"Visual Systems: The Quilter's Eye" by David Hornung

first of all I want to thank Peggy for inviting me and I want to also thank Peggy for curating that marvelous show upstairs it was such a treat to come here and suddenly be confronted with some I guess you could say old friends and and I mean that literally in some cases but also in my relationship to traditional quilts that you know I if you haven't seen this show and I suspect everyone in this room has you're really in for a treat and you better act quickly because it's coming down tomorrow I think the day after what I'm going to do is I'm going to read a few prepared remarks about two-dimensional design and I'm going to be showing you images from two-dimensional design classes I have taught that I'm not going to talk about I'm just going to run them as I make my remarks at the end of that time I'm going to get into a discussion of a few quilts traditional quilts and then I'm going to follow that with some images of some design projects I did with students freshmen were based on quilts I'd shown them in class so I'm delighted to be here and have the opportunity to talk about two subjects I happen to love traditional American quilts and design education and specifically the well known foundation course usually known as two-dimensional design now the question I have for you right off is how many people in here have ever taken a freshman design course a two-dimensional design course let me see your hands so I would say that's more than half the people in the room it's something it's a ubiquitous part of American art education has been for a long time so that's not really surprising how many people here have taught such a course a large number okay so I'm hoping that I'll be able to probably telling you stuff you already know but it's sort of interesting sometimes to get another teachers take on a subject that that you are working with yourself I've taught this course at eight different art schools and universities beginning as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1973 as someone who has had a lifelong fascination with the education of artists I've always regarded 2d to be uniquely challenging course of seminal importance while it is indeed an educational artifact of early modernism 2d design remains essential to contemporary art programs and here's why 2d design initiates the beginning art student into what might be called the structural subtext of all two-dimensional arts it proposes a grammar of form through the analysis of art in nature and complements that analysis with a flow of small projects that provides a physical engagement with a series of conceptual and perceptual discoveries of course design projects are teachers specific and vary in quality and in value the best ones in my opinion embody a set of fundamental principles with varying emphasis and with an interconnectedness that subtly reinforces those principles as the course progresses as anyone who is taught for more than a decade can tell you teaching conditions evolve of course there are differences from institution to institution I can assure you from personal experience that the classroom culture at a major art school is different from that at small liberal arts college but beyond that changes in the society at large have over the course of my teaching career change student attitudes and classroom performance one major change has been in student expectations about their work and its place in the world when I was a student and at the beginning of my teaching career almost no one I knew expected to make art with a capital A while at undergraduate school those of you here who are my age this will sound very familiar I think there was in fact among many students a sort of perverse pride and self-denial I remember a conversation I had with one of my students I'm sorry a conversation I had with one of my classmates about the gallery system when I was a senior art student and actually this contrast rather nicely with a class I said in on today it was really about career strategies well when I had this conversation with a student I asked him if he was going to try to find a gallery upon graduation when I asked him that he sniffed derisively and muttered something vaguely obscene about going commercial today students think of career almost from the beginning indeed there are in many programs at least one course devoted to career development something that would have been regard is unthinkable thirty years ago the world is different now and I'm not prepared to say that it's necessarily a bad thing given the galleries in New York routinely troll the graduate programs at Columbia Hunter and other New York schools for viable young prospects but I do believe that every artist benefits from periods of pure experimentation where there is no commercial end in sight in that respect 2d design is the purest of choices because it focuses on structural analysis and its projects are so prescribed 2d is essentially a laboratory course that cultivates formal awareness and rewards problem-solving within narrowly defined parameters sort of like playing tennis with a net along with color theory classes 2d design remains one of the last bastions of pure visual research and today's our curriculum I'm going to talk a little very briefly about the history of 2d and again it's to be familiar to a lot of you but it's interesting to remember this 2d design is a pedagogical artifact of modernism it probably has its origins in the Bauhaus in Germany in the 20s and 30s although it's clearly informed by the development of early 20th century art throughout Europe the curriculum at the Bauhaus encouraged a free flow of ideas across media and blurred the distinctions between the fine and applied arts it's natural therefore that the courses of study there favored the idea of transcendent formal values the writings of Wadley Kandinsky Paul clay Joseph fitten Josef Albers and Andy Albers all teachers at the Bauhaus heavily influenced the development of foundation design courses throughout 20th century