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Intellect Books - Fanchon Silberstein

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148 pages

English

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A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

A first encounter with art is like meeting a stranger: it opens you to new ideas, people, places and parts of yourself. In Art inSight: Understanding Art and Why It Matters, Fanchon Silberstein delves into the first known art and explores what it can reveal about how its makers saw the world and how contemporary artists can help us to see our own. The result is equal parts an ode to the joy of artful engagement, a how-to for anyone interested in understanding art and culture and a journey around the world from prehistory to the present day. Readers confront strangeness through observation, description and conversation, and are given the skills to understand cross-cultural divisions and perceive diverse ways of interpreting the world.

Organized by ideas rather than history, chronology or cultures, the book presents dialogues, imagining interactions between paintings created centuries apart and describing discussions among students learning the role of art in conflict resolution. By emphasizing the relationship between viewer and image, Art inSight urges readers to discover meaning in their own ways and offers questions that lead them into profound connections with works of art and the cultures behind them.

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: The ORIGINAL SKYPE

Meet a cave dweller, an African king, an Egyptian pharaoh, a Greek goddess, a Christian saint, and others who let you know who they are and what matters. What would a Roman general and Elvis Presley have to say to one another?

Chapter 2: Figure Things Out

Art is traditional, innovative, noisy, silent, figurative, abstract, pretty, ugly, orderly or messy. Objects change meaning depending on where they are and what is around them. Chairs, windows, animals, people, and trees may show up in unfamiliar places. Understanding grows through dialogue.

Chapter 3: STEP Back to Go Forward

Images from ancient to contemporary art show views of time, nature, human relationships, and more. Artists transform invisible values into visible forms and reveal ways people and cultures make sense of their worlds.

Chapter 4: WHOSE LENS?

Labels and headlines lead you to expect certain ideas. Artists use their perspectives to manage yours. Your tastes, opinions, prejudices, and past experiences affect what you see. When you are alert to the difference between projecting and receiving, you can move from sight to insight.

Chapter 5: ART IN DIALOGUE

Paintings from 16th century Iran and 20th century America talk to one another. They learn what is important to each by asking questions and modelling open-hearted dialogue. They see how artists in both cultures paint unreal scenes to seek what is real.

Chapter 6: The CAPTURE

Students in communication and mediators in training meet modern art at the Hirshhorn Museum. They ask one another what they see and answer by describing. They discuss each others’ perceptions. Successful mediators must be fine observers and excellent listeners.

Chapter 7: QUESTION AND PLAY

Practice overhearing yourself through questions and play. Simple observations lead to complex ideas. Circles and lines make up pictures and provide metaphors in art and in life. Narrow categories limit understanding. Questioning art is a form of intercultural communication.

Chapter 8: Travel

Go to new places through art without suffering culture shock. A bowl, etched with calligraphy, takes you on a journey to Iran, and a soup can goes with you to America. Both are more than their visual forms. Questioning them carries you from surface to depth.

Chapter 9: WHEN ART SPEAKS, LISTEN

Language of all kinds communicates, bewilders, clarifies, and obscures. Become fluent in the language of art and question its colours, materials, and forms - its titles, symbols, archetypes, and frames. “Speaking” the language of art leads to cultural fluency.

Chapter 10: FOLLOW YOUR SENSES - SENSE MEANING

Body and mind work together. Your senses introduce you to art and to the rest of the world. Notice your first reactions, your thoughts and feelings. Then, return to the art by observing and describing. Open yourself to others’ stories.

Chapter 11: MAKE SENSE OF THE SENSELESS

In the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, artists used small things to confront large ideas. Prayer rugs and cheeseburgers are filled with meaning. Find spiritual beliefs, patriotism, war, sex, and politics, along with fears, loves, desires, and angers.

Chapter 12: IN OTHER WORLDS

In 2010, the world watched the rescue of trapped Chilean coal miners. Artists take you underground to their dark world. Go more deeply into yourself through detailed questions about what you see in places you may never enter except through art.

