Some thoughts on On Teaching and Learning

Note: I was asked by a friend who runs a website that collects stories to write about teaching. It didn't work out, but I wanted to post the piece on this blog to get some ideas I had while working on it aired out. Comments are welcome.

From go, I knew that my work was slow to develop and that I wanted teaching to be a big part of my professional life. So I paid attention to teachers who I found effective.

Problem was I paid attention only to those who taught me, not those sitting in the classes and studios where I worked and studied. Thank heaven not every student was like me. It’s enough to say I learned the most from teachers who could teach students like me, ones who might politely be called ‘focused’ but who might more accurately be described as obsessed, or even nuts.

This became apparent when I was first asked to teach a workshop on piecing and quilting. That my students might have enrolled because they had a curiosity about the medium rather than a consuming obsession struck me as odd. Why go to the trouble of taking a class if your desire to know about this was any less than unbearable? Why not teach your self? That these students might have been smarter than me (they were) and realized that teaching is not a form of indoctrination but rather the transfer of knowledge was…well, it wasn’t how I approached being a student. As a student, I have enormous appetite and probably unhealthy appetite. As a teacher, I had to learn how to prepare meals – even courses – that were digestible.

So I had to learn all over again how to be in a studio or class room, how to listen to where my students were coming from and not try to cram everything I knew about a subject into a single session or even semester. I had to learn that people come to learning for a variety of reasons, and that they bring with them an astounding range of skills and experiences that may facilitate or complicate their education, but which nonetheless enrich it. I had to learn that the knowledge you convey as a teacher is a neutral power, and it’s up to the student to use it for good. As a teacher, you can model ethical behavior, but you cannot dictate it.

Teaching gradually shifted for me from a form of evangelism to something else. Rather than seeing myself on a mission to convey certain techniques and information before they disappear in the vapor of ‘progress’, I now see myself as a sort of arms dealer. I try to listen to what my students objectives are and I provide students with technical and ideological weaponry and force multipliers to express ideas they have which may require fortification. The process of education has changed for me from a steady ascend toward enlightenment (in which the teacher might illuminate a path for student) to an ongoing battle against complacency in which I can only hope my students are wise and mature enough to choose what I believe is the right side (after all, I’m not totally without ethics). If they’re not, they still deserve an education and I’ll deal with them in my civic and professional life.

After all, what animates our professional lives and private curiosities may not be what sparks a student’s imagination. As a teacher, one must rethink and re-imagine the subject one teaches over and over from multiple points of view, looking for ways into it. I get a taste in my mouth like sour milk when someone talks about teachers ‘making a subject interesting’ for students, but I suppose that may just be another way of addressing the importance of making it relevant for the learner. Teachers (and I’m as guilty of this as anyone) occasionally feel that their subject’s importance needn’t be investigated…it was important enough to get into the curriculum, right? A lot of what I teach (in courses ranging from first years studio classes to graduate seminars) is material for which there are no right answers…only more and less suitable temporarily meaningful solutions.

One day, I had a student teach me something good. He was a trombone player in a section of first year writing, and was pretty bright. Art, he suggested, is a verb. Things get ‘art-ed’; they undergo a kind of transformation. I had been watching him and his classmates struggle with the idea that art might not reside in mere objecthood in our class discussions, and his solution – simple and elegant – has been an inspiration to me. Did I teach him to think of art in that expansive way? No, not in anyway I’d previously understood teaching. I’d just set up conditions under which he could learn it.

This was an accident, but one I have tried to turn into a method. I realized I had become the teacher I wanted to be in a painting class not long ago, when I was in high arms-dealer mode, working through the possibilities a student might entertain to get unstuck in her work. After going through a range of complicated options, I mentioned some rather ludicrous possibility that drifted into my mind. My student interrupted me and asked, somewhat breathlessly, “Can I do that?”

Part of me wanted to list all the artists who had done that, and provide a brief homily on how one might go about doing that. But part of me had become a better teacher. So I said, “I don’t know, can you?”

