Do You See What I Mean
A Popular Education Chapbook
Inside:
I. The Artistic Obligations of the Popular Educator
II. Some Basic Tools
1. Brainstorming
2. Using a Photograph as Layout Guide
3. Creating and Using a Viewfinder Mural Guide
III. Drawing an agenda
IV. Drawing Warm-up Exercises
1. Drawing Dialogue
2. Two-hands on crayon
3. Dominant-Handed Drawing
4. Blind Contours
5. More Contour Drawing…
6. Visual Metaphors
7. Squiggle-ography
8. Collagelets
9. Collagicals
V. Writing Warm-ups
1. Open Sentences
2. Freewriting
3. Collective poem
4. Alphabetical sentences
5. Random words
VI. Drawing Exercises
1. Beginnings & Endings Drawing
2. Gestalt Poster
3. Learning Metaphors
4. Organization as Vehicle Metaphors
5. Self-Portrait
VII. Collective Murals
1. Modular Contour Guided Murals
2. Modular Grid Murals
3. Earthblankets
4. Historical Mapping
5. Community Mapping
6. Social Portrait
7. Body-outlines
8. A Brainstormed List of a Few Extra Ideas
VIII. Takin’ It to the Streets
1. Moveable Murals
2. Banners
3. Bankelsang/Cantastoria
IX. Screen Printing
X. More graphic ideas
XI. A Last Word
XII. Debriefing and evaluating drawing and mural work
XIII. Recommended Readings
XIV. USEFUL SUPPLIES
I. The Artistic Obligations of the Popular Educator
I don’t know how to draw. A startlingly common refrain from adults. For surely few four year-olds claim such knowledge. Which makes me very curious about when it is that we learn such things. Everyone can draw - anyone who can hold or grip a pencil, pen or crayon can make marks on paper, canvas or wood. Ahhh, but the retort is fast in coming: I can’t draw well. And more, of course. I’ve seen people go to great lengths to persuade me of their aversion to drawing. And yet given that images are one of the most powerful means of communication in our very, very visually-biased culture (if you see what i mean) it is unwise to take this pervasive (even “common sense”) attitude of incapacity at face value.
Popular education (as well as much post-structural theory) recognises that there are many means by which people communicate and make meaning of their world. Verbal language is merely the predominant form of communication. And – given the pervasive and global nature of the advertising industry, television, cinema and the internet – visual media are a close second. Some might argue that visual media are, in fact, the number one means of communication. I’m gonna stick with language. But, that said, this ‘zine is about engaging visual media in popular education work.
As I’ve learned from Antonio Gramsci and dian marino there are powerful bulwarks of common sense about art erected in both our individual and collective consciousnesses. We might tell a child that her finger-painting is lovely art; but we “know better” than to suggest she do more than stick it on the family refrigerator. We might call it art but common sense dictates that it is not Art. And yet the pleasure (even joy) of creating, the pride of product that can be seen in a child for having created something meaningful and communicative is often self-evident. Many an artist has striven to reproduce that childhood experience, that experience of creating before the personality has been overlaid with all the many rules, rituals, habits of thought and behaviour that are the norms of our social world. Picasso is perhaps the most famous 20th Century artist to have publicly striven to “draw like a child.”
What is the relation between the common childhood experience of creating art and the dominant social-global notion of Art? Not that I plan to answer this question very thoroughly – I’ll leave that to the scholars, and I’m no scholar; but it doesn’t take a scholar to witness the difference between the world of Art (deserving of galleries, museums, schools, training, investment of wealth and so on) and the world of the common individual who fancies they can paint more than a wall of their house.
While there are many good reasons to distinguish between the drawing of an untrained, untutored individual and that of a professional artist, there are also some detrimental common sense notions about creativity that hitch a ride on these distinctions. For common sense is not, as common sense would have it, always a positive thing. Antonio Gramsci was the first major 20th Century political/cultural theorist to recognize the formidable power of common sense in processes of social change. Struggling to understand how and why the Italian working class could act against their class interest (as Gramsci’s Marxism explained it) and support the Fascists, he theorized that there was a pervasive common sense that the Fascists were able to tap into and rely on to persuade/coerce the population to support them. This common sense included notions of Italian nationalism and pride, notions of what constituted good leadership, what ought to be feared vis a vis political and economic change and so on. And this common sense was more powerful than the emerging class identity of the majority of workers and citizens who were increasingly oppressed by economic hardship. As Gramsci reflected on this common sense he theorized that it was contradictory, composed of both good sense and bad sense. And the common sense notion of itself is that it is all good sense. Common sense is the Great Oz telling us all to “ignore the man behind the curtain.” And all are eager to agree. Where’s Toto when you need him?
