writings

writings, presentations, and abstracts

Fear of Meaning: Contemporary Art and Denuded Sign
(Peet Cocke and Scott Brennan-Smith)

Intention is integral to art making. Late capitalist visual culture, however, has thrived on the idea that art is synonymous with open-ended, viewer-determined meanings. Post-modern attacks on intention have created a climate in which viewers expect meaning to be so baffling and opaque that there is no visible difference between opacity and emptiness. Lacking context in which viewing has the potential to register significance through shared cultural commonalities, contemporary artists, like Madison Avenue have learned that trendiness is the sine qua non of success in the marketplace.

Artists who do work with clear subject matter and focused intention, do not preclude the role of the viewer in the process of constructing meaning, but rather the viewer imparts facets of interpretation providing a depth and richness to subject matter and intention, serving to articulate the artists’ intention even more clearly. This is not to say that intention is always clearly verbalized, inherent in the process of art making are parallel processes of shifting intentions within a wide swath of subject matter and form. Essential in this is an artist, cognizant of their intention, even if that grasp is an a tangential one. Post-modern visual culture has left us in a vacuum, where the object, maybe devoid of skill, maybe not, but certainly stripped of intention masquerades as both subject matter and form, and relieves the artist of historical and societal responsibility.

This paper will explore the idea of intention and intentionless meaning, post-modernist visual culture, and the role of late capitalism, citing specific examples from contemporary artists from the 20th and 21st century.

At 29.97 Frames a Second, Arshile Gorky Makes Me Sad

Throughout human history, we have made art and told stories, our shared, collective myths and art are an essential part of how we define ourselves as human and our humanity. What role do collective narratives and mythologies have in shaping an emphatic response? (Joseph Campbell) and what of literature, reading and the human imagination. (JRR Tolkien, JK Rowling) How has this context changed since the moving image, and later image and sound, became our primary mode for the mass communication of images and narratives.

How do images, both still and moving, aural and silent mediate whole mythologies, whole lifetimes, vast expanses of time and seemingly insignificant moments with equal grace and power? Why is it that moving images engender empathy—allowing us to suspend our disbelief and invoke and emotional response—but we are equally unmoved by a still image of exactly same subject? Do we recognize when we are being manipulated by these images?(Spielberg) And what effect does that have on the subject matter, form and our emotional response? Does cognition preclude an emotional response? What do visual artists do with the medium of film that differs from Hollywood? and Why is Hollywood so much better at it?

This presentation will explore these questions by using specific narratives across baroque painting, (Caravaggio) 20th century painters, (Kahlo, Warhol) video artists (Bill Viola) and feature films (Spielberg, Jackson) whose origins predate them all, and address the how and why differences, in the cognitive and emotional response engendered each medium. It will examine the apparent shift in the collective context where the still image, requiring cognition, seemingly elicits less of an emotional response than that of a more passively viewed moving image. It will also explore how individual artistic endeavors are enhanced and weakened by the ubiquity of technology, (iMovie, YouTube) and what role critical discourse plays in an emphatic response.

Digital Design or Adding Mighty Mouse to Your Toolbox

In examining the foundation curriculum we found the digital arts component is taught in isolation from problem solving issues addressed in other studio courses. We found that the skills acquired in the digital courses were not being applied outside their settings; also that digital arts were not a component of more traditional studio classes. We needed to find a way to address this fragmentation, and also fully address critical thinking skills as well as systematic integration of multi-modal pedagogical approaches. (Howard Gardner)

We first determined our primary goals 1. The integration of new technology; 2. Improved ideation and creative thinking, and 3. The enhancement of a students’ ability to understand and articulate their visual art work in the contemporary cultural context. The incorporation of these goals involves revisions to non-foundation courses and additional foundation level courses.

Solutions to out first goal required enhancement to existing curriculum. Already being taught were six-week, intensive software specific courses. These courses were specific art applications image compositing (Photoshop), illustration (Illustrator) and page layout (InDesign) software. These software packages form the core foundations with the digital area. These courses provided a basic understanding of the mechanics of the specific software programs, always within the context of the visual arts, and with particular emphasis on problem solving. Grasping the intricate particulars of software programs can be a daunting task, what we began to notice with young college students was a level of sophistication and savvy with the applications, from either being self-taught or experience in high school therefore it was not important for the focus of the courses to be on step-by-step procedures, but it was important to focus on concepts, principles and discovery. This was a key change, if the students were trained to “discover” the answers to their specific questions through the use of the resources that were consistently present, i.e. the application help file or manual, and/or third party manuals, rather than being hand-held through the software, then the curriculum could focus on the application of these skills within the larger context of the visual arts, rather than on knowledge and comprehension. This open-end approach to the software has yielded excellent results, by mid-semester the default response for a student to a specific question was to consult the help file embedded in the software and through trial and error the answer was discovered and because this discovery was made by the student, from within themselves it was more likely to be retained

Repetition and reinforcement through application is required in order to fully integrate the digital tools with the curriculum. We divided our digital facility into a private classroom and an open lab. This open lab became the support lab for all fine arts courses and is supervised by a fine arts faculty member fluent with the software and with the visual arts. We then looked at one of the first core courses in any foundations program 2-dimensional design. In cooperation will several colleagues who teach 2D design we developed a bank of projects that included a digital component or were entirely digital in nature. For example the visual element

Line:
Function of Line in Composition (9 Design Problems)
Overall objective is to create 9 compositions using line as the main organizational element. Line should be used to organize the composition into interesting positive and negative areas, and to illustrate the principle of design. For each design, consider varying the line width and length and how maintaining/breaking the picture plane could enhance/diminish the design. Do not use line to create shapes or recognizable images; use lines to break up the composition. Their function should be structural, not decorative. Make all compositions asymmetrical unless specific otherwise.

