CONTEXTUAL STUDIES 2009/10

 

WRITING A REVIEW

 

ANISH KAPOOR AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

GUSTAV METZGER AT THE SERRPENTINE

TELLING TALES AT THE VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM

HAUNCH OF VENISON

TURNER PRIZE AT TATE BRITAIN

 

 

 

AIMS

This first Contextual Studies written piece is intended to encourage you to read reviews critically and to both write and design your own. As an art and design student you should be continuously involved in visiting exhibitions, watching tv programmes, reading magazines and journals, and, of course, using the internet to research artists and designers. We consider this to be important for your own practical work, not just for Contextual Studies. I recently suggested you might subscribe to a magazine appropriate to your intended specialism.

 

 A key aim in this particular exercise is to encourage you to write purposefully, giving really careful consideration to the ‘voice’, vocabulary, and design of your prose, with a clear sense of your intended readers. A further aim is to develop your presentation skills: I am very keen that you give a lot of care to the appearance of your review/study guide. Indeed the goal is to achieve a professional and authentic look. In recent years, students have produced work to a superb standard, their presentations achieving a real elegance of presentation. I think you should begin by looking at a range of examples and discover the way designers use the page creatively, arranging text in blocks, breaking up the grid, using white space creatively, and so on. Look closely at the use of ‘headers’ and ‘footers’ to create a consistent ‘house style’.

 

   More often than not students are asked to bring Contextual Studies work to their degree interviews.  The interviewer will want to see evidence that you can cope with the written element of all university degree course. The idea is to choose one of the exhibitions on our itinerary on Friday. (If you wish, you may choose the Turner Prize or go to Frieze in your own time as alternatives). You should give yourself time to make notes in your Moleskines and think about your reactions to your chosen exhibition. Whatever your responses, they should be your starting points, not the end of your analysis. Think about the curatorial thinking of the exhibition. Think about every aspect of the exhibition including the lighting, the text panels on the walls, the leaflet or guide. Think about how the space is used. Is the exhibition set out sympathetically? Does the work gain through clever juxtaposing of one piece against another? A good review of an exhibition will include a sense of the exhibition’s purpose and the success or failure in achieving this. Is the exhibition too didactic? Is it patchy, ill-conceived, shapeless? Or is it incisive, elegant, focussed? Try to adopt a critical vocabulary (this does not mean slagging things off, it means using evaluative and insightful language). This is your first Contextual Studies piece and I want you to make a real success of it.

 

WRITING THE REVIEW

 

So - begin by gathering together various reviews from a variety of sources. You can find reviews online and I have suggested that you set about gathering some reviews on paper over the last three weeks. Choose some specialist art and design journals from the library as well as some general newspapers or monthly magazines (Sunday Times, Observer, The Face, Pop, Vogue).

 

• I hope your visit to London will give the opportunity to look at your chosen exhibition very carefully. Obviously it will make for a very dull review if you simply work your way through a list of criteria, so you will need to plan your review or guide’s content and make notes. (You may even want to ‘draw’ your essay initially.)   What are reviews like? How much is description, how much opinion? How much factual information do you need? Will you try to include a little on each of the artists (if a group show) or select just a few? How will your review end?

 

•             Think about the style you adopt: will it be journalistic, scholarly, emotive, even outraged, lyrical, dry and disdainful, prosaic? Think how different critics write: Adrian Searle, say, compared to Matthew Collings , Brian Sewell, William Feaver, Sarah Kent, Richard Cork, Richard Dorment or Andrew Graham-Dixon? I read a review by Jonathan Jones today that typifies his ebullient style! Sometimes , these days, non-specialist celebrities are invited to write - David Bowie for example, used to write for Modern Painters. Make a plan of your review’s main points before you begin, and try to conclude powerfully. The reader should feel that he or she really wants to see the exhibition after reading your review. Your review should have whetted their appetites as well as given the overall flavour of the exhibition. Above all it must not be blandly descriptive. Avoid a shopping list approach at all costs.

 

·      Be sure to include the required factual information, too, for preference separately to your main text, in a box or to one side: where, when, entry cost, travel, disabled access, telephone, website, guest lectures, etc.

 

For this task, I want you to decide both who the reviewer is and the journal or newspaper for whom you are writing. In this you can be imaginative. Let’s imagine an editor is seeking a new ‘angle’ on the Gutav Metzger exhibition art the Serpentine, commissioning a fresh perspective: maybe you could write as Pete Townsend and include references to your (his) early involvement with Metzger’s auto-destructive movement.

 

This information, together with a word count, must be included on the cover slip I shall be giving you in a fortnight.

 

Please keep your entire project backed up on a USB stick.

 

 

 

PRESENTATION

In the interests of creating an authentic look, you might include a photograph of yourself (or someone else!) as the piece’s author, advertisement boxes, sudoku or crossword, etc. (But not too many, please!) This is not to be used as a device to pad out your review and, I would stress, is additional to the word count.   I want a full single or double page, in whatever format you feel suitable. Some students last year made their reviews so authentic in styling that they could easily pass for the ‘real thing’. If you know your way round a desktop publishing software package such as Indesign you will have ample resources for this project but Word is easily powerful enough to produce very smart presentations.   Look at the ‘house style’ of your chosen magazine or newspaper. Things to consider/include are:

 

·      the use of columns and text wrapping and thin black lines

·      the selection of a suitable font(s)and point sizes

·      the use of text styling (bullet points, headers and footers, banners, logos)

·      the incorporation of subheadings and illustrations, footers and headers

·      the spacing on the page (including the use of white space)

·      the use of colour for text and translucencies

 

Please be sure to spellcheck the text! (In fact, also have a friend proof your text.) And please please please avoid aswell for as well, definate for definite, seperate for separate, to for too, i for I, alot for a lot, effect or affect, defiantly for definitely. Avoid unthinking use of words such as incredible, weird, nice, cool, legend or wicked.)

Once it is all beautifully styled, it is is time to print out! Please be sure to use a good quality inkjet paper as the improvement in quality over standard paper is huge. Canon or Epson have some very fine papers in their ranges. Scan images at a minimum of 200 dpi - please avoid low resolution images from the net as these will pixellate badly even if they look fine on screen (that only needs 72 dpi to look good, you see). When it comes to handing in your work, put in into a clear plastic cover file together with the completed Cover Sheet I shall give you.

 

It is very important that you don’t ‘lift’ text from existing guides or reviews. Please write all of the text yourself.  All discovered plagiarism will obviously mean failing the task and can potentially mean failing the course. Plagiarism means using someone else’s words as though they were your own. It is cheating, put simply. It is a real problem now in universities, chiefly because of the internet. I know it is easy to cut-and-paste from the numerous sources freely available. It is crucial that you avoid this or you will really learn very little from this opportunity.

 

The minumum length for your review is 1200 words.

Don’t try handing in a review that is less than this minimum.

 

Learning Outcomes

 

On completing your review, you should have a heightened awareness of the nature of reviews and the rhetorical and presentational devices they employ. In order to construct your own review or guide, you will have needed to ‘deconstruct’ the reviews/guides of others. I would hope too that you might become a more sophisticated and discerning reader of reviews. You will also have gained experience in writing to a purpose, as well as consolidated key skills in presentation. 

 

The deadline for this task is the very first day of next term. If you miss the deadline, the maximum grade you can be awarded is a Pass. But, of course, you won’t miss that deadline. I am really looking forward to seeing some excellent work from each of you.  

Paul