Reading notes

Gude Postmodern Principles

Quotes from reading:
- “I rarely see meaningful connections being made between these formal descriptors and
understanding works of art or analyzing the quality of everyday design. I ponder the piles of
exercises on line, shape, or color harmonies left behind by hundreds and hundreds of students
each year.”
- “Students in a quality art education program gain the capacity to reflect on cultural issues related
to self and society. Through studying and making art, students become attuned to nuance and
complexity. They learn to recognize the cultural choices that underlie even the most mundane
moments and reactions of everyday life and consider whether these are the choices they
themselves wish to make.”
- Spiral Workshop evolved three criteria for our curriculum:
* curriculum based on generative themes that relate to the lives of students and their communities;
* studio art projects based on diverse practices of contemporary artmaking and related traditional arts;
* art as investigation-understanding the art of others and seeing their own artmaking, not as exercises, but
as research that produces new visual and conceptual insights.
- “These “newly discovered" postmodern principles are often the fusion of a visual form and a
conceptual artmaking strategy. They are hybrids of the visual and the conceptual. This
hybridization is itself a hallmark of many postmodern cultural productions, eschewing the
boundaries imposed by outmoded discipline-based structures.”
- “art examples and projects in school art curricula should not be reductive representations of
theoretical principles, but should reflect the complexity of actual art”

Gude’s argument: Art is very complex and the curriculum needs to support that. It’s just about color, line,
value and/or shape—it’s also about the deeper meaning, gaze, artist’s personality/history. Do not focus
much on the skills and surface rather the impact the piece can have on the artist and the audience.

My thoughts: I completely agree. The curriculum needs to support the complexity of art so students can
express themselves and achieve/reach their full potential (maybe even explore and find who they are).

Postmodernism: Post-World War II intellectual movement and cultural attitude focusing on cultural
pluralism and release from the confines and ideology of Western high culture.

- Appropriation : Reusing/recycling found materials and changing them to create a new meaning and
piece. Can also be making a new piece of artwork using a pre-existing context.
- Juxtaposition : Placing or putting together contrasting imagery in a way to create a new meaning from
the interplay of clawing concepts
- Recontextualization : Posting a familiar image that generates new meaning by putting it together with
something it’s usually not associated with.
- Hybridity : Putting together different types of media into a piece (cultural blending).
- Layering : Putting multiple images on top of eachother.
- Gazing : What we are looking at, who is doing the looking (subject in painting and/or both) Who’s in
control of the imagery.
- Interaction of Text & Image : Interaction/relationship and interplay between text and image—thus
creating a stronger meaning
- Representin : Finding the artist’s voice, culture, and personal history in their artwork (includes, race,
class, cultural identity, and national identity)