Explore new strategies for making meaning in art projects...

ART EDUCATION / January 20136

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In 1976, Arthur E!and published “"e School Art Style: a Functional Analysis,” in which he pointed out that there were distinct styles of art made in schools that were unlike art made in other settings. He argued that these school art styles did not actually create possibilities for free expression for youth, but instead served the symbolic purpose of representing to others that there were oppor-tunities for creativity and free play in other-wise regimented school systems. Looking at the actual work produced based on a given project, E!and noted the lack of meaningful variation in the “art” that was created and famously concluded, “"e self same creative activities may not be as free as they [initially] looked” (p. 41).

Drawing on characteristics identi#ed by Brent Wilson, E!and described school art as “game-like, conventional, ritualistic, and rule-governed." He also observed that “the school art style does not seem to be a pedagogical tool for teaching children about art in the world beyond the school, though this is its manifest function” (1976, pp. 38-39). E!and’s conclusions that many of the art activities in schools do not actually support creative self-expression and that they are not e$ective in teaching students about methods of artmaking outside of school contexts, echoes in the literature of art education over the ensuing decades. Almost 40 years later there is lingering uneasiness

among thoughtful scholars and teachers as they continue to observe and analyze the everyday practices of art education and as they question whether art projects made in schools can provide opportuni-ties for students to truly explore personally meaningful subjects while supporting clear learning objectives about art content.

Many art educators and art education historians have grappled with questions of the appropriate philosophy, content, theory, scope, and sequence of visual arts educa-tion (E!and, 1990; Eisner & Day, 2004; Stankiewicz, 2001). What’s striking is that whether the dominant or proposed paradigm is Discipline-Based Art Education, creativity enhancement, visual culture, or another formulation, the range of projects that are actually taught in most schools has remained strikingly similar for several decades.1 When I scan the suggested projects in popular project-sharing art education magazines and websites, I see that many of the projects are eerily similar to those I saw in magazines as a young teacher in the 1970s, despite the many dramatic changes in the styles, materials, and methods of making meaning in contempo-rary art practices (Foster, 1983; Gude, 2004; Harrison & Wood, 1992; Riemschneider & Grosenick, 1999; Wallis, 1984). "e fact that suggested projects in such magazines are now routinely paired with a national art standard seems to have done little to encourage careful

analysis by authors or editors of whether the instructions or resulting projects are actually in sync with the stated standard.2

We cannot envision and manifest new styles of art education without examining and reconsidering art education curriculum as it is currently taught. We must be willing to let go of some of the old familiar projects (and their myriad variations) in order to make room for other sorts of projects and other kinds of art experiences.

Sometimes it is suggested that school art rooms don’t need projects at all, that students should be given the freedom to pursue their own creative agendas (Douglas & Jaquith, 2009). While this is the ideal end point of quality art curriculum, most students today could not initially make good use of this sort of freedom without a great deal of individual support. When students are not introduced to a wide range of meaning making strategies (and encouraged to analyze and re-purpose strategies they absorb from popular culture), they tend to fall back on hackneyed, kitschy image-making techniques. Because of logis-tical constraints of availability of materials, space, and time as well as the number of students in an average class, it is not realistic to assume that most art classes in school settings can (at least initially) function as open studios in which each student re-invents his or her own methodologies of making—discovering artistic precedents,

Explore new strategies for making meaning in art projects, breaking free from traditional molds, and employing a variety of aesthetic strategies.

Though the !eld of art education increasingly advocates for the importance of having clear criteria for judging the quality of a student’s arts

learning, we have not yet been as thorough and rigorous with ourselves in articulating the necessary qualities of the basic building block of visual arts curriculum—the art project. Perhaps the assumption that visual arts education will be project-based (unfortunately often translated in actual practice as product-based) has been so dominant and unquestioned, the !eld has not adequately theorized the structures, uses, varieties, and sequencing of these projects as an educational form.

O L I V I A G U D E

New School Art Styles:The

of Art Education

January 2013 / ART EDUCATION 77

materials, and methods on a need-to-know basis, supported by teacher input when needed.

"us, art projects are appropriate building blocks for visual art curriculum because good art projects encode complex aesthetic strategies, giving students tools to investigate and make meaning. Good art projects are not old school art-style recipes to achieve a good-looking product. Quality art projects are also not mere exer-cises in which students manipulate form according to teacher-prescribed parameters without any intrinsic purpose.

Good art projects are not assignments to illustrate or symbolize a theme, even an important theme, in students’ lives. In an article also inspired by E!and’s “School Art Style,” Tom Anderson and Melody Milbrandt list three strategic goals for curriculum that authentically engages students: “1) the use of discipline-centered inquiry, 2) the construction of knowledge (rather than its passive acceptance), and 3) teaching and learning that make connec-tions beyond school” (1998, p. 14). Note that discipline-based inquiry is #rst on the list, recognizing that there is no contradic-tion between teaching discipline-based knowledge and skills and making work that explores meaningful connections in students’ lives. Indeed, choosing applicable contemporary means of artmaking (o%en

emerging out of traditional methodologies) is a prerequisite of making meaningful art that investigates contemporary life.

Art made in schools will inevitably be some form of “school art,” de#ned by E!and as “a form of art that is produced in the school by children under the guidance and in!uence of a teacher” (1976, p. 37). However, the in!uence of teachers can support as well as sti!e indi-vidual creativity and meaningful explo-ration of content. “School art” does not inevitably signify educational art activities that are inauthentic and rule-bound. New school art styles can be developed that skill-fully and creatively utilize available mate-rials, tools, technologies, critical theories and contexts to introduce students to a wide-range of developmentally appropriate aesthetic practices—means of artmaking based in particular methodologies of expe-riencing, producing, making meaning, and interpreting (Gude, 2008). With such an education, students can now (and then later as adults) utilize various aesthetic sensibili-ties and practices to frame and re-frame experience, to develop “their own unique idioms of investigating and making,” and to generate patterns of perception that enable them to see the world with fresh insight (Gude, 2009, p. 10).

VALUE: Contemporary uses and practices of a medium, over curriculum that merely recapitulates the history of the mediumSocial Situations project. Rapidly changing technologies as well as contemporary commercial and !ne art practices have shifted the ways in which photography is practiced and utilized. Eschewing the more traditional strategy in which photography mirrors the world as it is, many contemporary photographers (such as Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson and Charlie White) utilize carefully chosen costumes and sets. Party Fight directed by Yetzinia Diaz. For the sequence of projects that led to this work, see the Spiral Workshop NAEA e-Portfolio, Liminality: Alternative Practices group.

Propositions About What to Value and What to Avoid in Choosing and Constructing Curriculum

"e possibilities for 21st-century art educa-tion cannot yet be fully known, envisioned, or articulated because the #eld is in the process of being re-imagined and revitalized. "is is the contemporary research and develop-ment project of the #eld of art education being conducted by thousands of practitioners—art teachers, professors, community artists, teaching artists, and museum educators—in collaboration with their students and other community participants. New models, methods, objectives, contexts, and projects will be gener-ated from a wide variety of cultural positions.3

My current contribution to this un#nished project of reimagining visual arts education is based on identifying a number of familiar, commonly taught projects and exercises. I then ask if there are other frameworks and valuing systems through which these projects can be reconsidered and then redesigned to broaden and deepen the potential for students to have meaningful experiences and to make meaningful art. "is then supports students in developing more wide-ranging and nuanced understandings of the world, conducting investigations through gaining and utilizing relevant disciplinary knowledge and skills—rooted in the past and including the latest contemporary developments within various relevant disciplinary practices.4


VALUE: Engaging in authentic artistic processes over making facsimiles

Consider this familiar line exercise—the students are instructed to #ll in grids with a variety of “expressive lines.” "e results are predictable: jagged = tense, wavy = soothing, bold and dark = angry. What are the students actually experiencing and learning? By de#nition, for something to be expressive, one must be trying to express something or be free to use the creative medium to #gure out what one wants to express. "us, “expressive line” exercises misrepresent the tradition of expressionist artmaking and do not teach a sophisticated understanding of meaning as a fusion of personal sensibility and aesthetic methodology. Even with such a familiar, seemingly simple exercise it is wise to ask if the project re-creates the actual experiences and processes of the artmaking on which it is modeled. "ere is nothing wrong with utilizing a short exercise in which students make as many di$erent kinds of lines as they can; it is deeply problematic to instruct students to match each line to a corre-sponding emotion, thus teaching them that there is a simple one-to-one (not culturally and contextually determined) correspon-dence between form and meaning, between symbol and the emotion conveyed.

