Autumn 2021 Reflection and Resources

This autumn I am completing the course “The Artmaking Process” at OSU with Dr. J.T. Eisenhauer Richardson. The purpose of this course is to develop understandings of the artmaking process as a way to engage with creativity and meaning making. We experienced new ways of thinking through personal artmaking assignments as well as through written work by professionals in the fields of art, art education, philosophy, and anthropology. The end goal of the work is to serve as a way to foster creativity in the students that we will teach. Some of the major topics covered in this course involved play and nonsense as a means of creation and meaning making, the interplay of sensation and creation, rhizomatic versus arborescent thinking, disruptions as an artmaking strategy, and the importance of incorporating the everyday into the artmaking process among others. One of the topics I found most significant in the course was incorporating play as a tool for learning. By incorporating nonsense strategies or creating barriers to overcome into certain lessons, it is possible to teach creativity to students by allowing them to learn through doing. We learn as much from the act of play and creation as we would from learning from reading, and sometimes more. The difference of learning through doing is that the thing learned is internalized more easily because it came from within. This will continue to be something that I try to incorporate into my lessons with my students to allow them to teach themselves to be independent thinkers with creative problem-solving skills.

Through this course I learned a lot about the theory behind teaching creative problem solving. I learned that I have been incorporating things into my teaching practice (creative obstructions, rhizomatic thinking, artmaking as disruption) for several years now in my attempts to teach creativity at the high school level, though I am grateful to have some of the research to back up what I am doing. I intend to create new lessons that incorporate methods to allow the students to learn from within, and to collaborate in their learning through play. Some lessons I have done in the past have incorporated these aspects though I did not fully understand their value. I did know the students enjoyed the lessons where collaboration and play were used. One example from my Drawing 1 class would be during our portrait drawing unit. I teach a one day assignment in which students are to explain how to draw a specific face from a photograph, while the draftsman cannot see what is being drawn. This incorporates creative obstructions and a careful study of the everyday (a face), while allowing students to work with their peers collaboratively. The students enjoy the process, and through teaching each other and by doing the work themselves they also have been solidifying content on portrait drawing and using the materials.

A new concept to me was from Tim Ingold, in his book about anthropology. The idea of learning through doing, not because we are cognitively processing what is happening, but that the act of doing something has sensory input that informs our subconscious. This is where artists and craftsman can do things without thinking about them. By consistently working with our materials, we are able to learn how they move, where they push back, and how they want to be used. I look forward to incorporating this into some of my future lessons to allow for different methods of learning. I have taught a lesson on using non-traditional media in past years in which we have worked with unusual, everyday materials in our artmaking process to create a finished artwork. I know that when this project comes around again I will be working in some additional opportunities for students to learn from the media they are using and to reflect on the process. The reflection is key to the process, and helps the students put what they are learning from within into words. A struggle I have run into in my own artmaking is this exact thing. In many of my own artmaking processes, past and present, I have let the process guide me. Sometimes, when a problem arises, I reflect on the issue and learn something new from the process. Other times, when all goes well, I move on without a second thought. I need to take the time to reflect on what works as well as what doesn’t. It’s ironic, actually. I often tell my students that we learn more from our problems than we do from our successes. It’s been staring me in the face for a while and through this reflective process I see that I need to flip the script to help them learn better. If the artmaking works well for me, I need to think more carefully over why so that I can pass that on to the students.

There have been many helpful resources that we covered this semester, but some of the biggest hits for me are listed below.

Annotated Bibliography:

Ingold, Tim. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. (pp. 1-44). Routledge. Ingold’s quote of “It is to regard art, in the first place, as a discipline, which shares with anthropology a concern to reawaken our senses and to allow knowledge to grow from the inside of being in the unfolding of life” (21) struck me the most. This relates back to the Deleuzian act of becoming, where the process is in a continual state of transformation. The idea that art, anthropology, architecture, and archaeology can be best explored by being actively engaged with the processes and materials to be studied. There is a difference between knowing and doing. Ingold’s title “Knowing from the Inside” (24) is significant to his work because it references the idea that knowledge is best internalized by actions taken in self-discovery, compared to collecting data from the works of others. Ingold’s approach to materials and materiality is one of fluidity in which the form, function, and interaction is constantly in flux. His mention of alchemy made his point clear to me. The base material of an artefact is not inherently something that can be pinned down easily because it holds many variables in it’s chemical and physical composition. All things come from a base material, and could be recombined or altered to meet many purposes.

