This is just sick. What, I miss the school year so much that I can't let learning go? Why don't I just run along and kill harpies in World of Warcraft like a nice blood elf? Sheesh.
Heather, and all other art/art history types, you aren't allowed to read this post, either.
I wrote my second contribution to the "mandatory study by division of labor" forums for Art History class with less angst and much less effort, sure that I was already doomed for a B or worse. (The big course assignment was to compare very different pieces of art in a museum, and you couldn't use a museum visit from a previous semester, nor could you use an online museum. Furthermore, he would only allow work from one of Victoria's two museums, and that one only had a single exhibit on a single theme at the time, and I was too busy with work to travel. Oh, the bitter posts I'm sparing you. Suffice to say that I wrote this up while using most of my brain to flash a "WHY BOTHER?" sign above my head.)
I do remember writing about this work of art (on 12 Nov 2001), because the next month I went to Disney World and saw some similar pieces at Epcot. Walt for the win!
Discussion Question 2, Fig 10-19
Travelers among Mountains and Streams
Fan Kuan
early 11th century, Northern Song dynasty
Two prevalent aspects of form in this Fan Kuan painting are composition and size/proportion. The painting has been composed into three separate sections which carry the eye across the work as if watching a play in three acts (416). These three sections are differentiated by size as well as content. First there is the large rock in the foreground, then twice as large is the area depicting the travelers passing the stream (416). Finally there is the mountain, twice as large as the first two areas combined (416). The proportional increase in the areas allows the viewer to emulate the experience of climbing a mountain and thus have a sense of leaving the human world to find the enlightenment advocated by Northern Song painters (417).
A significant element of proportion is in the smallness of the humans and mules compared to the nature around them. This brings attention to the idea of man as a part of something larger, an idea corresponding with the Northern Song artists' desire to promote spiritual communion with nature in order to achieve enlightenment (416). Also, the painting itself is very large, nearly seven feet tall, contributing to the sense of monumentality (416). The manner in which the stream-area and the mountain were arranged so empty space is between reinforces the Northern Song idea of painting realistic, idealized details instead of a realistic whole (417). Despite this emphasis on attention to realistic details, the landscape itself is not a specific place (417).
SOURCE/RELEVANT STOKSTAD PAGES: 416-7
RELATED WEB LINKS:
http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/art-history/fraser/b40/Chinese_Mon_Landscape.html
(Chinese monumental landscapes with images. Page is by Northwestern University art history professor Sarah Fraser.)http://www.boston.com/mfa/chinese/technique.htm
("Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1000 Years of Chinese Painting." Site is hosted by the Boston Globe but this section appears to be by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.)
(Note that we didn't have to use MLA style - these were supposed to be casual posts.)
(Wikipedia wasn't in gear back then, but the painting has a semi-entry now.)
That was 237 words. I spent 3000 words complaining about the class in the course survey. (In addition to issues already mentioned, I also had a problem with the professor's ongoing and unapologetic misspelling of "altar" as "alter." Unfortunately, I wrote about a Day of the Dead altar for my final paper, and guess what I kept doing? Yeah. I kept my pride by not picking up his "site" for "cite" problem, though.)
I don't know what I did with that final paper. I got a B on it, and I was a bit resentful of this - as all uptight, salivating, fearful, A-students can annoyingly be - because I felt like he was vague on how he wanted the paper to look. (Believe me, I've since walked a mile in his shoes with not demo'ing things properly to students. And believe me, I know I need to make sure not to put those stinky flip-flops on again.) We had to post our papers publicly, and there were people writing about what a nice time their families had visiting the museum gift shop, and people saying "this one was green and this other one was white," and stuff like that, so there was no reassurance there.
However, my paper itself ended up being just fine. Where I lost almost all of my points was in not citing sources for the images I drew. Each paper had to have images of the art discussed, and since photography wasn't allowed at the museum I visited (I forget how I wiggled past the "very different pieces of art" angle - probably by surfing a wave of semantics), and it was all very folksy local stuff (read: no illustrated catalogue), I drew my own sketches of the pieces and used those instead. Somewhere in the paper or the cover message I mentioned this, but I still lost those points because I didn't offer up an MLA-style citation of MY artwork on the Works Cited page. I can't decide whether that's a master stroke or totally bogus on his part.
But I got an A in the course, so who cares?
And I wonder where the kids get these poor attitudes? Tsk.
(You realize I'm quietly going nuts trying to not get up and look through all my old backup CDs until I find that paper, right? Because I let my old remote backup with GoDaddy lapse since I had everything on CD, but now I'm feeling the need to find those CDs and transfer it all to Amazon S3. This is good sense, as CDs aren't forever, but we all know the real reason is because the world has to know that I fulfilled my college requirements by writing a scholarly paper about a piece of astroturf with two blurry Polaroids taped above it. Now that's art.)
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Posted by: shari | 12 June 2008 at 11:09 AM