Modern Art Movements Essays in Art and Design History Course

Istanbul Gelisim University (IGU), Faculty of Fine Arts (FFA) Department of Communication and Design faculty members Asst. Prof. Dr. Çağlayan Hergül evaluated the works of the students within the scope of the Art and Design Lesson.

The 2021-2021 academic year has come to an end. We have come to the end of our Art and Design History course, which we have been interested in for a year. We watched and learned together the breathless adventure of art from the cave paintings and figurines of the Paleolithic period people to the present day. We have enriched our visual memory by following the periods of art history. Many of our friends, despite being in different departments, brought a new perspective to their lives with this visual feast. After that, it was time to evaluate these experiences in the further education processes.

Aside from this whole process, various experimental activities to ensure the permanence of most of the knowledge conveyed in Art and Design History courses was something I had been considering since the beginning of the term but could not find the opportunity to practice. In terms of practice, it was clear that distance education was also pushing the possibilities. However, in the second semester, we had the opportunity to practice these in my Communication and Design Department, where we continued face-to-face education. Our first attempt was to make a very successful drama of Jacques "Louis David's Death of Socrates" by our Kaan Chief Bath student. I saw that the applied drama was a very good reinforcer in remembering the names of this movement and its artist. In the following lessons, especially when we came to modern art movements, we realized that there was an experimental freedom for practice, and we did a few studies.

Creating Dada Poetry and Writing Surrealist Poetry

In particular, poets are at the center of many of the 20th century art movements. Guillaume Apollinaire in Cubism, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara in Dada, Tomasso Marinetti in Futurism, Andre Breton, Louis Aragon and Federico Garcia Lorca in Surrealism can be given as examples. In these movements, we see a modern culture that shows that poetry is not much different from painting and the poet from the painter. “Poetry is the written form of the painting, and the painting is the poem wrapped in lines and colors,” I said many times in lectures. Under the theme, we tried to experience that both actions are directly connected with metaphors and the subconscious. From this point of view, it is seen that Dada and Surrealism poems actually have a direct connection with art. This connection is “collage”… This practice, which started with Cubist painters, was firmly held by Dadaists. In short, this style is an artistic combination created by the random combination of various objects. It is a species that has meaning anxiety as well as no meaning anxiety. Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, brought up poems that had no sense of meaning. The poem “Karawane” was literally a collage. He created his lines by randomly combining the letters he cut from newspapers and other publications. Could we try this current poem that left its mark on a period? We tried, and colorful poems came out. We did not dwell on the meanings of the poems. The important thing was to experience the Dada movement at that moment and to consolidate the knowledge in this lesson. Not only did we compose Dada poems, we also read them… We created another poem based on Louis Aragorn's manifesto. In a nutshell, words or verses should be meaningful, but it doesn't matter if they are related to each other. In this study, while we were applying Piet Mondrian's De Stilj hound, we also experimented with a common surrealist poem.

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Trying a Mondrian Painting

It is quite possible to see the De Stijl movement in today's popular culture. Even in the new classrooms of our university… These vibrant red, blue, yellow and green colors add an insatiable color to the plain aesthetics of the lines. The mediocrity of hallways and classrooms vanishes in an instant. You feel like you are walking on a big line. In a way, I think that's exactly what Mondrian wanted to make you feel. Of course, there were neutral colors that limited these colors. Mondrian used black extensively. Geometric papers consisting of primary colors prepared and brought by my students were improvised on a neutral background, white, and these were limited to black-colored cut strip papers. As a result, some very entertaining De Stijl-style experiments emerged.

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Above All Making Knowledge Collective…

The classroom is a collective environment. We are not talking about a mere memory. We can talk about as many different memories as the number of individuals in the class. The learning here is also a collective learning…. The more we diversify this learning in the moment, the more we ensure its permanence. These interactive training and practice experiments in our classrooms diversify and strengthen a shared memory. Therefore, it makes a theoretical lesson permanent in our memory with a physical form, and it also encourages students in the applicability of the acquired knowledge. However, not only the educator but also the student is involved in collective learning. This makes the student think about why and what he is in the classroom for. Realizing that he exists physically and mentally is a reinforcement that increases learning and attention.

We are slowly moving towards 2023. There is no longer an obstacle in front of us like the pandemic last year. We will be in our classrooms. Our in-class activities will become more intense and diversified. We will continue to learn with many activities such as drama, music, literature, experimental art practices...

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Modern Art Movements Essays in Art and Design History Course

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