Living Powers(RLE Edu K)

The Arts in Education

Peter Abbs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415695800
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136495168
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

When originally published this was the first book to offer a collective history of all the arts – Art, Drama, Dance, Music, Literature and Film – in the curriculum. It also offers a coherent framework for the teaching of arts which is in line with the best current trends since the Gulbenkian Report of 1982. It insists that the arts, seen together should be an essential part of the national curriculum.

Part I

Confronting the Crisis within the Arts

1Towards a Coherent Arts Aesthetic

Peter Abbs

… aesthetics only appears obsolete today because a great dimension of human life and experience is catastrophically threatened.

(Peter Fuller)

Introduction

In this opening chapter I want to define and place in an historical context what I believe to be a slow but dramatic shift in our current understanding of the arts¹ and of our teaching of the arts in our schools. What, precisely, is this shift of understanding? Very briefly, one could characterize it as a kind of dynamic conservationism at work in all the arts. It reveals itself as a new concern with the possibilities of tradition, with the possibilities of form and convention, with the need for continuous and developing engagement by the pupil with the artistic medium, with the need for, at the same time, a critical vocabulary, an awareness of the terms of interpretive discourse. Instead of emphasizing, as has been the practice in arts education, ‘self-expression’, the new sensibility emphasizes a transpersonal involvement in the whole aesthetic field of the particular art form; instead of using art as a means to ideological discussion (now a widespread practice), art itself is seen as possessing a liberating energy, often not requiring sociological explication of any kind. The new sensibility insists on the metaphoric and sensuous meaning of art, on the primacy of its aesthetic form, a form which requires, above all, an aesthetic response. Precisely what we mean by the term aesthetic will be made clear later in the chapter.

Following the pattern set by our symposium I will first explore historically the reasons for this current movement — not, as yet, the dominant movement, perhaps — in the arts debate. This will involve me in a lengthy critical examination of modernism in the arts and of the progressive movement in education — for there can be little doubt that the practice of teaching the arts in our schools has its philosophical roots in those two vast, complex and seminal developments. My methods will be both descriptive and critical. I will try to demonstrate what the two movements actually claimed and then attempt to indicate the fallacies informing those claims, the consequences of which have led, in part, (for there are other political and social influences which are not so difficult to delineate) to the present impasse and disorientation. It is inevitable that in the space given I must dramatize my case; but I hope the constriction of words has merely forced me to concentrate on the essential problems, the truly fundamental issues. In the critical delineation of modernism I have confined much of my analysis to the visual arts, partly because of lack of space and partly because the visual arts reveal the spirit of modernism in its purest, or perhaps, most excessive form. After the critique of modernism and progressivism, I then move forwards to suggest better terms for understanding the arts in the curriculum. I offer a model of an aesthetic field in which all the arts can work, a field which allows for a continuous reciprocity of movement between tradition and innovation, between the individual and the community, and between the various stages of creation: from making to presenting, to responding and evaluating. In this way, I argue, it might be possible to bring all the arts, with all their obvious differences, into a philosophical unity which ensures a common kind of practice, the practice of aesthetic education.

Coming to Terms with Modernism and Progressivism

It is not easy to turn critically on modernism and progressivism for, in different ways, they have provided the very conditions for the development of the arts in the curriculum. In their origins these two related movements were so liberating, so culturally and imaginatively demanding, it is still difficult for many of us to formally recognize how in their later phases they became narrowing and imprisoning. This is because modernism was never an object of our attention so much as the mode of our own sensibility. We saw through its eyes, spoke through its mouth, conceived through its mind. Just as one of Moliere's characters suddenly realized that he had been speaking prose all his life, so we now realize that we were all modernists, even without knowing it. But the realization changes the phenomena for it brings a critical distance. Once — it was only yesterday — it seemed that the artist was inevitably at the vanguard of his civilization, an innovator, opening up the forms of the future, an original and iconoclastic energy; once, it seemed in the order of things that the arts in schools should deal with the contemporary, work only through process, remain ‘relevant’, be Original’, wholly ‘expressive’. Today we are less than sure. We turn on modernism now and ask of it, subversive questions. Why, for example, should the art-maker be conceived as always at the vanguard of civilization? What is so valuable about endless experimentation? Why should innovation be valued almost as if it were a self-justifying aesthetic category? And, in the teaching of the arts, why should work, say, in drama or dance, be confined to ‘process’ or restricted to contemporary relevance? In other words, we turn on the iconoclasm of the modernist spirit iconoclastically. We ask subversive questions of the self-consciously subversive. We interrogate the dominant traditions of our century and find ourselves, with a painful unease, on the outside, looking for better connections, concepts, possibilities; seeking not revolution but conservation, deep reclamation rather than innovation, continuities rather than discontinuities.

After a mere eighty years through which art has hurtled through the following stations: expressionism, fauvism, dadaism, cubism, surrealism, constructivism, functionalism, action painting, primitivism, conceptualism, minimalism, kinetic art, op art, pop art, where is there left to ‘advance’ to? When after the 1960s and 1970s, after the electrocuting of fish in London galleries, after the covering of cliffs in polythene (see Plate 2), after strutting for miles with a plank on your head, after filling the Tate Gallery with twigs and bricks and sand, after hanging up stained nappies and displaying coca-cola bottles — what further possible innovation was left to the aspiring art-maker? Well, there was one gesture left, and there were artists and critics and gallery organizers ready to make and applaud it. Frank Kermode tells us in his essay Modernisms that: ‘Peter Selz, the Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art was delighted with the famous Homage, which destroyed itself successfully, though not quite in the manner planned by the artist, before a distinguished audience.’² But after that? What then? As the poet Leopardi said, fashion is the mother of death. Modernism had to end with its own destruction because it was informed with a false conception of historical time and of the nature of art. Its destruction was implicit in its own premises. It was, in a sense, doomed to go to the edge. And, then, to leap over.

