accidentals and substantives: writing for artists

April 25, 2004

writing for artists

I've a little breathing room to blog before the final onslaught of papers, projects, and grading. I also just sent Morris Eaves, my advisor, 130 pages of dissertation material, not a single word of which came easily (which is not to say it wasn't satisfying). In any case, blogging feels like a welcome change of pace.

I've felt like an American abroad this semester while adjuncting in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University, an expat enjoying the new vistas too much to feel much nostalgia for the old. I like being able to duck into the gallery to view the multimedia installations or the sculpture studio to see the half-finished busts; I like the sounds, smells, and sights of the Fine Arts building: wet paint and pixels and fumes and solvents and plaster and found objects. There's a lot of kinetic (and synaesthetic) energy in these halls.

I'm sure I'll find my way back to a literature department soon enough, but in the meantime I'm making the most of my stay in AVT. Next semester, assuming enough students register, I'll be designing and teaching a Graduate Research Methodologies course (Art and Visual Technology 600), and if that doesn't run [update: Lynne Constantine tells me it probably will], I'll have the chance to work out the kinks in my Writing for Artists course. Now that I'm past the initial learning curve, I'm looking forward to tinkering with the syllabus, overhauling some aspects of it, all while keeping the broad outlines intact. Among other things, I want to devote more attention to blogging the next time around. We experimented with it this semester--with not one but two course blogs--but it didn't assume a central role, largely because I was developing content and lesson plans from scratch. Now that I've got the spadework out of the way, I can start to concentrate on fine-tuning things. You can find a copy of the course syllabus here.

I have a GREAT bunch of students. I'd say roughly 70 percent are majoring in the digital arts--graphics and animation--while the rest generally fall into one of three categories: painting, sculpture, and photography. I've tried to bring my own interarts scholarship to bear on the structure and curriculum. We had a module on the aesthetics of information transmission, for example. Instead of having them slog through G. Thomas Tanselle or Fredson Bowers or Norbert Wiener, I assigned them or introduced them to Phillip K. Dick's "The Preserving Machine," Sol Lewitt's Wall Drawings, Eduardo Kac's Genesis, and Alvin Lucier's "I am Sitting in a Room" (the last at the suggestion of Midnight Platypus and Heart of Darkness. See the comments to this post and this one).

The combination writing/studio arts assignment that grew out of that unit has absorbed a lot of my time and attention of late. In spirit, it resembles Surrealist chain games. Have a look here and follow the links for both the assignment itself and some of my students' work. I first experimented with ekphrasis and reverse ekphrasis when I taught at the Eastman School of Music a few years ago--they were successful assignments then, but I think they worked out even better this time around. (Part of it, I think, is that as artists, they really take to visual, concrete writing. I remember reading an article a few years back speculating that our language organ is, from an evolutionary perspective, a neurological rewiring of that portion of our brains originally consecrated to vision processing. Maybe visual artists, then, have an edge when it comes to imagistic or highly descriptive language?)