how to love your life
How?
Set people up for a future of unbridled creativity and free expression. Show it. Suggest it. Support them.
And then?
And then get out of the way of the inevitable flood.
What I do in life is create, and create/empower creators. That is to say, to empower people to be their fullest, most powerful, most fulfilling expression. I just set my Art 56 students up for their final project. The die is cast.
Final Project
Create an edition (minimum three copies) of an "artist's book." The artist's book must have a strong concept or theme. The binding of the book must relate to that concept or theme. The "book" must include at least three images generated in Painter.
Questions:
What is a book? Why is a book the way it is? What does its actual, physical binding relate to?*
And, what can a book be when an artist starts to tear the form apart and demand that form reflect or contain concept?
I brought tubs of artists' books, some by known artists (Cheri Gaulke, Katherine Ng, Christian Mounger) and most by my former students. First I let my students paw through my personal collection—four tubs of artists' books. Then I pulled a few out for scrutiny and explanation:
Valentine for Newt
Christian Mounger creates a heart-shaped brown-paper-covered book, hanging from chain link, for Newt Gingrich, filled with images of 1950s gay porn. Yay Chris.
Letter to Grandpa
(a student writes a letter in Spanish to her long-dead grandfather expressing her guilt at leaving him to die in El Salvador, in a handmade envelope, overlaying her ten-year-old face on the flag of El Salvador on the front, and her eighteen-year-old face on the flag of the US on the back)
Breast Cancer Barbie
(a student publishes a poem she wrote while enduring her own chemotherapy, about how Barbie would handle chemo—the binding being "Barbie" packaging, complete with cool wigs!, a hospital gown!, large Vicodin!)
Consumer
(a student makes a list for an entire week of everything he has ingested (every single cigarette, all the alcohol, all the drugs, all the food, minute by minute—discovering and facing his level of addiction and lack of control—juxtapposed with images of how it felt to be him, day by day)
Fortunate Me ("Fortune Ate Me")
Katherine Ng's exquisite bakery box of cardboard letterpress "fortune cookies," revealing the artist's thoughts and memories of her father and her own emotional state, with the "fortune" inside each cookie being one of her father's aphorisms.
After two hours of discussion, examination, sharing and listening, my students were completely moved. So I talked to them about the purposes of art.
Some art sells.
Some art guides.
Some art educates.
Some art entertains.
And some art—my favorite art— moves, touches, and transforms people. It shares something about the realities of being human. It expresses, for no other motive than to express. My invitation is always for my students to engage in all of the possibilities, including the latter. I have given myself over mostly to the latter.
This is what I live for. This very conversation. I have been building to this. From wrestling with technological concerns to wrestling with art concerns. From talking about pure form, to talking about what form delivers and how it delivers it, to talking about generating concepts (sketching, analogies, brainstorming, etc. etc. etc.) and winnowing them down.
We made it. We have arrived.
Evidence?
The emails.
The tearful, hushed conversations in the hallway at the break.
The energy and intimacy that is suddenly present.
The red eyes ringing the room as artist's books pass, hand to hand to hand.
Sanctity. Beauty. Humor. Joy. Deliberate tastelessness. Necessary creativity, as necessary as rain.
Now it is easy. I tease out their ideas.
I visit their sketchbooks and challenge their assumptions.
Now I get out of the way.
* We ask and explore. Discuss. think... to discover that the binding of the book is mostly driven by marketplace issues (production, distribution, shelf space, etc.), which itself grew from the history of publishing and book design. The form of a book has nearly NOTHING to do with its ideas or concepts.
Set people up for a future of unbridled creativity and free expression. Show it. Suggest it. Support them.
And then?
And then get out of the way of the inevitable flood.
What I do in life is create, and create/empower creators. That is to say, to empower people to be their fullest, most powerful, most fulfilling expression. I just set my Art 56 students up for their final project. The die is cast.
