Studies in Art Education - web.macam.ac.ilweb.macam.ac.il/~offprint/5042009.pdf · National Art...

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A Journal of Issues and Research

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Introduction to 50(4)Doug Blandy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307

EDITORIALJerome Hausman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310

ARTICLES

W. Reid Hastie: A Visionary for Research in Art EducationD. Jack Davis and Stanley S. Madeja . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314

Creative Intelligence, Creative Practice: Lowenfeld ReduxJudith M. Burton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323

Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth to Art and Its Educationjan jagodzinski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338

Are We Asking the Wrong Questions in Arts-Based Research?Dónal O’Donoghue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352

Forget This Article: On Scholarly Oblivion, Institutional Amnesia, and Erasure of Research HistoryMary Hafeli. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369

Reconceptualizing the Role of Creativity in Art Education Theory and PracticeEnid Zimmerman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 382

COMMENTARY

Response to Tavin’s “The Magical Quality of Aesthetics”Mary C. Carter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 400

MEDIA REVIEW

Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists for the FutureRita L. Irwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405

Copyright 2009 by the Studies in Art EducationNational Art Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research 2009, 50(4), 305-408

Volume 50Issue 4

Summer 2009

306 Studies in Art Education

Instructions for Authors of CommentariesSubmission and Preparation of Manuscripts. Commentaries are concise, sharply focused responses to issues that have been or should be addressed in published articles. Send commentary manuscripts to Karen Keifer-Boyd, Studies Commentary Editor, School of Visual Arts, 210 Arts Cottage, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802-2905. [email protected] Submit by email attachment (Word format) followed by two paper copies via post. Manuscripts must be double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 750-1500 words). Include a cover page that shows the title of the manuscript, word count, your full name, and institutional affili-ation, if any. The first page of a commentary manuscript should also include the title and your name. Although commentary manuscripts are not subjected to masked review, authors may be asked to make revi-sions. Additional infor-mation concerning commentaries may be obtained from the Commentary Editor.

Instructions for Authors (also see www.arteducators.org/studies)Submission of Manuscripts. Send manuscripts to Kristin Congdon, Senior Editor, Studies

in Art Education, Philosophy Department, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd., Orlando, FL 32816-1352 <[email protected]> Authors of all disciplines and fields of study are encouraged to submit research related to art education. It is highly recommended that a professional colleague read and critique the manuscript before submission. Submit an email letter requesting review and possible publication with an attached manuscript file (Word format, no PDFs) followed by a copy of the letter and two print copies of the manuscript on high quality paper via the post. In the letter, state that the manuscript has not been published nor submitted for simultaneous consideration elsewhere. Include the word count of the manu-script (excluding references) and the full name, address, email, and home and business tele-phone numbers of the author who is to receive editorial correspondence. Retain a copy of the manuscript for your records.

Preparation of Manuscripts. In preparing manuscripts for consideration by Studies, authors should consult and follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition, (2001). Manuscripts must be typed, double-spaced, 12 pt. font size throughout, have appropriate margins and no visible tracking. Include an abstract (75 to 150 words) and a separate title page. The title page should include the manuscript title, the full names and the institutional affiliations of authors, a running head, and author identification notes. Include also a list of three to five keywords or phrases that could be used in an electronic search. The first page of the manuscript should carry the title and the first page number; successive pages should carry page numbers and the running head. To facilitate a masked review, authors’ names, affiliations, and identification notes should appear only on the title page. Use author identi-fication notes to acknowledge the basis of the study (doctoral dissertation or paper presented at a meeting, financial support, or scholarly assistance), to indicate changes in the authors’ affiliations, and to specify the address of the author to whom requests for reprints or inquiries should be sent. Attach copies of figures, tables, and illustrations as separate files. Format notes as Endnotes rather than Footnotes. Images that add information to the accompanying text are welcomed and, upon acceptance of the article, must be accompanied by release forms, captions, and full credits, and be of publication quality (300 dpi, 4 x 6 inches). Image files for submission for review should be 50-100K and 72 dpi (resolution). Maximum dimensions are 800w x 600h pixels for landscapes and 600w x 800h pixels for portraits. All audio visual media, electronic media, artwork, and other specific examples of material culture must be referenced in the text. Although a longer manuscript will be accepted when reviewers agree that reduction would mean loss of essential content, the preferred length is 5,000 words.

Review of Manuscripts. All manuscripts are subjected to masked review by selected members of the Studies Editorial Board. To be accepted, most manuscripts undergo at least one rewrite. To correct for errors or ambiguities in papers accepted for publication, the Senior Editor may further edit a manuscript prior to production. Authors’ permissions are always obtained for extensive changes. A final decision on a manuscript may take at least 6 months. Every effort is made to publish a manuscript within 12 months of its acceptance.

Instructions for Authors of Media ReviewsSubmission and Preparation of Manuscripts. Both invited and unsolicited media

reviews (including, but not limited to, books, CDs, educational exhibits, games, video, and websites) are published. Reviews should be critical discussions rather than mere publication notices. Those interested in writing media reviews should contact the Media Review Editor for information and instructions. Send manuscripts to Sara Wilson McKay, Studies in Art Education, Media Review Editor , Department of Art Education, School of the Arts, Virginia Commonwealth University, 812 West Franklin Street, P.O. Box 843084, Richmond, VA 23284-3084 <[email protected]> Submit by email attachment (Word format) followed by two paper copies of each manuscript via post. Limit manuscript to 3-6 double-spaced, typed pages (approximately 750-1500 words). Type reviews beginning flush left with an APA citation, adding number of pages, and ISBN number where applicable. Single space and begin next line flush left with: “Reviewed by (reviewer’s name).” Add brief reviewer infor-mation (name and affiliation) at the end of the manuscript. Although reviews of media are not submitted to masked review, reviewers may be asked to make revisions. Additional information concerning media reviews may be obtained from the Media Review Editor.

Studies in Art Education 307


IntRoduCtIon

Introduction to 50(4)

Doug Blandy

Senior Editor

This issue of Studies in Art Education commemorates 50 years of publi-cation. The inaugural issue of Studies in Art Education was published in

fall 1959. This first issue included essays by Irving Kaufman, Edmund B. Feldman, Kenneth R. Beittel, Vincent Lanier, Fredrick M. Logan, and John S. Keel. Jerome Hausman edited the journal and contributed an editorial.

Hausman also contributes an editorial to this issue. Three of the articles that follow his editorial are written in response to an invitation from the editorial board for research articles inspired by the issues raised, and the problems posed, by the authors in the first issue of the journal. These articles are by D. Jack Davis and Stanley S. Madeja, Judith M. Burton, and jan jagodzinski. Each of these articles attends to historical figures and issues in the field while simultaneously commenting on contemporary issues and possible future directions. An additional three articles by Donal O. Donoghue, Mary Hafeli, and Enid Zimmerman are included because of their critical orientation to research in the field: arts-based research, the tendency to erase earlier research, and creativity, respectively.

Studies in Art Education has a history of publishing commentaries and media reviews. In keeping with this history one of each is included in this special issue. Mary C. Carter’s commentary is the second response to a commentary by Kevin Tavin on aesthetics that appeared in Volume 49, Number 3. The first response to Tavin was a commentary by Olivia Gude that appeared in Volume 50, Number 1. Tavin’s original, Gude’s first response, coupled with Carter’s in this issue exemplifies the importance of sustained debate within the field on issues of common concern. Rita L. Irvin’s review of Mel Alexander’s edited volume, Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture, concludes this issue by directing our attention to the future as well as the significance of art education that is multidisciplinary.

Together, the 50th volume of Studies in Art Education included 4 edito-rials, 24 articles, 2 media reviews, 3 commentaries and an introduction. The articles were selected from 78 active files spanning three years of submis-sions, including 48 new submissions from April 2008 through March 2009. Research published in this 50th year tended to be curricular, historical, cultural, philosophical, and critical-theoretical. Authors were associated with universities and one public school system in 18 U.S. states and three Canadian provinces.


Doug Blandy

Volume 50, Number 4 concludes my senior editorship of Studies in Art Education. I have appreciated the opportunity to serve the field, in this way, over the past two years. I have also appreciated the opportunity to express concerns and issues that I believe should be important to the field on those pages of the journal given over to the editor. These concerns and issues have included the politics of knowledge and publication; education and democracy; culture and democracy, education and media; embracing a systemic view of education in the arts; and the importance of place and the environment.

