TC#5
Artists take creative journeys exploring materials, ideas and technologies. Unpredicted outcomes can emerge through purposeful play. Artists take risks and trust their intuition. They embrace ‘happy accidents’ and learn from ‘mistakes’.
About the graphicOur Threshold Concepts for Art are accompanied with illustrations to aid their introduction. Each image contains a reoccurring graphic: a fingerprint in the shape of an artist's palette. In TC#5 this graphic appears as if distilled from an experiment, a result of the bubbling of ideas heated by art-tool flames. But art is not an exact science. Artists, on their own terms, will question, experiment, investigate, discover, invent and much more besides. Art offers unique freedoms, not least opportunities to play, express, provoke, subvert and contradict. The images below offer further inspiration and useful links to help dissect our TC#5 graphic further.
|
"The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion."
CHRIS OFILI
WhAT DO I NEED TO KNOW?
- Artists play, seriously. Opportunities for play are essential to a child's development. But as we grow-up purposeful play is often dismissed. Being creative - being able to bring something new and with value into the world - requires a willingness to explore and experiment, to test out expectations and boundaries, to detect new possibilities; to engage with the world with wonder and curiosity. Artists embrace play as a valuable way of understanding the potential of materials, ideas and technologies.
- Mistakes and failures are an essential part of the creative process. For students of art (particularly at Secondary level) failure is often perceived as an indicator that art might be a subject for the 'talented' or 'creative' students only. This is a mistake in-itself: everyone has the capacity to be an artist. Artists fail regularly, sometimes spectacularly, and often with immense frustration. Yet artists value risk-taking and mistake-making, which doesn't mean they work with less care, but are more comfortable with ambiguity and not-knowing, and constantly evaluate and develop as a result. Artists remain alert to 'happy accidents'. They are not afraid to pursue new lines of inquiry, even when these might seem absurd to others.
- The journey is more important than the destination. Put frankly, students that work with the singular intention of achieving a high exam grade are misguided. The same might be said for students that pin all their hopes on a 'final piece'. A reward might be forthcoming - though rarely guaranteed - but the experience will ultimately be diluted. 'Successful' artists and art students (those that enrich their lives and the lives of others through creativity) tend to be fully invested in what they are doing. They embrace daily opportunities to question, experiment, practice and make. The inherent rewards of thinking and practicing as an artist every day are to be celebrated and embraced.
Below is an introductory slideshow to encourage initial reflections and discussion:
Practical ideas for the classroom
Artists play: Re-imagining childhood games
What games and toys do you remember from your childhood, and how might these be re-imagined as conceptual and/or practical art making activities? The activities below might - for let's not dismiss the possibility of failure here - prove interesting ways to provoke new experiments...
1. Collect a range of old toys and games. Consider how these objects might be used as materials for art, for example, as surfaces to work upon, as forms to sculpt with, or even as tools to make marks. Techniques for experimenting might include collage, assemblage, animation or performance-based experiments.
2. In response to one childhood memory, produce a range of experiments using at least 3 different media/techniques (for example, painting, sound art, and collage, or assemblage, performance, and animation).
Below are some examples of artists' work that, in various ways, have drawn inspiration from childhood memories, toys and games. These include playful interactions with materials, the illustrating/re-imagining of memories, and the use of childhood associations to confront wider political issues. Click on the images for further information.
What games and toys do you remember from your childhood, and how might these be re-imagined as conceptual and/or practical art making activities? The activities below might - for let's not dismiss the possibility of failure here - prove interesting ways to provoke new experiments...
1. Collect a range of old toys and games. Consider how these objects might be used as materials for art, for example, as surfaces to work upon, as forms to sculpt with, or even as tools to make marks. Techniques for experimenting might include collage, assemblage, animation or performance-based experiments.
- How might these toys and games from your childhood (or a local charity store) be appropriated - physically manipulated, disrupted, reassembled, rearranged or re-presented?
- How might this form of play become purposeful? - Is the experience of hands-on experimentation rewarding in itself? What makes one experiment more successful than another - and is this related to visual, conceptual or technical appeal, or something else?
