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What’s your relationship to the word, critique? Does it bring to mind conversations about your work performance with your boss, a review of a movie that was just released, perhaps, or maybe that art school ritual of the class critique?
The past couple months I’ve been thinking about critique quite a lot as I prepared to co-teach a workshop with my friend and collaborator Laura Bucci (who is also on Substack). We presented it at the Canadian Society for Education through Art conference, which took place in Halifax at the end of June. The workshop is about critique; its title is our question, invitation, and proposition: Critique as Gift.
hands holding a speech bubble
I experienced formal critique first as a student during my bachelors, then as a ‘review’ with my team while working at a studio, and later as a teacher facilitating them in the classroom. Most recently, as a graduate student, I have only had one ‘critique’ in a year of study, yet many in other guises.
“What do you think?”
Critique, or crit, to me refers to that art school ritual of showing work to other people and hearing their thoughts. The general form is one where people stand/sit around a piece of artwork and talk about it. The artist is usually present, and may or may not speak in some capacity. It is primarily a verbal process, and the goal is to evaluate the work to some degree by the end. This seems to be the fairly common, ‘default’ critique. But in practise, there’s so much more to it that turns it into a complex, shared space of relationships, power dynamics, and speculative judgments.
As a student I participated in critiques that mostly followed this default format, both successfully and not, and I felt my work lived or died at the hands of my tired, hungry classmates. (For context, I was also in an illustration program where we were often making work in response to assignment briefs; the conversation revolved around whether the piece was ‘working’, ‘problem solving’ and ‘communicating’ to an audience, similar to design crits.) But when I started teaching and facilitating critiques, my relationship with them shifted.
cards with prepositions written on them, between, around, against, toward, through
When I was a student I had never really considered my professor’s ability to observe and read a work quickly, to get a sense of where the student was at and then deliver useful feedback adjusted to their level. Suddenly I was being asked to do this for work by students often attempting something for the first time, while I was in a position of authority (for the first time). That was just for the one-on-one private conversations — in a class-wide crit, I was trying to manage the group’s mood, energy, time and feedback in ways that were (hopefully) fair and kind. I often found critiques repetitive both in terms of rhythm and conversation. It was a struggle to keep things fresh and interesting.
Sometimes students also brought the assumption that for a critique to be good, it had to be hard or blunt, like it had to hurt. I think this is bullshit. (I love Leslie Dick’s article on it’s apparent opposite, soft talk) Feedback can be honest and truthful and given with compassion, just like receiving that feedback can be accepted without reactionary defensiveness when it is about the artwork and not the artist. These are the skills we were trying to develop. But I can also understand the other end of the spectrum that they were rejecting, which is passive, wishy-washy, generalised comments that don’t hurt because they don’t actually mean much of anything. Sometimes the critiques in my classroom rolled between these two extremes. I worried about whether the practise of critique was actually helping the students all that much, even though it was such a staple in many of their classes.
So I started searching for resources, asking other faculty (whose crits I had been in as a student) about their approach to critique, and trying out different strategies and experimenting in the classroom to keep it fresh. Sometimes the conversations about feedback felt exciting, with breakthroughs and epiphanies, but I wasn’t clear on how I could design an experience to encourage that result. I had the sense that we could make it better– that these ‘traditional’ methods weren’t serving my students and I, nor resulting in the kinds of conversations we were aspiring to have, which went beyond the binary judgment of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Could a critique be collaborative, exploratory, vulnerable and reciprocal?
a hand holding a purple booklet with a clip at the top, reads Critique as Gift a workshop by Laura Bucci and Katherine Rae Diemert
The workshop Laura and I developed is our attempt at beginning to imagine and answer that question with our participants, whom in this case were artists and art educators mostly at the high school and post-secondary level. We structured the workshop in order to practise a critique (of course!), and borrowed real artwork from our very generous friends to set up in the room for discussion.
We began with a couple conversational prompts, the first of which was our invitation: “What could critique as gift be?”, looking for alternative words and ways of thinking about it. Then we introduced the topic of ‘agreements and permissions’ — ways of collectively discussing needs and desires to acknowledge and change power structures within the group. With these, and honestly all of the other components of the agenda that we had designed, I wish we had had more time! There were lots of interesting thoughts and experiences our participants shared, and of course the topics themselves deserved more time for their complexities. (Hopefully we’ll be able to do this in the second iteration!)
Laura in front of poster that reads, What could critique as gift be? Some written examples are: an offering, creative hypothesis, insight, response, a joy to receive
In developing this workshop Laura and I dug deeper into what others had said about critique and ways of practising it. Some of it we agreed with, others we debated, and still more we let go of. A particularly influential person who has thought and written much about critique is Terry Barrett, whom we borrowed the three-phase structure from: description, interpretation, and judgment (which we re-named evaluation). If you’ve lead or participated in an art crit before, chances are you also moved in an out of phases similar to these, perhaps by different names.
bubble diagram showing phases, with a top arrow pointing to description, then interpretation, evaluation and looping back to description
Briefly, they are as follows:
*even now, the term ‘evaluation’ is starting to feel less appropriate and more confining. Just like we’re looking for alternative words to critique, we wonder if ‘feedback’ or ‘response’ could lighten the load and expand the goals of this phase
As Barrett says, these phases are interdependent and may be circled back through and in different sequences. When Laura and I tested these out, we found it was helpful to start with description, and consciously work with the goals and limitations of each phase.
Within and around these stages we incorporated exercises and tools that we borrowed from resources we had found or invented ourselves. Some were as simple as using the phrasing “When I see _____ , I think/feel/wonder ______” to deliberately connect an observation of the piece to a personal interpretation. In another we gave participants simple tools (or toys) to view artwork through: magnifying glasses, paper tubes, flashlights, cropping templates. Using them made people move their bodies in different ways from what they were used to, and there was an element of silliness or absurdity that lightened the mood.
some of the toys we used: cardboard tubes, papers with circles cut out, and magnifying glasses on a turquoise tablecloth
Thank you to our participants, for engaging so thoughtfully and positively with this first iteration of our workshop! We were very lucky to have such enthusiastic and open participants! And thank you to our friends who shared their work with us for this first iteration of the workshop: Autumn Star, Claire McNamara, and Emily Shanahan. We’re grateful to have been able to spend time with your work in developing this workshop. Big thank-yous and hugs for your trust and generosity!
Laura and I standing by three posters on the wall
Laura and I both feel pretty good about how the workshop went! Since the conference we’ve been meeting in order to reflect on the experience, and consider where this could go. We put quite a lot of work into the design of this experience, the publication, and all of our conversations about what we found and noticed.
If you would like to take a look at some of the resources I’ve been looking at, you can check out my Are.na channel critique - a ritual, a gift. You can also see my collection of crit structures that I was developing a couple years ago, that was a jumping off point for this workshop.
crit could include nourishment; drawings of a pitcher with fruit, a glass with straw, a bowl of popcorn
I’ve had lots of interesting conversations about critique with people over the past few months and one thing seems to be clear: people have a lot of feelings about it! We’d like to continue developing this workshop and our ideas around critique, and we’d love to hear from you.
What do you think about critique? Have you had any standout experiences with it, good or bad? What do you imagine critique as gift could be?
Leave a comment or write me back via. email (kdiemert@gmail.com), we’d love to hear from you!
Till next time, Katherine
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