CURRICULUM
From ART FOR HUMANS WIKI
Course 1
The Ethics of Vision
“Our civilization will largely survive in the works of our creation. There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. That quality confirms the faith that our common hopes may be more enduring than our conflicting hostilities. Even now men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may well be the survival of civilization.” — The first meeting of the National Council on the Arts convenes at the White House with President Johnson swearing in the members
(Excerpt from National Endowment for the Arts: A History 1965-2008)
A Sample Syllabus for 4D Studies By Paul McLean
Note: This is a sample syllabus for a dimensional art course I put together for a Fulbright Award package. If you would like to use any of it, please let me know and acknowledge the origination. If you have questions, feel free to drop me a note. - PJM
Contemporary artists today are expected to display proficiency in many disciplines. This course examines these expectations and proposes a production construct that provides artists who use it the means to succeed as solo and collective art professionals. We will also explore daily practice for artists, as it relates to the generation, regeneration and sampling of content. These studies will occur within the context of actual exhibit-building, culminating in an array of presentations, utilizing a spectrum of contemporary media options.
Note: These threads are the aesthetic underpinnings for the course. Students are asked to independently familiarize themselves with these concepts and inquiries prior to first class and will be expected to possess at least an introductory understanding of them by course’s end. Students will be encouraged to and rewarded for referencing the threads in assignments and work.
Thread One: A System of Forms Characteristics of forms in systems will be presented and analyzed. Calligraphy as a system of forms will be transposed on analysis of art/artist output, as defined in contemporary Western art.
Thread Two: Illustration of Content Methods for representing Motion will be presented and analyzed. Early uses of photography as an artist tool will be related to artist descriptions of ceremonial procession.
Thread Three: POV Spherical or spiraling perspective will be introduced as concept, as an introduction to the math of artistry. Systems of design, especially those involving numerical processes or progressions, will be examined.
Thread Four: Layered Narrative (Facets) Graphic and filmic software as a metaphor for dimensional narrative and a tool dimensional image-making will be presented and explored. Imagination and projection will be examined, in this context, as a map of 4 Dimension form, by way of Grigori Perelman.
Thread Five: History and Theme Composition (in the musical sense) will be introduced as a system binder, and as an instructional tool to help artists and viewers better understand the connections among elements in presentation. Rhizomal structures will be explored (starting with the web).
Thread Six: The Order of Events Circular systems of exchange will be elaborated on. Tribal modes will be compared to those of modern civilization, especially as pertinent to development of style and the so-called decorative arts.
Thread Seven: Proficiency and Value Memory and ghosts will be considered as interpretations of relative human functions, and samples will be examined. Translucency as a material quality (as in glazing) and as a semi-material state will be examined for the purposes of addressing craft and security as motivations.
Thread Eight: Chaos and its Solutions Fractal economies of means and expanding pictorial geometries will be examined and practiced. Choice among millions of colors will be identified and presented as a motivational determinant for the artist. Directional elements, specifically color modalities, as representative or narrative factors, will be addressed in this context, as flags.
Thread Nine: The Body as Ruler Physical correlations, especially those pertaining to the practice of architecture and picture-making/installation, will be discussed. The model, both the architectural sort and the artist’s subject, may be presented as a functional individualism, and arguments will be put forth for the negation of the sublime and abject as bookends for the creative enterprise.
Thread Ten: The Artist’s Eye The lens and focus will be considered as cause and effect in contemporary art, as will the general discourse on Vision. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle will be introduced in the context of a Dimensional Art that integrates Specific Objects with interactive relationships among art, artist, artwork, art venue and art viewer. Transamination will also be introduced in this thread, and the trans- prefix.
Thread Eleven: Space Emptiness will be presented in terms of the so-called white cube. Relative subjects to be considered in this context will include contemporary poets in relation to oral, song and poem traditions – as relevant to visual art outcomes. The personification of death and dying will be introduced in this context also, as a unifying artistic (or spiritual) strategy with many applications or tactics and unforeseeable results.
Thread Twelve: Risk and Dreaming Artist approaches that induce fear in the viewer will be presented and analyzed, along with related optic effects. Vertigo and after-image will be examined. The parallelographic nature of content/context in dimensional space will be considered as dreaming metaphor, relative to directional cyclic motion, especially waveform.
Thread Thirteen: Light Versus Dark Dualism is considered. What do art and spirits share? The contemporary art call/response pattern will be woven into an expanding perceptual pattern through communication devices, in both new and traditional media, for senses not identified as exclusively artistic. Differences between creativity and art will be confronted in this context, and definitions of both will be examined and discussed.