Sujets

Arts visuels

Histoire des Arts

Histoire des arts visuels

ART

Muséum

History

Cultural Studies

General

Modern Art

Activism

Museum

General officer

Ways of Seeing

Cross-cultural

EDUCATION

Public Art

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books
Date de parution	01 janvier 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781789381184
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	6 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,3000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2020 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copy editor: MPS Technologies
Design: Aleksandra Szumlas
Production manager: Emma Berrill
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Frontispiece: Untitled by Manuel Silberstein. Photography by Peter Karp.
Epigraph: D. H. Lawrence, Look! We Have Come Through! (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1917), 125.
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-117-7
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78938-119-1
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78938-118-4
Printed and bound by Gomer, UK
To find out about all our publications, please visit www.intellectbooks.com .
There, you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current catalogue, and buy any titles that are in print.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
My God, but I can only say
I touch, I feel the unknown!
I am the first comer!
Cortes, Pisarro, Columbus, Cabot, they are nothing, nothing!
I am the first comer!
I am the discoverer!
I have found the other world!
“New Heaven and Earth”
D. H. Lawrence
For Manny
Contents
Creative activity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Arthur Koestler, Drinkers of Infinity: Essays 1955–1967 (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 235.
PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: THE ORIGINAL SKYPE

Meet a cave dweller, an African king, an Egyptian pharaoh, a Greek goddess, a Christian saint, and others who let you know who they are and what matters. What would a Roman general and Elvis Presley have to say to one another?
CHAPTER 2: FIGURE THINGS OUT

Art is traditional, innovative, noisy, silent, figurative, abstract, pretty, ugly, orderly, or messy. Objects change meaning depending on where they are and what is around them. Chairs, windows, animals, people, and trees may show up in unfamiliar places. Understanding grows through dialogue.
CHAPTER 3: STEP BACK TO GO FORWARD

Images from ancient to contemporary art show views of time, nature, human relationships, and more. Artists transform invisible values into visible forms and reveal ways that people and cultures make sense of their worlds.
CHAPTER 4: WHOSE LENS?

Labels and headlines lead you to expect certain ideas. Artists use their perspectives to manage yours. Your tastes, opinions, prejudices, and past experiences affect what you see. When you are alert to the difference between projecting and receiving, you can move from sight to insight.
CHAPTER 5: ART IN DIALOGUE

Paintings from sixteenth-century Iran and twentieth-century America talk to one another. They learn what is important to each by asking questions and modeling open-hearted dialogue. They see how artists in both cultures paint unreal scenes to seek what is real.
CHAPTER 6: THE CAPTURE

Students in communication and mediators in training meet modern art at the Hirshhorn Museum. They ask one another what they see and answer by describing. They discuss each other’s perceptions. Successful mediators must be fine observers and excellent listeners.
CHAPTER 7: QUESTION AND PLAY

Practice overhearing yourself through questions and play. Simple observations lead to complex ideas. Circles and lines make up pictures and provide metaphors in art and in life. Narrow categories limit understanding. Questioning art is a form of intercultural communication.
CHAPTER 8: TRAVEL

Go to new places through art without suffering culture shock. A bowl, etched with calligraphy, takes you on a journey to Iran, and a soup can goes with you to America. Both are more than their visual forms. Questioning them carries you from surface to depth.
CHAPTER 9: WHEN ART SPEAKS, LISTEN

Language of all kinds communicates, bewilders, clarifies, and obscures. Become fluent in the language of art and question its colors, materials, and forms—its titles, symbols, archetypes, and frames. “Speaking” the language of art leads to cultural fluency.
CHAPTER 10: FOLLOW YOUR SENSES—SENSE MEANING

Body and mind work together. Your senses introduce you to art and to the rest of the world. Notice your first reactions, your thoughts and feelings. Then, return to the art by observing and describing. Open yourself to others’ stories.
CHAPTER 11: MAKE SENSE OF THE SENSELESS

