Today, Slashdot brought up an interesting topic regarding the (perhaps small) resurgence of manual labor and processes in the design fields: hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/08/17/205232.shtml.
The post points to two articles.
One, by G. Pascal Zachary in the New York Times, about the phenomenon itself: Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands.
And, Two, an op-ed in the Guardian by Richard Sennett: Labours of Love.
The first, the phenomenon, is something that I’ve long thought inevitable within the pendulum swings of social and technological changes as they feel out the right directions for themselves.
But, it’s the second article that really interests me. Because, it articulates a belief system and a real experience that underscores the manifestation of those ideas within the events of the first article.
It’s an issue that’s near and dear to my heart because I’ve taught digital media art in higher education and elsewhere, for about six years. But… I studied painting and drawing.
Toward the end of my undergraduate study, I started using the computer in order to produce silk screen prints on photographs - that I would sometimes manipulate with traditional drawing techniques after printing. Because I lost access to school facilities when I graduated, and because my interests turned from linguistic theory to finding non-theoretical interactions of visual form, during the two years between undergrad and grad school, I returned to a practice primarily painting with oils. Then, the reality of graduate education in fine art today is that being in the “painting” studio in most programs really means you can do anything. And, I did. I made a lot of work that combined digital media and painting.
Nearly all of the opportunities I’ve found through which to support myself since then, however, have involved new technology. This is, of course, due in part to the emergence of those technologies in art and to a glut of older faculty who are already well versed in the art materials and techniques that have been around in one form or another for centuries. I was one of the few people in my graduate program who could teach the Computer Graphics class. And, that has continued to be the door that I find open. As a person who studied painting, I’ve had faculty jobs teaching digital drawing, intro to digital media as a fine art course, intro to digital media as a design course, intro to graphic design, page layout, web design, and animation.
I’ve even made significant developments to integrate digital media, even 3D modeling, intro traditional studio foundations classes. I brought web 2.0 and blogging into my computer-based classes.
In my art work, I continue to use both digital and traditional media on the surface of a single work.
So, I’m no Luddite.
But, to counter the drive toward technoligizing educational settings is most surely to make one’s self anathema.
When I’ve suggested that it would be better if my introductory computer graphics classes did not have internet access, I’ve almost always been met with bewonderment and confusion. When drawing/painting faculty I’ve worked with have expressed kindred views, they’ve invariably been cast as anachronistic trolls (most weren’t).
Here though, is what caught my eye in the Slashdot blurb, from the NYT article:
Making refinements with your own hands — rather than automatically, as often happens with a computer — means “you have to be extremely self-critical,” says Mr. Sennett, whose book “The Craftsman” (Yale University Press, 2008), examines the importance of “skilled manual labor,” which he believes includes computer programming.
And, self-criticality is so important to art. In fact, art’s ability to teach critical analysis in general is among the things that I tout most when fighting the (supremely difficult) battle about the importance of art within a general curriculum.
I had a realization analogue to all this years ago. While I was working as the preparator for a gallery that showed his work, I twice had the opportunity to visit Jun Kaneko’s massive studio facilities in Omaha. I even stayed in the guest apartment, I think usually reserved for resident artists at the
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, once. What struck me then was that as a wildly successful juggernaut of the ceramics world, Jun Kaneko can do anything he wants. He’s even got a staff of half a dozen or so highly skilled assistants (in addition to the office staff) whom he can order to fabricate and prepare whatever he needs. Here’s the thing: in terms of ineffable art qualities like “poignancy” or “being challenging”, I don’t think it helps him - because he doesn’t have to be self critical. He doesn’t have to reign himself in. I, however, at that time and maybe again some day, had so few financial resources that I had to analyze and evaluate each step I made. Now, true, I was young and aspiring and he was older and quite accomplished; and each in need of very different assets for development. But, how do you maintain a sharpened self-criticality when you do not have any external factors driving it?
And that’s the struggle I’ve had with balancing digital media within my own creative process. You see, I grew up in and around construction work. By the time I was 17, I was passable as an apprentice bricklayer. I could and had framed houses, installed drywall, shingled roofs, poured concrete… Working with my hands played a formative and integral role in my creative thought process. All the while my art is fairly cerebral (not to say intellectual).
Yeah, but… there are so few things more comforting than an ability to press “ctrl+z” after you screw up an image. Just keep clicking and dragging stuff around until it’s right. It’s wonderful. The down side, however, is that you don’t suffer the same pains, as Richard Sennett describes, of “dwell[ing] in waste, following up dead ends”, “creat[ing problems] in order to know them” as with non-digital media. You can do those things… it’s just that it’s all so easy to fix. It’s the next best thing to when in the Disney cartoons, a brush wipes across the screen and suddenly the whole drawing is there. You risk losing an external factor that motivates critical thinking.
I used to think that after enough practice and development, the “struggle” of craft/expression would evolve so much as to become unrecognizable as what it once was - to essentially go away. Now, I can identify that event as the moment at which an artist’s work shrivels up and falls flat. The dilemma then is to balance confidence while maintaining a sufficient depth of engagement. I’ll leave it as an open question then; what are the relationships to external factors that artists need to forge in order to sustain that balance and engagement? To what extent do you need your media to present obstacles in order for you to continually grow via the use of it?
