Visual Arts as a Kind of Art - Assignment Example

Visual Arts as a Kind of Art Visual arts is a kind of art that uses matter, symbols, images as visible expressions of the confluence of psychological and emotional slates of an artist. Great artists use visual mode of art to fluently articulate in a creative manner any information, study, research, investigation or about beauty that strongly appeals to an artist. In school, visual arts are taught as a significant emerging method of preserving ideas, concept, frameworks, issues, dilemmas, and body of knowledge. The colorful drawing or painting; artful sculpture and architectural design; and, cultural arts presented in televisions, video documents, and folk arts evoke substantial meaning to children’s cognitive aspects. (Kindler,2003; Freedman, 2003). This is because every child has such strong visual intelligence (Kindler, 2003). Visual art has been used too as a tool, technique, structure to express a wide array of realities and educational objectives. To cite an instance, drawing illustrates a creative activity to show a geographic location, a historical site, a cultural landmark, an analytical investigation, or a natural landscape (Freedman, 2003). While learning is presented as art’s goals, it’s the responsibility of a teacher to ascertain and choose responsibly the content and process in fulfilling the goals depending on classroom circumstance and arts can be used as the basis for creative activity, historical and cultural investigation, or analysis, as any other fields within the visual arts (Freedman, 2003). The standards present educational goals. It is the responsibility of practitioners to choose appropriately from this rich array of content and processes to fulfill these goals. The latter however, depends on circumstances and the curriculum adopted by the learning institution (Freedman, 2003). In post–modern life, Duncan (2004) pointed how art has increasingly been integrated in mass media, in amusements, in fashion, in engineering, in websites, and in all avenues where interactions thrive (Duncum, 2004). It’s interdisciplinary and multi-modal (Duncum, 2004). Arts do not only present the fundamentals of knowledge for young learners but is extensive to ecological, social, economic and political discourse on issues. Visual artists give life to visual culture bridging popular beliefs into the mainstream and to the cores of change using concepts on multiliteracy and multimodality. Media communications illustrated this and impose the changing influential and didactic power of visual arts in communication (Duncum, 2004). Visual culture correlate with education since both shape identities as self transform through the learning process (Duncum, 2001). Arts also taught individuation of a person as one adopt to some perception and description specially that technology unleashed more power in constructing and deconstructing images, including the democratization of society since freedom becomes more significant in the discourse of visual arts (Duncum, 2001). Everyone could observe how discourse is increasingly becoming more visual to hasten understanding and to draw empathy (Duncum, 2001). Through it, aesthetics evolved in its values, ideation and in its physical manifestation. It helps in elucidating sociological frameworks for interaction, thus, made arts and education mutually exclusive to each other. Freedman (2003) and Duncum (2001) pointed this is how artistic visual images, ideas and practices bridge a learner with one’s environment, in knowledge-generation, or in reality-construction or description within theory-praxis relations (Freedman, 2003, p. 8-9). For instance, in post war era, arts and pictures became instruments in the children’s therapeutic for self-expression and trauma healing. However, Habermas contended that with complex social transformation, visual culture has also contributed to social transformation to cultural contradictions of moral positions. This is evidently explicated in the evolution of visual culture from the period of enlightenment, modern and post-modern era as manifested in the changes of arts from avante garde, democratization of aesthetics, commitment to individualism and to post-industrial capitalism world while still within the logical continuum of human assertion for freedom and freewill (Freedman, 2003). The modern period was featured with women’s assertion and claim for their space in nature and cultural development. In 19th to 20th century, the post-war era, visual culture has increasingly aimed at social transformation and the concept of a person ceased as mere biological fact but as agents for social transformation. Thus, arts were used to depict oppression, militarism, heroism, and colors start to have political meanings. In that pretext, art are taught not from contradiction of values and social norms but from the perspective of multidimensional interpretation (Freedman, 2003). Discussion on art works likewise changed from the intention of artists to variegation of interpretations, albeit art perception in this note has become more critical, complex and not aimed at attaining resolution. Nonetheless, it simply proved that art is significant for cognition and behavior development of a child (Thompson, 2005). Focus is thus given to how visual culture appeals to a learner’s senses: of seeing, of feelings, of knowing, and of learning (Thompson, 2005, p. 85). This is where emotions take part in the learning process of a child e.g. setting an expectation through perception and interpretation derived from emotional state. They may laugh, feel sad, awed, threatened, scared, uncertain and the like when they’d view an artwork. Through colors, forms, impressions, perception, interpretation of stories and drama plays (Thompson, 2005), learners create and recreate meanings. For psychologists, the processes of generating meanings from visual culture unlock self-transformation. This is because as art inspire interpretation and critical reflection, children can assimilate their knowledge in reconstructing reality using art (Freedman, 2003, p. 76). In post modern period, visual culture uses technology as instrument for art creation. It’s observed that imagery has more significant impact than texts. This is evident in mass media made visual art as reflection of cultural condition, symbols, representation, critique, and instrument for deconstruction of ruling thoughts. Its use has utilized the spaces on issues involving ecology, pastiche, eclecticism, recycling and in transformation (Freedman, 2003). In the continuing saga for social democratization, visual arts open up good aesthetics for accumulation of knowledge expansion, pluralism of ideas, and popular culture. Visual arts in this period