As Senior Editor, I have been fortunate to work with an editorial board that has been impressive for its judiciousness and conscientiousness in its review of manuscripts. The editorial board and I have tended to err on the side of inviting revisions rather than outright rejection. Collectively we have struggled with our desire to guide authors, and remain conscious of the importance of acceptance rates to a journal’s reputation and influence in the promotion and tenure process. In addition to reviewing manuscripts, the editorial board has worked with me to develop written policies asso-ciated with the duties, responsibilities, terms, eligibility, and election proce-dures for the Senior Editor, Associate Editor, Past Editor, Editorial Assistant, Commentary Editor, Media Review Editor, Studies Invited Lecturer, Editorial Board Member, and Authors. We worked with the National Art Education Association (NAEA) to develop a copyright agreement permitting authors to retain rights to reprint. An electronic submission, review, and filing system was developed and implemented. A task force, chaired by David Darts, began to consider Studies in Art Education within a Web 2.0 envi-ronment. The journal’s website, hosted by the NAEA, was re-designed and new material was added to assist potential authors. A Studies in Art Education 50th Anniversary committee, chaired by Kevin Tavin, planned and imple-mented a series of panels at the 2009 NAEA Convention bringing together past editors of the journal.

I am grateful to Candace Stout, the Past Editor; and Kristin Congdon, the Associate Editor; for being readily available to advise as I found my way. Karen Keifer-Boyd, as the Commentary Editor and Christine Thompson, as the Media Review Editor, facilitated the publication of significant material in Volumes 49 and 50. I could not have hoped for a better editorial assistant in Elizabeth Hoffman. Because of her good work, manuscripts moved through the review process in a timely and organized way. The electronic system that helped Hoffman make this possible was designed and managed by Jack Strukel. Julie Voelker-Morris and Catherine Ballard provided assistance with copyediting. Studies in Art Education was hosted at the University of Oregon by the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy. This center and the Arts and Administration Program provided funding and in-kind support. Davis Publications provided support to the Studies in Art Education Invited Lecture and Reception.


Introduction

Studies in Art Education demonstrates the commitment of NAEA to scholarship and the communication of research. Deborah Reeve, the Executive Director of the association, has emphasized this commitment to me in numerous conversations. The publication of Studies in Art Education is made possible through the extraordinary efforts of Lynn Ezell, Publications Manager, and Clare Grosgebauer, Staff Editor, in the NAEA office.

Thank you to those of you who chose to submit your research and opinion pieces to Studies in Art Education and for your trust in the editorial board and me.



EDITORIAL

Jerome Hausman

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

There was a time when I felt that those who were 50 years old were “very old.” A span of 50 years seemed so long. From today’s perspective, it is but an “instant”. Reflecting upon 50 years since Studies in Art Education was first published leaves me with polar responses: on the one hand, Studies has accom-plished so much; on the other, it is but a lonely voice amid the din of new ideas and speculations.

We are in the midst of dramatic change. For some, the present can be char-acterized as “revolutionary”. We are so caught up in the throes of radical change that we may not comprehend all that is happening to us. Whatever comfort we may feel based upon modernist notions of accomplishment and achievement can be balanced with countervailing forces that would threaten our very exis-tence. Some take comfort in characterizing the present as “evolutionary.” John McHale (1969) observed that “evolution is permanent revolution”.

In the mid-twentieth century situation, two aspects of change are crucial. One is the explosive growth in man’s capacity to interfere on a large scale with natural environmental processes. The other is the lag in conceptual orientation toward those capacities and toward the social processes through which man accommodates change. (p. 69)I chuckle now in rereading my second editorial in Studies: “The images and

ideas with which we describe and account for our present reality will eventually give way to new systems (and hence, new ideas and images) that enable our realizing other meanings” (Hausman, 1960, p. 4).

Prior to 1959, artists in their writing and creations pointed to new direc-tions that gave rise to new ideas. One could cite the writings of Kandinsky, Apollinaire, Picasso, Duchamp, and others. I recall a visit in the late 1940s to Jackson Pollock’s studio and my confusion in seeing his drip paintings. His new and unfamiliar imagery brought forth feelings of skepticism bordering on ridicule. Of course, I knew little of his having witnessed American Indian sand painting or his having seen Max Ernst’s automatic drawings, or his encounters with Surrealist Art or the community of artists that we now identify as the “New York School.” His canvasses were large, like the Mexican muralists whose works he admired. One needed to step back to experience the entire painting. Its scale was such that he had to have been “inside” the painting. Harold Rosenburg’s statement (1961) reflects upon this work:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. (p. 25)

Correspondence regarding this editorial may be sent to the author at [email protected]


Editorial

We can now see the larger dimensions of the changes taking place in our ideas about art itself. Piet Mondrian (1945) put it so well:

This consequence brings us, in a future perhaps remote, towards the end of art as a thing separated from our surrounding environment, which is the actual plastic reality. But this end is at the same time a new beginning. Art will not only continue but will realize itself more and more. (p. 62-63) Those who teach art need always be in touch with what is happening in art,

itself. George Kubler’s statement (1962) is instructive: Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art. (p. 1)It was in 1934 that John Dewey published Art as Experience. Note that

he referenced “experience,” not “things.” Was he denying the importance of the physical entities we refer to as “art”? Of course not! He focused upon the perceptual transactions taking place when encountering these objects or events. Emphasis was placed upon a creative process. For Dewey, the challenge was “to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are usually recognized to constitute experience” (p. 3). All of this has had profound and far-reaching effects on art education. There was greater attention being paid to the nature of artistic process and the inner dynamics as students gave form to their ideas and feelings.

Shortly after the publication of Studies, the Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development was held at Pennsylvania State University (1966). There were about 50 invited participants. The Seminar lasted for two weeks and included papers by psychologists, sociologists, educational theorists, art historians, art critics, philosophers, and art educators. The latter part of the Seminar was devoted to projecting research and curriculum devel-opment projects. The seminar ended on a note of confidence and optimism. We were “modernists”; there was faith in “progress” toward agreed upon ends. The “truths” of art education awaited implementation. Postmodernist ambiguities had not yet surfaced. A clean, more singular pathway seemed within sight. Yet, some voices anticipated ongoing difficulties. June McFee, for example, refer-enced the problems of society and social change. She cited subcultures of race, religion, and economic levels becoming more dominant factors and urged that we re-evaluate our goal statements, taking into account ethnic and cultural diversity. Her presentation referenced the broad contextual factors that impact what we do: the emergence of minority groups, economic depravation, urban population increases, automation, and mass media.

Presentations by Allan Kaprow, the artist; Harold Rosenburg, the critic; and Joslina Taylor, the art historian, emphasized the dynamic and evolving nature of the visual arts. Kaprow observed: “Educationalists naturally have to have art educable, which requires a great deal of systemization” (p. 82). He then


Jerome Hausman

continued, “Systemization, so far, has invariably killed magic, and has broadcast false or dull values.” Harold Rosenburg (1961) added:

Criticism is confronted by a flood of new forms, new motives, experimental attitudes. To react intelligently to these, criticism must test itself and develop new forms of insight and expression (e.g., multiple perspectives, a rhetoric hospitable to the ambiguities and paradoxes of art itself. (p. 64)

Taylor concluded: In teaching, it is essential to pose the problem through the works of art themselves, not by comparing contrasting sets of words … in the arts, the way to knowledge is gained is a part of the knowledge itself, how we find out is an inseparable part of what we find out. (pp. 49, 51)In the years following the Penn State Conference, there were many efforts

to develop comprehensive approaches that would satisfy modernist mandates. The Aesthetic Education Project, the Kettering Project, the JDR 3rd Fund’s Arts in Education Program, and more recently, the J. Paul Getty Funds efforts to establish “Discipline-Based Art Education” (DBAE). All of this was followed by the “standards movement,” With government and foundation support there were efforts to establish what every student should learn and be able to do at each level of schooling. The “other shoe” that had to drop was the call to test students so that we would know what they had learned. All of this has had unfortunate consequences in that testing was equated with evaluation, and State Departments of Education and school districts were caught up in “No Child Left Behind” mandates.

Many see the present period as one in which we are at a “crossroads.” On the one hand, there are those arguing that Art Education ought to establish itself as a “discipline” like others already accepted in the curriculum. Like other subjects, we ought to insist upon our place along with the resources to do our job. On the other hand, there are those arguing for wider inclusions, greater variability, and social responsibility. These arguments expand teaching emphasis to include visual culture: experiences with mass media, everyday objects and events, and new technologies for the expression and communication of ideas.

