Legend

Security panel at the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, which houses Piero Della Francesca’s famous Legend of the True Cross. ©Jim Hamlyn

Critical Tact or Punitive Feedback?

Jenny Holzer, Abuse of Power comes as no Surprise with Ladypink, 1983

“The real question as to whether someone is a good or bad educator is simply this: Has this person developed a sense of tact?” –Johann Friedrich Herbart, 1802

Most teachers will be familiar with the situation where a student complains about feedback they've had from another member of staff. Most of these complaints concern confusing or de-motivating criticisms which have been made about their work. I don't think we need to take such expressions of dissatisfaction as an excuse to go on a witch hunt, but I do think it’s important not to dismiss them. It is only when we fully appreciate the power of critical feedback, not just to motivate, but to confound, confuse, de-motivate and on occasion to entirely alienate, that we are likely to realise just how important it is that teachers use critical feedback intelligently and tactfully.

Many teachers, and even some students for that matter, believe that harsh criticism is sometimes justified, but why might this be the case? Whilst students might benefit, to some extent, from becoming a little more thick-skinned regarding criticism, since in the ‘professional’ field art critics are frequently far more scathing than art teachers, it might nonetheless be worth taking a moment to consider exactly how people become thick-skinned in the first place. Practically all teachers and students who advocate harsh criticism are confident individuals already, who feel able to absorb criticism and thereby profit by it. However, there remain a substantial number of students who are a good deal less confident and, not surprisingly, these students also tend to be a good deal less vocal about valuing harsh criticism. The truth is, you don’t make a more confident individual by undermining their confidence. Confidence has to come first, then you can think about being more firm with criticism. This is where tact comes in. Tact is the ability to accurately judge a student’s level of confidence and pitch criticism appropriately so that the level of challenge becomes neither stressful nor boring and confidence is promoted rather than crushed.

“A tactful person is able as it were to read the inner life of the other person.” -Max van Manen

Art teachers can be an opinionated bunch at the best of times and for similar reasons we also tend to be very passionate about what we believe. But these strongly held beliefs also mean that we’re inclined to hold powerful allegiances to our chosen media, genres, styles and approaches to art making and are equally dismissive or even vehemently opposed to media, genres, styles and approaches which we see as outmoded, superficial, mannered, clumsy etc. However, any criticism that derives from such beliefs, as inspiring and persuasive as it may be, can never be anything more than partial at best, and at worst simply perpetuates the values of the teacher.

“The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.”
-Amos Bronson Alcott

There are numerous circumstances in the teaching of fine art that call for critical feedback. Sometimes students produce work which entirely misses the point of a project or is founded upon naive conceptions due to lack of awareness or critical engagement. Work may be conceptually or technically flawed, it may be ethically questionable, vague or formally overwrought. At times, it appears as though a particular student may have simply chosen the wrong course of study and lacks the awareness, confidence or resources to remedy the situation on their own. And then there are students who are disengaged, lazy or offhand with work and who attempt to cut corners or, worse still, to pull the wool over their teacher's eyes by evading classes and/or trying to verbally embellish their work etc.

All of the above are situations where students might be seen to be falling short in one respect or another but it’s crucial for teachers to be able to clearly distinguish between such issues of engagement, perceive their underlying causes and, as much as possible, rise above personal preferences in responding to them. If someone is genuinely trying to manipulate a situation, then it’s pretty clear that they should be made aware that this is an unacceptable way of proceeding. However, if a student is simply naive, mistaken, insecure or misinformed, but is nonetheless engaging in good faith, then it is the teacher’s duty to constructively support them, encourage their engagement and to invite critical discussion about what is not working, rather than assuming a wall of unquestionable authority and backing this up through kinds of criticism that are practically indistinguishable from punitive feedback.

"In this direction he must, if he is an educator, be able to judge what attitudes are actually conducive to continued growth and what are detrimental. He must, in addition, have that sympathetic understanding of individuals as individuals which gives him an idea of what is actually going on in the minds of those who are learning.” -John Dewey

Stencil

The Inequality of Nice

"And this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! — It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; — people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word." -Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

In two consecutive tutorials last week I encountered the word “nice” being used to justify a decision about the presentation of artworks for exhibition. Should I have been surprised that two final year students should feel so comfortable using such an unqualified term during a tutorial? At one point, I asked one of the students to substitute the word “appropriate” as a means of highlighting the issue. At least when you use the word “appropriate” you have to think about how something is appropriate: appropriate to what?

If we wish to talk about artworks in anything other than the most superficial terms then the word nice has very little to offer. Nice is a nice word, which is another way of saying that it signifies absolutely nothing other than vague approval based upon no other criteria than gentility and convention. Nice demands no explanation. Nice is good and not nice is bad. According to many people, swearing is bad because it's “just not nice”.

Now, I’m all for people being nice and I'm all for nice weather, nice company, nice conversation, nice food and nice wine. But at some point, when we're wanting to understand a little more about what we do and like, we have to begin to think about our criteria a little more deeply.

Recently I've been thinking quite a lot about the issue of swearing and the extent to which our attitudes towards the use of expletives are often predicated upon contextual usage rather than simply meaning. Nice may not be a swearword exactly but its meaning is no less dependent upon user and context (and therefore it can actually be mildly offensive if used inappropriately, as Jane Austen was clearly aware). My nice is not your nice, but we have a tendency to use the term as if we had a shared understanding and agreement about its meaning.