Imagine an Impressionist-style painting of a picturesque (or sublime) landscape painted by a diligent student. "rough discussion, one learns that the assignment was to paint a scene based on photographs from calendars

or National Geographic magazines. "e student asserts that this is an original work because he has “made it his own” by shi%ing some colors and by combining two calendar photographs into one image. "e question here is not one of accusing the student of plagiarism or of questioning the artistic validity of appropriation as a strategy of contemporary making. However, the project was described in the lesson plan and to the students as being about Impressionism; the teacher showed students the works of important Impressionist artists and discussed their beliefs and methods such as “capturing the play of light” and “painting at actual sites, rather than in an art studio,” but these are not the methods utilized by the students; no actual “play of light” was observed or recorded.

"is painting project could be more aptly compared to the Photorealist paint-ings of Richard Estes and Audrey Flack in the 1960s/1970s or the work of contem-porary artists such as Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans—all artists whose paintings, based on photographic sources, challenge viewers to consider the subjective, shi%ing, and accrued meanings of images as they are circulated through various cultural settings. If such paintings were discussed with students, other uses of appropriated, juxta-posed, fragmented, and re-contextualized photographic images would be suggested and the potential content and contemporary relevance of constructing an artwork out of “borrowed images” would be deepened and expanded.

"e goal for an art teacher should always be to re!ect as closely as possible the actual methodologies used by artists in making work (Carroll, 2007; Mado$, 2009; Stewart & Walker, 2005; Sullivan, 2010).5 "us, if a teacher does want to introduce an Impressionism project, he or she should arrange for some en plein air painting sessions and guide students in observing the actual play of shi%ing colored light on forms. If the structure of a project seems to lead inevi-tably to making a facsimile, not mirroring actual artistic, cultural, or spiritual practice, as is o%en the case in projects adapted from other cultures (for example, African masks, Kachina dolls, or totem poles), the project is not actually teaching students sound disci-plinary methodologies of real artmaking and is thus actively mis-teaching the meanings, intentions, and processes of the original artists.

In postmodern times in which many artists work in post-studio practices (think of the many methods of Gabriel Orozco or Janine Antoni6 that o%en emphasize lines of conceptual engagement and re-purposing familiar forms and materials, rather than creating and discovering through manipula-tion of a habitually used medium), it can be di&cult to invent pedagogical practices that mirror the aesthetic practices of contempo-rary art. "is, however, is the challenging, collective task of art educators who take seri-ously the responsibility of inventing projects and activities that give students tools to understand and participate in contemporary cultural conversations.


VALUE: Utilizing skills, forms, and vocabulary in authentic contexts over de-contextualized exercises and recipesFree Form Color Investigation project. Students experiment with variations of hue, value, and chroma while enjoying the freedom to make an abstract painting. The project begins as a monochromatic exploration, adds the use of complements and then concludes with a free choice of hue to be added as an accent. Utilizing this project in Spiral Workshop for many years, we’ve noted the high degree of transfer to carefully mixing and choosing colors in other painting projects.

left: Untitled Color Study by Faith Wilder, Spiral Workshop 2003.

right: Painting Color Investigation, Pui Ki Law, 2011. For a complete lesson plan for this project, see the Olivia Gude NAEA e-Portfolio.

Good art projects encode complex aesthetic strategies, giving students tools to investigate and make meaning.VALUE: Investigating over symbolizing

Conflicted Characters project. Con"icted Characters project. Rather than make an anti-bullying poster with clichéd messages, students created a “cyber classroom” populated by their hand drawn characters and utilized the mix of characters to tell personal stories involving unresolved con"icts in home, school and community settings. Cyber Schoolyard by students of the Con"ict & Resolution: Pencils & Pixels group. She’s Too Rough; He’s Too Delicate by Diane Dominguez, Spiral Workshop 2004.


VALUE: Utilizing skills, forms, and vocabulary in authentic contexts over de-contextualized exercises and recipes

Teaching art vocabulary within rule-bound projects in which students must demonstrate knowledge by making works that display (and will be assessed by) pre-determined formal characteristics (such as “must be monochromatic” or “must have dark outlines”) doesn’t integrate learning arts vocabulary with exploring how such visual principles operate to generate meaning in actual art and design practices. Students may not internalize the usefulness of what is being studied because in most of these exercises nothing meaningful is at stake. How can you determine what is a “good composition” or the “right color” if the visual organization is not at the service of some desired communication?

If enhancing creativity is to convinc-ingly be an important goal of art education, projects must be designed to open out into unexpected possibilities, not narrowed into pre-determined channels. It makes sense to begin an art activity by drawing students’ attention to particular sorts of visual descriptors—such as color schemes or how contrast functions in a design—but then the students need to be freed to utilize or not utilize a particular technique or form in order to experience the key component of artistic expression—freely choosing to use form to make meaningful gestalts. "e practice of creating rubrics for each project that specify what formal charac-teristics must be displayed in a project is neither good, authentic assessment, nor good authentic artmaking (Beattie, 1997; Dorn, Madeja, & Sabol, 2004). Art projects shouldn’t be turned into tests. Instead, assessment of knowledge and skills can be conducted by methods such as asking students to utilize art vocabulary to explain choices in their artmaking or by teacher evaluation of each student’s contributions to group discussions in which students work together to describe and interpret artworks, making use of increasingly complex vocabularies.

VALUE: Experiencing as much as makingWhat the Smell? project. Following the methodologies of much contemporary art, not every art project must result in objects. Students created bottles of smell and recorded experiments in how smell can stimulate forgotten memories. What the Smell!? installation of the Agency of Recollection: Assorted Practices, Spiral Workshop 2011.

VALUE: Engaging in authentic artistic processes over making facsimilesExpressive Rooms project: Students recall an emotionally charged moment—ranging from delight to anger to uneasiness. After writing about and entering into the bodily experience of this emotion and after observing how distorted space contributes to the meaning of expressionist artworks, students created large chalk pastels on dark-toned paper. A Big Warm Hug by Sean Castillo. Spiral Workshop 2009. For a complete lesson plan for this project, see the Olivia Gude NAEA e-Portfolio.


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VALUE: Investigating over symbolizing

Quality art education does not merely picture what is already seen and under-stood. Quality art generates new knowledge. Students should not be instructed to illus-trate, symbolize, or represent (i.e. RE-present) things (such as ideas, beliefs, emotions) that are already fully formed, fully under-stood. Instead, quality art projects ought to enable students to reframe experiences, thus supporting students in individually and collaboratively #nding out something new about a subject. Such new insights cannot be summarized in simple language, but instead become vivid constellations of experience that remain in the consciousness of the artist and the viewers. Good art—and good art projects—transform the way in which we understand and process life experiences.

“Imagine being isolated in a gloomy place in which there are confusing encounters and uncanny occurrences with not quite under-standable implications and consequences.” Students began with this prompt in a project of the Spiral Workshop Decomposition group in which the youth artists studied the narrative structures and sensibilities of gothic art and literature in order to use these as a lens through which to examine experi-ences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety

that are sometimes aspects of everyday life in schools.7 Of course, classic life drawing and one-point perspective wouldn’t su&ce to explore these emotionally complex tales. Understanding that what gets le% out of images in #xed-point perspective is also “real,” the students began the project by smearing, crushing, and crinkling their papers and then allowing these mutilated surfaces to act as conduits to remembering and developing the pitiful, stoic, heroic, sinister, or harassed characters needed to tell their school stories. One surprise of this project was that a number of artworks focused on experiences in art classes! Students depicted such “horrors” as being commanded to have a clearly stated purpose before beginning an artwork or being "forced" to make paintings based on gridded photographs.

VALUE: Contemporary practices of a medium, over curriculum that merely recapitulates the history of the medium

While art projects may usefully be inspired by other art, including artworks of the past, artistic practices modeled in schools must be open-ended, capable of making fresh contemporary meaning. Projects based on techniques of realist drawing or on formulaic modernist elements and principles of design

are overrepresented in current art education curriculum, especially at the middle and high school levels. Occupying so much curricular space, such projects crowd out possibilities of teaching a wider range of ways of making art, aesthetic methodologies more suited to investigating contemporary life.

