Approaches to Postmodern Art-making

Terry Barrett proposes a new list of principles in his article Approaches to Postmodern Art-making that should shape an art education curriculum besides the standard elements and principles of design like line, shape, texture, ect. Some of the principles or themes that Barrett mentions are escaping the confines of museums, high and low art: kitsch, rejecting originality, jouissance, working collaboratively, appropriation, rejecting originality, simulating, mixing media, mixing codes, recontextualization, layering, hybridity, gazing, facing the abject, constructing identities, narratives, metaphors, and irony, parody, and dissonance. Below are some examples I found to be interesting.

Appropriation: " To appropriate is to possess, borrow, steal, copy, or excerpt images that already exist, made by other artists or available in the public domain and general culture". (Barrett, pg. 5)

Yasumasa Morimura

Recontextualization: " A means of constructing meaning by positioning a familiar image in a new and unexpected relationship to words". (Barrett, pg. 8)

Michael Ray Charles

Layering: " Some artists pile images on top of each other, thus changing the meanings of the images in their original uses" (Barrett, pg. 7)

David Salle

Hybridity: " Is mixing diverse cultural influences in a single artwork". (Barrett, pg. 6)

Pipilotti Rist

Gazing: "The tendency to represent women in ways that heightened the sexual or erotic aspects of women's bodies". (Barrett, pg. 9)

Vanessa Beecroft

PRINCIPLES AND POSSIBILITY: CONSIDERATIONS FOR A 21ST CENTURY ART & CULTURE CURRICULUM

     I recently read Olivia Gude's article Principles and Possibility: Considerations for a 21st Century Art & Culture Curriculum which is about how teachers and students are not really motivated to make art that is controlled by standards and principles. Gude says, 

    " The essential contribution that arts education can make to our students and to our communities is to teach skills and concepts while creating opportunities to investigate one's own experiences generating personal and shared meaning". (pg. 1)

     I agree with this statement, not that the elements and principles of design are not important, its just art curriculum's should not be based solely around them any more. There are so many other ideas that an art lesson should touch upon such as self-investigation, community, diversity, and deconstructing culture just to name a few. The standards for the visual arts may be should include these new ideas Gude proposes.

Developing A Living Curriculum

     I recently read the article A Middle School Curriculum From Rhetoric To Reality by James Bean. In this article Bean discusses a new way of thinking in art education which focuses on the social values and concerns that face us everyday, specifically early adolescents. When I read this I thought it was a great idea to build the lessons that we art educators make around the concerns of our students.
    Middle school students are at a climactic stage in their development, they are mid way between childhood and being an adult. Have you ever heard of the phrase " we don't live in a vaccum", well we don't and early adolescents don't. The world around these students influence their lives and develop some deep concerns. When they go to school they can't just leave these concerns at the door, they are with them wherever they go. Having a curriculum that integrates the students concerns whether they be social or personal, can be an outlet of sorts for them.
    Through the use of connecting themes students can focus in on some major skills like reflective thinking, valuing, self- esteem, and social advocacy. One may ask how do we find these connecting themes that would interest these early adolescents? One way is to discuss with the students what issues they are dealing with currently that they would like to concentrate on. Thinking about this idea of asking the students what topics they are interested in is awesome, I honestly wish my teachers did that when I was in middle school.
    A found that reading this article helped me understand what I need to bring to the table when I become a teacher. I need to be the teacher that is connected with their students, the current teacher, the one that is tapped into the world and the popular culture that makes it buzz.

Surrealist Games

     When a person mentions Surrealism the first person who pops into their minds is Salvador Dali and his famous painting The Persistence of Memory. Have you ever thought about how he came up with the idea for such a painting? Well, Dali and many other Surrealist artists including Max Ernst and poet Andre Breton all used games to help fuel their creativity. These games gave artists opportunities that used chance and the ridiculous in art making.
 

Some the most popular games are chain games, specifically the Exquisite Corpse. The Exquisite Corpse first started as a word game, players would sit around a table and write down an
-adjective
-noun
-adverb
-verb
-adjective
-noun
     on a piece of paper folding over the word to make sure the other players could not see what they wrote, they would unfold their paper and read the sentence aloud. Here is an example my friends and I did:
         " The boyish toad longingly crashed early Leah".
 
    Another way of creating the Exquisite Corpse is through drawing. It is the same as the word game but instead of dividing the corpse up into words, it is divided into body parts heads, torsos, and legs. Again all of this is done without letting the other players see what you drew.

   A game that I like to play is inkblot pictures. These are the same thing as doing a Rorschach test and it is a simple procedure. All you need to do is take ink or diluted paint and spread it or let it drip onto a piece of paper. While the ink is still wet take your piece of paper and fold it in half pressing down firmly. When you open up the paper you have a symmetrical image. See what visuals you can find in the inkblots and then draw what you see on top of the blot! Here are some examples I did:

 I saw a bulldog in this inkblot test that I did, I think it might have been because I think there so cute!

I did this inkblot test on the funnies section of the Sunday newspaper because I thought it might add some nice layering and color. When I looked at this inkblot I immediately saw a Chinese Dragon.

This is an example of an original Roschach Test. More information about these tests can be found on this wikipedia page



 

Here is a video I found of changing inkblot tests, how many images can you see?

Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Hello there!
        My name is Nina, this is my first blog ever so I wanted to start it off by letting all of you out there know a little bit about me. I am a student attending the State University of New York at New Paltz, and I am a double major studying Visual Arts Education and Ceramics. I decided to go into these fields of study because I love art! (I really do love it!) I feel as though I was destined to be and artist.
       When I was a kid I used to love playing pretend with my friends, and when we would pick the occupations we wanted to pretend to be I always said that I was an artists. I would take a plate and pretend it was my artist palette (haha, now that I recall these memories it seems kind of silly). Even though I pretended to paint a lot, I actually did physically make art on my down time as I got older. My parents used to tell me that I never played with my toys I would just color and doodle on my chalkboard. I was lucky to have such supportive parents and art teachers throughout my whole childhood, with out them I wouldn't have been the person I am today.
       I think that is one of the main reasons why I decided to go into the field of education, as well as pursuing my dream of being an artist. I want to support and inspire my future students. I want to show students that everyone has different modes of thinking and that there is no one particular way to do so. These are just some goals that I would like to achieve in my classroom but for now I will end with a quote, "To touch art is to touch the mind; to touch the mind is to touch a life" (J. David Arnold).