Creative Practices for Visual Artists

Time, Space, Process

Kenneth Steinbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351579124
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Contrary to popular belief, the practice of art isn't just a product of innate talent or artistic vision; artwork emerges from an intentionally constructed and maintained artistic practice. Developed from interviews with more than 75 mid-career artists, Creative Practices for Visual Artists examines the methods and approaches highly successful artists use to stay creatively robust for a lifetime. Offering practical strategies and concrete solutions, it also looks at the impacts of digital and social media, as well as recent changes in the educational system that can hinder the formation of a strong artistic practice.

Artist and educator Kenneth Steinbach addresses key issues such as: the role of embodied research and non-objective experimentation; reframing one's approach to studio time; forms of productive conflict; the positive role of anxiety; and the importance of failure for the artist. The book will be useful to students and emerging artists, the instructors that teach them, and established artists looking to develop stronger studio habits.

The companion website, www.creativepracticesbook.com, provides links to artists' websites and further information.

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Chapter 1

A Shifting Landscape

Angela, a sophomore art major in my Three Dimensional Visual Thinking course, looked at me with an obvious expression of frustration. I had just completed a ninety-minute discussion and demonstration for the Linear Space and Form Project, one in which students begin by cutting two-by-four wood studs into thin strips and assemble them into wood structures that embody a sense of physical motion, without actually moving. After outlining the assignment and how to work with the wood, I asked each of them to draw a dozen “interesting” potential solutions in their sketchbooks, due the following class. I told them they would be showing the drawings to the class, and dismissed them.

Angela followed me into my office, and after pausing to take a seat, continued for several minutes with a series of polite but focused questions about my definition of “interesting.” Most of her questions revolved around how my grading rubrics were constructed, and how I would be evaluating projects with criteria that were obviously subjective. My attempts to encourage Angela to invest time experimenting with materials or drawings were declined on the grounds that she didn’t like to start anything before she understood was what required, and how she was going to complete it.

Thinking that there was more to her story, I asked her to tell me about her experience at the university so far. She had arrived as an art major a year earlier, and after some initial successes, had lately been struggling in classes that she felt were at times frustratingly vague, with teachers offering little in the way of concrete examples and specific guidelines. The grading, too, seemed arbitrary as often as not. She quickly learned to ask her fellow students what each instructor “really” wanted. One seemed to prefer complex visual texture. Another seemed to love references to art history. A third would reward projects that were large and ambitious (I suspect this was me, though she was kind not to say). Asking her peers was simply more efficient. She didn’t have time to waste.

She confessed that Google was often her first response when faced with a new project. She would find forums where similar projects were given and see how other people had solved them. She wasn’t really sure if this was allowed but didn’t think it shouldn’t be, either. Finding these solutions was just more efficient, suggesting that it wasn’t necessary to generate solutions yourself when there was so much available online, so many possibilities. Though she didn’t copy those solutions directly, her attitude seemed to be, Why start from nothing when a solution is likely already out there somewhere?

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When I asked her to tell me about her own artwork, it was clear she was mostly just moving from one project to the next, and then one class to the next, with little attempt to make connections between them. Though, curiously, she also said that she thought the goal of her education was to help students “develop their own personal styles.”

My initial response was to chalk up some of these concerns to a bit of perfectionism, or maybe Angela was, in the language of learning styles, more of a verbal or logical learner. Or perhaps it was related to financial pressure. When I asked about her schedule, I found she was among a number of students who were trying to complete their degrees in less than four years, a group that had increased sharply since the economic crisis of 2008. This would often give them semesters with eighteen or more credits (twelve to fifteen credits a semester is considered full-time). Since they needed to maintain a higher grade point average (GPA) to be allowed to take more than a full-time load, they tended to be very focused on grades. Many of these students were, like Angela, working at least half-time in addition to their course loads.

As I began to talk over some of these concerns with a network of art teachers from across the nation, it was clear that variations of my conversation with Angela were being played out constantly, and represented dramatic changes in how students were approaching their education and the development of a visual arts practice. It seemed that as art educators the ground had shifted underneath us in significant ways, and we had not fully caught up to the new realities of who our students were, and how their environment was impacting their ability to develop a healthy practice.

These changes seem to come from three principal forces. The first, which has been hinted at, is that the high cost of college has eroded the time that students have available for making art. Escalating costs mean that, relative to a decade or two earlier, more students are taking the maximum number of classes allowed, working extra hours to pay for school, and reducing the number of classes taken simply to expand their knowledge in an area of interest. Students are also far more likely to focus their academic goals toward what they perceive are more immediately bankable skills, in order to pay back student loans. This, of course, does not include the impact on students who simply can’t afford to go to college at all.