And so, of common sense, we can make a simple equation: common sense = good sense + bad sense (plus a dash of nonsense). It is good sense not to step out into moving traffic. It is bad sense to assume that cars are the single best means of urban transport (transit fares just went up again in Toronto) and it is nonsense to think that cars are determined to leap off the road and mow one down (as I once worried as I tried crossing a busy street while under the influence of a particularly powerful psychedelic).
In our euro-american, post-enlightenment, Western world we live with powerful common sense notions of art that act to exclude the vast majority of people from the identity of “artist”. The “artist” (regardless of whether we’re talking of painter, director, dancer, writer, et al) is the heroic, lone individual who has struggled ‘against all odds’ to learn their craft and, presumably, has something to say. The popular appeal of the saying “it takes a village to raise a child” is, perhaps, almost common sense (triggering complicated and contradictory feelings about child-rearing in our nuclear-family dominated world). But compare the ease with which people grant legitimacy to this saying to the context of art and artists. Isn’t it equally true that “it takes a village to raise (create?) an artist? And yet it feels to me like we are a far cry from admitting any such thing. Scholars (as well as a minority of critical thinkers) might say, “of course”; but the majority of our citizenry still respects, if not worships, the individual, specially gifted artist who does something they cannot. And it is this last powerful exclusion that is the unique challenge of the educator who desires to inspire the use of the fullest range of means of communication.
The common sense notion of “I cannot draw” may be true when our scale of drawing includes only Picasso, Vermeer, and da Vinci. But if we were to include on our scale the drawing of a child to whom we would not dream of saying “that’s nice, but you don’t know how to draw” (such is good sense), then, of course, we can all draw. Not that it is all “good” drawing according to whatever scale of high and low art one might abide by, but it is communicative. And that is what the popular educator seeks to facilitate – the accessibility of the full range of communicative means for the participant in learning. This accessibility is not about forcing anyone to adopt that means – it is, however, tendering (with critical consciousness) the opportunity of its use – and, should that opportunity be taken, there is the possibility of an increase in the capacity of that learner to communicate and to act in the world for their benefit. And, when we operate, as popular education does, with an understanding and ethic that sees the individual as existing in dynamic social relation with others (Martin Buber’s notion of the I-Thou), then there is the possibility of acting with others against the unjust use of power used to benefit the few at the expense of the many or, put more simply, to resist oppression.
The predominance of commercial art (including advertising, film, television and the internet) acts as a formidable force in popular consciousness. As the popular educator promotes collective production of art (not to diss individual production but, rather, to act with the fullest range of practice, individual and collective) they must take on the overwhelming context of art as part of global economic relations. Dian marino, a popular educator, university professor and visual artist examined the context of commercial art (“drawing for dollars”) with community or collective art (“drawing for action”).
A method I like to use in my teaching is to compare a McDonald's advertising campaign (which called for a drawing process) with a number of socially critical drawing processes (outlined here a little later on). For a short time McDonald's restaurants ran a promotion campaign on the radio. Listeners were asked to make a "radio coupon" by tracing around the outside of a dollar bill and producing their own version of a dollar with a "Big Mac" in the middle. This coupon was then redeemable for one "free" drink with the purchase of a Big Mac (which at the time cost a few pennies less than one dollar). While there are some similarities between this activity and socially critical drawing, there are even greater differences.
The first important distinction is that the coupon is produced by an individual, and the drawing or coupon is kept as a discrete product you turn it over to the person who takes your order. The popular research drawing processes I describe later include individual as well as collective drawing processes, but the individual productions do not remain as personal productions; rather, they are consciously put before the group. Another difference is that the production process of making a coupon tends to obscure the economic system, while the socially critical processes attempt to explicate and clarify economic relations. Another characteristic of the coupon is the unquestioning or non-critical participation that goes hand in hand with the radio coupon process. The most critical questions that might be asked are "Where's a dollar bill to trace?" or "Does this look like a Big Mac?" More structurally critical questions could be asked: Who does and does not benefit economically or socially from the transaction? What are the historical origins of the fast food franchise? What is the difference between re-creating a corporate image such as a Big Mac and re-presenting social experiences?
The purpose of the coupon is for consuming-maintaining existing social structures-in contrast to substantially changing social structures. Two other issues are access to the data generated and who controls and manages the analysis of the data, for whose benefit? The accompanying chart summarizes some of these differences.
Drawing for Dollars / Drawing for ActionIndividual / Collective
Production process obscures relationships (economic, social, political) / Production process explicates relationships (economic, social, etc.)
