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Putting subjects at the core of the curriculum

Independent schools assosciation conference 2011

“If you want an even more succinct rationale for the arts in schools then I recommend the work of Professor Elliot Eisner of Stanford University. Eisner argues there are ten good reasons why the arts are essential in the curriculum:

a. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. This is unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

b. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

c. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

d. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

e. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

f. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

g. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

h. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

i. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

j. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.”

Multisensory Met: Touch, Smell, and Hear Art

September 8, 2015

Ezgi Ucar, Former MediaLab Intern, Digital Media

A visitor smelling a scratch-and-sniff painting at the spring 2015 MediaLab Expo. Image courtesy of the author

From Don Undeen, Senior Manager of MediaLab:

“The MediaLab has been fortunate enough to work frequently with the Met's fantastic Access Programs and Community Programs Office in exploring ways that museums can be more welcoming to visitors of diverse abilities. One of the concepts we've been learning about is universal design, which is the idea that products and experiences should be constructed to be usable by a wide range of people regardless of disability, age, or background. A corollary to this is that when you design for accessibility you generally end up producing results that benefit everyone. After a discussion about how to make the museum experience available to blind and partially sighted visitors, Ezgi created a suite of products that can bring anyone closer to the Met's collection.”

Multisensory Museum Experience

In the majority of museums, visitors can only experience the artworks by viewing them. Most museums work to make sure that galleries have neutral smells and sounds so that the visitor can focus on the artworks, but those factors can alter the experience significantly. All of the senses—sight, sound, touch, smell, and hearing—are a part of the museum experience.

Multisensory Met, a series of activities designed to create a more fulfilling museum experience, in the spring 2015 MediaLab Expo. Image courtesy of the author

#museum experience #accessible #multisensory #painting #sculpture #museum #gallery #tech #monet

Edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Kerem Nisancioglu and Dalia Gebrial

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist, racist business magnate, from their campus. The battle cry '#RhodesMustFall' sparked an international movement calling for the decolonisation of the world's universities. Today, as this movement grows, how will it radically transform the terms upon which universities exist? In this book, students, activists and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the home of the coloniser, in the heart of the establishment. Subverting curricula, enforcing diversity, and destroying old boundaries, this is a radical call for a new era of education. Offering resources for students and academics to challenge and resist coloniality inside and outside the classroom, Decolonising the University provides the tools for radical pedagogical, disciplinary and institutional change.

#decolonisation #university #pedagogy

Decolonising the Curriculum

Art history lags behind other disciplines in incorporating art by black and ethnic minorities argues Richard Hylton

Source

Image: Frank Bowling, South America Squared, 1967

Frank Bowling’s forthcoming major retrospective at Tate Britain has been a long time coming. So long, in fact, that visitors to it will be able to ‘experience’ what Tate describes as ‘the entirety of Bowling’s 60-year career’. As ‘one of Britain’s most visionary painters’ who ‘went on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and RB Kitaj’, and who ‘became the first Black artist nominated as a Royal Academician’, Bowling has finally been recognised by the upper echelons of the UK art establishment. Like Rasheed Araeen’s retrospective in 2017-18, organised by the Van Abbemuseum in Eindoven before touring to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (as well as Geneva’s MAMCO and Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art) that charted Araeen’s 60-year career (Interview AM413), Bowling’s retrospective characterises recent institutional attempts at slowly inserting black artists into British art history. It is difficult to overstate the significance of these exhibitions. Both Bowling and Araeen are in their 80s. Furthermore, these shows mark a break from posthumous recognition bestowed on artists such as Ronald Moody, Aubrey Williams, Anwar Jalal Shemza and Donald Rodney.

Accompanying the display of substantial bodies of work spanning several decades are equally substantial monographs on Bowling and Araeen respectively, which include essays by a coterie of curators, critics and art historians. These exhibitions and monographs reflect the museum sector’s continuing attempts to diversify the canon. But is academia’s instrumental contribution to these exhibitions evidence of a move towards expansive and pluralised notions of art history? In any number of retrospective exhibitions staged in the UK over the past few years, including those on Hannah Höch, Eva Hesse, Thomas Ruff, Käthe Kollwitz and more recently Joan Jonas, Anni Albers and Franz West, academics often play key roles, be it as curators, writers or advisers. Often testament to their sustained and prolonged academic inquiry, it follows that these artists figure prominently in course offerings on modern and contemporary art. Given that postwar black artists have been largely excised from dominant art history narratives, is the academy suitably equipped to follow the museum sector in diversifying its curriculum or does its role in historical revisionism mask prevailing racial and cultural hierarchies within art history? This article considers the racial and cultural politics of academe in the UK today. It argues that while feminist-based theories, for example, have played an instrumental role in challenging notions of the canon, conversely post-colonial discourse in its many forms, though equally important, remains largely marginalised if non-existent across the course offerings of many art history departments in the UK. Concepts of difference and pluralism are presently more widely reflected in the UK, not least by universities eager to project themselves as tolerant and inclusive environments. However, from their curricula to employment practices, academe remains largely impervious and resistant to change. Is this a consequence of an unspoken white privilege which continues to pervade and dominate the field of art history?