VALUE: Engaging messBodies of Water project. Students are often inhibited in spontaneously evolving an artwork based on accidents in the making process. In the Fluidity: Wet Media group, students were shocked when the teacher’s sample depicted the common occurrence of discovering that one’s clothing is stained by menstrual blood. Initial embarrassment, followed by sympathetic laugher, turned to relief as the young women (and the guys) discussed this common unnecessarily shame-inducing experience. Bleed Through by So!ya Freyman, Spiral Workshop 2010.

VALUE: Blurring the boundaries between art and life Outside the Label project. Students who had never before learned to sew immersed themselves in altering everyday clothes to become “art clothes.” However, as the project continued, students began wearing versions of their art clothes in everyday life. Altered clothes by Mia Sol de Valle in Outsiders: Alternative Media, Spiral Workshop 2009.


It may make sense to include Cubism in an art curriculum considering that many of the concerns of artists making work identi#ed in art history texts as Cubist—simultaneity, shi%ing perspectives, multiple points of view—are relevant to today’s globalized world. However, sitting in a studio and painting a still life in a “Cubist style” is not a productive aesthetic investigation of simulta-neity and shi%ing perspectives in contempo-rary fast-paced, media-saturated cultures.

Sound criteria for measuring the relevance and vitality of an aesthetic practice is to ask, “Are any signi#cant artists now making work in this manner?” In the case of Cubism, the answer is clearly “No!”8 "inking about another artistic practice with a long history—expressionist painting—either abstract or representational—it is quickly apparent that a number of contemporary artists are

making fresh meaning through artistic practices that have evolved out of historic expressionist means of making such as emphasizing subjective experience, allowing bodily energy to be seen in mark-making structures, and distorting forms and colors for emotional e$ects (Werenskiold, 1984). "us, though related to aesthetic practices of making that are over 100 years old, expres-sionist methodologies are living, meaning-generating cultural forms (Aguirre & Azimi, 2011; Bayrle, 2002; Duncan & Selz, 2012; Holzwarth, 2009).

Contemporary theories of making meaning recognize that all meaning making involves borrowing from previous meanings (Silverman, 1983; Sturken & Cartwright, 2009). For this reason, quality art education curriculum must always situate its projects within relevant historical,

cultural, and aesthetic contexts in order to teach students sophisticated contemporary concepts of constructing and deconstructing meaning. Equally important to sharing the history of a medium, subject matter, or theme with students is engaging them in understanding some of the aesthetic and conceptual questions that this practice is currently being used to investigate.

Postmodern thinking radically questions the notion of a single originary foundational tradition that must be absorbed before meaning making can begin. Asserting that students must recapitulate the history of art in their studies before understanding and making contemporary art is as discredit-able as believing that students must learn outmoded conceptions of biology or physics before being introduced to the range of widely accepted contemporary theories. It’s

VALUE: Telling stories about students’ livesDown through Generations project. Students utilized a worksheet with prompts such as “What jobs did your grandparents hold at various times in their lives?” and “Describe the food, people and seating arrangements at a typical (or holiday) family dinner.” to generate conversation with their families. The project is based on narrative art styles of great African American modernists such as Jacob Lawrence and Aaron Douglas. Bureau of Misdirection students in Spiral Workshop 2011 constructing images out of painted paper. Without Music by Candace Bey.

Are there other ways of teaching this content that provide more compelling learning experiences…?


important to recognize that we all always “jump in” the middle of a discourse and begin by eclecting from the past to under-stand and make from the perspectives of today.

Contribute to “New School” Art Styles

Teachers, take a fresh look at your old familiar projects. Honestly and fearlessly analyze the forms, functions, artistic meth-odologies, and conceptual understandings that each project teaches. When examining projects, it’s important to be both skep-tical of an art projects’ current worth and non-judgmental of your own past choices and pleasures. Perhaps this project did meet some of your curricular needs at one time. Now we are asking di$erent questions: Is this as relevant to artmaking processes today as it once was? Are there other ways of teaching

this content that provide more compelling learning experiences that are faster, more fun, and more likely to create knowledge and skills that transfer to other contexts? What aesthetic values are being promoted (and which are being le% out)? What do students (as well as their families and the school community) learn about the func-tions and value of art in contemporary life? Is the amount of time spent on the project proportionate to what is being learned about art and culture? While conveying disci-plinary knowledge, does the project have the potential to be used by students to explore and communicate personally signi#cant ideas and themes?

Be willing to re-imagine your teaching in light of your 5, 10, 25 or more years of life experience as a participant in unfolding, contemporary culture! Strength of char-acter means NOT using your considerable

creativity to come up with defenses for your past choices. In “Beyond Us Now: Speculations Toward a Post-Art Education World,” Laurie Hicks writes, “In our post modern world we have come to accept that many concepts critical to our taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world are no longer meaningful” (in Congdon, Hicks, Bolin, & Blandy, 2008, p. 5). Acknowledging that such shi%ing understandings can produce defensiveness and resistance, Hicks draws upon the Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso’s conception of “living well and dying well” to suggest how we might imagine bringing new manifestations of art education into being. She a&rms that “We need to understand and value the contributions of art educators in the past and in the present, because it is their contributions that open up the possibility for us to do what we must do—imagine and enact new directions” (2008, p. 6).

VALUE: Investigating the construction of meaning Cute Investigation activity. Students surveyed a collection of cute objects and then began the process of de!ning “cute” by creating a continuum of most cute to least cute objects in Painting So Cute and Creepy, Spiral Workshop 2007. Cute Value Scale classroom chart (far left) compiled by Pui Lam Law.

VALUE: Designing your environment Collaborative Mural project. When asked to do a mural for the entrance to the high school !eldhouse, the art teacher and the “Mural Team” took the unusual approach of picturing representatives of all of the sports teams. The coaches of teams other than Men’s Basketball were enthusiastic to be honored in the mural. The mural reshaped the physical environment of the school and also the relationship between the athletic department and the art department. Bloom Trail High School Sports mural installation by student artists, directed by Olivia Gude, 1989.


If we are to evolve art education curricular practices that have relevance to the lives of students and their communities, we must imagine an art education that is grounded in the realities of contemporary cultural life as well as in the realities of current school settings. To do this, the #eld will have to relinquish the ungrounded fantasy of endless, unequivocal originality in the work of students and teachers, the fantasy that every work of art invents entirely new symbolic systems. Recognizing that quality art and quality art education are made in the context of previous artmaking practices, art education curriculum ought to be structured to carefully introduce students to concep-tual, aesthetic, and technical methodologies by which various artists have generated meaning.

A project format is a clear and useful structure to introduce students to processes, valuing systems, techniques, and worldviews embodied in various artistic practices. Good art projects are designed to mirror actual aesthetic practices in ways that support students in utilizing these practices as means by which to experience, investigate, and make their own meanings.

We must create an art education that is not retro, rigid, or reductive in its understanding of what constitutes the necessary knowledges of artmaking. We must create an art educa-tion that is rigorous in its selection and trans-mission of a wide range of aesthetic strategies because in a democratic society it is the responsibility of teachers to enable students to understand, participate in, and contribute to contemporary cultural conversations.

We can think of school-art style projects in the sense that Arthur E!and described/decried—as recipes to make things without the possibility of making meaning—or we can foster a conception of art projects in schools in the sense that John Dewey conceived of project-based learning in which students are researchers who learn by doing (1938). In that sense, each classroom’s art education curriculum can be conceived of as an ongoing collaborative art project, as an experiment in “relational aesthetics,” in which teachers create spaces within which students and others in the school commu-nity can interact and create new knowledge by using artistic methodologies to experi-ence and interpret the world in fresh ways (Bourriaud, 1998/2009).

Arthur E!and concluded “"e School Art Style” by suggesting that perhaps focusing on changing school art was a mistake “when we should have been trying to change the school!” (p. 43). Today evolving “new school” art styles can place the #eld of art education in a central position in school transformation because of art education’s potential to integrate art into the core mission of truly successful schools—stimu-lating engaged inquiry utilizing a variety of methods drawn from a wide range of disciplinary practices. In the process of collaborating with our students to identify and investigate signi#cant content with living interdisciplinary aesthetic practices, art teachers can contribute to the reinven-tion of schools and invent not only a new form of art education, but perhaps also a new collaborative art form.