Personal experience has taught me the importance of recognizing a center for one’s life, developing a sense that reaches back to one’s traditions and ahead to the realization of new ideas and experiences. The future I aspire to would reject arguments that would polarize our field. Leonard B. Meyer (1967) noted:

If our time appears to be one of crisis, it does so largely because we have misunderstood the present situation and its possible consequences. Because a past paradigm has led us to expect a monolithic all encompassing style, the present cultural situation seems bizarre and perplexing. The ‘crisis’ dissolves when the possibility of a continuing stylistic coexistence is recognized and the delights of diversity are admitted. (p. 172)There is something exhilarating and exciting about encountering new issues

and challenges. We act using our existing knowledge and traditions. At the same


Editorial

(continued on p. 10)

time, each new instance offers a different opportunity. Things are not quite the same, even with seemingly identical circumstances. We have to chart a different course. At each point, we are engaged in inventing our life.

Postmodern thought suggests the idea of multiple possibilities and distinctive solutions informed, but not bound up, in a single view from the past. Our present situation should be seen as inaugurating a new era of possibility and responsibility for art educators. Just think of how contextual circumstances have changed. We are encountering extensions and enhancements of our world. New media and technologies have expanded and enlarged human potentialities. This new “prosthesis” has created a different sense of self and others. Just think of the possibilities for creating real and virtual environments. Consider the impact of digital resources and the existence of a blogosphere. Project the new and expanded roles to be played by artists and educators.

If we are freed of the guilt of necessity for arriving at singular, all-encom-passing and fixed answers, we can come to the adventure and satisfactions of working things through to the best, most informed, most satisfying outcomes. Gone is the feeling that doing away with one style of ideology is a prerequisite for the initiation of another. The process in which we engage should challenge us to test our theories and rethink what we know and value. Formulas, theories, and fashions are both tools and traps. They are tools for orienting, structuring, and evaluating what goes on in our lives. They are traps if they limit perceptions to rigidly fixed categories. This is why the art historian Rene Huyghe (1959) offered this caveat:

The more insight the history of art gives us into the necessities that form the artist, the more nearly it liberates us from the temptation of formulas, theories, and fashions, because it shows us that these things, being subject to perpetual change, are relative and vain. The only permanent thing is quality, which cannot be reduced to a formula or definition. (p. 438)

ReferencesDewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. New York: Capricorn Books.Hausman, J. (1960, Spring). Editorial. Some notes on our ideas and their structure. Studies in Art

Education, 1(2).Huyghe, R. (1959). Ideas and images in world art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.Kaprow, A. (1966). Report of the Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum

Development. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University.Kubler, J. (1962). The shape of time. New Haven: Yale University Press.McHale, J. (1969). The future of the future. New York: Ballantine Books.Meyer, L. (1967). Music, the arts and ideas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Mondrian, P. (1945). Plastic art and pure plastic art. New York: Wittenborn and Co.Pennsylvania State University. (1966). Report of the Seminar in Art Education for Research and

Curriculum Development. State College, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University.Rosenburg, H. (1961). The tradition of the new. New York: Grove Press, Inc.Rosenburg, H. (1966). Report of the Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum

Development. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University.Taylor, J. (1966). Report of the Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum

Development. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University.


W. Reid Hastie: A Visionary for Research

in Art Education

D. Jack Davis

University of North Texas

Stanley S. Madeja

Northern Illinois University

W. Reid Hastie, the fifth president (1957-1959) of the National Art Education Association, promoted the need for a scholarly venue devoted entirely to issues and research in art education and a place where related research results could be presented on a regular basis to the field of art education, as well as the larger field of education. His vision led to the initiation of Studies in Art Education, a journal of issues and research in art education. The first issue was published in the Fall of 1959. Hastie’s vision, practice, and support of research are examined within the context of the history of research in art education and the rapidly changing world of higher education following World War II.

When Studies in Art Education was introduced to the field of art education in 1959 as a journal for professional and critical dialogue about issues and research related to art and art education, it was a landmark. For the first time ever, there was a scholarly venue devoted entirely to issues and research related to art education. The fact that it has survived and flourished is a testament to the vision of W. Reid Hastie, the National Art Education Association (NAEA) president (1957-1959) under whose leadership Studies in Art Education was established. It is also a testament to the need for a forum where art education researchers could share the results of their work and engage in a dialogue with professional colleagues throughout the world (Beelke, 1972).

Research Trends in Art EducationWhile there is an established history of research in art education predating

the beginning of Studies, most related research prior to 1940 was conducted by individuals outside the discipline. Those few individuals, both art educators and non-art educators, who published their work did so in a variety of educational, psychological, and sociological journals (Davis, 1967). The earliest known piece of published research with a relationship to art education was a study conducted by the legendary leader of the child study movement, G. Stanley Hall. In May of 1883, he published a report on a study of the contents of children’s minds on entering schools in the Princeton Review (Hall, 1883).

In her thesis, A Summary of Scientific Investigations Relating to Art, Mary Strange (1940) presented a systematic look at scientific research in art and art education


Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to D. Jack Davis, Ph.D., Professor of Art and Director of the North Texas Institute for Educators on the Visual Arts, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle # 305100, Denton, TX 76203-5017. E-mail: [email protected] and to Stanley S. Madeja, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Art, Northern Illinois University, 730 Horne Street, St. Charles, IL 60174. E-mail: [email protected]

W. Reid Hastie


A Visionary for Research in Art Education

prior to that time, identifying all published research that she could locate. She reported that during the 57-year period between 1883 and 1939, 162 studies were published in books and in a wide variety of educational and psychological journals such as Pedagogical Seminary, American Journal of Psychology, and the British Journal of Psychology. These publications grouped themselves into four general categories: (a) color and color vision, (b) drawing and/or graphic ability, (c) picture preference and appreciation, and (d) tests and measurements. An examination of this work reveals that most of it was conducted by individuals outside the field of art education, primarily by psychologists and sociologists. In many cases, it appears that art was being used as a means to an end, without any foundational basis in aesthetics, creativity, or artistic processes (Davis, 1967). For example, the focus of many of the studies was not on art but on other topics such as mental development, intelligence, special talents and defects, differences in males and females on various traits, and school success. Art was simply used as a vehicle to examine the phenomenon being investigated.

Following World War II, the United States experienced unprecedented growth in higher education with the returning veterans and support of their education by the G.I. Bill. Art education was not excluded, and educational opportunities in the field were characterized by phenomenal growth, especially at the graduate level. More researchers who were art educators emerged, bringing about more research in art education. The field of art education was developing to a point that more research was necessary if continued growth were to occur. Art educators wanted evidence to support the generalities and beliefs that were so prevalent in the literature (Davis, 1971, 1977, 1990; Efland, 1990).

The volume of published research related to art education between 1940 and 1960 exceeded the volume of published research in the previous 57-year period by 30% (Davis, 1967). Two hundred ten (210) investigations were published in this 20-year period, approximately one-third the amount of time. Work in the same four categories identified by Strange (1940) continued, but research activity between 1940 and 1960 included four additional categories, expanding the research concerns of the field: (a) the study and teaching of art, (b) art and the personality, (c) creativity and the arts, and (d) therapeutic values of art (Davis, 1967). This all happened in the absence of a venue devoted exclusively to publishing research in art education.

Initiation of Studies in Art EducationIt was within this environment that W. Reid Hastie recognized and promoted

the need for a journal dedicated to issues and research in art education. NAEA, only a decade old, was guided through his leadership to initiate such a journal for the profession. Prior to that time, the regional associations––Eastern, Western, Southeastern, and Pacific Arts––which were combined to form the NAEA had recognized the importance of and need for research in art education. They had occasionally published research yearbooks (Michael, 1997). This provided the basis for the new national organization to continue the tradition of publishing yearbooks on issues and research in art education. The first NAEA Yearbook, Art Education Organizes, was published in 1949 and continued yearly through


D. Jack Davis and Stanley S. Madeja

1959. Three of those yearbooks (the 5th, the 7th, and the 9th) were research yearbooks. Hastie was a member of the first Research Committee of the newly created NAEA, along with Manuel Barkan (chair), Jerome Hausman, Edith Henry, and Vincent Lanier (Barkan, 1954). Hastie remained a member of the Research Committee until he became president of the organization in 1957 (Barkan, 1956). This Committee was responsible for producing two NAEA Research Yearbooks in 1954 and 1956. When Hastie became president, he reconfigured and expanded the Research Committee from 5 to 7 members: Jerome Hausman (chair), Kennth Beittel, Edith Henry, Edward Mattil, Helen C. Rose, George K. Ross, and Stanley G. Wold. Ralph G. Beelke, the newly appointed and first Executive Director of NAEA, served as a consultant (Hausman, 1959, p. ii). A third yearbook was published under the guidance of this new committee in 1959, and Studies in Art Education was launched in the fall of that same year. Jerome Hausman and Manuel Barkan prepared the proposal for Studies (personal conversation with Jerome Hausman, January 21, 2009), and under Hastie’s leadership as president, the organization made a commitment to initiate the publication.

