Art, Contemporary.

I am often asked by one of my students, usually following a discussion of modern art, “So what is going on in art today? What movement are we in?”

One of the biggest challenges of teaching art is the problem of contemporary art: How do you keep abreast of current trends and movements in contemporary art, and how do you determine which artists are relevant, lasting, or universal? It is too vast an ocean, it seems, and too deep with varieties of approach. Factors that helped create some formal or aesthetic commonality in the past – regional identity, shared faith, academic canon, mutual ideology – just do not exist the same way in our global culture. Is it a massive web of interrelated artists drawing from some collective database of influences, or a sea of individuals making art for a personal experience (a post-postmodernism?)

There are resources to help sift through the diaspora: online resources, local galleries and art magazines all offer some taste of what is currently happening in art. But perhaps the best resource is a series of books, webpages and videos made for PBS called Art: 21. The series focuses on current artists and organizes them according to themes such as romance, power, death, and so on. The artists chosen represent many different approaches, aesthetics, and nationalities, but all share an innate passion for art and creativity (and some degree of professional success). It is a well-presented series that offers a thoughtful and accessible overview of current trends in contemporary art.

So what movement are we in? Haven’t the foggiest.

Instead, I will post a few words about artists I discover here and there. Artists who interest me, or may be interesting to my students. Some come from Art: 21, some come from my own exploration, some… I don’t know where they come from. Perhaps after looking at several posts it will be possible to see a direction that contemporary artists are taking, but this will certainly be too incomplete a list to be indicative of anything more than my own passing fancy.

First up: Marcel Dzama.

New Art School is back! But different.

Too much has happened since my last post, so I will dispense with the detailed update. Here is what you need to know: I finished my first year at this new school, CH, and to answer my question below, “do the CH pros outweigh the HHS pros”? Yes. It is a wholly different experience, but put simply, yes. This is a destination job. I am teaching ideal classes (drawing and painting, graphic design, art history) in an academic community to students who by-and-large value creativity. I am able to make more meaningful connections with students, and I am still finding new challenges, both professional and personal. It is a very good place to be.

Another good place to be is grad school. I am now enrolled in a masters program at Ohio State University, and the function of this blog is going to change. While I still have funny stories about wacky things students (and sometimes I) say and do, I am going to use this blog in a different way. I will be using this space for some discussion of art education research and reflection on various practices. I invite discussion and feedback, so please do chime in if the spirit moves you.

Let me leave you with one funny story from last year (and the egg is on my face this time):

Art history student: “What was the relationship between van Gogh and Gauguin?”

Me: “Gauguin and van Gogh were close friends and similar artists, but very different personalities. Think of Gauguin as the yin to van Gogh’s wang.”

Class: (erupts in laughter)

Art history student: “Definitely putting that in my top 5 favorite teacher quotes on Facebook!”

A roomful of city planners, part 2

"I wanted to split the two worlds up. I wanted the black things to be [together], such as the haircut places and the low rent apartments." - AM, 10th grade

This statement comes from one of the written reflections submitted by Art I students at the end of the Urban Planner/Cityscape project, and it speaks to the kind of choices made by students in the process of arranging a city with civic, social and economic conflicts. In addition to the compositional choices illustrated by these reflections, I became aware that students were making assumptions about the required content of the drawings. These assumptions would underscore my student's situational context more than than the self-reflection and analysis in their own words could. Though I shouldn't be, I am surprised to find that I learned more about my students from their process than the end product, especially this role of situation as compositional tool.

The 10 criteria for the cityscape had the potential to raise several issues in student thinking, and my goal was to present the criteria without comment to allow the students to establish their own hierarchy of concerns. To recap, the 10 entities that students needed to include in their drawings are as follows:
1. Bank
2. Hospital
3. Apartments (low rent)
4. Condos (upscale)
5. Institution of Higher Learning
6. Sewage Treatment Plant
7. Mom & Pop Restaurant - African-American-owned
8. Chain Restaurant - White-owned
9. Barber Shop - African-American-owned
10. Clothing Store (inexpensive) - White-owned
In reflection of our city's real-life context, these entities could potentially highlight the conflicts that keep the city from progressing as quickly as our more cosmopolitan immediate neighbors. In particular, there are deep-seated racial issues that continue to exist: the city is roughly split down the middle between black and white with a burgeoning Hispanic population. There is a wide class division, emphasized by the elite private university and its largely affluent, out-of-town student body. This class division exists due to the economic disparity of the city, with little common ground between rich and poor. There are naturally social issues that arise from these other conflicts, including racial prejudice, gang activity and a rising crime rate, which inspires further bias in the residents of the neighboring cities. Other civic issues could be brought up, including urban redevelopment and gentrification. And would students make any mention of the flourishing arts community or high-tech, research-based industries?