Olivia Gude is a Professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. E-mail: [email protected]

VALUE: Trying a wide range of aesthetic practices Blind Dérive project. After viewing the work of artists whose work explores walking including Vito Acconci, Gabriel Orozco, Yukinori Yanagi, and Richard Long, students used walking as a methodology for reframing urban experiences. Agency of Recollection, Spiral Workshop 2011. Photo by Aaron Arreguin.

Art teachers can contribute to the reinvention of schools and invent not only a new form of art education, but perhaps also a new collaborative art form.


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Congdon, K., Hicks, L., Bolin, P., & Blandy, D. (2008). Beyond us now: Speculations toward a post-art educa-tion world. Visual Arts Research, 34(1), 1-15.

Dewey. J. (1938). Experience and educa-tion. New York, NY: Collier Books.

Dorn, C. M., Madeja, S. S., & Sabol, F. R. (2004). Assessing expressive learning: A practical guide for teacher-directed, authentic assessment in K-12 visual arts education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Douglas, K., & Jaquith, D. (2009). Engaging learners through artmaking: Choice-based art education in the classroom. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Duncan, M., & Selz, P. H. (2012). L.A. raw: Abject expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945-1980, from Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy. Santa Monica, CA: Foggy Notion.

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REFERENCES1 In 1976, Arthur E!and, referring to

the work of Vincent Lanier, estimated that the school art style had remained largely static for the previous “forty-#ve to #%y years”, bringing the total time of relatively static curriculum content in 2012 to 75 or 80 years.

2 It is disheartening that the 1994 National Visual Arts Standard “Students select and use the qualities of structures and functions of art to improve communication of their ideas” is o%en cited for recipe-like projects in which students have virtu-ally no opportunities to choose and develop meaningful content.

3 "is research must to be rooted in actual practice. Too o%en curriculum guides suggest projects that have never been taught or that haven’t been re-taught and re-thought in recent years. "us, educators are encouraged to utilize projects that don’t meet contemporary criteria for meaningful arts education. One result of this practice is the relentless repetition of steps such as “sketch thumbnails” without considering whether there are other methods (both analog and digital) more commonly used by artists and designers today to experiment with composition and form.

4 "is includes the disciplines identi-#ed as “the 4” in Discipline-Based Art Education as well as such #elds as visual culture, material culture, critical theory, and cultural studies.

5 I use the terms artistic method-ologies, artistic practices, aesthetic methodologies and aesthetic practices interchangeably to describe the procedures by which an artist or group of artists conceive of, develop, and judge the success of artworks. "ese include perceptual, experi-mental, and conceptual strategies as well as choices of media and technologies. "e way in which media and technologies are utilized is never neutral; their uses always imply worldviews—ideologies that determine what is signi#cant and what is not noticed.

6 Both of these artists are featured in the “Loss & Desire,” Season 2 (2003) episode of the Art 21 (Art in the 21st Century) series.

7 For the complete sequence of gothic-inspired projects see the Department of Decomposition in the Spiral Workshop National Art Education Association e-Portfolio, https://naea.digication.com/Spiral/Spiral_Workshop_"eme_Groups

8 In the age of the Internet, it is always possible to #nd some artist, somewhere making work in any style, but this does not mean that this is a particularly relevant or prevalent style of contemporary making. Also, in postmodern times one may #nd artists who deliberately appropriate and re-contextualize a historic art practice in order to generate fresh meaning—teaching about such an artist would require teaching about the original artistic practice and post-modern practices such as reclama-tion, appropriation, reinterpretation, irony, pastiche, positionality and context, thus encouraging students to make these sorts of contextualized, postmodern “moves” in their own art thinking and making.

ENDNOTES

AUTHOR'S NOTES"anks to Arthur E!and for “calling the question” with his analysis of the function of school art and for gener-ously sharing his time and insights with me as I developed this article over the last few years. "anks to the many dedicated and inspired teachers of the Spiral Workshop whose fresh ideas about art and art education generated the art curriculum that is the basis of the theoretical positions of this article."anks to Jessica Poser who co-directed Spiral Workshop with me 2005-2008.


What are the obstacles? I hear these reasons from art educators: (1) young children can’t comprehend the complexities of 21st-century theory; (2) because contem-porary art is conceptual, it is not conducive toward making “school art” products; (3) parents and administrators won’t under-stand; and (4) young students must learn the “basics”—self-expression and design principles—before they can fully participate in contemporary curriculum.

A!er 12 years teaching contemporary practices to young children, I see evidence to the contrary. Elementary students are poised

and capable to comprehend and respond to contemporary art. Tangible products can be made within a conceptual, contemporary framework. Parents and administrators are capable of understanding and supporting contemporary approaches. Modernist instruction in lower school is a counterpro-ductive foundation for future postmodern curriculum.

How do we make full-"edged, contem-porary instruction happen for elemen-tary graders? Where are the lesson plans? Where are the DIY videos? I think this pedagogy hasn’t been codi#ed because—like

What keeps us from robustly practicing contemporary art curriculum in elementary grades? Why is it less frequent in grades K-5, than in 6-12? Are we postponing

contemporary theory because we think modernism is a better foundation for young children? Or are we just not sure how to wed theory and practice (Bastos & Zimmerman, 2011)?

Elementary school is not too early to introduce contemporary art; young students are especially adept at learning by mimicry and embracing contemporary art practices, including site-speci!c works.

Developing criteria together for a project based on observations of Cai Fei, Remedios Varo, and Trenton Doyle Hancock.


contemporary art—it is dynamic, layered, and slippery. A constructivist approach suits it. It is #tting that students respond divergently, construct diverse meanings, and create unpredictable products (Richardson & Walker, 2011).

Practically, how does this look in a class-room? $is article explains one approach. I built my contemporary curriculum, project by project, from two divergent ideas about mimicry. One advises teachers to have students respond to the ideas behind contemporary art instead of imitating its forms (Gaudelius & Speirs, 2002). $e other states that copying other artists’ forms is how we deepen our understanding about the ideas in the work (Muniz, 2005).

Both approaches to mimicry proved indispensible. Students can learn by mimicking formats of contemporary artists. On the contrary, they learn by creating work completely unrelated to the forms, but through the metaphors within artists’ work. For me, both practices are neces-sary ends of the spectrum of contemporary curriculum. $e following projects, done with K-5 elementary students, address these two disparate approaches to mimicry in making art: (1) Learning by Mimicking Contemporary Art Formats and (2) Learning $rough the Ideas Within Contemporary Artworks.

In both approaches, I showed my students contemporary artists’ work, observed my students’ interpretations, and o%ered projects based on their and my own understanding of the work. I double-coded old and new concepts, layering design principles and pre-21st-century art into the projects when relevant (E"and, Freedman, & Stuhr, 1996, p. 108-111). $is elusive curriculum trusts the resonance of contemporary art and the intel-ligence of young children. Nothing is really tried and true. Instead we continuously try things and make them true.

Learning by Mimicking Contemporary Art FormatsYoung Children are Experts

I’ve found that site-speci#c art, instal-lation, and social practice formats come naturally to young children. $ey already do this serious work everyday, are experts in its structures and rituals, and understand these formats deeply and intuitively. In their #rst exposure to this art, young children are initially surprised that adults seriously engage in these practices. A grown man #lls up gaps in buildings with Legos?! A grown woman disguises herself on the streets like a vending machine?! A grown man knits super hero costumes?! $eir delighted surprise turns to relief and hope in the realization that this kind of work doesn’t have to stop a!er childhood. Adulthood isn’t just a life of non-#ction. $ere is room for the fantastic.

So what in the world do we make in response to this art? A!er letting go of traditional notions of school art production (Elfand, 1976), making and learning through these more transitory formats becomes possible. $e questions change from “What will I hang in the art show?” or “What will my students take home?” to “How is my students’ thinking connected to their making?” and “How does their informed-making interact with their concerns and the world around them?”Site-Speci!c Work: In and Beyond the School Building

Start with kindergarten. Start with the ultimate concerns of #ve-year-olds. Every year my kindergart-ners tell me about fairies that live in the schoolyard.