Dear Gilles and Felix,

Hello Friends,
I'm doing a small installation in the window of Moore College of Art and Design's ARTShop. The opening is Monday, September 8, 2008 from 5-7pm, 20th and Race Street in Philadelphia. All are invited to attend!
Hope you are well and looking forward to Fall!
Best,
Terri

Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that….
The Philadelphia Museum of Art has acquired my large photogram titled Optical Bridge.
It is in the museum's permanent photography and print collection.

Sincerely,
Walter
http://www.walterplotnick.com

The Myth of the Butterfly

I was amused to see Peter Dizikes' story The Meaning of the Butterfly in the June 8 Boston Globe. In it, he writes:

MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the "butterfly effect," the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz's suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly's wings.
Translated into mass culture, the butterfly effect has become a metaphor for the existence of seemingly insignificant moments that alter history and shape destinies. Typically unrecognized at first, they create threads of cause and effect that appear obvious in retrospect, changing the course of a human life or rippling through the global economy.

Dizikes goes on to talk about how the idea of the butterfly effect has come to reflect mass culture's expectations of research - that it should be able to explain anything (he cites a line from a Robert Redford film as being evidence of this influence).

Yeah, whatever. I think Dizikes had some interesting things to say about the universe's ultimate randomness in his essay and our collective desire to compact such frightening complexity into Ashton Kutcher vehicles. But for the artists, there's something else the myth of the butterfly promises.

If we accept the premise that any tiny force can rock the world, we buy into a game in which we can work in relative obscurity in the hope that we'll be causing a cultural tsunami without even knowing it. To the butterfly effect, you can add the first few minutes of Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, in which the critic Rene Ricard talks about how a critic cannot miss the next big thing laboring in obscurity (this is Van Gogh's great lesson, not anything about what he saw or how he represented it...it's about how undervalued artists can be redeemed in death). Artists flap their wings in the obscure jungles of their studios hoping to trigger tidal waves on the shores of major cultural capitals.

And that would be great. If it didn't keep artists from being engaged in the world. The cultural butterfly effect decrees that an artist who actually tries to affect the climate is acting out of hubris, not in response to the necessities of his or her work. Art is too easily disentangled from politics, and attempts to reconnect art and daily life are sadly regarded as attempts to make your own weather.

Forget the butterfly. Forget looking for little things that can leverage large things. Maybe it's time to start using big causes to achieve big effects. Perhaps what that will lead to is great, big, messy failures. But at least there won't be any more self-marginalizing, intentionally 'minor' work to fret over.

On Recieved Wisdom

I read a lot of students' writing and patterns start to emerge. One of the most prevalent is the confusion between real experience and received wisdom. Almost every semester, there's a class discussion in which we need to separate what it's like to see a picture on a website or a book or a magazine from seeing it at a gallery, or a museum, or in a studio or someone's home. There is always that student who sees these things as fundamentally similar, and I'm always a little confused about that. Hughes is talking about his relation to Abstract Expressionism, but what he said was immediately applicable to the German art that was so hot when I was in school in the 80s.

So I wanted to share a passage from an essay by Robert Hughes that helped clarify this problem some years ago.

Thirty years ago, Abstract Expressionism was pretty well a mandatory world style. We in Australia looked at it with awe. The bottle in which its messages washed up on our shores (since the paintings themselves did not cross the Pacific) was the magazine ARTnews. Its hagiographic tone was clear. Except for the titans of the history books, whose work we hadn't seen either - from Michelangelo and Leonardo down to Picasso and Matisse - we had never read the kinds of claims made for any artist that Harold Rosenberg or Thomas Hess made for Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning. They were grand enough to stifle aesthetic dissent. Only contact with the originals could have tested them, and we could not see the originals. Thus, although we didn't know it, we were in a situation of man American artists outside New York in the 1960s - flat on our backs, waiting for the missionary.

