Practice, The Conceptual Framework & The Frames

YR 11 INTRO TO STUDYING stage 6VISUAL ARTS Practice, The Conceptual Framework & The Frames

PRACTICE • When we look at an artist’s practice we discover: • The artist’s working methods • The development of his/her style • What the artist is influenced by • What the artist’s intention is in their artmaking • The frames within which the artist works

Ideas PRACTICE Practice relates to students’ artmaking and critical and historical studies of art. Practice describes artistic activity demonstrating the ability to make suitable choices from a repertoire of knowledge and skills. Practice respects the different views that circulate and are exchanged in and about the visual arts. Actions

CONCEPTUAL FRAMWORK The conceptual framework is made up of four interrelated agencies by which students can systematically think about, talk about and write about Artworks. • Artist • Artwork • World • Audience The conceptual framework is a system that allows you to understand an artwork as well as the artist who made the work, the time and place in which the work was created and audience responses towards the work. The four agencies can be used to categorise information you gather about artists and artworks so that they can be analysed and evaluated.

Conceptual Framework ARTIST In the conceptual framework we see the key agencies (or components) of the artworld and how they relate and are linked to one another ARTWORK AUDIENCE WORLD

ARTWORK • Artworks are intentionally made by artists. • We consider what is an artwork, and how an artwork can take many forms. An artwork used to be in the form of a drawing, painting sculpture or architecture. This was later broadened to include photography, then came the ready-made. Now we have installations, and technology based artworks such as video, hologram and computer generated works. • Artworks have a material and physical form. E.g. Film, video and digital artworks use the material of celluloid, tape and chip, although the viewer is likely to experience the form of the artwork as a screen image. • Some artworks exist only for a short period of time, so the documentation of them by video or photograph becomes the artwork (e.g. in Performance and earth art) • Artworks function in different ways in each of the frames. E.g. The artwork functions in the structural frame as a text to be read like language.

ARTIST • What is the definition of an artist? Historically it was someone skilled in art media and its techniques. We thought of an artist as a creative person whose perceptions of the world were heightened or more sensitive than the norm. • The traditional function of the artist is to make artworks, (images or objects). • Although artists, architects & designers can enlist others to produce their work, the individual who conceives that work is typically identified as fulfilling the artist function. • Artists created original works. Now it’s acceptable to appropriate (copy) past artworks if the meaning or context is altered. • The artists can be examined from each of the frames:

Structural frame:the artist produces artworks & objects using sign systems that are a language that can be read Subjective frame:artist as Romantic hero/heroine, the genius who originates the new, the prophet and the bearer of deep universal truths. Cultural frame:the artist as skilled artisan or tradesperson working for powerful social institutions or the propagandist or apologist for an ideology or an individual, or a respected elder, the custodian of specialized knowledge. Postmodern frame:Artist as celebrity, the entrepreneur & the market and media savvy personality.

AUDIENCE • The audience function is ongoing yet changeable as artworks inhabit different viewing contexts, are bought and sold, publicly exhibited, privately viewed, destroyed, damaged, lost or consigned to storage. • Artworks typically engage audiences through museum and gallery exhibitions. Increasingly audiences are found or produced through the public display of artworks. This includes audiences accessing artworks by electronic and print media. Sculpture is often located outdoors. Designed images and objects may be shown in museum collections or displays. As many designed objects are manufactured as multiples they can be purchased and appear in everyday use. Architecture is also experienced by being used. • Contemporary audiences will differ from historical audiences as different worlds, along • With diverse subjectivities of gender, race and class, produce the audience function. • Some recent changes to the audience function is in interactive art where the viewer actually determines what happens with an artwork.

WORLD • The agency of the world refers to all the vast and possible things artists and audiences get interested in, and artworks can be about. • The agency of the world designates the systematic ideas of the time, existing theoretical commitments, what is considered plausible and credible in the field of visual arts – and in turn implausible and incredible. • Closely mediated by the frames, the world is NOT to be confused with the cultural frame (which refers to issues of power and identity arising from the economic, the social and the political). • How does the world affect the viewpoint or emotional reaction of the artist? What social political and technological changes have made an impact on the artist or artwork?