Tales of their existence are passed on from year to year. I ask my students where the fairies are living and if they would like to make something for them. $en we make the objects and install the work beneath bushes, between tree roots, and under pipes. Because it is outside, this is a perfect project for clay. Houses, food, toys, machines, crowns, etc. are made and placed in speci#c sites for the fairies.

In site-speci#c work, a!er the context and the reason for an intervention is established, students enthusiastically make art. Within the instruction of the fairy objects (and in all the projects in this article), traditional design and technical skills are not discarded, but become indispensible, because they serve a greater purpose for the student (E"and, Freedman, & Stuhr, 1996).

As children grow older, they can continue to respond to their school’s culture. A common art project in schools now is to teach social justice through artists like the Guerrilla Girls or Shephard Fairey. O!en this work is displayed as an art exhibit. But how can students learn more through the intention of the site-speci#c format? Can

17

A N N E T H U L S O N

Contemporary Practice in the Elementary Classroom:A Study of Change

Placing site-speci!c fairy houses made of clay.


students place their work in speci#c places in the school building so they leverage geographical location to strengthen their voice ($ulson, 2011)?

A!er my 4th and 5th graders found their own issue of concern, they scanned the halls to #nd an appropriate place for a speci#c protest. A!er completing their poster, they placed it in that spot. A “Homework Kills Trees!” poster was placed above the teacher photocopier; a “Taste Buds Have Feelings Too!” sign protested a healthy, but not so tasty new lunch program in the cafeteria; and a “Pull ‘em Up!” poster with an image of animals wearing exaggerated, sagging pants was placed on entrance to the middle school wing. Student choice of the physical placement of the protest is as much about the cra! of site-speci#c art as the carefully composed posters they produce (Powell & Lejevic, 2011).

O%-site installations may be less frequent, but can happen on #eld trips. Anticipating a trip downtown, I told students we would be taking a brief detour on our way to a museum to visit a lonely clown and I asked the students to make a friend for the clown. $ey each drew a creature on a small magnet. While we were in the city, I led them toward a sunny alley between a theater and a restaurant. In the alley a large mural of a clown, painted about 40 years ago, greeted us. $e mural is not very well known and students were thrilled to be in on the secret. On metal pipes near the clown, students placed their magnet and we went on our way (see schoolo!hepoeticcity.com for this and other urban art ideas).

What are we teaching children when we do site-speci#c work? Context matters. Art is dialogue and not just monologue, as it inter-rupts public space as a gi! to delight or a provocation to challenge. Art doesn’t have to be guarded, bought, and owned because the exchange can be one of ideas, not commodity (Sullivan, 2010).

What are we teaching children when we do site-speci#c work? Context matters.

Painting fantasy world maps. "Triangularopoluas," a fantasy world map by Sierra Curdts.

Student magnets at the site of the lonely clown.


Trying out our paper shoes.

What are we teaching children when we do installation? Art doesn’t have to be made in isolation.

Installation: "e Scary Food MazeOur second graders hosted an event to

share their learning about nutrition. With their classroom teachers, they made a healthy food bu%et for their families, accompanied by presentations about the nutritional science in their recipes. I was asked to display art at this event. One of the teachers had recently seen an art installation exhibit and asked me if that was a possible format.

$e next day his students came to my classroom full of their learning about nutri-tion. I was at a loss as to how to facilitate an installation project. First I showed them several art21 videos of installation art made by Janine Antoni, Judy Pfa%, and Do Ho Suh. A!erward, students talked about how Pfa% ’s dark forms showed her sadness about friends who died, how Antoni braided real things from her life to show that she loved and remembered people, and how Do Ho Suh made things you could walk on, even when it seemed disrespectful to do so. I was surprised at their understandings of this work. $ey de#ned installation as “art that people can walk through and be in.”

I then challenged my students to create an installation that their families could walk through and be in, to learn about nutrition.

$ey worked in small groups to come up with a plan. A!er groups presented, the class voted and combined two of their favorite plans into one: !e Scary Food Maze.

A!er four art sessions, students followed their plan and created all the elements for the installation. On the Nutrition Night, eight students came early to set up. We had to work with the space and shi! our expectations a little, but when we #nished, the children were excited and poised for their #rst customers, as they called them. Walking through paper- and fabric-lined paths, people entered the maze and stopped at a fork in the path. At the fork, a sign lurched, containing a riddle about healthy and unhealthy food. Food jesters wrapped in stray fabric pieces quizzed the participants. If you answered the riddle incorrectly, you had to go down a dead end path to a 3 foot, sinister-looking shrine to junk food. If you answered correctly, you entered the path strewn with drawings of fruit and vegetables toward the glorious bu%et table.

What are we teaching children when we do installation? Art doesn’t have to be made in isolation. Collaboration involves con"ict, compromise, and fusing ideas together into one hybrid. It also teaches that as a collective, we can have more wonderful ideas and create

grander spectacles. What are we teaching parents and administrators when we do an installation? Art jovially invites and provokes community to engage with ideas, poetry, and relevant issues (Pearse, 1997).Social Practice: Shoes and Pigeons

When teaching about social practice, I’ve found that children can understand it better when they jump into the social practice of the artists we study. And they willingly jump. I took a group of K-5 students to see an art exhibit that included shoes. Artist Viviane le Courtois has been making her own jute shoes for many years. She wears them until they wear out, saves and numbers the old shoes, and makes a new pair to wear. $e exhibit included a long line of all the shoes she has made to date (vivianelecourtois.com). We talk about the work being about how things wear out and how le Courtois measures the human energy it takes to wear them out. $is is a very abstract idea. I wondered, how can we make something to help us understand it better (Muniz, 2005)?

So we mimicked the social practice of le Courtois. Students made paper shoes that they taped over their own shoes and wore these to the museum to see her exhibit. A!er a bus ride and a six block walk, their paper


shoes had pretty much fallen apart. “How long did yours last?” they asked one another. “Mine made it until Delganey Street!” By mimicking Courtois’ speci#c act, students were poised and ready to understand and appreciate the rows of jute shoes that, like theirs, had also fallen apart. Like her, they wanted to quantify and share how long their shoes lasted. $is research experience helped transfer their thinking to the rest of the museum’s exhibit, which was about energy expenditure and human impact on the earth (Lynch, 2007; Marshall & D’Adamo, 2011).

Another exhibit at the same museum involved carrier pigeons. Artist Jon Rubin (www.jonrubin.net) trained carrier pigeons to "y around town and back again to the museum. $e museum o%ered free pigeon check outs to any participant who wanted to join Rubin in making his art. Peter $ulson, a #rst grade teacher at a school about 10 miles away, took his students to the museum. $ey went to the roof to see the pigeons in their coop and checked out several to take back to school. From their school grounds, students released the pigeons with great ceremony and got word from the museum when the tagged pigeons arrived. “Big Rose, Baby, and Buddy have returned safely!”

Of all of these formats, social practice is the most challenging to old notions of “school art.” However, traditional questions, “What did they make?” “What art media was used?” “What did they take home?” “What can I display in the halls?” can still be addressed. Students made a social sculpture with artist Jon Rubin. $eir actions were the art media. In fact, Rubin’s artwork couldn’t exist without their participation! $ey took home a remarkable story of engagement and authentic artmaking. Like the documen-tation of social practice artists, we could make documentation for our school hall, explaining the process with words, artifacts, and photographs.

Learning Through the Ideas Within Contemporary Artworks

At the other end of the spectrum, students can create works based on the ideas of contemporary artworks that have little to do with the forms. Like the work with formats, I o!en didn’t have an end product in mind. At #rst this made me uncomfortable and afraid. Project by project, I came to trust the artists we studied and I came to trust my students. $e artists’ work led my students to rich, enchanted thinking and spurred them to create provocative, meaningful projects. $en, when I paid attention to my students’

work and their thinking, my students led me (Duckworth, 1996; Malaguzzi, 1998).Fantasy Civilizations: Ideas of Utopia and Dystopia and Fabricated Worlds

With their classroom teachers, my 4th-grade students studied components of European and non-European civilizations: education, government, transportation, energy, economics, religion, communication, class, and luxury. I asked them to create their own civilizations based on these de#nitions through fantasy and their own interests. $ey would create a map of their world and expand from there to make artifacts. Later, students would create a con"ict with a part-ner’s world and create a narrative on how to address it.

