“I do that.”
I tend to be very impressed with how the Museum of Modern Art presents artwork to elementary aged students. The museum educator picks images based on a theme, they lead the students through guided inquiry-based discussion of those images, students create sketches of ideas that are being presented to them, and they conclude the day by creating a work of art in the educational studios. MoMA has always been willing to make the tours as individualized as possible, so I always ask them to conclude the tour in the galleries displaying contemporary artwork.
Ms. Berry’s fourth grade class was recently led into the current exhibit, Here is Every: Four Decades of Contemporary Art, and the tour concluded with examining Arturo Herrera’s A Knock (2000). There is always something a little more exciting happening when students view contemporary art. It tends to lend itself to the natural sensibilities of children—a sense of fun, the whimsical nature of play, and a reflection of the world around us. When students encounter this work there seems to be a little more engagement on their part, possibly because the work genuinely reflects some of what they are thinking about. When the class sat in front of Herrera’s work and excitedly uncovered the many layers that exist in the piece, they began identifying the shapes and forms hidden within his cutouts and slowly realizing he used comics as his source material.
Personally, I have loved Herrera’s work for quite some time. But I was pleasantly surprised when our tour finished with A Knock because I knew that I could share Herrera’s Art:21 segment as a follow-up. My fourth graders loved seeing Herrera work in his studio and explore the different materials that he uses, especially the photo based work. Seeing the studio practice of artists can demystify the artistic process. Not only does it give a student the chance to say that “I can do that” but it gives them the chance to say “I DO THAT!”
What is so impressive about Herrera’s creative process is that it truly embodies how fourth graders create. Watching Herrera play with the images for his collage is the exact approach my students take….they re-contextualize the visual imagery in front of them to create some type of meaning. When students are presented with the question, “What does it mean for a work of art to be a portrait?,” they are now meaningfully engaged in the same type of questions that contemporary artists battle. Children have a wonderful ability to represent their reality in a way that offers terrific surprises in the same way Herrera uncovers in his work.
Collage created by Emily, age 9, Hillside School, New York.
Art21 Professional Development at MoMA
On Saturday, January 24 Art21 is partnering with the Museum of Modern Art to offer a full day professional development workshops titled Teaching with Objects and Film: Focus on Contemporary Art. The workshop introduces participants to a variety of strategies for engaging students with contemporary art through the study of objects in the museum’s galleries and the use of Art21 multimedia resources. This workshop will model ways to prepare for and extend museum visits with your students in the classroom through video, web, and print resources. Sessions in the museum’s galleries will focus on ways to engage students with looking at, discussing, and interpreting works of contemporary art. Workshop activities will emphasize inquiry-based learning, thematic approaches to teaching, and ways to integrate the artists’ process as described in their own words.
The workshop fee of $45 includes a copy of the Season Four Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century DVD and accompanying Educators’ Guide, MoMA Educator Guides, and an Educator’s pass that allows teachers free admission to the museum until September 2009.
Teaching with Objects and Film: Focus on Contemporary Art
In collaboration with MoMA
Saturday, January 24, 2009, 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
To register for Weekend Teacher Workshops or more information, please e-mail teacherprograms[at]moma.org or fill out this application form and fax it to (212) 333-1118.
Rolling Up Our Sleeves
Since this column gets posted on Wednesdays (and believe me, I didn’t arrange it this way), it’s been my pleasure to contribute posts directly after the November 4th election (see Hope and Change) and today, after the thrilling inauguration of Barack Obama as our 44th President.
Throughout President Obama’s speech, I kept thinking about ways we can teach students about being truly productive citizens- citizens that contribute, think critically, offer service, and teach others. It got me thinking about artists in the Art21 series who can help teach about these things in a variety of ways….
First, Krzysztof Wodiczko can certainly teach students that speaking out can not only be something done in a newspaper editorial or part of a speech, but it can also be a part of the art we create. Wodiczko helps voices literally project themselves and allows viewpoints to be shared in ways few artists approach.
Nancy Spero can teach about protest and history, and how protest can take many forms- somehow avoiding violence yet simultaneously picturing it.
Jenny Holzer offers students the opportunity to think critically about the text she uses in her work and then relate that to what it means to be a “good” or “productive” citizen. Her recent work with declassified documents can open up meaningful discussion about what citizens should know and be informed of.
