Creative Challenge:

What is Art?

Artists:

Matthew Barney, William Anastasi, Tony Orrico, Jeff Koons, Rembrandt van Rijn, Marcel Duchamp, James Franco, Robert Rauschenberg

Creative Challenges encourage students’ capacity for creativity.  Creativity is a skill, like all skills, it comes with practice, knowledge, exploration and application.  “Creativity occurs when an individual is faced with a problem that is ambiguous and proposes alternatives” (Dewey).  Students will be provided with a problem, a paradox, a material or technique where they will utilize intuitive thinking to overcome conventional thinking and engage in visualizing their own personal interpretation.  Creative Challenges are introduced in class, in 1-2 week intervals, to be completed outside class.  Documentation of the processes and final piece are examined in class as a group.  In addition, students will record and analyze their thought processes during the creative challenge as a written reflection.

Students will examine the approaches, methods, results, and ideas of many artists and their artwork.  Matthew Barney’s approaches creativity and form with struggle against resistance.  One must push their body to the limit to develop and progress, similarly to building muscle.  William Anastasi and Tony Orrico, utilize the ‘artist’ as the instrument through which to create art.  James Franco sells invisible art, where the artist and buyer collaborate to form the act of artistic creation.  The buyer will only receive a title card with a description of a piece of art.  Students will examine these contemporary approaches to art and discover their own meaning to the evocative question, “What is Art?”

Objectives

Students will:

1. Analyze the evocative work and concepts of various artists that push the boundaries of what is and can be. 25.A.5

2. Write a manifest defining their definition of question, “What is Art” 26.A.5

3. Construct a piece of work embodying their written manifest 26.A.5

4. Expand their art practices by constructing a work referencing their personal questions and interpretation of how art can be defined 27.B.5

State Goals:

25.A.5: Analyze and evaluate students and professional works for how aesthetic qualities are used to convey intent, expressive ideas and/or meaning.

26.A.5 Common for all four arts: Analyze and evaluate how the choice of media, tools, technologies and processes support and influence the communication of ideas.

27.B.5: Analyze how the arts shape and reflect ideas, issues or themes in a particular culture of historical period.

Access and Measure Prior Knowledge:

What is Art? Can the Art Process be fun? Discuss their normal studio practices and experiences.  Discuss the traditional function of an artist within their art practice.  What can art be, do and look like?

Steps:

-Work Session One:

*As students walk in the classroom hand them a colored card.  When class starts arrange them into groups dependent on color of the card.

1. Open PowerPoint; students will examine the question, “What is Art?”, how philosophers have defined that question, and how artist’s have defined that through a manifest  (Attached – annotated images)
2. Examine how philosophers have defined ‘Art’.
3. Students will have a discussion within their group and answer the following questions.

1. What can art be, do and look like?

1. Is it the final result or process?
2. Does it have to have a realistic source?
3. Does it have to be aesthetically pleasing?
4. Do you have to be a trained artist, practicing in the art world?
5. What materials can art be formed from?
6. Do you have to physically create the art yourself?
7. Do you create art for personal reasons and hope it sells or do you create art as a business?
8. What can art be, do, and look like?
1. After writing down their group answers, students will have a teacher-guided discussion about the above questions.

5.Warm-up Activity, in their groups, students will present their ideas to the class, discussing specific objectives (attached – criteria)

6.Peer Review, each group will grade the presenting group dependent on the criteria (attached – group presentation assessment)

7.Hand out creative challenge sheet with objectives (attached – challenge handout)

           Students will:

1. Write a manifest defining their definition of question.
2. Construct a piece of work embodying their written manifest.
3. Collect 5 answers of other people’s definition of “What is Art?”

Materials:

-        (Classroom environment open for students to interact with)

Additional Materials:

-       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_manifesto [Art Manifesto Examples]

-       Beardsley, Monroe. “An Aesthetic Definition of Art.” In Robert Stecker and Ted Gracyk, eds. Aesthetics Today: A Reader. Lanham, Md:. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010, 122-130.

-       Dickie, George. “The Art Circle.” In Robert Stecker and Ted Gracyk, eds. Aesthetics Today: A Reader. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2010, 130-137.