It might be worthwhile to consider the idea of connoisseurship in this context. I have some serious reservations about the idea of connoisseurship because I think it tends towards exclusivity and critical stasis, however I'd be very wary about telling a wine connoisseur that they can pick up a nice bottle of Rioja from Asda for £3.99. My nice isn't their nice, but I'd certainly be keen to test their nice and to know the criteria they were using to form their opinion, and in the process, I’d hope to refine my own version of nice. The point is an important one I think, because it goes some way to explaining an unavoidable inequality in the way that experts and novices use commonplace language in relation to their specialist field. If a wine connoisseur tells you that your local supermarket is selling a nice Rioja for £3.99, it's probably worth a trip to buy a whole case.

Fastidiousness

The Perishability of Language and the Self

“But there is one other crucial thing to be mentioned. The tumour that will destroy me is in the proximity of my speech area. But I am also a word-earner. I have been doing this all my life as an adult. And I still survive as a language-user – speaking, listening, reading, writing – over the past two years. Or, rather, I survive in fluctuating ways.”

I’ve been reading and re-reading Tom Lubbock’s haunting and bewildering account of his gradual loss of language to a glioblastoma multiforme tumour, published 10 days ago in the Observer and subsequently on the Guardian website.

“It's not possible to get any distance from my project: being alive. Objectively, from the outside you might say, my life is terrible, unbelievable. And it's true, I hate this. I hate the way I am at the moment. But there is no objective view, I am here, in it, and there is nothing else, and this fact brings with it many things that make it of course easier. And beyond that there are many other things to think about.”

I’ve met Tom on a few occasions, being somewhat distantly a friend of friends. Even so, we’ve barely exchanged words, although we once had a brief discussion when a friend brought Tom by my studio and he showed a genuine interest in a couple of postcards I was working on. He even took some away with him.

Tom was a speaker at a conference at the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh some years ago along with Nathan Coley (“The most boring artist in Britain”) and Tom Eccles. The theme of the conference was the Monument in Public Art, and he spoke memorably of the distinction between monuments which are built to endure and monuments that he described as “perishable”, which he suggested offered a more fitting way to mark the passing of the people and things which claim our affections. In order to move on with our lives we often need to forget. Our memories are porous and our lives are likewise transient, so it makes little sense to ossify memories that might distract us from new and equally important experiences and encounters. In many ways the richness of life is this very exchange between memory and forgetting. But, of course, this is the preserve of us for whom memory is a resource which is relatively easily accessed and utilized. As Tom’s article shows, our commonsense notions of the unity of memory and recall are far from providing us with a revealing picture of how memory actually works.

During one of the breaks in the conference, as people were busy networking away, I noticed that Tom had disappeared. He returned just as the presentations were due to recommence and when one of the organizers politely enquired where he’d been, he replied: “For a walk around the grounds. I don’t really feel comfortable in these situations.” This characteristic combination of humility and an unflinching willingness to explain his alternative perspective has always marked Tom out as an exceptional thinker and it’s all the more disturbing to literally see the signs of this ability ebbing away on the page before you.

Only Artists Make Art

Joseph Beuys famously repeated “Everyone's an artist”, thereby acknowledging that creativity is a universal human tendency. It’s a liberating idea, but in spite of its egalitarian directness, which can be traced back at least as far as Novalis (from whom Beuys reputedly borrowed the idea), the familiar old hierarchies continue. It's almost taken as a given that printmakers and painters are artists, but when it comes to photographers, opinions are less certain. According to one of my old student notebooks it was the gallerist and curator Graeme Murray who, during a group tutorial at Glasgow School of Art, once said: "Painters make paintings, sculptors make sculptures, printmakers make prints and photographers make photographs, but only artists make art." It's a little pedantic perhaps, but for a young fine art student working with photography, it struck me with the force of a revelation.

It’s not your medium that defines you, but what you do with it.

Something for Nothing

Trap (after MD), ©Jim Hamlyn 1990

One of the most extraordinary things about art making is the degree to which serendipitous, unexpected and illuminating connections and discoveries occur unbidden. But can we really claim authorship for things which are not wrought by determination, vision or technical mastery? Is this not a deception of both ourselves and our audience and is it not, likewise, a duty of all creative individuals to fashion significance from the raw materials of their craft and to prove themselves worthy of all they conceive? If so, then surely no discovery, of any kind, can really be claimed or attributed to the ingenuity of human agency. Most artists would argue that it is the sensitivity which they have sharpened over years of practice that allows them to "see" the connections and make the discoveries for which they claim ownership. This sensitivity then, is one of the principle skills of the artist: the ability to perceive and to ensnare the fleeting fortuitous miracle of chance - the intangible breath of inspiration as it glides almost imperceptibly by.

Utter Bollocks - An Essay

I've had another online essay published over at Dyske.com. It's on the subject of swearing. I'll post it on this blog too sometime, but for the moment you can only read it by following this link.

The Pleasure of Knowing

“I don’t know much about Art, but I know what I like”

This phrase juxtaposes two kinds of knowledge: knowledge about something and knowledge of something. I may know of your best friend but this doesn’t mean that I know about them. If I knew about them I might like them, but I can’t really like anything much (apart perhaps from the most primitive pleasures) without further knowledge.

The implication of the phrase is that knowing is somehow opposed to liking or that liking precedes and is superior to knowing. This isn’t just anti-intellectualism but a privileging of sensory pleasures over cognitive ones. There’s knowing and knowing. The more we know, the more refined our understanding and the greater the scope for pleasure.