Walker 4 &5

Walker Chapter 4

            In this chapter, Walker spoke of the idea of how art-making problems can be used as tools to enhance big ideas in the classroom.  The problems that Walker suggests are transformation, concealment, disruption, illogical combination, and opposition. I think that the way this idea is explained in the beginning of the chapter makes it quite confusing, however, by the end, I realized that all Walker was trying to get across was that when other artistic problems and processes are brought into a project, it can in turn enhance and expand upon the big idea your students are working with. My favorite of the five major questions Walker asks is “Does the art-making problem extend beyond cleverness and novelty”. I especially like this question for middle school and high school curriculum development. From the small bit that I have seen, students at this level are starting to understand the idea of using art a less literal way, however, they tend to stick to obvious solutions to get away from this less literal representation of ideas. I think we as teachers can get our students to understand this concept of letting art-making problems enhance and extend the big idea they originally started with, they will create much more unique and thought provoking art. I really enjoyed when Walker brought up Barbara Kruger as an example of how to explore this with students. I am partial to Kruger because much of my research has focused on parts of her work, but that aside, the lesson Walker thought up was genius to me. Having students look around them in order to get a picture that would seem normal at first glance but then having them think critically enough to find something wrong with that picture, or a way to comment on that picture to make other people think is an amazing idea. It would force students to take into consideration the world around them, find something that they feel strongly about, figure out a way to represent that photographically, and then think about how to put a spin on it with text which would suggest their ideas, but not be too blunt or give away too much. It would be a tough exercise for many high school students, but I feel like even if they didn’t all succeed at every part of this project, they would have learned a lot about how to think about art, and how to use art-making problems to enhance their art.

Walker Chapter 5

            This chapter was overall about art boundaries. In one particular section of this chapter, Walker was writing about a teacher who was showing her class the abstract work of Sean Scully “Angel”. In this section, there was a student who said this of the painting  that the streaked paint was “like a marker running out. It’s ugly and boring and looks like something a three-year-old could do. The lines are not even strait. It’s all messed up.” I greatly appreciated this quote for the reason that before I was educated in art history, this would have been my exact quote if I were being shown this painting. I used to think that all artists should create to the best of their technical abilities. I did not understand art that “looked like a something a three-year-old could do”.  This whole story by Walker led into the idea of teaching students about abstraction and how to utilize specific boundaries such as color, line, emphasis and so on to create art with deep meaning behind it. I thought this whole scenario was a great way to explain how to go about teaching the importance of boundaries and aesthetic choices in abstract art.