Thursday, April 22, 2010

Last class discussion made me think a lot. After talking about Menand's Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety made me re think about my question about interdisciplinary in an Institution. Through our my 2 years in Tyler, I have been thinking about where I stand as an artist. Going to classes upstairs at the painting department and having many many studio visits, I didn't understand why people were asking me to identify who I was as an artist.

I felt a lot of overlaps in my work that was about printmaking and painting. The dialogues between the two departments were complicity different. I knew I had a stronger connection with printmaking but I wasn't making any "prints" in my work and the painter had a strong connection with my painterly work. I enjoyed the classes and continued taking classes upstairs but really didn't know why or where I stand. That is when I started to think about interdisciplinary. Why do we divide departments when the contemporary art dialogues doesn't necessary require which departments we had our degrees on.

I have been asking myself this semester "why am I doing what I am doing?". I have certain habits in my practice and never questioned them. I simply just made work. My thought for right now is that I have been avoiding the most basic stuff in my work. Meaning I wasn't covering my basic elements. I narrowed down a lot of elements. After our last class and the discussion about Menand's Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety made me realize that I need to redefine how my disciplines exist in my practice. Going to Tamarind Institute was to learn and master the medium of lithography and coming to graduate school afterward, I didn't need question about the medium anymore. Therefore I didn't need to go over any basic learning of the material that I was interested in. My attention was to develop my practice in graduate school and making more work related to the meduim helped me develop my creative thinking. I slowly recognized my habits of making. The process of physically engaging myself, using the same surface and materials was the main overlaps that I never questioned but never ignored.
The work that I have been making recently allowed me to recognize some fetishes of printmaking practice.
Krauss's Sculpture in the Expanded Field made me rethink about my relationship between printmaking. It allowed me to accept where I am coming from and how I should take printmaking in to a positive practice.Learning the discipline is very important (at least in my art practice) because I took me to where I am right now. Last class made me think about where I can go with my work.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I was brought up a little short when Myungwon write that she felt that she'd been 'avoiding the basics' and greatly impressed by the frankness of this post. I posted a passage from Lewis Hyde's book, Trickster Makes This World that I hope will give a little more direction to the idea of discipline and how, as a thing in the world that won't go away, it can be used productively in your work.