Article Topic - Torbett - Carroll Text - Faciliting Aesthetic and Critical Inquiry

One of the "missing links" that I feel lay prevalent in the studies involving visual culture lies within the portion pertaining to the engagement of students to art objects.  By this, I mean allowing students to actually "see art."  And in saying that, I am referencing physical pieces or works of art.  With technology and the internet today, Museums are seeing less and less traffic, and a more saddening fact is that museums are being viewed as places to go see old things.  I chose to use an article for this segment of Carroll text which "hones" in on a study in the United Kingdom in which students were taken to an art museum and were engaged with actual authentic art. The article is titled, Promoting Positive Attitudes in Children Towards Museums and Art:  A Case Study of the Use of Tate Kids in Primary Arts Education, by Koula Charitonos, from the Open University in United Kingdom.

As I stated above, the article deals with the challenges of getting learners to the museums to view actual art.  It also focuses on promoting positive attitudes in children towards museums and art and also addresses to what extent the use of Museum Web Sources can enhance learning and engagement.

The study introduces the United Kingdom museums to be the most fluently visited museums by teachers.  The case study research focused on children, the Tate Kids, and sought to understand their perceptions of events by describing participants' experiences and thoughts about a particular situation.  The children were asked to write a definition of what a museum was on a sheet of paper.  The overall perception was that a museum was 'a  learning place.'  The children were asked to create meaning maps which showed that museums were collectively related to knowledge in general. The study also showed that the Tate kids referenced the museum as something tangible, and that there was no virtual mentions in the meaning maps. Reference was made to the museum that "old retired people were there," and that museums can be boring, as they were made to sit down for long periods of time while someone talked.

During the reading, and interesting quote from a student named Maria caught my attention. She states that she doesn't like museums and viewing because "I don't get the picture, I don't really get the picture...and I don't know if the artwork is good."  She also said, "Art isn't treated as in school."  This may be linked to the fact that children view art as a practical activity, rather that completed works. Th children seem to think that art done is school is more 'authentic.' (Charitonos) 

The final question asked to the Tate Kids was "What do you think art is?"  After visiting the museum, the consensus was that art is not purely practice, that it is also viewing.  One student even said, "Art is for everyone."  You may draw a picture and you may not like it but someone else might like it and get stuff from it.  

The rest of the article/study (which I will not detail), states the importance of using art museums Web media to drive students to the museums to view actual art.  It also promotes using this media (Web) to encourage the viewing of art in a classroom setting, rather than focusing solely on art making.  I believe this ties in with making meaning through art.  We must have a strong sense of vocabulary when viewing, so it would be necessary to take art further in the classroom than just making.  Making meaning of art will enhance and encourage the iKids to take a stroll at their local museums and galleries.

Torbett Blog Topic -Art:21 Mike Kelley

The Artist that I chose for the Art:21 Series was Mike Kelley.  His primary focus was on using memory to create art.  Mike Kelley passed away in 2012, and there was a nice memorial tribute to him on the site, which included additional interviews with Art:21.  He received his BFA from the University of Michigan and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts.  He created memory pieces by using highly symbolic ritualistic performances and stuffed animal sculptures.  He also creates paintings and models.  In referencing the questions posed, I came to these attributes:

1.  How will you help students connect the enduring idea to the students' lives?

I chose Mike Kelley's works because they are indirectly involved with High School (which I will get to shortly).  Using memory is vitally important to connecting to any works of art.  Having students act out visual interpretations through dance or perfomance can utilize repetition, which enhances memory and serves as aesthetic understanding.

2.  How will you build students' knowledge base about the enduring idea as it relates to other content areas as well as to life?

We are all ritualistic people.  A student's knowledge base could be built upon realistic values.  A ritualistic approach to connects developmental processes can be attributed to creativity and art making. 

3.  How will you build students' knowledge bas about enduring ideas as they occur in art.

Kelley suggests in his documentary that there is a perception that all work is created through "repressed trauma."  We can adopt principles of art criticism while viewing his work such as Art:21 Sessions.  Also, view his work titled 12 seasons, in which ovals were painted in efforts to show endlessness, and black space was used to represent "missing time."  The 12 Seasons is a symbolic series of work which represents his abuse as a child and reoccurring trauma that he faced in life.

4.  How will you engage students with exploring, questioning, and problematizing  the enduring idea through artmaking?

Kelley shows an interesting work in which he recreated models of all schools that he attended as a child, including his childhood home.  The interesting approach is seen when he purposely left out rooms and other portions of the structure that he doesn't remember. This symbolism is used to project the power of memory.  What we have and what was lost.  Students could be asked to recreate certain pieces from memory, and only focusing on what is remembered.  Also, Kelley uses what he calls "past high school rituals" such as Prom, Dances, Homecoming, etc.  He recreates them from memory.  Maybe students could create storyboards, backdrops, props focusing on how these so called rituals would be conducted in their own right.  Also, they could create their own soundtrack using what Mike Kelley calls noise makers.

Kelley was an interesting study.  I enjoyed this artist.

Torbett Article 2 - Carrol Text - Developing A Repertoire of Skills

One of the topics involving visual culture that I have embraced, and feel as though may be one of the most crucial interdisciplinary approaches to this movement is visual storytelling.  As a Graphic Designer (Visual Communicator), and artist, I feel that telling a story or sending a message visually is at the core of visual literacy.

For this topic in Carroll text, I chose an article titled Encouraging Visual Storytelling (Moving Forward), organized by the Alumni Study Group for Narrative Art, Maryland Institute College of Art.

