[MUSIC]
So now I want to talk for just a few minutes about what you need for this course. The first thing you need, and I say this with all sincerity, is you need an open mind and a deep sense of curiosity.
It isn't really helpful to go into a course thinking that you know it all already, or trying to measure what you know against what somebody else in the class might know, including the teacher.
It really is going to be much more helpful to be questioning about what you know. Be willing to follow
down ideas and track down more images, if you want, from things that you see in the class, and come to it knowing that I think one of the most amazing things about the internet is, not only can we teach courses like this, but you have an amazing resource in terms of an almost endless and inexhaustible archive of materials to search through.
The second thing I'm going to recommend, that you need for this class, is some sort of a sketchbook.
I think this is such an important thing to have as an artist and as a creative person in general, and developing a sketchbook habit is a very good thing to do. There's a variety of ways in which you can approach this.
My favorite way is a traditional sketchbook-looking sketchbook. And I tend to like them quadra-lined, but you may like blank pages, you may care more about the heft of the page; there's endless ways of thinking about this.
The reason that I like these kinds of
notebooks is that the spiral binding
allows you to
innerly put things in it without, sort of-- it gives you some room to add to them.
So, I brought in, just to show you briefly, some
of my project sketchbooks that I've kept from my own work.
And you can see that they're
kind of a mess, but your
sketchbook
is supposed to be a place for permissions, right?
A place where you can put all your ideas and not edit them too
quickly, because it's those unedited ideas that you may come back to later on.
So, this should be a space where anything goes and it's okay. So, you
can see me keeping images that I want to think about more for projects.
I like to layer them over other images and texts, that is, either my own writing or
quotes and other sources that I'm working from.
I tend to sort of work from project to project-- and here's some of
the funnier ones that I've worked on in the national parks in San Francisco.
So it becomes a place where you always
know you're going to find the ideas that you've
had, or the images that you especially want
to keep hold of and think about longer.
I also, oftentimes, will keep a box for
a class or a project, and that box is for
all the loose things that I can't jam into the sketchbooks.
And then, again, you have a kind of ready-made archive of materials.
And you can see that there's media work and
recordings that I've kept, along with
various notes, typed scripts, email
correspondence.
On the other hand, if this all seems
incredibly
old-fashioned to you, and you really have fully embraced
a digital culture, there's many different ways to keep a sketchbook online.
One of the ones that I like the most-- and I'll
turn this so that you can see it a little bit
on the camera-- is to work in a blog kind of
format. And this is a particularly clever art blog called, "Lines and Colors."
But you can see that it's a place where you
can put images that you're thinking
about, links to other resources.
You can cut and paste text.
I tend to think about these kinds of
blogs as almost the digital equivalent of old-fashioned scrapbooks.
And I certainly have treated the Facebook page for this course
as a kind of scrapbook, or
place to
put things that I thought you might be interested in, or
I wanted to remember to refer back to in the class.
So, it's up to you how you keep your sketchbook, but I
think you will really lose something if you
don't take part in that part of the
class.
One of the things you don't need for this class are any textbooks. It's in
part because-- and I'll probably
talk about this from time to time-- it's
in part because many of us who have been
art historians for a long time
have a sort of vexed relationship to the
notion of art-historical
textbooks, in general.
They're really super expensive, and for as much as they have in
them, they're always leaving out something that one feels is very important.
Any book is a process of putting things in and also leaving things out.
And you should be aware of that.
Same could be said for this course, for sure.
So there are no assigned textbooks or readings,
but there are books that will be
recommended.
I've already recommended books on the Facebook page, and
there will also be links, as it's possible to do so, to texts that would be interesting
supplemental reading or might sort of give you
another way into the material of the course.
This really is meant to be a course about
looking and
thinking, and not about keeping up with lots and lots of reading.
At the same time, finally, one of the
things that you should take really
seriously is
the doing of the assignments. And that's not just because you
want to get a certificate of achievement, or what have you, but because several of the assignments are designed to create wikis or archives of class knowledge that we've built together. So, when I ask you to do an assignment, for example, about works of art or texts that have been very important to you, it's because, as much as you say what's important to you, you can learn from what somebody else has said about what's important to them. And if we do that work together, we will have created something really amazing by the end of this course.
