Andy Ash
Planning, practice, development
Thinking about how 2D art has dominated art education.
As art teachers, we are constantly under constraints. Constraints of time, constraints of materials.
Designing without waste.
Working with and innovating even with very simple materials.
The fun of working through materials, and the importance of fun in the classroom.
Above is a group project, using limited materials to suspend and balance a pen with a structurally integrous structure of 8(out of ten) lollipop sticks and 1 metre of tape. Our group achieved second place with 94cm in the air, however our group's structure was the strongest and stayed standing longer than any other.
R Krauss 1979, Sculpture in the exapnded field.
It could be constructed
It could consist of many parts
It could represent an idea
It could be made from found objects
it could be a performance, an action event
It could use words, sound, smells
It could use rooms, buildings, buildings, landscapes,
It could be the artists own body
it could be people
It could be be you!
THIS IS SCULPTURE
Donald Rodney
Artist that suffered from Sickle cell.
In the House of my Father, 1996-7.
School Art: School Sculpture
'....Much of the work taught iand examined as art is too often depressingly trivial and bears scant resemblance to the vital, radical and often anarchic activity to which this name is attached by the rest of society.'
Hughes A 1999
Elements of Sculpture:
Form
Space
Materials
Process
Surface
Colour
Weight (balance)
Sound
Volume
Rhythm
Composition
Gravity
Scale
Environment
Time
Place
Additionally, I suggest:
Ephemerality
performativity
Narrative
Reactivity
Density
Interactivty
Tension
We were set in groups
A project we made using cardboard, and paper, attaching the objects together using magnetic strip tape to create images of balance, weight and tension. My sculpture is the central pink sculpture. I decided to make my life much harder for myself by creating these swirling natural forms, rather than simple geometric shapes.
Afternoon Session at the October Gallery
After a contentious afternoon session, I wrote the following email to Andy.
Usually it would be in my nature to avoid confrontation, however I feel its important and productive to actively seek clarification to confirm that my takeaways from the session allign with the intended taught material.
Dear Andy,
First, I wanted to say thank you for this morning's session. It was really very valuable to me, to consider faming lessons on sculpture with Kraus' writing on sculpture in the expanded field.
The value of these sessions reminds me why it's important to study the theory of pedagogy alongside teaching practice and why I am studying to be a teacher through a PGCE and not through teach-first programs.
Our Monday sessions are not momentary distractions from our placements, but a time for development and learning.
Every lesson that I learn, I record on my research blog which I'm developing as I continue this course. Overall, the lessons taught on this course are expressed succinctly
And I have seen great improvement in my teaching practice. However, I have struggled with this afternoon's session, and I hoped I might raise some questions to you in my reflections.
It comes more naturally for me to avoid conflict and not to challenge people when I assume an oppositional reading to taught material, however my teaching practice has taught me that a deeper understanding can be found when teaching is challenged.
I am, therefore, very grateful for your support in raising my concern to the artist. However, I would love to hear your response to what I took away from this session.
As I said before, I struggle with the idea of cultural appropriation.
Personally, I am someone with an incredibly mixed heritage and I believe that it is only though engaging with different cultures that we can grow to understand each other and create a more pluralistic society.
I am also, however, open to the teaching on this course and so in lieu of our previous sessions on cultural appropriation I can understand that it can be insensitive, ignorant, and damaging to cultures to use the signs and symbols of their cultures without literacy.
I had productive discussions about this with my table. Without literacy, the Chrisitan cross and the Hindu symbol for peace can easily become hateful symbols. Using another language without literacy can also result in adverse and unintended meanings. Symbols may have value in how they are applied, and so we must not cheapen them by using them to reinforce negative stereotypes or by applying them to artefacts of waste (such as old newspaper).
Again, I am grateful that the artist responded to my question, but I am left dissatisfied with the answer.
We were given a sheet of symbols from an African tribe and asked to reproduce them, using our judgement to decide on what would look the best.
This is, verbatim, the same exercise which we have been taught demonstrates cultural appropriation of Indigenous Australian culture.
The artist responded that it is not cultural appropriation, because the artist we looked at feels that African culture is underrepresented in art.
While we did look at an artist, we were not asked to make artworks in response to the artist but to the imagery of the symbols. The artist themself did not use these symbols in their artwork, nor did they make art that was 2D. They instead made 3d sculptural works which were very far-removed from the task we were asked to complete.
On reading set for cultural appropriation previously, the text mentioned that working through an artist can be one way to access other cultures without appropriating them. However, this task was not working through the intentions of the artist.
The takeaway I got from this response was that because the artist leading the session found that El Anatsui felt their culture was underrepresented in western art, she would encourage the appropriation of African culture.
We have been taught that appropriating indigenous symbols is insensitive and hurtful, but we are no presented with teaching that encourages appropriation of African symbols.
Is the lesson here that appropriation can be positive? Perhaps the definition of appropriation that I have presented above could be expanded to include both positive and negative applications?
Personally, I would not apply any of what I learned in this workshop to my teaching practice. If this session was as delivered by someone that is not of African heritage, I imagine that lots of other STs would be voicing similar concerns. As someone who is not of African heritage myself, I would not feel comfortable applying this to a classroom setting.
My aim is to develop a racially sensitive pedagogical practice, and I hope I can find a way to access inclusive teaching practices without encouraging students to appropriate the language and symbols of a culture.
Additionally, the second half of the session about asking, 'what would you give, to African slaves?' also made me uncomfortable.
The answers that were encouraged such as 'friendship' and 'I would listen to them' felt almost insensitively insulting to the issue that was presented.
It reminded me of a poetry piece that was widely criticised online, titled 'If I was Hitler mother' which used similar phrases such as implying and that if Hitler just had a loving mother who listened to him and lover him then he wouldn't have committed genocide.
I agree with the artist that it's important to engage with empathy, but to claim that if we went back to the time of the slave trade and offered friendship that it would be enough to lessen any of the pain caused by the intercontinental slave trade.
I feel this was a missed opportunity to discuss how artists have a voice and can use art to campaign for societal change.
I apologise for this lengthy email, but I wanted to adequately show my appreciation to yourself and fairly present my contentions with the afternoon session. Please do correct me on any area that I may have misinterpreted, as the purpose of this email is not to argue my perspective but to ask if it aligns with the intention of what was taught.
Kind regards,
Luke
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