Participation: unquestioning / Participation: critical
Corporate images / Community images
Purpose: profit, maintaining existing structures / Purpose: social, changing social structures
Corporate access to: increase profit; and develop more effective ad campaign / Community controlled for their benefit; material can be used and reused in different ways
Drawing and graphic imagery are being used to "educate" us on a large scale. The McDonald's radio coupon campaign is just one small example. Processes such as drawing have political ramifications, and often these relationships are lost in the shuffle to describe a "new" technique. Our corporate reality is educating us, focusing our attention and actions to suit the political economy of profit. If education is not neutral, then neither are the visuals embedded in that process. Klaus Mueller details the political ramifications of language patterns, indicating that working-class people are often hampered with "restricted" language structure that operates as a major obstacle to reflective and action-oriented responses to problems." An elaborated language pattern facilitated the middle and upper classes' maintenance of a political economy that supports them. The use of visualization processes such as drawing can, then, help working-class people make a language work for them.
From Wild Garden: art, education and the culture of resistance, by dian marino (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1997).
A popular educator’s responsibility to facilitate access to the full range of means of communication necessitates a critical consciousness for which the above paragraphs are only a beginning – a mild scratching of the surface of the history and practice of art in everyday life. There is much wonderful writing and scholarship that is worth exploring.(See suggested reading pg.#). This ‘zine describes a variety of visual art tools and practices that can be used in a variety of ways. Popular education values equally the process and the product of learning and creativity. One at the expense of the other can lead to imbalances that could well come back to haunt you – consequences that undermine the capacity of people to resist oppression.
A popular educator must facilitate both engagement in democratic dialogue and disruption of oppressive behaviours, ideas and structures. And one very powerful means of disrupting the bad sense notions that prevent people from drawing or painting is to play. Playfulness, much more than a simple pleasure, can also be a very effective means for challenging the ‘power over’ relations that act to shut down our creativity. Creativity quashed makes people more vulnerable to being kept in line with dominant “common sense” behaviour. Playfulness exists along a wide continuum of behaviours – from the infant engaging their world almost entirely as a game or puzzle to adults engaging in sports to city populations frolicking in carnivals. The popular educator wishing to employ artistic means of communication and critical thinking in learning situations needs to model both a comfort with the means they’re using and a sense of playfulness. It is this playfulness that encourages a necessary atmosphere of light-hearted risk-taking that is essential to the creative process.
There are both tricks and tools that can be used to good effect in this cause as well. E.g.: a fundamental practice of any creative process is “brainstorming” (see pg. #). The description of the four rules, as you’ll see, is one that encourages playfulness and irreverence, which are good dispositions for learning in a group situation. A good “trick” to use in a workshop that will be using visual art is to “draw your agenda” (see pg.#). It’s hardly a “trick” that anyone will resent and it is a nice way to subtly model drawing as a means of communication.
It is important to decide (or discern) the purpose of the artwork. If it is only being used to have a dialogue by other means than talking then it may not be very important to evaluate the aesthetic of the works produced – messy, contradictory, clashes of colour and collage may not be considered “good” art, but they can yet act as powerful contributions in a group dialogue. The quality of a piece takes a back seat to its communicability. If, however, the artwork is intended for public display (for viewing by more than the workshop participants, e.g. community members, organizational colleagues, or fellow residents of a city), then the aesthetic can become more important. In this case, you might serve the aesthetic needs by a variety of means:
- At some point in the workshop have a critical discussion about the difference in the aesthetic that a small group expects or needs of art that they produce and the aesthetic that a larger group (uninvolved in the production process) expects or needs. While “communicability” in the context of the workshop may actually be part of the aesthetic for workshop participants, this “communicability” may be irrelevant to a different audience.
- Design a process (as with a mural) that gives a framework that participants fill in.
- If you are not an artist, then you could recruit an artists as a co-facilitator or guest; including this type of expertise into a workshop can help “raise” the level of the “quality” of the art produced. This, of course, can have a negative effect on some participants who may feel self-conscious or even intimidated in the presence of an “expert.” This can sometimes be ameliorated and sometimes is unavoidable. It is always a balancing act of a number of variables: process and product, individual and collective needs, group and community identity, learning and advocacy goals and more.
- Finally, though this could well be your first option, you could suss out what ability your participants have – you might be surprised.
This ‘zine contains a smorgasbord of art activities used in popular education, advocacy and social justice activism. It begins with drawing warm-up activities (which can be as important in supporting learners to engage art as stretching is before physical exercise), and proceeds through a variety of methods and projects of increasing complexity. This ‘zine also includes a brief description of brainstorming and a few writing exercises which can serve to support drawing and mural work. All these methods can be adapted to many different group situations and can be used simply as tools to facilitate communication within a group or to produce collective art and any combination of these as well.