Schedule & Activities

Materials List

Art 110: Introduction to the Visual Arts

Fall 2013

■ Section 2: Class No.5407
Instructor: Glenn Zucman
• [email protected]
• Office Hours: TuTh 10:30 – 11:00 outside UT-108 & TuTh 12:30-1 @CBTL in USU

ART110 – VISION
In 1439 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. 40 years ago Marshall McLuhan said that our classrooms were (I’m paraphrasing a bit) too Gutenberg and not enough Berners-Lee. Yes! McLuhan, media genius of the 20th century, said that 20 years before Berners-Lee invented The Web! So, for Fall Semester 2013, Art110 will try to be a little less Gutenberg and a little more Berners-Lee.

This course will cover 3 million years of Art History: from a proto-human moment in a distant South African cave, to the autonomous, post-human, Images That Think out somewhere in cyber-space. Along this journey we will consider the constantly evolving nature of human consciousness and how our consciousness is revealed & redefined through art. Among many other times and places, we will consider the art, life, culture, and consciousness of: 14,000 years ago, 1660, 1994, and 2013.

PREREQUISITES
• None: This course requires no previous experience studying Studio Art or Art History.

OBJECTIVES
The purpose of this course is to familiarize the student with the practice, appreciation, and cultural interactions of art across the ages and across the globe. This course will survey the entire sweep of history from ancient art to the contemporary moment. Students will be introduced to the terms, principles, methods, theories and practices of art.

LEARNING OUTCOMES
Upon completion of this course, the student will be able to:
• Describe some of the styles, ideas, and issues found in the Western canon.
• Understand and articulate some of the ways that art functions vis-a-vis human culture
• Build upon their direct, introductory experiences, in Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Animation, and Data Visualization in both Physical and Virtual worlds
• Articulate their understanding of the relationship between art and: culture, speech, creativity, expression.
• Describe the role of the artist in culture / society.

FORMAT OF COURSE
This course includes weekly:
1. Readings
2. Mini-lectures on video
3. “Artist of the Week” talks on video
4. Weekly Activities
5. Visits to the CSULB School of Art, Student Art Galleries

For details:

• Schedule & Activities
• Materials List

TEXTBOOKS
You’ll have the chance to read 3 small Thames & Hudson “World of Art” books this semester:
• The Body in Contemporary Art, by Sally O’Reilly
• Graffiti and Street Art, by Anna Waclawek
• Internet Art, by Rachel Greene

POINTS & GRADES
Your course activities will be “turned in” through Tout micro-videos or through iClicker questions on Tuesdays. Here is the points breakdown:

TOUT
(approx.)
15 Activities x 25 = 375
13 Student Galleries x 15 = 195
Due: Sunday night by 11:59pm

iCLICKER
(approx.)
9 Readings x 10 = 90
12 Lectures x 10 = 120
12 Artist of the Week x 10 = 120
Due: in-class clicker questions on Tuesdays

Tout Total = 545
Clicker Total = 358
Final = 97

Total Points = 1000

A – 900 points
B – 800 points
C – 700 points
D – 600 points
F – 599 points & below

OTHER DETAILS
Univ. Withdrawal Policy
It is the student’s responsibility to withdraw from classes. The Drop deadlines for Fall Semester 2013 are:
• Sept 9, 2013 before 10pm – using MyCSULB – without a “W” on your transcript
• Nov 15, 2013 – with the signature of the Art Department Undergraduate Adviser
• Dec 10, 2013 – with the signature of the Dean of the College of the Arts

For the first 2 weeks, withdrawal is your choice and done through MyCSULB. After that it requires at least the signature of the Art Department Undergraduate Adviser and is very likely to be denied. The CSULB Art Department is “impacted” and therefore maintains a strict drop policy. The official Art Department Drop Policy is no drops after the second week except for serious and compelling reasons. Severe or extensive medical problems would be a reason to drop late, but fear of receiving a final grade lower than desired, or change in your work schedule, are not considered serious and compelling reasons. If allowed, a “W” will appear on your transcript.

Incompletes
The Art Department grants “incompletes” rarely and only for the most extreme conditions.

Accommodation
CSULB will make reasonable accommodations for any student who has a disability. It is the student’s responsibility to notify me in advance of the need for special accommodations. This course utilizes many activities and many tools. Most of you should have no trouble with any of this, however if anyone has challenges with any course aspect for any reason, please be in touch ASAP and we can work to find suitable alternatives. A sincere effort should result in real learning and a good grade, so never be afraid to ask for any accommodations you need, but do make a sincere effort.

