The Conceptual, What's the Idea
Throughout history art has been burdened with the responsibility of advancing culture, politics, technology, and psychotherapy. Art is a wonderful outlet to discover the world, understand concepts, and self-reflect.
ALTERED BOOKS (Big Idea1: Investigate Materials, Processes, and Ideas)
Learning Objective
1. A Document experiences to generate possibilities for making art and design.
1.C Document investigation of viewers’ interpretations of art and design.
Essential Knowledge
1.A.1 An experience is an event or occurrence. Experiences include interacting with actual surroundings; imagining abstract and fictional concepts; communication; and research. Reflecting on experiences often sparks questions and inspires investigation. Experiences can be documented by recording observations and perceptions related to an experience.
1.C.2 Examples of how inquiry guides sustained investigation through art and design can be documented by recording questions, lines of inquiry, investigative processes (e.g., practice, experimentation, revision), and outcomes (e.g., learning about materials, processes, and ideas and asking more questions). Documentation becomes a resource for the artist/designer. Documentation can be shared with viewers; it can be presented as a work and/or as part of a sustained investigation.
Instructions:
Altered book assignments are due once a week. These assignments should be completed outside of your class period. They are meant to develop your independent thinking skills, your voice, and your ability to experience & experiment with art techniques and ideas. There are no right or wrong answers and you will be scored on your ability to lose control and simply create. Make sure each art piece is a two-page spread.
Print out the list and paste it inside the front cover of the book.
Keep your pages as a 'surprise' for sharing day. During the critique, look for commonalities and differences in your classmate’s visual interpretations of each idea. Allow others to speak about your work first to see if they understand your intent.
If you are using your week's book in your portfolio, make sure to produce a digital slide to include in your portfolio.
Option 2: Found Poetry
Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.
A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions. Decisions of form, such as where to break a line, are left to the poet.
More about the Found Poem
Examples of found poems can be seen in the work of Blaise Cendrars, David Antin, and Charles Reznikoff. In his book Testimony, Reznikoff created poetry from law reports, such as this excerpt:
Amelia was just fourteen and out of the orphan asylum;
at her first job—in the bindery, and yes sir, yes
ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging about
her shoulders, “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie,
the stitchers (“knocking up” is counting books and
stacking them in piles to be taken away).
at her first job—in the bindery, and yes sir, yes
ma’am, oh, so anxious to please.
She stood at the table, her blond hair hanging about
her shoulders, “knocking up” for Mary and Sadie,
the stitchers (“knocking up” is counting books and
stacking them in piles to be taken away).
Many poets have also chosen to incorporate snippets of found texts into larger poems, most significantly Ezra Pound. His Cantos includes letters written by presidents and popes, as well as an array of official documents from governments and banks. The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot, uses many different texts, including Wagnerian opera, Shakespearian theater, and Greek mythology. Other poets who combined found elements with their poetry are William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Louis Zukofsky.
The found poem achieved prominence in the twentieth century, sharing many traits with Pop Art, such as Andy Warhol’s soup cans or Marcel Duchamp’s bicycle wheels and urinals. The writer Annie Dillard has said that turning a text into a poem doubles that poem’s context. “The original meaning remains intact,” she writes, “but now it swings between two poles.”