other writers such as Arnheim GaN brick and Panofsky also contributed important theoretical literature about the construction and perception of two-dimensional images that's a Paul clay we're looking at there as you well know the foundation design curriculum is particularly ubiquitous in Britain in the United States its appeal bloomed with the advent advent of high modernism especially as espoused by Clement Greenberg who under the influence of 19th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that the fullest realization of any art form could only be arrived at through a rigorous contemplation of its own unique means and conditions as an educational tool 2d design how to contain an appeal to late modernists for its Frank examinations of the means by which memorable images and designs have been made throughout human existence but unlike Greenberg in formalism the tenants of two-dimensional design are expansive and inclusive rather than reductive and exclusive and it would be a mistake to see the two as synonymous as I sometimes hear nowadays from time to time if two-dimensional design could be said to favor a visual style that style will probably abstract and when not abstract tending toward a graphic rather than tonal representation of pictorial signifiers the typical design pedagogy seems to be based upon three assumptions ok assumption number one that there are a set of fundamental principles of design that are shared by the full range of two-dimensional disciplines which include painting illustration graphic design photography textile design drawing and printmaking number two assumption to but these principles are best examined and absorbed as an abstract subtext presented graphically that is in a manner that is essentially flat emphasizing a frontal read for even oblique shapes and three that our psychological response to the abstract features of two-dimensional imagery is often unconsciously based upon our kinetic experience in the physical world for example uh nagger unanchored diagonally can can engender a sense of anxiety or instability in the viewer while the image of a square resting on a line parallel to the bottom of a picture plane suggestibility that's a very simple and obvious example of that okay the principles of 2d design any list of what actually constitutes the principles of design is bound to excite argument this is a particularly due to semantics or partly due to semantics because people simply have different words for similar things but there are more serious disagreements about how one identifies and names visual phenomena that in fact are always seen and complex and synergistic context of a whole work of art although there would be bound to be overlapping concerns no to design teachers would be likely to agree completely on such a list and if you've ever attended a faculty meeting a freshman foundation where there's the honest put upon them from the high administration to come up with a universally agreed-upon curriculum you can see exactly what I mean by the kind of arguments that can erupt another way to check this will be to look at a survey of the chapter headings of current 2d design textbooks and you would see this is a very clear clear problem but fundamentally although they may disagree about its particulars most design teachers believe in the productivity of isolating elements of design for special consideration in the end it's not so important that we all agree on precise principles what's more important is that we use whatever principles we do endorse as a lens through which to examine the noticeable features of visual structure in art and nature the principles of designs however they are determined lend focus and vocabulary for a meaningful discussion discussion of art and design the visual examples that serve to illuminate design principles come from three major sources nature the visual environment particularly is captured photographically this is a marvelous photograph I found in New York Times about five days ago and finally the history of art and design this last category may include two-dimensional artifacts from any culture or any time and I have to save it right here this is one very contemporary aspect of 2d design instruction it's beautiful and encouraging that examples of design principles will be found in every culture at every epoch so you have instant multiple cultures multicultural education now there's one I want to talk a little about my own pension in my own teaching and the kind of imagery I like to look at I want to say that Western art especially where art in the Renaissance tradition such as Vermeer does exhibit the strength of I mean the strong principles of two-dimensional design but usually in what I would call immersive painting situations like a Vermeer now that what you're looking at here is a study a student did where the assignment was to translate a tonal language into a graphic visual language rendering Vermeer in gouache which forces the student to find flat tonal equivalent to a very subtle kind of plastic rendering in the actual painting but all the things we talked about in design are really evident in Western art however having said that personally I tend to favor art that is either abstract or that which is replete with visual duality this is a Matisse and what I mean by visual duality is art that makes reference to the visual world while at the same time acknowledges its own material condition and well we'll just stick with it what you saw briefly there was a piece of outsider art and then you saw a you tomorrow woodcut right good that's you passed the test and now we're looking at some 18th century samplers early 18th century samplers what all these that's a 19th century hooked rug what all these objects have in common is that they are frontal and they present visual duality and the last few examples I show are really examples of American vernacular design which I'm personally very partial to I love using American vernacular design like things like quilts and samplers and things like that because they have such