Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment

The book

Published in 2012 by Paper Monument, the art imprint of the n+1 Foundation. It gathers assignments, anti-assignments, essays, and images from over a hundred contributors — teachers and students alike — across a wide range of institutions, functioning at once as archive, teaching tool, critique, and tribute.

The gambit

Its central document is a seven-page reprint of John Baldessari's list of 109 prompts from his famous "Post Studio" class at CalArts in the 1970s — the touchstone for the whole idea that an assignment can itself be a work of conceptual art. Around it, contributors including William Pope.L, Amy Sillman, Chris Kraus, Mira Schor, and Michelle Grabner worry the question of how, or whether, creativity can be taught.

How it reads

As a smart, playful, sometimes anxious portrait of contemporary art pedagogy — useful in the studio and revealing about the field's uncertainties. Its very form, a book of prompts, enacts its subject.

For more context

The conceptual-art assignment tradition (Baldessari, Sol LeWitt's wall-drawing instructions); and Paper Monument's other publications on the state of contemporary art.

Sources

• Draw It With Your Eyes Closed (Paper Monument)
• Brooklyn Rail review
• The Creative Independent