Top 3 Readings: Fall 2016

Walker, S.R., Naming Play for Artmaking

Dr. Sydney Walker takes on the concept of play and writes this passage saying that not only is it essential for therapeutic and engagement issues, but rather it lies at the core of learning as well. She writes about the nature of play and it’s application in art education. She uses Delueze and his thought theory as well as a number of historical and contemporary artists to further her point. She looks at the artists Alÿs, Callie, Tiravanija, and Orozco. Walker states, Play “is paradoxical, representing a complex and complicated phenomenon that can produce serious thought about the world and self.” She continues by making the assertion that play is not merely a means of amusement but “a strategy of resistance against the conventions of both art and society.” In other words, play is a place that a student can safely test out current impossibilities in the hopes of connecting them to realities. Play has “the ability to dislodge ideas from their usual moorings and precipitate new ways of thinking.” As art educators we need to wary of teaching art in the same way it has been taught for decades. We need to prepare students to understand and interact with contemporary artists working now. As art evolves so should art education.

Walker, S.R., "Artmaking and Nonsense."

Dr. Sydney Walker writes this chapter on Artmaking and Nonsense based on her own work and the work of Delueze. “The chapter develops Deleuzian ideas of nonsense as a response to the pedagogical operation that drives the text, how can we help students find new ways of thinking through artmaking?” Walker looks at artist, Nina Katchadourian, and some student artwork examples. Using nonsense or “everyday conditions,” these works or art create new meaning through nonsense. She gives key points on how we should take nonsense seriously when developing artmaking pedagogy. These include; structure, concept, intertwining with sense, ordinary, and paradoxical.

Walker, S.R., Rhizomatic Thinking

Dr. Sydney Walker uses this chapter to move from Deleuzian ideas of nonsense and sensemaking into a relabeled idea of Rhizomatic Thinking. “Rhizomatic thinking does not proceed in an orderly, logical or rational manner such as arborescent thinking, but seeks discontinuities from heterogeneous connections that logically make no sense.” She argues that Rhizomatic thinking produces new ways of thinking through experimentation and expansion of knowledge. Rhizomatic thinking requires deterritorialization and reterritorialization and not just simply absurdity. Walker looks at Deleuze and Guattari and picks apart ways of thinking and how it relates to art making pedagogy. Looking at Ann Hamilton’s Event of a Thread and a couple student artmaking examples, Walker reveals how introducing alien elements into artmaking can produce a Rhizomatic event in thinking rather than an arborescent, logical progression. “The pedagogical goal for fostering rhizomatic thinking in student artmaking is never simply about being clever or entertaining, such as it might appear when artmaking turns toward play and deviance from traditional ways of working, but the aim is to prepare the ground for thinking about self and the world in new ways.”

*Bonus Reading that made me want to quit everything, take a class at Aberdeen, and become an archaeologist:

Ingold, T., Making, chapters 1 & 2

Tim Ingold, professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, wrote Making about his reflections on Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. He takes a look at a class that he taught in the spring of 2004, “The 4 As: Anthropology, Archeology, Art, and Architecture.” In this class he looks at the intersections between the four disciplines and how they create knowledge. Ingold looks at what it means to create and how that creation can allow us to correspond across different ways of thinking. In the first chapter, “Knowing from the Inside,” Ingold looks at what knowledge is and how it is best attained. He argues for learning by doing. By allowing ourselves to be immersed in something, we can better understand it rather than just record what we see. In “The Materials of Life,” Ingold looks at the blurring of the terms Material and Object. He looks at how we can create using our knowledge rather than recording knowledge. When talking about spending a day making baskets, Ingold states, “Later they would tell me that they had learned more from that one afternoon than from any number of lectures and readings: above all about what it means to make things, about how form arises through movement, and about the dynamic properties of materials.”

**Second Bonus Reading that was good but not as good as I wanted it to be:

Jack Thorne, J.K. Rowling, and John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child