Visitors

I was unable to attend class on Tuesday for Jethro's visit due to an annual work meeting that I had to attend. However I was told that he talked about the portable gallery space that he created for his AP Art class. During ARTED 226 I had the chance of observing Jethro's class and he actually talked to me about this display space that he created and many of the things he was working on as a teacher. I love the idea of a portable gallery. I like it because I think it changes not only the access that students have to display art, but also broadens the types of audiences that will interact with it.

As far as Dan Barney's visit we talked about Object-oriented Ontology. At first all of this was going over my head but then as he continued to talk about it and read about it from books I started to get some interesting insights, though they may not be exactly what was intended to come from that discussion. First he read a chapter to us from Graham Harmon's book about how "objects teach." This is the idea that every object offers something for us to learn from. Some examples given in the book were that tulips teach how to stand alone, or grass teaches how to network, etc. I like this theology because isn't that partially what we hope to do through art? If we claim that art, just like any other object, is pedagogical by nature, that may seem deeply rooted in instrumentalism. However, I feel that this idea could be somewhat related to every theoretical approach to understanding art, just through different terms. If I was an expressionist I may say art exists to communicate through feelings, emotions, etc., yet are our senses not just another way to learn about and understand the world? Although this approach may not be perfectly applicable to all theoretical approaches, I feel that in essence each theoretical approach seeks to communicate something very specific through art, which in turn creates some form of a clarification, understanding, or learning based experience either by the audience or artist.