Ties that Bind: Part 1

June is Wedding Month and in keeping with that, the next exhibition at A.K. Collings Gallery is entitled "Ties that Bind".

The opening reception will be on Sunday May 31, from 2 to 4.

Robert Malinowski and Erin Glover are two young artists who will be departing for their honeymoon in Paris on the weekend following the opening. They have produced a series of delicate drawings which are romantic and just a tiny bit odd...capturing the truth and intensity of married life.

Svava Thordis Juliusson is a sculptor who works with zip ties and other found materials. She will be installing sculpture from the "Svona, Svona" series. (this is a term of consolation in Icelandic, roughly meaning "there, there"). Juliusson's work and the Glover/Malinowski collaborative drawings relate thematically, and her work will be discussed in my next post.



Artist statement for "Ties That Bind": collaborative drawings by Erin Glover and Robert Malinowski:

"In our most recent work, we have staged small vignettes that unveil personal encounters in public spaces. The mixed media pieces sew together delicately rendered drawings and gem – like photo based images onto the same surface. The work is intended to hold conversation between the two of us as artists, as well as tell an intimate story as you travel through each image. We have both carried solo artistic careers in our respective media for the past seven years, but relish an opportunity to work together on collaborative projects. Our duet work has grown to hold a history of its own."


"Robert’s drawings depict moments excerpted from every day. The figures are shown overwhelmed by thoughts or emotions or both. Rendered as pencil drawn portraits, the characters are perfectly composed except for their heads which appear to fragment and float away from their bodies. Replaced by hearts, letters, numbers, or a variety of combined symbols, the identities are lost in an eruption of penciled markings."


"Erin’s work paints a series of domestic tokens. A gathering of garments that wrap, cover, and protect; and furniture pieces that shelter and embrace. Each item is shown empty, but carrying shapes and forms that reference the body. The collected personal objects and furniture are all worn from use and tend to adopt grand and layered personalities when planted into the new compositions. These works are small pockets of private space."


"In our collaborative work, the space is a shared landscape between the domestic tokens and the story book portraits. Sometimes, through the process, the negative space becomes more important. Large expanses of unclaimed white allow for tension and connection to grow between the figures and the objects in each piece. In our newest pieces, the figures and the household items will be shown close together, often overlapping. Robert will draw people huddled on a sofa and Erin will carefully paint a quilt over and around them. Erin will paint patterned sheets on a bed and Robert will gently pencil lovers sleeping underneath."


"It is critical to our development as artists to continue working together as an artistic team. In the process of producing collective artwork there is an natural critique that occurs. With each artistic mark, a partnered response. We are each others art community, critic, and collaborator. It is an invaluable experience to have the opportunity to work so closely with another artist to develop an ever growing series of pieces."


A.K. Collings Gallery
Hours:
Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 5
(Sundays, by invitation, for Artist Receptions)
otherwise, by appointment

Never Too Early

One more installation in my series of posts pertinent to arts education, this time from the tenderest end of the spectrum (age-wise, anyway). In a fabulous send-up of Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", Maggie Simpson, whilst pursuing her studies at "Mediocri-Tots Daycare Center", gets punished for being creative. It all works out in the end.

I Wish I'd Written This...

....but I am glad Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City) did.

"Dear Arts Canada, Your Website is Broken.
Canadian art websites in the Toronto area seriously need to kick it up a notch. A survey of search results found when preparing for my visit to Toronto today. The result: exasperation."

Taken to task for their crummy websites are ROM, AGO, MoCCA, PowerPlant, and for good measure, The Globe and Mail.

Thanks! Toronto always listens when a New Yorker notices.

Neurodevelopment of Drawing Ability in Children

I have had a long standing interest in the development of drawing skills in young children (from a neuropsychological perspective). Of course, children vary widely in talent, creativity, willingness to take risks, and so on, but there are some very interesting and predictable developmental stages which can be tracked through children's drawings, and which reflect what is going on at the level of brain development.