Mark Dion can teach students about teaching others through art. Whether it’s work inspired by literature or installation inspired by natural elements, Dion shares with students that the work of contemporary artists can educate and inspire discussion about things such as sustainability, recycling, and preserving natural resources.
Lastly, I want to mention Robert Adams‘ photography. Through his quiet and intense pictures, students can reflect on the things we must do to save and reclaim the parts of our landscape that are devastated by greed and carelessness.
Have you used, or are planning to use Art21 segments and resources as part of your post-inauguration lessons? Please share them with us!
Pictured above: Jenny Holzer, “Benches”, 1989
Installation: Dorris C. Freedman Plaza New York, New York.
Interview with Eleanor Antin Part 2
Following is the second part of my conversation with Eleanor Antin, continued from Part 1 yesterday…
JF: One thing that has been important in my own work with students and colleagues is related to your suggestion about the viewer continuing to look with a playful mind, continuing to search for new meaning and relationships. How do you suggest people slow down and go about doing this in a shopping mall culture, especially with so much access to an art world that summarizes and simplifies?
EA: I hate malls. I hate shopping. When I find an artwork that interests me in a gallery or museum, I can sit with it for a long time, letting its possibilities open up to me. The problem is everybody else. My classical Greek and Roman works are allegories, and while allegories were obviously pleasurable and interesting to a medieval or renaissance audience, they’re not the way busy Americans in that hypothetical mall tend to see the world. But I have some tricks up my sleeve. My images are often funny. They can be beautiful. Some are haunting because they’re melancholy as well. Yet where do these emotional undertones come from? Why is that big strong man sitting in front of an old suitcase filled with heavy rocks? We’ve seen him carrying suitcases before. Is that what he carries around?? Rocks? Why? What does that mean? And why is that woman lying on a funeral bier with moonlight spilling down on her while a blonde adolescent girl awkwardly, perhaps fearfully, stoops to catch a ball that any second now, will be thrown by an older man with a demented grin? We’ve seen him before too, with the dead woman, though she was very much alive then.
Each image is its own allegory and since the characters reappear, we recognize them, we know something about them, so they are part of a meta allegory that hopefully is interesting enough to stop the people in that hypothetical mall and even against their will (after all, they probably want to get back to the car before they’re caught in traffic), force them to stop and really look. Because they’re curious. Maybe they’re disturbed. Maybe they’re laughing. Beautiful and sensual and comic images can seduce even self-absorbed people into entering the artist’s world and maybe recognizing something about their own. Or maybe it’s simply that my work possesses what the great anthropologist Malinowski would have referred to as a high coefficient of weirdness.
JF: You mention having “tricks up your sleeve” to get viewers to look closely at the images you create. I would think that part of it involves taking a variety of risks. Is risk-taking important in order to make these pictures funny, haunting, beautiful, or melancholy? How do you go about taking risks in your work? Is it conscious, or do opportunities present themselves and you go with it?
EA: For some reason I don’t really comprehend, people think my work is very risky as if I’m walking on a high wire, while as far as I’m concerned, I’m just walking over a crack in the pavement. Some people find my concentrated indifference to the fit of my work with the scene a dangerous game. And I do make some effort to have relevance to the going scene; after all, I’m not a hermit, I know what’s going on in the world. But the scene is often trivial and it’s always transient. I’ve watched a lot of scenes come and go—remember I’ve been around a while and seen artists waste a lot of time on work that 4 or 5 years later has become little more than the emperor’s clothes in the fairy tale. Art is too important to come off of a fashion designer’s runway.
Myths, metaphors, and more: Interview with Eleanor Antin, Part 1
Last month I had the good fortune to speak with Eleanor Antin (Season 2) in a series of lively and engaging emails that included her thoughts on preparing for exhibitions, working with allegories, making “controversial” or “risky” art, teaching art, and working with actors (vs. models). Below is the first of two parts. Tune in tomorrow for the nail-biting conclusion. Many thanks to Eleanor for being so candid (and patient!), as we worked on the interview right through the holidays.
Eleanor Antin, The Death of Petronius from The Last Days of Pompeii, 2001. Chromogenic print, 46 5/8 x 94 5/8 inches. All images courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York.
Joe Fusaro: When you share a series of work or create a proposal for an exhibit, what are some things you think about going into the process?