THE FRAMES The Frames are the way to give meaning to, and generate different understanding of the Conceptual Framework. The Frames provide different philosophical / theoretical and interpretive structures for understanding the layering of meaning, significance , value and beliefs related to the visual arts. They are used to assist in adopting points of view when approaching students own Practice in Artmaking, Art History and Art Criticism. They provide alternative ways for interpreting and explaining meaning and why artists and audiences take on different points of view.

SUBJECTIVE STRUCTURAL Po$tMoDeRN CULTURAL

STRUCTURAL • Artists often create their own visual language using codes, symbols or signs to convey their meaning. • We can interpret these works by analysing the elements of design (line, direction, shape, size, tone, texture and colour). • An understanding of which element is most important to an artist can help us to discover the artist’s technique. • The structural frame is where we discuss how an artwork is made. • The composition (arrangement or sense of unity) is generally very important to structural artists. Marcus Harvey, Myra, 1995, acrylic on canvas, painted using casts of children’s hands, 396 x 320cm.Hravey is known for his tabloid-provoking painting of Myra Hindley created from the handprints of children that was shown in the Sensation exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art in 1997. Following a string of attacks by vandals, the painting had to be removed. Words: symbols, visual qualities, visual codes, formal elements, composition, materials, techniques, technologies.

SUBJECTIVE “I think therefore I am”. - René Descartes, philosopher • Looking at an image from a personal point of view • The subjective frame is to do with an Artist’s emotions and imagination. • It requires us to react to an artwork in a personal way, responding to our feelings. • It shows us that we look at artworks in different ways according to our own life experiences and imagination. Frida Kahlo, The broken column, 1944, 40 x 30.7 cm Words: emotion, intuition, imagination, memory, fantasy, spontenaity, the subconscious, dreams, personal experience.

CULTURAL The Guerrilla Girls are a group of radical feminist artists established in New York City in 1985, known for using guerrilla art to promote women and people of colour in the arts. One of their most famous posters was plastered across New York City buses in 1989. Its headline read, "Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?" The Guerrilla Girls conducted a "weenie count" at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, counting naked males and naked females in the artworks as well as numbers of female artists in the collection. Their design was rejected by The Public Art Fund as a billboard so the Guerrilla girls ran it as an ad in the public buses in New York City. This poster has been reproduced in many, many textbooks on all subjects from geography to art history to women’s studies. The GGs went back in 2005 to do a recount and found that there are now fewer women artists shown at the Met, but more naked males in the artworks. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”.- John Donne, poet • Looking at an Image from a historical, social and political viewpoint • Within the cultural frame, we look at influences of society or cultural background of an artwork. • An artwork may reflect or comment on such aspects of culture as religion, politics, social status, race relations, gender concerns, influences of economics and technology. • Within this frame we ask ourselves why an artwork was made and what is its purpose. Words: time and place, styles, culture (social, religious, political, economical, technological, scientific, philosophical), identity (personal, national, gender, racial)

Po$tMoDeRN • Mass media and the popular culture of our time often uses images and words from the past for new purposes, or they are given a new meaning. • This idea of appropriating (copying and adapting) has influenced many contemporary artists. • The idea of originality is questioned. Artist’s working in this frame challenge past ideas about what is art. • They break the established conventions in a variety of ways; by the use of new media, questioning traditions, using new and often shocking subject matter, taking art to the public in non-art spaces and appropriating. Words: difference, fragmentation, questioning the conventions, scepticism, appropriation, quoatation, paradox, ambiguity, parody, ambuigity, parody, irony, use of non-traditional technologies, materials and/or techniques.

Po$tMoDeRN Read as a visual language- but in reference to its borrowing of existing texts / forms. Requires the audience to have knowledge of these things being referenced.

Artist Artwork Audience World SUBJECTIVE STRUCTURAL CULTURAL POST-MODERN

Guernica Pablo Picasso, 1937 Oil on canvas 349 × 776 cm, 137.4 × 305.5 in Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

Ron English, Grade School Guernica 27' x 11' Oil and acrylic on canvas (2006)

Practice, The Conceptual Framework & The Frames