The proposal was well accepted by the NAEA Council and was approved providing that the publication ‘did not cost the Association any money.’ Jerry Hausman was the first editor…. The first issue was published at the University of Georgia under the eye of Alex Pickens. It is full of typographical errors, but proofs, copy corrections, etc., cost time and money, and at that moment there was little of either. But with advertising income, subscriptions, and very low printing costs, the publication supported itself. (Beelke, 1972, p. 16)The pressing need for a dedicated research journal for art education was

clearly evident, and under Hastie’s visionary leadership, the organization seized the moment and made a paradigm shift for the field of art education. Without a strong tradition in applied or basic research and without a systematic venue for reporting the research that was being done, Studies became the research journal for NAEA and an authoritative voice for the field of art education.

Hastie’s BackgroundHastie, who was a graduate of the State Teachers College in Edinboro,

Pennsylvania, held a master’s degree from the University of West Virginia and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught in the Monongalia County Schools in Morgantown, West Virginia and at the University of Pittsburgh (1941-1949) prior to going to the University of Minnesota where he taught for 21 years (1949-1970). Hastie completed his career as Professor of Art at Texas Tech University (Department of Art, Texas Tech University, 1981).

When elected the fifth president of the newly formed NAEA, Hastie was still in his formative years as a college faculty member and was a relative newcomer to the field at the national level. Walter Cook, dean of the College of Education at the University of Minnesota, was a strong advocate for art education and encouraged Hastie to become involved in the field at the national level (Conversations with Stanley S. Madeja and D. Jack Davis, 1960s). Cook’s



interest built upon a legacy of strong support for art education. The College had initiated the Owatonna Art Education Project under the leadership of Dean Melvin Haggerty in the 1930s. This project became a landmark in school-based research and curriculum in art education (Chapman,1978; Efland, 1990).

Along with strong support from his home institution, Hastie brought to the presidency a broad vision of the field of art education and a commitment to move the organization forward. During his presidency, Hastie accomplished a number of things that positioned the NAEA to become a stronger voice for art education nationally. A national headquarters for the organization was estab-lished in Washington, DC, moving the records and property of the NAEA from Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where they had resided since the beginning of the national organization. The first Executive Director for the organization, Dr. Ralph Beelke, was employed. Hastie and Beelke, along with the other leaders of the NAEA, were aware of the changes that were occurring, especially in relation to teacher education where a power shift from teachers colleges and normal schools to comprehensive universities was taking place (Dorn, 1997). Hastie recognized that this shift meant changes in the way that business was conducted in regard to teacher education. With major comprehensive univer-sities becoming players in the teacher education field, more emphasis would be placed upon research. Without a venue for the publication of research related to art and art education, the field of art education would struggle to establish itself strongly among other disciplines that had such mechanisms in place. Hastie also believed that professional organizations have an important role to play in research, even though most research is done by an individual or a team of individuals. He believed that committees in national and regional organiza-tions could identify major issues and provide the raw material for more specific and detailed studies that would be conducted by individuals. He also thought that professional organizations should serve as a clearing house for research and that their seminars and conferences could provide a forum for evaluation, discussion, and debate about research (Hastie, 1959). It was within this context and under Hastie’s leadership that the NAEA initiated Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education. The first volume appeared in the Fall of 1959.

Hastie’s Beliefs About Research and Art EducationHastie embraced a broad definition of research consistent with the one written

by the Committee of Research in the College of Education at the University of Minnesota in May 1958. It stated that research includes “all forms of scholarly work” that was “aimed at discovering new knowledge or at making creative interpretations, organizations or applications of this knowledge” (Hastie, 1959, p. vii). He believed that such a definition could provide a base for “integrating all of the diverse types of studies and investigation into a single research program” and emphasized that debates about whether one type of research was better than the other were pointless (Hastie, 1959, p. vii).

Hastie held strong views on the need for research in art education. These views are expressed clearly in his introduction to the 1959 NAEA Yearbook which he


penned in the last year of his NAEA presidency. Reflecting on Lester Dix’s intro-duction to the fifth NAEA Yearbook on research, Hastie (1959) stated:

There is every reason to believe that the state of mind of art educators with respect to research has become even more uncomfortable because they are not keeping pace with the accelerated drive to discover new knowledge that is characteristic of our world today. (p. vi)This statement was made within the context of his understanding of the

rapid expansion of knowledge in many areas and its applications to new uses that resulted in events like the launching of Sputnik by the Russians. He noted that such events represent a severe blow to the pride of the American people, and when that pride is injured, the citizens of the United States had to have someone or something on which to place the blame. Hastie (1959) noted:

The nature and characteristics of this period of criticism is best exemplified by the actions of scholars and scientists as educational reformers. Here we have an interesting phenomena (sic). These men are highly disciplined within the confines of their own field and draw conclusions objectively after careful analysis of the data from controlled observations. Now, in this new role, they are quite willing to make very broad generalizations emotionally and subjectively and without either data or observations (p. vi)

Writing specifically about art education, Hastie (1959) noted that:Talk in terms of vague generalizations and unsupported claims about the benefits that all individuals derive from art experience will not give adequate support for a program of art education for children and adults. Clear, concise conclusions and recommendations tested by carefully controlled investigations will be required. (p vi) Hastie recognized that one of the most important issues facing art educators

attempting to do research was assessment and the resistance to measurement of any kind by a large percentage of art educators. He believed, as did Thorndike (1914, p. 141), that “if a thing exists, it exists in quantity; if it exists in quantity, it can be measured” (Hastie, 1959, p. vii). He thought that “Measurement is not in itself wrong. It is rather that the available tools and methods may not give an accurate account of what is going on inside a human being when he engages in an art experience” (p. vii). He believed that art educators had to create the “instruments that will open the door to research possibilities in the arts and art education” (p. vii). In his thinking, the choice was not about whether to do research or not to do research. Rather, he believed that art educators would “be required to clarify and promote those characteristics of personal development that can be promoted more effectively and efficiently through art experience than by another means available in our system of education” (p. vi). Additionally, he thought that when this was accomplished that it was necessary to share the results in an easily understandable language that could be understood by those who were not researchers.

The initiation of Studies was but one of many visionary actions that Hastie took in his long and distinguished career as an art educator. Following his




presidency of NAEA, Hastie continued to be actively involved in research. As a faculty member in one of the small number of institutions that offered doctoral degrees in art education, he guided the work of students as well as pursuing his own interests. He engaged in a variety of professional activities which also became landmarks for art education. Additionally, he remained an active artist.

Additional Contributions to Art EducationHastie was selected as the editor of the National Society for the Study of

Education’s 64th yearbook. The Society issued annual yearbooks on various topics concerning American education. The 64th yearbook was only the second the Society had done on the topic of art education; the first one was published in 1941 (Whipple, 1941). Art Education: The Sixty-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, published in 1965, was well received. It broadened the base of art education by formally introducing the discipline to the larger field of education by a respected professional society. The Yearbook was also unique in that it included work by authors outside the field of art education such as Robert Beck, a professor of educational philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and younger members of the profession such as Elliot Eisner at the University of Chicago, Stanley Wold at Illinois State University, and John S. Keel at San Francisco State University. It is important to note that Walter Cook, Dean of the College of Education at the University of Minnesota, was also a prominent member in the Society and served on the Society’s Art Education Committee, along with Hastie, Eisner, and Wold.

In 1969, Hastie co-authored a book, Encounter with Art with Christian Schmidt. In this book, Hastie did pioneering work in researching the nature of artistry and the artistic process. The book explores the artistic process and the importance of thinking and behaving like an artist as part of an art educa-tor’s persona. He contended that one can generalize about the artistic process and that it can be compared to the scientific method which is primal to most thinking in and about the sciences. His visionary thinking was reinforced some 7 years later at the Aspen Conference, “Arts and Aesthetics: an Agenda for the Future,” co-sponsored by the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory, Incorporated (CEMREL) and the Education Program of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies and supported by the National Institute of Education. In setting a research agenda for arts and aesthetics, the conference participants identified the roles of the artist and the artistic process as research priorities. In summarizing the conference discussions, Madeja (1977) stated:

Should the artist be the researcher, or should the artist be the subject of research? Some of the arguments over these questions evolved from differing perceptions of what constitutes research in the arts. The term “researcher” is used in many discussions to mean “an individual possessing a particular scholarly background and special training.” The artist was rarely considered a “researcher.” Traditionally, the artist, the arts object, and the arts experience are the phenomena to be investigated. The researcher investigates the way artists work, the objects


and performances they create, the effects of the arts on the society, and the audience’s response to arts objects and events. The researcher, once removed from the creative act and the created object, studies its properties, makes generalizations, and determines theoretical and pedagogical applications. This conception of research as a strictly academic or professional pursuit does not allow for what many conference participants saw sees as a major part of the role of the artist—the investigation of problems within their area of interest. (p. 17)The topic provided a very engaging issue for conference deliberations.

