The activity that follows is intended to provide an unending collection of idea-seedlings for art making and teaching through the permissions of contemporary art. These idea-seedlings are the quick products of a simple art analysis where we decipher artworks’ form, content, and—most importantly—their potential for pliability of whatever material may be at-hand. In other words, this exercise is an examination of contemporary art precedence with the aim of gathering permissions that can then be used in our own creative work as artists and teachers*.
“Permissions” is something we do in all of our creative work (no matter if that work is artistic, scholarly, or pedagogical). Gathering permissions is not unlike an academic literature review that is typically done at the beginning of a research project or experiment. With a literature review (or the collecting of permissions) we look at what has been done before to inform and situate whatever is next. Differently than a conventional literature review (done for mere scientific purposes), we may enact this process of looking at contemporary art for permissions constantly, to the point where the identifying and gathering of permissions may become an essential part of our creative practice.
It is important to remember that this activity will only lead to fragments, but that the fragments that we come away with as a group can potentially help all of us in our work for years to come. By the end of today, we will have gathered all the work we do as a group into a book that will then be distributed—first and foremost to YOU—but also to other interested art educators.
The two fragments that we will develop today are the permission-directives, and the always-in-progress-matrixes by which we might begin to ideate about how this basic research might eventually become actual art education curriculum and art activity.
The directive is a direction that is open-ended enough to generate significantly different outcomes from different participants. Directives are made through the scholarly tool that follows this introduction.
The matrix is an attempt at organizing some of the directives generated by a participant into media specific and age appropriate lesson-seedlings, or starter ideas, which can be used to initiate curricular thinking. The matrix poses questions intended to focus on the development of future lessons. The focus comes through figuring out and organizing some thoughts on how an artwork can be generated from open-ended directives, what learning actually takes place from these art activities, and how the whole endeavor can be assessed or evaluated.
what permissions do we get from contemporary art?
PHILOSOPHY (the thinking behind it)
Unlike any other science, art is one of the only discourses that can be equally participated in by both students and professionals alike. Despite the label of “student”, all art-makers are contemporary practitioners and therefore should be engaged as such. This means that it is equally important for a young artist to be exposed to the work of other contemporary artists (their contemporaries) as it is for more seasoned artists. The purpose of this exercise is to quickly generate a diversified collection of contemporary art languages that are akin, not only to your sensibilities, but also to the diverse needs of your current and future students. This exercise aims to develop an expanded language for the individual art teacher of what is possible in art NOW. The art teacher is, in many ways, a teacher of language invention. For this reason, it is of optimum importance for the art teacher to figure out how to “speak” the multiple languages of art that exist today. As learning a foreign language demonstrates, the most comprehensive way to develop fluency in a new language is via immersion; and so it is with the language(s) of contemporary art: those who wish to speak the languages of contemporary art, let alone teach from them, must immerse themselves in those languages.
RESEARCH ACTIVITY (what to do)
To begin, find a locale that contains a variety of high quality examples of art that is being made today. In the best-case scenario a contemporary or modern art museum or gallery is good; in a more everyday scenario, a good art magazine filled with images will do. The art section of your school or town library can also work. Whichever site you’re working from make sure that your pool of works is as random as possible, that way you can really explore. Of course the internet is the ultimate repository of images, but it is mostly uncurated and therefore you may not be coming across works that are part of the current discourse in contemporary art. This is not a legalistic process though, if you have a problem with the implications of only looking at works that have been vetted by a larger community, by all means look and learn from whatever you’d like.
Once you’ve identified your pool of random works, take a look at them as if you were experiencing them in actuality. Saunter through the museum or gallery, curiously browse at your library or methodically leaf through your magazine. Ask yourself: 1. “How is this thing made?” and 2. “What is this thing about?”. These two questions will address the two most frequently occurring concerns in artworks and consequently in art education: form and content. At all times, it is important not to discard your own sensibilities. The works that pull you in or make you inquisitive will find a ready connection to your existing knowledge and experiences and therefore the sharing of the languages in those works with others will be more integral, maybe even genuine. However, don’t be hesitant to be challenged by an artwork that doesn’t fit neatly within your notions of what art can be. Bringing a challenging art work to a group of students, without first sharing your prejudices about it with them, may reveal an openness to the work on their behalf that will inform your reception of it.
Depending on what your site for art is, it may appear very daunting. For example, working from library stacks can be daunting because of the sheer volume of the collection. Going to an encyclopedic museum may also cause you to be overwhelmed. I would suggest that you develop a semi-arbitrary selection process so that you don’t spend too much time deliberating your beginning. For example, decide that you will only look at books whose spines are specific colors; or artworks facing a certain direction in the museum. Maybe, you can decide to only select books or artworks of artists’ names you cannot pronounce, have never heard of, or are from a certain section in the alphabet, i.e. artists whose names begin with vowels or the letters in your first name. The more complex your selection-device is, the more satisfying your process will be when you begin to see the inevitable (seemingly coincidental) connections emerging between works. These connections might even help you develop themes or connections in your curricular units as well as use divergent artists who “speak” a similar language.
