Recording Movement - Tony Orrico

January 18, 2012

As part of their 2nd grade curriculum, these students are learning about heath and wellness. Using this as a jumping off point, we talked about Tony Orrico.

Tony Orrico makes art by recording movement:

This is a piece he did in real time. He keeps this up for nearly 20 minutes! He uses large sticks of graphite (pencils without wood on the outside) so that he doesn't have to stop to sharpen.

And this is a time-laps of a piece he worked on for 4 hours without stopping. If you watch, you can see him drop the Sharpies in his hand when they run out of ink and then pull new ones out of his pockets.

And this is a picture of him after doing a series of circles - look how sweaty and covered in graphite he is!

The students then asked me why he was making drawings that didn't look like anything. I returned the question and asked what reasons they could think of for making abstract or non-representational artwork (after explaining that that was what it was called).

Here are some of their really insightful answers:

• Because he wants you to decide what it looks like.
• Because he wants you to spend time thinking about it.
• Because he wants you to think more about how he made it than what he made.

Then I asked another question. I asked them to think about different ways they could record their own movements. I was especially impressed that they seemed to combine what they had learned the week before with what we were talking about.

The first idea was to drag your foot across a piece of paper. I asked how you would record it, and they responded that you would leave marks if you had a really dirty foot.

Then each student had a piece of paper and used pencils, pens and crayons to record a movement pattern. I then brought the students to the back by table group to spend just a couple of minutes each recording that same pattern onto 3 pieces of brown packing paper and one piece of newspaper.

Next week we will talk more about media and collaboration since we brought them up this week without explaining them.

Here are some pictures of the work the students did: