Mapping As Institutional Critique Session Number 2, Teen Artist Project, 10-12th grade, 3 hour session, September 17, 2017 TAP students are learning about their environment, community and local architecture and their own place within it. Students reflect on their relationship to place and their own mobility within their local environments. Playing within public space, they learn about the ways that we create social spaces through interaction with community. Students map the social space in personal and relational geographies that reveal power structures within art economies and geographies. Students become aware of their own geographical relationship to the museum and to artists’ in the gallery. Students map the birth-places of artists whose work is on view in the museum galleries. Students will reflect on where they have access and who has access to areas of the building/grounds. Students will discuss and reflect on how geography can reveal the ways that space and place dictate access and agency and form notions of identity and belonging.
Key Concepts: We create meaning in places as we inhabit them. Mapping a place or a journey, we create meaning and importance. Mapping can be a creative record of an experience. Essential Question:
How do we construct a sense of place?
What can we learn from mapping relationships to place?
How do we map place? How do we map relationships?
How do we construct meaning and narrate experiences within place?
Where do we feel at home? How do we map belonging?
Where do we have access to and where can we not go?
Lesson Objectives: The student will be able to observe the ways that we construct a send of place through social interactions and relationships. The student will map their personal geographies and the places of origin of artists, whose work is on display in the museum. Students will identify the ways that geography might reveal unequal representation in the museum.
Specific Art Content: Students will reflect on observation, identifying works of art and artists. Students will observe their local environment, looking for patterns in relationships, patterns in nature and meaning in social space.
Artists/Artwork: Robert Irwin (Continuing Responses), Francis Alys (The Leak), Trevor Paglen, Janet Cardiff, Institute for Applied Autonomy (Routes of Least Surveillance), Mark Lombardi (George W. Bush), The Centre for Land Use Interpretation(CLUI)
Resources & Materials: Maps of the museum, museum district, fort worth, dfw, texas, united states, and the world Power Point presentation iPad Mapping Clipboard Mapping Home: Player Profiles (worksheet or Excel form) Mapping Artists’ Origins: Artist Profiles (worksheet or Excel form) Ruth Watson, Mapping and Contemporary Art Kevin Lynch, Cognitive Mapping Method Robert Irwin, Notes towards a Conditional Art
Instruction and Its Sequencing: Students reflect on the social space of the museum and map the geographical relationships between the TAP students, artwork in the collection, and artists in the collection.
Introduction/Motivation: Present artworks and introduction to theories of social space. Introduce students to ideas of mapping as presented by Kevin Lynch and his cognitive mapping methodology. Present history of institutional critique and social practice or relational aesthetics. Show examples of Francis Alys, Hans Haacke, Suzanne Lacy and Robert Irwin. Guided Practice
Students and instructors go over maps of the museum and floor plans. Discuss areas of museum that students are familiar with and areas that they do not have access to.
Students are led of a tour of the museum Vault. Museum educators present the labeling system and organizational wayfinding system that the museum uses to document all of the metadata.
Museum educators discuss behind the scenes life at the museum. Ask students to name the different types of people who move through the museum and discuss the types of access that they have. Discuss the functions of different areas and give some history to the design process of the building. Discuss the design of Tadao Ando, the Japanese architect of the museum, to illustrate another complex global relationship that connects the museum to a larger cultural and social space.
During the tour, students use colored marker to articulate areas of access within the museum and notate the players who interact with the building, and other observations such as feelings within space.
Discussion: Where can we go in the museum? Who has access to different areas of the museum? What level of access implies power? How does the architecture reflect values about art and value?
Return to the classroom. Discuss mapping as a visualization of relationships. Mapping relationships requires understanding definitions of “home.” Students discuss definition of home and ideas of belonging. Reflect on homework activity, and discuss how the information might visualize relationships. Student data is entered into GIS software which is on the classroom projector.
Discuss meta data and data mining of information. Present the work of Trevor Paglen, Routes of Least Surveillance, and Mark Lombardi.
Discussion: Data Mining, Marketing and invisible digital networked spaces. Introduce students to the idea that data collection of personal, location information and behavior is shared and sold. How can geographic information be used by artists to make invisible relationships more visible?
Independent Practice
Students go to gallery where selections from the permanent collection are on view. Using their Artists Profiles printout or Excel doc, students enter metadata about artists. Each student selects one artist in the gallery and maps significant geographical points. Returning to the classroom, students use the iPads to research the artists and select important locations to the artists timeline of life events (birth, current residence, nationality, location cited in artwork etc).
Students use prepared GIS tool to map the artists’ geographical information. Students play with setting parameters and selecting methods of information display.
Students analyze the results of their tests, asking questions about concentration of artists in areas, nationalities, and other variables such as gender. Discuss representation and access as geography limits and determines access to opportunities, institutions and networks within the art world.
Discuss methods of presenting this information. Do the results transcend information visualization towards art? Play with digital tools to affect the imaging.
Closure
Students will discuss mapping as a visual form. How can students use this information to create artworks? What kinds of relationships are important to make visible?
Students are given a homework assignment activity to bring to the next week’s session. Students draw a map of the Modern from memory, without looking at their clipboard or other reference imagery, students recreate the Modern floorplan and are encouraged to embellish or notate with recollections of works of art or points of interest that they remember.
Formative Evaluation Instructor will ask questions to initiate discussion to assess students’ understanding of the ideas presented. Students will share their maps and brainstorm ways to extend notions of mapping.
Classroom Management Procedures
The general session is broken up into activity chunks with groups breaking out in game play and returning to discuss and regroup. These activity chunks are 20 minutes long which gives students adequate time to experiment and navigate within the museum grounds and then build upon the complexity of game play after each discussion.
Before each session of game play, communicate the area of game play for example lets try this version by the reflective pool. In order to facilitate physical engagement that is appropriate for museum spaces, students will need to have a thorough conversation before game play starts about the kinds of behavior and engagement that would be problematic within the exhibition and public areas.
Students pairings will be important because compatibility is key. It is possible to divide students into groups using game practices.
Summative Assessment and Evaluation: Summative assessment is based on reflection during guided discussion.