Overview:
What do Tim Burton, Charles Shultz and Billy Collins have in common? I have listed a film director, cartoonist, and poet. Some of the greatest artists of our time provide us with unique ways in which to see the world, but many teachers would never think that in a unit plan these disparate artists could be combined. How does one use comics to inform poetry or teach Shakespeare? How does poetry have anything in common with film? This unit provides teachers with the tools to be able to use a range of art forms to help students understand content and to process what they understand in a unique and varied way. This subject matter is a powerful tool and has a cross-curricular adaptability if you as a teacher gain an understanding of how combined media can be a wonderful vehicle for delivering content that is initially difficult or intimidating for students, but soon pays off. I will discuss many resources that could be of use in an English, Drama, or History class, as well as Visual Art, which is my primary focus.
My classes are mainstream and include students from ninth to twelfth grade. Most often this is their first art class. I have roughly thirty-three students per class. They sit at tables of twelve which makes collaboration very accessible. This unit is designed for visual art and English classes and can be applied to any grade level. I have my students for one hour a day and five days a week for the entire year. I allow ten minutes for set up and clean up, so the actual lesson is fifty minutes per day. This is a four week unit of poetry and comics that will include Animated Poetry for an extra two weeks. Tableau Vivant is also another extension that can take a month or longer.
The reason I chose this subject is not only that I am intrigued by the rich combinations of media, but also that I want my students to see the nuances of these pairings and learn that each medial art-form can be at once liberating and limiting. By learning what each medium does, they will gain a better understanding of what medium they should use to express a specific idea, and their understanding of visual art will expand as they move through a series of scaffolded experiences of intermediality. I will start with teaching traditional poetry and explaining its conventions and limits, then we will move to comics and their structure, advantages, and limits. Next, I will talk about how animation is comics in motion and talk about how it differs from still comics. Finally students will learn the conventions of theater and how tableau vivant can be used to express poetry or art and how it is similar to and differs from animation.
This unit will help you understand the conventions of poetry, comics, and theater and how to combine them in interesting ways that will help your students appreciate the expansiveness of convention by blurring media to create a new space for learning and challenge the students' notions of what art is and why it is important to them.
Before embarking in this intermedial journey, I would like to encourage you to simply ask your students: What is art? Why does it matter? When I ask a first yeFar student the question above, the answer usually follows this form: "Art is a painting of a landscape that has a feeling", a student says as I nod, "yes" while wanting them to understand it's much more than that. Students often give detailed examples of specific art objects, while most often overlooking art's expansiveness and its relationship to our individual and collective lives.
As an art teacher for all levels, I've come to understand the importance of changing our lessons to incorporate multiple viewpoints about what art is. Encouraging variation in the projects in content and scope, always scaffolded from one instance to the next, is my method to help students understand that there are exciting moments than can happen in all media.
How students view art directly influences how they see the world. The word, Art, is a term that is much broader than students realize and its many layers once understood can foster an appreciation for everything from clothing to furniture to architecture, city design, billboards, nature, portraiture, digital media, etc. What is considered art is by and large a matter that needs to be explored and, even more importantly, experienced through intermediality. As a person who is influenced by everything you see, I want you to think about artists you love, movies, cartoons, and every image that you find inspiring. I encourage you to pair some of them together and think about why you like them so much. This unit is born from a love of Chris Ware's cartoons, Kim Addonizio's poetry, and Tim Burton's films. All artists create by distilling the things they love into ideas that speak of what's in their heart what needs to be said. My students will also come to be aware of their own personal narrative, because without that we would not have anything to say.
Art in Culture and Society
Let's face it, we are all products of mass culture. All art comes from somewhere. Visual culture is the way in which images in the mass media are integrated into our every day experience, but my students for some reason don't see these images as art. I encourage you to use examples of advertising, fashion, and anything you can get your hands on to prove that these images are in fact visual art. Thinking of art as a solo medium that functions within its own terms is the beginning art student trap. Art is usually thought of as (still art) a drawing or a painting or other conventional and Eurocentric ideals that still weigh heavily. These medial choices belonged to the Renaissance but have since become classist in that within this specific definition art is only for the rich and those who are well-educated enough to gravitate toward traditional museums. Easel art, as it's sometimes called, is still what people buy to cover walls—that is, if it wins out over the plasma TV. This outworn ideal prohibits some people from considering that art is for them—that they too have the opportunity to enjoy such an activity as going to a museum or creating a piece of art involves having techniques other than the use of expensive oil pigments and bristle brushes. At present we in developed societies are lucky because technology makes images more accessible. This fact helps the art teacher or any teacher for that matter in that all forms of art can be researched and made accessible to students in a matter of seconds. Multi-media such as collage, combining a plethora of materials and formats of art, are encouraged and even more interesting to us now than ever before. Learning in the arts is less linear because of all the ideas and materials now accessible. Intermediality is a given in today's rapid exchange of information. The lens through which we view art must focus the complex dissemination of images around us.