Thread Fourteen: The Hero and Beauty Cost/benefit analysis will be presented and examined in tandem with art production approaches and art organizational models. Artist management and agency will be considered in terms of fiction and nonfiction, as political purposes. Trans-critics (such as Blek, Banksy, Goya and Daumier) will be considered. Examples of visual voice, a reference to McLuhan, arguably speak to institutional predispositions. Social methods for restricting or shaping expression, the effects of which contain the manager’s tasks - to stabilize and categorize, define (or collect) - will be examined in relation to emerging comic forms such as the Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Thread Fifteen: Forever Supply and demand are examined as artist tools, especially with regards to digital output. Natural history museums are again considered, in the context of colonial and neo-colonial phenomena. Identifying an ideal art and artist will be attempted. Plans for housing and presenting the ideal art will be drawn. A beautiful burial plot for the artist will be designed.
Course Structure: Students will be graded on the basis of in-class participation (25%), quality of research and presentation (25%), contributions to exhibit production (35%) and understanding of material (15%). Grading will combine traditional points and letter evaluation systems, supplemented by the instructor’s anecdotal review of student activity. In other words, measures will be both formal and informal. Students will have every opportunity throughout the course to determine class standing. The instructor will offer the student feedback or tasks for purposes of improving the student’s class standing, upon request by the student at any time during the course. Special circumstances and needs of individual students will be considered when appropriate, as determined by institution policy and instructor discretion. Disruptive behavior will not be tolerated. Students will be expected to treat themselves, their fellow students, their instructor, school and community with respect.
Participation Our goals include: identifying each student’s best practice, whether administrative, artistic, interpretive, responsive, etc.; improving the student’s ability to apply theory in the art arena; to illustrate approaches in art organizational methods, both for-profit and nonprofit; to instill respect for logical or reasonable problem-solving; to demonstrate how contemporary artists must conduct the fluid transition among a plethora of roles and crafts; to prove the value of open communication in the production environment; to make transparent the process of creating, exhibiting and interpreting art; to improve students’ appreciation for and skills as artists, curators, art organization staff and administrators, critics and viewers; to hone students’ production capacities as creative professionals; to teach the value of deadlines for defining artistic output.
Meetings 1-4: Meeting; Interview; Survey; Competition The course introduction will contain a sequence of exercises intended to reveal students’ individual and collective capacities as art practitioners, so that they can be provided a position in the production where their chance of success is improved, if not assured. Social characteristics of the art world will be informally introduced here, for the purposes of collective-building. Trust, or at least the necessity for shared goals, is essential for effective organizational practice. Here we will build a commons, an identity, a visual language and other intangibles and tangibles to promote cohesiveness within the collective structure. The instructor will meeting with students collectively and individually and assign tasks that activate the student’s creative investment in the project, if possible, and inspire desire to participate within the context of the collective effort. Assignments will be tailored to improve observational, relational, and creative skills. Group projects will occur within normative nonprofit organizational practice (such as focus groups and campaigns).
Meetings 5-8: Two solo assignments and two collective projects (in teams) Students will begin to practice their determined roles as artists, curators, critics, viewers and installers. The class will divide time among the architectures it inhabits (studios, classroom, library, community, home). The first solo and collective projects are intended to activate the secondary spaces required for art production (those outside the body). Documentation, revelation, illustration, representation of revealed characteristics of the inhabited environment are the goals. Camera-based projects will begin in this phase, as will the archiving of created or discovered materials. Students, facilitated by the instructor, will begin to shape the content for the exhibit and engage the community in which the exhibit is sited. Students will be challenged to cultivate relationships (partnerships) outside the classroom to further the collective’s aims. We will commence to identify and develop stakeholders who support the production or can provide constructive feedback, to make our efforts more effective and therefore more successful. Art objects will be produced for exhibit or installation.
Meetings 9-12: One solo assignment and one collective project The focus of this phase of the course will be presentation and integration of organizational forms. Aspects of production that can be monetized will be. An account will be established for funds to be input and expended. Oversight for fiduciary responsibility will be established. Class time will be devoted to review of current activities and responses to production events and conditions, as well as comparative study of organizational methods and theory (applied). Solo and collective projects will be critiqued and modified by class, instructor and, where possible, outside experts. Finished works will be documented and formatted for virtual and real-world presentation. The overarching goal will be to situate the course outcome in a hierarchy of quality, merit and value. Criteria for success will be examined and output will be evaluated using those criteria.
Meetings 13, 14: Exhibit production Students will be expected to defend their decisions (creative, organizational, and theoretical). Role-playing exercises will be conducted, to hone students’ abilities to confidently and competently present and justify their solo and collective work. The goal is to manifest a collective in mature form, and for students to operate as witnesses and agents of this phenomenon concurrently. Final adjustments will be undertaken to bring exposition to an acceptable (or better) level of finish or refinement. Clarity of presented material will be analyzed. Claims of value will be reviewed. Consideration of thematic trajectories will be presented both as discourse and as an indicator of subsequent productions. Students will be interviewed to ascertain how the production experience has impacted their understanding of art, artist, artistic production and presentation. Definitions of art will be undertaken from solo, collective, organizational, material and community POVs.
