medanstanislaus@gmail.com

This is me, Stanislaus Medan, *1988, an artist and art educator in Vienna, Austria. Look up the glossary below for more information about my approach to art and education!

art from my perspective as an artist

Among the objects and phenomena in our world, I personally view art as a fracture in the system, the decisive abnormality, through which we can see the world clearly. It is a mistake, that becomes a lense for insight. In a social system of functions like science, reproduction, politics and so on, art has the responsibility of representing the blank space, the ilogical, the possible but not yet realized, the unsaid, the deviant, the left out and the left over.

art from my perspective as an art educator

I like to describe art as a form of creative expression for ones own pleasure, that can lead to a wider public and social relevance.

beauty

I conceive the notion of beauty as a conventional nature as a common misconception. Rather, something is beautiful, when it evokes tingling in the stomach, a weird laughter, or a strange inspiration or association.

Grading

I am unhappy with the current grading system. There you have great creative abilities gathered in two weekly hours with neon light from above at eight o’clock in the morning. Nothing is less measureable than creative output. On the other hand, it is possible to grade the individual development of skills and the ability to apply freshly learned knowledge. But this is dependent on the cultural and social assets, a student brings with him/her from his or her family structures. To grade those things would be classistic. A student who ist not well equipped with European pictorial tradition will have to learn harder and will need more time for it. Hence it is simply impossible to grade art students in a fair way. I would rather give an oral feedback in a student-teacher discussion, where I could enlist qualities, I personally discovered in the duration of our student-teacher relation.

Since I have to grade in the current system, giving only a-grades is not a solution either. In a performance-based system, students will put their efforts increasingly in the directions, in which the fear of failing is the greatest. This leads to a competition with the creative classrooms, that the latter must loose. As a result, many students distance theirselves from the topics, they initially loved and were inspired by. Grading for me is an ongoing struggle.

methods to art making

Art can be done following three questions:

1. What do I want to depict?

2. How do I depict it?

3. For whom do I do it?

my own art practice

You may also want to see my artwork: >

Picture

Art education has the responsibility of teaching methods to the reading and making of pictures. One learns about the functioning of a picture through translating it in to spoken language, through copying it and finally and most important, by deconstructing it. In this concern, art education does not only empower people, but also makes makes them democratically conscious citizens of this society.

Social progress

I see my work as deeply entangled with social developments. To be neutral is to be illusionary, when every possible action is if not explicitly, implicitly political. Following this approach, I strive to have an anticlassist, antiracist and feminist teaching style.