide: http://fineart.about.com/od/Curator/ss/Curating-A-Show-In-10-Easy-Steps-A-Step-By-Step-Guide-For-Art-Curators.htm

Cu`ra´tion

n.

1.

Cure; healing.  Check out independent curators

The mini art gallery

Stage one:

All individuals to make a gallery space out of a cardboard box. This to be able to be opened out so that photographs can be taken.  See below.

Stage two

All individuals to make a series of miniature artworks based on what they have been doing in the studio.

Stage three

Miniature work done the previous week to be displayed in bays. Curatorial teams organised (teams can’t select work displayed in their own bay, so we will simply move round so that teams curate other bays) to select from the work and organise mini exhibitions in mini galleries that will be documented.

Nb Each team should have 4 or 5 mini galleries to work with. If you want to you can link them together so that it appears as if this is a major exhibition and you would then curate each ‘room’. Alternatively you can decide that one, or two mini galleries are to be used and the others kept for something else. This will depend on  approaches to the work presented.

Nb C, M, Y, K groups will be decided upon at some point during the introductory sessions.

Another workshop we are thinking about uses mobile phones as an icebreaker.

The mobile phone concert as ice breaker

Two groups are formed from all students available.

The first step is to divide each group up by cell phone brand.

Once divided into phone brands each group has to find a common ring tone that the majority of phones have. The Nokia group perhaps the “Nokia Tune”, Motorola “Hello Moto”, etc. but this is to be agreed by each group. Those without common ring tones can partner up with someone else without a common ring tone.

Groups to work towards constructing order out of chaos. The goal is to be able to construct and send a finished ‘symphony’ to the other group.

The aim is not to create a cacophony of phones going off at once, so you need to have different sections play at different times, like a symphony. Instead of the “string section”, you might have the “Samsung section”.

At some point you will need to get back together to pair off with the other group and trade phone numbers, group A will be the first ‘instrument’ and B will be the caller, roles will then be reversed.

The callers will at some point need to elect a ‘conductor’, so that all callers are clear as to when they send their sound ‘message’, as well as a recorder, (someone who will record the symphony and post it onto a social media platform).

After the ‘instrument’ group is in place and ready, one student rings the ‘caller’ conductor to let him/her know and then the conductor counts off the sender group, or selected sub-groups to ring at counted off intervals, until the symphony is played.

Everyone then as individuals writes up the process and records their thoughts.

Each collaborative workshop session will have to be active, maintain interest throughout, deliver a clear outcome, be designed to get over a particular issue surrounding collaborative practice and work as an realistic introduction to documenting practice. The two staff delivering need to be clear about what is being delivered as we are in two separate studios. 

Probably the biggest issue is that of numbers. I have posted in relation to the collaborative module a couple of times before (you could use labels to collect them together) and each time the numbers to deal with increase. The first post records 50, the second 80 and this year we have 96 students enrolling. I won't be in post next year as this is my last year of phased retirement, but I would presume there will be a planned enrolment of 100. This continuing increase in numbers means that each year some areas of collaborative practice have to be dropped and others refined so that larger groups can be engaged. In particular I find myself having to do more work as an orchestrator and organiser. I am delivering less content and spending more time spinning plates. The larger the group the more chance some students will become disengaged because they don't really understand the use of the sessions, don't understand the instructions, so feel 'stupid' or embarrassed or simply can't hear or see the instructions for the day. (We set the stools out in the studio so that new first years could sit and listen to welcoming talks, the stools filled half the studio when laid out and some students you could predict were going to end up behind a pillar or other obstacle that will obscure their view.) One big issue of course will be what I call the murmuration, that noise made by large groups of people when they communicate internally. Janet Cardiff made great use of that in her '40 Part Motet', a beautiful piece responding to a Thomas Tallis composition. She had separately recorded the 40 individuals who would sing this and assigned to each individual a separate speaker, which was erected as part of a circle of speakers when the piece was staged. As you entered centre of the room it was staged in you were struck by the collective 'murmuration' of individuals but as you walked around the edges of the room each speaker revealed the sounds of the lone human. I must use this example to help open out the collaborative idea with the students and at the same time use it to explain how communication processes are also broken down with attritional 'noise'. 

