Brown_Are We Entering in a Post Critical Age in Art Education

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National Art Education Association

Are We Entering a Post-Critical Age in Visual Arts Education?Author(s): Neil CM BrownSource: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Spring, 2003), pp. 285-289Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1321014 .

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Copyright 2003 by the Studies n Art EducationNational Art Education Association A Journalof Issues and Research2003, 44(3), 283-289

Commentary:Are We Entering a Post-CriticalAge in Visual ArtsEducation?Neil CM BrownTheUniversity fNew SouthWales

The current institutional boundaries of the arts are subject to challengefrom various quarters.In a similar way the boundaries of school syllabi inthe arts are under reconstruction. This commentary lists a number ofreasons why it is that the boundaries between subjects in the humanitiessuch as the Visual Arts, History, English, and Social Studies are being re-drawn. These reasons focus on the socio-critical frameworks that arewidely advanced as causal explanations of practice in the humanities. Thediscussion concludes with the proposal that art education has alreadyreached a post-critical moment in its evolution.First, digitization is gradually eroding the distinction between the 'high'and 'low' arts. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin (1968) observed, technology isnot merely affecting the patterns of artisticconsumption, it is changing thenature of the arts being consumed (p. 224). At first digital technology hadlittle impact upon traditional forms of painting and drawing. Softwaredesigners tried initially to capture the expressive intuition of drawing bydevising touch sensitive electronic pads and pens to simulate the drawingprocess. Talented children, it was thought, could possibly use thecomputer as a tool for drawing expressivelyonly if the interfaces could besensitively adapted as an extension of the hand. Much later in the century,however, digital artists have dispensed with touch-sensitive pads. Thekeyboard and mouse have become as indispensable to the process of digitaldrawing as they are for word processing.As a result there are an increasingnumber of successful young artistswho have never drawn conventionally.This is evidenced in the profile of skills possessed by students enrolled intertiary design programs. Digitized production of high-quality multi-modal images has made positions in music, cinema, and the graphic artsaccessible to young people who possess only vernacular levels of technicalskill in these disciplines. Digital technology not only de-skills, it popular-izes artistic competency. Interactivityvia the Internet brings a symmetry tothe division between the roles of the artist and audience, the maker andthe critic, in digital media, a division in which asymmetry has been thebenchmark of communication up until now. Nevertheless, technical inno-vation as an issue in both the high and popular arts is not new. From thebeginning of the century technological change in the recording of parlormusic, in cinema, radio plays, and illustrated magazines, has altered the

Correspondenceregarding his commen-tarymay be addressedto the author at Collegeof Fine Arts,TheUniversityof NewSouth Wales, PO Box259, Paddington,Sydney NSW 2041,Australia.E-mail: [email protected]

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patterns of participation and popular access in the arts. Technical changealone, therefore, cannot account for the continuing relevance of thelow/high artdebate in the fields of artseducation.

Second, the popularity of the arts is not only decided by their aestheticquality; it is decided by the way in which their images and performancesare understood. Once defined by their immediate aesthetic quality, theboundaries between the arts are drawn up under cognitive theoryaccording to differences in their symbolic domains. Cognitive approachesto the artsconcentrate on the semantic propertiesof performances,that is,on what artworks mean and how their meaning is framed. To perceive thearts as a symbolic domain is to abstract their meaning. It allows thedefining features of objects and performances in the arts to be detachedfrom their specialized material and technical characteristics. It also freesthem from their specialized presentation in museums, galleries, theatres,and other centers of institutional guardianship.Abstract or 'meta' notionsof the arts, which frame the meaning of representationalartifactswithincognitive assumptions of aesthetic value, are easily transportablefrom artform to art form, thus breaking down the barriers between subjectdomains. Significantly the portability of meaning in the arts, madepossible under the auspicesof cognitive theory, also allows the popular andfolk arts, even images of the everyday,to be apprehended as art. Cognitivetheory not only originates as a literary metaphor ('visual literacy,' forinstance) it operates through the explicit medium of language. Undercognitive terms, 'artfulness' is a property that is attributed to artifactsthrough the language of critical ascription. Rather than a specializedquality belonging inherently to a specialized few, it is a collection of prop-erties attributed to artifacts at large. Ironically, then, the cognitive revolu-tion in the arts has encouraged the increasingly influential opinions ofsome art educationists to advocate that art is reallyabout 'life' (Freedman& Wood 1999, Duncum 2002). Paul Duncum, for example, argues thateducation in the arts ought to draw its curriculum from the study ofeverydaymedia and the built environment, a source of 'artistic'content hebelieves to be more relevantto contemporary youth. He bases his view onwhat he sees as clear evidence of the inverse correlation between thecultural interests of the young and the old. Nevertheless, the popular artshave always had a presence in Western and most other cultures, andinterest in them has always been driven by the young. Thus it is not somuch the popular leanings of youth towards the mass media but cognitivetheory, formalized into the mainly language-based discipline of CulturalStudies, that has given to popular imagery and performances of theeveryday, the necessaryrigor to be entertained as a serious field of artisticstudy. Paradoxically,then, advocacy of the popular arts in arts educationhas been attendant upon their theoretical elevation, under the banner ofCultural Studies, to a state of 'seriousness'commensurable with the higharts.

