Dani Farras

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One day before the final presentation, everything is almost set up to make it really well.

Carly and I have worked together in our ideas and have interviewed Kathleen for almost 40 minutes. From that and our visit to the Arts For Humanity, we have picked some speeches that explain our idea of art as a great educative resource, ore than a goal itself, and we have summed some of those talking into a video, compared to some images of teens adults and children “art-ing”.

From the point of view we have chosen (and we believe in), there is a strong connection between the relation of the educators, the arts and the people who is being educated. I think we have to underline how important is that an educator believes truly in what they are doing, and in the relevance of education itself.

Art, as we see it, helps the  education process in developing open-mindedness, in allowing the people to be able to switch perspectives and think of other possibilities more than the own one, promotes creativity in almost every way and helps divergent-thinking. For all of this, we believe that some kind of art education is necessary to build a well-rounded person in schools and also out of them.

It is also important that, in schools, art education helps other subjects as a tool, as creativity is allowed (and necessary) in every aspect of life, from basic cooking to the most technological device. And also that outside schools there is a wide availability of different resources that might make it possible for each person to develop individually in a very unique way.

Robert Barry, an artist, also uses art as a tool to express some of his ideas, and in some way, educate the viewers through making them think with his pieces, installations or own ideas.

I am going to make the Final presentation with Carly. We have been working in the ICA together and have similar interests, so it is going to be really rich to work in dialogue and try to find answers to our questions between the two of us.

I would resume our main ideas in one big title:

Outside School Art Resources.

In this title we would find our experiences in the ICA, the Swampscott trip to the MFA, the visit to Artists for Humanity, the experience with the Boston Arts Academy group and the visit to the Burke High School.

We find ourselves interested in the power of art education to connect with Teens and reflected a lot about this fact since we read the text about Multicultural Education, and how the No Child Left Behind Law transformed the art education completely. How can there be people who is not going to be taught about art at all?

Even though we still haven’t set a small thing, we have this big context from which we expect to develop a more concrete methodology by the end of this week, when we will have read, commented and revised our blogs and, finally, interview Kathleen Lomatoski, our mentor in the ICA.

Last week we visited two especially motivating places. We spent the morning in the ICA, the Institution where I make my internship with Kathleen, and where I am learning so much. Then after having lunch, we moved to Artists for Humanity, a completely different center than all which we have seen before.

Let’s start from the beginning, noting of course how bright and shinny was the sky that day.

We had an interview with Joe Douillette, the man in charge of the Teen afterschool programs  in the ICA. He explained us his task, which is mainly to manage and plan all the stuff for this highly valuable program, that is privately funded. He tries to find experimented professionals in several disciplines related to New Media Arts, and with some experience and interest in education. By doing this, he finds people who really fit in the spot, and others that are not that good at it. He explains how the attitude of the educators influences the work they do, as education is an activity related to the experience and the relation between humans.

He also showed us the internet network in which they work as well as some results of the workshops, which try to be really engaging and hands-on from the beginning, as some of them are as short as only 2hours x 6 weeks.

They plan different things to promote participation and knowledge of the ICA, such as the Teen Nights, allowing Teens to make important decisions in the institution and to experiment in lots of ways, not always in a strictly artistic form, which also.

Joe also explained how they are trying to create an efficient network with some schools in order to be a well-known program and, as it is free for Full-Scholarship Boston Public School members, make this program available to as many people as possible.

On that very Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend one of this classes as an observer for my Art & Human Development class, and I have to say how inspiring it was to be in a class with all those things happening. During the 2 hours, they were all the time switching from one activity to another, participating and creating a really interesting project on architecture.

In the afternoon we went to another awesome place which was Artists for Humanity. Basically, a non-profit after school institution based on arts. But a lot more than that, as we noticed later. That is a place for teens to go, spend an accorded number of hours each week for learning and practicing art, and then get payed for it. They set the perfect environment for a rich growing and creative flourishing.

One of the surprising facts, which is also a bit ambiguous and I don-t know if I completely agree with it is that they pay the teens to work in the institution, to learn there and produce their artwork. But as they explained to us, there are also certain projects which are more like assignments or orders more likely to a job than learning projects. And I know how much one can learn from the real world, but for me it sets a morally dangerous situation, that I would not want to deal with.

Most of this reflection about AFH is because of my conception of art, which is not about money and transactions but about ideas and intellect. So I have the feeling that this institution works more like a factory than like an educative setting. They make things that serve one pre-conceived goal, like mere objects, and take the conceptual or intellectual value from the pieces that could potentially be done in a place like that.

But from everything and everywhere we can take good things, and above all, the AFH serves the teens with great effort, and it seems to work especially because of the near attention payed by the Mentors that each student is assigned to.

This week we have visited two really different art settings, both of them based in spreading the contemporary art in original ways. First, we spent the morning in the Aspect Magazine headquarters, where we learnt how does this e-magazine works, and the different strategies that they use to acchieve new and different publics. Also, the difficulties that it has, sometimes, to get to publish some artworks in the new media-era, when the “original” art pieces might be replied infinitely and this makes it difficult for those who still believe in art for its economic value, to deal with this facts.

