Understanding Art Education

Engaging Reflexively with Practice

Nicholas Addison, Lesley Burgess, John Steers, Jane Trowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415367400
• eBook ISBN: 9781134210176
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

What is distinctive about art and design as a subject in secondary schools?

What contribution does it make to the wider curriculum?

How can art and design develop the agency of young people?

Understanding Art Education examines the theory and practice of helping young people learn in and beyond the secondary classroom. It provides guidance and stimulation for ways of thinking about art and design when preparing to teach and provides a framework within which teachers can locate their own experiences and beliefs.

Designed to complement the core textbook Learning to Teach Art and Design in the Secondary School, which offers pragmatic approaches for trainee and newly-qualified teachers, this book suggests ways in which art and design teachers can engage reflexively with their continuing practice.

Experts in the field explore:

• The histories of art and design education and their relationship to wider social and cultural developments
• Creativity as a foundation for learning
• Engaging with contemporary practice in partnership with external agencies
• The role of assessment in evaluating creative and collaborative practices
• Interdisciplinary approaches to art and design
• Developing dialogue as a means to address citizenship and global issues in art and design education.

Understanding Art Education will be of interest to all students and practising teachers, particularly those studying at M Level, as well as teacher educators, and researchers who wish to reflect on their identity as an artist and teacher, and the ways in which the subject can inform and contribute to education and society more widely.

Part I
Histories and Futures

Chapter 1
Art and design in education
Ruptures and continuities

Nicholas Addison

Introduction

I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!

(Alice in Carroll 1962: 36)

Education at its most fulfilling is recognised as a transformative process, one in which people come to understandings of the world that help them to live their lives more richly and rationally. In this sense, education changes people; like Alice, on one day they can be one thing, on the next, another. Art education, and the subject in schools, art and design, is frequently spoken of in this way, whether change occurs gradually through modifications to learning dispositions, pleasure in making something worthwhile or, more radically, through an ‘illuminating experience’ (Taylor 1986: 18–34) or a ‘traumatic conversive experience’ (Hargreaves 1983). In this sense, the products of art, craft and design activity not only transform people’s material and visual environment but also the way they think about themselves and others.

The aim of this chapter is to show you that this transformative potential has not always been central to the aims of art education; indeed, at times, it has been used for explicitly instrumental ends. I try to tell the history of art education as a sort of narrative, one in which different aims and values are proposed, put into practice, pitted one against the other, move to resolution then further conflict, are revisited, reconceptualised and sometimes reformed. In this way, I intend to look at what the subject has become; that is, what it signals within the curriculum as a whole, and how and why it has turned out that way. In effect, this chapter is an analysis of the discourses that have helped to shape a subject that was once central to modernist beliefs about the purpose of progressive education but that has since become more peripheral.

It is important that, as teachers of art and design, you are able to advocate your subject from an informed position, not only in relation to your practice as an artist, craftsperson and designer, but also as a teacher who understands the possibilities for art education in schools. This chapter is therefore designed to help you position and evaluate your beliefs within a specific, educational history and to encourage you to follow up reading that can support your developing pedagogy by placing it within the discourses that, as you enter the profession, dominate it (Moore 2004). In this way, and like Alice, you can engage with the question: ‘Who in the world am I?’ and, further, ‘what might I become?’ It is therefore also designed to help you defend and promote what you teach as an instance of wider philosophical concerns and social practices. This is particularly important after the introduction of a new curriculum in 2008 (designed to supplant the old one by 2011). This reconceived curriculum not only encourages teachers to look at local resources and situations, it also foregrounds the contribution that different subjects can offer to ways of learning and how they can work together to equip ‘learners with the personal, learning and thinking skills that they will need to succeed in education, life and work’ (QCA 2007a).

Art and design teachers often pride themselves on the difference of their subject from others within a school curriculum that many progressive educators have characterised as over-prescribed and information-led (Eisner 1998). This difference revolves around a belief that practices in the subject are, of essence, creative and thus foster creativity in all students. An array of attendant ideas and aspirations is called upon to bolster this unique position and claims are made that qualities and aptitudes – such as individuality, self-expression, autonomy and spiritual well-being – may result from an immersion in its practices. As the foundational document for art and design, the National Curriculum itself is not shy of this perception (QCA 2007a) and there is undoubtedly a degree of credibility in its claims, for art and design does offer the potential for students to develop creative attitudes and practices that increase their ability to make informed choices in shaping the environment in which they live. However, many of the hyberbolic claims extolling the relationship between art and freedom (see the earlier NC order, DfEE 1999) echo and rehearse myths that have accrued to the practice of fine artists in the west since the Romantic period (craftspeople and designers rarely figure in this pantheon) and were initially injected into art education at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century (Cunliffe 1999). These myths have coalesced in the popular imagination around the figure of the outsider, frequently tragic, artist; consider Hollywood and British films as indicative of this stereotype, from Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in ‘Lust for Life’ (1956), Tony Hancock in ‘The Rebel’ (1961) to ‘Basquiat’ (1996), Bacon in ‘Love is the Devil’ (1998), Pollock (2000) and ‘Frida’ Kahlo (2002).

