Black Bucket Essays
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Kristen Letts Kovak
'Keep Art Weird'
The Carnegie Museum of Art just closed an excellent retrospective on Duane Michals. A photographic pioneer, he worked in serial stills and handwritten narrations while his contemporaries captured the decisive moment. What made Michals break the rules? Accordingly to him, he didn’t know that the “rules” existed. But, after 50+ years of exhibiting his photographs, his career cannot be attributed to innocence alone. He is clearly conscious of contemporary standards and chooses to work both within and in spite of these norms. While the easiest way to break the rules is to never learn them, innocence can only be temporary. Whether self-taught or a product of the academy, an artist will eventually encounter other artists. Creativity may initially come from freedom, but it is deepened through conscious contextualization.
In 2002 the PA Board of Art Education approved state wide K-12 standards. The board was full of dedicated teachers who wanted to ensure that construction paper penguins and Valentine’s Day cards did not pass as visual thinking. When it came time to vote, everyone except me gave his or her enthusiastic approval. I was a lowly student representative entitled to less than ½ of a vote. I was uncomfortable with a room full of people determining the standards that they too would be evaluated on. They were defining quality based on their own curricula. While their goal was to strengthen art education through increased standards, they also limited its scope to their own preferences.
Last year, I attended a Carnegie Mellon: School of Art meeting on how to evaluate learning objectives. This time, the idea of standardization was met with fervent objections. We were not arguing against goals, just about pre-determining what successful fulfillment might look like. Our syllabi clearly list learning objectives for each course; we just keep them open-ended enough for the unexpected to occur (which, it inevitably does). However, most art programs do not have the freedom to focus on creative risk-taking. Since our freshmen come to CMU with outstanding training, we get to encourage experimentation from the beginning. It is because of our high standards for admission that we can maintain such an open-ended set of curricular standards.
Duane Michals’ career is a case study both for and against standardizing art education. His art world naiveté gave him the freedom to push existing boundaries, but his success has made his work a standard part of art curricula. Students now contextualize their practice within a framework that he helped to establish. Standards, after all, are just a record of our temporal concurrence of ideas. We may risk momentarily normalizing our thoughts, but standards also help us to identify the next boundaries to cross. I am still not comfortable signing my name next to statewide art standards, but I support any proposal that standardizes continuous dissent.
Artists need something to resist, even if we are only resisting each other. So, let’s take a page from Austin’s civic campaign and make our motto to “Keep Art Weird.”
Volume 1, Issue 2
Normalize difference until there is no space between self and other.
Kristen Letts Kovak
'Keep Art Weird'
The Carnegie Museum of Art just closed an excellent retrospective on Duane Michals. A photographic pioneer, he worked in serial stills and handwritten narrations while his contemporaries captured the decisive moment. What made Michals break the rules? Accordingly to him, he didn’t know that the “rules” existed. But, after 50+ years of exhibiting his photographs, his career cannot be attributed to innocence alone. He is clearly conscious of contemporary standards and chooses to work both within and in spite of these norms. While the easiest way to break the rules is to never learn them, innocence can only be temporary. Whether self-taught or a product of the academy, an artist will eventually encounter other artists. Creativity may initially come from freedom, but it is deepened through conscious contextualization.
In 2002 the PA Board of Art Education approved state wide K-12 standards. The board was full of dedicated teachers who wanted to ensure that construction paper penguins and Valentine’s Day cards did not pass as visual thinking. When it came time to vote, everyone except me gave his or her enthusiastic approval. I was a lowly student representative entitled to less than ½ of a vote. I was uncomfortable with a room full of people determining the standards that they too would be evaluated on. They were defining quality based on their own curricula. While their goal was to strengthen art education through increased standards, they also limited its scope to their own preferences.
Last year, I attended a Carnegie Mellon: School of Art meeting on how to evaluate learning objectives. This time, the idea of standardization was met with fervent objections. We were not arguing against goals, just about pre-determining what successful fulfillment might look like. Our syllabi clearly list learning objectives for each course; we just keep them open-ended enough for the unexpected to occur (which, it inevitably does). However, most art programs do not have the freedom to focus on creative risk-taking. Since our freshmen come to CMU with outstanding training, we get to encourage experimentation from the beginning. It is because of our high standards for admission that we can maintain such an open-ended set of curricular standards.
Duane Michals’ career is a case study both for and against standardizing art education. His art world naiveté gave him the freedom to push existing boundaries, but his success has made his work a standard part of art curricula. Students now contextualize their practice within a framework that he helped to establish. Standards, after all, are just a record of our temporal concurrence of ideas. We may risk momentarily normalizing our thoughts, but standards also help us to identify the next boundaries to cross. I am still not comfortable signing my name next to statewide art standards, but I support any proposal that standardizes continuous dissent.
Artists need something to resist, even if we are only resisting each other. So, let’s take a page from Austin’s civic campaign and make our motto to “Keep Art Weird.”