Eleanor Antin: Historical Takes at the San Diego Museum of Art was a mini retrospective of the work I’ve been doing over the last eight years. Earlier, I had a full retrospective from the late 60’s through 1999 at LACMA and I traveled with that huge show to several museums, including St. Louis and the UK while wondering, ‘where the hell do I go from here?’ Somewhere around that time, one sunny afternoon, I was driving down the mesa to La Jolla, the ocean sparkling blue green below me, La Jolla gleaming in the bay, when suddenly I had an apperçu that hit me with a strange sad power. La Jolla was Pompeii, rich and gleaming, without a clue that it was on the verge of annihilation. Pompeii was where the rich and powerful had gone to escape the heat, stink, and mosquitoes of the Roman summers, where those senators fortunate enough to live that long in the notoriously insecure world of imperial Rome went to retire. Extend the metaphor, and you have the ancient empire merging with ours, where affluent citizens lived the good life innocent of the destruction lurking just around the corner.
So since then, I’ve been working with myths, metaphors, characters, and settings invented out of the ancient world of classical Greece and Rome, all the time aware that these are really my neighbors. Maybe we don’t have a volcano on our doorstep, but with global warming, climate freakiness, wild fires, water loss, disease migrations, economic destabilization, terrorist vengeance—hey, we’re on a roll here….
Love’s Shadow, 1985. 16mm film, black-and-white, 2 1/2 minutes.
For me a show is always motivated by a generative metaphor, a kind of poetic image which opens up to related ideas, images, ambiguities, dreams, sensations. Nothing is closed, there is no end. If the viewer wants to keep looking and has a playful mind, my work can be like a hall of mirrors, expanding and suggesting new meanings which, in turn, may suggest others. Poussin and Magritte are among my favorite artists. They may have different sensibilities but their works are always restless and fluid. Unfortunately, I find the art world too ready to summarize and simplify. I’m often embarrassed by the simplistic takes even well-meaning critics may have on my work. I become a couple of declarative sentences in a stranger’s mouth.
JF: Why do you think some people consider your work controversial? How do you respond to this reaction?
EA: I’m confused when people consider my work “controversial.” Or the word most often used is “brave.” I don’t know what they mean. This isn’t Soviet Russia or Hitler’s Germany—yet. Those countries may have been intellectually monstrous and physically murderous but they seemed to think artists were important enough to persecute. Here, relatively few people care what artists do. This allows us freedom even if it assures us of irrelevance. So to call me brave is silly.
A well-known curator once said disapprovingly to me, “you always do whatever you want to do.” What should I do? What he wanted to do? You can say the art world cares what we artists do. But who are they, this art world? Dealers? Curators? Critics? Collectors? Other artists? Fellow travelers? I’ve been with a great dealer, Ronald Feldman, since 1977 and he respects artists and assumes we will do whatever we want to do. Curators come and go. Critics have deadlines and space constraints. Collectors? Oh, please! They don’t know what they want until somebody tells them. Hopefully they have intelligent advisors, but they often don’t. Other artists, yes, they’re the best part of the art world, though many of them seem to feel that there’s a war out there, so they’re often in survival mode. They won’t always tell you how much your work means to them and that can make you unhappy, or even sometimes buggy, but hell, if they get ideas from you and you stimulate or provoke their work, isn’t that a good thing after all? It just means that there’ll be more good art around.
Teaching with controversial subject matter
On the topic of art and controversy, I thought I’d share a teaching-related story of my own. Previously to working at Art21, I was an associate educator at the New Museum, where I ran a high school program called G:Class. While the museum was closed during construction of its new building, I relied on Chelsea galleries to explore curricular connections to contemporary art. As a way to help develop a sense of network and inter-connectivity among students in different classes across the city, I developed a mail art project on the heels of Frank Warren’s Post Secret, connecting it to a Ray Johnson exhibition and the documentary about his work, How to Draw a Bunny. I asked each student to create a postcard-sized artwork to be sent to another student through the mail. Students had to investigate something they feared, something they loved, or if they were really ambitious, both. They also had to consider that this work would travel through the United States Postal Service and the student who received it would respond with another piece of mail art.