In 2000, as part of a presentation for my MA in History of Art, I explored the politics of black artists in British art. Ruminating on why Bowling had been and continued to be frozen out of mainstream narratives of British art, I showed Who’s Afraid of Barney Newman, 1968, from Bowling’s now widely acclaimed map paintings series. The paintings represented an amalgamation of ideas pertaining to abstraction and representation, culture and identity, as well as being a witty homage to the revered US painter Barnett Newman. Comprising shimmering green and red sections, intersected by a luminous yellow crevice, reminiscent of Newman’s signature ‘zip’ motif, a faint but discernible white outline of the map of Guyana, Bowling’s country of birth, reinforced the interplay between representation and abstraction. This confluence of narratives and entry points to Bowling’s work were, so I thought, sufficient to spark and sustain a productive discussion in an art history context. However, at the end of my presentation, and possibly as a means of igniting discussion within the student group, an art history lecturer ventured the opinion that the UK was awash with painters working in studios waiting to be discovered. Although a fleeting, if not flippant comment which would not find its way into print, the lecturer’s observation did represent for me a certain hostility within art history teaching towards asserting that the art world is a racially structured space. This personal experience took place within what could be considered a relatively liberal and progressive art history department. Nevertheless, it embodied, in microcosm, the formidable challenges and obstacles within art history. For the record, in 2000, at the age of 65, Bowling was not ‘waiting to be discovered’. His exemplary practice and the high regard in which he was held was reflected in many important exhibitions of his work in the UK and the US, which belied his systematic exclusion from the mainstream art world. In the intervening years, Bowling’s stock has risen significantly within the museum arena, yet art history teaches us nothing; despite a plethora of awards, exhibitions and critical attention, we are offered only a selective view of history. Tate’s foregrounding of Bowling’s time working alongside Hockney and Kitaj is a case in point. Scouring Tate: A History from 1998 by Frances Spalding reveals not a single mention of Bowling. Following Lubaina Himid being heralded as the oldest practitioner to win the coveted Turner Prize, the BBC glibly commented that ‘Himid made her name in the 1980s as one of the leaders of the British black arts movement – both painting and curating exhibitions of similarly overlooked artists’. Where Bowling is now seamlessly positioned as part of postwar British art, Himid’s recognition was framed by a casual acknowledgement of ‘similarly overlooked artists’. These seemingly different forms of historical recovery nullify rather than address the incalculable damage systematic art-world exclusions have had and continue to have both on individual practitioners and on wider narratives of art history.

Cultural theorists and art historians have contributed an immense range of scholarship, much of it academic, which has done much to expand and challenge received notions of art history. Three anthologies produced between 1999 and 2008 explored key themes spanning contemporary African art as an emerging force during the 1990s, the re-examination of art from the colonial period, and new discourses on modern and contemporary art. Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Market Place, 1999, edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, pooled a wide range of articles from journals and exhibition catalogues published between 1991 and 1997, written by art historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Mercer, VY Mudimbe, Laura Mulvey, Everlyn Nicodemus, Chika Okeke and John Picton. Similarly, Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, 2002, edited by Kymberly N Pinder, includes a broad collection of writing but this time using a narrower ‘historical lens’, primarily focusing on art from the 19th and 20th centuries but also including art from ‘antiquity to the middle ages, and Modernism and its “Primitive” Legacy’ in order to reconsider historical painting, through to the work of artists such as Sargent Johnson, Horace Pippin and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then there is Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts 2005-08, co-published by MIT Press and edited by Mercer, which further exemplifies critical thinking emanating from academia. The first volume, Cosmopolitan Modernisms, 2005, offered what Mercer described as ‘a partial and provisional review of how we have arrived at the current state of play with regard to understanding cultural difference, not as an arbitrary irrelevance that detracts from the “essence” of art, nor as a social problem to be managed by compensatory policies, but as a distinctive feature of modern art and modernity that was always there and which is not going to go away’. Unlike the previous two anthologies, Mercer’s series was primarily based on new writing, but in keeping with their aspiration it too ‘sets out to question the depth of our historical understanding of cultural difference’. We could also cite art journals such as Third Text, Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and Small Axe, launched in 1987, 1993 and 1997 respectively, which have also, to varying degrees, been supported by those based in the academic world. But why has this wealth of publishing been unable to have any impact on the presumed white authority which continues to underpin the teaching of art history? The histories of black artists were often considered as separate if not largely irrelevant to art history. Today, museums are historicising and incorporating black artists into British art history’s grand narrative; but does this now present a conundrum for art history departments? It is an understatement to suggest that those responsible for managing art history departments think more carefully about what constitute core subjects and specialisms in the 21st century. Artist Mary Evans’s eloquent observation that ‘the political, social, and cultural dynamics of modern Britain are in many respects the legacy of Britain’s imperial past’ provides an enticing starting point for narrating postwar British art. Rather than being seen as limited or specialist, though, such an approach to art history should be seen as a challenge to existing conventions. This is not a new proposition.

