ipad update….and help please

I have said in the past that one of the purposes of this blog was to record the process of digitalization at the school I teach at.  I haven’t written anything about this for a while and in the meantime have run into an unexpected problem. If there is anyone out there with a similar problem, or better still has an idea how to sort it out, I’d love to hear it.

It’s a wifi connection problem.  I am working with an iPad Air, now running on ios 7.1.1.  When I’m at home, and only at home as far as I have seen, it won’t connect to the wifi. It will occasionally load a page when I first switch it on, but then it grinds to a halt.  The signal looks strong, the blue bar starts to fill as a page starts to load, but then it stops.

Meanwhile everything else still works fine with the wifi, my Dell laptop, three android mobiles and two ipod touches.  The strange thing is the wifi did work with the iPad for the first month or so that I had it.

I’ve been trawling the forums looking for solution, tried all sorts, but it would seem that I am not the only one with this issue…..which is kind of comforting, but with 200 or so pupils starting to work with iPads at my school next year I find myself wondering if I’m going to be the only one with this problem.

A secret love

When I was at art school, one of my art history lecturers described herself as a cartomaniac. At the time I had to think for a moment about what she could mean, but as the lecture went on it became clearer, she had a love or at least a fascination for the world of maps. I can relate well to this. I too love a map.

It is the schematic representation of the world around us, everything so familiar, yet so different, the symbols, the lines and patterns, the place names. There is just so much. When I travel, a map is always a necessity, seeing where I am, what’s around me and where I can go. I, like most people have a small collection of maps from various holiday destinations I’ve visited over the years. But perhaps my favourite is actually one closer to home, it is a very Dutch map indeed and one showing the most interventionist approach to the real landscape. It shows the 32 kilometer long afsluitdijk.

There are artists enough who have made use of maps in their own work. I fully expect one day to make paintings and drawings based around this particular view of the landscape, but up until now the right ideas in the context of my own work have yet to present themselves.

The same isn’t true though amongst the adults that I teach. I have regularly set assignments that are hung up around travel be that walking, running or biking routes through the locality or journeys round the globe. My angle has often been to try and encourage the participants to try and break away from the conventions of map making, get away from the idea that the sea has to be blue and polar regions white, simplify forms, think about what ideas of content you can use to help dictate the way the painting goes.

Last night while I was doing this I was struck a change in how this sort of assignment is now approached. I used to show up with a pile of black and white photocopies of the world map as a jumping off point. Now though, the iPads and tablets come out and the world quite literally opens up. Last night one group member opened up GoogleEarth, scanned around a bit, for some reason decided to focus in on Timbuktu, zoomed right in on the grid formation of the streets and buildings of the city, and proceeded to set to work on an abstract painting based on these forms. It really was wonderful to see, the instantaneous nature of it all. My black and white photocopies seem like such a distant memory.

Is this the most difficult art assignment of the year?

I can’t speak for everyone of course, but for my pupils this is the most challenging assignment I get them to attempt. The challenge comes not in the technical skill, knowledge of materials or pure facility to draw but because it requires a sharp combination of text and image, maybe humour and above all a good idea.

 Essentially it is an advertising assignment, but an assignment that I also relate to surrealism and tend to focus on examples from advertising that could be said to have a surreal quality to them. The assignment I set is to design an advertisement for one product from a list that I provide and that could be used in a magazine, on a billboard or in a newspaper. Alternatively it could be a storyboard for a TV, cinema or internet advertising film.

 I start by showing them a whole series of examples. One or two or the examples are quite complex and might need a bit of an explanation, but by and large these groups of mostly fifteen year old are well able to follow the line of thought in the advert, make connections to the product, or see the joke if there is a joke to be seen. More broadly, they are perfectly able to spot the really good adverts and explain why they are so successful.

 But then comes the hard bit. Try coming up with your own idea. Be original, think outside of the box, take an oblique angle. Ask yourself what your product is all about, what are its characteristics, what can you focus on and start to build an idea around?

It can all be so simple. An example like the one above makes use of an existing image or situation and by careful placement of the product name and slogan the image and text come together to form a delightful whole, with a real feeling for humour. The pupils see this, they understand it, they laugh. But trying to get them to think beyond the “Buy our chili sauce because, well, it’s very hot…” level is so difficult.

I tell them they have to turn every idea and product over in their minds, look at it from different angles, bounce ideas off each other. But this is so different to most other school work, where you are generally rewarded to grinding away at assignments or preparations for tests. It is about being open and ready for that idea to come.

 It’s still early days with this assignment, if anything memorable, the good, the bad or the ugly comes up, I’ll post for feedback. 