humble origins and yet the design in many cases is so extremely sophisticated I think it's easy for students to relate to it to find this kind of sophistication in such an unexpected place sometimes which brings me to the quilt part of the presentation and I'm going to attempt to not trip over this wire and continue the conversation you probably could teach an entire can you still hear me I'm out of red okay you probably can teach an entire 2d course just using american quilts and I have done whole sections based on the quilt because it turns out that the variety of form is enormous and quilts exhibit whatever your list of principles of design are I assure you you'll find them in American quilts this is an African American quilt from the 20th century and what I without creating a list that we could argue about I will say that almost everybody in this room would probably agree that one fundamental design principle is the tension between unity and diversity and design you know so you have to have cohesion or the design is incomprehensible but you also have diversity or the design is boring right and it's really interesting to study objects in particular that really try to fall in that zone in between the two and the first few things I'm going to show you here think are good examples of that this design obviously has a very unified color scheme black and red very simple but the simplicity of the color scheme actually contributes to spatial ambiguity in a very interesting way and the way you're I guess some call them rivets and attention you can run through this I do have a pointer actually if I can technically challenged individual here we go the little channels of black and how they moved through the piece and create almost like a musical line through the piece while at the same time you have this simultaneous very physical almost sculptural presence of what almost is akin to a brick wall so there's a fluidity to the piece and also a kind of a structural strength and diversity and unity this is another piece this is a I think this is the early 19th century quilt pictorial quilt done mostly in applique and you if you don't know applique is when you sew pieces down on top of a quilt as opposed to piecing when is when you join pieces together and often quilts combine the two this one has pieced elements some of these blocks like here I think there is a piece grid in the middle of this in fact this is probably appliquéd before it was pieced in fact it may have been advocated by different people it has a little bit of the quality of a friendship quilt or like Phoebe Warner okay so it's one person but when you agree that's how it was probably put together it was assembled yeah anyway one of the things about this piece in addition to the principle of unity and diversity is the quality of shape and I think that's it's something that it's something to pay attention to when you're when you're teaching 2d design to get students to cultivate a sense of a refinement of refined we appreciation I guess of the character of shape the quality of contour and in this case the the way in which natural forms are reduced to very eloquent two-dimensional design forms or decorative forms it's another african-american quilt I think this one really pushes the envelope of unity and diversity and it's cohesive it has this large central element I think stabilizes it but there's this wonderful energy and almost a sense of chance and chances incidentally another good source of design ideas and the idea of intermingling chance and deliberate design which is procedural I think procedural issues are things that we talked about in two-dimensional design the way designs are conceived this is a very simple mostly applicate appliquéd print print I mean a placated quilt another thing about quilts and unfortunately it doesn't show up in any of these slides and when I show close to my class is in these forms they vary see very little of the quilt line itself so there's a whole part of quilt making that really isn't available to the slideshow and that's what you'll see upstairs when you go up and you see how richly the quilt line integrates with the pattern on the top and to me the quilt line is kind of a conceptual it's a beautiful conceptual thing because it unites the front and the back it really announces that the piece is a sculptural object this is actually not a quilt it's a woollen coverlet that was made in the 18th century I think around 1770 I'm correct and it's a very atmospheric piece and it has this wonderful quality of a sense of purpose but also wistful it almost reminds me of like looking into a riverbed or a creek bed and you're seeing these elements against the darkness at the bottom of the river floating by on top and the delicacy of the line and particularly these little these little leaf elements that are more subtle because they're close in value to the background but the way they create different degrees of contrast like the greatest contrast obviously in the lightest elements and then this subtle range the spray of darker elements so there's many different volume levels in this piece people don't see these things unless you point them out to them in general to me the relation between language and visual imagery is a very troubled one the problem being the language is linear and takes place in time and images are simultaneous and take place all at once there's also the problem of trying to provide a road map a linguistic road map as a way to enter a piece of visual art and I think it's always problematic it tends to make people notice only one aspect of the piece however I would say that especially with freshmen it's amazing if you ask them to describe a piece before you describe to them how little they're seeing you actually have to coax it out of them and I've always maintained a descriptive criticism is largely undervalued in contemporary art education for me you should earn the right to interpret through rigorous description and description describing is noticing so it's an important part of design education this is