Critical Response at RISD

What makes for a positive critique? Students were asked this question by the facilitators of the Liz Lerman Critical Response Workshop, which was held yesterday in RISD's Tap Room, hosted by the Office of Student Life. The responses from the 30 students at the afternoon workshop were illuminating:

Critiques work when:
- the people critiquing have an idea of the original intent
- the criticism is specific but not given as an attack
- the critic can be open minded from beginning to end / free from their personal bias
- the person's comments open up a discussion or dialogue with the artist
- the feedback is honest
- the resulting discussion is high-energy
- the critic offers a fresh viewpoint (often times this comes when the person is from outside the artist's own discipline, but sometimes the artist just wants to hear from someone who can speak his or her own language, knows the references...the end point being that both opportunities are valuable)
- the critic offers set of knowledge that can inform the project
- there is an expression of paternal/maternal support versus the competitive sibling syndrome

After being walked through the four-step process that is at the heart of the Critical Response theory - see the Roadmap for Meaningful Dialogue - someone asked about students' immediate responses to the process. These two were especially interesting in the context of RISD learning:

1. I wish faculty were here to hear this! Right now is one of the first times I've ever heard about this different model of critique; it just makes sense.
2. I feel like this could be useful for how critique is modelled in Freshmen Foundation - faculty often just let us flounder.

Put into practice in a model critique by volunteer students from the Construction/Deconstruction Wintersession class, I was surprised by willingly students engaged in the Critical Response practice. What felt to me like a pretty warm and fuzzy process of neutral questions and opinions by permission that might turn off the typical RISD student, actually seemed to open up the space for people to feel more empathy for the artist's process and offer opinions that were coming from a more informed place.

The question that naturally came up at the end of the workshop was: how does this kind of process get applied at RISD? It is not as though faculty are just going to make the automatic switch. The presenters offered one suggestion around how to rephrase a negatively generated opinion to ask yourself neutral questions rather than just retreat to a defensive position. Because when defensiveness starts, learning stops.