Integrating Critical and Contextual Studies in Art and Design

Possibilities for post-compulsory education

Jenny Rintoul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317193203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Integrating Critical and Contextual Studies in Art and Design examines the relationship between two aspects of art education that appear at times inseparable or even indistinguishable, and at others isolated and in conflict: Critical and Contextual Studies (CCS) and studio practice. Underpinned by international contexts, this book is rooted in British art and design education and draws upon contemporary case studies of teaching and learning in post-compulsory settings in order to analyse and illustrate identities and practices of CCS and its integration.

The chapters in this book are divided into three sections that build on one another: 'Discourse and debate'; 'Models, types and tensions'; and 'Proposals and recommendations'. Key issues include:

• knowledge hierarchies and subject histories and identities;

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• constructions of 'theory' and the symbiotic relationship between theory and practice;

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• models and practices of CCS within current post-compulsory British art and design education;

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• the reification of ubiquitous terms in the fields of art and design and of education: intuition and integration;

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• approaches to curriculum integration, including design and management; and

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• suggestions for integrating CCS in art and design courses, including implications for pedagogy and assessment.

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Integrating Critical and Contextual Studies in Art and Design offers a comprehensive analysis of the current drive towards integration within art education, and elucidates what we understand by the theory and practice of integration. It explores the history, theory, teaching and student experience of CCS, and will be of interest to lecturers, teachers and pedagogues involved in art and design as well as researchers and students of art education.

PART I

Discourse and debate

1

CCS IN A CHANGING LANDSCAPE

What is CCS, where has it come from and why be concerned about it in an art and design curriculum?

Introduction

Critical and Contextual Studies, Critical Studies, Contextual Studies, Visual Culture, Theory, Research, Art History and Contextual and Historical Studies are some of the many terms in circulation for forms of ‘theory’ in art and design education. Notwithstanding important differences, these terms allude to a common curricular ‘space’ that has long had a problematic position within or alongside the studio-based elements of art and design courses. The Coldstream Reports of the 1960s recommended that ‘the history of art should be studied and should be examined for the diploma . . . About 15 per cent of the total course should be devoted to the history of art and complementary studies’ (HMSO, 1960: 8). Since then, the content of this ‘theory’ aspect of an art and design course has been the source of lively debate. Ways of teaching this form of ‘theory’ are perpetually in flux;¹ there have been no formal policy recommendations since Coldstream. ‘Critical and Contextual Studies’ (CCS) is the most commonly used term in British post-compulsory art and design education and is therefore the term utilised throughout this book.

While CCS (and its many incarnations) is deemed significant within art and design education, it remains a contentious area of the course: ‘On the issue of what critical and historical studies should be, opinions remain divided’ (Carroll, 2002: 61). Views include those stemming from the Coldstream reforms, whereby ‘under the guise of providing students with contextual frames of reference, the scholarly was used to legitimate the degree status bestowed on the new DipAD qualification’ (Parsons, 1999: 149). These views encompass the perception that CCS is an unwanted adjunct, functioning as an imposed means of validating the position of art and design as a subject within academia. Such views result in instances of CCS being delivered begrudgingly, as though it should not be held in high regard for fear of it impinging upon the identity of the ‘real’ subject. Contrasting views on CCS have emerged from the development of Visual Culture as an independent discipline, including proposals (some made in fear, others in celebration) that it is the practice that is the adjunct to theory: ‘the essential function of art education is the analysis and understanding of Visual Culture, relegating the creative experience to secondary level’ (Aguirre, 2004: 257); ‘[critical studies] should not necessarily inform the practice of art and design . . . art and design practice may then be undertaken principally for the benefit of informing critical studies’ (Thistlewood, 1993: 311). In these views (and a multitude of others), identities of CCS coincide with broader developments in art education and art and design discourse.

It is on this premise that this chapter is designed. Through a historical analysis of art education, the position of CCS is identified across compulsory- and post-compulsory education, predominantly in the UK and USA, with a view to contextualising current constructions of CCS (detailed in Chapter 5). The chapter is divided into three chronological models, using De Duve’s (1994) three shifts in art education to frame the discussion. Staff and student readers might consider these shifts in relation to their own experiences of art and design education, the identity of their own course cultures and their own teaching and learning. Drawing upon Bernstein (1971) and Goodson (1993, 1995 [1988]; Goodson, Anstead and Mangan, 1998), the chapter aims to make sense of the ‘shape’ of CCS within, alongside and sometimes in conflict with art and design, establishing some of the themes examined in Chapters 5, 6 and 7.

