This TED Talk by Ursus Wehrli brings to light an important challenge of the artroom for students with AS. The "WHY" in art that we can't always define. This presentation has allowed us to view someone else's attempt to answer the WHY of some artworks, particularly a series of obtuse and vague modernist and contemporary artists' pieces.
By injecting a concrete organizational method to the works of Magritte, Miro, Klee, etc., Wehrli has done what I suspect many of my students do on a regular basis. When I ask them to describe what they see going on in a piece, there are many who will merely recite to me a list of items they find in the image. The verb is passive, citing no true action but merely existence.
A while back, I showed this image, by Brian Ulrich, to my students and asked what was going on. Many of my students found little of surprise in the image and simply stated, with no irony, that the man was posing with his LCD projector. The machine was an equal member of the photograph. And it seems a likely candidate for 'tidying up." What we would then get, and this could be helpful to some of my students, would be a chart of relationships from the image. We'd have the man, woman, children and projector. By piecing them apart in rows/columns, the imbalance of the machine-to-people ratio in the image may appear more easily to my students, thus filling them in on the joke.
I posed the question of "Why" to my students when we watched this TED talk, and one answer took me by surprise. An 8th grader softly explained how, for someone who doesn't like this kind or art, they could see it differently and then maybe they'd say they liked the art." I thought he hit the nail on the head! Such insight from an 8th grader! And I want to agree with him: when we're forced to look at something from a different angle, is it not so that we're better able to appreciate it from its original vantage point?
No comments:
Post a Comment