nama squill of course color is another issue if you just want to talk about quilts for color alone you could talk for days because they're so often so subtle and so intelligent I used to get questions when I talked about quilts in the past from audience audience is really skeptical that the women that made these quilts actually did it on purpose and that always floored me you like you could put a pile of fabric scraps on the floor and wait for years before it assembled itself into a quilt you know and also the the subtle anomalies in this piece for example I mean there's this sense of symmetry there's the grid and the stability that the grid offers but then playing against the grid are these anomalous little moments of color and surprising value like right here for example and even the subdivision of that block you know that don't really adhere to the logic of the whole and I often use in my class I use the analogy of music where in music you have a steady beat and then you have a melody that rhythmically aligns itself against the beat and what happens is a level of interest that can't be explained simply by the addition of one element to the other it's like an exponential increase of acoustical interest and I think it's very much what happens in visual art with pattern a lot of times there's another one I love this one this is again a checkerboard we have to be you know by definition one of the dullest of all possible designs because it's so predictable but look what they're doing in the lighter blocks and how they're setting up these little counter rhythms that really don't follow a strict script I don't think about quilts is this quality of inner life to me there's well today it's very unfashionable to use the word spiritual so we don't talk like that anymore but let's just say psychologically satisfying inner light emanating from inside the color of many quilts because of the way they organize the color sometimes people question whether these things are art I don't know what else you'd call them I mean I sure behaved like art they affect me the way art affects people I can't be alone I don't think I'm alone in that right this is a log-cabin I'm going to show you a run of log-cabin patterns because log cabins are I think it's one of the most versatile of all quilt patterns a very simple pattern very ancient pattern but when I show you these log cabin quilts you can see how differently they're manifested by virtue of basically the organization of the color and I was thinking about something the other day about how I don't know if I was talking to Michael about this that's a great one yeah streak of lightening I think that's coming yeah they're very satisfying to contemplate and you can really look at them for a long time and see fresh things forever and forever really and there's this quality of let and layering and it's beautiful when you have this deep quality of layering in a quilt because at the same time you have to quit line which tells you that this is a stitched object it really refers to the picture plane very emphatically so you have this paradox all quilts have this but particularly quilts to have these complexity pattern layers I was talking to somebody about the nature of vision we're talking about color and only what it was is the color class I was teaching other day the in fact vision the active vision is really your retina recording colored pattern bits of colored pattern and your mind interpreting it so for example you don't see roundness you see a basketball lying across a room that's lit from the side you're not really seeing around this you're seeing a pattern that your mind interprets is round this that's why for example you've probably seen this optical illusion where concave a concave like a series of egg carton a concave image can be mistaken for a convex image where you can't quite make out whether it's going this way or if it's going this way the reason for that the reason for any optical illusion is that those are cases where the mind becomes frustrated in its ability to decode pattern okay so my theory of the week my theory of the week is that one of the reasons why things like this are very satisfying to look at is because in a way they they represent the way we see most literally they don't ask us to understand them as roundness or anything else there's a kind of a satisfying relaxation in being confronted with flat pattern it's almost like a de vista core it's like our reptile the reptile part of our brain know that the reptile brain you've heard that the reptile brain says thank you when we see a pattern another this is another log cabin I love the perforation a little white perforation that kind of penetrates the whole piece at the square and the squares here extremely small the scale the square makes a big difference another log cabin this one I think shows better than all the others the the actual pattern but you can see what they do with the little pink that's the one consistent thing this little pink element in the center it's it's four triangles two pink and two black or dark brown and that's the consistent thing that's a little belt it goes off and every square but everything around it is highly mobile and varied and this is not a log cabin obviously what I like about this quilt a good example of figure-ground ambiguity and figure-ground ambiguity or positive negative space ambiguity this is something I think most design teachers would say something should be taught two-dimensional design and the reason for that is because it gets the student to see the whole picture playing as an active element most people when they come out of the citizenry and they become arts students come in with the idea that a picture is the thing they're representing and the space around it is of secondary importance when in fact there's so much psychological potential and expressive potential in the integration of those two elements so this is a good example of that this piece I think it's one of the most mind-numbing ly interesting and compelling quilts I've ever seen I just