Dear Dori,

Your post offers a wonderful sense of the openness and bridging qualities
that an anthropologist can bring to design critiques. But neither you nor
Ken explicitly mentioned what I consider to be the most valuable learning
experience in a critique - hearing the different views of critics and
students as they address student accomplishment in a shared context. As a
student, I  learned as much from the dialogue between jurors as from any
insightful remark about my work. To hear Robert Venturi debate Lou Kahn
about underlying issues that I hadn't even registered was a real lesson in
architecture! I suspect that your contribution had more to offer the student
than you imagine. Thanks for being there so well.

Chuck

-- 
Dr. Charles Burnette
234 South Third Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106

215 629 1387
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On 12/17/06 1:44 PM, "Tunstall, Elizabeth" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Art and Design Critique Week at UIC
> 
> The past week (Tuesday to Friday), I attended the art and design critiques
> held at UIC. Tuesday was the first of four days of Studio Arts MFA
> critiques. Wednesday was for Electronic Visualization MFA and senior
> graphic design thesis in the afternoon. Thursday and Friday were graphic
> design MFA critiques.
> 
> One of the advantages of my meta-disciplinary role is that I am encouraged
> to gain a wide view of what the School of Art and Design is doing for its
> students and its reputation. To see the similarities and differences in
> perspectives is such an enlightening experience. The key concepts that
> hold the week together are (1) the various relationships to
> "indeterminacy" in art and design, (2) the communication of the specific
> and/or the universalistic in creative intentionality and decision-making,
> and (3) the contextualizing discourse of the critique.
> 
> 1.
> Indeterminacy, the state of not being clearly ascertained, described, or
> calculated
> 
> I was surprised in the critiques by the way in which the students handled
> or did not handle indeterminacy. In the art critiques, the students
> embraced indeterminacy like a safety blanket. When pressure to provide a
> reason for either their work or curatorial decisions, they would say, "I
> want to leave that up to the audience." This was not accepted by me or the
> other critics, who again emphasized that art needs to communicate, even if
> it is communicating no particular message.
> 
> In the EV critiques, the technical learning curve made them be more
> calculated in their intentions from a tool perspective, yet their subject
> matter for their technical concepts were indeterminable. Meaning, there
> was nothing specific about whether they used 3D stereoscope for a black
> and white graveyard scene or a fly over the New Mexico desert. Leaving me
> and others, the feeling that they tried things (motion sensors to activate
> films, Cubist cinematic effects, robot-like shrimp) because they seemed
> technically cool to do as opposed to pushing some conceptual statement
> about the world.
> 
> Graphic design students on the other hand struggled with the two classes
> that afforded them lots of indeterminacy. My class in research methods
> and, my colleague, Jorg Becker's graphic design conceptualization course.
> It is my belief that graphic design positions itself as a problem-solving
> field and less as a problem framing or generating field. Both courses
> required lots of research to frame and/or generate the problem. My
> course's research was by nature more systematic and rigorous while Jorg's
> was more impressionistic and inspirational, but the intent was to force
> the students to define a problem before seeking to solve it through their
> formal design skills. In the student presentations, they talked poignantly
> about their frustration and confusion with designing from positions not
> their own and coming up with an actionable problem statement(s) by which
> to derive a conceptual solution.
> 
> Thus the challenge of an art and design education is managing
> indeterminacy so that their is enough mystery to find the approach and
> solution compelling, yet enough description or calculation to enable a
> clarity of intention to the audience.
> 
> 2.
> the Challenge of Communication, the successful conveying of feelings and
> ideas
> 
> The ability for a painting, sculpture, interactive piece, film, poster, or
> narrative to communicate successfully is the evaluative criteria of all
> critiques. It is the delicate dance between creative author's
> intentionality and audience's interpretation of the work (which can be
> completely separate from the author's intentions).  For me, the goal of
> the creative author is to have enough awareness of the interpretive
> possibilities so to be able to guide the audience to interpretations that
> have the highest spiritual, emotional, and intellectual payoffs, in others
> words, that create a moment of communion with the world. The challenge is