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Third, Cultural Studies treats the opportunity to engage in artisticproduction as a politics of rights. A political emphasis on human rights isreluctant to do two things. One, it is hesitant about differentiatingbetween good and bad art on the grounds of anti-elitism. Two, it reducesthe value of art and its performances to a knowledge of their causes, that is,to their cognitive value. In other words, a politics of rights theorizes thecauses of cultural production in the artsby stripping away values based onthe virtuoso skills of the maker and replacing them with explanationsbased on culturalnecessity and democratic accessof class, race, gender, andso on. The production of high, traditional, and classical art is thusexplained under an egalitarian politics of rights as the result of culturalexclusion and of elites.

Fourth, cultural studies is currently under division into a number ofsub-disciplines. Among the newest of these is the domain of VisualCulture. Visual Culture is represented as a body of literature borrowedfrom writers such as Virillio, Barthes, Guy de Bord, de Certeau, Hall,Williams, and others commenting upon popular culture and visualization.Much of it is currently assembled within two large readers(Hall & Evans1999, Mirzoeff 1998). Visual Culture is conceptually underpinned bypost-object art, post structuralphilosophy, and critical theory in sociology,as well as by the psycholinguistic revolution in cognitive theory of the arts.Its critical tone is, in general, disrespectfulof the traditional boundaries ofartistic fields. There is no question that theoretical changes in the humani-ties of this kind have altered who and what are authorized to speak andpractice under the traditional banners of the different arts. Even moresignificantly, digitization has reinvented the material and spatial termsunder which the artsare engaged. Spontaneously emerging, largelyauthor-less imagery, produced by semi-intelligent but often unreflective commer-cialized systems, take the imparting of artistic meaning out of the hands ofthe maker of art and hand it over to the beholder and consumer. Underthe auspices of Visual Culture, the prevailing paradigm of artmaking ischaracteristicallyone that is distributed, interactive, and assembled as amontage by informed beholders and consumers. The most radical agentson the artmaking scene are the cultural critics who indirectly 'make' theworks, not through the application of technical skills, but though the attri-bution of socio-cultural motive to what are otherwise little less than free-floating and borderless images. This process of critical analysis is referredto as deconstruction.

Fifth, deconstructive pedagogy is designed to deliver up a measure ofsocio-economic critique to students. Under these terms the arts justifytheir use in education as a critical methodology insofar as they are able toinform and emancipate students' individual experiences from the domi-nant and over-bearing forces of cultural life (Freedman 2000). However,the use of deconstruction in the arts for purposes of cultural critique isunresolved. For instance, when teachers alert their students to the way in

