The articles and readings in Freedman seem woven with a common thread of ideation. Use of multimedia, study of semiotics, use of transmediation within the classroom, and creating learning situations for visual culture are ideas that jumped from one reading to the next. I found the "Transmediation as a Metaphor for New Literacies in Multimedia Classroom" by Ladislaus M. Semali and Judith Fueyo to be a thin recap of Nick Kremer's Visual Culture course. It reminded me of my pervious self-reflections on teaching and how I want to incorporate many new tactics including: multimedia texts to analyze and for students to create, using Metaphor as a big idea to introduce conceptual thinking within the students own artworks, and more frequent studies of semiotics. It is my belief that the use of semiotics thinking should become an automatic lens used to view the world and it is our job as visual arts educators to provide opportunities for our students to develop such a lens.
One of the last remarks from "Kittleman's review of Serra's MOMA Art exhibition" commented on how Serra's early works were "ugly, nasty, down and dirty". This reflects back to the importance of creative/conceptual processes used in art making. I love the rubric used in the Studio Thinking course for our artwork because it does not base it's concentration upon the technical skill or pleasing aesthetic of the artwork itself but instead upon participation in class, preparation for class, quality of thought, artwork is content rich, etc. I can't help but wonder if Serrra received such support in his art making at his earlier stages...probably not with a critique such as the one above.
One of the last remarks from "Kittleman's review of Serra's MOMA Art exhibition" commented on how Serra's early works were "ugly, nasty, down and dirty". This reflects back to the importance of creative/conceptual processes used in art making. I love the rubric used in the Studio Thinking course for our artwork because it does not base it's concentration upon the technical skill or pleasing aesthetic of the artwork itself but instead upon participation in class, preparation for class, quality of thought, artwork is content rich, etc. I can't help but wonder if Serrra received such support in his art making at his earlier stages...probably not with a critique such as the one above.
The very last sentence of the Serra article comments on the beauty and purity in his natural creative process. How wonderful would it be to foster such natural processes within our own students? I also loved how his work dealt with SEVERAL big ideas such as; time, place, and emotion.
The Freedman book tied in well to the same idea of bad vs. good art. On page 53 of the Freedman text she discusses how there is always a value put on art and this often categorizes it as good or bad. As teachers we spend much of our time deciding which exemplars of artwork we want to share with out students. Why not do as Kathy did with the Neighbors photos and show art that has not yet found a distinguished home? Allowing our own students to have juicy discussions and form their own opinions about artwork. All we have to do is ask as Freeman does;
"What art is worth teaching?" pg. 54 and then go a step further and as our selves, Why?
After reading the Freedman text, I had a new realization. I know it is important to teach our students to create meaningful, conceptual works of art, but I did not connect why it is so important. Sure, I realized on the shallow end that it is important because it creates more interest and thus motivation for students to complete the work. More importantly, on a humanity level,
Artist are writers of history!
If we are not teaching our students to record their thinking...then it is forever lost.
Articles:
Transmediation as a Metaphor for
New Literacies in Multimedia Classrooms at http://www.readingonline.org/newliteracies/semali2/index.html
Kittleman’s review of Serra’s MOMA Art exhibition
I love your thought/realization that "Artists are writers of history". What a true and thought-provoking statement! And our students are MOST DEFINITELY writing history because they are so involved with the visual culture of our time - they are contributing themselves - and writing history!
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