Contextual Studies

A Photoshop session which turned out to be a free period, library induction and Contextual Studies.


A certain amount of messing about.  I thought my timetable said that I have Photoshop in the morning, for which I have to go to a different site in the city centre.  I turned up, but there was no-one there, so after some consultation with the equally confused receptionist, I caught a train back to the main campus.  When I found the course leader (just by spotting her through a window), she explained that my timetable said that I had a free morning until after half term.  There was another girl there who'd made a similar mistake.  We were both relieved not to have missed a lesson, but we then had about three hours to kill until there was another class.  In the afternoon, half the class went to the city centre site.  The ones who turned up were chiefly a group of mates -- so only one of them needed to get it right and the others would follow.  The teacher joked that 'oh well, at least some of you were listening,' but I think if I post a picture of the timetable, you'll see the problem.  It's in size 2 font and an unintelligible shambles.  I'm a graduate and I can barely understand it, so I don't see what hope a 17-year-old has.  The course leader said she was planning to make a clearer version of it and email it to us, but I don't see the point of doing this after the term has begun and people have already got times and places wrong.  It's rather important, because absent marks in the register are taken extremely seriously, and if you get just four in a row, you're automatically kicked off the course.  There's 'absent' and then there's 'noodling around town on buses and trains trying to find the right place to be, while the lesson continues without you'.  So, all in all, not an auspicious start to Wednesday. 

In the afternoon, Contextual Studies.

During this session, we had our library induction.

Afterwards, we went back to the classroom and the teacher showed us examples of the projects we'd be expected to complete by February.  There's a big A3 sketchbook filled with colour images and handwriting discussing the images.  There's also a magazine, which I think is a fancy graphic designed way of presenting all our term's essays in one place; I'll try to get another look at an example later.  (Two 500w articles and three 1500w articles, on an exhibition, book, art from another culture, an artist who's inspired you and a historical artist.)

Then she asked the big question, 'What is art?'  To answer this, she handed out some 'presents', ordinary items like pens and hats and jars, and asked us whether we liked the presents and what we thought of them.  We all made aesthetic value judgements, 'I like it because it's brightly coloured,' 'I don't like it because it's too plain'.  She explained that a big part of our judgements of things is to do with what they look like, and how making things beautiful as well as functional seems to be an innate human urge.  As soon as we know how to make something, we're wired to decorate it.  The instinct to make art is the instinct to decorate, express a feeling or record an event.
'The history of art is the history of human society'.
She mentioned Maslow's Hierarchy, which lists all the things people need to establish stability before they're able to be creative.

Then the teacher handed out some printouts of artworks, and asked us to get into pairs and discuss them; then it was opened up to a group discussion.  The two works we focused on were Holbein's double portrait The Ambassadors and Damien Hirst's diamond-studded skull, For the Love of God.  I have to write up my notes about these in my sketchbook.