[MUSIC]
So now I want to talk for just a few minutes about what you need for this course. The first thing you need, and I say this with all sincerity, is you need an open mind and a deep sense of curiosity.
It isn't really helpful to go into a course thinking that you know it all already, or trying to measure what you know against what somebody else in the class might know, including the teacher.
It really is going to be much more helpful to be questioning about what you know. Be willing to follow
down ideas and track down more images, if you want, from things that you see in the class, and come to it knowing that I think one of the most amazing things about the internet is, not only can we teach courses like this, but you have an amazing resource in terms of an almost endless and inexhaustible archive of materials to search through.
The second thing I'm going to recommend, that you need for this class, is some sort of a sketchbook.
I think this is such an important thing to have as an artist and as a creative person in general, and developing a sketchbook habit is a very good thing to do. There's a variety of ways in which you can approach this.
My favorite way is a traditional sketchbook-looking sketchbook. And I tend to like them quadra-lined, but you may like blank pages, you may care more about the heft of the page; there's endless ways of thinking about this.
The reason that I like these kinds of
notebooks is that the spiral binding
allows you to
innerly put things in it without, sort of-- it gives you some room to add to them.
So, I brought in, just to show you briefly, some
of my project sketchbooks that I've kept from my own work.
And you can see that they're
kind of a mess, but your
sketchbook
is supposed to be a place for permissions, right?
A place where you can put all your ideas and not edit them too
quickly, because it's those unedited ideas that you may come back to later on.
So, this should be a space where anything goes and it's okay. So, you
can see me keeping images that I want to think about more for projects.
I like to layer them over other images and texts, that is, either my own writing or
quotes and other sources that I'm working from.
I tend to sort of work from project to project-- and here's some of
the funnier ones that I've worked on in the national parks in San Francisco.
So it becomes a place where you always
know you're going to find the ideas that you've
had, or the images that you especially want
to keep hold of and think about longer.
I also, oftentimes, will keep a box for
a class or a project, and that box is for
all the loose things that I can't jam into the sketchbooks.
And then, again, you have a kind of ready-made archive of materials.
And you can see that there's media work and
recordings that I've kept, along with
various notes, typed scripts, email
correspondence.
On the other hand, if this all seems
incredibly
old-fashioned to you, and you really have fully embraced
a digital culture, there's many different ways to keep a sketchbook online.
One of the ones that I like the most-- and I'll
turn this so that you can see it a little bit
on the camera-- is to work in a blog kind of
format. And this is a particularly clever art blog called, "Lines and Colors."
But you can see that it's a place where you
can put images that you're thinking
about, links to other resources.
You can cut and paste text.
I tend to think about these kinds of
blogs as almost the digital equivalent of old-fashioned scrapbooks.
And I certainly have treated the Facebook page for this course
as a kind of scrapbook, or
place to
put things that I thought you might be interested in, or
I wanted to remember to refer back to in the class.
So, it's up to you how you keep your sketchbook, but I
think you will really lose something if you
don't take part in that part of the
class.
One of the things you don't need for this class are any textbooks. It's in
part because-- and I'll probably
talk about this from time to time-- it's
in part because many of us who have been
art historians for a long time
have a sort of vexed relationship to the
notion of art-historical
textbooks, in general.
They're really super expensive, and for as much as they have in
them, they're always leaving out something that one feels is very important.
Any book is a process of putting things in and also leaving things out.
And you should be aware of that.
Same could be said for this course, for sure.
So there are no assigned textbooks or readings,
but there are books that will be
recommended.
I've already recommended books on the Facebook page, and
there will also be links, as it's possible to do so, to texts that would be interesting
supplemental reading or might sort of give you
another way into the material of the course.
This really is meant to be a course about
looking and
thinking, and not about keeping up with lots and lots of reading.
At the same time, finally, one of the
things that you should take really
seriously is
the doing of the assignments. And that's not just because you
want to get a certificate of achievement, or what have you, but because several of the assignments are designed to create wikis or archives of class knowledge that we've built together. So, when I ask you to do an assignment, for example, about works of art or texts that have been very important to you, it's because, as much as you say what's important to you, you can learn from what somebody else has said about what's important to them. And if we do that work together, we will have created something really amazing by the end of this course.
[MUSIC]