A week after I assigned the project, we met at Feigen Contemporary gallery to present the finished project and begin our tour. It was a small group of 12 students and the discussion was dynamic, involving talking about process and the ideas that inspired their creations. One student sheepishly presented two postcards. One of his postcards featured a detailed graphite rendering of an erect penis and, on the other side, a vagina. The second postcard featured a red background with stick figures in different sexual positions with a white substance smeared on the other side (it was Elmer’s glue.)
I could feel my face burning and imagined that it must be beet red. Here I was, exposed in front of these students. How was I going to deal with it? I saw the student shrink because of my reaction, so I took a deep breath and knew that if I didn’t acknowledge my own emotional reaction I would not be able to deal with this situation responsibly. I told the class I was a bit shocked and embarrassed and in admitting that, I was able to regain my composure.
I asked the student what he was trying to communicate. He told me he questioned why certain behaviors and images are deemed “appropriate,” while others were “inappropriate.” Why are certain things considered pornographic, but billboards in Times Square or primetime television shows are not? Why are some things considered private while others are public? These comments intrigued me and were justifiable concerns. We had a productive conversation about these issues as a group, while acknowledging how his artwork failed to communicate this nuanced idea and just shocked us. It was one of those difficult moments in teaching where a boundary was definitely crossed but presented a rare and important learning opportunity for both the student and myself.
I returned to the school and next week armed with reproductions of certain artworks that explored elements of sex, sexuality, and issues of privacy. These examples included work by Paul McCarthy, Wangechi Mutu, Marina Abramovic, and Keith Haring. We talked about these artists’ works, the ways in which sex and sexuality are part of daily culture, and how artists use different strategies to question ideas of the public and private, sex, and sexual identity. While this “lesson” would never be part of my regular class preparation, it provided a rare opportunity to address issues relevant to students in an open and respectful way.
Wangechi Mutu, Yo Mama (2003) and Paul McCarthy, Tomato Head (1994)
I’m curious how other educators have tackled similar scenarios. How has sex and sexuality come up in your classes? What were those situations and how did you deal with them? Please share your stories by leaving a comment below.
Using contemporary art to help open conversations
What’s the place of contemporary art in schools? What’s the place of “controversial” contemporary art in schools? And what’s our responsibility as teachers?
The very best contemporary art speaks a language our students can understand. One of the great gifts of Art:21 is that we can introduce our students to artists who LOOK and SOUND like they do, and who are making art that deals with issues that are important to them.
Kids grapple with issues of sex and identity early on. Stereotypes abound: girls are princesses, boys are athletes; girls are good at art and boys are good at math. Beautiful people are tall, light-skinned, with clear complexions and good hair and are very, very thin. What’s a regular every day kid to do?
A few years ago we presented a show called Sugar and Snails. It was created in response to a desire to have open conversations with our students about issues of gender identity and body image. Even at very early ages kids deal with questions like these, and it’s our job to help them make healthy choices.
Samantha Salzinger’s Skin Deep Series provided opportunities for our middle and upper school students to directly confront issues about beauty. For adolescent girls AND boys conversations about eating (or not), complexions, hair, makeup, tanning, tattooing and piercing, exercising and all sorts of other physical issues are every day occurrences. Salzinger’s large format portraits of patients recovering from plastic surgery called into question all of our assumptions, both student and adult, about the price of beauty.
Samantha Salzinger, from the Skin Deep Series
Our students responded with works of their own. Human sexuality teacher Debbie Roffman asked middle school students to create collages that highlighted the stereotypes and subliminal sexual messages in popular culture. Their work showed their understanding that sex sells everything from beauty products to cars to home appliances. In their collages, the students created thoughtful, funny, often startling pieces and raised our awareness about how the media helps reinforce stereotypes.
Nikki S. Lee, #7 from The Skateboarders Project (2000)
Nikki S. Lee, The Tourist Project #9 (1997)
Photographer Nikki S. Lee’s work really called into question the whole idea of fitting in. In her Projects, Lee identifies a group (tourists, Hispanics, yuppies, elderly people, lesbians, and others) and works to transform herself to be as much like them as possible. That’s Lee herself in the foreground of the skateboarders piece and second from left in the tourist piece. Our students looked at works like these and (almost without fail) took a closer look at how they, too, reinvent themselves to conform to a group norm. It happens very early, doesn’t it, when “everyone” has a particular shoe or backpack or haircut? Nikki S. Lee’s work provides an opportunity to talk to kids about it.
