Kenneth Roy
It is possible
that the first minister
just needs a holiday
Kenyon Wright
Let’s not cut the number of MSPs
Andrew Hook
Could Scotland
have its own
Ivy League?
Angus Skinner
Are we ready not to have government?
Christopher Harvie
Whit thochts
anent oor
ain time?
Alan Fisher
The riot in Greece
Alison Prince
Tough oil is with us.
There is no way back
to the time of plenty
Catherine Czerkawska
The problem with euthanasia
Tessa Ransford
Works of art are not good
for anything. They are
an end in themselves
Rear Window
Springburn diary
16.06.11
No. 418
Rear Window
Friday
As a bad Catholic girl from Springburn I have always thought that purgatory is full of Glaswegians – most of them from Springburn. Then again I have always thought that Springburn is already Hell on earth, that all us poor bastards have already met the ‘Big Yin’ and that we’ve already been judged.
Springburn is one of Britain’s poorest constituencies and I live bang slap in the middle of it. Like a lot of people here, I see my residence as temporary and hope to move soon.
Today, when I took my young son, Stuart, to school I asked if there was any news of an after-school place for him. The head of the after-school club informed me that there was a waiting list. So much for ‘an increasing number of after-school places’. I can’t find work until my son is in one of these clubs, and he’s dying to go as all his friends are there.
Tonight I couldn’t sleep for hearing my friendly neighbours above me. What did I say about Hell on earth?
Saturday
Punch and Judy upstairs stopped arguing at around 4am. Awakened at 7.45 with my five-year-old wanting his breakfast. Oh, the joys of being a parent!
Sunday
To a supermarket. Tailed by a security guard who must have thought I was a shoplifter. Ignored him. This particular security guard loves a confrontation, and I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction. I saw a few people I know to be shoplifters filling their jackets as he was following me, and felt better: I had got one over him. He always follows the wrong people.
The rest of the day was uneventful. Oh, come on, it’s only a Sunday in Springburn.
Anne-Marie McManus
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Today’s banner
The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
Works of art are not good
for anything. They are
an end in themselves
Tessa Ransford
Some years ago I was asked to tutor a module on creativity in life and art at the Centre for Human Ecology and walked rather blindfold into it. I was told I must organise peer assessment of the students’ projects, so I decided to set out the criteria they should apply and suggested that they grade each other’s work from 1 to 10 under these headings.
They worked hard at this and did what they could. However the second time I tutored the module the students didn’t want to assess each other, claiming that assessment destroyed the creative spirit in which they had worked. Despite my efforts to persuade them to the contrary they couldn’t get away from the idea that assessment meant:
a) competing against each other
b) comparing unlike works with each other
c) negative criticism.
When I started a workshop for practising poets, called the School of Poets, in 1981, I set it up in such a way that we worked in small groups, each with an animator, who saw that time was allocated fairly between the participants. Sometimes people would come along to the group who were looking for an audience rather than critical feedback and ‘didn’t want to change anything because that’s the way it came to them’. A great many well-educated people think of poems as a divine gift from on high. They would probably not talk of paintings or other works of art in that way.
I used to suggest that constructive criticism can only be of benefit: either the poet will get a new insight into their own poem and see where it isn’t working, or they will be confirmed in their confidence that it is the way they want it, even if others don’t seem to ‘get the joke’. By joining in discussion of others’ work they were also able to learn what they needed for their own work, even though they didn’t know they needed to learn it until they learnt it.
I say ‘get the joke’ to show that our response to poems is often of the same kind as to jokes: we either get them or we don’t. Having them explained just does not have the same effect. And to get the joke we have to be familiar with the context, have some sort of shared experience with the joker. The good reviewer or teacher will help the reader to enter into that shared experience and thereby come to an understanding of the poem for themselves.
