Reading Reflection #3

               This week’s reading of Freedman, Chapters 3 and 4, had me thinking continually of perspectives and frames of reference.  She started out talking about the “Social Life of Art” and “the ways in which the past lives in the present and future.” (p. 43).  Western Art History has put value distinctions on art, assigning value and worth, by looking through a western, white, male frame of reference.   Freedman mentions Janson’s History of Art, a book which I remember well.  I was first introduced to Art History, as a discipline, in my first week at Colorado College as a freshman.  For the first three months of school, I had signed up for a class called Renaissance Culture, part of which included a lot of time spent in the dark with slides projected on the wall.  I loved it, but through the course of that class, I began to realize how focused we are on Western culture and what kind of perspective everything was taught from.  Janson’s book had tiny little chapters on non-western art.  There were not many women artists either.  (We did see Artemisia Gentileschi, which influenced me to take an Art History class on Women in Art that same year.)  Freedman talked about contexts and how important they are to understanding and to making judgements.  We also need to remember the contexts of the people who have made judgements about art in the past.  Everyone has their own perspective, created from their own history, through which they look at the world.

               Chapter 4 talked about Art and Cognition, and how we process visual information as “a combination of both psychobiological and sociocultural effects.” (p. 64).  Our brains cogitate a certain way and we look at everything through the lens of what we have looked at before.  We build our knowledge on the previous knowledge we have gained.  That is the same idea as scaffolding, and reminds me of the zone of proximal development, which would presumably always be moving or evolving.  Freedman discussed artistic development in children, both the stage by age and the novice-expert concepts.  It makes sense that scientists and educators would study children’s drawings so extensively.  The drawings give a wealth of information from people who can’t really communicate.  We are studying artistic development in the Overview class, so it was interesting to read about two differing ideas or perspectives. 

               The Transmediation as a Metaphor for New Literacies article was interesting.  It reminded me of the Barrett article on decoding visual information to find meaning when it talked about semiotics and how teachers “need to find methods and analytical frameworks that help students make sense of and critique the codes and coded messages of our times.” (p. 1).  We need to give them some tools to help them when they are outside of school.  We want to help our students be well informed and able to think.  I agree with the idea that there should be more of the “creative features of kindergarten in the grades, rather than pushing the features of the grades into kindergarten.” (p. 6).  Kindergartners get to explore and play to learn.  Every grade should get to do that.  It reminds me of gifted classrooms, where the students do projects based on exploration and a personal perspective on what is interesting or worth knowing.  I guess that the creative features of kindergarten take up class time without yielding quantitative results.  Maybe that deters teachers or administrators.  But I think that experiences like that lead to better learning in the future.  Also, as Eisner (I think) said, the dividends of learning come in the future and can’t always be gauged at the time of assessment.

               I have never learned much about Richard Serra’s work so I don’t have previous knowledge to build upon here.  I remember that he had a piece in St. Louis that was controversial back in the 80’s.  It was in the newspaper a lot.  I think people were grumpy about the rustiness. This review made me want to be inside the works, walking around and experiencing them.  The passage about “the terrifying sublime” reminded me a bit of the corn maze field trip.  The corn itself wasn’t scary, but it sure had the potential to be.  Sublime.