Reflecting upon what is currently referred to as arts-based research (Sullivan, 2005), it is clear that the ideas for this approach are embedded in this type of thinking. The artist as researcher investigates a process, a technique, and a creative problem, probing all the elements and components of that problem in order to solve it.

Hastie also played an influential role in the implementation phase of the Aesthetic Education Program (AEP) which was launched in the late 1960s at CEMREL. He served as a content specialist for the program, helping to shape the visual strand in the AEP curriculum and setting the stage for art engagement in the larger domains of visual culture as a part of art education programs. His articulation of ideas regarding how the artistic process would affect the basic art curriculum was a critical piece of the content outline of the AEP curriculum. It related to the larger content domain of aesthetics and the artist and dealt with questions such as: Why do people make works of art? Where do artists get their ideas? What is the process that the artist uses to organize those ideas into objects? What role does the art form play in dictating the process, methods, and techniques used by the artist? What does the individual artist bring to the creative and inventive and imaginative ways of working within that process? He also emphasized that the individual artist is the variable that makes each work of art unique and encourages inventiveness and creativeness. Hastie projected the idea that the artist––in addition to exposing his or her work to critical judgment by a larger audience in terms of aesthetics, cultural, and artistic values––was a critic in the process of creating his or her own work.

Hastie was committed to basic research studies that focused on improving instruction in the visual arts. He recognized the need for applied and practical studies relating to the teaching of the visual arts at every level. These studies would expand the knowledge base by providing practitioners with exemplars and best practices for the teaching of art. These methodologies would also foster the inventive, creative, and artistic development of the student. His thinking was in concert with the creativity movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Baron, 1972; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Guilford, 1956). Hastie also encouraged research which optimized the learning experience in classroom environments as exemplified by the work of his graduate students (Davis, 1966; Jensen, 1971; Madeja, 1965; Templeton, 1963).




ConclusionStudies in Art Education has continued to grow and thrive for 50 years. It has

moved from a semi-annual journal to a quarterly journal, and the volume of research reported has increased exponentially. Without a doubt, it is the premiere research journal in art education in this country and beyond. Four times a year, it reports on the best thinking and work that is occurring in the field. While the focus of the research and the methodologies used to explore probing questions in art education have changed, they fit into the comprehensive thinking that W. Reid Hastie embraced as the first volume was launched in 1959. Thanks to his vision, his leadership, and his energy, the field of art education today stands tall with its peers in other areas of education by providing a respected venue for reporting the research that is so vital to exploring issues and shaping practice in the art classroom.

The high standards maintained by the editorial staff of Studies provide a benchmark for future research in art education. Quality research is essential to the future of art education; it will provide the “clear, concise conclusions and recom-mendations tested by carefully controlled investigations” that W. Reid Hastie (1959, p. vi) called for in 1959 when Studies in Art Education was initiated.

ReferencesBarkan, M. (Ed.). (1954). Research in art education: 5th NAEA yearbook . Kutztown, PA: National

Art Education Association.

Barkan, M. (Ed.). (1956). Research in art education: 7th NAEA yearbook. Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Baron, F. (1972). Artist in the making. New York and London Seminar Press Inc.

Beelke, R.G. (1972). Associations are people. Art Education, 25(1), 14-21.

Chapman, L.H. (1978). Approaches to art in education. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Davis, D. J. (1966). The effects of two methods of teaching art upon creative thinking, art attitudes, and aesthetic quality of art products in beginning college art students (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1966). Dissertation Abstracts International, 27, 2272.

Davis, D. J. (1967). Research trends in art education. Art Education, 7(20), 12-16.

Davis, D. J. (1971). Research in art education: An overview,” Art Education, 24(5), 711.

Davis, D. J. (1977). Research trends in art and art education: 1883-1972. In S. S. Madeja (Ed.), Arts and aesthetics: An agenda for the future (pp. 109-147). St. Louis, MO: CEMREL, Inc.

Davis, D. J. (1990). Teacher education for the visual arts. In W.R. Houston (Ed.) Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 746-757). New York: Macmillan.

Dorn, C. M. (1997). A national association: Our growth, organizational development, and special projects. In J. Michael (Ed.), The National Art Education Association: Our history – Celebrating 50 years, 1947-1997 (pp. 71-80). Reston, VA: The National Art Education Association.

Department of Art, Texas Tech University. (1981). Education in art: Critical issues for the 80s: A symposium in honor of W. Reid Hastie. [Brochure]. Lubbock, TX: Author.

Efland, A. D. (1990). History of art education: Intellectual and social contents in teaching the visual arts. New York: Teachers College Press.

Getzels, J. W., & Jackson, P.W. (1962). Creativity and intelligence. New York: Wiley and Sons.

Guilford, J. P. (1956). Structure of intellect. Psychological Bulletin, 53, 267-293.

Hall, G.S. (1883). The contents of children’s minds. Princeton Review, 11, 249-272.



Hastie W. R. (1959). Introduction. In J. J. Hausman (Ed.), Research in art education: 9th NAEA yearbook. Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Hastie, W. R. (Ed.). (1965). Art education: The sixty-fourth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.

Hastie, W. R., & Schmidt, C. (1969). Encounter with art. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

Hausman, J. J. (Ed.). 1959. Research in art education: 9th NAEA yearbook. Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Jensen, O. M. J (1971). Differences in perception through teaching drawing in contrasting groups of fifth grade students (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1971). Dissertation Abstracts International, 32, 3156.

Madeja, S.S. (1965). Comparison of two methods of teaching art to students of high and low art ability (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1965). Dissertation Abstracts International, 26, 5297.

Madeja, S. S. (1977). Introduction. In S. S. Madjea (Ed.), Arts and aesthetics: An agenda for the future (pp. 1-20). St. Louis: CEMREL, Inc.

Michael, J. (Ed.). (1997). The National Art Education Association: Our history – Celebrating 50 years, 1947-1997. Reston, VA: The National Art Education Association.

Strange, M. (1940). A summary of scientific investigations relating to art. Unpublished master’s thesis, Baylor University, Waco, TX

Sullivan, G. (2005). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

Templeton, D. E. (1963). The creative process of communication: An examination of the process of analogizing of students and teachers of art and its implication in the area of creativity (Doctoral dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1963). Dissertation Abstracts International, 26, 2596.

Thorndike, E. L. (1914). Units and scales for measuring educational products. Proceedings of a Conference on Educational Measurements, Bulletin of the Extension Division, Indiana University, 12(10), 128-141.

Torrance, E. P. (1962). Guiding creative talent. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Whipple, G. M. (Ed.). (1941). Art in American life and education: The fortieth yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.



Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at: Art Education, Box 78, Teachers College Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027. E-mail [email protected]

Creative Intelligence, Creative Practice:

Lowenfeld Redux

Judith M. Burton

Teachers College Columbia University

Volume 1, No. 2, of Studies in Art Education, appearing in spring 1960, included an article by Viktor Lowenfeld titled “ Creative Intelligence.” Here, he highlighted his belief in the importance of creative intelligence to human functioning, linking it to creative practice as represented most purely in the artworks of children and untutored artists. The present article written with over 60 years of hindsight, offers a gentle critique of Lowenfeld’s theory of creative intelligence as exemplified within his concepts of developmental stages, growth components, and final outcomes. Yet, by paring away some of his outmoded surfaces, there lurks within Lowenfeld’s seminal offering to art education the enduring idea that creative practice offers ways of knowing and world-building that enliven knowledge through acts of personal generativity.

Viktor Lowenfeld contributed to the inaugural volume of Studies a short piece titled “Creative Intelligence” (1960). Here, expounding on an issue already given prominence in his widely published text, Creative and Mental Growth (1957), he argued for a new view of creative intelligence. Along with others of his time, he assumed that within cognitive functioning creativity stood apart from general intelligence operating with a set of traits of its own (Barron, 1955; Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Guilford, 1950; Wallach & Kogan, 1965; Torrance, 1962). Introspective accounts of artists and other highly creative individuals had indicated that creativity was intimately associated with an openness to indi-vidual experience and exhibited freedom, playfulness, and uniqueness relative to individual purposes—all traits that, unlike intelligence itself, were considered unmeasurable (Dewey, 1934, Read, 1943).