Plate 2CHRISTO, 1969. Canvas and cord cover part of Little Bay in Australia. Innovation without tradition can become quickly meaningless.

There was a time when modernism threw a light on the world — a demanding, dazzling light — allowing us to see in a new way, to see from diverse perspectives, unexpected angles, original vantage points. Then it often shocked, but the effect of the shock was to liberate, to extend, to deepen. It disturbed into awareness. Later, it shocked only to bore and enervate. It numbed the mind until finally the aesthetic of modernism, driven by its own internal logic, led to a widespread cultural anaesthesia. We are now coming round. And still we find it difficult to believe that only ten years ago so much pretentious and hollow art-making lay at the centre of American and European culture and at the centre of its complex network of validating institutions, the public and private galleries, the art colleges, and the Arts Council. Coming round, in a numb state of disbelief, we find it hard to believe it really happened. Late modernism seems like a nightmare we cannot now acknowledge, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Yet it did, of course, take place. And in the waste-land of late modernism, in its plastic debris and dust, we must now find a better aesthetic for our society and our schools.

But as all things are defined in some way dialectically we can only establish a more comprehensive philosophy and practice of the arts, by beginning with a diagnosis of modernism in art and progressivism in education. What happened to modernism? What happened to the progressive movement? I would like now to take each in turn and then, by bringing them together, outline the elements of an alternative practice for our schools.

What was Modernism?

Modernism, as it pertains to the arts, is not easy to define; yet the term exists and refers to a certain disposition of mind which most of us can recognize (if not tabulate) and probably feel in some confused way a part of. As to its meaning, the word itself, perhaps, gives a major clue for ‘modernism’ derives from the Latin ‘modo’ meaning ‘just now’ or, as the Americans would have it, ‘right now!’. From the outset modernism self-consciously proclaimed its own contemporaneity, wanting to establish an art for what it saw as its own historic time. Modernism, true to its own name, is marked by a highly conscious orientation to time, particularly to the present tense. In 1925 Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, attempting to describe and evaluate the first phase of modernism wrote:

The new art is a world-wide fact. For about twenty years now the most alert young people of two successive generations in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Rome, Madrid have found themselves faced with an undeniable fact that they have no use for traditional art; moreover that they detest it.³

From the outset, then, modernism envisaged itself as an international movement, defined negatively by its opposition to traditional culture; consciously setting itself against the past and facing only the present and the future. Art-makers traditionally seen as the conservers of their culture were conceived as revolutionaries, not in the rearguard of civilization, but in its vanguard, speaking the language of ‘now’ and ‘tomorrow’.

Nearly all definitions of modernism are emphatic about its iconoclastic spirit;⁴ its insistence on disruption and discontinuity, on its conscious departure from inherited traditions and established conventions. Its aim was continuous experimentation. ‘Make it new’, urged Ezra Pound in the early years of modernism and the imperative, which now strikes us as a piece of advertising copy, informed the whole complex movement from TS Eliot's Waste Land and the Dadaist's placing of a moustache on the revered Mona Lisa, to the shuffle-novel and John Cage's composition 3½, (being three-and-a-half minutes of unplayed silence: end of piece). In the same spirit as Pound but in radically altered cultural circumstances Marshal McLuhan told the electronic children of the 1960s: ‘If it works, it is obsolete’. The signpost of modernism pointed only one way: forwards. FORWARDS!

Plate 3ALAN CHARLTON, Corner Painting in Ten Parts exhibited in the Hayward Gallery 1986. We do not engage aesthetically with such work. We merely conceive it in a minimal way.

It is possible to see modernism as a continuous movement running through the length of our century but having, at least, two distinct phases. I will designate these two phases as early modernism and late modernism. Rather arbitrarily, I will suggest that the first phase ran from 1900 to 1940 (with the major impetus in the first twenty years) and that the second phase ran from 1940 to 1980 (with its final gaudy efflorescence and extinction taking place in the last twenty years). The classification is partly determined by the convention of decades. The dates have no definitive precision — for clearly the mood of modernism can be found in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century in the French symbolists and the English aesthetes and, equally as clearly, the cult of the modern has continued, in certain odd places, after 1980. Yet the dates are not wholly arbitrary. 1900 saw the publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, which was to have such a profound effect on the twentieth century sensibility; while 1940 marked the middle of the Second World War in which the survival of any kind of qualitative European culture seemed distinctly unlikely; and 1980 marked Roy Strong's explosively hostile review of Norbert Lynton's book Modern Art. This review, published in The Listener, must have been one of the first public attacks on the second phase of modernism, late ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates and Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Confronting the Crisis Within the Arts
• Part II The Arts in Education: Their Collective History and Their Future Development
• Part III Into the Future
• Bibliographies
• Notes on Contributors
• Index