- What might you learn about construction (or destruction) techniques - the resistance (or submission) of various materials when it comes to breaking, cutting, tearing, attaching, joining and so on? How might new potential meanings or possibilities arise through these re-creations?
- Which emotions are stirred - via all senses - through the tactile engagement of familiar surfaces and forms?
2. In response to one childhood memory, produce a range of experiments using at least 3 different media/techniques (for example, painting, sound art, and collage, or assemblage, performance, and animation).
- Which materials and techniques are best-suited to evoking your chosen childhood memory, and why?
- Which materials and techniques lend themselves best to creative play? Which feel most enjoyable or rewarding to work with?
- Which materials and techniques are the most frustrating to work with, and does this frustration stem from a lack of knowledge or physical control of the materials, or something else?
Below are some examples of artists' work that, in various ways, have drawn inspiration from childhood memories, toys and games. These include playful interactions with materials, the illustrating/re-imagining of memories, and the use of childhood associations to confront wider political issues. Click on the images for further information.
Material matters: Resistance and submission
'Mastery' in art is often associated with the mastering of materials and techniques. The term "Old Master" tends to refer to painters of skill who worked in Europe prior to 1800 and produced work of a pictorial or representational nature (for example, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt or Francisco Goya to name a few). However, artists have always challenged 'traditions', and increasingly so since the turn of the 20th Century. Rather than seeking representational mastery (with paint, for example) many artists have been drawn to the properties and potential of the medium itself, and the tools and techniques employed to make marks.
Consider the portrait examples below and follow the links for further information. These examples (from a popular art history discourse - typically all male artists) are presented chronologically from left to right. As a sequence they crudely demonstrate a shift from representational subject matter to an emphasis on marks, materials and gestures.
- Which portraits might be described as the most playful or experimental (and why)?
- How might a list of words describing the skills, interests or working practices of each artist differ?
- what are the purposes of each portrait (or the artists' intentions), and how might these differ?
- Which work has the most value to you (and why)?
"IT TOOK ME A WHILE TO DROP THE FORMALITIES AND REALLY WORK FROM THE GUT. I THINK IF THERE IS ANY VALUE IN MAKING A PAINTING IT IS IN THE UNIQUE COMPOSITION OF MATERIAL EXPERIMENTS AND PERSONAL SENSATIONS THAT YOU'VE HAD"
Rosy KEYSER
Rosy Keyser is an American contemporary painter and sculptor known for producing large-scale gestural, abstracted works. In describing her work she talks about the relationships between energy and form, and how materials can be combined or 'pitted against each other' to create 'reactions that 'interrupt the natural order of things'. Keyser's varied and unconventional use of materials (paint, fabric, wood, plastic, cork, sawdust, found objects...) align her approach with prior art movements such as Neo-Dada and Arte Povera.
Neo-Dada artist Robert Rauschenberg was particularly influential in breaking down the distinctions between art objects and everyday objects, as initiated by Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement in the 1920s. His early work anticipated the Pop Art movement. Acts of creative play and open-ended experimentation have since become widely embraced by artists. Take a look at this short film (right) to gain a sense of the diversity of Rauschenberg's work and his commitment to playing with ideas, materials and technologies. |
|
How might you experiment with various combinations of surfaces and textures, materials and forms, pigments and methods of application?
1. Produce a series of experimental wooden or cardboard tiles that systematically test the resistance of the materials you are using. For example:
1. Produce a series of experimental wooden or cardboard tiles that systematically test the resistance of the materials you are using. For example:
- How might fabrics be stretched and fixed at a near-tearing point?
- How might the thickness/dilution of the paint used affect its ability to dry as a raised surface, or to drip or splash freely?
- What happens when various textured and painted surfaces are layered, and then torn and punctured to reveal what is below?
- How might the compositions developed (the arrangements of marks, textures, tones, shapes etc.) influence the visual appeal of the work? Consider words such as balance/tension, harmony/discord, symmetrical/asymmetrical, contrast, affinity, fragmented, congested.
- How might the collective arrangement or display of your tile experiments (e.g. in a grid format, as a long sequence, or as a stack) create further interest or appeal?