> dialing up or down the specificity or universality of the ideas until they
> result in a gestalt moment of specific universality or universal
> specificity. This challenge was present in all of the art and design
> critiques, but it hit home with me in the art critiques.
> 
> There is one art student who had done a series of painting of gem-like
> mountains and then a drawing of Snow White with the words "Puta" and "Run"
> on it. The key painting was this large canvas with layered white paint,
> but a grey box that looked like a screen or mirror with a pink gem-like
> mountain reflected in it. In his statement, the artist made it clear that
> it was tied to his heritage (without stating what it was, for I had to ask
> him 4 times what is your background).  His heritage was Cuban, thus his
> antagonism to Disney images of childhood, and the meaning of the mountains
> being those of Cuba. This was not at all accessible in the work itself, so
> the discussion became about how accessible should his narrative be,
> whether that is what he really wants to convey (because it seems most of
> his statements is about being known for his aesthetics), and how much does
> the work have to speak for itself. In other words, his work was unclear in
> terms of the message being one about the sadness of leaving behind one's
> history (very universal) or one about the specific relationship between
> Cuba and the US as it relates to his childhood memories (very specific).
> 
> Separate note: There is an interesting narrative about the art and design
> work of people of color in terms of an anxiety about reveling of one's
> ethnicity in the work versus being about aesthetics (i.e. formal
> principles of art and design). The Caucasian students' whiteness is never
> brought up as being contrary to aesthetics, so again the normativeness of
> art and design "whiteness" is marked in the absence of discussion about
> white ethnicity's impact on the work.
> 
> 3.
> Discourses of art and design critique
> 
> Doug Ishar paid me the highest compliment (for an anthropologist) at the
> school holiday party. That my comments in the art critique were like that
> of another art colleague not as someone from another discipline. This is
> high praise for an anthropologist because we are evaluated by our skills
> in culturally passing for a native. Although problematic at many levels,
> the idea is to learn the language, behaviors, assumptions, and beliefs of
> the group you are studying to such a degree of detail that you can mimic
> or "pass" as a native. So I attended the critiques to specifically learn
> the discourses (in the Foucault's sense of practices, institutions, as
> well as language) of art and design. There seems to me to be three
> intentions embedded in the critique:
> 
>    1. To provide a variety of interpretive possibilities to help the
> student clarify their meanings and sharpen their decision making. Every
> phrase begins with a version of  "I think it means..." Students are
> able to refute this interpretations, but often they restate their
> positions "I was trying to do..." or cop out with an "I leave it up to
> the audience..." But this exercise in providing interpretive
> possibilities is again key to sharpening the student's skills.
>    2. To contextualize the students work within the larger art and design
> "literature" and institutions. Critics offer a lot of references to
> other artists and designers work with whom the student's work
> resonates. This is more so on the art side than in the design side,
> which I think has to do with a more established critical body of
> knowledge in art as opposed to design. But this is the one area that
> opens the possibility of interdisciplinary dialog. What if a designer
> in an art critic offers up a designer's work that the art student
> should visit? What if I suggest for them to read anthropological or
> social theory texts relevant to their work (actually I do that)? At
> UIC, we need more of those interdisciplinary conversations.
>    3. To investigate the curatorial decisions of artist and design
> students, so that they understand that the move from "intuitive"
> creation to strategic presentation requires precise editing and
> decision-making. Many students focus so much on making the work that
> they forget that the work will have to live in a context (perhaps
> ephemeral like much of graphic design but sometimes more permanent like
> an outdoor sculpture).  In many cases the critique would consist of a
> 1/3 focus on the technical form of the work, 1/3 on the content and
> message, and 1/3 on the presentation and set up. If there were problems
> in one area or another, more time was devoted to the problem area, but
> if everything was pretty much okay, that was the relative split.
> 
> I really enjoyed the learning I gained through the week. It helped me
> contextualize my presence in a school of art and design and what role in
> need to play as the anthropological participant observer.