What is Intermediality?
The concept of intermediality in culture is described beautifully in a citation from Katherine Hayles by Stephen E. Tabachnick in his book, Teaching the Graphic Novel: "we are in the midst of a cognitive shift and reading today has become a hybrid textual and visual experience, as witnessed by the inescapable presence of the internet." 1 In animated poetry, Billy Collins's works are an example of words forming a rich narrative that is brought to life through a colorful sequence of images, sound, and text. This emerging form of art follows the conventions of music videos in the 1980's and makes the normal conventions of traditional still poetry much more textured, interesting, and visually appealing to students. Students gain an understanding of content when they learn in multi-modal ways. By having the text, image, and sound support each other, students come away with a richer meaning in less time. Tradional poetry needs to be spoken and read several times by my students before the text can be understood to the automatic degree that it registers when seeing an animated poem. I am not suggesting that Billy Collins poems are being simplified by the images, as they are rather enhanced to provide a more interesting sensory response that evokes moments of emotional stimulus and awareness.
Finding the Narrative in Words & Images
It is my primary goal that my students be prepared for this high-speed and multi-layered world, that they become problem solvers. As Einstein says, "Creativity is more important than knowledge." Google and other well known employers often list creativity as a main skill they are looking for in their staff. They need people who are able to switch hats and form concepts that appeal to people on a mass scale. To do this, it is a necessary skill to learn how words and images work together, how colors affect how people feel, and essentially what is important to display as a representation of a belief or message that gets disseminated out into the world.
My students will learn this skill from a variety of angles. They will look at images and text from the point of view of a visual artist and a writer. Acquiring first-hand knowledge of the blurring of media and art themselves through art-making and interpretation is the most meaningful of all the activities in my beginning art class.
The important common feature within and among media I call the Narrative. The story embedded in the art includes the story of the art–making. This is who the artist is, what culture or background they come from, what is important to them and how they have chosen the materials to convey what they are appearing to say. The next element of the narrative is the story the viewer arrives at as a result of looking at and interpreting the art.
Narrative drive is a core quality of the greatest importance across media. Without the layers of narrative, there would be no art or writing, period. The story is the driving force behind the wish to create art, and it is common to all art-forms. The collaborative narrative between artist and viewer forms a partnership of merged experience. In his essay, "What is Art", Anthony Bond says, "I believe that a precondition for the existence of art is an empathetic link between the artist and the viewer, which is necessary for their collaboration to complete the artwork." 2 The story that is created in the maker's and the viewer's eyes is the narrative core that makes the experience valued by both.
Two Disparate Schools of Defining Art
Here are some more elaborate details about the definition of art throughout time periods. First there is the early approach to visual arts that is central to the traditions of Europe. According to biographer Giorgio Vasari, during the Renaissance—his period—the word Art jointly encompassed painting, sculpture, and architecture. Later, this grouping was expanded to include music and poetry, and all together became known in the 18th century as the 'Fine Arts'. These five Arts have formed a core which has generally excluded 'decorative arts' and 'crafts', all of which have utility as an end. In the early 20th century, however, all traditional notions of the definition of art were challenged by Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement with which at times he was associated. Duchamp, a controversial artist in his time, declared that anything the artist produces is art. This conceptual focus took the viewer away from things that are considered beautiful. He was a showman, and an example of his facetious philosophy of art is his famous urinal in a very prestigious art show, but at the same time a broader and more inclusive assessment of art was born from his provocations. In his essay, "What is Art?" Anthony Bond says, "I strongly believe that art can sometimes change the way we look at the world." 3 Duchamp's urinal did exactly that. But, the point I would like to make is these two camps are extreme. I think Vasari's focus on beauty and Duchamp's focus on the conceptual "art is anything" notion should be challenged by the idea of process. The making of a piece of art is the experience in which the greatest meaning can be derived. The art-maker and the viewer meet at the point of the narrative in the work, and the process should support the narrative and prevail.
What is art now?
My students will decide after participating in this unit whether their concept of art has changed and how. It is my goal to show them the complexity of layers across media and within the definition of art. Hopefully, their response will derive from first hand experiences of the rich nuances that they find in intermediality. It is my belief that in the intermedial the most substantive and multifaceted ideas lie between media. The beautifully murky and sensuous realm that one senses between media is almost a third space that allows the artist or viewer to explore the five senses and form experiences that would never exist within one art-form alone. The experience of getting lost and then finding oneself enriched is what I hope my students will realize when studying Poetry Comics, Animated Poetry and Tableau Vivant. These three examples of intermediality are scaffolded in my lessons to build upon one another and implement prior knowledge and activate schema. The flow of one discipline to the next is strategic in that the curriculum goes from still pictures in PoetryComics to motion in Animated Poetry and finally the artist in motion in Tableau Vivant. It employs media that are rich in sensory experiences while still relying on imagery either with text or in a pictorial manner. Audio is also utilized in some Animated Poetry and Tableau Vivant.
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