The copy of ARTnews would arrive and we would dissect it, cutting out the black-and-white reproductions and pinning them on the studio wall. One was, say a Newman. You had just read one of Thomas Hess's discourses on how Newman's vertical zip was Adam, or the primal act of division of light from darkness, or the figure of the unnamable Yahweh himself. How could you disagree? On what could you base your trivial act of colonial dissent? A mere reproduction, two inches by three? But Yahweh doesn't show his face in reproductions. He shows it only in paintings. And if you got to see the paintings, what if you didn't see it? Did that mean that his terrible and sublime visage was not there either? Of course not; it meant that you had a bad eye; or that Yahweh doesn't show himself to goyim in the South Pacific. And since it is difficult for the young and otherwise uninitiated to avoid, still less be skeptical about, the language in which peak experiences are offered to them, you were apt to assume that it was your own unpreparedness or sheer obtuseness prevented you from seeing the deity that lurked within Newman's zip or Rothko 's fuzzy rectangle.

...which is a round about way of retelling the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but not just that. Images are used in arguments as evidence, to be persuasive. If they're included, it's because they're persuasive...a truism that's too seldom open to critique. What I think young artists writing about their work in relation to others sometimes forget is that the image is evidence in someone else's argument, not the argument itself. To cite a painting or sculpture (or whatever) without having really looked at it is too often to try to bring, whole cloth, the value of that object to your writing. And how can you really look at it without, well, really looking at it? And to what extent are we really looking at things when what we see is what another writer has written? Or what a photographer has framed, excluding all else?

Art surprises us. It is, in spite of the cliche, in some fundamental way, both window and mirror. We get a view to something else while the art works simultaneously tells us something about where we stand (and whether we are funny looking or have bad hair). Seeing in art what you're told by historians and critics should be as much a cause for alarm as for celebration. It's great to have the validation that comes with having your unfocused, unspoken impressions converted into language, but it's an act of robbery if that language gets between you and the object you're interested in.

Works Cited

Hughes, Robert. “The Decline of the City of Mahagonny.” Nothing if not critical: selected essays on art and artists. New York: Pengun, 1990. p.5

Tales from the Crit

At Art Center, I have classes in which students from a variety of disciplines crit one another. 'Fine Art' is among the smallest programs at Art Center, so an interdisciplinary course will skew toward other areas - photo, film, and illustration. This can lead to some interesting conversations, as the basis for critiques varies so widely between areas of study. But last week, I got to thinking about what constitutes 'art' in a crit dominated by photo students.

It seems one of the primary functions of a crit for my students is to identify possible uses for what they're looking at. Could it be used to sell a product? for fashion? As an answer to a technical problem about lighting? If no apparent use presents itself, Art Center students will start to talk about the work in question as "fine art". To an anthropologist from Mars, fine art at Art Center sounds like a market segment for objects that don't play well with others, ones that observe no apparent rules, ones that seem 'expressive' in some undefined way.

Because I spend most of my professional life thinking about fine art (to the exclusion of other things, such that the addition of the word 'fine' seems prissy), I come to this conversation with a pronounced bias. In a nut shell, I think it's interesting that something attains art status by not having some properties. To get into the 'art' conversation, I have always thought that an object or activity needed something in excess of the ordinary, not the lack of something.

In his book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught, James Elkins lists the possible 'orientations' crits may follow, and I think this observation is important here. Art Center's students seem most interested in what Elkins calls 'rhetorical' and 'profession' orientations - those that speak to how effective the work is or how well it responds to professional standards. I'm more interested in what Elkins calls 'ethical' or 'teleological' crits - those that consider the life of the work in the world.

My objective here isn't to argue for some absolute method of running crits or discussing art; it's to get a conversation going about how students see the relations between parts of the field. My concern is that students - driven by what they regard as important...grades - will dismiss crits from unexpected orientations. Can they be met half way? Should we be more focused on the long term life of the work or on the short term? Can additional resources be brought to bear on a crit to make it fulfill more than one function?

You can't make this stuff up: Thoughts on research, art, and design

This post was given in response to the symposium Cultures of Inquiry: Context at Art Center College of Design on March 18, 2008. I invite any thoughts on the subject of research in art and design education in the comments area.