In this chapter, I wish to show how this mythology distorts the social and cultural practices of contemporary artists, craftspeople and designers; that is, a distortion of the way in which the majority of artists live their lives and practice their art. I also intend to question the way that these myths have affected the school subject both in terms of practices in the classroom and its wider reception within the school community.

Although this book is primarily concerned to help you contribute to moving art and design forward, for the moment it is nevertheless necessary to look back.

Art and art education in modernism

Some philosophers, artists and art educators have believed that art and aesthetics can change the world (Nietzsche 1872/86; Dewey 1916, 1934; Read 1943, 1950; Beuys 1973). In the first half of the twentieth century, attempts to put this utopian claim into practice took diverging political paths, from the rural sanctuaries and small urban collectives of the early avant-garde, the activist networks of Dada and Surrealism, the design experiments of the early Soviet, De Stijl and Bauhaus, and on to the manic excesses of the Nazi regime (Taylor and van der Will 1990). What all these attempts had in common was that they offered an alternative to the bourgeois norms of the consolidating capitalist nation states of the west, whether in the form of a retreat, critique, intervention or wholesale revolution. It was during this time that many artists had re-educated themselves in opposition to the conservative principles of the nineteenth-century academy and, embodied in the forms of modernist art, craft and design, proffered their beliefs to the people. Often, these beliefs were antagonistic to prevailing norms and were thus received as alien and alienating and, as such, summarily dismissed. However, in those circumstances in which artists were in alliance or collusion with the state, these beliefs were sometimes imposed on urban populations, especially in the form of architecture and design. But newly imposed beliefs and practices tend to last only as long as the regime that imposes them, so, in the second half of the century, the preferred strategy of modernist thinkers in Europe was to parallel urban and environmental change with programmes of education in an attempt to alter the beliefs of the people for the good. Read (1943), for example, echoing Dewey (1934), argued that by educating young people in and through art they could be led away from the conformity and competition fostered by traditional pedagogies towards collective and creative action. More recently, Joseph Beuys (1973) claimed ‘Only art is capable of dismantling a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART’ (p. 125).

During the 1970s, such claims and practices were increasingly developed in social situations through community and public art, a development that has since come to be known as ‘New Genre Public Art’ (Lacy 1995), ‘relational aesthetics’ (Bourriaud 1998) and/or ‘dialogical aesthetics’ (Kester 2004). This is not so much a movement as a set of common strategies deployed by artists to organise collaborative, temporal and socially situated events. Typically, a small group of artists work with people who are perceived as marginal to the dominant discourses and practices in the field (Paley 1994; Lacy 1995). Although such artists draw on the strategies of the early avant-garde, they are more concerned with changing attitudes and social practices through participation than with critiquing practices within the art world. In relation to school art, they offer real opportunities to develop inclusive, socially engaged and critical practices (greater attention is given to this approach in Chapters 4 and 7).

Counters to modernist beliefs

In contrast to the positive view of the arts as a transformative force, a number of intellectuals have argued that the western concept of art is a primary means for reinforcing and consolidating existing power relations. For Bourdieu (1984), it is a mark of distinction, a way to separate those with knowledge and taste from those with none, a social process that secures and perpetuates class privileges. For Baudrillard (2005), art is (more brutally) an accomplice of power, the most immediate way to construct spectacle and propagate myths and untruths. Power, in its contemporary manifestation as global capital, is sustained through corporate, media practices and disseminated through a multimedia network that is constructed and coordinated by designers. It should be remembered that your students, in terms of numbers, are far more likely to enter this field as a profession than that of fine art or craft. In a post-industrial, service economy, it is also likely to dominate the visual landscape of their lives and is therefore productive of their tastes and desires. The practices of socially engaged artists tend to critique the urgency and hegemony of this field, but many fine artists, despite the resistance of their work to normative taste and morality, are happy to belong to an international system in which the exchange value of a single work may exceed the annual GDP of the smallest and/or poorest nation states (taking Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull ‘For the Love of God’ (2007), selling for fifty million pounds, as a benchmark). Such works can be bought and sold as a sign of wealth and accumulated as investments; in this way, the productive work of artists may be just as much a part of the network of global capital as product design and advertising. Nevertheless, these realities and perceptions are rarely encountered in the art room because they do not conform to the Romantic myths of freedom that are so central to art’s symbolic role, especially in the context of an education for democracy, nor do these facts reaffirm the sense of intrinsic goodness afforded central tenets of art education such as imagination and creativity. So why has the subject in schools become dominated by a fine art ethos rooted in a mythology, the truth of which is only partial?

Before looking at the changes within English art education in an attempt to map the continuities and discontinuities of the various discourses that in common make it an object of study, it is worth spending time considering how the term ‘art’ has fared in the same national context and within the time-span of modern history. The radical changes in art practice brought about by modernism are crucial to understanding why art and design has a unique and somewhat wayward position in the secondary curriculum.