The architect who built the Scottish Poetry Library took metaphors and ideas that I had been working with over the years; he found ways of expressing them through the building. Thus there was a dark side and a light side to the bookshelf area; there were public spaces and private spaces; there were poems and anonymous phrases from poems through the ages in all three of Scotland’s languages on the glass frontage and catching the sun on the balustrade at the mezzanine level; there were other significant engraved texts. There were inner and outer areas interconnecting.
The architect understood that his task was not to build premises for
for
for
What about a work’s usefulness or ethical status? I believe that the artist should concentrate on the aesthetics and allow the beholder/audience/reader to interpret the ethics according to their own principles or to find uses according to their own needs. The trees of the good, the useful and the beautiful do meet at the top and the greatest works probably will have moral impact, and social usefulness, as well as high aesthetic value.
A really creative person does not need a prize as an incentive or as a reward. The best incentive and the best reward is an understanding, changing and growing readership or following.
It is a truism that aesthetic judgements are subjective, but so are all human judgements. Even if you have strict rules and criteria they will be applied by subjective human beings. How can we make this a strength rather than a weakness in the assessment formula?
There is a call for greater involvement of the public, more peer assessment in the arts. Ways of allowing this to happen effectively have not yet been explored it seems. Then we hear that the market place provides the only fair judgement. But it doesn’t. It only tells us what kind of art is commercially successful or generally popular with most people at the moment.
To discover what will sell or is popular is not the same as finding out what is aesthetically good. A variety of kinds of readership or audience, demanding a wide range of creative effort, is as important to the health of the arts as biodiversity is to crops.
I am experimenting with a simple assessment technique which
I hope may provide a step at least towards an answer: towards a way of making peer-group aesthetic judgements. I tried it out with my module group to see what teething problems emerged. The initial plan was this. Imagine that each student has a row of boxes in front of him or her, individually labelled with certain criteria. The other students put a bean in the boxes where they consider that the project on offer meets those criteria, and nothing if they think it does not. At the end the beans are counted up under the different criteria headings. The students then have a guided peer group assessment on their achievement. However instead of boxes and physically putting beans in them I’ve been helped to devise an online package, so that participants can click on the boxes and the computer works out the averages and responses for each person under the various headings.
There is still a need to decide on criteria. This actually allows for flexibility. For different kinds of work in different contexts the criteria can be varied. The criteria I chose for my students were as follows: thought, form, rhythm, voice, intelligibility, imagination, emotion, presentation. I go through each one with them discussing what we understand it to mean.
Tessa Ransford is a poet and founder of the Scottish Poetry Library. She wrote this piece in 2003 and was inspired to submit it to SR in the light of recent articles in the magazine
16.06.11
No. 418
Rear WindowAs a bad Catholic girl from Springburn I have always thought that purgatory is full of Glaswegians – most of them from Springburn. Then again I have always thought that Springburn is already Hell on earth, that all us poor bastards have already met the ‘Big Yin’ and that we’ve already been judged.
Springburn is one of Britain’s poorest constituencies and I live bang slap in the middle of it. Like a lot of people here, I see my residence as temporary and hope to move soon.
Today, when I took my young son, Stuart, to school I asked if there was any news of an after-school place for him. The head of the after-school club informed me that there was a waiting list. So much for ‘an increasing number of after-school places’. I can’t find work until my son is in one of these clubs, and he’s dying to go as all his friends are there.
Tonight I couldn’t sleep for hearing my friendly neighbours above me. What did I say about Hell on earth?
Punch and Judy upstairs stopped arguing at around 4am. Awakened at 7.45 with my five-year-old wanting his breakfast. Oh, the joys of being a parent!
To a supermarket. Tailed by a security guard who must have thought I was a shoplifter. Ignored him. This particular security guard loves a confrontation, and I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction. I saw a few people I know to be shoplifters filling their jackets as he was following me, and felt better: I had got one over him. He always follows the wrong people.
The rest of the day was uneventful. Oh, come on, it’s only a Sunday in Springburn.
