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Few people spend enough time with works of art to be able
to use them as tools of self-discovery. Yet that is exactly
what the students, drawn from six local high schools, did
during daily visits to the Walker between December and March.
Form the first day, when each student spent 20 minutes in
the museum's storage area looking at a work of art he or
she had not seen before, until the final week, when they
made presentations in the galleries, the students enjoyed
an unprecedented opportunity to explore, question, and challenge
the art of our time and their own attitudes toward this art.
While the Listening Project class was structured as an intellectual
and emotional journey for the students, the installation
and video piece served as a way to facilitate visitors journeys
through the Walker galleries.
During the four-month course, the students studied the media
arts, art history, museums, and communication skills. They
interviewed staff members from every department, did research
in the library, made their own art, met with artists, and
experimented with ways of communicating with museum visitors.
Throughout, the students made audio and videotapes and kept
journals to record their ideas and reactions to the range
of their experiences: these serve as the raw material for The
Listening Project installation. De Michiel took this
material and created a film demonstrating the responses that
contemporary art can produce in adolescents. Organized to
parallel the structure of the class, the installation breaks
the students' explorations into five categories: Questioning,
Listening, Responding, Challenging and Dreaming. Rather than
provide specific information about a group of artworks, the
installation suggests ways of looking at and "listening to" those
works.
--David Henry, Walker Art Center (1994)
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