Try Something New: Spring Labs

Jordan Baseman, Be Your Dog, 1997

Rules and Regs to follow or break carefully.

• Each week, complete one lab for a total of nine completed assignments, including the required first lab for week two, and required midterm and final assignments (which I will explain in class). In other words, choose six, and complete three required.
  
• Each lab should include very carefully written text-- sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.. Careful does not mean normal paragraphs. you could use maps, grids, text boxes, spoken word on video.... but make your use of words precise and intentional.
  
• I will occasionally supplement the main labs with group work, in class work. etc., and ask you to include it in your commonplace
• You may team up on up to half of your assignments; just let me know who collaborated.
• Contain ALL YOUR WORK in a single book, whether digital, store bought, handmade, creatively conceived (something not typically thought of as a book). How can you make your labs into one united work?
  
• I will collect 20% of the 'books' each class meeting at random, and they must be up to date. In other words, in week four, you must have completed four labs, in week eight, eight labs.
  
• All labs must include some sort of meaningful reference to an artist on the key work, or a work by an artist on the keyworks list (use at least eight artists total-- i.e. only a couple repetitions) Use at least three from 19th and three from twentieth centuries. Sometimes you may just make an insightful passing reference. Sometimes go very deeply into the work.
  

Lab Choices

1. Required first lab, complete by March 27th or 28th!! Read Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life." Full assignment here.

2. Respond to a found object. you can find it yourself, or you can borrow an object from Found Magazine. If you feel stumped for ideas, you could try one of ideas here..., come meet with me in office hours, or talk with a friend.

3. Go to Wake Forest and look at works in their Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art. Start at the Benson Center, the student Union (you can get a chik-fil-a sandwich or a krispy kreme to sustain you while you look and think). Remember I told you about their art purchase program? I will tell you more in the beginning of the term. Anyway. Find a work that interests you, research the artist and the piece (I can help you with sources) and respond to it with an essay, a video podcast, a map, chart, graph, or other information network, an artwork of your own, a review... or...

4. Write a letter to a character in a work of art. Before starting, learn something about the work, the artist, the point in time in which it was made. You could also fall in love with a character (virtually) or tell a different story about him/her, or compare that character to a figure from a different painting.

5. Complete an assignment on Learning to Love You More, conceived by performance artists Miranda July and Harrel Fletcher. (you might first look at July and Fletcher's own websites.) Put your assignment in your commonplace book. Can you think of a creative way to refer to a keywork, however peripherally?

6. Required writing lab on Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida. I will detail the assignment in class.

7. Go to Smarthistory. Watch or listen to three podcasts. Then, choose a work of art from the 19th -21st century by an artist represented in the textbook. Choose a partner if you like. Research the work and the artist, have a conversation about the work and record it in audio and or video. Edit the conversation with loving care into a format for a particular audience (Students, children, gallery visitors, alien life forms, your art history teacher, a group at a cocktail party...) and package it appropriately in your commonplace.

8. Write your own lab assignment and complete it in your commonplace. Consider emailing the assignment to me to post here for others to try.

9. Make a piece of art in a public place. Document the response of at least five viewers (either secretly or by asking them for their response.)

10. Look at field guides to birds, flowers, animal tracks, etc. in the appropriate section of a bookstore or library. Make a field guide to art in Winston-Salem (or another city.) Make sure you give some insights into the locations you show and some individual works. This would make a great group project.

11. Gather a group of five-ten well-known artworks and explain why you think of them as connected. Possibilities: ten works of art on the same subject, seven very blue works, works that show how horrible people can be, art about love, death, curiosity, art that you talked about with your boyfriend the day before you broke up. Works that include dogs, well-designed shoes, or that include collections of paintings int he background. Portraits of power, beauty, desire. Make a little book, cartoon, or webpage that digs into why you think these works should go together.

12. Choose any -ism that we have studied this term. Romanticism, Realism, modernism, Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Symbolism, Expressionism, pre-Raphaelitism, futurism, Modernism, minimalism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Popism, and Postmodernism. That's not all of them-isms, but a start. Complete the reading for that period (or ask me for some reading on it) and make a work of art that engages with the major aspects of that period, or analyze a work of art that you think best describes the attributes thereof. OR, see if you can write two paragraphs in the style of that style.

13. Write a speech about your favorite work of art and what makes it good. Orate in a public place and document the experience.

14. Create a meal that you see in a work of art. Invite people to pose as the figures in the work pose, document the experience, and enjoy the meal.

15.Required Final Exam Lab. I will unveil the assignment after midterm.


