assignment prompt:
On your blog I would like you to assemble a group of (3-5) objects (images of objects or images of images) into an organizational system. I would like for you to metaphorically connect your collected system to the question: "what is the object of art education?" Please explain your choices and the reasoning behind your decisions and explain how and why your collection goes together and how they connect to art education.
Next, I would like you to choose one object from someone else's system and bring it into yours. Again explain your reasoning about how it fits into yours and how the new object changes your system.
Next, I would like you to choose one object from someone else's system and bring it into yours. Again explain your reasoning about how it fits into yours and how the new object changes your system.
my response:
Its amazing how much of my understanding comes from misunderstandings. Case in point, Kathy once quoted this wonderful phrase by G.K. Chesterson in the opening to a presentation: "Art is the signature of man." The misunderstanding? Any time I tried to re-quote it I always misquoted. For some reason I kept repeating it as "art is the punctuation of life." So as I began thinking about what my collection would be I decided to put these grammatical glyphs to good use. I don't know if they could quite be considered objects "per se", but I'm going there anyway (which is partly why I hastily illustrated them here). Here's how I see the connection to the collection and the metaphor.
Artmaking is quotations.
Quotation marks signify qualification of someone speaking. Artmaking gives us the opportunity to make our ideas (and voice) visible - as well as to quote others.
Artmaking (and artwork) is an exclamation.
Artmaking can be a declaration, a celebration, a battlecry... Though some works are intimate and speak in subtlety, their are others who refuse to be silent.
Artmaking (and artwork) is questions.
What is the artist trying to say? How does this piece add to the conversation of those before it? What does this work ask of me as a viewer? Do I agree with this or disagree? ... the questions continue.
Artmaking (and artwork) is life's comma, the cause for pause.
Creating art forces us to stop and observe the world around us in profoundly different ways. Viewing art can have the same effect.
Artmaking (and artwork) is parenthetical.
Artists make visual asides. Sometimes these are to clarify. Sometimes these are asides which help us reveal more. Artmaking (and artwork) is both the enclosure and the space to learn more.
Connecting to other's objects:
If I had to choose another object to be a part of my collection I would include Kathryn's diary. A diary (or sketchbook/journal) is a vessel which is made to hold one's musings - an appropriate form to hold punctuation of all sorts. Additionally, as Kathryn so eloquently stated, "The diary fits inside the desk and represents our most personal and private views and experiences, which often emerge in our artwork in carefully calculated metaphors and symbols. It holds our emotional responses to the world we live in." By extension might we consider ourselves or our students as the journal itself - our expression encased within, let out (shared) by untying that which holds us back?
(or is that too cheesy?) :)
