Thursday, September 4, 2008
Assignments and Inconvenience
I had an interesting conversation with my friend Ryan about the difficulty of getting a studio practice rolling again after taking a long time off (years). Part of the problem is that new decisions are often be driven by convenience, which ends up being evident in the work. So, the thought of picking inconvenient things to try seemed appealing to me.
This reminded me of how easily we can give assignments to students, but how hard it is to give them to ourselves. I miss being given arbitrary assignments, but for some reason don’t give them to myself. So I thought I would share a list of the first assignments that popped into my head:
Week 1) Start with a pile of some material (wood, wire, cardboard, buckets, etc…), break down the original material and make some sort of configuration (must fill a small room).
Week 2) With any material, create 20 surfaces, pull images out of each one that relate to the surface.
Week 3) With any material, make 3 works every day from observation, outside … miles away from home.
Perhaps the assignments themselves are revealing, but the real “wow” moment would come while looking back on all the completed work to see if any patterns/interests/questions emerged. The work itself might not be good, but anyone could rediscover some interests using this method.
I would be curious to hear what kinds of assignments other people think of. Please share!
posted by cjagers at 04:57pm Add comment