War and conflict project

As a follow up to my previous post I thought perhaps a little more documentation of the There they stood…. project would be good. Firstly the the installation of the work as it is at school at the moment. Trapped behind the glass at eye level does seem to work well for it.

Discussions with the local museum are ongoing and hopefully with time it will be exhibited there I would fantastic for the pupils involved to see their work displayed alongside the work of others in such a professional context.

 

The close up work shows a little of the process involved in the project and in particular the poems written by the pupils about the likes of Picasso and Goya, whose work we have studied during the course of the project. It is worth remembering that the poems are being written by fifteen year old Dutch pupils who are writing in their second language.

If you haven’t watched the video documentation in my previous post, do take a moment to do so.

War and conflict in a school art project

There they stood, there they were…. is the name of a group artwork that I have been working on with three groups of 14-15 year olds that I teach, sixty-five pupils in total. It has been made within the framework of a cross-curricular project that we run at school. During these projects we take one global theme and explore it in various ways in the context of a variety of timetabled lessons. For our third years the theme is War and Peace. For my part, as an art teacher I use the project to take a look at how the war has been presented in the visual arts through the centuries and how the media deal with it today.

It provides a good opportunity to show the pupils how art can tackle the most serious of topics, how it can be quite shocking at times and how artists can use their artistic practice as a form of protest. After such a project there can be little doubt in the minds of the pupils that art offers important communicative possibilities even with the heaviest of subject matter.

Having said all that, I have been quite taken aback by the impact of the practical artwork that the pupils have just finished working on. The starting point for the whole project are the piles of shoes (and indeed other objects) that can still be seen at the site of the Auschwitz prison camp in southern Poland. A couple of months ago I spent time showing pupils these heaps of ‘left overs’ from the victims of the camp. I showed them photographs of the piles of shoes, suitcases, glasses, artificial limbs and even hair that is still displayed there. The images were greeted by a attentive silence. I visited Auschwitz a number of years ago, everything about the place is in many ways quite overwhelming, but it was without a doubt these traces of actual victims that left the greatest impression on me.
The reaction of the pupils left me in no doubt, the work form that I had in mind was going to be the right one. Each pupil worked on and over an old shoe, first covering it with paper and paint and then a layer of imagery, text and paint. Each shoe became a three dimensional collage that documented one of the many conflicts and it’s victims from war zones around the world in the post-Auschwitz period of 1945 up until the present day. Vietnam, Korea, the Arab Israeli conflict, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Syria and others all featured in the work. Photographs, artworks, newspaper articles, maps and details of the destruction of each conflict featured on the shoe.
On the sole of each shoe a poem was added that the pupil had written about one of the artworks or photographs that we had discussed in the lessons. Images such as Picasso’s Guernica, Goya’s 3rd May or the Eddie Adams street execution photograph from Vietnam.

I have been able to display the resulting heap of shoes in a glass case at school that is, in its way, not unlike the glass cases in the actual prison camp, although the pupils’ version obviously being of a much smaller scale. The shoes trapped there, behind glass, and in the film shown here have gained a weight, a charge, that I had hoped for, but if I am honest has been more powerful than I had expected. Watch the film, judge for yourself, the music helps of course, but it is a charge that the pupils themselves can identify and relate to once past the initial excitement of seeing their own particular shoe in the documentation.

Larger than the sum of the parts….in the classroom

Most of the classes that I teach are relatively large. Mostly they are between twenty five and thirty pupils, more often than not, closer to the thirty.  That presents plenty of problems at times, mostly relating to the basic practicalities of working with large groups and messy materials or difficult to use tools. Also, simply getting around a class of thirty a offering some individual guidance in a lesson of sixty minutes is challenging to say the least.

There are however also advantages, and as far as I’m concerned, working on large scale group works are one of the them. There are so many good reasons for doing it once in a while with any class or group of people you might be working with. Consider the following points:

• The strength of building on the group identity, a team working together as a number of ‘social’ advantages
• The lower achievers share a chance to participate and have a place in a greater whole, my experience is that this works particularly well
• Pupils like to help and support each other for the benefit of the group work
• Large artworks do simply have a ‘wow’ factor. In the first instance that can be fantastic in the classroom as pupils realize that something a bit special is coming together, there can be a quite tangible buzz of success. Outside of the classroom larger works do tend to put the activities of the art department very much in public view, and that can only be a good thing!
• It can also have the positive spin off that the more able pupils realize for themselves that they too might actually be able to try some more ambitious scale work.

Distorted faces group projects

Group work certainly isn’t something to use very week, but it does offer some great possibilities. I once watched a Tim Rollins workshop with some art students, it was one of the key moments that moved me towards working in art education and at the same time was a fantastic demonstration of what can be achieved in group work in the arts.

The film below is pretty old but for any one interested in art or education it is certainly an interesting watch.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S.