Lecture/Discussion
Notes
Week I: An Introduction to Studying Art
and Design History
Since many of you
missed class during the first week, I'm putting some very rough notes
on this website. Slides and supplementary material can be located here.
Be sure to read everything listed in the "assignment" column
of the Schedule. Remember that
the best way to do well in this class is to attend faithfully, take very
good notes, and ALWAYS review the material within a day or two of each
lecture. Maintaining your workbook is also essential to your learning
and retaining the information.
The basic questions we have to consider at the beginning of a class
like this are "What is art?" "What is design?" "What
is the relationship between art and design?" as well as "How
do art and design come to mean?" The major avenue through which we
can begin to answer these questions lies in interpretation
of works and in understanding works within their cultural contexts,
and learn both to analyze and criticize works accordingly. The approach
in this class, therefore, will include locating works within their historical
contexts, formal analysis, and criticism where appropriate. But we will
also engage in ways of exploring ideas and techniques creatively.
Defining terms like "art" and "design," proves to be difficult because each culture seems to have a different definition. What we can attempt fairly fruitfully, however, is to describe what we mean, taking cultural and historical contexts into consideration. By doing so we begin to become aware of what kinds of cultural baggage we bring to bear on how we understand these terms. It also helps to ask a better question: "What goes into a work of art?" Some possibilities:
creativity, energy, emotion, time, money, talent, sweat, feeling, skill, design.
These "components" make it clear that early views of art have several elements in common with ours:
It appears, therefore, that the founders (more or less) of what we call "the Western tradition" had something in mind about art that approaches what we do in this school. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the "fine" arts began to be seen as superior to and qualitatively different from the "lesser" or "applied" or "decorative" arts. Artists were valorized over craftsmen and women, who--according to this view--simply realized the artist's intention (or design). This wasn't necessarily the case even in the Renaissance, but probably as a result of the importance that easel painting and sculpture acquired during the rebirth of interest in things Classical, later critics determined that these two visual media held a place apart from the rest. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement revived interest in the "lesser arts" and attempted to re-integrate them into human cultural life. Morris himself strove to reunite art, design, and craft by taking part in the design process both as artist and artisan.
The beginnings of
modernism lie in this effort to reconcile art and design. We'll talk about
this more in a later discussion, but for now it's important to note that
if we are to radically separate "fine" from "applied"
arts, then the notion of what art is, and who is an
artist, becomes severely limited. The legacy of the shift back into a
more balanced view of the relationship is apparent in the designation
of the advanced degrees many people earn in both art and design fields:
a Bachelor of Fine Arts or a Master of Fine Arts (which counts as a terminal
degree--on an approximately equal level with a PhD). While it is still
quite possible to earn a degree in "applied arts," as many of
the associate degrees at AiDallas are designated, the distinction is becoming
less and less pronounced.
As we discuss the relationship between art and design, it becomes clear
that the two terms are probably inseparable, but that they may reflect
different aspects of the artistic process. Design imposes order on art;
a work of art is "designed" by the artist. But although design
seems to have stood in the background of Renaissance art, it came to the
forefront in Modernism. As a means of pursuing this relationship, we will
consider the design elements of the images we view in class; we should
also remain conscious of how design and art work together in the projects
produced for this class.
Since you're already on the internet, be sure to read my assigned essay on the interpretation of Paleolithic art. To know what I expect in terms of academic excellence, Ten Rules For Passing This Class. For some introductory information on studying art history--especially if you have unwisely chosen not to purchase a textbook, see the first three sections of Dr. Robert Belton's Art History: A Preliminary Handbook from Okanagan University College in British Columbia.
Some basic points to remember about early forms of art
What we can know about preliterate cultures is little; that is, because they didn't write things down and aren't around to tell us what things mean, we have to depend on several indirect sources, and these only allow us to begin. Not only that, except for concrete scientific information (dates, species, media), we can't know anything with certainty.
However, because human beings haven't physically changed since modern homo sapiens sapiens emerged (their brain capacity was every bit as large as ours), we can, by analogy, take some intelligent stabs at trying to figure out what our ancestors were doing when they painted pictures of animals with spots all over them, or carved voluptuous, steatopygous figures to carry around. For example, recent discoveries about shamanism in modern hunting and gathering cultures (or those just emerging into settled agriculture) have begun to shed light on how and why prehistoric peoples painted on cave walls, and why these paintings look the way they do. The possibilities include the following:
I cannot stress the importance of realizing how little it is that we actually know. The experiences of twenty-first century human beings almost everywhere in the world are so completely mediated by technology that it is very difficult for us even to imagine life in Pleistocene Europe, let alone decide what paintings made during the period meant. Most of my students can't imagine life before the cell phone--much less before electricity or other world-changing technologies.
Appoach the material we study during the first two weeks with caution. Things become a bit easier after the late Neolithic and early Bronze ages, when people begin to write, and record their ideas about thier art, but it's only during the Classical period (around 500 BCE) that Western philosophers start articulating cultural notions of how art arises and what it means. Until then, we must rely only on indirect evidence to develop educated hypotheses, and base our interpretations on what little we can know.
If you missed class week 1, be sure to go to the library to watch the video, "The Day Pictures Were Born," chapter 2 in the series How Art Made the World (DVD GE 550).