Nineteenth-century art education: technique and skills of imitation

During the nineteenth century, students of art and design were credited on their technical skills, demonstrated through their ability to ‘imitate’ works of the past. British art education in this period grew in part to meet the demands of the economy following the industrial revolution and the increased need for skills in drawing, craft and design in emerging industries. The belief was that a technical art education would lead to better designed products and a more skilled workforce. In the USA, early art schools (as distinct from liberal arts colleges) were formed on a similar basis, as were many across Europe (Jones, 2006: 231). This emphasis on technical skill pre-dates the nineteenth century; technical drawing was embedded in the Art Academy long before the start of Britain’s national system of arts education – that is, long before the first design schools of the early nineteenth century.

The prevailing model of art education throughout much of Europe in this period was that of the French Academy, based on the practice of the Parisian École des Beaux Arts (founded in 1648). Students were taught systematically and en masse, learning to draw through copying from drawings, plaster casts and eventually the live form (Madoff, 2009: 39). Influential teachers such as the artist Jacques-Louis David promoted this emphasis – central to art education in England in this period – on drawing, copying and linear learning. For example, MacDonald (1970) notes that, under David, less attention was afforded to contemporary art developments (such as the French Impressionists and advances in colour theory) than to looking backwards to the European Old Masters. De Duve (1994) labels this an Academic Model. The studio-based focus on technical skill and imitation is echoed in the CCS provision within this model.

What we might understand as CCS in this period – including history, aesthetics and other forms of ‘theory’ – focused on the method of art-making and was thus directly related to practice. For example, Sir Joshua Reynolds – the first president of London’s Royal Academy of Arts (RA), founded in 1768 – developed teachings in art theory and aesthetics² in order to develop a pictorial language in students (Wien, 2008), complementing their imitations of the European Old Masters. This idea of CCS integrated with or directly informing practice continued through the mid-nineteenth century at the RA, where the art and design course consisted of twenty-three stages of design:³ students were shown twenty-three examples of Renaissance work, one corresponding to each stage (Jeremiah, 2008).

Alberti’s ‘On Painting’ (1435) – often cited as the first example of art ‘theory’ (Williams, 2009: 57) – formed a core part of integrated art/theory teachings four centuries after its first publication. The nineteenth century was a period in which ‘theory’ of the Renaissance, such as Alberti’s text, was organised into a set of rules for art practice and art teaching (Daichendt, 2010: 36). In other words, ‘theory’ was embedded in practice; theory was designed to underpin and support the practice. That said, a form of CCS also existed (although not labelled as such) in the lecture theatre in this period; not all students would go on to be artists or designers (as remains the case), so the lecture aspects of the course ‘educated’ students in the history of art and design with the intention of developing in them an interest and taste in art (Jeremiah, 2008). It was not just in Europe that this Academic Model prevailed. Walter Smith – who trained at South Kensington (UK) and was former headmaster of the Leeds School of Art (UK) – was hired by Massachusetts state (USA) to introduce a system of design in Boston public schools, demonstrating the theoretical connections between British and American art education (Chalmers, 2000).

De Duve (1994) proposes a triad to illustrate this Academic Model: ‘talent– métier–imitation’. In De Duve’s model, artistic ‘talent’ is highly valued according to the ability to ‘imitate’, which develops within the rules and codes of ‘tradition’ – that is, the canon of art history. These rules and codes make for tightly defined subject content. The Academic Model of art education was therefore, in Bernstein’s (1971) terms, an example of ‘strong classification’. In addition to its focus on art history and ‘tradition’, this model supported a discrete CCS that borrows from other subject areas. Under Leighton’s presidency of the RA, a historical and philosophical course was taught alongside (and distinct from) studio practice; students were left to synthesise studio-based and lecture-based aspects of their art education experience. Along with ‘talent’ according to the rules of tradition and ‘imitation’ of Old Masters, the third aspect of De Duve’s Academic Model triad – ‘métier’ – is also concerned with the value of tradition and history. Métier classifies the arts according to techniques (De Duve, 1994: 24), so that each discipline is taught according to its technical conventions. This is a tightly classified, tightly framed (Bernstein, 1971) and historically grounded approach to art and design.

