For the past 9 weeks I took my first course or
MOOC at
Cousera, an online site for learning from well known universities. This was run from
Calarts and was of a very high standard. Last evening they had a closing hang out using
google+ to sort of sum up the course.
At art school, RISD, I took several Art History classes but none really compared to this experience. The lectures were wonderful showing Art through various concepts rather than in the chronological fashion. These lectures and exposure to a wide amount of art, some of which I was familiar and some quite new , seemed to trigger a wider view to research, like a seed growing new shoots. If this ever goes online again I would strongly recommend.
I would like to share some three of the required assignments from the course.
Required Assignment 1: World-in-a-Box (Track A)
This assignment is taken from an excellent book entitled Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the assignment (New York: Paper Monument, 2012). It’s also listed in the course bibliography. I credit it to sculptor Rachel Foullon, who credits it to sculptor and teacher Jack Risley.
Instructions:
Using any means, materials and style you like, create a collection of objects and design a means of displaying them. Some things to think about:
Your objects can be in two (flat) and/or three dimensions.
You could make the objects or collect them from elsewhere.
They might belong together chronologically, or not.
Think about how the objects can be combined to make something that adds up to more than just themselves (or alternatively, how the collection “is what it is”).
Think about how the objects relate to each other spatially and how the means of display reinforces or complicates that sense of space and objects within it.
This is a photo montage using as a background on of my own fragmented oil paintings and then pasting various sculptures from photos of
Storybook land, a group of theme parks in Holon. The statues represent well known characters from Israeli children's books. I put in the easel to sort of represent myself in this fantasy world. Also painted in the fashion of children's paintings,,,, example the sun etc. Although these books are not known internationally I thought they represented a child's fantasy. It was not fully understood... in my peer evaluation they thought the rat with a suitcase was "unemployed" or "homeless"... homeless he was cause he wanted to rent a flat in the famous
Flat for rent by Lea Goldberg.
