Abstracts from the Annual Meeting in Durham, North Carolina
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Abstracts from the Annual Meeting in Durham, North Carolina October 17-20, 2012 Conference Chair: Beth Mulvaney, Meredith College Abel, Troy. Virginia Tech. Design Education: Incorporating the Scientific Method and Eye Tracking Data into Design Studio Critiques. Design education, by broad definition, is the instruction of theory and application in the creation of products, services, and communication. Integral to design education is the process of studio critiques that incorporate educator comments and reactions to student work, in an attempt to educate them on better design decisions. Critiques date back to the master/apprentice model and remain remnants of the Bauhaus style in current design studio education. While valuable, critiques often lack tangible substance that students can capture, process, and apply to future design problems. The critique methodology discussed in this presentation moves students out of the studio and into a research lab to assist in validating design decisions, therefore augmenting the traditional critique model of evaluation. Once students complete the initial iteration of a project, they use the scientific method of exploration in an attempt to validate their design decisions, while also incorporating a series of methodologies that test the validity and integrity of their designs using eye-tracking equipment. The results of these tests are then used during critiques to inform future design decisions and possible directions for future iteration. Students begin to see the connection between design, research, and execution. Alexander, James. University of Alabama at Birmingham. The Art of Assessment: The Art Studio Critique. Central to studio art education is the critique. At its best the critical review of a student’s work can be informative, even enlightening and beneficial. At its worst the critical review process can be deflating and destabilizing. Primary to the critique is blunt and honest critical analysis. Anything less is insincere. Integral to that process is the separation of opinion from critical judgment. It is imperative that comments such as “I like it” be validated by critical reasoning. Second, it is helpful to understand the genre within which the piece of art is being expressed. It is possible to dislike an artistic style and yet recognize excellence within it. Third, it is important to address the relationships among concept, material and methodology. In that context it is valuable to understand that art is what is conceived and that craft is how it is constructed. Allen, Pam. Troy University. “Print-Like” for a Safer Environment. Did you know that you can use household products such as vegetable oil and alcohol to clean up oil-based inks? Or that you can use wintergreen oil instead of acetone to transfer photocopies? There are many safe products that can be used to replace the highly toxic solvents and chemicals normally used in a printmaking studio. Today’s water-based inks feel and act much like oil-based inks with slower drying times and less color fading. In the summer of 2003, Allen attended a Nontoxic Intaglio Printmaking Workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, given by Keith Howard. Impressed with the nontoxic processes and tired of using solvents that were making her sick, she made a conscious decision to change the printmaking studio at Troy University to a safer, cleaner environment. For this panel, Allen will discuss the trials encountered over the years, along with the successes of using nontoxic materials and more contemporary printmaking techniques. Alligood, Chad. The Graduate Center, CUNY. Beer and Sympathy: Tom Marioni’s “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art” Stepping among empty beer bottles, scattered cafe chairs, and vacant tables, visitors to artist Tom Marioni’s seminal exhibition at the Oakland Museum of Art in 1970 encountered what appeared to be the detritus of a hardy party—one to which they apparently were not invited. For this show, entitled “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art,” Marioni invited close friends to the museum on a Monday, when it was normally closed; the curator’s job was to bring the beer. According to Marioni, he and his guests “drank and had a good time[;] the show consisted of the evidence of the act.” Since its initial staging, this work has continued to evolve through subsequent appearances in a variety of contexts and forms, both situational and sculptural. In this paper, Alligood considers Marioni’s work as a case study in the particular importance of designated sites of social engagement in the emergent California art scene of the 1960s and 70s, especially given its disparate geography. Second, Alligood attends to Marioni’s shift away from art-as-object to art-as- social-encounter, a shift simultaneously indicated by his founding of the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco in 1970. Alves, Rita. Independent Artist. Complexity of Content and Slow Media