Art Ed Lecture #2: Olivia Gude

I met this amazing lady at Temple a couple weeks ago, and the meeting came, as these things often do, at the exact moment I needed it. And I think this applies to so much beyond art education.  Or maybe art education expands to so much more than we might ordinarily think.

Also, her initials spell "OMG".

Here is Olivia's (rather incredible) online portfolio: https://naea.digication.com/omg/Welcome/published
And the Chicago Public Art Guide she recommended me to check out for the projects I've got going on--an invaluable resource (and I don't even like the word "invaluable"!  http://www.cpag.net/guide/2/2_pages/2_4_13.htm

She talked about building a "bricolage" curriculum.  One that ties nicely with one of the points Sam Seidel made about institutionalizing "toeing the line".  One that plays with the delicate balance between experience and energy.  She wants to provide her students with opportunities to break out of habits, develop creativity by trying unfamiliar methods.  But she says that teachers need to do the same.  Every year, she takes a project out of her curriculum and adds a new one--often, one she hates.  Gotta push the boundaries of that old comfort zone.

She also believes in giving students as wide a range of methods for art- and meaning-making as possible--as a sort of aspect of cultural democracy.  But that each must be current, relevant, used.  A way of making contemporary meaning.  Because, the idea is, art gives us a range of methods for living.

To her, projects are far from evaluations of who can produce exact copies.  They are "vehicles of aesthetic investigation".  They're "spaces" that invite us in and are open enough that they have the potential to take us to new places. That's one possibly-obvious concept that has, now that I'm consciously keeping it in the front of my brain, changed my outlook on my little mural class.

Some curriculum ideas that resonated with me:

-Altered road sign project.  Playing with symbols, satire, and archetypes, questioning truth and meaning. "Bureau of Misdirection".

-Surrealist map games--using a pre-existing map as a sort of Rorschach test, pushing yourself to think in a quasi-reactionary way, finding shapes within it, fusing the inner and outer states of the world, realizing that nothing is just one thing.
-"Worksheets" with questions to ponder--but not your average worksheet.  These are self-reflection questions that would start a ponderance at a bar.  Process of eliciting stories--writing, sharing, and going BACK to writing.
-Painted paper color wheel and autobiographical collages
-Or autobiographical comics, superpowers, white and black scratch/hatching technique.  Ideas of superpowers, hero cycle etc
-Walking map--recording impressions.  Blind contour walk, possibly using cell phones to document and later compare.  GIS? Documenting one another.  Reference "Great Wall Walk" (Ritualized Goodbye and Honorance) by Abramovic...and example of a bittersweet and beautiful and fully recognized divergence of ways...something all too rare
-Faces--making faces as an exercise in liminality.  Practice with lights out first--the body as an artist's tool.  Then students work as actors, directors, photographers.  Concept of contact sheet, of inevitability of necessity of multiple attempts.  Redefining "failure".
-Social situations--brainstorming and storyboarding.  Director/author, actors/artists, photographer, rack of costumes, write out as script.  Push notions of what is art
-Fluxus--events with minimal score, open to unintended.  Use overworked "Elements and Principles of Design" as scores (like Yoko Ono head-banging-against-the-wall repetition piece) ...commentary on education and creativity
-Colorfields, bacteria, decomposition, duration--snack in petri dish, let it do its thing, then paint it!
-Gothic Horror Stories--a place to bring forward vulnerabilities, listen, connect, change culture of schools

Some quotes to mull/get students to mull: 

"Good art projects provide opportunities and tools for making meaning."
"Art is a process, and what you see is the residue."
"Is art that looks real the best way of representing reality?"
"Existence is taken for granted."
"You have to be able to deal with contradictions. Otherwise you'll have to leave, and the whole point is to stay, and make change."
"Assess, don't obsess.  Don't rubricate me!"
"Creativity creates anxiety." ...of course how we deal with that is the important thing.
"We need to move away from making something, to thinking differently."
"Students' lives depend on it."

Read:

-"Fluxus Performance Workbook"
-"Situationist International Anthology"