In observing student group discussions, conferencing with them one on one, and reading written responses, I determined that students made important assumptions that would persuade the content of their cityscape drawings, and these assumptions were based on their own situation. Because of the lack of diversity in my school, the situation is common to most students: the school is predominantly African-American (greater than 90%), with a large portion of the school from middle- and lower-income households. To say the school is struggling academically would be overly polite - it is at the bottom of the district's test scores, and a state consortium has threatened to close the school if scores do not improve. At the same time, the school is a long-standing point of pride in its community, with a national alumni organization and strong sense of tradition. The performing arts department has been successful for years and continues to attract positive attention.

With the commonality of racial and economic backgrounds in the school, I expected race and class to play the biggest role in compositional choices. I also expected to be confronted about these issues as a white teacher. With the class disparity in this city divided along racial lines, I expected to be held as a symbol of affluence as well. This did not happen. My students are savvy enough to know that a person from affluence would not find a public school teacher's salary acceptable.

In the next post, I will identify the assumptions my students made, and will list the choices that resulted from these assumptions.

[To those of you - both of you! - who read this blog, I apologize for the infrequent posts lately. I've been swamped with the spring musical, and hope to get my act back together...]

A hostile audience

"God! I do NOT want to do this! Art is stupid! God-uh... Why can't I change classes??" So sang B, the day after it became too late to change classes.

One of the things that attracted me to teaching as a career was the fact that it retained some of the most exciting elements of music as a career - creative, social, with a performance aspect - while adding more rewarding and frankly reliable elements - a state paycheck with state benefits, professional opportunities, and oh right, the chance to positively impact the lives of children. I think it is my background in those first elements that has made my career shift relatively smooth and painless. When I was a record store owner, I learned that if we wanted to be able to pay our bills every month, we needed to adapt to the slippery, evasive needs of our clientele. Perhaps more importantly, as a performer I learned how to negotiate a hostile bar crowd who has not come to see you play tonight, and is refusing to pay the $3 cover charge required if they want to continue to drink there. You stock the right records, you play the right covers, you contort yourself but don't sell yourself out. If we were saving a cover of Cheap Trick's "Surrender" for an encore, we'd open with it to appease the scowling bikers and hobos hovering around our girlfriends.

My brother, now a Penn State faculty member, followed a similar career trajectory from bar band to classroom. From tot to teen, I admired the rock star side of him, and was honestly perplexed by his passion for education. I remember him saying, after being asked by a confused little brother who had just inherited his vintage, no-longer-used Gretsch Chet Atkins Tennessean, that teaching was just as satisfying as performing. Standing up in front of a class of students, he assured me, was just as rewarding as standing up in front of an audience at a club.

I didn't believe him.

Now that I'm on the rational side of planning a career in the creative arts, I can understand where he is coming from, and yes, it is just as rewarding. Maybe even more so, because you know it matters. Songs are great, and I love nothing more than being told by a complete stranger that my music affected them on a deep level, but what fills me with happiness now is to see a student discover a love for art, or if I'm lucky, discover that they have a valid, even important voice.

That's why I take B's comments as a challenge, and one that I'm ready to win.

The project was Hand Drawings, wherein students practice and apply skills for drawing from life and observation - accurate shading and detail are preferred. Though seemingly simple, it is exactly the kind of project that causes a student like B to shut down. Drawing the human body, especially something as complex as the hand, requires a fair amount of skill and, because of the familiarity of the subject, leaves little room for error. Everyone is familiar with what their hand looks like (it's not like the back of their hand, it IS the back of their hand!), so for a student who feels like she can't draw, it is like being asked to speak Russian or breathe underwater. Most often, a student who doesn't understand will reject the project by either shutting down or becoming defiant. B was feeling defiant.

"Let's take it one step at a time. Now, how do you begin drawing hands?" I say. I had shown them some techniques whereby the artist simplifies an object into geometric shapes.