Meeting 15: Exhibit presentation Celebration! Anecdotal review of in-process discoveries will be conducted informally and textually. The relationship between documentation and participatory experience will be examined. The concepts of art as gesture, performative production and “trans-event” will be applied to the exhibition trajectory, the goal being a measurement of value outside the means of material estimation. Students and instructor will together endeavor to identify all inertial effects activated by our efforts over the course. The intent is to define in truth what is it is that we did. The course will culminate with a gift exchange.
Research and Presentation These exercises constitute formal training in dimensional aesthetics, which will be applied in the studio and exhibit venue and the focus of classroom studies and discourse. The goal of these exercises is to systematically integrate new and traditional approaches to making, understanding, viewing and presenting art, so the student will be better equipped to navigate among those arenas and develop a better appreciation for each facet of art as experience.
Meeting 1: Representation (10) Students will be asked to find and present representations, formal graphics, components of systems (ten), which will in turn be formulated by students under direction of the instructor, into compositions, with or without linear characteristics. Reason will serve as arrangement criterion. Suggested terms include “I” and “see” and so on. Binary code will and the math of “one” and “zero” will be discussed in terms of social correlations.
Meeting 2: Animation Students will compile a library of animations that the class will arrange as a linear sequence. Early photographic studies of subjects in motion will be considered, along with software that produces simple progressive moving images that project the illusion of motion. Scroll painting will be comparatively analyzed in the context of cinema. The effects of animation on painting and other traditional media will be discussed.
Meeting 3: Color set Students will create color charts and wheels, in the format of design palettes, which will inform the artwork subsequently generated. Assignment of color to infer meaning (“red means stop”) will be discussed. Physicality of color, especially with regards 20th century large format (non-easel) painting will be examined, as will color in costume design. The emotional content of color (“seeing red”) will be discussed.
Meeting 4: Map Students will produce a map that is an interpretive study of a pre-existing map. Various contemporary art approaches involving mapmaking will be discussed. The 2 Dimension qualities of map graphics, the globe, and software-generated (such as weather maps) that serve as GUIs for data sets will be compared. The question of the Earth’s rotation in space as an exempted concern for the mapmaker or –reader will be raised.
Meeting 5: Armature Students will present captured sound and produced sound for an audio library to be mined in production. Other sonic components such as rhythm will be examined, relative to human biographics (e.g., 60 bpm = the heartbeat, described on an oscilloscope). Students will also find and present examples of interlocking structures, such as modular systems and rhizomic web pages. Of especial interest to the class will be a discussion of creative opportunities and constraints within such systems.
Meeting 6: Timeline Students will be asked to develop an action or occurrence that evolves or is determined by a pre-determined timeline. Anomalies (artificially produced or inherent) common to the form will be examined. Suspension of disbelief, and other pressures associated with adherence to timelines, will be considered in this context. Dream sequences (especially those sequences that are rigidly time-formatted) will be examined for their independence, perceived or real, from linear constraints.
Meeting 7: Finish and Style Students will find and present samples of patina, varnish and other processes in traditional art forms. The functional aspects of “finish” will be examined. Students will find and present software-based correlations in current graphic design and contemporary art practice, expressions that serve no protective function (or do they?). Particular attention will be applied to issues related to those finish techniques that either hide or accentuate evidence of human interaction with the object, artwork or design. Memory will be discussed in relation to evidence of the “human hand” and the nature or meaning of touch.
Meeting 8: Flag/Sign Students will find and present examples of wrong use of symbols, or the wrong use of objects, as symbols, for symbolic arguments or reactive movements. Documentation of breakdowns in symbolic form or systems will be examined as a point of departure for artistic exploration. Interpretation will be discussed in this context, as a critique of contemporary art criticism. Students will be invited to develop a language of Artspeak and propose its literature. Abstract expressionism reviewed by Marxist critics will offer a foundation for our exercise.
Meeting 9: Model Students will investigate figurative art and present examples to the class. These examples, inspired by models, will be embedded in miniature settings and software environments. Finally, students will bring models to life, by posing in “brick and mortar” environments, for documentation purposes. The results will be compiled for use in our exhibit. Visual mathematics involving infinite expansion and reduction will be discussed.
Meeting 10: Blur Students will find and present examples of motion and light jointly distorting, resisting or otherwise affecting the camera’s attempt to capture a moment in time. Artistic strategies that utilize blur and other focal affects will be examined. Of especial interest will be the use of such effects by 3D artists to produce believable representations of life by digital means. The ethics and collateral psychic impact of such techniques on viewers, particularly passive audiences, will be examined.
