How To Work on Work
Questions for Project Critique, Analysis and Development
 
Below are the kind of questions I find myself posing to students (as well as myself and other artists) about their work. A project rarely just springs fully formed from the artist's mind. The process of development and revision requires questioning and experimenting on conceptual and material levels. If you reach an impasse--try a different strategy.
 
There is no substitute for actually working on the piece. Don't wait until you feel you have it all "figured out." If you're making a video, just get the camera out and start experimenting. This doesn't mean that you're not responsible for the final content, just that there is no formula for developing an artwork. Question your ways of working as thoroughly as you do your subject matter.
 
Getting "hands-on" and/or talking the project out with someone else are what I find to be the two most helpful activities.
 
 
1. Describe your idea to yourself, try and find out what it is really about. For instance, you have a desire to make something about "urban experience" and imagine photographs of crowds downtown. When you think about it, is it actually "urban experience" or "images of the crowd" which interest you? Are you making assumptions-before you have even "recognised" or examined you idea- about the fact that "photographs of crowds" really do evoke "urban experience" as you are imagining?
 
2. Will the medium you are considering really convey your ideas? For instance, if your real desire is to produce feelings of confinement, or a hectic pace, or trying to instil some kind of fear in the audience, photographs may not be the best medium as they tend to assume a certain distance, both spatial and temporal, between the viewer and the image. Is the medium appropriate to the topic or is it just the one you are most comfortable working in?
 
3. What is your work saying/assuming about the "nature" or genre of the medium? If, to stick with our example, you are still thinking of using photographs of urban locations in your work, are you considering the history of documentary photography?
 
4. What are the broader cultural references in the work or the idea, and do they make sense for your piece? For instance, if you have made a soundscape that is three and a half minutes long, are you unwittingly referencing the duration of the average pop song?
 
5. Could your piece take on another scale? Should it be larger? Smaller? Longer? Shorter (duration)? Should it be louder or softer etc. etc.? What does the scale relate to? Human scale? Miniature?
Monument? Think about what meaning the scale lends to the work.
 
6.What is the physical relationship of the work to the viewer? Does it indicate-as a large painting or a loud noise might-that the viewer should stand far away? Should the viewer move around the work? Is there a way you can situate it in the space which invites people to physically engage. Is the work hung high or low? Is the viewer immersed in the work or can they stand back? Do the implications of the viewer's physical relationship suityour ideas?
 
7. Will there be audience interaction/participation, if so, is it meaningful? It seems that many artists currently seem to accept a de facto positive value in having the audience "interact" with the work. Are all interactions necessarily "positive"? The usual argument is that any interaction with the work is positive because is breaks down an assumed hierarchy or division between the viewer and the art. What does it mean to give a viewer a meaningless or perfunctory interaction? One's life is full of just such interactions, and they do little to fundamentally alter power relations.
 
8. What is the experience you want the viewer to have-how would you characterise it? Analytical? Experiential? A reflective experience that will come back to them later? An experience that is shocking, pleasing, confrontational, or uncomfortable?
 
9. Break down the elements in the work and check them against your ideas and against each other. Are all the elements "necessary" or are some of them ideas you have grown attached to, but which no longer really fit the parameters of the piece. Remember that you don't have to do or say it all in one art work. Presumably you have lots of years of art-making ahead of you.
 
10. What are the foreground/background relationships/hierarchies in the work, could they be changed? If, for instance, you have a voice and some music on a soundtrack, does the music always have to be "behind" the voice, or should it occasionally overwhelm it? In a more metaphorical vein: if there are a variety of elements in your work could their importance or dominance (their foregrounding) be shifted around?
 
11. Compositional considerations of rhythm, movement, flow, created by colour, line, shape, editing, sound, etc. You may think that your piece doesn't have a compositional principal, think about it again, observe the organisation of elements, sketch it out as if it was a composition, if it takes place over time, map it on a graph etc. Is you piece "single voiced" multi-voiced" does it have a narrative arc? SoIs there a strong sense of beginning middle and end? Is the composition as appropriate to your ideas?
 
12. What kind of relationship to the conventions and codes of representation-which are employed to produce meaning -is indicated in the work? Stuart Hall defines representation as "the process by which members of a culture use language (broadly defined as any system which deploys signs, any signifying system)."
 
Representation as we are discussing it here does have to do with the readability of an image but that readability is not directly related to whether a work is imagistic, pictorial, abstract, etc. Some artists make images which stress their own "unreadability." They risk their work being "meaningless" because they don't want to replay or perpetuate (exhausted?) codes and conventions of representation. Both Malevich's Black Square (1913) and Gerhard Richter's Grey Paintings (1960's) have been discussed in these terms. Other artists, such as Andy Warhol, make something which employs a very conventional cultural sign (Marilyn Monroe or Campbells Soup) but in the way they reproduce or situate the work a relationship to the very possibility or impossibility of making cultural meaning, is indicated. Other artist's such as Jeff Wall, or the film maker Jean Luc Goddard, employ an idea of "genre" (a tradition of history and genre painting in the case of Wall and the B Movie in the case of early Goddard) to make the work readable by a large audience.
 
I don't mean to suggest that you should, or should not resist the codes of representation which inform your media (be it painting, sculpture, video, language or a combination thereof) but rather that our art work is alwaysalready involved in establishing such relationships. Therefore, the more conscious we can be of these "ways of speaking", the more purposeful we can be about our relationships with the social codes and conventions of representation. Remember that representation is not a likeness to the world around us, but a "process by which members of a culture use. . . any signifying system."