The shore at Berneray
by Islay McLeod
Tessa Ransford
They worked hard at this and did what they could. However the second time I tutored the module the students didn’t want to assess each other, claiming that assessment destroyed the creative spirit in which they had worked. Despite my efforts to persuade them to the contrary they couldn’t get away from the idea that assessment meant:
a) competing against each other
b) comparing unlike works with each other
c) negative criticism.
When I started a workshop for practising poets, called the School of Poets, in 1981, I set it up in such a way that we worked in small groups, each with an animator, who saw that time was allocated fairly between the participants. Sometimes people would come along to the group who were looking for an audience rather than critical feedback and ‘didn’t want to change anything because that’s the way it came to them’. A great many well-educated people think of poems as a divine gift from on high. They would probably not talk of paintings or other works of art in that way.
I used to suggest that constructive criticism can only be of benefit: either the poet will get a new insight into their own poem and see where it isn’t working, or they will be confirmed in their confidence that it is the way they want it, even if others don’t seem to ‘get the joke’. By joining in discussion of others’ work they were also able to learn what they needed for their own work, even though they didn’t know they needed to learn it until they learnt it.
I say ‘get the joke’ to show that our response to poems is often of the same kind as to jokes: we either get them or we don’t. Having them explained just does not have the same effect. And to get the joke we have to be familiar with the context, have some sort of shared experience with the joker. The good reviewer or teacher will help the reader to enter into that shared experience and thereby come to an understanding of the poem for themselves.
The architect who built the Scottish Poetry Library took metaphors and ideas that I had been working with over the years; he found ways of expressing them through the building. Thus there was a dark side and a light side to the bookshelf area; there were public spaces and private spaces; there were poems and anonymous phrases from poems through the ages in all three of Scotland’s languages on the glass frontage and catching the sun on the balustrade at the mezzanine level; there were other significant engraved texts. There were inner and outer areas interconnecting.
The architect understood that his task was not to build premises for
for
for
What about a work’s usefulness or ethical status? I believe that the artist should concentrate on the aesthetics and allow the beholder/audience/reader to interpret the ethics according to their own principles or to find uses according to their own needs. The trees of the good, the useful and the beautiful do meet at the top and the greatest works probably will have moral impact, and social usefulness, as well as high aesthetic value.
A really creative person does not need a prize as an incentive or as a reward. The best incentive and the best reward is an understanding, changing and growing readership or following.
It is a truism that aesthetic judgements are subjective, but so are all human judgements. Even if you have strict rules and criteria they will be applied by subjective human beings. How can we make this a strength rather than a weakness in the assessment formula?
There is a call for greater involvement of the public, more peer assessment in the arts. Ways of allowing this to happen effectively have not yet been explored it seems. Then we hear that the market place provides the only fair judgement. But it doesn’t. It only tells us what kind of art is commercially successful or generally popular with most people at the moment.
To discover what will sell or is popular is not the same as finding out what is aesthetically good. A variety of kinds of readership or audience, demanding a wide range of creative effort, is as important to the health of the arts as biodiversity is to crops.
I am experimenting with a simple assessment technique which
I hope may provide a step at least towards an answer: towards a way of making peer-group aesthetic judgements. I tried it out with my module group to see what teething problems emerged. The initial plan was this. Imagine that each student has a row of boxes in front of him or her, individually labelled with certain criteria. The other students put a bean in the boxes where they consider that the project on offer meets those criteria, and nothing if they think it does not. At the end the beans are counted up under the different criteria headings. The students then have a guided peer group assessment on their achievement. However instead of boxes and physically putting beans in them I’ve been helped to devise an online package, so that participants can click on the boxes and the computer works out the averages and responses for each person under the various headings.
There is still a need to decide on criteria. This actually allows for flexibility. For different kinds of work in different contexts the criteria can be varied. The criteria I chose for my students were as follows: thought, form, rhythm, voice, intelligibility, imagination, emotion, presentation. I go through each one with them discussing what we understand it to mean.