General ideas that you can bring into many of these blogs:

• create a photo album, map, chart, comic strip
• recreate a painting in 3-d, transform it in photoshop, act it out in public and document the viewer response
• Have a conversation, record it, and edit it carefully.
• make a flyer describing why this work matters, and post it around school.
• create a character who will complete all your commonplace entries for you.
• Write a field guide to your own understanding of art history, and complete all your labs in this style
• Interview friends, family, or strangers.
  
• See if you can find someone to complete a lab for you just for the fun of it. Grade and comment on their work.
  
• Make a 3-d paper replica of a work
• Write as if you love writing
  
• transform your room into a room you see in a painting
  

March 30-April 2 Art as Mirror; opening our eyes

Walt Whitman, 1887

Revolutionary French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire wrote "The Painter of Modern Life," in part, to provoke artists into making work that interpreted and expressed the place and time in which they lived. In 1844, in his essay "The Poet," American Transcendentalist essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a distinctly American poet to express America's unique poetics. In 1850, Walt Whitman began working on "Leaves of Grass," which many consider the answer to Emerson's call.

For this Lab, I ask you to determine what such a call for today would sound like and what artist working today you think hears that call.

Your mission:
Meeting March 30 or 31
Product Due April 2 or 3
Read Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life" before class on March 26 or 27. Make some notes in the margins, and write down at least three comments to make in class if I call on you. If you do not have a comment ready, I will ask you to leave.

In class the 26th and 27th, we will discuss the article and organize into groups of three to four members so you can arrange a meeting place for classtime Monday or Tuesday, 30 and 31 March. Then, you have a three part lab:

1. Each member of the group should talk to at least five people each about what they believe defines Today: modern life, our moment. You could do this individually, or as a group. You can talk to people you know in person, by phone, or over the internets, or set up downtown, at the mall, or at an official-looking table near the Pickle Jar and interview people you don't necessarily know. Document the answers in writing, cartoon, video, audio...

2. Discussion. Monday and Tuesday, March 30 and 31, during your regular class meeting time. Three topics: a). discuss what defines the time we live in. Come up with your own definition of our time, either as individuals, a whole group, or splinter groups. b). Discuss each member's commonplace book. Ask: what works well and not so well about it? Does looking at it teach you anything? What three ways could they improve it. Document the answers and keep them to give me the first time I collect your commonplace. c). Discuss the lab assignments on this blog. What ideas leap to mind as you read the assignments? What lab will each of you complete first? Everyone choose one and brainstorm for a few minutes with the group on the topic.

3.DUE April 2nd or 3rd The Product(complete as individuals, a whole group, or splinter groups): Determine what artist, filmmaker, musician, etc., you think serves the role Baudelaire asked for in this essay... an artist who helps us see our own times. Baudelaire landed on Constantin Guys, but Edouard Manet seems implied by his article, and Manet may have responded to Guys' call either consciously or inadvertently. (Look at some paintings by Manet here.) Find a way to explain how your pick helps us see and understand the world we live in. Include at least one quotation from Baudelaire, and analysis of one work by the artist, filmmaker, cartoonist, designer, performer.... Pull it all together in an interesting way in your commonplace.

Commonplace Books, reminder.

Beineke Library MS 84, Girdle Book, 15th century

A definition, from a digital commonplace book:

"Silva rerum they were called, commonplace books that contained a 'forest of things'. Excerpts of exceptional thought were dutifully copied into these bound books for further reflection and digestion. Commonplace books were considered necessary tools for learning that commonplacing was taught in universities such as Oxford. Milton, Hardy, Emerson, and Thoreau all kept their own commonplace books.

Commonplacing wedded reading and writing as necessary ingredients, they were inseparable. Bits and pieces from one book joined with other excerpts from elsewhere. The way the ideas were assembled revealed the personality of the commonplacer…what topics interested him, what key arguments did he find cogent that he could build upon…what turns of phrases could he learn by heart so that he, too, could express himself with clarity and winsomeness." from Lightly Locked.

Beineke Library MS 454 image of a Horse

Log Book – Termite Grid Ronald King several great artist's books

A cute, rather playful commonplace:

And another, more straightforward and elegant, and featuring just the works, from my colleague Jonathan Milner, who teaches politics at UNCSA.

Jonathan Edwards, early 1700's

How might you rethink the format of a book? Jonathan Edwards did so by dint of necessity: his style called for it. That happened to Marcel Proust, too, who edited so much his manuscripts became layered and pasted.

Marcel Proust, Manuscript page from In Search of Lost Time, around 1920

Beineke Library MS 327 - Merchants Commonplace Book - Venice - 1312