It's all about the journey
Simon Starling is a conceptual artist whose practice combines in-depth research and experimentation with a great sense of play and adventure. He is best known for his 2005 Turner Prize winning work, ShedBoatShed when, simply put, he chopped up a shed, turned it into a boat, rowed it down the Rhine (using an oar that was originally displayed on its wall), and then reassembled it as a shed. It's the kind of inventive, looping journey that Starling has become widely celebrated for.
The short film below includes Starling discussing an installation created for Tate St. Ives, Cornwall. It is a recreation of a gallery by the sea (within a gallery by the sea), within works related to ships are displayed.
Simon Starling is a conceptual artist whose practice combines in-depth research and experimentation with a great sense of play and adventure. He is best known for his 2005 Turner Prize winning work, ShedBoatShed when, simply put, he chopped up a shed, turned it into a boat, rowed it down the Rhine (using an oar that was originally displayed on its wall), and then reassembled it as a shed. It's the kind of inventive, looping journey that Starling has become widely celebrated for.
The short film below includes Starling discussing an installation created for Tate St. Ives, Cornwall. It is a recreation of a gallery by the sea (within a gallery by the sea), within works related to ships are displayed.
"I’m not somebody who gazes at the stars all the time. But one project leads to another. A body of research will grow a little shoot and become something else." |
|
"Starling’s practice combines the tradition of the British explorer – intrepidly venturing into obscure places – with the persona of an eccentric inventor. Such processes [as demonstrated with ShedboatShed] encapsulate a kind of poetic logic." taken from Tate resources
'Autoxylopyrocycloboros' is another of Starling's experimental projects. The absurd title is a collage of related words incorporating ‘Ouroboros’, a mythical tail-eating serpent (this self-eating reference will become apparent). Starling reclaimed a small wooden steam powered boat from the bottom of Lake Windermere. This was then repaired and launched on a journey upon Loch Long, Scotland (where steam-powered boating originated). The boat was fuelled by itself - it was steadily sawn up and fed into the boiler which powered the engine. Through this comically poignant process of auto-destruction, the boat finally sank, to be returned to the bottom of a lake.
'Autoxylopyrocycloboros' is another of Starling's experimental projects. The absurd title is a collage of related words incorporating ‘Ouroboros’, a mythical tail-eating serpent (this self-eating reference will become apparent). Starling reclaimed a small wooden steam powered boat from the bottom of Lake Windermere. This was then repaired and launched on a journey upon Loch Long, Scotland (where steam-powered boating originated). The boat was fuelled by itself - it was steadily sawn up and fed into the boiler which powered the engine. Through this comically poignant process of auto-destruction, the boat finally sank, to be returned to the bottom of a lake.
The sole evidence of the project (sunken boat aside) is 36 photographs that when exhibited were projected as a slide show (on technology as dated as that of the steam engine). These images played on a continuous loop, a fitting beginning-end for Starling's playful cyclical journey.
How might you create your own inventive adventure inspired by the work of Simon Starling?
Devise a creative experiment based on 4 key considerations:
How might you create your own inventive adventure inspired by the work of Simon Starling?
Devise a creative experiment based on 4 key considerations:
- It must involve a physical journey - a movement through a particular location or space that has some reason for being chosen.
- It must involve an act of making - something new must be created (which may or may not exist at the end).
- It must involve an object and/or an influential bit of knowledge from a different domain - a reference to, or inspiration from another subject area, for example, Science, literature, Religious studies, History, Philosophy.
- Once completed the success (or failure) of the project should be displayed or documented in a related manner or location.
“Screwing things up is a virtue. Being correct is never the point. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."
robert rauschenberg
FURTHER READING
The following texts have been chosen to promote wider contextual study. Students should consider the author's intentions, their chosen writing style, and how the texts combine research and historical facts alongside personal insights and opinions.
- Why play is important to us all, Lauren Laverne, The Guardian, 2014
- Richard DeDomenici: the artist who organised protests against himself, Matt Trueman, The Guardian, 2016
- Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, Dr. Tom Folland, Khan Academy article
- Simon Starling: Making Connections, Anne Rochette and Wade Saunders, Art in America magazine, 2010