#art #decolonisation #curriculum

chezzzie

Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque

If artists are generally boundary-crossers, a younger generation of (mostly women) artists is going for full penetration—making artworks that speak to something deep in the body, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.Among the most potently grotesque examples are Tala Madani’s nightmarish babies and dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and violence, and Jala Wahid’s visceral, sculptural allusions to cuts of meat and dismembered organs and body parts. Or take Marianna Simnett’s unsettling, darkly comic videos that bring to life imagined narratives of bodily invasions—including a gruesome nasal operation and a fable about varicose veins and cockroaches-cum-cyborgs. Then there’s Maisie Cousins’s glossy, close-up images of a wet soup of food, decaying plants, and bodies, which recall the more appalling corners of Cindy Sherman’s imagination. In painting and drawing, too, the grotesque is rampant, with elastic, deformed, or monstrous bodies populating works by Christina Quarles, Ebecho Muslimova, Jana Euler, and Dana Schutz.

Keep reading

A federal court has ruled that the US intelligence’s surveillance program exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden was unlawful, and possibly unconstitutional.

NSA confirms that Edward Snowden was right, their mass surveillance program was illegal.

#webcore #edward snowden #nsa #internet

A Vernacular WebThe Indigenous and The BarbariansWhen I started to work on the World Wide Web I made a few nice things that were special, different and fresh. They were very different from what was on the web in the mid 90's.

I'll start with a statement like this, not to show off my contribution, but in order to stress that -- although I consider myself to be an early adopter -- I came late enough to enjoy and prosper from the "benefits of civilization". There was a pre-existing environment; a structural, visual and acoustic culture you could play around with, a culture you could break. There was a world of options and one of the options was to be different.

So what was this culture? What do we mean by the web of the mid 90's and when did it end?

#olia lialina #web #net

Be overwhelmed by Babel, Meireles’ 2001 artwork, which explores information overload and failed communication

Cildo Meireles refers to Babel as a ‘tower of incomprehension’. Comprising hundreds of radios, each tuned to a different station, the sculpture relates to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. God was offended by this structure, and caused the builders to speak in different languages. No longer able to understand one another, they became divided and scattered across the earth, and so began all mankind’s conflicts.

#artist research

Olia Linalina (2017) Treasure Trove. Webpage.

Source

#artist research

Petra Collins, The Ardourous

http://www.theardorous.com/

The Ardorous is a platform for female artists showcasing individual and collaborative projects between a collective of female creative professionals – all full of ardor but each with a unique artistic style and voice. Curated by Petra Collins

“I messaged women who I loved; that’s how I got work and connected with people.”

This blog acted a female-run space for other female artists to share and exhibit their works, providing a space for them in a male-domindated art world.

The internet has opened up access for minorities and females to regain conrol over their agency within art, able to share and exhibit however they would like without the oppressive role of white-dominated, male-dominated art institutions.

#blog

Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce by Julian Stallabrass

The development of Internet art has been short and rapid and dates from the introduction of web browsers in the mid-1990s. Artists realized the potential of a medium and system of delivery that side-stepped the mainstream art institutions and allowed them to make direct contact with an audience. Their interventions have ranged from works that deconstruct the browser itself, to works that shade into political activism. Internet art has been international, with distinct contributions emerging from the US, the Far East, Europe, the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, and the Third World. As the sophistication, range, and numbers of works made for the Internet has burgeoned, major art institutions have moved in, attempting to host and curate them, to ambivalent responses from the artists themselves. Internet art raises fundamental questions about the definition and value (both aesthetics and monetary) of the art object, art's role, and its relationship to its public, and the future of the current art establishment.