Final Project
Create an edition (minimum three copies) of an "artist's book." The artist's book must have a strong concept or theme. The binding of the book must relate to that concept or theme. The "book" must include at least three images generated in Painter.
Questions:
What is a book? Why is a book the way it is? What does its actual, physical binding relate to?*
And, what can a book be when an artist starts to tear the form apart and demand that form reflect or contain concept?
I brought tubs of artists' books, some by known artists (Cheri Gaulke, Katherine Ng, Christian Mounger) and most by my former students. First I let my students paw through my personal collection—four tubs of artists' books. Then I pulled a few out for scrutiny and explanation:
Valentine for Newt
Christian Mounger creates a heart-shaped brown-paper-covered book, hanging from chain link, for Newt Gingrich, filled with images of 1950s gay porn. Yay Chris.
Letter to Grandpa
(a student writes a letter in Spanish to her long-dead grandfather expressing her guilt at leaving him to die in El Salvador, in a handmade envelope, overlaying her ten-year-old face on the flag of El Salvador on the front, and her eighteen-year-old face on the flag of the US on the back)
Breast Cancer Barbie
(a student publishes a poem she wrote while enduring her own chemotherapy, about how Barbie would handle chemo—the binding being "Barbie" packaging, complete with cool wigs!, a hospital gown!, large Vicodin!)
Consumer
(a student makes a list for an entire week of everything he has ingested (every single cigarette, all the alcohol, all the drugs, all the food, minute by minute—discovering and facing his level of addiction and lack of control—juxtapposed with images of how it felt to be him, day by day)
Fortunate Me ("Fortune Ate Me")
Katherine Ng's exquisite bakery box of cardboard letterpress "fortune cookies," revealing the artist's thoughts and memories of her father and her own emotional state, with the "fortune" inside each cookie being one of her father's aphorisms.
After two hours of discussion, examination, sharing and listening, my students were completely moved. So I talked to them about the purposes of art.
Some art sells.
Some art guides.
Some art educates.
Some art entertains.
And some art—my favorite art— moves, touches, and transforms people. It shares something about the realities of being human. It expresses, for no other motive than to express. My invitation is always for my students to engage in all of the possibilities, including the latter. I have given myself over mostly to the latter.
This is what I live for. This very conversation. I have been building to this. From wrestling with technological concerns to wrestling with art concerns. From talking about pure form, to talking about what form delivers and how it delivers it, to talking about generating concepts (sketching, analogies, brainstorming, etc. etc. etc.) and winnowing them down.
We made it. We have arrived.
Evidence?
The emails.
The tearful, hushed conversations in the hallway at the break.
The energy and intimacy that is suddenly present.
The red eyes ringing the room as artist's books pass, hand to hand to hand.
Sanctity. Beauty. Humor. Joy. Deliberate tastelessness. Necessary creativity, as necessary as rain.
Now it is easy. I tease out their ideas.
I visit their sketchbooks and challenge their assumptions.
Now I get out of the way.
* We ask and explore. Discuss. think... to discover that the binding of the book is mostly driven by marketplace issues (production, distribution, shelf space, etc.), which itself grew from the history of publishing and book design. The form of a book has nearly NOTHING to do with its ideas or concepts.
posted by laurelpaley at 12:58 PM
3 Comments:
Outstanding post, sis.
That's the way to leave a permanent impression on your students!
wah... how come we didn't get one??? :D~
Hi, what a great class that must have been!
Years ago when I was teaching drawing and printmaking I brought in a guest artist to do a bookmaking workshop. The first sort of "throw away" exercise, just to get people thinking sequentially, was the eight page origami book made from a single sheet of paper. As far as I was concerned, that was the end of the workshop - I love that tiny form and have been making those tiny books ever since. It's not about the craftsmanship of bookmaking - my obsessions over craft are all about printmaking - but about that little narrative in those tiny pages.
You never know what is going to strike a chord and have a lasting impact, do you?
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