Kaprow, Allan. (1997). Just Doing. TDR, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 101-106. https://coyotziculturia.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/kaprow_justdoing.pdf Kaprow explains several of his artmaking Happenings in which he or students were asked to engage in experimental art through ordinary spaces and occurrences. Alan Kaprow extends the idea of artmaking beyond the usual traditions of media and technique by his use of Happenings. His work focuses on the experience itself more than the product created. Similar to John Cage’s musical works, a Happening is something that lives only briefly and constructs its meaning not in brush strokes but in the memories of those who experienced it after the fact. The act of creating the work is not necessarily the artwork itself, but the act is integral to the art made in the lived experience of those involved. Kaprow explains that play is an essential part of experimentation, and it is different than “gaming” in that it does not have a winner or a loser. Play is not competitive, but often times collaborative. In Kaprow’s works it seems his interest in control is to guide the participant’s actions, while not specifically dictating the method in which they accomplish them. He relinquishes control of the participants to decide what the work means to them. Much like in everyday life, meaning is made in the mind of the person experiencing the event, and is rarely injected by an outside force. So does the works by Kaprow.

Walker, S.R. (2014). Artmaking and Sensation. Unpublished manuscript for Artmaking, Play, and Meaning-Making. Walker delves into the connections between the body, sensation, materiality, and art. artist Richard Serra created a verb list which ties in readily to experiencing the materials of artmaking, which is how Walker found herself working with these concepts. The premise put forth in this text explains that artists learn just as much, if not more, from the materials that are worked with as the instruction that may be provided. The writing covers the work of several art education students at OSU and some contemporary artists like Alfredo Jaar (Skogshall). An important point brought up in the reading explains that closure is needed for learning to be complete by verbally interacting about the experiences in artmaking. The artist must be reflective of what is learned and experienced as the materials work on the artist while the artist works with the materials. The interaction with materials teaches things subconsciously, and reflecting on the work causes the artist to bring the subconscious to the conscious. Another pedagogical point of note in this reading is that “Art should create its own reality rather than strive to re-present the real.” (40) This is more easily done by setting the conditions for an experience to be cultivated, instead of targeting specific emotions to pinpoint in the work created.

Walker, S.R. (2014). Naming Play for Artmaking. Unpublished manuscript for Artmaking, Play, and Meaning-Making. Walker explains in this reading some earlier uses of play in artmaking by the Dadaist, Surrealist, Fluxus, and Happening artists and the progression of moving from conventional artmaking practices for more everyday content, procedures, and materials. Play in artmaking is best served by starting with nonsense, and sense will be made from that. This reading covers contemporary artists Francis Alÿs, Gabriel Orozco, Rikrit Tiravinaji, & Sophie Calle and their methods of incorporating play into their practice. Play can participate in traditional or non-traditional approaches to artmaking, but will be motivated by different intentions.

Walker, S.R. (2014). Chapter 2: Rhizomatic Thinking. Unpublished manuscript for Artmaking, Play, and Meaning-Making. This reading extends the concept of nonsense and sense-making through the idea of artmaking as arborescent or rhizomatic. An arborescent process follows a more logical path, and stems from a base concept or practice and creates variations of ideas as it progresses. Rhizomatic processes typically grow in varied spaces in seemingly unrelated concepts that are caused by interactions with the exterior world, though there is an underlying root that ties them together. There is a lot of interplay with the illogical and the logical. Rhizomatic thinking is meant to actively disrupt meaning, which leads to new methods of thinking as compare to tree-thinking which creates heterogenous practices and work. This chapter covers several terms significant to Deleuzian practices and sense-making including deterritorialization, reterritorialization, the encounter, line of flight, and becoming as they relate to rhizomatic thinking.

Walker, S.R. (2014). Chapter 2: Everyday Play. Unpublished manuscript for Artmaking, Play, and Meaning-Making. This reading explores the subversive idea that “the artist’s role is not to make beautiful things, but to become an agent for social change.” (1) The first artist mentioned is Rikrit Tiravaniji and his work of creating a dining experience in a gallery space. The idea of incorporating the everyday into artwork is to celebrate the “unnoticed, trivial and repetitive actions comprising the common ground of daily life.” (2) Art has been incorporating aspects of the everyday into works since Picasso and Brague with synthetic Cubist works, to more recent works by Alan Kaprow and his everyday Happenings. This reading also includes mention of Ben Highmore who “identifies the quotidian with the intersection of the macro and micro, a characterization of the everyday as both large overarching structures of social power and small daily rituals.” (4) The take-aways from this reading as it relates to artmaking include planning an experience more than a work, make space for play, experiment with structures of the everyday, and relinquish expected outcomes.