#academic research

At A Distance: Precursors to Art and Activisim on the Internet

edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark

Networked collaborations of artists did not begin on the internet. In this multidisciplinary look at the practice of art that takes place across a distance - geographical, temporal, or emotional - theorists and practitioners examine the ways that art, activism and media fundamentally reconfigure each other in experimental networked projects from 1970-1980s.

By providing a context for this work - showing that it was shaped by varying mixes of social relations, cultural strategies and political and aesthetic concerns - At A Distance effectively refutes the widely accepted idea that networked art is technologically determined. Doing so, it provides the historical grounding needed for a more complete understanding of today’s practices of Internet art and activism and suggests the possibilities inherent in networked practice

#academic research

chezzzie

works and pages from Digital Art by Christianne Paul

#academic research

Notes from ‘Pics or It Didn’t Happen’

Images banned from Instagram (2016)

above: Arvida Byström

From Alexis Anais Avefisian’s essay, THINX:

Background: THINX is a feminine care brand that made waves in it use of pro-female marketing, showing real blood, body positivity etc.

Ironically enough, a mere few months before the THNX frenzy, something suspicious happened. Visual arist and Instagram sensation Rupi Kaur had a series of photographs of a fully clothed model, her clothing lightly stained with period blood, twice removed from [Instagram] as a violation of its terms of service. Kaur’s work is distinctly feminine, using the soft lighting and pastel coloring that has allowed brands like THINX to appear unassumingly authentic. Such nuanced comparisons bring about a crucial question: why is it that feminist-leaning ad campaigns are allowed to grow massively popular on social media platforms, but user-generated content of a similar nature is often censored?

above: Rupi Kaur

#academic research

Skirky asks “What happens next?”—no doubt imagining future waves of digital protesters. But he has already answered the question. What happens next is more of the same. A networked, weak-tie world is good at things like helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teen-age girls. Viva la revolución. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell

#academic research

Christianne Paul, Tate Talks

- Christiane Paul’s keynote presentation was part of ‘Lives of Net Art’, a series of events exploring how contemporary artists use the internet, as well as reflecting on the possibilities the internet has offered artists from the 1990s to the present day. In her presentation, Paul focuses on the challenges museums face when displaying and preserving net art.

- the early net.art was a mostly European movement. it was more playful - and people took this to mean it was naive which isn’t fair to say

- everyone could tell this medium was going to become commercialised due to is fun and engaging nature.

- in 1996, Rhizome was founded to host the net art of these artists.

#artist talk

Linda Stupart artist talk

From her lecture at Bath Spa University, 2019.

- Stupart is an artist, writer and educator from South Africa

- she talks about abjection, a feeling we use to describe when something both repels and attracts us at the same time.

- when something crosses a boundary, it becomes disgusting. for example, bodily fluids. we swallow our saliva all day everyday, but the thought spitting into a cup and drinking it is disgusting. we know we are full of blood, but then this blood leaves the body through a wound or a period, it becomes disgusting

- she notes some also feel the same about refugees. when refugees are in their own countries, our culture pities them and fights for their rights. however once they cross the borders to escape, they become abject and our culture sees them as a burden.

- Stupart describes herself as a ‘spell-writer’ artist.

- Spells to bind male artists from killing you is an example of one of her works. Men have historically contributed or endorsed the murder of female artists who became ‘too powerful’ and challenged or questioned the patriarchy. Much of Marina Abramovic’s early career was marred by violence from her viewers and contemporaries.

- Work depicting females cutting or harming themselves are often criticised as being ‘hysteria’ - there is no allowance for interpretation, contemplation or critque because of our history of trivialising female emotion, deeming them unimportant or over-the-top.

- However in art, when a male is depicting as harming or cutting themselves, it is often considered profound and vulnerable.

She tells us of a popular example. When Britney Spears released her music video for ‘Everytime’ depicting a metaphorical suicide, she was lambasted and attacked for the ‘promotion’ of self harm and glamorisation of suicide. The vulnerability and underlying issue of her artistic expression of the mental pressure she was under as a teenage ‘Miss American Dream’ were not appreciated or even recognised.

Here’s the part that I always come back to when making art

- Stupart has made her works (spells) into free-to-download recipes for anyone to print off and follow themselves at home, essentially making her performance art re-creatable and open source. She talks about the element of spirituality in her work, and how it is not about monetary profit but the principle and access to it that is more important to the wider context of spell casting.

#artist talk

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