love the way via logic of locking those little pictorial elements into this tumbling block and particularly these elements that exist at the corners of the you know it's just so satisfying it has has the density of a Richard Serra sculpture for me you know it's just so dense and and the irrationality of it you know these little sort of symbolic elements this is the 19th century quilt I'd love to meet the person who made this and this is called a bowtie quilt and this is a good example of two patterns kind of running over each other and integrating and there's a tremendous amount of visual energy this obviously held together very much by the color it's it's a primary triad basically but a real flickering animated design and then yeah there's a real idler this one the the radial quality of the of the quilt is really exacerbated by the choice of print here which had a wavering line that the the quilt maker saved for the center and it's really kind of astonishing it's an astonishing piece of sewing - this is hand piece long diamond shapes you know I don't think anybody alive today would be able to do this you know just like they don't go mad they'd be dead but yeah so mindful of time limitation I just want to show you some design projects that we did now I had a little session in my design class little section where we did all our designs with rubber erasers using a rubber stamp pad and at the beginning I taught them a few temple simple techniques a technique I call ghosting which is where you do a second you print on another piece of paper then you get a lighter version so you can have several layers of discernable value coming off the same eraser block Statler Mars makes these square racer blocks that can be used for this another one is masking where you've masked part of the square to create other shapes like triangles or more eccentric shape so you can cut like a curved shape and stenciling which is related to that but that's where you actually cut a hole in the center of a piece of paper and you stamp over it so using those three basic techniques we created a range of pattern istic design we categorize the designs like this is an exercise in centrifugal pattern and there are many examples of American quilts that use this pattern the most recent one with the one we just saw at starburst it's another example of it's a little bit like that block design where you create the implication of a three-dimensional solid on the most simple way actually just two colors a but in this one the white of the page really has a lot to do with success of the illusion this is what we call an all-over pattern and there's it's not just making a pattern like that's the assignment there has to be a certain amount of gracefulness in the solution ingenuity discovery and aesthetics God forbid you know we actually still talk about aesthetics and two-dimensional design later on you learn to eschew aesthetics when you get to your upper level Theory classes but for the time being I think it's in order to really understand anti aesthetics you have to understand aesthetics first so we talk about things like proportion is the run of all over patterns done with rubber stamps and this is an exercise in layering trying to get a sense of patterns being seen over patterns in this case the white element is floral leaf elements are basically masks of paper and then they're stamped around so but they look like positive rather than negative elements so there's a kind of procedural irony there in this one these little blips are you they use the pencil eraser to make those little elements there are a lot of ideas attendant to aren't making that can be taught at the same time you do this like for example teaching freshmen about letting go of a mechanical sense of perfection and learning to appreciate the nuance that comes from the process itself that's a really a big art idea that's one of the things that is the beginning of sophistication and visual art so you begin to understand that the process itself has a life that you have to respect or do you can respect again later on when you become a postmodernist you can ignore all that but it's an important thing because high school kids don't even begin thinking about those things in their normal life it's a real revelation to freshmen particularly so when I just happen to love I love the missing piece here I think that's very much in the spirit of the American quilt you know and also the way sheet is another thing that is I really stress I always try to get them to think about the edge of the format and to treat every aspect of the page is equally important that's true of great art I mean if you look at there aren't any weak spots in a Vermeer if you look at an Indian miniature you know nothing is blown off you know everything not that everything is equally detailed but there's a sense of purpose in every part of a great work of art oh this is interesting exercise where we establish a pattern and then I encourage them to sort of play against the pattern with elements either randomly or knowingly and we talk about things like true randomness and true chance and the illusion of chance and if that's even possible and also strategies of making like a strategy of think and do which is like architecture where you totally plan something out and execute it as opposed to a more empirical style you actually realize the piece in the process of making and again these are also big important ideas in an entry level design class now these are designs that are not true patterns but pattern istic so they have the cloud and and also the definition of a pattern for our purposes was regular elements at regular intervals okay regular antal elements at irregular intervals is not a pattern but then you get into the issue of Patt the perfection of a pattern is really a function of distance like to the to one power of a microscope a salt crystal s it looks like a perfect diamond but then when you go in closer you see the imperfections so and then taking a step taking a step further we talk about pattern as metaphor and