Art in England

In England, it is the ‘fine’ or ‘high’ (brow) arts that tend to constitute most people’s definition of Art with a capital ‘A’ (Bourdieu’s ‘field of restricted production’, 1993). Williams (1988: 41) argues that this usage was not general until the nineteenth century, although it had already been established institutionally with the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. What differentiated the fine artist from the skilled artisan was the ability of the former to work with imagination and from within a tradition of representation that was afforded intellectual credibility. Together, these faculties came to constitute ‘creative’ work which, in the proselytising hands of the Romantic poets, was extended to include literary and musical as well as visual work, thus the concept of the arts (Williams 1965: 27–29). Although similar distinctions between the ‘ars mechanica’ and the ‘ars intellectualis’ had been formulated since the Middle Ages, and from the sixteenth century had been institutionalised in Renaissance Italy (Pevsner 1940), Williams (1988) associates the distinction in England with the process of industrialisation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the context of ‘capitalist commodity production’, the hierarchical necessity to redefine the ‘purposes of the exercise of skill’ (p. 42) was a prerequisite for the maintenance of developing power relations between the bourgeoisie (owners) and the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie (professionals) and the emergent urban working class. Williams argues that, because capitalism reduces ‘use values to exchange values’:

There was a consequent defensive specialization of certain skills and purposes to the arts or the humanities where forms of general use and intention which were not determined by immediate exchange could be at least conceptually abstracted. This is the formal basis of the distinction between art and industry, and between fine arts and useful arts (the latter eventually acquiring a new specialized term, in Technology (q.v.)).

(ibid)

Williams draws on the definition of aesthetic practice provided by Karl Marx (1975) in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in which a rationale for the separation of art from the utilitarian can be found. Marx suggests that a satisfying and complete life can only be achieved through the cultivation of the aesthetic faculties:

For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word the human sense, the humanity of senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanised nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense.

(Marx 1975: 353)

The implication here is that within the immediate historical context, the majority of the population are unable to dedicate time to aesthetic cultivation due to the crude necessities of working by selling their labour. It is therefore the social responsibility of artists (in the widest sense; see below) to contribute to this cultivation by disseminating their work and by providing educational opportunities to enable everyone to participate at some level. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Arts and Crafts movement at its most idealistic, in the late work of Morris and his disciples, attempted to achieve this. However, this group pitted themselves against industrial procedures and were therefore bound in the midterm to fail. However, it could be argued that their concern with sustainability and the environment will ultimately win the day (Papanek 1994).

The definitions, divisions and uses that Williams identifies (1998) remain current. Therefore, objects whose primary function is representational and/or symbolic (e.g. traditional painting, sculpture: in utilitarian terms, those objects that are ‘useless’), and other objects produced by a group of professionals calling themselves artists, are contrasted with two other classes of objects. First, objects manufactured for utility purposes: those produced by a) designers (mass-produced and dependent on industrial technologies) and b) craftspeople (dependent on pre-and post-industrial technologies); second, those objects produced for mass communication: advertising, cinema, television, the Internet (of which the visual component is often dependent on photographic imagery). Given that these uses gained common currency in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that today traditional forms of fine art are set in opposition to the work of contemporary artists. Much contemporary practice takes the form of explicitly multimodal texts (frequently lens-or screen-based and often produced and disseminated in relation to the mass media tradition – that is, employing its technologies; Pijnappel 1994) – work that is signified as different because it is symbolic, discursive and reflexive rather than explicitly utilitarian (Hapgood 1994; Weintraub 1996; Jones 2003). Additionally, many contemporary artists question the hierarchical structures on which the mythology of traditional art and artists is maintained – in particular, the western, bourgeois notion of individual and originary creativity embodied in the self-expressive realisations of male genius (Parker and Pollock 1981: 1–14). The perpetual challenge to traditional modes, conventions and institutions that such modernist practices signal sits uncomfortably in an education system that aims to acculturate young people within dominant social and cultural practices where art tends to serve celebratory and/or recreational functions. Was it always this way?

Art and industry, art and morality: the Victorian legacy

The dominant form of English art education in the nineteenth century could not be further removed from the rhetoric of inclusivity underpinning the educational philosophy of the early twenty-first century. Swift (1995: 115–127) recounts how, from the 1850s, education at secondary level was unapologetically designed on the basis of class. The ‘poor’ were instructed in skills that they could apply to future employment but, in addition, received moral guidance as a means to ensure disciplined and conformist behaviour. Middle-class students were instructed in subjects that would provide them with signs of the necessary distinction for management, ownership and rule (e.g. Latin or Greek for boys). The art curriculum, The National Course of Instruction 1852, coordinated by Henry Cole, was likewise divided between a programme in which working-class students (mostly boys) were required to develop proficiency in mechanical drawing so that they could mat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Histories and Futures
• Part II Reconceptualising Practice
• Part III Relocating Practice
• Bibliography
• Index