Re-imagining the Art School

Paragogy and Artistic Learning

Neil Mulholland

• Editore: Palgrave Pivot
• Anno: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030206291
• Argomento: Education
• Categoria: Teaching Arts & Humanities

This book proposes 'paragogic' methods to re-imagine the art academy. While art schooling was revolutionised in the early 20th century by the Bauhaus, the author argues that many art schools are unwittingly recycling the same modernist pedagogical fashions. Stagnating in such traditions, today's art schools are blind to recent advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As discipline-based education research in art eternally battles the perceived threat of epistemicide, transformative educational practices are rapidly overcoming the perennialism of the art school. The author develops critical case studies of open source and peer-to-peer methods for re-imagining the art academy (para-academia) and andragogy (paragogy). This innovative book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the art school, as well as how the art academy can be reimagined and rebuilt.

© The Author(s) 2019

N. MulhollandRe-imagining the Art SchoolCreativity, Education and the Artshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20629-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Diglossic Academy

Neil Mulholland¹

(1)

Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland

Neil Mulholland

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter considers why there can be no singular ‘idea of’ the art school (Rothblatt in The Modern University and Its Discontents: The Fate of Newman’s Legacies in Britain and America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997). Presently, post-secondary education is cultivated in every facet of the artworld; art school imaginaries proliferate a myriad of arrangements. The heterogeneous character of art schooling is rooted deeper than the identity crisis that higher education presently encounters. Today’s art academies are anachronic assemblages of premodern (workshops, technê) and modern (studio, art) spatial and ideological formations. This chapter examines some of the ways in which current art educational imaginaries continue to be haunted by, often contradictory, premodern and early modern attitudes towards technical schooling. Developed in Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, such attitudes formed key pillars of ‘the modern system of the arts’ (Kristeller in J Hist Ideas 12:496–527, 1951). While the early universitas and guild-shop technical schooling actually have more in common than is often considered, art academies today nevertheless perform a dissociative ars-technê organisational identity. The contemporary art academy is diglossic; an institution that ‘speaks’ more than one dialect, oscillating between the codified knowledge of artes liberales scholarship and the tacit knowledge, or ‘know-how’, of professional apprenticeship. This chapter examines the diglossic art academy in relation to what the educationalist Gert Biesta calls education’s multiple ‘domains of purpose’. Biesta’s framework enables us to comprehend, and challenge, the different forms of qualification, socialisation and subjectification manifest in art education and its emergent disciplinary formations.

Keywords

Diglossia‘domains of purpose’Heterogeneity

End Abstract

How might we begin to characterise post-secondary art schooling in the early twenty-first century? Art education is not exclusive to university art departments or specialist academies of art, it exists in a wide variety of formal and informal settings. It takes many different organisational forms, traversing social practices, artist-led initiatives, online professional development courses, international biennials and philanthropic programmes. When considering the distinctive pedagogies of art education, we need to be attentive to the manifold nature of its institutional formations and transmogrifications. This variety is exhilarating and potentially liberating. Art education, it would seem, is for all; it can take place anywhere and can take (almost) any form. At the same time, this variety is perplexing (Groys 2009: 27). The widespread perception that contemporary art is an ‘intellectual birdhouse’ (Dombois 2012) independent of ‘discipline’ and that art education, thus, is an open-book, has precipitated an identity crisis within specialist post-secondary art academies. Such art academies, in turn, find their identity crisis compounded by broader structural crises precipitated by the impact of globalisation, digitisation and neoliberalism on higher education.

Diglossic

In this chapter, I outline some of the ways that the contemporary art academy can be considered to be diglossic; an institution that speaks more than one dialect: namely the codified lingua franca of the liberal arts and the many vernaculars of technê . Since European art academies first emerged in sixteenth-century Italy, their diglossia has been diagnosed as a symptom of a split identity, a curse in need of a cure. In this quest, many art academies have gradually organised to privilege the lingua franca ‘ ars ’ over the vernacular technê , and vice versa. In doing so, academies have often sought to imagine (Anderson 2006) and polemicise their ‘roots’ in contrary pre/modern origin myths of art schooling.

Drawing on Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory, I propose that this diglossia is generative rather than a destructive form of disassociation. A diglossic disposition allows the art academy to constantly reconsider and adapt its identities in relation to different situations. This is evident, for example, in how the art schools accommodated broader economic and epistemological changes by combining contrary European premodern and early modern attitudes towards technical schooling. Art academies today perform a dissociative ars -technê organisational identity: oscillating between (post)humanities scholarship and professional apprenticeship. To this end, following DeLanda, I want to consider what might cause today’s art academies to understand themselves as anachronic assemblages of ‘premodern’ (workshops, technê ) and ‘modern’ (studio, art) assemblages.

The art academy I wish to focus on in this book is a modern, specifically European, phenomenon. As a specialist branch of higher education, this contemporary art academy is an imaginary that shares some of its tropes with ancient practices of craft apprenticeship, and some with more recent forms of scholarship developed within medieval monasteries and universities. In The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Shiner 2001), Larry Shiner argues that art is a modern European concept. Since ‘art’, as we currently understand it, emerged a considerable time after the formation of craft-guild society and the first European universitas , premodern ‘art’ schooling is an anachronism (or ‘category error’). There can be no ‘art’ school prior to the modern invention of ‘art’.

While acknowledging that describing what came before its institutional formation as ‘art school’ would be anachronistic (Luzzi 2009), examining traces of the art academy’s late medieval and early modern European precursors might help us to better appreciate its diglossic organisational identities. Thus, if we seek to trace a premodern history of European ‘art’ schooling, we would have to position its antecedents somewhere between ars and technê as they developed from the formation of its Europe’s first university in 1096 to the establishment of the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence in 1563.

Domains of Purpose

As medieval educational tropes, technê and the artes liberales were highly differentiated. I examine this differentiation in relation to their respective domains of educational purpose. In a number of his writings, the educationalist Gert Biesta remarks that, since there are so many reasons to learn, there is no singular sense of purpose for education per se, rather there are what he calls multiple ‘domains of purpose’ (Biesta 2015: 234). While numerous, these domains have three co-present, generic characteristics: ‘qualification, socialisation and subjectification’. ‘Socialisation’ describes the many ways in which groups of learners form, and are in turn, formed by a cohort. ‘Socialisation’, thus, is a social process (such as being inducted into a community of artistic practice) that results through forming relationships. ‘Subjectification’ relates to the ways in which our identities as human subjects are, largely, shaped through ‘socialisation’.¹ Qualification triangulates ‘socialisation’ and ‘subjectification’ by confirming (or denying) what our newly formed identities enable us to do (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Biesta, G. Generic characteristics of domains of educational purpose

Following Biesta’s triad of characteristics, I will examine the different forms of qualification, socialisation and subjectification manifest in technical and liberal arts education. Firstly, I will apply Biesta’s definition of socialisation to late medieval learning environments. A focus on the different habitats of the apprentice and student enables us to understand the slow assemblage of the workshop and studium into the ‘studio...