It was interesting the theme about the “Kitsch”, and how some concrete and historical artwork pieces have become nothing more than a brand or a pattern to fill any object. I am specially interested in this because nobody would have a mug with, for example, the Guernika, by Picasso, considered a masterpiece, but with strong images about a bombing in Spain during Civil War, but everybody is OK to have the Damoiselles of Avignon in their Mug, T-shirt and Key-holder (Originally “The damoiselles of Avignon street”, a street in Barcelona where it is still common to find prostitutes). Partially because this second painting has been emptied of significance, becoming just a symbol of Modern painting, and modern culture, then high culture, then social status. This is also one of the faces of the ownership of the art.

An image can be replied thousands of times, but the “original artwork” is inmutable… Since the sixties, and even before by the Dadaists, this concept has become really ambiguous, getting to the point of Sol Lewitt, who determines not to make more art pieces with his hands but writting instructions so as the pieces can be made again and again. As Mike Mittleman said, “artists have a huge responsability to communicate [and making their reflections and works being accessible to people], and not doing so, is a selfish act”. And even if it is their “right” to do so, it is not what the society needs.

Also is the private companies’ right to pursue maximum beneffit with lower costs, but then, people will occupy streets because the companies and those who have power to create employment and solve the economic crisis are not making effort to do so.

As artists (and philosophers, and scientists) have the possibility to change the ideology currents and feed the need of new ideas from the society, they have the right to do it or not. But it is not a matter of what they COULD do, but a matter of what the SHOULD do.

After having lunch, we visited the show Residue, in the Miles Gallery.

The main lecture I take from that exhibit is the new conception of drawing as a residue itself. Given the representational impossibility, the process takes importance in art, as seen in well-known artists as Richard Long, when the resultant piece or object is not the main goal of the intervention, but the “residue” of it, which has importance as a reminder of what happened and not for itself.

We met as planned in the morning. My group were 3 guides for 9 students, a really good number. We lost a lot of time eating before getting into the museum, and that was a little bit annoying for me then in the museum, having to rush through the galleries just investing 15 or 10 minutes in each. Well, this things happen, and educators must be prepared to think of B plans and try to select the important things.

We started our tour, after meeting and chatting outside the museum, in the Contemporary Gallery. I have to say, my favourite place from the museum.

As I see it, we succeeded in talking to the kids in a passionate way, at their level and trying to make them engage with the forms of contemporary art, using the Félix González-Torres as our particular gate to get into the Art World and with clear instructions: Try to go through art, and let it touch you.

(The artpiece of González-Torres in a different setting)

We spent some time in the Contemporary Wing, and, in small groups or couples, we were able to discuss with some of them an extense range of themes about artworks in the place. Concretely I talked to the only boy in the party about this piece of Kader Attia which I made a photo of:

Then, we went in chronologically reverse order, trying to draw a piece in each of the levels, and making basic introductions to what we were going to see and its context. I think this part did not work as well as the contemporary one, partially because of the time. Some of the kids became really interested in the craftmanship of some neoclassical marble pieces which, really, were impressive.

Once it was time to go down to the entrance, we crossed the whole museum to get there, where we would make an informal evaluation of the visit, while reading a piece of Jenny Holzer. From that conversation, the big interest among some of the students in what we had seen and extracted from the Contemporary Wing, and some of the pieces of the Modern Gallery. The rest seemed not to attract their interest at all.

It ended happily, with impressions that really favour my belief in how contemorary art have the hability to envolve people if it stops being too elitist and, as seen in the pieces I show above, makes an effort to talk approach the viewers.

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In the afternoon, we tried to share the Shaziah Sikander Show with another group of teens. This time, the relationship was different: One Highschooler for each Massart. It supposed continuous dialogue and a lot of confidence between the two of us.

I shared that time with Amber, a girl who is really good at drawing, and especially interested in figurative watercolors. She loved the watercolors by Sikander, and so do I. We had a nice chat about painting techniques used by herself and also by Sikander and, in the end, we finally talked some time about the concepts under the pieces of the Afghan artist. Especially, we agreed in how, sometimes, artists must have this way of expression to get through personal problems that might, or might not, be caused by cultural affairs.

I found very inspiring that moment of each couple sharing their ideas within the large group, showing a horizontal way of teaching//learning in which I feel very comfortable.

First of all, a couple of impressions.

It is really good news that groups as Mobius can survive since 1977 giving life to arts and being used as meeting point and to construct knowledge and experiences.

It has been really surprising that an old and great institution as the Harvard University has that collection of arts and display it in sush an open-minded way, combining different types of art, from the most “modern” pieces to those more “contemporary”, maintaining almost the whole sense of each piece. I did not expect that, at all.

For me, the big difference between this two settings we have seen in Cambridge are precisely the presence or not of the body of the artist. We have seen, El Putnam has said and showed it to us, how the body of the artist is always real when a performance is happening. This is one of the conditions for a performance to be so, in fact. In contrast, we have not seen any artist in the Harvard Museum. Even though, in some pieces, we could imagine this or that movement of the painters, what is considered “art” in Harvard, or what is able to be exposed, are the results, mere objects that in a performance would have been just the medium for a message.

How would it be, it we understand the Jackson Pollock painting that is in the HM as a performance made by the famous artist? Isn’t Felix González-Torres inviting continously the “audience” to perform, when interacting with his artworks? The Tim Rollins piece, made in the Bronx by School students would also be seen as a big performance. This three pieces have in common with the performance that they envolve movement and time, and also the infinite possibilities of the human behavior or the chance.