Meeting 11: Container Students will find and present containers, which we will assemble into architecture in class. We will attempt to fill spaces occurring in our architecture with expressive elements, and then document the results. IN ADAGIO, the presumptive title for the exercise, will describe a new pyramid, a new burial form, for contemporary art as form.
Meeting 12: Wave (Reverb/Distortion) Students will find and present examples of systematic disruptions of repeated forms, or structures that inhibit fluid movement. Variances and tolerances will be examined, with special emphasis placed on how solid forms disintegrate under continuous stress. The transition between sleep and waking will be discussed. How does belief in the concrete assemble and dissolve? What sort of art represents the point of fracture?
Meeting 13: Causality Students will find and present sequences that demonstrate the realization or frustration of expected outcomes. The art of justification or explication will be discussed, as a point of departure for an examination of contemporary art that evidences the artist’s need for criticism and his willingness to invent critique where there is lack of critique, within the work itself. The romantic notion of artist as sensitive and isolated from society will be confronted.
Meeting 14: Stencil Students will be asked to produce a cabinet of wonders in any medium. The class will discuss hybrids. In the art arena, cultural studies, entertainment and education are prevalent as motivations for current curatorial practice. Students will be invited to suggest artist qualifications relative to institutional aims. The class will explore how art reflects the needs of the professional presenter in both the commercial or retail art scene and the trending “art palace,” that is, the museum designed by a distinguish architect, erected at great expense.
Meeting 15: Inventory Students will design their own estate collections. We will discuss preservation and conservation, the Canon and art as legacy.
Exhibit Design (Tentative Production Outline) This outline is only a raw template for the proposed exhibit. The instructor will invite students and administration to participate in all phases of production. The goal will be to map the production pipeline for art exhibition for the host institution and affected community, with emphasis on material support, communication pipelines, cultural compatibility and overall receptivity. Generally, outcomes indicate positive and negative factors and influences, which the class will document in the Finals project. The production systems analysis will be offered the host institution at the end of the course. The exhibition will be of the highest quality.
Meeting 1: Concept, teams, calendar Meeting 2: Title (Theme), press release, drawings Meeting 3: Artists, critic, curator(s), installers, viewers, collector(s) Meeting 4: Studio visit Meeting 5: Interviews, budget Meeting 6: Artist production, marketing campaign Meeting 7: Artist production, invite Meeting 8: Artist production, poster Meeting 9: Artist production, website Meeting 10: Artist production, preview Meeting 11: Artist production, critique Meeting 12: Artist production, installation Meeting 13: Opening, sales Meeting 14: Documentation Meeting 15: Inventory, de-installation
Finals Project: A 3-5 page review of the exhibit
The instructor will conform to the policies of the host institution and confer with administration to apply these in the classroom. Subsequent to appraisal by administration advisors on normative requirements for student attendance, academic honesty, grading systems, workload, etc., the course syllabus will be modified to reflect both the administration’s suggested practices and requirements, as well as the demands of the course material and scope.
Note: The following graph is essentially a summary proposal of course structure. I believe that this sort of educational approach requires a small class size. The goal is to integrate traditional methods of craft transmission (apprenticeship) with current educational processes and tools. I am open to suggestions for refining this concept to make it practicable in the collegiate environment at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
4D Production Theory Students will be expected to familiarize themselves with the above syllabus thoroughly. Prior to the first class, the student will present the instructor with a detailed list, describing her set of interests, goals (what she would like to learn about/what she would like to learn how to do) and prerequisites (academic, professional, artistic or personal), which would indicate the reason(s) the student applied for the course. The student will study the outlined course threads, research assignments and so on, in order to determine which of the assignments, theories, activities, etc., would best serve to further the student’s aspirations. She must consider the array of directives as a set of options, from which she must choose, or assemble, a curriculum that is reasonable and defensible to the instructor (and the student, herself). This curriculum will serve as the basis for a unique creative and academic trajectory that will begin to describe the student’s participation in both the production and the academic components of the course. This list may be modified or updated at any time, with notification of the instructor, with whom the student will be expected to confer periodically. The instructor at any time may call upon the student to adjust or review the curriculum, based on the instructor’s observation of the student’s performance. Some course assignments, like the finals project, will be common to all. Others will be uniquely assigned to a qualified student or team of students. The goal for the student is to customize and optimize subjective aspects of the course experience, to inspire the student’s drive to self-realize in the collective context. The goal of the instructor is to inspire the student to produce excellent work, the excellence of which can be verified or evaluated in the production process using standard or objective professional and academic criteria.