Working full-time again

I’ve had no time for reflection lately due to the fact that I’ve been working full-time again. Kelly the head of first year and head of the drawing strand has been incapacitated by her increasingly bad back problems and has been off work. I was asked to take over and have for the past few weeks been sucked into the nightmare of administration and assessments. This blog started out as a reflection on my final years of teaching. The one area I have not really opened out is of course administration and assessment because both these areas never interested me and I never found them useful. In theory they ought to be of value but the reality is that they are often unnecessary evils. The attempt to atomise learning through the use of learning outcomes was something I’ve already pointed out was a failure. You shouldn’t know what outcomes are going to be achieved. Both staff and students should be open to discovery and the journey should be about self-realisation, not a demonstration of learnt abilities. In particular assessment begins to skew things around in ways that totally distort what the activity of becoming an artist is really about. The evidence trail itself stops us getting to grips with those moments of realisation that are like epiphanies. Artists can feel when the moment is right to talk about something. You see someone working and know whether or not they are lost in the making. If a student is lost in that making you wait until later and then you can engage with how that immersion was allowing them to reach a totally focused attention. It is more akin to the moment of meditation or being in the zone as sports-stars put it. You need practice and commitment to achieve this state and more experienced practitioners can guide you towards this, by pointing towards those necessary building blocks that take you through knowledge and beyond into the meaning tone of the practice. Instead what I often find is that students become obsessed with the evidence trail. Studio books full of photographic records of what they have done, notes that tell me they have done this or that, each component of course designed to lead me to the conclusion that they have satisfied the learning outcomes. This type of evidence gathering has usually been undertaken as part of a previous course and students have been trained to present the evidence in particular ways, but this is all they have been trained to do and it means nothing. I have been an external examiner and been faced with boxes of this sort of evidence and I had to ask courses to not do it again, and to try and think about how artists actually work. For instance; a painter who is totally in the zone might paint, scrape out, re-paint, scrub out, paint again, scrape off etc etc over and over again, each time building towards a moment of discovery. There will be no sketches, no preparation drawings, no photographs of each stage, no images of similar artworks, no studies; simply focused painting. If we look at a Frank Auerbach portrait drawing for instance, it will have been worked on and worked on, the image will have been cut back and re-built time after time, but all we have in the end is one drawing. The experience is in the mind of the maker, that experience is one that another artist can appreciate but you can’t give it a mark. What you can do is acknowledge intensity of involvement, you can help steer students towards their own areas of fascination, help them find their obsessions and acknowledge them.

However I’m employed to sort out the assessments and standardise the competing rhetorics surrounding different staff so that assessments are ‘fair and valid’. These rhetorics are to do with different value systems that staff come with, all of course valid but all subjective. I have to attempt to employ some sort of objective criteria to iron out these differences, but at the end of the day it simply covers up an activity that doesn’t make any sense. Students want feedback but they themselves get confused by asking for feedback on the marks. Why did I only get 56, why did I get 68 and not 70? These are meaningless questions except for those who want to achieve grades. Yes you can be told how to get higher marks, basically provide more and more evidence. If you work hard every day and evidence this you will get good marks but there is something else, it is closely related but different, you have to work hard to get into the zone, just ask a sports-star, they will refer you to hours and hours of practice, but then there is that moment of epiphany and it’s un-markable and yet essential to becoming an artist.

I may be having to work full-time for a while and if this is the case I suspect I shall be making far fewer posts, but it will no doubt give me lots to reflect upon again. In particular I have been writing lectures to support new modules and I might post these up when I have time. 

Material Thinking

Over and over again the issue of material thinking comes up when I’m working on the studio floor. This is a complex issue and needs to be broken down into different aspects.

