Dissonance Day Eleven: Surrealistic Museum Project:

I have been looking forward to this project since it was assigned last Thursday. But I woke up this morning with a bit of worry. What if the projects are not interesting? What if no one spends any time looking at them? What if the assignment is just a bust and we have nothing to talk about? In the past when I have given this assignment it has been at the end of a section on Surrealism, this time it is at the beginning. Will the students have any idea what I mean by juxtaposition or clash of elements? Will they all just look up Surreal images online and copy what is there? Many question and concerns. However, as has always happened in the past, I was delighted by the outcome. Given the chance to be creative or do unusual assignments the students here tend to rise to the occasion. So that it wasn’t just an exercise in wandering around I gave the students a few things to consider up front and about a half an hour to explore everyone else’s projects.

Do you have any questions for anyone?

What do you see in projects executed by others?

Any intended meanings?

Any unintended meanings?

Any of the projects funny?

Any of them disturbing?

All of the pieces reflected the nature of the question posed. It was interesting to see what the students noticed in the discussion. Some of the same themes came up again and again – a number of stuffed animals and references to genitalia – either explicit or implicit. It was interesting that given the same assignment some of the pieces were moving, some frightening, some just laugh out loud funny. The intent of the conversation was to begin to explore this type of activity as a technique – one that either is useful or not useful in a kind of “tool box” of artistic techniques. In the discussion we further explored the following questions:

How did executing this project compare to the time project?

Is it simple to put random things together?

What of the see what happens idea?

Is this a technique you work with all the time?

Does this technique have a use value?

Did you discover anything you were surprised by?

What I like about this project is that is it asking the students to do something that they are not necessarily asked to do in arts classes (Julian’s classes aside). The general intent of projects in arts classes is refinement. Zeroing in on meaning or intention and shaping the work to fit a certain goal or parameter. It was interesting to hear that some of the students struggled with this project in wanting to refine the work. Others had the opposite reaction, that this project was easier than the time project since it required them not to think about meaning or refinement.

This course is not designed as an art class, but hopes to use these projects as a way of exploring certain techniques and the philosophical ideas behind them. Techniques that rely on chance combinations can ultimately take us places that planning and logic cannot. I need to weave all of this together and draw back on the Dadaists and Futurists in the next class but also tie it to Surrealism. So we will be moving backwards into Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto from 1924. The goal is to create connections between the projects and Breton’s writing. This is where I felt some of the projects were quite strong – the ones that included the paragraph about the process. Why the object ended up looking the way it did is just as interesting as the object itself. I need to push more on this both connected to the projects and to the blogs.

We do have some more surrealistic thinking to do in the next class. In all likelihood I will start them with some automatic writing.