The Contest: Writing vs Visual Arts
Some news from my world: I’ve been hired to teach at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. I’m incredibly excited about this new development. A couple weeks ago they invited me to give a presentation at their professional development day, which was awesome, so I spent the entire day there last Thursday going to sessions, getting to know the people, and giving my own presentation, and it was great, but I realized something. One of their big challenges, at least in the liberal arts department, is getting these students, who all think they are artists, to write. In session after session, I heard teachers talk about trying to get students to see writing as something they should want to do, something they shouldn’t be afraid of, and for some reason I was a little surprised. I’m not new to students who hate writing, but generally those students don’t see themselves as creative people. Often they see themselves as better at math and science; they’re students who have been put down for their writing by one teacher or another and have given up on themselves as writers. I suppose that can happen to people who are good at visual arts, too, but my assumption, I’ve just learned, has been that words are part of the arts and that artists would most likely have an affinity for them. I was wrong. The teachers at PNCA went on and on about students who think writing is useless and painful and irrelevant. Sigh.
So here’s the question: how is writing like the visual arts? They are both skills that have to be practiced; neither of them are innately learned. There’s one thing. But what about the process? My boyfriend is a writer, visual artist, and musician, and it makes sense to me for all those things to go together, but how do I convince reluctant students of that? Could their hatred come from some learned misconception about what writing is? Maybe these are unanswerable questions until I get in there and meet my students, but I’m curious to know what other people think. If you’re a visual artist, how do you relate to writing? And vice versa? If language really is our most prominent mode of self expression, how do I convince a bunch of visual artists of this? Should I assign multigenre assignments where they’re allowed to incorporate words with images? Any suggestions at all would be greatly appreciated.
I feel that analogies would be the wrong move: Think of the words as colors or types of brush strokes or shading. That seems too flowery, too “bullshit” of an answer.
Figure out why writing is the ugly kid. It may be that it seems more pretentious? Maybe too laborious? Maybe it seems too contrived or more obviously manipulated?
As far as similarities. You could talk about perspective, image(poetical like image and deep image), ekphrastic poetry, pattern/contrast, setting, character, etc. as they cross over. The challenge seems to come in with narrative. I wonder if they’re not into writing prose specifically, or if it’s everything.
I’m not sure about the cross-genre thing. It may put writing further into the backdrop, like when you HAD to include three citations in your paper. Didn’t matter where they came from, ya just crammed them in there.
This might not work as well for poetry, and it might not even encourage any really good fiction or nonfiction, but I think there are certain aspects of the theater that might help them want to write. And maybe you’d have to use movie examples to make it more familiar to the students. But here’s my thought: one of the common threads between literature and the dramatic arts (kind of visual…you look at it…) is human interaction. Get them writing dialogue. Drama. People fighting. Or get them writing monologues. Give them a topic and let them rant. If they like expressing themselves that way, they might develop an interest in the more artistic side of it. Of course, some of them will probably still think writing stinks.
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I wonder if writing is seen as restrictive, and therefore, not a particularly interesting way to express one’s self. I think back to the way I was taught to write and wonder how on earth it became so appealing. 5 paragraph essays. Beginning, middle, and end. Formal poetry. There are a lot of boxes.
Meeting your students will shape the way you try to reach out to them, but one avenue might be to say, hey, the visual arts and the written word both have classical lineages and formal aspects to them, but look at all this stuff you can do once you figure out that part! Gertrude Stein? She was friends with Matisse and Picasso. And she wrote crazy poetry! Or perhaps, matching up visual arts movements and the corresponding literature that came out of the same period.
Though, now that I think of it, maybe visual artists don’t find that stuff interesting either.
Congrats on the job, Jaime. It sounds great.
Similarites: A blank canvas, a blank page; images “vibrate” and one has to sit with them and let them expand; one is in service to the poem, one is in service to the painting, sculpture, etc.; vibrant colors, dynamic words; nothing superfluous in either genre. I’ve painted in watercolors, oils and acrylics. I write lots of poems; the more you pictures you paint, the more you learn, the better you get, the more poems you write, ditto.
Congratulations on the new job Jaime!
I often get weird comments and looks when I tell people that I am both a scientist and a writer. As if you can’t be creative and do science or as if you can’t like science and be a writer. Maybe these kids have recognized that art and science and math involves a huge amount of creativity, but (like Geneva said) someone took that out of their writing?
As far as motivational examples, one of my first writing teachers once put up two letters side by side. Both of them were applications for internships, but one was written with bad grammar, spelling mistakes, and weird punctuation. Instead of asking who we would give the job to she asked us things about our perceptions of the letter writers. Things like: who did we think was smarter, who drove a nice car, who would we like to be friends with, who would keep a promise. It really made me understand that writing well is so much more about just communicating. Maybe you could do something similar and have the letter be to a gallery or art show organizer.
Thanks everyone. These are all great ideas!
Laura, I love the idea of having them write dialog. Maybe it could be interactive, too. I could have them write in class back and forth to each other as a way to argue instead of arguing or dialoging verbally. That could be interesting.
And Asa, the letter/perception exercise is awesome! I definitely want to do that! I was also thinking of this activity that I’ve done with lots of students from little kids to adults. (Disclaimer: I borrowed this from my friend John S. O’Connor, an awesome teacher and writer whose book Wordplaygrounds is totally worth checking out.) You get the class to give you a letter of the alphabet, you write it on the board, and then you ask them to tell you what the letter looks like besides a letter of the alphabet. They come up with all kinds of creative things. You write them all on the board. Then you write the letter on the board again but this time sideways or upside down. You do the same thing, asking students to see the letter in new ways each time you turn it a new direction. At the end you ask the class to think of several of their favorite or most interesting words that start with that letter. Then you read the whole list as if it’s a poem and you talk about how they were able to make something interesting and new out of something ordinary just by seeing it in a new light. This is what I hope for students to do with language and writing. And I want them to see that they can make beauty and insight out of anything, even something as small as a letter of the alphabet. This activity is also good to talk about how letters, and consequently words, are merely symbols that we’ve assigned meaning to, and that we get to decide how to use them to make meaning and affect people.
Anyhow, this discussion is quite helpful. Thanks again.