Drawing Upon Art
This publicity/sample packet presents Drawing Upon Art as a corrective to the passive, text-heavy habits of art-history instruction. Williams argues that the fundamental problems of visual art cannot be grasped adequately through reading alone; students must reenact them through drawing, looking, and hands-on exercises. Built as a companion to Gardner's Art Through the Ages, the workbook promises roughly four hundred assignments that translate canonical visual problems into accessible contemporary tasks. Its polemic is pedagogical but also aesthetic: art history, in this account, is not information about images but a chain of embodied problems that must be attempted. The packet turns the workbook into a small rebellion against the classroom's habit of explaining vision without making anyone see.
- DATE:
- 2009
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Julia Friedman; Gardner; Cengage Learning; Wadsworth
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Wadsworth; Cengage Learning; Gardner's Art Through the Ages; college and university art appreciation classrooms
- KEYWORDS:
- drawing over reading; embodied art history; four hundred hands-on assignments; Gardner corrected through practice; passive art-history instruction attacked; visual problems reenacted; workbook as rebellion; seeing vs knowing about seeing