"I don't care, it's stupid!". She is looking away from me. But I'm still there.

"Well, can I see what you've done so far?"

"I didn't do anything. It's not good, I'm not an artist. God, can't I change classes? Can't I take Creative Writing or music instead?"

She has drawn something, in fact, and I move it closer. She is still looking away, and is very poor at hiding her annoyance with me.

It is a rudimentary mitten-shape hand - the first step in the process of observational drawing through geometric reduction. There are still three steps to go: contour lines for the shape of the fingers and hand, details in the wrinkles and lines, and finally shading.

"OK, well this is actually a good start," I encourage.

"No it's not, it's dumb. God."

"Look, you've only just started. Right, it's not beautiful now - I wouldn't buy this and put it in a frame and hang it on the wall - but you're on the right track. You just have to keep going."

She is looking at the drawing now, not looking away. She is quiet.

"It's like cooking. Do you cook? Well let's say you're making a soup. You melted some butter in a pan, cut up some onions, and then you push the pan away saying, 'I can't make soup'. Well you haven't made soup yet! You're only getting started! Wait til you make the soup and taste it, then you can decide if you can make soup or not. OK?"

She is still looking at the drawing. She has picked up her pencil, and is kind of tickling the paper with her pencil. I move away and keep my distance for the remainder of class, but I keep my eye on her. She will work on her drawing for the rest of period.

At the end of class, she comes up to me with a finished drawing of a hand like her own, holding a pencil. It is crude and simple, but she is beaming.

"Look, what do you think?" she gushes. I praise enthusiastically, it is the freaking Mona Lisa. I give her a verbal pat on the back, saying that I always knew she could do it.

She takes the drawing with her, and will come back periodically throughout the day to show me her progress on the drawing. A little detail added to the knuckles. A change in design to a baby hand holding a rattle, and oh yes, how do you draw a rattle? Some color, some shadow. How do you get the right skin tone?

She hasn't asked to drop my class since.

It's a new art school.

For me, anyway.

I am borrowing the title for this blog from a song by the Jam – “Art School”, side one track one on their first album – and I long for it to have symbolic meaning, but it would be a stretch. The art school The Jam sang about was a metaphoric one and the song was meant to be a statement of purpose – a manifesto for the first wave of punk (and one that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the fascist rhetoric of the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which glorifies war and speed and calls for the destruction of museums and libraries). Probably not a total success as a manifesto – the "All Mod Cons" LP works better both musically and philosophically - but still something I keep hearing in the back of my mind as the soundtrack to the montage of images (the clip-show episode?) of the high school TV drama that was my day at work. “Say what you want, 'cos this is a new art school”.

It's a new art school, because I am a new art teacher. I am in the middle of my second year teaching art in a public high school, and it is a new career in a new town. My profession for most of my 20s was music – record store owner, shipping drone for record label, struggling musician, 4-track jockey – but my background was in visual art. After selling the record store and dissolving several bands I decided to look into teaching. Seemed like the perfect new path which held on to the best bits of the old path: creative, with a performance aspect, but most of all affecting the lives of other people in a positive way.

It's a new art school because it's nothing like the old art school. I hope. I have very few positive memories of my high school art classes, and certainly did not enter education because I had an inspiring art teacher. I went to a small private high school – less prep school, more country club – and was taught art by the wife of the headmaster. Well-meaning person, but not the kind of teacher who wanted to have challenging, philosophical discussions about painting or the state of contemporary art (as I did, and tried to do). Most of our projects were time-fillers. There was very little freedom to select content or media, and very few opportunities to analyze or evaluate our work. I hope to change that for my students.

It's a new art school because, despite expensive schooling and training and the first sprouts of experience, I really don't know what I'm doing. I went on to study art and art history in college (despite my ho-hum high school art experience) and art education at the graduate level, but I still feel unprepared for much of what I do. Too much theory, too little practice. I had some very helpful professors and an excellent student teaching mentor – I still hear his Obi Wan voice reminding me to use The Force in a sticky situation – but, for the most part, I was told that many things about teaching can’t be taught.

And they were right.

For these reasons, I feel it is necessary to keep a journal of my experience – a journal about the teaching of art, and the art of teaching. A place to reflect on the challenges and occasional successes of what has so far been the hardest thing I have ever done. Anyone got some pointers?