Showing your students variant sources of similar ideas will dissuade your students from thinking that you are saying any given project should be done in any specific way. Divergent examples that point in the general direction of what you want your students to learn allow for various student interpretations of what you are saying and will consequently produce a plethora of results from your student’s thinking and making processes.
In order to make this selection-process work for you, you must assign yourself an overly ambitious goal that you will attempt to meet. The ambitiousness of your goal is necessary so that your eventual failure in meeting that goal will still produce abundant results. For example, determine that you will collect 100 examples in one hour. This of course might be impossible, but your attempt at achieving this goal will produce sufficient results (maybe thirty). When you document your sources, make sure that you include all the necessary reference information so that you could recall that image if needed.
Again, take it slow. Imagine this process like an immersion into these worlds of art. It will be in your slow traverse through what is happening in your experience that will allow you to be able to mine the richness of the art that exist. We can use the term “mining” since one of our principle roles as art educators is to help dig out the resources that make up our contemporary practice as makers of objects, ideas, and processes in order to grow our imagination about what is possible in art, as well as engage in meaningful conversations about what is being made.
INVENTION ACTIVITY (what’s next)
Once you have collected a reasonable amount of contemporary art examples, designate for each work a statement that identifies both elements of its form and content.
You may say something like:
The artist did…,
The artist seems to work in…,
The artist intended to …,
The objective of that work was to…,
When I look at this work it makes me think about…,
I think (fill in the blank) is important to the artist.
It is very important that you not attempt to figure out whether your suspicions about the work are true. At this point it is not necessary for you to know whether or not what you perceive to be true, actually is. What is important is what you think is happening in the work, since what we are trying to do is develop a set of languages that can then be proposed to our students as directives. From that standpoint it is irrelevant whether or not what you saw or thought you saw was actually what you saw.
After having delineated what your list of works may be about and how they might be made, I would like you to translate those observations about form and content into specific directives. Although I want your directives to be specific, I would challenge you to come up with directives that don’t specifically describe what you saw in that particular piece of contemporary art. A directive is a direction that is open ended and serves more as a parameter or challenge rather then a method or strictly delineated action. The partial vagueness of a directive allows your students to fill in the gaps and produce work outside of your anticipations.
I will give you an example. Say that you have run across the image on this page.
You may or may not know that the documentation in those images is of Yoko Ono’s Fluxus performance Cut Piece. Those facts are only as important as you want them to be for this exercise. You determine that “how this piece was made” [FORM] was by:
“the artist uses her body”
or
“the artist uses a collaborator, could be friend could be a stranger”
or
“the artist sits still as something is done to her”.
You then determine that “what this work is about” [CONTENT] is:
“audience participation”
or
“the objectification of the woman artist/body”
or
“vulnerability”.
Whatever you decide is fine; you need not worry about how correct you are in your observations since even your mis-readings will produce results. Now that you have your ideas about what the form and content might be, formulate those observations into two types of directives, one addressing the form (F) and the other the content (C).
Your directives (which are intended for someone else to follow) might read like this:
Present a work that takes place on your body somehow (F).
Initiate a work that is only finished when someone other then the original author interacts with it (F).
Think about a moment when you were vulnerable; without making the memory totally obvious, start your work from that memory (C).
Collaborate in making a work that demonstrates an injustice occurring in the world; be poetic in your interaction (C).
Any and all of these directives may be used either in tandem or in contrast to each other. Do this for your twenty most intriguing finds and bring all your notes (artwork information, form and content notes, and directives) to the next part of this exercise, the Matrix development (see below).
So you’ll notice that at this point the process requires you to bring all your notes and what you’ve collected to class. The reason that this works best with a group is because when everyone comes together then you have 400 directives for a group of 20 students. We usually write them on notecards or sticky notes. We then put them all up and this leads to the completion of the next part, which is the Matrix. In the Matrix the seedings get more robust because you stretch the imagination to consider activities, learning, and assessment of that learning. A very important thing I usually do with my students is we don’t put our names on any of this work because at the end all the work is given back to the students collated, professionally bound, and ready to be used. You can see an example of one of these books in this BOX FILE.
Downloadable Matrix Template
*The teacher-as-creative-practitioner is both a cliché and a misunderstood, under-explored phenomenon. On the one hand no one will deny the fact that the teacher is usually asked to think on their feet and to make continuous adjustments both in anticipation of and during the teaching moment. On the other hand the potential for pedagogical practice to be a contemporary art medium—a new media if you will—is only explored intermittently by artists and teachers, and even less under the long-term commitments of pk-16 schooling.
Jorge Lucero © 2009. Revised, October 2023.