The Canadian Society for Education through Art maintains an archive of school children's art produced between 1930 to 1995, some examples of which are available in an on-line gallery. The documentation supplied is not the best (ages, dates, names of the young artists are often missing, the wrong captions are attached to some images, and the archive seems to have come to a crashing halt in 1995). Nonetheless, the archive is a potential treasure trove of data for researchers interested in cognitive development, in trends in art education, and the impact of arts education on subsequent academic achievement and vocational attainment. In a previous post, I wondered about what influence the "Kate Bush experience" had on the kids in a 1981 "Razzmatazz" studio audience, and similarly, I wonder about what has become of some of the students whose art is documented in the CSEA archive. Much of the work is wonderful, and reflects not only nascent talent on the part of the children, but the influence of dedicated and inspiring teachers.

Art produced by children between the ages of 6 and 12 provides a window into a very interesting period of neurological and cognitive development. Of course, drawing ability improves developmentally along with eye-hand co-ordination, fine motor skill, kinaesthetics etc., but what is most fascinating is the way in which children's drawing ability shows us something about the developmental progression from a "modular" brain to an "integrative" brain, as the frontal lobes develop and as interhemispheric and intrahemispheric connections are reinforced and refined.

I've pulled a few examples from the CSEA archive to illustrate.


Peter, age 6, 1976, British Columbia. (felt pen)
Peter's drawing is schematic and very verbal/analytic in nature. His drawing represents what he "knows", not what he "sees". Element by element, he documents what is important to him in the scene, as if following a list of key words or concepts. Drawing at this stage seems to be a very language-mediated activity. In the scene as he saw it, for instance, the electrical outlet would have been behind the presents and hence, not visible. But to Peter, it is a very important element, and so he includes it in his drawing.


Ken Kranrod, age 8, 1977, Alberta (pencil)
Ken's drawing is very accomplished. The detail is fantastic, and each element in his drawing is a little masterpiece. However, he is not fully out of the schematic stage. While the detail is rich and far more developed than that of the 6 year old above, Ken has not quite crossed the threshold of drawing what he sees: rather, he is representing what he knows and what is important to him when he thinks about a circus. (I love the swishy action-marks he's put in to give a sense of motion to the bear's dumbells!) Perspective, size of the elements, depth of field: none of this is developed in the overall composition. In fact, the elephant appears to be standing on the bear's head. The elephant and the hippo are also drawn in a very different, cartoon-like style, and demonstrate foreshortening in a manner that is not evident elsewhere. I wonder if these were copied from one of those "how to draw animals" books that are so beloved by children at this age, as their desire to produce representational and realistic drawings for a time trumps their joy in unfettered self-expression. By way of anecdotal finding, most kids seem to go through such a stage, although I am not aware of research specific to this observation.


Lynne Dunsmuir, age 10, 1970, British Columbia (oil pastel)
At age 10, Lynne is starting draw what she sees in a more realistic, representational manner without resorting to cartoon tricks and techniques. Her drawing is less about the disparate elements of what "makes a dog", and more about integrating categorical knowledge with real experience. At age 10, she is on the cusp of a period of tremendous frontal lobe development. She's really captured "dogness" in this drawing, because her brain now has far greater integrative capacity. Stated simply, she is more able to integrate what her left hemisphere "labels" with what her right hemisphere "sees".


A. Wallace, age 12, (Year?) New Brunswick ("paint")
A.Wallace has talent, no doubt about that. She (or he) is entering a much more mature stage of neurocognitive development. Those frontal lobes are really starting to work for her! She is in a watershed period for the development of abstract thinking, flexible problem solving, and increasing capacity for empathy, delay of gratification and moral judgment: these are all related to frontal lobe maturation (which will continue on through her late teens and even early twenties). These are all highly complex and integrative cognitive functions, and are more or less unique to humans, as is the making of art.