It’s work like this that helps open conversations with kids about issues that make a difference.
Check out more about Nikki S. Lee in this month’s Art Education magazine: Identity in Flux: Exploring the Work of Nikki S. Lee by Amanda Allison. It includes lesson plans for grades 9-12 that explore identity within contemporary subculture groups. January 2009, Volume 62, No.1.
Carolyn Sutton is Director of Arts at The Park School in Baltimore and a member of Art21’s National Education Advisory Council.
In-Progress
Teaching in the arts requires, at one ugly point or another, to have veiled conversations called critiques. They are hideous things that most students from middle school through graduate school would often rather avoid. Visits to the dentist can be more exciting. But as educators we’re often in the position of having to conduct them in order to force students to slow down, pause, reflect, and make decisions about the quality of their work.
In-progress critiques can have a tremendous benefit for both students and the teacher, because instead of discussing work at the end of an assignment or project, the discussion takes place before the work is complete. It gives students a chance to share the direction they’re going instead of the destination and invites suggestions for important next steps.
During a recent in-progress critique, students in my classes looked at some paintings they are creating about power, influenced by Art21 artists Ida Applebroog, Cai Guo-Qiang and Laylah Ali. All of the works—half finished—were hung up. Students seated themselves somewhere close to their painting at the start of class on Monday and I asked them to look at the work for two minutes in silence. What I really asked was for them to look at it until they began to see it. I asked the class as they sat in this bizarre silence (believe me, if you teach, you realize how bizarre and beautiful silence can be in a school setting) to think about the positive aspects of their work so far, but also to focus on next steps in order to create a successful painting based on the criteria we set up. After the silence they shared their thoughts with a partner and by the end of the critique had formed a short, written plan to guide the rest of the process. After taking a look at their plans and adding my own ideas, we made final decisions the next day and jumped back in.
Because creating contemporary art and being inspired by it requires students to meaningfully reflect on the work they see and the work they make, it’s part of our responsibility to construct situations where students can step back from the rhythm of a process and consider possibilities—alone, with classmates, and with their teacher.
In-progress paintings by Nyack High School students Julio Melendez (top) and Heather Bailey (bottom).
24-Hour Marathon at the Guggenheim
Tonight, starting at 6pm, the Guggenheim hosts a 24-hour durational event concentrating on the concept of time, including its “myriad philosophical, psychological, biological, sociological, poetic, aesthetic, and economic manifestations… geared toward both the academic and the general, art-going public.” Comprising interviews, lectures, discussions, and performances, the marathon will engage Time across a broad spectrum of fields, artists, architects, scientists, philosophers, historians, engineers, filmmakers, musicians, and other cultural producers.
Produced in conjunction with the exhibition theanyspacewhatever, time is here treated as as a malleable material itself and is a pervasive concern of the artists in the show, including Art:21 Season 4 artist Pierre Huyghe, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, and Philippe Parreno. The latter two will be presenters at the 24-hour “performance,” along with Julieta Aranda, Shamim Momin, Alexandra Munroe, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matthew Ritchie (Season 3), Nancy Spector, Lawrence Weiner, Lebbeus Woods, and a host of others.
There will be free coffee on hand. For the complete schedule and further information, click here.
All I Want For Christmas
All I want for Christmas is to catch up.
The break between Christmas and the New Year provides teachers a time for catching up with family and friends, but also time to reassess how the year is going and plan important next steps for our classes. At this point, I’m in the midst of some great work with the students I teach, including a unit that asks students to create paintings interpreting the theme of power, one that asks students to visually define SELF in a variety of ways and a new unit called OTHERS where AP Studio Art students work one-on-one with models (inspired by an ongoing conversation I’m having with Eleanor Antin, which will be published here on the blog in January). Taking the time over the break to do some purposeful wandering is also a great way to refresh planning and get ready for the second semester. Get out to the exhibit you’ve been wanting to see. Get into the studio (or wherever you make your art) for a little extra time. Catch up on the Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, Aperture and Art on Paper issues that have been waiting in a neat pile. Make notes. Scribble ideas for big ideas and plans. Lay them all out a few days before going back to teach and begin to plug in artists, art, and maybe even plans for a field trip or two.
Happy Holidays!
Pictured above: Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms”, 1977–79
Spectacolor electronic sign. Times Square, New York, 1986.