In order to move them into the realm of fantasy, we observed and analyzed three artists: 20th-century artist Remedios Varos, and 21st-century artists Trenton Doyle Hancock and Cai Fei. Students looked closely at each artist’s fantasy worlds, thinking about the implications for their own pieces. $rough democratic protocols, students decided that their world maps should have: all parts of a real civilization, many #ne details, a variety of forms, intentional color to evoke mood, real parts imaginatively transformed, fabulous stories, extraordinary

Receiving a carrier pigeon from Jon Rubin's exhibit, "Thinking About Flying," and releasing a pigeon to go back to the exhibit.


characters, and it all should be cra!ed with care. $e #nal maps and artifacts didn’t visually resemble our mentor artists’ work, but students wouldn’t have been able to develop this high quality of criteria and product for visual narratives without these models (Berger, 2003).

Architectural Design: Ideas of Nomadic Living

A!er studying 18th-century Native American Plains Tribes with their classroom teachers, my 3rd graders knew a lot about tepees. In the art studio, we investigated contemporary nomadic shelters, starting with Andrea Zittel. $ese young students were

left Student generated criteria for a fantasy civilization based on observations of Cai Fei, Remedios Varo, and Trenton Doyle Hancock.

left Broadside protest poster placed in the bathroom stalls.

above Analyzing contemporary nomadic shelter designs.

"The Scary Food Maze": student installation.

Small groups presenting a plan for the food installation to the class.


Instead of #lling the halls with artwork, like an art gallery, I put up documentation of the process, like a history museum.

captivated by her tiny living spaces, especially her islands. I asked them to construct their own nomadic shelters based on questions Zittel asked through her work: How little do we need to live? $eir task was to create a shelter that could travel, carry life essentials, and survive the climate of the plains.

A!er looking at the nomadic shelter designs of Zittel and other designers, students created their own plans and #nally three-dimensional models. $ey thought carefully on our culture’s excess, homelessness, and the di%erence between need and luxury. $e #nal models didn’t look like Zittel’s, nor like a tepee, but it mirrored their ethos: What does it take to live on this planet? What are the essentials? How do you take your home with you?

clockwise from top "Nomadic Shelter Model (interior)" by Anya Dihn.

"Nomadic Shelter With Wings" (exterior)

by Anya Dinh.

"Nomadic Shelter Blaster Pack" (exterior).

Building a nomadic shelter model.


School Art, Parents, and Administrators: Building New Partners for New Paradigm

$rough the contemporary art classroom, student art o!en doesn’t look like “school art” most parents have come to expect (E"and, 1976). But students take home many prototypes and preparatory works for their #nal, more conceptual pieces. Ironically, these preparatory works o!en look like traditional school art. I sometimes used this occurrence to appease parents temporarily.

Educating parents and administra-tors about contemporary art takes a shi! in school art display. Instead of #lling the halls with artwork, like an art gallery, I put up documentation of the process, like a history museum. When a project is #nished, the documentation tells the story through evidence of student and teacher thinking.

$is includes explanations of the contempo-rary art, photographs, dra!s of student work, sketchbook pages, student quotes, and #nal artworks (Forman & Fyfe, 1998). $rough these, my parents and administrators gained access to the process and slowly came to appreciate and own the curriculum.

Our Professional Community: Cultivating Theory and Practice

Like 21st-century art and art curriculum, our professional development needs to be in "ux. Manifestos from the experts, prescribed lesson plans, and comprehensive teacher packets don’t suit this "ux. To bridge the great gap between contemporary theory and current practice, we need a new paradigm for professional development, which requires a more reciprocal exchange of ideas. I believe we need "uid, social networks where

academics and pre-service, novice, veteran, and retired teachers can converse. $eories can be tried, celebrated, refuted, challenged, argued over, combined, reformatted, revised, and tried again. Like contemporary art, the theory/practice gap calls for collective work, not a few inspired geniuses. Our methods of professional development should #t coher-ently with how and what we are teaching our students: a paradigm based on trust, in which we collectively and continuously try new things and make them true, at least for the time being (Bennet, 2007).

Anne !ulson taught K-8 art at !e Odyssey School in Denver, and is an Assistant Professor Art Education at the Metropolitan State University of Denver in Colorado. www.annethulson.com. E-mail: [email protected]

Bastos, F., & Zimmerman, E. (2011). Surprise me! Art Education, 64(1), 5-7.

Bennet, S. (2007). !at workshop model. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Berger, R. (2003). An ethic of excellence: Building a culture of cra"smanship with students. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Duckworth, E. (1996). !e having of wonderful ideas and other essays on teaching and learning (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

E"and, A. (1976). $e school art style: A functional analysis. Studies in Art Education, 17(2), 37-44.

E"and, A., Freedman, K., & Stuhr, P. (1996). Postmodern art education: An approach to curriculum. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Gaudelius, Y., & Speirs, P. (2002). Contemporary issues in art education. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Le Courtois, V. (2010). Chaussures (126 pairs). Retrieved from www.vivianelecourtois.com/perfor-mances7.html

Lynch, P. (2007). Making meaning many ways: An exploratory look at integrating the arts with classroom curriculum. Art Education, 60(4), 33-38.

Malaguzzi, L. (1998). History, ideas, and basic philosophy: An interview with Lella Gandinin. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini & G. Forman (Eds.), !e hundred languages of children (2nd ed.). Greenwich, CT: Ablex.

Marshall, J., & D’Adamo, K. (2011). Art practice as research in the classroom: A new paradigm in art education. Art Education, 64(5).

Muniz, V. (2005). Re#ex: A Vik Muniz primer. New York, NY: Aperture.

Pearse, H. (1997). Doing otherwise: Art ed praxis in a post paradigmatic world. In J. Hutchens & M. Suggs (Eds.), Art education: Content and practice in a postmodern era. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Powell, K., & LaJevic, L. (2011). Emergent places in preservice art teaching: Lived curriculum, rela-tionality, and embodied knowledge. Studies in Art Education, 53(1), 49-50.

Richardson, J., & Walker, S. (2011). Processing process: $e event of making art. Studies in Art Education, 53(1), 13-15.

Rubin, Jon. (2011). $inking About "ying. Retrieved from www.mcadenver.org/$inkingAboutFlyingMCADenver.php

Sullivan, G. (2010). Art practice as research (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

$ulson, A. (2011). Strange bedfellows enchanting space. Teaching Artist Journal, 9(3), 163-174.

$ulson, A., & P. (2011) scho-olo!hepoeticcity.com [www.schoolo!hepoeticcity.com/www.schoolo!hepoeticcity.com/shoes.html

REFERENCES


On the occasion of becoming the Instructional Resources Coordinator under the editorship of Dr. Robert Sweeny—and under this issue’s umbrella theme of “new”—I’m presenting an Instructional Resource (IR) not for a speci!c K-12

designation, but rather for the art teacher. This is a gesture that has not—at least not in the recent history of Art Education—been performed overtly in the pages of IR. Arguably the purpose of the IR is to introduce art teachers, alongside their students, to artworks that propose a certain kind of permission for art practice by showcasing under-exam-ined forms (making) and content (ideas). In addition, IRs have the potential to present artists’ processes and their “modes-of-operation” (Lucero, 2012, p. 107) as permissions for new ways-of-being by the artist/teacher in the classroom, the museum, the studio, the exhibition, the performance, or the presentation.

Instructional Resources as PermissionJ O R G E L U C E R O , I nstruc t ional Resources Coordinator

This IR is for the art educator who under-stands himself or herself as a creative prac-titioner, active or otherwise. It is for creative practitioners/educators who !nd themselves crunched for time, money, energy, and external dialogue. "is IR is for those of us who want to have a larger conver-sation about how our art practice and art education practice coexist. Creative practitioners/educators (as I see them) encompass individuals studying in certi!cation programs; BFA or MFA students who are considering teaching in some capacity; art education graduate students; K-12 art specialists; teaching-artists; college professors/artists/researchers; museum educators; artists who are interested in social, rela-tional, or civic art practices; and—dare I say—non-art teachers who nevertheless are interested in making, theories-of-making, and making-pedagogies.