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which children's naive palates are commercially exploited by the foodserved at McDonald's?, teachers are not merely warning students againstthe abuses of a global corporation. Teachers are also being critical of theirstudents' childish tastes. While on the one hand, under the pretext ofvisual culture, teachersmay claim the food served by McDonald's ought tobe respected through the democracy of students' popular choice, teacherssimultaneously imply, on the other hand, that the food at McDonald'sought to be condemned for pandering 'irresponsibly'to the values whichunderlie that choice. How does a child reconcile the emotional gratifica-tion provided by a Big Mac with McDonald's' rational disavowal as aninstrument of corporate exploitation? Elitism can creep into art educa-tional discourse as easily through preferredvalues brought in through theback door of culturalcritique and disapproval,as through the front door ofhigh canonical art and virtuoso talent. Elitism is thus not only confined tothe differentiation of values; it also depends upon the way in which thosevalue differences are embedded in the subject domains of the schoolsyllabus.Sixth, the democratic ethic in North America blocks the general enter-tainment of praxiological forms in education that interfere with an ethicsof free choice. It is not so much a lack of recognition of socio/culturalagencies of race, gender and class at work in the practice of artists,students, and in the art of teaching. Rather it is that a politics of subver-sion is likely to be ascribed to any agency, cultural or otherwise, thatthwarts the political and intellectual autonomy of individual actions.Democratic goals can wall off education from those pessimistic explana-tions that condemn practicaloutcomes to cultural determination. In otherwords, there is opposition to those kinds of critical explanation of actions,such as prescribedin public curriculum that cannot be bent by individualsto their own purposes. Thus the task before the protagonists of visualculture is to reconcile the underlying irony of cultural critique with itsdemocratic applications for the individual student. We know that criticaldeconstruction through the making of art is one formula for producingsuch a reconciliation. A difficulty with deconstruction, however, is itstendency to highlight the futility of many of our most basic institutionalpractices, including those that justify the inclusion of the arts in education.In sum, there is an ethical cynicism in the process of critical deconstruc-tion that provides no guaranteesfor social reconstruction in the practiceofart in education.

Seventh, deconstruction reduces the value of art and its attendant skilledperformances to a knowledge of their causes, that is, to their 'cognitive'value. Hilary Janks (2002) argues that critical literacyis essentiallya ratio-nalist activity that does not address the non-rational investments thatreadersbringwith them to texts and tasks. (p. 7) Perhaps,she argues,we areentering a post-criticalage. Janksopposes what she refers to as the inherentrationalism of deconstructive criticism. The dominantly causal reasoning

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thatshapesdeconstruction,heargues,eavesout 'desireand identification.'Desireand identification re hekeymotiveswhich,forexample,drivechil-dren to eat at McDonald's,butwhich childrenareunableto accessreflec-tively throughcriticalreasoning.Childrencan learn the algorithms orpointingout andreciting he dimensionsof corporatemperialismt workthrough the McDonald's empire, but the consequences of children's'understanding'ave ittleinfluenceover the conductof theirown motivesandinterests.Thus VisualCulture, hrough he criticalpedagogyof decon-struction, s unableto bringabout felt changes n children'sbeliefs.Janksargueshat criticism ailsto influence hildren'sresponseso culture nsofaras it removeshuman agencyfrom culturalunderstanding.Only art canrestoreor reconstructhis agency.It is the transgressiveowerof art thatenableschildren o confront he forcesof culturaldomination hat colonizetheir innermost beliefs.Art and humor are the irreverentwaysin whichchildrencan framereconstructive ction.They arethe waysthat teachersare able to bringabout changes n children'sbeliefs.The deconstructiveagendaof VisualCulturenVisualArtsandEnglishmaybe little morethana formof top-downmoralizing,propagatinglite middleclassvalues.It isreconstructiveaction throughthe characteristic orms of expression nVisualArtsthatbringsaboutculturalchange.

ReferencesBenjamin,W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanicalreproduction.in H. Arendt, (Ed.)Illuminations(pp. 217-252). New York: Schoken Books.Duncum, P. (2002). Clarifyingvisualcultureart education. Art Education,55(3), 6-12.Freedman,K. (2000). Neo-pragmatistviews on making meaning:contemporaryaestheticsin

curriculum.Paper presentedat the 40th NAEA Congress,Los Angeles.Freedman,K. & Wood, J. (1999). Reconsideringcriticalresponse:Student judgments of purpose,

interpretation,and relationships n visual culture. Studies n Art Education,40(2), 128-143.Hall, S. & Evans,J. (Eds.) (1999). Visualculture:The reader.London: Sage Publications.Janks,H. (2002). Criticalliteracy:beyond reason. TheAustralianEducationalResearcher,9(1),

7-27.Mirzoeff, N. (Ed.) (1998). Visualculturereader.London: Routledge.

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