FUN!
In addition to all the stuff you have to do to get a grade in this course… don’t forget to have fun! Art is a fun, interesting, exciting, and enjoyable subject. Art offers pleasure to the viewer, consolation to the distraught, and wisdom to the seeker. Art will enrich your leisure time, resonate with your life, and offer surprising relevance to almost any career field you choose!

We have 2 tools for “turning in” your work: the Tout mobile app, and iClickers. Check the chart below for Activities, Student Art Gallery Visits, Readings, Lectures, and Artists of the Week. The Activities & Gallery visits you’ll “turn in” with a Tout. The Readings, Lectures, and Artist OTW, we’ll “turn in” with iClicker questions in UT-108 on Tuesdays.

TOUT

Tout is a micro-video platform. You can use it on phone, tablet, laptop or desktop with a webcam. Tout’s 15-second video clips force us to get to the point! If you are not prepared, you can just “um” and “ah” and say nothing in 15 seconds, however, if you pre-think 2 thoughtful sentences about art, aesthetics, culture, and ideas, you will find that 15 seconds is plenty of time to express 2 complete sentences: two complete thoughts about what specifically you find compelling in a work of art.

HASH TAGS
All touts should have 2 hash tags (and any additional hash tags you like)
1. #art110f13 – the hash tag that lets us find ALL the touts for our class!
2. #art110f13idxxxx – where “xxxx” = the last 4 digits of your CSULB Student ID – this hash tag will aggregate all of YOUR touts. You’ll be able to “turn in” activities simply by “turning in” your hash tag

iClickers

For your readings in Body Art, Street Art, and Internet Art, and also the short video Lectures & Artist of the Week, we’ll use iClickers in class. And YOU get to write your own questions. If you visit
• Write a Question

You can write your own multiple choice questions for each week. Turn in questions by Sunday night and I’ll select some of them to use in class on Tuesday. Plus you get EC for writing questions! You can write an Opinion question: How do you feel when you read that the artist did this? Or an Objective question, The artist created this work in response to what?

Be sure to look at the already written questions and write something that hasn’t already been written. I’ll pay the question author 3 points EC for a good Opinion question, and 6 points EC for a good Objective question. You can write up to 1 of each per week.

In class, everybody who answers an opinion question gets points for it. Everybody who Correctly answers an objective question gets points for it.

[box type=”download”]If the activity schedule ^above^ doesn’t appear in your browser, try going directly to the google doc.[/box]

Student Gallery Visits

Most weeks you’ll be visiting the CSULB Student Art Galleries. I hope you really enjoy this. It’s a chance to see what other students your own age are thinking about. Each week the 5 School of Art galleries have new shows. In fact we’re meeting in the Gallery Courtyard on Thursdays. Our class is 11:12:15 and the galleries open at Noon. So you can visit at the end of class time on Thursday or any other day of the week. Thursday at 5pm is the end of each week’s shows. They load out and new shows load in on Friday and Saturday. Then there’s an opening on Sunday night. If you’re around that’s a nice time to go as it’s a big party and you’ll probably get lots of free food! And then they’re open Mon-Tue-Wed-Thu from Noon-5pm.

Each week you can take a look at the 4-5 student exhibitions, pick the one you find most compelling, and find the artist (they’re usually around.) Each week you’ll “turn in” 2 Touts on the 1 show of your choice: 1 Tout from you saying something about how you respond to the work, and 1 Tout from the artists answering some question from you. As I noted above, you can say a lot in 15 seconds, IF you think about what you want to say in advance!

Activities

Week 1: 3D: Plaster Casting

• Details on Plaster Casting

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 1: 1 Activity Tout[/box]

Week 2: 2D: Drawing

Sketch your name in Bubble Letters
• Details on Drawing

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 2: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 3: 2D: Painting

Spray Paint your name in Bubble Letters, 2 colors
• Details on Painting
• Venice Art Walls.com

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 3: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 4: 2D: Photo: Instagram

Everyone Instagrams & hash tags “my life” on the same day, then Tout about the aggregate class portrait.