The second force affecting Angela and her colleagues is the ascendency of digital platforms and media. These students are “digital natives,” a phrase that refers to those born after the ascendency of the Internet, and who have never been without digital technology and its influences. This is often a descriptor used as a shorthand way of talking about a demographic that is perceived as being digitally preoccupied, removed from the physical world, and obsessed with social media: a characterization that is unhelpfully reductive and more than a little judgmental. It is important to acknowledge digital media’s widespread impact on a group that has lived intimately with these technologies throughout their lives, however, and interacted with them at important developmental stages. There is a sense that digital platforms have not only rewritten the way in which we live, work, and communicate with each other, but have also rewritten many social codes and contracts.

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The degree to which we now have immediate access to virtually unlimited content on the web has created a radically different relationship to images than in the past. The philosophy inherent in the Internet, which is to make content available to anyone at any time, has defined it as the default resource for any problem; artistic ones included. The hard reality now is that many developing artists begin projects by searching the web for potential solutions. Online searching in this way, which often falls somewhere between researching, crowdsourcing, and shopping, raises challenging questions such as: When is one ethically and legally allowed to use ideas or imagery from other artists? At what point does inspiration become appropriation? or What makes something “mine”?

Evaluating the advantages and ethics of such Internet research is complicated by the fact that artists routinely borrow from each other in ways that are mutually agreed upon and beneficial. A musical example can be found in hip-hop, which is built upon a spectrum of interactions that range from sampling of riffs and melodies from previously published tracks, to reinterpretations of songs between equally collaborating performers. While not all of these interactions happen face to face, performers play off each other in a way that showcases the other’s work, developing layers of musical richness and connection between them.¹

The visual artist who is looking to find solutions online is typically not looking to collaborate with others or establish recognizable connections to his or her work. More often, these found solutions will be reworked in some way in order to obscure the source. This concealment is telling; it indicates that the work is being appropriated in some way. This appropriation can take many forms, such as lifting part of an artwork to create a website header, or putting a song underneath a video track. While a student may get away with this within the boundaries of a class assignment, it is a clear ethical and legal problem when stolen work is used in professional situations. It is easy to forget that most artworks on the web are under some form of copyright, because the way we encounter them suggests otherwise. It is far more prudent to assume that any image found on the web may not be used because of copyright restrictions than to assume is it available for use.² Even if an artwork is not protected by copyright, there are ethical considerations in passing off another’s work as our own.

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More often, artists searching the web are not looking to lift images and ideas directly, but shopping for ideas to get started much in the same way that divergent thinking in problem-solving offers up a multitude of potential directions from which the artist can choose. This is less problematic both legally and ethically, as these ideas can be translated into new directions. Visual ideas can be very polymorphic, with the ability to be reinterpreted in countless ways. Many artists were deeply influenced by Jackson Pollock’s rhythmically energized non-hierarchical compositions in the 1950s, which were revolutionary concepts within the Western canon at that time. The better artists allowed his paradigm-changing paintings to transform how they thought about relationship to the canvas, the nature of space within the paintings, and the freedoms afforded the artist within abstract expressionism. Others just tried to copy the way he threw paint.

However, web searching for inspiration instead of solutions habituates us into thinking about art and artistic practice in unhelpful ways. The flattening of content that is the result of Internet word and image searches reduces complex visual ideas to the lowest common denominators, defined by keywords that often have little to do with what is really going on. Artworks and careers that take decades to develop are compressed into brief experiences that sit cheek by jowl with works from entirely different cultural and geographical contexts, the result of frequently obscure connections to the initial descriptors. Important movements become reduced to competing “styles” rather than different visual strategies for understanding and relating to the world with roots in social and historical contexts. Most often we are told what we are experiencing in an image, either by text or context, so the narrative content becomes far more important than its visual characteristics, prioritizing quickly recognizable imagery over visual texture and richness.

Continually shopping for solutions, rather than developing one’s art within a holistic practice leaves the artist with no critical mass of knowledge and ideas. Artists working in this way are constantly drifting from one idea to the next with few connecting threads between individual works. The locus for decisions is located outside of themselves, and they are forever asking “What does this teacher/client/curator want and how can I deliver it?” instead of approaching each new opportunity with an attitude of “How can I interpret or reinvent my artistic interests to bring something new to this opportunity?” Such disembodied and externally located motivations are exhausting over the long term, and can lead to a sense of burnout and cynicism about artistic work.