Schools

The emphasis on drawing and imitation in this period was not exclusive to the Art Academy. Henry Cole’s National Course of Instruction was established in English schools in 1852. Through this, working-class, mainly male students developed skills in mechanical drawing (in preparation for the schools of design) while middle-class, mainly female students took courses in ‘cultural enrichment’ and the copying of great artworks in order to develop good taste (Addison, 2010: 13). Art education in this period was ‘an education of the eye, and of the hand, such as may indeed be the first step in the career of a great artist’ (Committee of Council on Education, 1857–58, in Addison and Burgess, 2013: 18) – although, as with other careers at the time, this was rarely the trajectory for female students. Broadly, art education in this period focused on drawing, imitation and practice; when ‘theory’ was part of the programme, it was predominantly a theory for developing practice.

Early to mid-twentieth-century art education: the medium and the mind

While De Duve’s Academic Model involved looking backwards to tradition and established techniques and outwards to observations from life, his shift to the Bauhaus Model in the twentieth century was based on looking forwards to innovation and inwards to the psychology of the mind and the essence of the medium (De Duve, 1994). During the twentieth century, the French École des Beaux Arts model gave way to the German Bauhaus model as the most influential for designing art education across Europe and the USA.

Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus in Dessau in Germany (1926–32) was renowned for Itten’s Vorkurs (foundation course), which focused on material experimentation and forward-thinking ‘invention’ rather than on imitating tradition. Rather than positioning technical skill as the marker of talent, De Duve’s (1994) Bauhaus Model (‘creativity–medium–invention’) valued the generation of ideas and creativity. This focus on generating ideas as a marker of talent was influential in art schools across not only Europe and the USA, but also Latin America (Madoff, 2009: 114). Remnants of the Vorkurs model remain in contemporary UK education in the form of the one-year Foundation Diploma in Art and Design (introduced in 1965), which retains the Vorkus’s experimental and broad grounding in art and design.

One of the Bauhaus goals was to overcome the division between art and craft: a division that had persisted throughout the nineteenth century in UK and German arts education (unlike in French education, which combined the training of artists and designers) (Daichendt, 2010: 46). Despite remaining unfulfilled, this aim of dissolution was forward thinking; indeed, the avant-garde and inherently modernist intention of looking forward, rather than backwards to tradition, steered the Bauhaus experiments. Nonetheless, these experiments were tightly confined, not least because both the arts and the curriculum were classified by medium. Each medium was subject to experimentation and questioning while simultaneously representing an essence against which excellence was measured. The boundaries between each medium created the parameters around which students could experiment, ‘unleash’ their creativity and realise their potential.

Unlike the Academic Model, De Duve’s Bauhaus Model is transhistorical and student-centred. De Duve (1994: 25) suggests that, in this model, perception could be perceived as a basic reading skill and imagination as a basic writing skill. Consequently, it was for the student to understand and realise these skills and, guided by immediate emotion, to unlock their creativity. Daichendt (2010: 17) described this as a ‘taking the lid off’ approach to art education. The transmission of knowledge – or ‘framing’ (Bernstein, 1971) – is less controlled than in the Academic Model; it is up to the students to discover their own creativity through being well versed in the visual language inherent to each medium.

During this period, there is evidence of a CCS provision that feeds into practice. For example, at the Bauhaus, Kandinsky and Klee taught forms of visual analysis to be applied in practice, rather than a metanarrative in the form of a history of painting. This period also brought with it the study of theories of perception, questioning and ideas, and thus a broadening of CCS content. This is reflected in the lectures given at the Slade School of Art at this time; until 1956, Wittkower was an art history professor and lectured to students about the Renaissance in relation to contemporary practice. When Gombrich took over the role, lectures became based on theories and ideas (Chambers, 2008). Within the studio there was also a broadening; the nineteenth-century art education of detached observation and anatomical studies shifted towards perceptions, subjectivities and experimentation.

Forms of CCS in the lecture theatre context varied from institution to institution in the first half of the twentieth century, not only in content but also in quality. The broadening of CCS was evident on the DipAD, where the ‘history of art’ provision was expanded to include general studies, complementary studies and/or liberal studies. The General Studies Department at the Royal College of Art (RCA, founded in 1837 as the ‘Government School of Design’ in Somerset House, London) was dubbed ‘The Department of Words’ by the students (MacDonald, 2005: 205), marking it apart from the language of art and design practice that resided in the studio. The formulaic structure and examination of general studies gave rigidity to art education at post-compulsory level that was not consistent with the prevailing individualist Romantic myth of the artist or the child-centred pedagogic experiments in schools (Richardson, 1948; Read, 1943).

There appeared, on the surface, to be a theory/practice divide that equated to a lecture theatre/studio divide. However, in reality, forms of ‘theory’ were not only formalised in the lecture theatre bu...