One: Materials carry concepts associated with their histories and where they come from. For instance oil paint is not only a particular sort of paint that operates in a particular way, it also comes with a heavy cultural baggage. It is seen as a type of ‘honorific’ material. You can’t use it without acknowledging it history and how as a medium it is culturally significant. However similar issues occur with other materials, if I make something out of chocolate, our past cultural associations with this material will effect how any object made from it is read. All materials can be looked at in this way, paper, metals, wood etc etc. It is important to fish for the actual issues already identified as well as other potential ‘readings’. For instance a student may have identified a particular sort of mahogany to make something from because of its associations with the making of certain musical instruments or furniture. However it is of course also an endangered tree species and as soon as this work is exposed to an audience it is likely that the later reading might predominate. Not just the materials themselves carry concepts but the ‘finish’ applied to them does the same. High levels of ‘finish’ such as polishing suggest either long term investment of human labour or machine ‘finish’; both of course carry certain connotations. The crafting might be vital, or might be incidental, but again is important to the read. Some materials are gendered, for instance metal work can be seen as ‘macho’ or some textile crafts ‘feminine’, again these issues need to be unpicked. Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘Ur’ history can be useful when unpicking several of these issues.

Two: Material specificity. The way a material can be shaped is to do with the specific make-up of its elemental structure. Clay can be molded, wood can be cut, but it can also be molded if cut into thin enough sections and dampened for long enough. Metal can be forged and welded. These ‘basic’ or ‘raw’ materials also of course have culturally specific readings often to do with how we expect these materials to be worked. However sawn clay or molded wood are also materially specific. What is often an issue is how far these materials can be pushed? Can they be worked in new ways, or do traditional ways of working them have specific readings that the maker wishes to imply? As well as the ghost of Greenberg, there are other ghosts too, one important one being the issue of mimicry. Materials are often used to mimic other things, oil paint to mimic the look of fur or a marble carving to mimic sugar cubes. Wanting one material to stand for something else of course leads us into metaphor and likeness. Non art materials, such as tin cans, building materials, recycling from skips also have material specific issues as well as of course carrying with them their various histories and previous uses. However will all materials there will be a basic set of things you can do with them, cutting, folding, tearing etc the list as developed by Richard Serra is still a classical one to introduce to students. Serra’s Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself from 1967–68, starts: to roll, to crease, to fold, but also includes to repair, to discard and of location, of time etc. At some point in every year of teaching I must have referred to it.

Three: The relationship between human beings and materials. The way any individual handles a material can develop or lead to a signature ‘style’. When working with any given material there comes a time when the maker and the material become one and this allows for a synergy and new narratives to develop. Some people have a natural affinity for certain materials and if this is the case a whole career can be constructed by developing this focus. This is why it is important to give students time to explore as many different technical areas as possible before specialising. Sometimes you see students come alive when developing a black and white photograph for the first time, or when etching metal, or rewriting a line of code in order to adjust the way some existing software operates. How this engagement can be ‘read’ by others is another issue. For instance particular brush strokes or ways of handling a palette knife can be part of a ‘signature’ style, but so can the traces of handprints in molded clay or the way certain welders use a torch. One aspect to think about is that the maker can leave enough traces of the process of making for the audience to ‘unravel’ the process of an object’s making, another is, what does it mean if the ‘personality’ of the maker works in such a way that it can suffuse the object. The ‘signature’ style perhaps being how we recognise the artist in the work. Does the artist impose a style or should it simply arrive from the process of making? One very important issue is that of how communication with others works. Recognition of how something was done by others starts the process of internal mimicry. As I examine the way a box was made, I can feel in my hand the saw and the screwdriver as I mentally put it back together. You could call this ‘the hand in the mind’. Sometimes this narrative of making has to be totally transparent, at other times it is hidden, finish polishing away all human traces of the making.

Four: People as materials. All humans are themselves simply materials and have particular qualities unique to them alone. We are the size we are because of what we are built of, if we were any bigger gravity would grind us back down as our bones would be too weak to support us. By opening out these issues we can also start to look at related things such as scale. Objects and their handling can reflect hand scale / body scale /finger tip scale / bigger than body scale etc. Materials can also be harder or softer than human skin or bone. Some materials are more ‘like’ the ones that build us and some are less like us. We have emotional relationships with materials. Some are cold, some warm, some repulse us; some are so fascinating we want to possess them.

Reminding students that what they have made is a materialised thought can be very useful as it gets them to realise that it’s not what they thought they were doing but what has actually materialised that is important. Sometimes I also look at how verbal language itself is materialised thought. The shape of the mouth and throat, the relationship between the lungs and the windpipe and how we eat, the structure of the tongue, all combining to create a unique tool that can construct sounds in very complex ways. The mind in the body, or embodied mind thinking again helps with these concepts and most importantly this allows for both the craft focused and the idea focused students to find worth. 