One thing came through loud and clear at Tuesday’s talks: design research regards information as a resource too valuable to ignore. In this way, it’s no different from the rest of contemporary culture, where a specific relation to ideas and events outside the work has become a valuable ingredient in successful art or entertainment. Consider the explosion of films “based on a true story”, or the rise of the memoir and the autobiography as literary forms threatening to eclipsing the novel. When readers learn that what they’d thought was factual is actually invented, the backlash can be swift and harsh, as we saw in the recent scandal surrounding the revelation that Margaret B. Jones’ searing autobiography “Love and Consequences” was actually Margaret Seltzer’s novel about gang life in South Central LA. Would Seltzer’s book have earned the ecstatic reviews it garnered if it had been published as a novel? Many in the publishing industry thought readers would have overlooked the book if it had been published as a work of fiction, and it’s immediately obvious that information derived from lived experience is considered differently than invention (“Writing Truth”).

So the interest in design research can be seen as a reflection of the larger culture’s interest in setting design, art, and entertainment products into a context of ideas and experiences that are more widely accessible to users and readers than in an earlier age, when creativity was seen as a primarily internal or intuitive act. There are a lot of great things about this for artists, designers and ordinary people; we give up the somewhat shabby ideal of a heroic, protean genius-creator for one who’s engaged in the problems and practices of the very people who will ultimately use or consume the products they produce. Great. But there are a few things we, especially if we’re involved in education (which has a responsibility not only to promote new ideas but to preserve past knowledge), need to be cautious about, too.

To begin with, an emphasis on research (especially empirical research) as integral to creativity in design or art practice perfectly reflects our current collective distain for traditional authority. The distillation of contemporary abhorrence of authority to a slogan, such as Onny Eikhaug’s claim that, “the problem with experts is that they know too much”, is a mantra for the Wikipedia era, in which expertise is distrusted as somehow out of touch with the fast pace of life, or merely inadequate to challenges better suited to crowd-sourcing or maverick outsiders with original insights. As educators, we ought to think this one through. Writing about the way our relation to authority is changing, Peter J.M. Nicholson points out that “the agents we have traditionally relied on to filter and manage information – agents like research universities, the traditional media, and highly trained experts of all kinds – are less trusted as intermediaries than they once were”. Trying to fight that change is like trying to stop the sun from setting. But rather than fostering distrust for expertise by endlessly repeating its prevalence, we should provide students with skills to be able to evaluate sources of information and employ them responsibly and the encouragement that doing so will have rewards not only in the marketplace, but for them as participants in an increasingly crowded media environment.

Both Rama Gheerawo and Tina Park offered intriguing reflections on the use of design research, but each suggested the difficulties that lie ahead for those of us training a new generation of designers and artists in research. Right up front, we need to realize that how data is solicited, collected, documented, and categorized have profound effects on how it’s ultimately interpreted and valued. In my third year of teaching the Art of Research and countless conversations on the emergence of design research, I remain uncomfortable with the use of specific terms – e.g. “visual ethnography” – in art and design school. Not because I feel the techniques of sociology and anthropology don’t have a place in the lives of our students (I think they do), but as I learn more about these ideas, I realize the shallowness of our use of them in relation to the richness of their use in their native discourses. This is an old problem for art education, especially as it takes place outside of universities: how do we get the expertise necessary to teach our students, when most of our own expertise is in the handling of the materials necessary to make the products of our discourse? One can go around and around about the value of having photographers teach photo history or graphic designers teach design history, but at the end of the day, with all due respect to the few artists and designers who have a secondary, scholarly practice, students who study art history under art historians learn differently than those who learn from practitioners in the field. It’s not just a matter of defining research for our selves. Rama Gheerawo usefully talked about the connotations of ‘research’ when he introduced and concluded his talk, but I’m not sure that as, as a profession, we have the power to re-brand what research means to our clients and community.

            Perhaps a more productive approach is one suggested by University of Chicago sociologist Ronald S. Burt, who has been working on a theory of “structural holes” (Erard). Burt, like research advocate Stephen Wilson, sees creativity as a collaborative endeavor in which designers and artists must continually expand social networks that, in practice, tend toward stasis. At Art Center, we are well positioned to exploit structural holes and put our student designers and artists in contact with engineers and entrepreneurs so they can integrate the ideas of these professionals into their work. Of course we do this in some programs, but it’s a challenge to continually open networks and lines of communication, one that is made all the more difficult by suggesting that designers and artists can somehow go it alone by picking up a few useful research skills.