I think this is an important idea because you get under students to understand that the abstract language the underlies pictorial and visual organization in Art and Design actually conveys meaning and it does it mostly in two ways either through analog or through metaphor analog is when what I was talking about earlier way a diagonal effects of psychologically and how it's analogous to experiences we have in the real world metaphor it's more to do with I think the unconscious the way the unconscious mind recognizes familiar processes of thought so for example a pattern like a fully-realized pattern like a checkerboard would be a pattern that is not lifelike because the way we think is something that exists in time and in our thought processes are always in flux and we also lose memory so there's this quality of erosion so thinking about pattern as a metaphor for qualities of consciousness or the act of thinking this is if you look at that pattern in that way it's very interesting it's like an idea in the becoming you know and this - you know there's a semblance of order and assemblance of predictable but there's also uncertainty you know and you know of course this is a matter of interpretation and there's no right answer but if you get freshmen and start thinking about even abstract systems as relating to something real and not mere decoration I think you're well on the way to getting them into a higher level of sophistication and a fuller engagement with history of art in the world this is about patterns that dissolve and we talked about memory loss when we did this exercise about trying to have a pattern that denoted the quality of memory loss of course that's a subject near and dear to me because I'm 58 years old but you know it's really nice eighteen year olds their memories are just as bad as mine but I'm desperately trying to remember and they just don't give a damn this is another one this one in this one they really stayed with a hard like absolute kind of black-white sort of design this is very rich design actually and this is a good example of the foreground background ambiguity positive negative and of course all these illustrate many principles simultaneously so and that's always in the conversation this would be a good example of a pattern istic design but not a pattern and it relates lots of natural forms obviously and of course nature is always behind this I think nature and art are the best teachers and I will say this I think that there's not enough emphasis on nature in a lot of contemporary design classes I think we've gotten away from that too much although of course I did have the experience of showing my class one time I showed them the movie rivers and tides you know that movie uh Andy Goldsworthy and we watched the film and they all patiently watched the film I was very proud of them I turned the lights on and I said anyone have anything to say and this young woman my class goes I hate nature this is an interesting one on the left it was made with a kneaded eraser and trying to control you know the way the image moved and these little elements of transparency are quite beautiful and this is one very like a quilt where you have an element that's repeated and inverted rotated to create what I love about this is you can actually see the way it was made it's a real sense of process in that piece another one time this is a good example of a ghosting technique and and then sometimes people will actually cut the block and create something more like a printmaking exercise but sometimes I don't let them do that till they've gotten really bored with working with a square and then I delight them by saying get out your exacto knives they love just a little bit of freedom if you're a total fascist a little bit of freedom really they really savor it and then these are some free designs that we started talking about like can you really make something that isn't cohesive at all and what's really interesting is after they take enough design class they have a hard time doing that you know I mean I think these are marvelous designs and typically the one were left with use of text and what text brings to the the image and a couple examples of painted designs now these were done they're gouache paintings that were made when I first started teaching it Indiana University back in the 70s I had all these farm kids who were like they had the work ethic to end all work ethics it was amazing it would do anything I wish I could think of something more impressive for them to do but they painted these amazing look at this pattern this is an astounding this is three patterns overlaps and each pattern has its own set of intervals they line up in different places each time I could never get a contemporary freshman to do this no way I I couldn't do it you know I wouldn't have the patience to do the sounds like that's one there is a little evolution in history of our consciousness this is another beautiful hand-painted design and finally the last one this interesting assignment where each person created a block what wasn't a block as a rectangle but basically positive negative the idea was to try to give equal weight to the positive and negative to come up with a design and the mandate was that we curve a linear okay and then we put it together and this really is very like a quilt situation and then you get these interesting places where one block weeks into the other and you have these long runs and so they get this sense of the collective and then going back to the quilt the community aspect of quilt making the friendship quilt the autographed quilt and the quilting bee itself so so basically this is the way we I mean in my classes I sort of digested the lessons of the American quilt okay that's my talk

Channel: International Quilt Museum

Views: 1,260

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: quilt, quilts, art, david hornung, international quilt study center & museum, quilt house, museum

Id: ejAZbFZj2g4

Length: 42min 0sec (2520 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2017