Thursday, Sep 19 will be our “Art110 Life” day. For the 24 hours of Thursday (12:01am to 11:59pm) we’ll snap Instagram pix and please use the hash tag “#art110f13life” You can snap all the pix you like, but please snap at least 4 through the day. Then on Friday or the Weekend you can look over the big collection of pix that you and your classmates generated and Tout your thoughts on the creation.

To View Our Pix:
• On Mobile > Instagram > #art110f13life
• On Web > statigr.am/viewer.php#/tag/art110f13life

Note that for me, Statigram only seems to show hashtag results if I’m logged in. And, there are no Statigram accounts, they use your Instagram UserName & Pass to login. And, you can only make an Instagram account via a mobile device. So, for anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone, be sure to use my iPad on Thursday to make an Instagram account. Once you have a UserName & Pass, you can login to Instagram or Statigram on a laptop or desktop.

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 4: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 5: 2D: Photo: Landscapes with a Corpse

Last week we tried “New Media” photography with our collective Instagram project. This week we try more traditional photography with a self portrait. Well, mostly traditional. It’s a self-portrait imagining your own death! The photographer Izima Kaoru has been working on his Landscapes with a Corpse series for 20 years! This week we’ll take our inspiration from his project.
• Details on Landscapes with a Corpse

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 5: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 6: 2D: 10 Seconds

For our 3rd & final week of photography projects we’re going to participate in Alma Haser’s “10 Seconds Project.” A link to the full directions is below. The idea is to make a video of you making a selfie. But this selfie isn’t a hold your arm out selfie, it’s a “10 Seconds” self-timer shot. So you’ll need 2 “cameras” (phones, etc) but that’s easy since we have so many classmates. I’ll bring a couple of tripods on Thursday and you can improvise and help each other. As Haser explains, your goal is to “hide” in plain sight. It’s derived from a unique form of hide-and-seek that Haser and her brother played as kids.

Oh… and she’s agreed to pick the 4 best! So in addition to the project points, we’ll also have 25, 50, 75 & 100 points of EC for the top 4 projects as picked by Alma Haser!

So… post your photo on Instagram with #art110f1310sec
And you can upload the video as your Tout
AND please also email your links to Haser! [email protected]

• About the Ten Seconds Project
• Alma Haser’s video
• The 10 Seconds project rules

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 6: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 7: AH: Museum Trip

Last week we “found art” around us, and this week we’re going to an Art Museum. We’ve got many great museums in the SoCal area. I’ve selected LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for our trip. LACMA has an enormous campus with a huge, encyclopedic art collection, and after a time “wandering in the desert,” LACMA today is one of the hottest Art Museums in the world. They’ve also got a lot of indoor and a lot of outdoor works for you to look at, so you can see and think about a wide range of work and settings.

LACMA is free on the 2nd Tue of the month, so we’ll use our Tue Oct 8 class to visit LACMA. If you can’t go that day, you can check out their website for other days / times / and price options:
• Visiting LACMA

Please do 4 Touts while at the museum. At least 1 indoors. At least 1 outdoors. As usual, think about the work before you push record and then give us 15 seconds of powerful ideas.

2 Reply Touts – watch your classmates touts and reply to 3 or more “Museum Visit” touts.

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 7: 4 Museum Touts, 3 Reply Touts + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 8: New Media: Counterfactual Identity

CFID
MMORPG
vk.com

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 8: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Tout[/box]

Week 9: ePortfolio 1

• WordPress.com << make your Website / CMS / Blog / ePortfolio

• ePortfolios @Clemson

• Award winner: Evan Goodwin

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 9: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 10: Media Camp!

Oh
Yeah!

[box type=”tick” style=”rounded” border=”full”]DUE WEEK 10: 1 Activity Tout + 2 Gallery Touts[/box]

Week 11: Vlog

This week we make a Vlog or “Video Blog” to use as the greeting to the website we launched 2 weeks ago. Obviously we live in a video age and having your smiling, confident, informed face greet visitors will take your website a long way toward landing that job or internship, winning the ASI election, or achieving whatever your goals are. It can be short. if you were me, you might say something like:

Hi, I’m Glenn Zucman. I’m a visual artist in Los Angeles. My Intermedia art practice ranges from robotic projects to online identity activities. I teach art at Long Beach State, and I’m the former host of the arts interview radio broadcasts Strange Angels for KBeach Radio and Border Patrol for American Public Media. Thank you for visiting my website, I hope you enjoy the work, and just click on the ‘contact’ button if you have questions about anything. Thanks a lot!