Blog #3 - Duncum's 7 Principles

Duncum's 7 Principles - 

Hybridization?

Layering?

Appropriation?

Art Provides these 7 principles: power, ideology, representation, seduction, gaze, intertextuality, and multimodality.  The last two principles are recently added to the new areas being explored in visual images.  Along with other well known art principles, intertextuality and multimodality are explored by Paul Duncum.

Due to the present availability of computers and changes in social norms, Duncum points to some innovative organizing principles that are new and necessary in understanding and teaching new Visual Cultural Studies.  His references include some of the following regarding visual images: "agency, audience, discourse, globilization, high and low culture, identity, myth, rhetoric, scope, regime, semiotics, and visuality."

Modality, according to Duncum, is that there is no purely visual images;  that they never appear without words, music, or other sounds.  Multimodality becomes clear in television, movies, in print, and on computer screens.  "Words, music and sounds effect anchor the meaning of images."  Duncum found that pictures of children with happy, pleasing music in the background were perceived differently by the viewer if the music was a genre which eluded to fear with a threatening tone.  Magazines in foreign languages become void of understandable meaning, even with the image present, when the words that facilitated the understanding of the image were absent.  In addition, television, when viewed without sound, was vacant in complete understanding.

Intertextuality, according to Wilson, is stated that "All images relate to other cultural texts such as books, poems, music, and of course, other images."  "With computers, intertextuality is known as hypertext, where pressing on blue words, and often on pictures, immediately takes the user to a related screen."  Students make associations through the access of new and intricate connections.

Duncum integrated low-technology with intertext by encouraging students to group and organize their divisional ideas and the far reaching cultural associations from one multimodal visual much like the show, American Idol.

In our present time, or society is experiencing a virtual avalanche of visual imagery on a global scale.  The basic key elements, power, and how it is expressed, ideology or cultural beliefs and values, and manipulations of body posture, gesture, gaze, are all still the absolute formal elements  and principles that are and always have been monumental in curriculum for the appreciation of and the understanding of art.  Duncum advises that educators need to be more fully equipped to challenge students in understanding images with new tasks in orientation in Multimodality and Intertextuality.

Blog #2 - Gude - New School Art Styles Article

In the article, Olivia Gude makes a strong case against that of Khami by saying that the old school art styles are beginning to prove to be ineffective. Gude makes reference to Effland, a researcher that, over 40 years ago, made the argument that art education in schools was NOT cohesive with the art that was being created in High Schools.

Gude has adopted these principles, and has taken them to a new height by integrating a set of standards that are making solid ground in the art education profession.

Gude challenges us as art educators to reexamine our curriculum and decipher whether it is affluent with the use of discipline-centered inquiry, construction of knowledge, and making a connection beyond school.  She has invoked a set of Values in which we shall investigate.

Engaging in authentic artistic processes over making facsimiles is described by focusing on the artist's making process vs. the final product.  In other words, to indulge in the meaning of artmaking.

Utilizing skills, forms, and vocabulary in authentic contexts over de-contextualized exercises and recipes.  Do this by teaching vocabulary within rule bound projects and enhancing creativity by designing open ended projects that produce unexpected results.

Investigating over symbolizing.  This is accomplished by encouraging students to find out something new, not by making them envision what is already known and accepted.  Make them explore new subject matter in efforts to have them students learn something new about the subject matter.

Contemporary practices of a medium over a curriculum that merely recapitulates the history of the medium - this suggest that we borrow from previous meanings in efforts to use while making meaning of the new processes.  We do this by using historical, cutlural and aesthetic practices.

For Class.....

Blurring the boundaries between art and life according to Gude says that students whom accept the idea that art and artful/design thinking can be a part of their daily lives understand that art cannot just blur a boundary but can transform the way in which they experience the world…

To conclude, the article urges art educators to use these recipes to create new knowledge by using artistic methodologies to experience the world in fresh ways.

Facilitating Investigations Week - 1

After reading the article by Michelle Marder Kamhi http://www.aristos.org/aris-04/rescuing.htm, I must say that I was immediately looking for a refuting article.  As one who came from the Visual Culture generation, I was taken back by some of the arguments that she was making against my field.  I will note two of them, and then pose my thoughts.  For my refuting article, I chose our friendly reading companion, Paul Duncum. http://vassarliteracy.pbworks.com/f/Duncum_visual_cultural.pdf

The Breakdown

Kahmi states: "By focusing on abstract questions of race, class, gender, and ethnicity, moreover, the visual culture approach to interpretation lays stress on politicized issues that divide society, rather than on shared human values and concerns."

This is a statement that I feel needs to be "focused on."  To start, artists of the early age (i.e Michelangelo, Leonardo, etc.), whole-heartedly focused on issues that divided society at that time.  Religion (which is referenced), would be one of them.  These artists focused on the political issue of religion regularly, which at that time, very much divided Society.  Slavery was prevalent, it has been said that homosexuality was common, women were not treated as equals, but Religion...It was a BIG DEAL!  There was no need to really sell Religion, as it was sure persecution if one chose a different path.  I believe that focusing on issues today, are no different than those of the fine artists, who focused on issues of their time.

Kahmi states:

Postmodernist genres such as "Pop art," "installation art," and "video art" have nothing essential in common with the traditional visual arts and therefore should not be classified or studied with them as "art."

She is correct that there is little in common with with traditional visual arts, as the mediums used back then are still being used today, but are being used to portray a different message.  I want to make clear, however, that mediums have changes.  An artist's pallet has been modified to different mediums that were not being used back then, as they simply did not exist.  I believe that Michelangelo would have used a camera, had he gotten the chance.  The beauty of art and culture is that it is constantly changing, with society (which consistently changes).  Our ability to adapt to different environments is one of the keys to our survival as human beings.  This calls for cultural awareness.  If we do not understand culture, we will not be able to adapt to what is around us.  

Nick Kremer (AWESOME) wrote in an assignment I was recently investigating in his class:

At its narrowest, [Art] is a collection of visual masterpieces deemed so over time by “experts” in the field; at its broadest, all of creation. Most agree to a definition somewhere between these two extremes, citing other notable qualifications for art such as being “man-made,” “creative,” “aesthetic,” “purposeful,” or “holding metaphysical value” to the creator and/or its viewer”.


Well put, sir!