Curriculum:

What happens in Mr Tait's class?

Statement of Purpose:

The Soft Discipline.

I teach Art. This means many things to me, my students and to anyone else to whom I speak about my job. A standard response from adults to my introducing what I do is,

“Well that must be fun!”

It is, indeed, fun.

Others will comment on the subjectivity of defining Art or observe the preciousness of the Arts such as they are encountered at a museum or an opera house. There is truth in these reactions as well. Still more will address in an abstract sort of way the cultural necessity of Art as one might who is not particularly interested in Biology would try to describe the concept acquired during some long ago freshman class of what mitochondria do . Even still more will grow blank and find something else to talk about. These reactions bear a certain honesty as well, for, just like those who see in Art and the study of Art as party or pretension, these reactions belie a broad disconnect between the nature of Art, particularly as an academic discipline, and society in general.

That’s where I come in.

You will find the details in the Unit Overviews and Classroom Policy sections and peek at the labor in the Images section, so I will spare a great deal of description here, but my purpose is simply to have students understand that humans are visual organisms and that our perception of the world, provided that we are sighted, is based enormously on our vision; it dictates or emotions to us, determines a great number of our decisions in life and shapes how we conduct ourselves through life. The Visual Arts, in all of its idioms, is the deliberate engagement of this fact of human reliance upon sight for the purpose of communication among people. Simply put, in Art, humans have taken a natural process and adapted it to our human world. This adaptation, as with Music, Writing, or Mathematics becomes codified into agreed upon formal concepts and methods in order to be understood by groups of people and be taught and developed by successive generations. These fundamentals are the building blocks of the myriad experience of visual life in the human realm.

In sum, this means that we find Art not only in museums, but in every facet of our lives, from the clothes we wear and the cars we drive to the sports we play and the TV we watch to the money we transact with and the leaders we elect and the religions we practice. The principles of Art make writing possible regardless of the language or alphabet. Art plays the symbolic intermediary in those things which are difficult or impossible to visualize. The same communicative power that makes History, Mathematics, Religion and Music transmittable amongst people lets us imagine the faces of gods. Art is the language of seeing. And that is the point I intend to make to my students.

Of course, it is of necessity to the creation of an effective learning sphere that students be engaged by this process, having fun and creating pieces worthy of their intentions. As well, that they do so in the environment of mutual support and respect for the individual regardless of the orientation of their approach to life, learning and creating described by the Holy Cross Mission.

That’s what I do.