HOW TO CRITIQUE

Last Everything Is New Workshop

As we wrapped up the Everything Is New project, our last workshop was preparing us for critiquing and learning how to critique, as further on in the course we will be having group critiques, where we will be expected to critique the work of others, while they critique our own.

The beginning of the session included a brainstorm in small groups, of what we think of or already know about the word critique, and what it means to us. I was familiar with the term and the process, as during sixth form I was used to frequent critiques with my tutors, so this wasn’t something alien to me. The ideas we collected together included that of, evaluating a piece of work, judging a piece of work, offering advice and guidance after seeing a piece of work, testing how successful a piece of work is when being understood by others, how well it communicates a message, where you can take the piece of work to push yourself further etc. Once we had brainstormed what critique was in our small groups, we were then given an image, without an explanation, and were told to critique this image and then share it with the rest of the group. The image we got was Cryopreservation by Taryn Simon. I personally had never seen the image before, and when looking at it originally I thought it was a sculpture or installation, however at the end of the critique we found out that it was actually a photograph. Because my group was unsure of the image, it made it hard to critique, however we managed to critique it by asking questions, we said that as a stand alone image it was hard to understand because of the lack of context, we did not know the history of the piece or what it was about, therefore we couldn’t evaluate how well it communicated this. With the impression that this piece was an installation, we said that it was hard to critique due to us not being able to experience the installation itself, we couldn’t see the scale of the piece, what the piece was doing or how it interacted with the space it was in, therefore it made it hard to understand as a piece. These questions and “problems” we were facing were not negative however, it was just an example of critiquing a piece of work and evaluating how easy the piece was to understand and therefore how effective it was. However we were also introduced to the importance of context, as when we were given the context that the image was in fact a photograph, not an installation, it changed the effect the image had instantly. The context allowed the image to make more sense to us, and for its value and message to be communicated easily, therefore emphasising the point that context is vital when presenting your piece to other people.

We then, went and scanned / printed an image from a book in the library that we liked, and collected them together in another room. We laid out our images and proceeded to generate words that we could use to describe images from a series of tasks. The first task being to find an image we liked, and then write a word describing the image on the back, we then collected all these words and discussed how we would use them within a critique and whether they were objective or subjective language. We then had to choose an image that we didn’t like, and work on critiquing the image ourselves, practising this use of language and not letting our bias or opinion influence our writing. This was challenging yet important, as it was important to be objective, rather than subjective, to give a helpful critique.

After we had worked on this, we then collected together everyone’s ideas to create a series of informative posters on the importance of critiquing, and how to critique effectively. This collaborative element of the session allowed all of our ideas to come together, we created ideas such as : using the correct use of subjective and objective language, being helpful with the critique – being careful with the words you use, describing the work and how their work could be perceived by others, comparison to other artists – in an objective way rather than a subjective way, advice on how to enhance the work rather than improve it, how they can proceed forward. These posters and collections of ideas was an effective way of choosing the important elements of critiquing, and allowing us to gain an understanding of what to consider in our later critiquing sessions.