Process. Content in art comes out of process. When processing time is minimized or eliminated, the complexity and subtlety of the content suffers. This is the fundamental reason that slow media continues to be practiced— that in an age of instant computer imaging, hands-on media like drawing and painting have not lost popularity. In discussing how the process of making influences the layers of meaning in artwork, Alves speaks about her choices in education, which led her from a concept-based undergraduate program to graduate school at the New York Academy of Art, one of the most technically-based “slow media” schools in the country, and ultimately to her current identification as a conceptual installation artist. Alves has often been questioned about her choice of academic training and about why she chose to paint and draw things by hand that can be done more efficiently on Photoshop. This presentation clarifies the relationship of these process decisions to complexity of content while showing images of some work done over periods of two or more years. Amrhein, Laura M. University of Arkansas at Little Rock. NOLA and Beyond: Jacqueline Bishop’s Imaginary Landscapes. Jacqueline Bishop works in a variety of media and in diverse locations to consider human potential. Her landscape paintings of baby shoes and installations, such as Black Memoria, explore the psychological relationships between humans and non-humans and our disappearing organic world. In this paper, Amrhein discusses a range of works and their relationship to traditional landscape painting and art historical precedents, such as the environmental art movement. She also considers how her multi-disciplinary approach and broad research and activist interests are parlayed into intimate, often visceral works that are aesthetically driven cultural critiques. Anania, Katie. University of Texas at Austin / California College of the Arts. Line, Sensation, Restriction, Extension: Carolee Schneemann’s Social Experiments with Rope. In 1962, Carolee Schneemann and Allan Kaprow planned a Happening in which they would cut New Yorkers adrift from ropes on a barge off the coast of East Hampton. Though the event was never realized, Schneemann henceforth referred to rope as a kind of line, using it to organize or inhibit physical movement in many subsequent performance works. This designation was both generative and strategic, as she was a painter and draftsperson trying to negotiate her identity within the Judson dance circle. She frequently wrote to friends about her laborious hours of daily drawing and the problem of communicating that labor to the viewer in her performances. This paper, then, considers rope as a crucial tool that synthesized drawing and dance in Schneemann’s live work, serving as an extension of flesh as well as a framework for social experimentation. Like the drawn line upon which Schneemann relied so heavily in her private practice, rope was an optical means of dividing space. It was responsive to touch, sharing a theoretical and phenomenological kinship with line, but it also sprang back into place, which, to Schneemann, helped to reconcile the optics of line with the contingencies of the moving body. Anderson, Brooke. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The John Biggers Murals at Winston-Salem State University. John Biggers (1924–2001) was a native of North Carolina. A long-time admirer of Diego Rivera and the WPA mural tradition, Biggers mastered the art of large scale, site-specific message murals in North Carolina, Virginia, and Texas. It is his largest projects at Hampton University and Winston-Salem State University that are the culminating artworks of a longstanding career. This paper delves into the two artworks at Winston-Salem State University, Origins and Ascensions, two murals that bring together the primary concerns of Biggers’s goals as an artist: sacred geometry, African history and spirituality, African-American history, folk art and religion. This paper also presents the site-specificity of the murals and their intended purpose to convey the mission of a Historically Black College. Biggers remains a regionally recognized artist who is slowly gaining capital on the national art scene; an ongoing examination into his life philosophy and his artistic practice is warranted. Origins and Ascensions are two of the most monumental and important artworks in the state of North Carolina, but they are not widely known, visited, or appreciated. Anderson, Carrie. Boston University. Exchange(d) Encounters: Johan Maurits and the Ethnographic Gift. During his tenure as governor-general of Dutch Brazil, Johan Maurits of Nassau Seigen (1604–1679) amassed an extraordinary collection of ethnographic images and objects, which he subsequently presented as a series of calculated gifts to an elite group of European patrons. Though gift exchange has long been recognized as a crucial mode of social negotiation in early modern Europe, far too little attention has been paid to the ways in which the practice facilitated the widespread dispersal of ethnographic material.