Sunday 20 October 2013

Fine Art Year 1 week 3


Quite hard going this week as I had the beginnings of a chest infection and felt really ill on Monday and Tuesday. This is quite normal this time of the year as students have also brought all their germs with them and staff have also been going down with bad colds and related infections. If you can you just get on with it, but it does mean you are not perhaps as sharp and on the ball as you could be. I was very aware on Monday that at the end of the afternoon session I was too tired to really push students to participate in the final question and answer session and I let them go early.
I’m also very aware that what I’m teaching isn’t what I would teach if it was up to me. I really feel the students need a basic grounding in art history before we start looking at issues related to the modules. However the Individual and Social module has a contextual element to it and my job is to deliver this. This week I was looking at Formalism and its supporters as well as issues that formalist thinking had problems with, such as certain sorts of content. Perhaps I was due to the chest infection but I did find it very hard going.
Because most students haven’t done a basic art history course such as the Renaissance to Modernism or Modern Art from 1890 to 1960 or anything similar, it’s hard for them to contextualise the information. For instance at one point I was looking at the differences between Suprematist paintings such as Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground and Ad Reinhart’s Ultimate Paintings, but between the two time periods there is a huge mass of information that needs filling in, not least World Wars One and Two, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, Greenberg, the rise of abstract painting within the modernist tradition, etc etc. So although I try to intimate these things and allude to them, it becomes a mess of bits. I’m sure all some students will remember will be the point about Suprematist paintings sometimes been shown in room corners in exactly the place you would have expected an icon to be or that Reinhart also made cartoons. (I’m not sure I should have made as much as I did about the influence of cartoon styles and simplifications). Because I was struggling physically and speaking through a really sore throat, I might have misjudged the pace or failed to emphasise the right things. I was trying to make a point about Modernism and the idea of the signature style of an individual (the individual aspect of the module) and at the same time open up ideas such as the universality of geometry, Plato’s pure forms etc., trying to open up the tensions between different approaches, but I’m not sure how well the issues were being understood. These are only two hour sessions and we have a break for 20 minutes. Several students have dyslexia or similar learning difficulties, so after getting a feel for their level of engagement I have started to embed far more links to online materials in the Powerpoints I’m now preparing. One good thing about being ill is that I have been restricted in the later half of the week to bed, so have managed to construct learning materials for the next couple of sessions.

Tuesday was really hard going as I was on my own with 60 students on the studio floor and trying to track everyone I spoke to. My feeling was that the initial enthusiasm is starting to fade and the open plan structure needs to be changed because as students develop an idea they need walls and spaces suitable to construct, but instead they are either gravitating to tables or simply starting to avoid the studio as it isn’t supporting their ideas. It’s old fashioned but I still feel that boxing the space gives each student an area that they mentally own and this is where they will be happiest.
Perhaps not best to be writing any posts this week, there is a tendency to feel the glass is always half empty when I’m ill. 

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