Some of these sort of “holes” were revealed in Shona Kitchen’s presentation. One could neatly divide the idea of research into “pure” and “applied” foci, but doing so runs the risk of marginalizing the most original and valuable contributions a hybrid (or perhaps even mongrel) idea like design research has to offer. Artist/designers Kitchen (or Nina Katchadourian, or Stacy Levy, or Fritz Haeg, whose work is embedded in questions of language, ecology, and sustainability) and are powerful arguments for leaving room in the discussion of research for speculation and critique. Critic Martin Kemp has talked about the value of research-based practice in contemporary art, and there’s room for a more detailed exploration of that idea at Art Center (Honigman).

            By now, I’ve probably revealed some fundamental misunderstanding of what design research is. If so, my apology takes the form of pointing out that describing what something does can help imply what it is, but not always. (For instance, I can tell you that a hernia hurts, might be unsightly, and can ruin your day, but you’d be hard-pressed to infer exactly what one is from that description.) It’s because I believe in the potential of what design research does, as I’ve seen it employed by my colleagues and students at Art Center, that I’m interested in seeing it more fully integrated into the curriculum and seeing its use adopted on the professional level. But as a user of design rather than a designer, my stake in design research is quite different than many of the values expressed at the conference. As a user of design, I’m for design research because it turns the designer into my advocate; armed with information gleaned form design research, the designer can explain to her client why her solution is superior to other solutions that may not embody my interests. As a user of design, I’m for design research because it puts the objects I use and look at into a larger cultural context, rather than leaving me with nothing more than some ‘creatively’ styled object. And, a user of design, I’m for design research because it promises to get designers out from behind their computers and out into the world where they have consider the impact of their work on the environment and the market.

The context one can build for one’s work through research is an asset too valuable to ignore. But, like all resources, the knowledge gained through design research needs to be thought of in terms of stewardship. Like all resources, it can be responsibly employed or carelessly exploited. Research creates responsibility; not only to utilize the information it yields, but to put it to just and ethical use as well (after all, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). In the end, the value a researched context can provide to designers is enormous. But its value to others outside the practice of art and design – whether they’re configured as users, audience, readers, or whatever – is incalculable.

 

gerard brown is an instructor in the Humanities and Design Sciences and teaches The Art of Research to students on the Film, Fine Art, Illustration, and Photography tracks.

 

Works Cited

Erard, Michael. “Where to get a good idea: Steal it outside your group.” The New York Times. 22 May, 2004.

Honigman, Ana Finel. "Universal Leonardo". Artnet.com. 12 April 2007. http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/honigman/honigman1-19-06.asp

Nicholson, Peter J.M. “The Intellectual in the Infosphere”. The Chronicle Review. 29 Mar 2007. 20 Aug 2007 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i27/27b00601.htm

Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. Cambridge, MIT, 2002 (p. 38).

“Writing Truth in Fact and Fiction.” Weekend Edition. Natl. Public Radio. 8 Mar, 2008. 22 Mar 2008 http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=88008140.

Online Writing and Blogging

Hello All!
Gerard recently passed this list of on-line Art Writing and Blogging from Frank Smiegel. As you are all in the midst of thesis preparation and other scholarly pursuits this could be a helpful list of resources. Frank mentioned that having a decent spectrum of art writing to explore, from the very personal to the very polished & almost scholarly--will help folks see some viable writing types they might develop into a voice that isn't the dutiful term paper or diaristic ones. Note that the comments listed next to the links are Mr. Smiegel’s!


* Alec Soth: www.alecsoth.com. Mr. Soth seems to have stopped blogging for the time being; a big drag. There are still a wealth of archives there.

* The performer/artist Momus has a fantastic and almost daily meditation on culture high + low, near + far http://imomus.livejournal.com. There's a great entry up from a few days ago on Nick Cave's Grinderman band and their song "No Pussy Blues"--required reading, establishing for aging post-punks like me. . . .

* Jerry Saltz is a weekly must-read for anyone involved in contemporary art. He's at www.nymag.com.

* Artforum critic Brian Sholis blogs smartly at: www.briansholis.com.

* NYC-based www.artfagcity.com. can be decent.