The article opens by stating that the interest in narrative art and visual storytelling has moved to the forefront of art education as a practice.  Visual Storytelling reflects n the intertwining of several ideas.  These ideas include the conception that children look at most things in the sense of a story.  Also, the idea that graphic narrative conventions helps aid a child to tell more visually appealing stories can only prove to be a positive influence on the learning child.  "The research of Brent and Marjorie Wilson and Janet Olson have done much to forward the practice of developing narrative techniques.  In Practice, narrative skills seem particularly useful in providing a bridge from early schematic drawing to a more flexible and dynamic language that can express emotions, action, interaction, special effects, time and weather, all in the service of a story."

Jerome Brunner has developed a conclusion that through story, we gather and build most of the meaning that we get from life. We tell stories to reflect upon past occurrences in our everyday life.  Therefore, it can only make sense that we utilize art in storytelling, whether the story derives from literature, drama, music, mythology, etc.

The case is made when stated that the best reason of all to pursue visual storytelling as a means of visual expression is that it brings forth an authentic voice and gives it an artful format.  In telling a story, no matter how tragic, sad, funny, moving, dramatic, or remarkable, a visual meaning is constructed.  

Torbett - Blog Topic- Carrol Text - Fascilitating Investigations

The article that I chose was written by W.J.T. Mitchell, and Titled Interdisciplinarity and Visual Culture.  Mitchell refers to visual culture as "iconology," and defines it as the general studies of images across the media.  Iconology focuses on the cultural construction of visual experience in everyday life as well as in the media, representations, and visual arts. "Visual culture is, in short, an "interdiscipline," a site of convergence and conversation across disciplinary lines" (Mitchell).

Mitchell introduces 3 specific kinds of interdisciplinality:

1.  Top Down - A comparative, structural formation that aims at reproducing itself in a new disciplinary form or is content to remain an ad hoc or transitional moment.

2.  Bottom Up - a compulsive and compulsory interdiscpiliarity that is dictated by a specific problem or event.

3.  Inside Out - an indisciplined or anarchist moment in interdisciplinarity.

It is referred that Cultural studies are considered "the awful truth" that was concealed for so long under euphemism of interdisciplinarity. Visual Culture is a new hybrid interdiscipline that links art history with literature, philosophy,studies in film and mass culture, sociology, and anthropology.  In making the case for art history, Mitchell claims that visual culture would be an "inside out" interdisciplinary, as it looks like an "outside" to art history opening out the larger field of vernacular images, media, and everyday visual practices. On the other hand, it may look like an "inside" to art history's traditional focus on the sensuous and semiotic peculiarity of the visual, as art history relies on pre-conceptualized models that have already been put into place for the viewer.

It is Mitchell's feelings that disciplines such as mass media and and film would fit more comfortably in the visual culture shell, as both are the most powerful and persuasive forms of visual culture. Mitchell finalizes on Five key points necessary to define visual culture as a true discipline:

1.  Visual culture should be "mindful" of the different disciplinary histories that have blended within its terminology.  

2.  It must recognize that vision is a mode of cultural expression and human communication that is as fundamental and widespread as language.

3.  It has to resist the consructivist reflex and reopen the question of culture's boundaries with visual nature.

4.  Visual Culture from the standpoint of vision must lead us to aesthetic and semiotic boundaries.

5.  (Interesting) - Visual culture must be grounded in noth only the interpretation of images, but the description of the social field of the "gaze," the construction of subjectivity, identity, desire, memory, and the imagination.

This article really helped me define  visual culture.  It gave me a better understanding of what visual culture actually is.  It also opened my mind to the interdisciplinary structure of visual culture (its makeup).

Incorporating language in visual culture must be taken into action in order for one to understand the literacy behind this movement. 

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!

The iBrain

This was a great read.  I could not help but think of my poor mother, who has been technologically left behind.  How frustrating it is for her.  My step-father, after 35 years, has decided to go back to school and secure his degree in embalming.  Creepy, I know.  He has elected to take online courses, and it has been a pain trying to bring them up to speed enough to actually get true functionality out of their computer, much less, bring them to the world of online learning.

In relation to the chapter, I am totally an ibrainer.  I am so stimulated by digital visualization that I cannot get enough.  I am NOT a multi-tasker.  Technology allows me to be, somewhat.  I am hyperactive, and in retrospect to the views of the Chapter (Stone),  I am think that over-exposure to visual data is a good thing.  I am drawn to a video we watched in class that stated the average child spends 6 hours per day in front of a screen.  How impressive!  I think that we are seeing words like hyperactivity and anxiety and stress more, because students are likely to become bored without visual stimulation.  Let's face it, the days of inventing a game to play outside in between lemonade breaks are virtually over.

Instead, we crave information.  We beg for exposure to visual data that is either personally stimulating, professionally stimulating, or educationally stimulating.  I believe these words are derived form those who could simply bored by the lack of visual stimulation.  This Chapter is right down my ally as it deals with the research I have been conducting dealing with kids and lack of communication skills being developed because of all of the digital communication that is being conducted to date.  I keep reminiscing about a photo I saw of one of my Freshman students while in elementary school playing with his iPhone 3 in class!  That doesn't seem so long ago.  We are 1-3 years away from students being totally exposed to this information at an early age.

The concern being brought up dealing with the effect of screen time on babies and youngsters was quite interesting.  My son is better at angry birds than me and he is four.  His verbal skills CRUSH mine at his age, and he is using bigger words.  I am a stay at home dad with a travelling wife, and do feel that too much TV can cause overstimulation.  I try to limit my child, but with interactive games, and other medias, I feel that exposure is good.  Most games my son plays deal with problem solving.  Where's my water? , Angry Birds and other similar games are great in helping children develop problem solving skills.

The iBrain will continue to develop, as it should with technology.  It is OUR generation that will need to pick up the slack in the gap.  We MUST stay ahead of our children, or at least keep pace as best as we can.  I cannot wait to see what developments lie on the horizon.