Approaching graduation, I find myself thinking about my years at art school and the things I’ve learned there.

We had this assignment in my first ever class at SAIC. It was a reading that basically said (at least, this is my memory of it 4 years later) just because it’s art that doesn’t mean it’s good. Looking back it was the perfect article for a first year class—welcome to art school you young punks. It’s a perspective I now take for granted. At the time, however, I remember it coming as a bit of a blow. It certainly went against a lot of what I thought of artmaking at the time.

The reading was “frivolity and unction” from Dave Hickey’s book Air Guitar.

Here are two books that explain grid systems well. The second link has some nice preview pages.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design/Raster Systeme Fur Die Visuele Gestaltung

Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop

Tim O’Donnell, one of my professors, once pointed out the problem of trying to describe subjective experience in objective terms. He followed this by asking a student to describe what it’s like to be them.

The perplexed student probably had a good idea what it was like to be them because they had been that way for a long time. The loss for words came from the inability to transmit that to another person. To such a simple question it follows that there is no language to answer it.

For further reading on the topic, it was suggested to read Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” The 1974 article takes these ideas and applies them to nonhuman proportions. It’s a short read and available online:

Thomas Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat?” [online text]