I watched the extra clips of Ursula Von Rydingvard. The last line in the clip about how her German family instilled the importance of hard work into her says it all. Where do we go from here? While postmodernism tells me, there is no “right way.” The old idea that hard work and toil are the only way to create “good art,” is gone. As Ursula points out, it’s not about how hard you work, it’s about how good your idea is.

 

The building I work in also houses a startup accelerator and a community co-working space. Every week entrepreneurs come and pitch their business and ideas in the Café, on the other side of the wall that my students hold their meetings. My students are preparing to live in the world, as people with ideas, opinions and experiences. I want my students to find their own voice, not copy mine. I want them to question my voice, question their parents, question their other teachers. I want them to be curious enough about ANYTHING to figure things out for themselves, to research things for fun, to determine the problem and hack away at different solutions until they are satisfied they have solved it in a way no one thought possible. I want them to be brave, not shy away from talking to strangers, or bragging about things they’ve accomplished. I want them to take HUGE risks and fail gracefully only to get back on their feet and try harder the next time.

 

During this year, where the only fine art I’m teaching is graphic design, with a bit of architectural site model design thrown in, I’m mostly facilitating students on the skills they need to figure things out for themselves. The conversations I’m having are me asking questions, not giving answers. I’m not working harder than my students, most of the time. What I want the future to look like is an interdisciplinary future where students can meet LA requirements by writing an artists’ statement, where students can get art credit by working with a professional graphic designer who’s helping them create a website.

 

While I’m a bit starved for the poetry of existential crisis, I’m confident that I can find those conversations as they come up, in fact, I have had a few very conceptual creative conversations with students, and on a level I wouldn’t have been able to have if I were focusing on Elements and Principles of art.

 

Art without meaning or art without a good IDEA behind it do not help students become actualized human beings. I hadn’t seen the clip with Trevor Paglen on art 21. Though his art is an investigation, not necessarily calling for change, simply the act of collecting evidence through multiple lenses creates such deep meaning that the results, though beautiful, are almost secondary to the IDEA. Artists who bring multiple viewpoints to such controversial topics, as war, surveillance and space pollution make it difficult to look at the world in black and white. The poems that were presented, one, expressing escapism and the choice not to engage in the real world by watching simulations of violence and death, and not paying attention to the real violence that surrounds us. The other end of this crisis is to acknowledge how we are disconnected, in the Wordsworth poem, he mourns the lack of connection between human and nature. This desire to be connected, to each other, to ourselves, to the past, to nature, is what drives us right? Is art for us to connect or for us to escape into? I suppose it is for both.