Process Piece

I'm not going to lie, I wasn't in class on Wednesday and this assignment kind of threw me for a loop. The prompt especially left me wondering what exactly was an artistic "process" I could do in relation to the Barney reading. It said to document some type of process, which is an act of human labor with a beginning, middle and an end. But how did a process of human labor connect with the Barney reading? I never thought of a process of human labor as connected to artistic creation. However, I'll come back to how I started to think of this assignment metaphorically and in broader terms. 

Processes is an ambiguous term and can mean so many things when it comes to artistic creation, but the prompt gave me somewhat of a direction with the process relating to "human labor". Immediately, just like many of my classmates (I read their blogs) I thought of showing the process of getting ready for school or possibly baking cookies. These were acts of human labor in which I could show their processes. But I was also thinking efficiently and thought, "Why not show the process of cleaning my room and cross off two things on my to-do-list?" I made a video of me cleaning my room and all the processes that go along with that like making my bed, organizing my desk, folding my clothes, and vaccumming the floors. I took the idea of a silent video form very literally and paid homage to the silent films (Charlie Chaplin) of the early 20th century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C11v7xcIZb4

Now, as far as how this assigment relates to the reading I thought of how going through processes in life like cleaning my room are a lot like going through processes in art. When cleaning my room I'm going through the process of moving, organizing, transforming and creating a product of a clean room. In the process I'm thinking of how I want my room to look and be represented. Paraphrasing the young boy's comment in the reading:
It's not just like I snap my fingers and my room is suddenly immaculate. I don't just clean my room right away; it was kind of a long process to get to the finished product.

Going through the process of creating is what helps us gain experience and make meaning for ourselves. In this class I haven't just read ABOUT art (like Barney discourages teachers from having their students do), but have wrote about art texts through actively creating and engaging with them. Barney says,"Reading print texts about artistic practice is not the same as engaging in authentic artistic practices." Just like learning the practice or process of cleaning my room, there are artistic practices and processes of inquiry to be learned by students about the arts. I see this activity as a metaphor to what we should be teaching our students about "art as a process", just like Mr. Baker did with his class in showing them the artistic processes and inquiry that jewelry artist Jan Yager went through. She went on an artistic investigation asking questions, exploring, collecting, gathering information, researching, looking at old artifacts to get ideas, drawing and photographing plants and delimiting her investigation in order to create her jewelry and finished product. That is what I want to help students understand--that creating art is a process. Or like Barney says, "To create in the visual arts means to engage actively with visual arts research methodologies--the disciplinary methods and philosophies surround the selection and use of methods, materials, processes, and contexts."  I want them to come to terms with what artistic investigation is and how and why artists engage in artistic inquiry. Just like Mr. Baker I can help students experience and understand the processes artists use in their creations. I'm still not sure exactly how I could implement this in my English classroom, but the idea sounds nice and I'm looking forward to our classroom discussion on it.

2 Quotes that really stuck out to me from the Barney reading:

• To create in the visual arts then is to “write” visual arts texts. To be able to do this requires more knowledge than simply reading or interpreting print texts about visual art, although this is often an important aspect of being able to participate in visual art as a community of practice. More importantly, to write a visual arts texts, one must have experiential understanding about how visual arts texts are created in context. 

• The literacy focus in a visual arts course should not be solely about the ability to read or even interpret what is written about art but to begin to contextualize and engage with art as a complex disciplinary practice, along with its discourses, methodologies, and interpretive frames for meaning making