My apologies to colleagues and readers who may object to my oversimplification of the neuroscience involved. The point I want to make overall is that between the ages of 6 and 12, a great deal is happening in a child's cognitive and neurological development, and it is happening very rapidly. Opportunities to make art, and to be taught skills of "looking" as well as "making" should not be considered a mere recreational frill or therapeutic outlet for kids in school (although that's good, too!). Evidence is mounting that training in visual literacy and in making art may literally change brain development, by promoting and enhancing connections and feedback loops between various brain regions. (This has been studied fairly extensively in the case of music). The child's neurodevelopmental stage affects their art, and conversely, the practise of art may well affect brain development.

(related posts here, and here and here)

Kate Bush Talks to Kids About Making Art

Another post on the general topic of art and education. Here is a clip from the early 80's British TV show "Razzmatazz" featuring a sweet and sincere Kate Bush talking to kids about the art, music and choreography involved in making a music video.

"I'm very lucky because my interests are actually my work, and in so many ways, any interest I have can become a part of my work...that's the wonderful thing about art...anything you do can then become your work... just keeping your mind open for all these things. It's really fun. Life becomes work."

I wonder what these children went on to do in their lives. They seem so attentive, and I cannot help but think that this experience must have been influential.

Speaking of which: Kate Bush's work would appear to have been an influence on Marcel Dzama and his skating ghosts as well. And a good influence, it is.




(video clip via, via)

Last Chance to Vote for Grange Prize.

There are only seven days left to vote for the Grange Prize in Photography. As I indicated in a previous post, I was torn between Lynne Cohen's intellectually compelling and vaguely unsettling photographs of uninhabited spaces, and Marco Antonio Cruz's supremely humane and textured black and white photographs of blind people. I have avoided voting until now, but have gone back to look at the photographs a number of times. In the end, Cruz's photographs are something I'd like to have on a shelf, in a portfolio or book, and look at when the mood strikes. On the other hand, I could live with Cohen's photographs. They are so ambiguous that they would bear looking at everyday, and they'd tell a different story every time. My vote goes with Cohen. You can see her work at Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto until May 30.

Art School Advertisement

Don Novello's circa 1980's TV ad for the San Francisco Art Institute, from a time when not taking yourself too seriously was considered a virtue.

Artists, Art Education and the Academy

(AP Photo/The New York Times, Ruby Washington)

NY Times art critic and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Holland Cotter published a terrific article this February titled "The Boom is Over: Long Live Art". With characteristic optimism and genuine passion, he argues that the economic downturn may in fact be good for art and artists, who can take the opportunity to slow down, think more and take greater creative risks: "...adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again." In other words, since not a lot is selling anyway, why not do as the spirit moves you, rather than bending your creative agenda in the attempt to produce work that is "sale-able". There is much truth to this argument. It is easy enough to think of artists whose work has become stale, or worse, under the pressure to produce and reproduce sale-able product.

Embedded in the article are a couple of paragraphs in which Cotter suggests that art schools might also reconsider how they teach:

"Art schools can change too. The present goal of studio programs (and of ever more specialized art history programs) seems to be to narrow talent to a sharp point that can push its way aggressively into the competitive arena. But with markets uncertain, possibly nonexistent, why not relax this mode, open up education?
Why not make studio training an interdisciplinary experience, crossing over into sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, poetry and theology? Why not build into your graduate program a work-study semester that takes students out of the art world entirely and places them in hospitals, schools and prisons, sometimes in-extremis environments, i.e. real life? My guess is that if you did, American art would look very different than it does today."

Of course, he is talking about something which would operate on a deep and systemic level, beyond simply tacking a few liberal arts courses onto a program of studies so that art schools can grant bachelor's degrees instead of "mere" diplomas. The transition from art school to degree-granting University status has been a painful experience for several Canadian art schools in recent years. I have friends on faculty in some of these schools. These teachers tell me that by far their best students, and often those who display the greatest talent, are students who have done a couple of years or even a full undergraduate degree in science, liberal arts, whatever, before coming to art school. They also tell me that generally, kids attending art school fresh from high school dislike the liberal arts courses they are required to take, because they fail to see the relevance, or because they lack the academic preparation needed to make productive use of their exposure to a larger world of ideas.