Perhaps the most influential force impacting Angela and her peers is the culture of assessment that developed in the current K-12 educational system in the U.S. after the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. For some time I had been noticing a shift in the way students respond to open-ended creative challenges, particularly those that involved ambiguity or the potential for multiple outcomes. I had also noticed their growing skepticism about the value of speculative projects and research and the possibility of discovering solutions through physical labor: activities that artists have always invested in. Much of this can be traced directly back to pedagogy implemented as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requirements that focus on specific, singular, defined outcomes that can be more objectively assessed.

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This way of educating hits the arts particularly hard. When a student in a math class does not understand quadratic equations, for example, he or she is more likely to frame that failure of understanding as a personal challenge with the content. The same student wrestling with the ambiguity that comes in projects that have the possibility for multiple outcomes (such as what one finds in an art class), is more likely to perceive their struggle as a deficiency with the course, the instructor, or themselves. He or she is less likely to perceive open-endedness, the need for self-direction, and the possibility of many equally viable options as an inherent part of the content to be mastered, and tends to look at them as unnecessary obstacles getting in the way of learning the content. Such challenges are seen as unproductive problems.

Recent studies have started to pull apart the curiously complicated impact of these forms of assessment on learning. It seems that tasks that require the learning of physical skills, or lower-level learning such as memorization or acquiring specific forms of knowledge, are enhanced by the expectation of assessment. However, such evaluation is actually a hindrance in higher-level learning such as analysis of ideas and making new insights. In such situations, participants tend to come to better solutions, and often come to them faster, when there is no expectation of evaluation.³ Clearly there are aspects of both low- and high-level learning within the Linear Space and Form Project. None of Angela’s questions were about the low-order requirements of mastering wood handling skills, or having a sense of implied motion. She was very familiar with this way of working, and could interpret and resolve those aspects easily. Her questions were focused on requirements that represented higher orders of thinking that would allow her to develop a unique and successful solution from among many potential directions. After considering her educational background, this apprehension seemed a pretty normal response. Given her limited experience with such open-ended requirements, why would she act differently?

Nowhere is the impact of these educational changes more sharply felt than in how Angela and her colleagues deal with failure. Almost certainly she would fail a few times while she wrestled with some of the ambiguity in these requirements, and she knew it. In a K-12 educational climate where failure most often leads to lower grades and is seldom seen as a productive force leading to new directions, insight or ideas, there is little value in risking it. Students experiencing this through years of education have deeply negative associations with failure, to a degree that they may not fully appreciate as they begin to develop an art practice. Failure is simply the enemy.

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A New Approach

After identifying these forces, helping students respond to them seemed to require more than an occasional conversation within the classroom. It is clear that these problems represent deeply seated behaviors and reactions that have been developed in response to years of social, parental, and academic forces that were not likely to be dispelled by a lecture or two. I felt a more long-term interventionist approach was needed, so with little more than a title and an inkling of an idea, I proposed a Creative Practices class to address these new challenges: a course offering that my faculty colleagues graciously accepted.

All of the conclusions in this book have been road-tested in Creative Practices. A full description of the class is outlined in Chapter 7. While a continual work in progress, the overarching goals are to provide the resources and structure to dramatically reorient a student’s relationship to his or her own work, shifting it away from an academic mindset of completing assignments, and toward a self-directed way of making. In the class we talk a lot about how the culture of assessment shapes the student’s relationship to learning and the development of an arts practice in both positive and negative ways. We work to establish a new relationship to studio time, and to develop an authentic body of personal ideas and processes that support a long-term practice.

In retrospect, it was a class I had been preparing to teach for a long time. Hired into a failing art department at a small college more than twenty years earlier, my first teaching assignment required me to rework curricula that defined painting projects, right down to the type of brushes students were required to use on each part of their gridded photo-based self-portraits. This could not have contrasted more with my own studio education, which was often characterized by the sole instruction on the first day of class to “just work.” Such freedom in developing visual ideas felt natural to me, the son of a builder/inventor, whose youthful home was always stuffed to the eaves with projects that members of my family were working on.

The first weeks of teaching drawing, design, and sculpture in my new teaching assignment were marked by constant friction and frustration for both my students and myself. It was apparent that my central challenge as an educator was to bridge the gap between these two approaches, teaching students to construct methods and practices for making that I had never fully articulated for myself. It was a challenge that continued through all of the eight different studio classes I taught each year. These early experiences were a gift. Forced to experiment with teaching methods and ideas to see what really worked, I was able to quickly develop teaching expertise that otherwise would have taken far longer. Teaching multiple media simultaneously also allowed me to see ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Creative Practices for Visual Artists
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 A Shifting Landscape
• 2 The Problem with Creativity
• 3 Time and Space
• 4 Research and Embodied Knowledge
• 5 Productive Interaction and Conflict
• 6 Process Is the Product
• 7 Creative Practices
• 8 Participating Artist Biographies
• Index