As I will explain in a moment, this IR is intended to present the work of one artist as a speci!c type of conceptual-art-permission. "at permission is an introduction to a more streamlined everyday practice that is not only inclusive of a person’s creative and pedagogical tasks, but also manifestly engaged in a robust contemporary art conversation about “the everyday” (Johnstone, 2008, p. 12). "e “everyday” as an art gesture is arguably rooted in Marcel Duchamp’s revolutionary readymade gesture (Roberts, 2007). At the same time, following the motivation of the readymade gesture may prove to be more valuable in the long run than paying any type of credible homage to the readymade itself by simply replicating it. In other words, although the everyday-gesture-as-art

may begin with Duchamp, it stands to argue that thinking too much about Duchamp while trying to bring everyday life and art together can be somewhat un-Duchampian. It’s paradoxical indeed, but since Duchamp’s original gesture was an anti-art gesture, referencing Duchamp (or copying him) in this day and age is decidedly an art gesture.

"e way of working that is proposed by this IR’s artist is not media-speci!c; it is primarily idea-driven or what can be broadly understood as “conceptual art” (see Goldie & Schellekens, 2010). "is simple, but crucial shi# from object to idea, opens up the possi-bility that a creative practice can include forms as far as the individual’s imagination and courage will allow, including immaterial forms (see Lippard & Chandler, 1968/1999; Bois & Krauss, 1997) such as pedagogy and other types of relationality.

"e shi# from the object maker to the artist as philosopher that is presented in this IR opens up pedagogical moments, gestures, and tasks as a material that can be played with, manipulated, and ultimately entered into the greater contemporary art discourse. "e conceptual artist determining what is and what is not art is a relatively old idea, but in art education it is an underutilized and under-recognized mode of operation. As a member of the art educa-tion community, I believe that our collective atten-tion to these more conceptual practices can have an emancipatory e$ect on the proverbial question I’m continuously asked by creative practitioners who are also educators: How do I continue to make art, while teaching?

Instructional Resources

Figure 1. Alberto Aguilar, 2012. Portal (Esther Grimm).

J O R G E L U C E R O

Polyglot of the Everyday:

Alberto Aguilar

Alberto Aguilar!e Chicago-born artist Alberto Aguilar enacts his artworks through video, performance, sound recordings, cooking, photographs, participatory events, drawings, installations, interior design, writing, collage, singing, teaching, conducting interviews, curating, mail-art, being on the Internet, writing, and personal social exchanges (e.g. conversations, meals, gi"-giving, visits to strangers’ homes, being with his family, being a tourist, playing games, doing favors, telling jokes, etc.). Aguilar practices without a studio, that is to say, his projects—usually worked out on a notepad, on the computer, through social networking (both actual and virtual), in conversation and collabora-tion with others, and through mostly ad-hoc means—are #rst conceptualized and then brought to fruition in the space, time, and through the material that the concept requires.


Aguilar can be seen as a polyglot artist. Although it is a minor di$erence, a polyglot is di$erent from a polymath, or what is commonly referred to as a “Renaissance Man.” !e polymath (the old-school Renaissance Man) is a #gure who purport-edly knows about many things, yet may choose to express and investigate them through the same form; whereas the polyglot (like Aguilar) may be “saying” the same thing over and over again, but does so through multiple “languages” or forms. Aguilar’s polyglot conceptual practice involves multiple ways-of-being and making, which are uni#ed by the ideas behind the work, not necessarily any devotion or consistency with a speci#c media. !is is a critical distinction to make as we examine Aguilar’s process in relation to the creative practitioner/educa-tor’s demanding challenge to sustain two seemingly di$erent practices—the teaching job and the art practice—at equally integral levels.

What Aguilar’s practice proposes are everyday gestures—including the teaching gesture—as material. Aguilar’s intertwined art/life practice proposes that a teacher’s tasks—even the mundane and arduous ones—can be moved around, played with, presented, and theorized as sophisticated contemporary art practice. It is important to note here that although the term “sophisti-cated” can create an undesirable and conten-tious hierarchy, I’m actually reverting to the term’s root (sophism), to point to the unpre-tentiously inquisitive—almost quotidian—and generous philosophical undertones that come across in Aguilar’s work.In some of Aguilar’s work such as his Domestic Monument series, this generosity of ideas points toward the hyper-local or what Duchamp (1945/2008) called the “infra-slim” (p. 90) to the extent that what is usually recognized as art begins to disappear and what is usually considered “the everyday” begins to appear as art. Take for example

Portal (Esther Grimm) (Figure 1), a work that now exists as a photograph, but which was created serendipitously during a visit to Esther Grimm’s home. Esther Grimm, Executive Director of 3Arts, a Chicago organization that focuses on supporting the work of “women artists, artists of color, and artists with disabilities” (http://3arts.org/pages/about/), invited Aguilar to her home to host a version of his Personal Dinner Invitation (see below). Aguilar says, “[the Domestic Monuments] are a way of engaging with people and their stu$ to get to know the person, but it all started o$ as mischief-making and leaving little surprises in people’s homes or studios” (personal communica-tion, September 1, 2012). During Aguilar’s visit to Grimm’s home, he literally found this hula-hoop in a room, thought that it would #t the mirrored end table and proceeded to bring them together. It is a gesture that has similarly been described as “banal” (Sollins, Dowling, Tatge, Sha$er, & Ortega, 2003) in

Figure 2. Alberto Aguilar, 2012. A Personal dinner invitation, Fenn House, Hyde Park (Chicago, IL).



the work of Gabriel Orozco and which the art critic Lori Waxman (2011) succinctly under-lines in Aguilar’s work as, “monuments [that] appear to have been muddled right out of the heady mash of home life” (¶10).It may seem unusual to get too personal with the biographical details of an artist whose work is being examined, but in the case of Aguilar it is important to share these facts, because it is not just his art objects—as compelling as they are—that can be useful in opening up the permissions I’m proposing for the creative practitioner/educator’s enhanced understanding of their own blended artistic and educational practice. Aguilar is an art teacher at Harold Washington College in downtown Chicago, a parent (with his wife) of four children, a very good friend, and an involved citizen in a number of other—unavoidably—resource-consuming ways. Like many teachers, he is an artist who can’t spend expanded periods of time in a studio and therefore Aguilar has diligently tackled the challenge of constructing an art practice from all of his other activities. One of Aguilar’s works that has garnered signi#cant attention is his ongoing A Personal dinner invitation (Figure 2). !is is a work that has seen more than a dozen incarnations; some held at Aguilar’s home, some in “o%cial” art spaces, some in other people’s homes or community spaces. !e form of what Aguilar does can be tempo-rarily suspended for the purposes of this IR since my aim is not to have Aguilar’s form examined and then imitated. Rather, I’m proposing that it might be more impor-tant for us to understand that even though Aguilar has invited hundreds of strangers to these orchestrated dinner events, it is not as important how he did it, unless it helps us to understand how this type of conceptual exercise can change the way we engage with our everyday practices as potential moments of creative practice/art.Aguilar uses social media to engage the communities where he holds dinners; he advertises, communicates with, scopes out, and eventually invites a diverse handful of local participants to these 4-hour events. !e evenings usually include a three- to four-course meal which Aguilar cooks with his wife Sonia; orchestrated games spearheaded by his children; invited lectures or perfor-mances by other artists; music contributed

Figure 3. Alberto Aguilar, 2012. Collage.

to the event by all the attendees; and parting gi"s donated by other artists, Aguilar’s mom, and himself. Bringing together young, old, professional, community activists, visual artists, business people, dancers, teachers, laborers, chefs, writers, and students, Aguilar takes one of the essential—yet admittedly di%cult—aspects of being a professional

artist (networking) and mushes it together with the most basic of human activities: conviviality, or living alongside each other. A few days a"er the dinner Aguilar contacts all the of the dinner guests and asks them to please send him a mailing address so that he can send them an additional gi". Being that they just spent 4 hours with him and

Aguilar’s polyglot conceptual practice involves multiple ways-of-being and making.


Figure 4a. Selection from the series: Drawing in Passing, 2010-2012.