Create symmetrical balance using only straight horizontal and vertical line. Divide the ground into a design that emphasizes line, but develops interest in how the space in divided.
Create asymmetrical balance using only straight lines
Create Harmony using only curved lines
Create Variety using a combinations of vertical, horizontal, diagonal and curved lines of varying widths.
Use only vertical, diagonal and/or horizontal lines to imply shape, with line as the ground and the white of the paper as the figure. Final composition should display a reversal or unexpected relationship between positive/negative space and figure/ground.
Use any combination of lines to emphasize proportional relationships.
Use any combination of lines to create a focal point or visual dominance.
Use any combination of lines to emphasize movement, repetition, rhythm and progression
Use any combination of lines to create economy.

This project required students to use the line segment tool and the stroke palette. The project could have been completed by using the more complex pen tool,

Create a composition, digitally and to be repeated three times, to explore the following color schemes, relationships, and simultaneous contrast: Analogous, Warm/Cool, and a playful use of color that may challenge our notions of aesthetically pleasing relationships. The digital compositions should be 8x10 @300 dpi and use the images that I have approved.

The tools that will be used are the magic wand tool, and manipulating the tolerance to control the creation of your shapes. You will also be using the paint bucket tool. Select colors by using the Pantone Solid Uncoated color swatches; be creative and adventurous with your use of color since you can always change the color.

To help achieve our second goal we developed a new course entitled “Conceptual Blockbusting” and plan to integrate it into the foundations curriculum as well as the GE pattern of the college as a whole. Based on a combination of the cognitive learning ladder know as Bloom’s Taxonomy (Benjamin Bloom), Howard Gardner’s work on multiple intelligence and James L. Adams (Author of the book by the same name) this course was design to deconstruct the creative process and allow through lecture and practical experience each student to identify their learning strengths and Explore the mental and emotional factors involved in the creative process, identifying common perceptual, cultural, emotional and intellectual blocks to creativity. The course presents students with basic concepts to enhance innate creative abilities. Numerous creative problem-solving techniques, invention, scientific, and artistic case studies are explored.

Our planned “capstone” to the program sequence was the addition of a “history of digital art” or “new media” course. A survey art history course specific to digital art, this course would begin with an introduction of the artist and the computer, and move through a brief history of the computer, printing, image editing, digital painting and drawing, 3D modeling, animation and the web and interactivity. And a project based course in which the students would complete a site-specific installation. This project, modeled after a two-semester project in SUNY Stony Brook combined 2D design, 3D design, photography and digital art. The projects are to be highly considered, and detailed planning is required, from preliminary sketches through a detailed hardcopy document and/or web site, documenting the process and installation. Through this process of both of these courses a context could be explored, beginning with early modernism, dada and surrealism, through pop and the inceptions of earth art, installation, site specific installation work, including film/video and performance.

Like digital art itself this conception of a foundations program inclusive of digital media is in flux. We are at the preliminary stages, integrating a digital component into 2D design, drawing as well as some of the more advanced courses, beginning and intermediate painting and intermediate drawing. We anticipate many modifications to this concept as the program grows.

American Idol and the Rise of Mediocrity

The role of the critique in the discourse of visual art is “over.” This proclamation is familiar to me as well, but it is familiar to me from a chorus of students whose educational experience lacks fundamental critical thinking skills. An educational system obsessed with “tests” and “learning outcomes.” An educational system whose only goal is the regurgitation of facts without regard to Benjamin Bloom’s “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives” comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

The era critique isn’t over it’s just “hard work” it requires students to think, and in many cases arrive at the realization that their work might actually trite, pedantic, devoid of aesthetic value and content. This is an impossibly difficult realization to come, to given that media culture dictates that anyone can be a superstar regardless of how boring they may actually be. We can thank MTV and a multitude of others for starting us down this road in popular culture, The Real World, Big Brother #1 through whatever; the endlessly tedious Survivor and Fear Factor series. All series in which we, the voyeur, watch “people just like us.” But they are not just like us, they have been chosen based on a carefully crafted set of criteria, and then placed in a strictly controlled situation, where the entire situation and outcome is predetermined, predetermined by the producer, by the program’s sponsors, and by the person or persons with their hands on the non-linear editing device. All of which is designed to make the whole ordeal appear entertaining and as arbitrary as real life. This, despite the fact that we know through actual experience that our real lives are not arbitrary and not always entertaining. Because of this experience of media, students arrive at out classrooms with a well ingrained sense that you either have or you don’t, and the fact they are there in the first place means they often have a strong belief that they already do have it. In the context of such a well-entrenched belief system, it is no wonder students resist criticism generally and the critique specifically. Consumer culture has led to a pervasive sense that personal choice is the operant factor in all endeavors, so merely choosing something lends an air of authority to all our actions. Never is there and opening for second-guessing, for reflection, especially not with the voice of “authority” behind it. Not only media culture but the culture at large which even now, in its extreme, is beginning to accept that what was once right and wrong, good or bad, is an inalienable choice, a human right, with no regard to any collective morality that formerly coupled right and wrong with a set of somewhat universally accepted rules and definitions. Slavoj Zizek addresses this in his paper entitled “You May” In this paper Slavoj sites:

…According to the risk society theory of Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and others, we no longer live our lives in compliance with Nature or Tradition; there is no symbolic order or code of accepted fictions (what Lacan calls the ‘Big Other’) to guide us in our social behavior. All our impulses, from sexual orientation to ethnic belonging, are more and more often experienced as matters of choice. Things which once seemed self-evident—how to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself—have now been ‘colonised’ by reflexivity, and are experienced as something to be learned and decided on.

This combination of an educational system whose emphasis is only on knowledge unencumbered by comprehension, and this reflexive culture, presents college professors with students whose simultaneous self-appointed significance and desire to only get the “right” answer, can prove deadly to an instructor critical of a work, especially in a public/peer forum such as a critique. Moreover in a studio course, resolutions to problems tend toward the subjective, and this “right answer” becomes a “good solution” which is still experienced through reflexivity, as a choice, and is then, because there may be no “right answer” further elevated, beyond criticism. Ironically this situation is exactly one reason that a critique is necessary, for it is through the process of a critique, where that “good solution” is examined and contextualized, and determined to be a “good solution.”

The art world took a long step toward reflexivity in 1917. There isn’t a 20th century art history course in this country that doesn’t show this urinal and talk about it as a fundamental shift in the way art is produced. Of course we all know that content is informed by context and however and whatever the actual theory, behind this action, contemporary students, steeped in reflexivity, and weaned on getting “the” answer, will invariably look at this and see; a urinal, devoid of the artists hand with the exception of “R Mutt” scrawled on the porcelain—art because Duchamp said it was. He described his purpose with the piece as shifting the focus of art from physical craft to intellectual interpretation. And the art world didn’t stop there we further embraced more formal movements abstract expressionism, color field, minimalism, formal from our contextual, learned perspective, but from the outside something quite different, and today we bear the fruit of that embrace, anyone can drip paint, and anyone can paint wide fields of uninterrupted color; stripped of their context they become even more accessible and pedestrian.

The true master, Warhol, showed us how it was done. The quintessential blend of Duchampian theory; art because the artist proclaims it, celebrity, and craft. “In the future everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes” what we didn’t know at the time was that this was a warning—world-famous for fifteen minutes in a lifetime. What we also didn’t know at the time is that for the spectator those fifteen minutes can seem like a lifetime. All of the previous work was new and challenging for its context, and consciously or unconsciously built on Duchamp’s proclamation, and it was with a voracious and unbounded appetite the art world embraced and consumed this work, and the celebrity.

How did we get here? Prior to the turn of the last century artistic training and supplies were accessible to only the few, pigments, canvas, and painting and drawing materials were expensive and out of reach of most, and only the few could spend their hours painting or sculpting without having to be concerned with keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. In short prior to the industrial revolution art making was reserved to a certain class, and the principle of unintended consequence is simultaneously benevolent and cruel. Out of the industrial revolution eventually came inexpensive artistic materials. Artistic training shifted from the few apprenticeships to public schools, colleges and universities. This migration of materials and skills continues to this day and has enlarged to include media and technology.

One only has to visit “myspace” to expose oneself to mass experimentation in design with tools previously reserved for the few. Experimentation unbridled by anything, not even content, assuming it’s there, stands a chance. Viewing a fraction of the “myspace” pages, is itself perhaps the best justification for retaining the critique. Coupling the deployment of tools to the masses with the reflexivity of the culture, and a knowledge only based educational system we get people who call themselves and artists and designers and what they make art and design; and further, the demand to be beyond criticism; for how can you criticize when according to the reflexivity of popular culture, it is an inalienable right to choose.

Anyone can call themselves an artist—I go to the local art store I buy paint, I squeeze some on the canvas, smear it around there it is. Anyone can call themselves a filmmaker, I shoot some footage with my phone, I drop it into iMove, edit it and there it is. But all I’ve really done is paint; and make a home movie. And this is where the critique is essential. Being an artist is a career, and it requires of us a lifetime of commitment, intense study, and work, making good art for a single semester can and should require these same characteristics. One cannot use the tools and proclaim oneself an expert, or even proficient, one cannot simply know the facts without understanding and comprehending what they mean. An educational system fails its students, its purpose, its community, and its culture when it lacks goals beyond the knowledge of facts. We want our students to be innovative and experiment, to push beyond the boundaries, and we want them to comprehend, evaluate and synthesize what that means. The critique is the process by which we do that—and in that process we find sometimes that a urinal is just a urinal.