In the wake of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, artists used small things to confront large ideas. Prayer rugs and cheeseburgers are filled with meaning. Find spiritual beliefs, patriotism, war, sex, and politics, along with fears, loves, desires, and angers.
CHAPTER 12: IN OTHER WORLDS

In 2010, the world watched the rescue of trapped Chilean coal miners. Artists take you underground to their dark world. Go more deeply into yourself through detailed questions about what you see in places you may never enter except through art.
WORKS OF ART

INDEX
Preface
In my sophomore year at the University of Michigan, I got very sick during a flu epidemic and learned what it was to be weak and vulnerable. At the time, I was taking a survey course in art history that touched on Greek art and had introduced me to the famous statue of the Winged Victory, a marvelous marble woman, who, though missing her head, expressed power (and to me, health) through her body. At the end of the semester, the professor asked the students to write about a favorite work, and she was it for me. She soared. She was about being alive. She touched me personally, and later, when I read about her, she taught me about the ancient Greeks.
That was the first time I walked into a work of art and made it my own. It has happened since, though probably without the force I felt as a nineteen-year-old coming back to life. Walking inside a work of art exposed my feelings, and the journey opened another world. It made me curious about the Greeks. The Nike carried me into a culture and its people and led me to understand how “art opens a window into a culture’s dreams, drives, and priorities” revealing “aspects of a culture’s soul.” 1
I was confronted with many cultures’ souls during years abroad as the wife of an American Foreign Service Officer living in Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Pakistan, and Brazil. Along the way, when we lived in Washington, DC, I earned a master’s degree in special education at George Washington University in a program that focused less on disabilities than on learning styles and helping schools meet the needs of children. We studied perception, how beliefs shape the ways we see, and we were cautioned against thinking we understood children’s views before letting them talk. We learned the value of asking respectful questions.
My work as a school consultant in Northern Virginia and later in Rio de Janeiro taught me that conversations with children are a form of intercultural communication. Children see and think differently than adults, just as adults see and think differently from one another, and when varying cultures and nationalities get into the mix, those differences can be huge. I ruefully noted that during my earlier years abroad, language issues aside, I thought I understood a lot more than I did.
A decade later, I directed programs for the Overseas Briefing Center at the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute to prepare employees and families for their moves abroad. When I left full-time work there, I became a docent at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and received superb training in modern and contemporary art. Worlds opened to me, and I learned that art really is about everything in the world—that art is personal, spiritual, social, and political. The endlessly new forms artists invented captivated me.
During the same period, I worked with Sandra Fowler, a talented intercultural trainer, to design “Training of Trainers” workshops using art, and for several years we taught “Art as Intercultural Communication” for the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication in Portland, Oregon. I was enthralled to see our participants meet art directly, describe what they saw, and go places they didn’t expect to find. They stepped outside their prejudices, and went straight into the images. They probed for meaning. They used vision and intelligence to look before anyone told them what to see. They read and listened to teachers after they paid attention to the surface and made a direct connection to works of art through their own observations. Those students inspired this book.
Artists show the rest of us what matters. They often are unsure of what will happen when they enter unknown territory to create landscapes that would otherwise have remained unknown. 2 They are interculturalists who work to live consciously in a complex and uncertain world.
NOTES
1 . David Barr, Nets , 1988, film and essay produced by Macomb Community College.
2 . Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past , trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1981), 932.
Acknowledgments
Many colleagues, students, friends, and family have inspired me with their knowledge, understanding, enthusiasm, and conversation, leaving me a large debt of gratitude. They listened patiently, offered wise counsel, were generous with their time, gave me the benefit of their insight, professionalism, and expertise, and provided unfaltering friendship.
Without Sandra Fowler, a gifted intercultural trainer, I could not have written this book. Sandy and I designed and delivered training programs together for over thirty years, and many of the ide