Figure 4b. Selection from the series: Drawing in Passing, 2010-2012.


presumably found him trustworthy, they send the address and then they receive in the mail an original collage (see Figure 3).!e collages are not overly involved, although they are overtly considered, and this helps us to understand something else about Aguilar’s method: nothing is overly worked. Aguilar puts more trust in his ability to edit from an array of quickly produced works, than to force something to emerge from intense, prolonged labor. !e term “produced” may be used loosely here, because the way that Aguilar’s process has unfolded points

more to the likelihood that the work isn’t as much “made” as it is identi#ed in—and then re-presented to—the world. With a Duchampian sincerity—which is necessarily irreverent in the most profound manner—Aguilar has managed to bracket multiple aspects of everyday life in order to sustain a more integrated scholarly, artistic, familial, spiritual, and professional existence.Two other examples of Aguilar’s consistent—however pragmatically integrated—method are his Drawing in Passing series (Figures 4a and 4b) and the 5-year collaborative

performance and video works he’s done under the moniker We Matter with his oldest daughter’s elementary school cohort. Both of these series primarily follow the Swiss artist !omas Hirschhorn’s dictum, “energy yes, quality no” (in Drons#eld, 2010, p. 132) in that, through the pursuance of energy, a new quality emerges. Both the drawing series and the We Matter work can be contextual-ized for the sake of this IR, through the same lens that Johnathan Drons#eld posi-tions Hirschhorn’s energy-chasing work. Drons#eld (2010) suspects that Hirschhorn “is heeding Nietzsche’s call to educate the will before anything else” (p. 132) and in the same way Aguilar’s drawing series works under a speci#c set of parameters whose #rst rule is “work.” By “doing,” even in a way that seems frivolous (e.g. one drawing every morning on a piece of notebook paper, posted as a status update on Facebook), Aguilar proposes that some artworks get more serious through their accumulation—that is, through their energy.!e videos that he’s made with his daughter’s class work under a similar device: set up an unpredictable situation, allow elements of chance, take other people’s wishes and directions seriously, “roll with the punches,” capture it through a form (e.g. video, sound recording, writing, or photograph), then edit it for presentation’s sake. In the series of screen captures shown in Figure 5, we see a collection of seventh graders playing with the text and imagery of Shakespeare’s Othello. Voice tracks are laid over children’s animated gestures. !e voices are those of the children, but they’re disembodied. !ey run, they play with found props (e.g. a tree’s limbs, a bed sheet turned curtain, each other) and follow Aguilar’s o$-camera open-ended directives (e.g. run, argue, stand, look). He’s not attempting to illustrate Othello, rather through a collage sensibility he is proposing that the subtleties of being a seventh grader learning Othello can be the perfect match to create a di$erent type of energy, one that is poetic—Shakespearian almost—and ultimately le" to be interpreted by the actors, the artist, and the audience. Aguilar’s work with the children, not unlike his Domestic Monument with the hula-hoop, can be seen as a method of bracketing, isolating, and representing the everyday with an intent motivation to not drop any of the many activities “real-life” has him juggling.

Figure 5. Othello 8m40s, 2011.

Aguilar proposes that some artworks get more serious through their accumulation—that is, through their energy.



ActivityTraditionally at this point in the IR, the author provides a means through which questions can be asked about the artist’s works featured. Also, potential classroom activities are laid out as curricular options. What I have done instead is asked Alberto Aguilar to please contribute an artwork in the form of a list for this IR. !e parameter I gave him was to please identify tips for making a more &uid integration between one’s everyday practice and one’s creative practice. !is is what he made:

Tips for Integration by Alberto AguilarInstead of going to the gym, walk whenever possible and take the stairs instead of the elevator. This will create more time for you as an artist. It also stimulates ideas in your brain as you physically move your body, see things happen on the street, bump into people you know, or !nd things on the ground.

Instead of signing up your kids for organized sports, play actively with them (e.g. sports, Nerf sword !ghts, invented physical games). Invent new rules for existing games, or their playing !elds and courts. Videotape this when the game or the interaction becomes interesting enough or just videotape it and hope you get something good or funny.

Consider household chores as art compositions or performance.

At your child’s school, volunteer to make a work with the students as opposed to just showing them “famous” artists’ works and giving a craft project; spend at least a week instead of a day.

Make work at work. Think of your students and co-workers as collaborators. Your o"ce is a studio. It makes being at the o"ce more exciting and you will invest more of yourself into it.

Have people over for dinner. Think of it as a “studio visit.” All the organizations in your house (both accidental and thought out) are a work. How you treat your guests is a performance. Did you deliver the goods? This makes having people over more exciting. Show your house as an artwork, a huge collage that you’ve made with your family. Create a memorable atmosphere and a soundtrack, control the lighting, and give a tour of the home with stories that bring attention to the living qualities of the home.

Think of your online presence as a persona, or a self-portrait. How would you like to present yourself to the world? Be selective and thoughtful. It is an artwork.

Your spiritual walk is a work that you make over a lifetime. It’s like carving away at a large block of stone and that takes time. For example, you can’t read the Bible in one sitting and expect to understand it. It is something that reveals itself over a long period of time. As you change and grow, your understanding of it changes. This is parallel to having a creative practice and developing as an artist by making many works (over time) rather than just a few.

Above all, vacations are a time of rest, but it makes them more fun—and it makes you more engaged with your family—if you think about your day-to-day itinerary as a creative work. The family photos will also become more valuable and meaningful. Instead of taking a picture in front of a famous monument think of your day as a journey that has potential for bringing forth monumental images. Make images that document a playful engagement with the new environment you !nd yourself in.

Instead of going on an expensive vacation, think of a walk down the main business street of your neighborhood as an artwork. This is an opportunity to get to know the old shops, their history, and the people that tend them. This is true social engagement. For example, I came up with an idea for something I called “Pizza Parade.” I told my kids that we would walk up Archer Ave for three miles and go into all the local pizza places and ask the owners if we could have one slice of pizza. In an o"cial tone we told them that we were on Pizza Parade (see Figure 6) and we were documenting it as an eventual blog. It was a vacation, without spending money. The kids created Pizza Parade pins and one of my sons put on a pizza costume that we happened to have in our box of costumes. It worked! Some vendors gave us a slice and others gave us an entire pizza! The kids were amazed that it actually worked. It was a very substantial experience that stayed with us. It transformed us.


Bois, Y.A., & Krauss, R. E. (1997). Formless: A user’s guide. New York, NY: Zone Books.

Drons#eld, J. L. (2010). Headless in Hirschhorn’s classroom. In J. Walwin (Ed.), Searching for art’s new publics (pp. 125-136). Bristol, England: Intellect.

Duchamp, M. (2008). Notes on the infraslim. In S. Johnstone (Ed.), !e everyday (p. 90). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (original published in 1945)

Goldie, P., & Schellekens, E. (2010). Who’s afraid of conceptual art? New York, NY: Routledge.

Johnstone, S. (Ed.). (2008). !e everyday. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lippard, L. R., & Chandler, J. (1999). !e dematerialization of art. In A. Alberro & B. Stimson (Eds.), Conceptual art: A critical anthology (pp. 46-50). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (original published in 1969)

Lucero, J. R. (2012). La Pocha Nostra: Practicing mere life. In T. Quinn, J. Ploof, & L. Hochtritt (Eds.), Art and social justice education: Culture as commons (pp. 107-109). New York, NY: Routledge.

Roberts, J. (2007). !e intangibilities of form: Skill and deskilling in art a"er the readymade. London, England: Verso.

Sollins, S., Dowling, S., Tatge, C., Sha$er, D., & Ortega, E.-L. M. (2003). Gabriel Orozco. In Art 21: Art in the twenty-#rst century, season two [DVD]. New York, NY: PBS Home Video.

Waxman, L. (2011, November 2). !e art world needs more children. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-02/entertainment/ct-ent-1103-aguilar-waxman-review-20111102_1_alberto-aguilar-art-world-photographs

REFERENCESAlberto Aguilar’s videos, including Othello 8m40s, can be seen in its entirety on his website: http://albertoaguilar.org/category/work/video-work/page/3/

Jorge R. Lucero is Assistant Professor of Art Education at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. E-mail: [email protected]

Figure 6. Pizza Parade, 2012.


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