Kati: Copies and Seeing

Watching the "Ways of Seeing" episode reminded me of this new method of teaching I heard about last year. Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is basically the same thing that John Berger did with that group of kids, inviting them to speculate on art and support their ideas with things they see in the pictures, only now its been given a name and turned into a form of curriculum. Teachers facilitate the discussion, but do not challenge or agree with their students' interpretations. Here is a video of VTS done with a bunch of kids if anyone is interested :

In the video, one of the things someone says is that kids really want to understand what they are looking at. I don't think that applies just to kids, but I think at some point, we're taught that only experts can understand art, like John Berger says when he talks about the very verbose, inaccessible art catalog. Sherrie Levine's photograph of Walter Evan's photograph gives us so little to work with to try and understand, which I think makes it frustrating. We expect, as John Berger said, that art will create this tunnel between us in the present and the moment of the image's creation, and the image is what gives us clues and allows us to connect to that moment. Sherrie Levine seems to be rather deliberately shifting the window away from the Great Depression and to the moment when she and her camera looked at Walter Evan's picture, but she gives us no new information to understand her mood or her motives. We're forced to speculate rampantly, and I suspect that makes many of us uncomfortable. I'm glad that through methods such as VTS, kids are being taught that there isn't a right answer and rampant speculation is okay; however, how do you support your argument when there is no physical evidence?

On the idea of copying and appropriating being one way that our generation digests new information and material, discussed in Lessig's Ted Talk, I found this interesting art project from a French photographer. Mathieu Lambert: Fake Tales of America. The artist, who has never left France, took pictures in France and then subtitled them with the names of American cities to create the idea that he took the pictures on a trip to America. While the project is incredibly original, it is also a form of plagiarism, in the sense that he is duplicating images of American culture and then pretending to pass them off as being authentically American.