Fine Art Year 1 week 6

I delivered the final part of the first phase of the contextual studies element of the individual and social brief on Monday. This was focused on ideas surrounding identity and how as individuals we ‘realise’ ourselves. The students seemed more responsive to this than the social aspects introduced last week, perhaps in our society they are tuned in far more to the self. Each week I also recommend students watch a particular old TV programme on art. There is a huge amount of material now on YouTube, the suggested viewing this week was “Shock of the New” episode 5. This will be the last of the formal lectures, most of the following sessions will be much more ‘workshop’ orientated. Students have to annotate selected texts and break them down into understandable chunks and this means that they have to be guided through close reading. At the end of the lecture I introduced these texts and pointed out that they are now all available to be downloaded from EStudio. Next week I will be giving students extracts in photocopy form and we will be working on these. I know these future sessions will be hard work, not just for me but for the students. The feedback already is that some students don’t understand why they need to understand what lies behind practice, one student in particular stating that they just want to make art not spend time thinking about it. Part of me does sympathise with this but as I pointed out at the time, if students want a university degree, they also have to prove that they can undertake academic learning. We also had a discussion about the move from artists as craftspeople to artists as intellectuals, which was hopefully much more useful.  

Some slides taken from the PowerPoint.

The area I thought was going to be the hardest, introducing Lacan and 'Mirror Theory' seemed to go OK and I thought that on the whole students could see the relevance to their own developing practice. However as I pointed out, what is really interesting is that I can't see into their heads and they cant see into mine. 

Tuesday I was back in the studios hosting critiques. I had groups of 6 and we spent the time trying to focus on what individuals should be doing, as opposed to what they were doing. By ‘should’ I mean not what the briefs suggests, but what as individuals they ‘feel’ is right. We are already half way through the first term and students will have to opt for a particular strand after Christmas. By trying to identify the ‘feeling tone’ or natural interest that lies behind the work, we can hopefully help individuals gain ownership of their own practice. This is a slow process and works a bit like this.

In groups of 6 after a short individual student presentation and a reflection back to see if we all understand what was presented, certain questions are asked. Such as, “This particular piece of work suggests that you take it forward in this way….., however this one over here suggests……. and this suggests……. Which direction feels better for you?  These suggested directions are carefully thought through and include not just differences in approach but differences in uses of materials, scale and ways of using content. Slowly students open out and we get to an area that they reflect back to the group that they are fairly comfortable with. For instance it might be that the student identifies something as straightforward as “I just want to paint”. Well if this is the case, we can focus on some simple basics, such as what happens if you mix and apply different grounds? How and why are you applying the paint in the way you are etc. Sometimes this can be a real relief to a student who is struggling to intellectualise a practice and yet deep down what they really love is moving paint around. Others will identify the fact that it is an approach that they feel comfortable with. One student for instance was coming to terms with the fact that what they wanted to do was “Make art like life”. We then spent some time trying to unpick this, what did he mean? The closest we got to was the “Moment of Epiphany” concept. He wanted to develop a way of sharpening his awareness to the everyday potential of experience. It was thought that he probably therefore needed the right toolkit for this, a still camera, sound recording equipment, video etc. and in what formats? Is this kit one of those new phones that does everything, or do you really need specialist equipment that allows you to ‘capture’ these moments at the best possible resolution? At the end of each ‘crit’ students were asked if the session had helped them become much clearer as to direction, most felt that they were now much more focused and they were asked to come up with a series of clear actions to get them moving on whatever track was identified. (I.e. make notes before they forgot what it was that had been identified)

There are problems to this approach, the main one being that students can move away from what the briefs are suggesting. However, my experience is that all they have to do is present the work at assessment in such a way that outcomes are identified, and there is always a way to do this. The real danger is that students start to feel that the course is offering nothing for them. If they seem to be simply going through a series of hoops, hoops that if documented will enable them to achieve the outcomes, at some point they will become emotionally detached from the work and either stop coming in or just lose interest all-together. The moment a student says, “I really feel excited by doing this” or “Yes that really feels like me”, you know there is a chance of something interesting going to happen. I’m a firm believer that students need to become obsessed with what they are doing, that they need to have total ownership over their work, if not we will lose them, emotionally if not physically.