Teaching Art

Today marks the finish of a year of teaching at The College of Fine Art, Bangalore. I acted as a Project Guide for final year, Applied Art students. The final year batch of Applied or Commercial Art picks a subject which they research and develop communication campaigns for. They spend the whole year on this project, which in theory is a final intensive boot camp session in ‘applied art’. In reality though, it’s anything but.

It’s funny. About the time I left college I always felt that if I taught there, I could make a huge difference. Of course I wouldn’t, because I can’t handle the teacher’s salary bit… but I just thought that I could use better techniques. It’s funny because that’s exactly what happened. Ten years later I was invited over as a guest lecturer. After a year of guest lecturing, I applied some of my learnings with the new batch the following year. I learnt a great deal, and here are some of my observations.

What price art?

First things first. The college is a fine art institution, and has retained with it some archaic sensibilities towards what is considered commercial art. Following tradition is fine, but a lot of students join these courses with a definitive career goal. These very same students are pitched into a competitive atmosphere with students from design institutions grabbing more plum opportunities than art students do. It’s a shame. It’s like unintentional sabotage; scuttling careers to retain tradition. Notions like Applied Art (Terminology from the late 1800s referring to artisans use of decorative elements on crafts) have no right to exist in this day and age. It’s not just terminology, it’s also the ‘applied art’ style of thinking that bogs down students. The same group that lives on deviant art at night struggles to understand ’stippling submissions’ during the day. The gap is a yawning chasm.

Let’s pick a specialization!

The gap is immediately apparent when a student passes through foundation and arrives at the chosen specialisation – Applied art. The first year is a faithful fudge. You can’t really argue with the syllabus here. It teaches technical skills… most students kind of wonder at the point of these classes, but a couple of poster design and CD cover design assignments covers up those suspicions. I put it across like this because I felt it too, and did my fair share of grumbling back then. Computers were all the rage during the mid 90s and I was part of the new wave itching to use them as part of my work. It didn’t happen, and I was angry. Here I was with all this knowledge, talent and skill and I couldn’t show off. I had to slow down and approach project work from an angle completely alien to me. Poster paper, Poster colours and Set squares. To teach someone traditional techniques for a year two is one thing… to insist on it at the cost of higher learning is plain stupid.

Now see, here’s the twist. The fourth year applied art section is a complete black hole. It repeats a lot of the 3rd year syllabus and it’s easy to spot the 4th years because thats when you first really start lounging around. By now you know that when it’s submission time you can spend a night getting a required number of ‘hand-works’ (Don’t even ask!) in place. So what do the kids do? They lounge, sit around stuff like that. A year later the damage is irrepairable. It’s simple. By now everyone knows what it takes to get through. So no one cares. I should know. I had a hugely successful freelance business on the side during the 4th year. I had nothing but time.

2006 and 2007 were payback.

So… when I got invited to teach, I got to try out my theories in teaching design. All of them. My first courses were with the 3rd and 4th years. I was told to teach them brochure design, poster design and Typography. Right. I started by asking the class how many were interested in brochure and poster design. Almost all of them were. I pointed out the library and referred a few good books that ought to teach them about brochures and posters. Once that was out of the way… I held a series of lectures lasting over 6 months. The subjects that I taught were:

1. Visual perception: An understanding of interplay of form, texture etc…
2. Controlled Visual perception : Optical illusions, stereograms, etc.
3. Theories of perception: Gestalt, NLP, a brief history of Psychology (also invited a Psych. Grad student down on a vacation to give a lecture)
4. Language, and Meta Talk: Spotting the not obvious
5. Meta talk in visual communication: Subliminal advertising, hidden messages
6. Mind mapping: Creating categories and structures

Yup. It flew way above their heads, but I managed to learn a lot about their attention spans and the process by which they learn. Since I was teaching once or twice a week, I had enough time to reflect over reactions and feedback. But I knew that I was on the right track. My reasoning is this. 2 years of foundation i art is more than enough for students to understand structure and form. The remaining 3 years of specialization should focus on teaching them how to use their knowledge of form and structure for pointed results.

For example, anyone who draws about 25 sketches a day inevitably understands scale and proximity in forms. Though this is not verbalized, an intuitive understanding exists. The 3rd specialized year should then teach the students to recognize this phenomenon, name it (Gestalt) and allow them to consciously use it in their work. The same with meta talk, which is in fact the lifeblood of graphic design. To communicate through devices such as visual metaphors one should learn about the concept of metaphors first. How else can you embed the ‘values’ of a company in a logo concept?

I’m not sure how the students took it though. I got some confused reactions. Some loved the classes, some just went ahead and said it. It was incomprehensible. Also I was too late for the final years that year.

2007, I promised myself that I would break my concepts down into way smaller pieces. I also got realistic. This was no time for philosophy, the final year students required a portfolio that could land them jobs. I needed a game plan. So I did the following:

• Told the students that they could pick anything they wanted as long as they could justify it. This blotted out the earlier framework, so students could really experiment.
• Every student had to open a blog and document their projects on it (This so I could keep an eye on every single one of them. Go here to see it. I also noticed a lot of them on Orkut, so I opened a community there too.)
• Every project had to have either a working rationale or if applicable, a business plan. I insisted on this, and on a realistic budgeting process. This had to be mapped out through a mind map so the students can pre-visualise the route that the wil take.
• In every class that I conducted I dutifully stayed away from prompting them about mundane stuff like brochures, posters and blah. Instead I tried to give them an overview of the process and thought behind communication in general. I also tried not to give them a subjective aesthetic opinion, only a logical observation.

I felt that this was important because working on actual ‘media’ or pieces of the project they didn’t really need help on. They had 4 years to get that right. What they needed was to open their minds to the larger scope of the profession. They will eventually learn that there isn’t any one field out there for them, so I decided that they might as well learn that now. I also saw how deadened they were to concepts such as workshops (It’s not exactly a novelty in art education). I used every trick in the book to teach. Stand-up routines, filthy abuses, reverse psychology, storytelling, orkut scrapping… all these helped break the monotony and helped insert the required levels of shock to get them to listen.

Today was my last teaching day, and I will not be holding any more classes for this group of students. Of course, I’m supposed to attend their grading and I’m going to try my darnedest to give that a miss. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think of how I would restructure the training for the entire ‘applied art’ section in the time that I have taught there. If I’m ever called back after these last few sessions of mine… I’m going to really try and work on the new batch. From the root this time.

Fun Facts about CKP ‘n’ Me!

• I’m crazy about the place. My favorite spot is the huge tree by the stage.
• CKP was my first Co-ed experience. Really!
• I flunked my 3rd year applied arts. I failed poster design and ad layout
• Sometimes I seceretly lived for days in the sculpture department, and stole papayas and coconuts if hungry (Thanks Kashi)
• Never collected my fine art degree because I was mad at the system. To this day I am degree-less.