By the 1960s the issue of creativity, especially in education, had become a topic of urgent discussion in the light of the Russian launch of Sputnik. The need for new thinking in the areas of science and technology had sparked a debate that reached into all branches of intellectual endeavor including the arts—once thought to have priority in such matters. While reflecting thinking current in his time, Lowenfeld was less interested in what one might call the social purposes or pragmatic outcomes of creativity than he was in its quieter workings in how individuals functioned within, and made sense of, their worlds.

“Man and environment” do not change. What changes is our subjective relationship with man and environment. It is this subjective relation between the world and ourselves that has to be studied in order to know how to stimulate a child properly according to his age level (Lowenfeld, 1960, p. 81 [emphasis in original]).


For him, “creative intelligence” existed within everyone and acted to enlighten what he termed the search for “subjective truth” providing encounters with the world that were relational, distinctive, and unique (Lowenfeld, 1957, p. 25). Creative intelligence unfolded over time, could not be forced, and was encoun-tered in its most pure form in the artworks of children and untutored artists: “Creativity on a naïve level is best seen in primitive folk art and also in the art of children” (p. 24). Thus for Lowenfeld, creative intelligence was exemplified in creative practice and his lifetime concern was to enlighten the conditions under which this occurred.

The Notion of Relationship: A Human Purpose for ArtThroughout all his writing, Lowenfeld was consistent in the emphasis he

placed on relational-knowing at the heart of art practice, aesthetic experience, and as a reflection of creative intelligence.

A work of art is not the representation of the thing; it is rather the representation of the experiences which we have with the thing. These experiences change with our subjective relation to the environment as well as with the medium through which these relationships are expressed. This holds true for the design and execution of a chair as well as for the design and execution of a picture. (Lowenfeld, 1957, pp. 79-80)The unifying theme in Lowenfeld’s work, and the underpinning of his

conception of creative intelligence, is found in the brief statement above intro-duced into the 3rd edition of Creative and Mental Growth (CMG) in 1957. For Lowenfeld, all things were known relationally, and visual images existed in the world as expressions of that knowledge. To this end, he believed that creative practice functioned to integrate intellectual, emotional, social, aesthetic, physical, and perceptual life, or what he termed “growth components.” He argued that creative practice contributed to the development of a harmonious personality at the heart of which was a flexible mind able to empathize with and be sensitive to the needs of others. Seen in the context of his time, Lowenfeld’s vision was, at root, a prescription for repairing the world. Looking back in time and extrapolating from his own early experiences and those of his compatriots, Lowenfeld explained how they:

learned to use all of their senses to become more sensitive to nature, for only a person who uses all the refinements of his sensitivities will grow up a refined human being in a world of peace. (quoted in Ranuft, 2001, p. 6)Perhaps by drawing on these earlier experiences and having survived two

bruising world wars, Lowenfeld (1957) later wrote:Our one-sided education with the emphasis on knowledge has neglected those attributes of growth which are responsible for the development of the individual’s sensibilities, for his spiritual life, as well as for his ability to live cooperatively in a society. The growing number of emotional and mental illnesses in this nation, the largest in any nation, as well as our inability to accept human beings first of all as human beings regardless of nationality, religion, race, creed or color, is a frightening sign and

Judith M. Burton


Creative Intelligence, Creative Practice: Lowenfeld Redux

vividly points out that education so far has failed in one of its significant aims…. Art Education, introduced in the early years of childhood may well mean the difference between a flexible creative human being and one who, in spite of all learning, will not be able to apply it and will remain an individual who lacks inner resources and has difficulty in his relationship to the environment. (p. 2)Lowenfeld was not alone, of course, in claiming that art education could exert

a powerful influence on repairing a fragmented world by providing the resources for creative practice, and mental integration. Both of his near contemporaries, John Dewey and Sir Herbert Read, had made similar claims in their ground-breaking works, Art as Experience (1934) and Education Through Art (1943).

More than 60 years on, and even a cursory glance at the world today, reveals that years of art education practice under the influence of Lowenfeld, Read, Dewey, and others, have produced neither a noticeably better world nor more balanced and harmonious personalities. Given what we now know, we can hardly argue that artists of the past such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Goya, Picasso, and Bacon were models of integrated or harmonious personalities, nor menders of their worlds. Yet these artists produced great art in their time––art that had undeniably powerful effects on their contemporary and future audiences. For they created new forms of thinking and feeling in paint and stone that not only enriched the emotional texture of life but also opened to view new depths of human relationships. In short, they gave birth to forms of meaning that enriched human experience, expanded cultural reach, and often, challenged prevailing aesthetic and social norms.

While perhaps Lowenfeld’s position on the role of art in the creation of a more harmonious world seems overstated, even naïve, to us today, he nonetheless framed an issue of contemporary relevance. For if artistic activity in the lives of children and adolescents is not about saving the world, then what ultimate end does it serve? A contemporary re-casting of Lowenfeld’s work might offer us a newer kind of answer. For by paring away a number of his outmoded surfaces, and at a deeper level, we find Lowenfeld is consistently preoccupied with a more hospitable claim: that artistry, both creating and responding, is about making the world personally meaningful and endowing the outcomes with social and aesthetic significance. Aesthetic growth, fostered in art education, Lowenfeld (1957) writes, is the task of education in which:

The individual’s sensitivity toward perceptual, intellectual, and emotional experiences is deepened and integrated into a harmoniously organized whole, so that his senses are brought into harmonious and habitual relationship with the external world. However, in this education process art can play a major role inasmuch as no art expression is possible without a heightened sensibility toward the external world and our ability to bring our inward senses in harmonious relationship to it. (p. 9)It is important to recognize that Lowenfeld was proposing a humanizing

purpose for art rather than charting the growth and development of the talented or specially gifted individual. He appears to have thought that, with insightful


Judith M. Burton

teaching, all young people would grow in their abilities and that creative intel-ligence and talent would blossom. For him, thus, creative intelligence enlivened and integrated the operations of thought while creative practice drew upon experience of life as subject matter, and in doing so, helped children and adoles-cents to situate themselves empathetically within the network of relationships that composed their worlds.

Development and InstructionChildren’s creative products have enchanted adults of all walks of life for

well over 100 years. The work of Lowenfeld offered a theory and description of stages that, from the first publication of CMG, came to dominate school art practice. His influence did much to free teachers and children from the aesthetic and conceptual straight-jacket based in “imitation” and “telling” that dominated much school practice at mid-century. Theoretically, however, as his critics have noted, his work was less invested in artistic development per se, than in creative intelligence as it related to the formation of self-identity, person-ality, and human relationship. He was not alone in his time in believing that a consciousness of self would emerge through an empathetic ability to identify with others; an ability made possible through creative practice. Through recalling memory experiences as sources for creative action, Lowenfeld, like Read and Dewey, believed that children and adolescents would become insightful about the purposes and problems of others.

I think this is the great contribution of art to man: art embraces not only physical skills and abilities, not only the mind, but also the emotions and many aspects of growth which we otherwise would leave untouched even in our present educational system. I would like to become more poignant and clear about this so that we all understand it. (quoted in Michael, 1982, p. 5)

Stages and PhasesLowenfeld’s thinking about the subject matter and purposes of creative

practice in the lives of children and adolescents was encapsulated by his theory that creative and mental growth took place in stages. He was among the first to set forth what, in his time, was a comprehensive view of development distinguished by its continuity from childhood through late adolescence. He delineated stages of artistic development, moving in predictable order and at designated ages from what he called the scribbling stage of infancy to the crisis of adolescence. Lowenfeld’s view of development was complex and assumed an interweaving of intellectual, emotional, social, perceptual, physical, aesthetic, and creative components of growth.

His stages began with the very young child as an active agent in the acqui-sition of concepts of lines, marks, forms, and their relationships. This pre-repre-sentational development, Lowenfeld argued, derived from an innate creativity that required very modest environmental guidance. From this point onwards, he envisioned a sequence of stages in which skills accumulated in the construction of visual images that built on each other in hierarchical fashion becoming increasingly dependent on the knowledgeable intervention of teachers. Within



the forward movement of creative development, young people revisited and elaborated on images of objects and events, constructing ever more complex relationships with them.

