Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

by Paper Monument (Editor), n+1

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: the Art of the Art Assignment is a unique and wide-ranging anthology featuring essays, drawings, and assignments from over 100 contributors including: John Baldessari, William Pope.L, Mira Schor, Rochelle Feinstein, B... Full description

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Teaching, Design, Education, Essays, Visual Art

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Arie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun read with moments of utter brilliance.

[Bart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pleasant enough little book that often serves as nothing so much as a reminder of how little art schools have to offer, despite themselves.

Whether rebelling against universities run like corporations, rehashing sex debates from the 1960s, or refusing to answer the book's simple request - provide the best art lesson you've been offered, or offered yourself - the hundred or so teachers featured in Draw It with Your Eyes Closed meet so many stereotypes adults associate with college students that the book is hard to enjoy, no matter the insights held in many of the lessons offered by teachers willing to follow the book's simple assignment.

This is not a book one would recommend to anyone considering paying for art school. As no one actually does this - either through grants, scholarships, sponsorship or student-loan default, no one uses his own money on a two-year art program - one might recommend this book to actual art-school students or graduates of such programs.

Coincidentally, the reader who may garner the most from this book, garner it in the form of relief, is the reader who did not attend art school. Better to have set to work directly on finger-painting, really, than chance upon a professor - like so many in this book - who does not believe in giving assignments or any other sort of direction because it might impede either himself as a teacher or his student as a student.

For that much is not lost on anyone who reads this entire book: Few of the professors are teachers, but all of their students are students; the artists, after all, are somewhere else, making art, while so much for-profit instruction happens at the academy.

[AraLucia Ashburne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wide variety of artists offer their favorite MFA art assignments; clever, intriguing, inspiring and sometimes humorous. This book offers creative and innovative opportunities with both depth and breadth: some doable, some impossible (just to see where they will take you). It was an absolute delight as a read and as an experience and one I will go back to over and over for many years to come. If I could only take a single book to a desert island this would be it.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emma Komlos-Hrobsky (Editorial Assistant, Tin House Magazine): The book I’ve looked for excuses to talk about all year (2012) is Draw it With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment edited by Dwight Garner. The book compiles personal accounts of memorable art school tasks, particularly stories of battle raged with intrinsically impossible assignments and the attendant humiliation/pain/suffering/revelation they caused. (My favorite features performance art with a grilled cheese sandwich and an adult squeezed into a kid-sized Spiderman suit.) The stories hit home if you’ve ever slept on a studio floor rolled up in your own canvas while trying to figure out what it would mean to make an objective painting. Even if you haven’t, it’s a delight to think about how to outwit or outlast the prompts’ absurdities and hear tell from the brave souls who did just that.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

As an art educator (not studio professor), I enjoyed several bits of this book. It reaches, often, towards the unnameable, difficult-to-recreate aesthetic experiences that motivate us to make art in the first place. Much of it feels like it's meant to be photocopied and hung in art departments - in a good way. I would recommend it either before or after watching Art School Confidential.

[Shelley · Rating 4 out of 5]

worth a look, for artists or most other humans. Excellent for looking at art, better for problem solving. I would say to skip any that are overly-- precious or self-important.
And get to work.
There are deadlines.

[Nicola · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating. I no longer regret not going to art school, and the variety of voices was great. It was very thought-provoking.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A serious manual on why you should avoid art school.

[Peter Derk · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book made me pretty confident that it's impossible to accidentally do witchcraft or conjure a demon or whatever. If that was possible, surely one of these art assignments would have stumbled into something like that by now. "Shit, I just told them to make something formless, then to create a form to hold their formless form, and then a goddamn topless woman with huge jugs and feathery wings crashed up from the floor and started spitting acid at people, and now I have to find 3 more students to take the class and replace the ones who died, otherwise the enrollment is too low and the class will be cancelled, plus the topless bird woman wants to take the class and has worked with the Disability and Access Center on campus and really given me one heck of an accommodation letter that, well, I don't even know where to begin with. Is being born in Hell a disability? Sort of seems like it would be, certainly doesn't set you up for success, but we don't really call being born anywhere on Earth a disability..."

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5-4

i’m definitely not the target audience here, and i’m sure i would’ve gotten more out of this book if i was a working artist or an art school student. i’d highly recommend if you’re looking for new approaches to art-making since the plethora of voices in this book give you so many directions, funny anecdotes, and literal assignments to work with. only reason i’m not rating this higher is two-fold: certain longer essays included that felt redundant/didn’t add to the book’s overall conversation and that museum/art non-profit educators are left out

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full of interesting ideas for instructions to give students to see how far they can improvise and bend ideas past the obvious responses. Only thing is, so many of these assignments would never be allowed in the current art school context due to WHS legislation and other policies that have come in since the writers took these classes. But the potential!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall not a terrible book to read. It had some entries that were fun/brilliant/informative but many of them were long winded stories (some good and some bad). I did end up bookmarking a large number of the pages though. Worth picking up if you can find it for a good price.

[Danae · Rating 3 out of 5]

Este libro es un recurso fantástico, lo he usado mucho en las clases que hago.

[Yokusun Basi]

Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment by Paper Monument (2012)

[Romie · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no way to say this and not sound obnoxous: I am among other things a conceptual artist and one of my preferred mediums is the art assignment. I would say "fake" art assignment, since I don't teach art, but they're not fake; sometimes people do them, sometimes with the blessing of cultural institutions. However, nobody's required to and the point isn't whether they get done. They are to teaching what Diana Vreeland's "Why Don't You" column is to fashion advice.

In that spirit, I like this book very much. Although some of the contributors offer real teaching assignments which might help a student mature in his or her own work, and a handful indulge in tedious shoegazing about the pointlessness of art school, the book feels for the most part like an excellent dinner party at which everyone tells their best anecdotes.

The finest examples rival the best fiction in The Paris Review; my particular favorites are Alfredo Gisholt's "Clandestine Drawing," about a secret weekly drawing class in a basement in Mexico City in the middle of the night, and Brad Farwell's account of a whismical cake-based architecture project that went terribly and predictably wrong.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 90 artists/teachers reflect on and/or share about the most successful or unsuccessful art assignments given or received. There were some humorous anecdotal stories sprinkled throughout some straightforward assignment explanations. Also, general art theory talk about teaching and learning art. I will use some of the assignments for my own inspiration, and while most of the assignments are either inappropriate or too advanced for a younger audience there were still some gems that I can adapt to work in a younger classroom. I enjoyed reading this book and took a lot of notes from it.

[Elisa R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. So much variety in response, and even outside of art assignments, my favorites including radical critique methods, the intimate questionnaire of Paul Thek, and the important refusal of assignments in entirety. Definitely recommend to both students and teachers, **especially** art students in their first year.

[Ryan Hill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book has the look of a 70's newsprint manual on conceptualism. But its actually a compendium of a variety of practices and sensibilities. Historically interesting, but not completely useful for my classroom teaching.

[Ally · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fun :D

[Nicole Geary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed it - I read this book in no particular order, mostly by picking it up and going to random selections and then reading until I was satiated.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great art tips and assignments from various art instructors for every age.

[Mills College Library]

707.1 D767 2012