Response to a Meaningful Cultural Work

Exploring art, music, film, television, dance, writing or any other work of culture. “Work of culture” refers to any work produced as a reflection upon human thought, experience, or spirituality.

1. Choose a work of culture that you connect with deeply, one that has provided you with valuable meaning. Explore why you connect with this work, how it made you feel, whether the ideas it made you think about were interesting to you. Write a lot of notes about your reaction to it, how your own life experience may have connected you with this work. Think about the choices made by its maker in order to create the experience that you had. Simply describing what you see is a good way to get the ball rolling, and it helps you notice a lot more about the work. Explore form and content by making two columns in your notes, one for “Form” and one for “Content”. Can you connect specific aspects of form with their corresponding expression of content? For example, van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” uses many short brushstrokes in a circular pattern (form), which expresses a feeling of rhythmic dancing motion across the composition (form), creating a feeling that we can experience the night sky as a giant swirling universe (content). Use the list you make to help you write the essay.

2. Explore the three forms of evaluation we have discussed throughout class. Each of these apply to any maker of a cultural work since the “arts” includes everything we consider artistic production. Formal: the visual elements. The artistic period in which the artist works and the artistic ideas to which she responds. Contextual: the world beyond the artist that informs his work; may be scientific, political, social, environmental, etc. Expressive: the artist’s identity and biography. How the artist expresses her own personal point of view and who she is. If you choose to visit an art museum or gallery for this journal, the art venues in our region that you can visit are: Penn State Abington Art Gallery, Abington Art Center, Michener Art Museum (Doylestown), Quaker Meeting House in Chestnut Hill (James Turrel’s Skyspace) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), New York City galleries and. 

3. Writing - The response you write must be between 700-1000 words - Your essay should contain detailed descriptions of the works you discuss. Include observations using formal, contextual, and expressive analysis. All of these elements should support a broad point you are making about the work. - As with any essay, you can use information you find through research, but it must be rephrased in your own words.

4. Presenting Bring the work of art to class or present it as a reproduction on the projector. You will give a 3-5 minute oral presentation on this work. Movies/TV should be presented as a still image or a clip, music should be a section of a song, a written work should be presented as an excerpt. Bring a laptop, a USB, or email it to me ahead of time.

5. Grading Your journal will be assessed on whether your oral presentation is satisfactory and whether your written submission uses all of the elements discussed in class, and how sophisticated an argument you make with supporting examples. Additionally, the goal is to see if you connect deeply with a cultural work, so if you find something that truly speaks to you the chances are that you’ll do well with this assignment.