has more acceptance on disagreeing ideas, thus, art concepts are fragmented, dissonant, more of a collage of realities and instrument for deconstruction of governing thoughts (Wilson & Wilson, 1977). Learners here are encouraged to have multiple interpretations in understanding images, of art’s representation, and entailing meanings (Wilson, et al., 1977). Sparrman (2012) affirmed that visual culture do not only carry commercial importance but also encourage public opinion and shape young learners in their identity formation. This likewise insist that knowledge about visual art and communication is significant in participating for social development and transformation. Such is derived from the empirical facts about art’s input to social and cultural patterns of visuality and images’ crucial role in the learning process (Sparrman, 2012). Pupils’ expression of their selves and how they assimilated their cultural freedom of speech are manifested in visual arts. Sparrman (2012) argued that through positioning theory, pupil’s identity is completed and takes form through social interaction. Researcher contended that in dealing with learner’s ideation, values, notion relating to friendship, love, relationships and sexuality through visual arts, what was evident was the gap between common adult ideas on young learners and how pupils articulate themselves about their experiences. Starrman (2012) concluded that classroom discussion on sexuality using the film Lilya 4-ever showed stereotypical perception of gender and thus, may have contributed to learner’s gender construction. Garoian and Gaudelius (2004) opined that the pedagogy of visual culture taught people to see and think in varied lenses and in the process bridges interaction of social beings. As people are immersed with visual culture, the levels of understanding and impacts of arts to social relations provide a way for teachers and students to appreciate or differentiate corporate, established subjectivity, and their personal valuation of artmaking’s correlation to their subjectivity (Garoian et.al., 2004, p. 298). While subjectivity of art may mean such narcissistic fixation with governing visual culture, but this still challenge students to explore the commodity of fetishism because of their variegation of personal perspectives and interpretations. In order to appreciate plurality of thoughts on art in classroom instruction, Garoian et.al. (2004) suggest the use of collage, mosaic, montage, assemblage, installation, and performance as forms in studying, immersing, examining and critiquing visual culture (p. 298). This mode of visual arts is dominantly practiced in the 20th century as depicted by the artists from Cubists, Futurists, Dadaists and Constructivists (Garoain et.al., 2004). Through this, learner’s creativity are enhanced in engaging themselves to sociological aspects of visual culture while they are constantly negotiating meaning within the spaces of impossibility and possibility of art’s reality. Teacher however must understand that to meet these art’s standards, learners must learn vocabularies and concepts associated with various types of visual arts and must exhibit their competence at various levels in visual, oral, and written form. However, Wilson et al. (1977) argued that teacher should not impose their images on a pupil of art, rather encouraged them their ingenuity and impulses to impress their art concepts and interpretation of reality. Creativity should not be oppressed nor suppressed in the learning process or in the strategies of art creation. Wilson et.al. (1977) contend that as teacher are suppose to be facilitative in instruction, art should be made more noble and sublime when learners’ creativity are exercised with their freedom of thoughts even if drawn objects are mere representations of multi-dimensional realities or even in the use of games (Hicks, 2004) as classroom activity for knowledge generation. Teacher should therefore be innovative and should insure that the curriculum advocate the same. In this study, the following questions are generated: a) What are the functions, meanings, purposes, and objectives of visual arts? b) What are the different theories of arts? c) What is the history of art? How does it evolved? d) How does visual culture stimulate intellectual development of a child? e) How visual culture does help the development of child’s theory of reality and in generation or acquisition of knowledge? f) How visual culture generates or evokes meanings and transforms a learner? g) What are the responsibilities or accountabilities of a teacher in visual art in teaching arts fitted for children in developing their ideation on gender-based realities? h) What are the methods and modes of visual arts that must be utilized by teacher in classroom instruction for young learners to encourage variety or plurality of ideation on arts? i) What are the transformation and learning that pupils would be generating out of visual arts? References Freedman, K. (2003). Teaching Visual Culture: Curriculum, Aesthetics and Social Life of Art. Teacher College Press. New York, New York. Garoian, C. R. and Gaudelius, Y, M. (2004 ). The Spectacle of Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education, Jstor Publication. Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 298-312 Duncum, P. (2004). Visual Culture Isn't Just Visual: Multiliteracy, Multimodality and Meaning. Studies in Art Education, Jstor Publication. Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 252-264. Duncum, P. (2001) Visual Culture: Developments, Definitions, and Directions for Art Education. Studies in Art Education, Jstor Publication. Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 101-112 Hicks, L. E. ( 2004). Infinite and Finite Games: Play and Visual Culture. Studies in Art Education, Jstor Publication. Vol. 45, No. 4 (Summer, 2004), pp. 285-297 Kindler, A. M. (2003). Visual Culture, Visual Brain, and (Art) Education. Studies in Art Education, Jstor Publication. Vol. 44, No. 3, pp. 290-296. Sparrman, A. (2012). Young People’s Consumption of Visual Culture: Collector Gadgets, Sexuality and Democracy. Department of Child Studies, Linköping University, Nordic Infromation Centre for Media and Communication Research, pp. 114-115. http://www.nordicom.gu.se/common/publ_pdf/226_Current%20Research%20Project%20sparrman.pdf Accessed: April 12, 2012. Thompson, C. M. (2005). The Ket Aesthetics: Visual Culture in Childhood. Pennsylvania State university. InJAE, NTAEC, pp. 69-89. Wilson, B. and Wilson, M. (1977). An Iconoclastic View of the Imagery Sources in the Drawings of Young People. National Art Education Association, Art Education, Jstor Publication Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 4-12 Read More