For Lowenfeld, stages were distinct and unified structures. Children and adolescents passed through the same stages in the same way and at more or less the same ages. Pictorial and graphic skills were not so much accumulated stage by stage, but involved important changes in their organization over time. Their very names: Scribbling, First Stage of Self Expression, First Representational Attempts, Achievement of a Form Concept, Dawning Realism, Pseudo Realistic Stage, The Period of Decision, and Adolescent Art, capture the significant achievements that characterized the flow of development over time. Stages were composed of the “growth components” and it was the achievements of each stage to ensure both development and also balance among components. Development itself occurred in response to the changing experiences of everyday life which, Lowenfeld believed, mobilized natural interests and curiosity and inspired creative action. While stages dictated what was experientially salient at any given time, they were continually challenged by new events in children’s lives that provoked imbalance in the structural organization of the growth compo-nents. The compulsion of young people to create paintings, drawings, collages, and clay works was part and parcel of their drive to organize everyday experi-ences and, in consequence, achieve balance and harmony in their thinking.

Lowenfeld, like his near contemporary Jean Piaget (1929), believed that creative growth and development occurred as a process of natural unfolding, each stage coming into being one after the other in a linear fashion. This trajectory of development was conceived by both Piaget and Lowenfeld as largely unaided by external social forces. While it is true that Lowenfeld situated the subject matter interests of children and adolescents in the context of their self-world relationships, he did not make a place in this for the artistic influences of the surrounding culture. In fact, he envisioned a disunity between education and the environment that was “clearly expressed by an art expression which because of its extreme individual character almost loses its communicative meaning” (Lowenfeld, 1957, p. 39). Against this, he urged teachers to help youngsters identify with their own subjective experiences and believed that the pictorial devices that they acquired were their own inventions coming into being to meet their own expressive purposes.

The complete integration of content and organization, of design and its meaning, is one of the intrinsic qualities of creative work. Any artificial influence on the part of the teacher would only cause confusion in the child. Such unity has to come from the child as a sign of his state of mind and should help the teacher only to gain more insight into the child’s growth. (Lowenfeld, 1957, p. 67)It was not until adolescence and the emergence of visual and haptic interests

that Lowenfeld acknowledged the role that social influences, embedded in the study of the history of art and crafts, played in determining forms of creative practice.


Judith M. Burton

This strictly linear view of growth and development has been much criti-cized over the years, and the notion of structurally unified stages seriously ques-tioned. Research, inspired by the work of Vygotsky (1962), and later by Bruner (1990, 1996), Kegan (1994) and Egan (1999), has made it clear that, from the first, all facets of children’s development are not only situated within the culture of which they are a part but also shaped by the practices, skills, and expectations of that culture. From infancy onwards the actions and outcomes of human endeavor are molded by culture, parents, and teachers who challenge and nurture development and its forms. If parents have created an environment in their home where infants can explore and play with materials, if children have then been encouraged to expand and enrich their learning in materials in pre-school, then they will likely be ahead of those youngsters who have been less fortunate. If, later in schools, children have been offered constructive learning experiences in the visual arts that respect their subject matter interests, they are more likely to continue in their creative development than those who have not. Learning how to learn, to pay attention and concentrate draws upon the inter-vention of an adult or teacher, and are themselves skills of the culture that shape development. Creative growth is, thus, heavily conditioned by experiences with materials, visual ideas, and ways of learning that children encounter during the course of their lives both inside and outside school.

The culture shades development in two additional ways: via the commit-ments of the art teacher and via the preoccupations and practices of the art world itself. For example, usually teachers have been trained in art school and likely are sympathetic to one or other style of art that influences their own creative practice. These sympathies inform their understanding of the discipline and help shape their instructional practices and expectations for their pupils’ accomplish-ments. Of course, while most teachers adapt their own art commitment to their perceptions of pupils’ interests and past experiences, this will vary considerably from teacher to teacher. Moreover, the teacher’s understanding of difference and diversity also enter into how the discipline is portrayed to pupils. Class, race, ethnicity, and gender are all defining components of the socio-cultural world that we now understand have influential bearing on creative development and its outcomes. Children growing up in different circumstance and with diverse cultural backgrounds and experiences appear to follow a variety of develop-mental tracks. Nowadays, teachers who honor difference and diversity in their art classroom will introduce their pupils to the works of under-represented communities and cultures, thus offering a wider spectrum of models for inspi-ration than Lowenfeld could probably ever have imagined.

Growth ComponentsBut in his time, the work of Lowenfeld challenged the supremacy of the

cognitivist tradition of development. For Lowenfeld, as for Piaget and other developmentalists, early learning was situated in the very young child’s physical action in the world and the feelings that accompanied those actions. Learning centered in the physical body was conceived to be fundamental to the reach of childhood creative growth and was accompanied by an emerging ability to reflect on the outcome of action and give it direction. However, Lowenfeld



parted company from traditional developmentalists such as Piaget by arguing that learning through body action, the senses and feelings, was not left behind in infancy, rather remained a potential source of knowledge and action throughout life. Indeed, it was the function of this embodied knowledge, Lowenfeld believed, to bring a sense of aliveness to drawings, paintings, collages, and clay works no matter how complex or formal they became. Throughout CMG, teachers were exhorted to offer children physical activities as part of their motivations for learning in order to keep this capacity alive.

Lowenfeld’s commitment to embodied experiences led him to modify the centrality usually attributed to intellectual growth in education by situating it as one component among several included in his conception of the human mind. By dividing the mind into seven components, he gave each a significant role to play in development: “Growth occurs simultaneously in its different components and affects the child in his totality” (1957, p. 48). He perceived that learning in the schools of his time was directed toward the nurturance of a narrow rational scientific mind neglecting the wider range of human abil-ities and needs. This led him to offer creative practice as the place where the thinking, feeling, and perceiving of the whole individual could be attended to and developed. His theory suggested that growth components changed and developed at each stage, and thus, each stage could be envisioned according to the designated accomplishments he set forth. As the drive to construct ever more adequate schemas for changing life experiences unfolded, Lowenfeld’s assumption was that there should be an accumulation of parallel skills in all growth components. When one or several growth components appeared to lag behind, a stage was thought to lack inner structural unity and balance; when this occurred, he assumed that inner mental integrations suffered from a lack of homogeneity. Here, art teachers were urged to make careful study of the growth components as they shaped each stage of development and take steps to help maintain “harmonious relationships” through their teaching (1957, p. 60).

It is clear that Lowenfeld envisioned his growth components as fundamental units of creative intelligence, or mental life. However, seen in retrospect, the strength of his theory for his time was to give a place and function to body-senses-feelings in the construction of knowledge. Philosophers of education such as Langer (1953), Reid (1954), Scheffler (1991), and later D’Amasio (2003) and Johnson (1987), argued for a close kinship between cognition and emotional life, but this had largely been ignored in education both before and after Lowenfeld’s time. As Louis Arnaud Reid (1973) pointed out:

It can be argued effectively that feeling has a crucial function to perform in coming to know and understand: it has a cognitive function and is not a mere subjective happening. This stands out very clearly in the development of aesthetic understanding, but it has a far wider application than this. (p. 175)It is important to recognize that Lowenfeld’s theory called into play and

dignified capacities of mind (or growth components) that were largely excluded from the education of his day. However, while we may now assume that children and adolescents do call upon a broad range of habits of mind in creative practice,


Judith M. Burton

and elsewhere in their learning, these do not of necessity achieve or maintain parallel growth as Lowenfeld thought (Burton, Horowitz, & Abeles, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Gardner, 1983). There are many determining factors impinging upon how habits of mind might develop and interact in creative endeavors, such as past experiences with materials and practices, individual interests and temperament, and influence of teachers and parents. Reid (1973) offers us a poignant glimpse of this.

Into all our awareness—perceptual, imaginative, conceptual, and aesthetic—there enter countless influences, influences of what may (but need not) have been once fully conscious, but are now consciously forgotten, taken for granted, having become part of our disposition to attend and apprehend. We ‘see’ the world in perspective as coloured, resonant, three-dimensional continuum, a world of nameable things and relations… We see it because of countless explorings, learnings, teachings, education—from babyhood onwards. Everyone comes to the arts with all this ordinary equipment. We come, too, as individual persons—with certain temperaments, dispositions, and gifts, with special personal associations which effect what is seen, with a particular cultural background in which the arts and aesthetic may or may not have played a part. (p. 183)It is also highly probable that some components/habits of mind come to

the fore at different times and for different purposes in development. We all know, for instance, children who are gifted in drawing or painting yet whose social and physical abilities are much more rudimentary, or the young child who shows little aesthetic interest, only to blossom in adolescence. We also know youngsters who, experiencing times of emotional distress, may either endow their creative practice with heightened feelings or withdraw from any such activity entirely.