"Multidisciplinary" and "interdisciplinary" are not the same things. It is enormously challenging to create a truly interdisciplinary atmosphere in an academic institution. It requires open mindedness, a setting-aside of ego and territoriality, and a willingness to take chances (*see footnote). It also requires an ability to communicate in plain English, rather than discipline-specific jargon. These qualities are in as short supply in art schools as they are in any institution. In an ideal future, perhaps we'd see not only greater interdisciplinarity within a given institution, but greater inter-institutional co-operation and collaboration. It would it be easier for students to transfer credits between institutions (and not only credits for matching courses), and there would be structures in place to facilitate cross-institutional collaboration in research, and a sharing of resources. Currently, this exists in mostly nascent form as special events or conferences, for example the Toronto's annual Subtle Technologies festival, or in superstar think tanks such as the Perimiter Institute. Hardly the stuff of everyday experience for the average undergrad, let alone grad student or even faculty member.

Buy-in to the interdisciplinary notion is made all the more difficult when it is perceived that studio hours, and entire studio programs (ceramics? glass?) are being slashed to make way for lectures in anthropology. Graduate programs in fine art can leave their participants feeling drained of all creative energies, if verbosity is rewarded over tangible productivity and development of technical skill. Allow me a deliberate non sequitur: raw Derrida is already pretty hard to chew, and it doesn't get any more nutritious when mashed up and added to art stew. It is difficult to get the recipe just right. (**see footnote)

It is curious that arguments for interdisciplinarity in art education take on a one-directional, one-sided character. Even in Cotter's essay the suggestion seems to be that artists would make better art if they had more exposure to liberal arts, science, etc. Is this is a reflection of artists' unconscious participation in creating and maintaining their own underdog status in western society? Let us frame the issue in the opposite direction, and promote the value of education in the arts for the betterment of other disciplines. Wouldn't visually literate scientists or engineers have a leg up on their more narrowly focused, less educated colleagues? Making sense of the ouroboros might only be possible in the context of a visually enriched and broadly educated psyche. I know of few concrete examples of taking interdisciplinary education in this direction, but here is one. At Harvard med school, students spend an hour a week at local museums undertaking guided study and discussion of major works of art. Improving their visual literacy is seen not only as a culturally enriching experience, but as a cognitive exercise which contributes to the development of greater powers of observation and visual discrimination, thus improving basic bedside diagnostic skills.



* David Bolduc is one of Canada's most sublime contemporary painters, and his bio provides a wonderful example of how interdisciplinarity can flourish outside the academy. Would he be the painter he is today if he had not dropped out of art school in the late 60's, taking his bedroll and camping out on Stan Bevington's sofa at Coach House Press? Would "Brick" be the same without Bolduc's contribution?

** For a fascinating thread on the worth of an M.F.A., go to this recent discussion on Joanne Mattera's blog. The discussion is relevant to the Canadian state of affairs, although thankfully, the costs of higher education are far less a factor in Canada than stateside.

School's Out for the Summer

I have been on trains and planes for the past week, shuttling between Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, attending to some important beginnings and endings in the life of my family. For a full week, I've been too preoccupied to look at art, read about art, or even open my computer. However, I had the pleasure of encountering many university students from across the country, heading home at the end of their school year. So, in honour of them, I plan to spend a bit of time this week on the subject of education in general, and art education in particular...starting with one of my favourite Pinky Show clips. It features some familiar school architecture, combined with classic Ivan Illich passages read in voice-over by a Japanese schoolgirl. Weirdly appropriate and very funny. Somehow, his commentary on the state of our educational institutions seems even more appropriate today than it did 40 odd years ago. Large class sizes, too many classes taught by sessional instructors and grad students, and graded by multiple choice rather than essay: it must be hard to keep a sense of creativity and curiosity alive for those students and professors who have a passion for knowledge, and are not afraid to learn from failure and risk. I celebrate those students who have that passion, and want them to know that in ten year's time, nobody will care or remember that they got a B- rather than an A in Art History 101.