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I have been invited by Coursera to take this course leading to the role of an invited mentor for learners on one particular course. Here is the first exercise.

The course is;

"Modern Art & Ideas

The Museum of Modern Art”

To read about the course's aims and objectives, see: https://www.coursera.org/learn/modern-art-ideas/home/info

Steve’s view: This course focuses on ‘ideas’ as a tool for engaging with Modern Art. It defines the latter through the holdings of the first and arguably most influential institution for the representation, collection, storage and display of ‘Modern Art’, The Museum of Modern Art in New York. This needs to be said before we start because the function of selection runs through this great institutions’ role: in decisions about what to buy and maintain, what from this store is to be displayed and where.

1.     Think back to when you took this course as a learner. Which part of the course did you find the most challenging or interesting? (This is the topic you will use to respond to the next question)

2.     Write at least 200 words to explain the topic you chose above to a learner just starting this course. Make sure your explanation is clear, detailed, and easy to understand.

·       The modular nature of the course enables participants to take on central ideas as they emerge and focus on a well-selected number of art-works for comparison and evaluation focused on that idea. For me the key idea (and that I did my coursework on - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=204161) were contrasting ideas in art and art criticism & history of ‘space’ and ‘place’.

·       Approaching ‘modern art’ can be problematic for people who look in it for a picture representing a world they can always recognise – something you identify as a place, such as my place of birth or where I met my husband. Instead modern art has considered a more fundamental idea – what is ‘space’ and how is it represented without the familiarity assumed in the notion of ‘place’. Space can be two, three or four-dimensional (that is it can be a flat shape, have depth as well as length or breadth or have time as a component as well as depth, etc.)

A lot of theories of modern art have identified, for instance in the 1950s by Clement Greenberg (and in the claims about his own work of Jackson Pollock), that the fundamental problem for art is that it needed to avoid the illusion of a picture having depth (or perspective) and understand that it’s essence was pattern built or composed on a flat surface. Here ‘space’ was an idea that included not depth illusions (only width and length of a given canvas) but which did include ‘time’. Pollock talked about his painting as having rhythm like music or poetry (both time-based arts) and being composed in the action of their making (over time) and the action of the observer’s duration of gaze at the picture.

You will see lots of art in this section that makes both space and place a problem (as in Van Gogh’s Starry Night) where the painter’s claims about the space he inhabits contrasts with simpler ideas of ‘place’. Starry Night is definitely not just a picture of the town, Saint Remy, that Van Gogh’s asylum window looked down upon.

This idea is even more difficult in Rachel Whiteread’s House where she recreated (the East London artwork was demolished) the space INSIDE a house as a solid object or in Matta Clark’s Bingo (which is shown on the course) since that conveys the meanings of house space by translocating a wall of a demolished house with a flat inside and outside into MoMA itself. We see stairs and doors but are they such in a detached single wall or only ‘spaces’ that tell us something about what we mean by living in the world. In Rachel Whiteread’s artwork, space in becoming solid no longer can be anyone’s ‘place’ (a home that is lived in). So what is it?

1.     Think back to when you took this course as a learner and choose another part of the course which you found difficult or interesting.

2.     Write at least 200 words to explain the topic you chose above to a learner just starting this course. Make sure your explanation is clear, detailed, and easy to understand.

·       Rather than choose another module week title as above, I’d like to take one word from one week – that is the word ‘Transforming’ from ‘Transforming Everyday Objects’. That is because in each week you will examine how things (even everyday things like walls and houses) are transformed by becoming art and / or being placed in an art-museum.

·       I think art has always ‘toyed’ with the idea of ‘transformation’. A favourite source for an artist’s subject-matter was the Latin poet, Ovid’s, Metamorphoses, where things change into other things all the time – like the young woman Daphne pursued by Apollo turns into a laurel tree. Bernini couldn’t resist sculpting this in stone in the seventeenth century.

In ‘modern art’, this issue is both less and more complicated. For instance, putting a single wall (like that in Bingo) in a museum makes us see (and perhaps interpret) it differently.

The thing now in the museum (whatever it starts off as being named) is in a new context physically but also takes on the ability to mean more and different things to different viewers.  What happens when we put fur round a tea-cup? You’ll see this very thing so I won’t give the game away yet so you can ‘see’ it – whatever it is- for yourself.  In a complex sense, we recognise art as ‘strange’ when things we thought we ‘knew’ about now seem strange to us.

Even what looks like very ‘realistic’ painting of a real-world place, such as that in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, actually makes the world look queer - we see it from the stance of a grasshopper but yet we also see it in human dimensions, so that single bits of grass at the front of the picture as being as visible as Christina’s house on the horizon. Our sense of vision is ‘queered’ (it’s transformed). In Wyeth’s picture, this may help us to see3 the world as Christina as well as one containing Christina. If we take the time we learn that Christina (she was a real neighbour of Wyeth’s) could only mobilise comfortably by a kind of side-ways crawl over the ground. In this way art makes us see the world anew. Jump in! Enjoy it!