* The "Scene & Herd" gossip column at www.artforum.com. is always more than art world fun--and will often make you want to quit the whole biz and just take up farming.

* For small journal-based writing, you can sample Cabinet Magazine at www.cabinetmagazine.org. There's a great piece up now about Duchamp's urinals.

* Good reviews are also found at www.theartnewspaper.com.,www.artsjournal.com., and www.stretcher.org.

Some thoughts about crits...

I've been having a lot of trouble with an article I came across over winter break in the December 10, 2007, Washington Post. The story, by Shankar Vedanta, walked a fine line between being a business piece and a holiday story. A passage sets up the basic premise:

[William B.] Swann's research [published in the Academy of Management Journal] suggests that the conventional wisdom about end-of-year performance evaluations and the general good cheer demanded by the Christmas season might have paradoxical effects for many people. Managers who offer inaccurately glowing reports in the hope of encouraging employee loyalty may discover that employees with low self-esteem feel less loyal afterward, And high expectations of goodwill, charity and bonhomie at Christmastime can cause these types of people not to feel better about themselves, but worse.

Vedanta reported on research that addressed the relation between performance reviews and workers' self-images, particularly in relation to self-verification theory, described in this way:

All people carry around an image of themselves that tells them who they are, whether they are good-looking or average-looking, for example, or clever at math, or kind and thoughtful or largely self-centered. Inasmuch as people want to be recognized for the things they are good at, Swann's work suggests many people also want honest acknowledgments of their flaws, and that when these flaws are minimized or wished away, people end up feeling worse rather than better.

Being just off a long weekend of critiques at UArts and in the middle of another week of them at Art Center, the article seemed to be about more than end-of-the-year performance reviews. It seemed to be about how crits go awry, and about what is expected by someone who is getting a critique - something about reaffirming their idea of themself. And that is something I cannot deliver.

Much has been made (by people my age and older) of the way the generation now completing graduate school and entering the workforce deals with criticism. The idea that this generation enjoyed uncritical praise in its youth that causes them to meltdown in the face of criticism as adults has been rolled out so often that it has attained the status of conventional wisdom. Such a broad societal observation may be ultimately untestable, and therefore should be looked at with some suspicion. There's a certain 'blame-the-victim' logic at work here, too. But more sinister is the way it turns the subject from the object of criticism - the work - to the other person in the conversation - the worker.

Outside the art world, there are millions - perhaps billions of people whose identity isn't based on their work. They may be accountants or teachers by day or for forty hours a week, but they're musicians or athletes or filmmakers at their core. While it would be foolish to pretend that criticism of a job done less-than-stunningly has no effect on the person who did it, it would be similarly off-base to assume that criticism of the work and of the person are one and the same. Artists - more than any other professionals - obviously must be capable of separating self from work to benefit from critique.

No duh. But Vedanta points to a strange problem when he uses "honest" to signifies a concordance between an individual's self-image and what others say about him or her. It's as if to say what we recognize as accurate isn't what is in fact accurate, but rather what fits our image of ourselves.

My job as a viewer is different than my job as an art-maker. My job as a viewer is to look at the work and evaluate in relation to other works I've seen or can imagine. It's not that I don't care about people; it's that I do care about art objects. Expecting a critic (or your boss, who's evaluating your performance) to provide feedback that's in line with your image of yourself is absurd. Arguably, a good deal of the art in the world is about departing from the limits of one's identity into a larger, imagined world. Fencing art works into the limits of individuals' personalities seems...sad. Not to mention impossible.

But as a teacher it seems that there is often no middle ground between students who think every positive crit is Pollyanna-ish blather and every negative crit is a personal attack. To me, it's not that emerging artists can't take criticism, it's that too many of them see the work as first and foremost an extension of or surrogate for themselves. They seem to overlook the opportunity for artworks to live in a world of other artworks, just like other products live in their contexts, and to talk about them as separate from themselves.

I feel as though I'm just scratching the surface of this problem, and that I'm declaring a position that requires a lot more explanation than this space allows. But since so many of the people who might read this are involved in making, discussing, and teaching other to make art, I wanted to put it out there.