Looked at from the perspective of today, a less rigid view of growth compo-nents raises questions about unified stages. The very concept of fixed unified stages is probably misleading, for in reality, most children’s creative practice includes evidence of several so-called stages co-existing harmoniously in any one work. We only have to think of the creative practices of early childhood, where first images of people are often accompanied by actions derived from Lowenfeld’s scribbling stage, called upon to depict the actions of wind, or fire, or movement; or think of later childhood in which a medley of different spatial views such as: bird’s eye, overlapping, and fold-over co-exist as they call upon a variety of ways of perceiving and acting in the real world of space; or of adolescence where scribbling or doodling often enters into more formal attempts to depict perspective or volume. Indeed, in the real world of today, it seems that both children and adolescents will call upon a great divergence of skills and practices as they meet a particular challenge, or make an imaginative leap into a new idea.



Phases and TransitionsA re-casting of Lowenfeld’s stage theory suggests that development occurs in

smaller overlapping units or phases, wherein new behaviors emerge over time but are not necessarily structured in equal graphic complexity as Lowenfeld thought. The products of these phases include specific skills, practices, and accomplishments that can be called upon flexibly in the process of creative practice. New skills as they emerge enter into children’s and adolescents’ artistic repertoires widening and deepening their constructive and expressive potential. Thus, challenges prompted by youngsters’ expanding worldviews inspire subject matter ideas that call into being a range of graphic possibilities; these in turn, provide a reflective lens on the subject matter provoking new thoughts and feelings for expression. This kind of flip-flop interplay between experience and repertoire is made possible by the imagination which invites experimentation, testing, and play as possibilities are explored (Arnheim, 1974; Franklin, 1973; Green, 1995; Smith, 1983; Wener & Kaplan, 1963). Here, the imagination comes into play, as indeed Lowenfeld suggested, to inform creative intelligence and generate new meanings.

As we now envision it, development might be understood at one level in terms of phases rather than stages and as gradual transitions in creative behaviors as these are layered in complexity over time. At another level, development might also be seen in terms of what David Feldman (1994) has called crys-tallizations, or the integration of phases for increasingly complex constructive and expressive purposes. Here, a range of earlier (and later graphic) skills may be called forth in response to a youngster’s experience or idea and may crys-tallize as a constructive-expressive vehicle. While such crystallizations may often be temporary, they nonetheless introduce new skills and possibilities into the young person’s existing repertoire.

This conception of development would be a more adequate explanation for how children and adolescents quite naturally and happily appear to draw upon differently organized groups of creative behavior in single works, and how actions vary from material to material. For example, a 10-year-old may combine a complex feel for pattern and design in depicting a human figure, yet place the figure on a simple baseline more typical of a younger child. The same child working with clay may ignore pattern and design completely in favor of a concentration on the spatial volume and action of the figure. It also explains how, from time to time, creative practice appears recursive, as if youngsters need to revisit past possibilities and explore their potential for further growth. Indeed, if we examined the works of mature artists through this lens of development we would find groupings of differently structured actions brought together for an infinite variety of expressive purposes. We have only to think of the play of formal precision and brushy texture in Hockney’s Bigger Splash, or Turner’s Rain Steam and Speed, or Rembrandt’s Girl Standing in a Pool, and myriad other such examples both historical and contemporary.

Seen from the perspective of contemporary thinking about human and artistic development, many of Lowenfeld’s ideas can be seen to foretell later advances in the field. His delineation of stages, however, now appears much


Judith M. Burton

too inflexible, age determined, and rigidly linear. While Lowenfeld’s theory of creative and mental growth makes much of respecting children’s experiences, he tends to assume that all children and adolescents are likely to have had, or indeed should have had, the same kind of experiences occurring within the same time-frame. This makes very little room for youngsters from diverse back-grounds, with diverse cultural and gender experiences who grow richly in their difference. We know for example that feelings such as love, fear, and anger present different challenges to boys and girls based on socio-cultural expecta-tions and this is reflected in the art they make (Cox, 1993; Feinberg, 1977; Flannery & Watson, 1994; Tumin, 1999). Moreover, if young children have had plentiful exploratory experiences with materials, they are likely to have more richly endowed repertoires than youngsters whose opportunities have been more limited. Adolescents who have benefited from continuous art expe-riences through their childhood are likely to weather the conflicts of adoles-cence and re-discover their expressive voices more easily than those who have not. We now know that human development does not proceed according to a smoothly flowing linear agenda, for young people progress according to indi-vidual and different rhythms. Some children quite naturally progress rapidly in development only to slow down from time to time, while others begin slowly and then speed up; still others follow a more even pace.

Thus, while development clearly takes place in creative intelligence, we now need to understand it differently as a constructive activity rather than as a spontaneous unfolding. We need to go beyond Lowenfeld’s theory of fixed- and age-assigned stages with clearly bounded growth components, experi-enced by all young people in the same way. Creative practice enables children and adolescents to structure their understandings of self and world in much more flexible ways than he envisioned. We need to be much more open to the realities of 21st-century youngsters living in a heterogeneous, complex, tech-nological, challenging, and culturally diverse world. We need to do all this without losing Lowenfeld’s essential belief in the contribution of the visual arts to our human capacity to construct complex knowledge and make the world a meaningful place.

The Outcomes of Creative GrowthWhile often overlooked now, Lowenfeld’s commitment to the importance of

relationship at the heart of creative practice makes his developmental theory quite distinctive: He envisioned creative practice as a vehicle for sensitizing children and adolescents both to their own needs and capacities as well as to those of others. In concert with other traditional developmental theorists he gave priority to individual development, believing that properly supported creative practice would lead to personal autonomy. (Erikson, 1968; Piaget, 1951; Kohlberg, 1969). This kind of freedom carried with it a distancing of perception that allowed young people to stand back and critique their worlds, circumventing what Lowenfeld saw to be the corrosive conventions of the commercial culture. Unlike his contemporaries in cognitive psychology, however, Lowenfeld envi-sioned that personal autonomy, enhanced by richness of perception and well-



nurtured expressive abilities, would naturally offer possibilities for enlarging ideas about relationship rather than reinforcing self-other separation. He argued that creative practice offered an experience of responsiveness to others, a way of being present in the world, of reaching out and being seen and heard. He suggested that it was during the process of working with materials that young minds were able to reflect upon people and events of great salience to a sense of self and, through the agency of the imagination, to be empathetic to others they did not know and to situations they had not experienced.

It is well to remember that … one of the major concerns of art education is its effect on both the individual and society in general. To live cooperatively as well-adjusted human beings in this society and to contribute to it creatively have become most important objectives for education. It is impossible to live cooperatively and understand the needs of our neighbors without self-identification. As the child identifies himself with his own work, as he learns to appreciate and understand his environment by subordinating the self to it, he grows up in a spirit which necessarily will contribute to the understanding of the needs of his neighbors. As he creates in the spirit of incorporating the self into the problems of others, he learns to use his imagination in such a way that it will not be difficult for him to visualize the needs of others as if they were his own. (1957, p. 36)His commitment to the centrality of relational thinking, perceiving, and

feeling in creative growth has the theoretical hallmarks of his old colleague, the philosopher Martin Buber, and brings Lowenfeld more squarely into the camp of psychoanalytic theorists such as Donald Winnicott (1971) and Marion Milner (1971). In this aspect of his theory Lowenfeld was clearly ahead of his time. For it would be more than 20 years before feminist theorists would chal-lenge traditional developmental views of the objective-rational mind, by re-situ-ating it within a relational worldview centered on caring and justice much like Lowenfeld had proposed (Gilligan, 1982; Miller, 2007).

If Lowenfeld placed creative practice in service of the construction of ideas about self and world, the outcome, as we have seen, was not to be judged as an aesthetic object. His wariness of the prizing of intellectual ability over all other capacities of mind in education was also carried over into his perception of aesthetic education. Here, he was clearly fearful that criteria drawn from formal aesthetics were being used to evaluate the artwork of children and adolescents. Moreover, he was also concerned that learning to apply formal aesthetics in their own creative practice worked to divert and stultify youngsters’ own natural aesthetic inclinations.

Aesthetic growth is organic with no set standards; it may differ from individual to individual and from culture to culture… If we attempt to regiment aesthetics we arrive at dogmatic laws which have their expression in totalitarian rules… It implies that all set rules, rigidly applied to any creative expression are detrimental to aesthetic growth. (1957, p. 58)


Judith M. Burton

Moreover:Aesthetic growth, although very important, constitutes only one fraction of the total growth of the child. However, since art has traditionally been interpreted as being related mainly to aesthetics, this concept is greatly responsible for the neglect of other factors of growth. (1957, p. 49)For this reason, perhaps, in his theory, aesthetic growth, like intellectual

growth, was no more than one capacity of mind among several and did not have overarching sway over creative practice. Here, he parted company with many of his colleagues and would indeed be much criticized for this view in later years (Barkan, 1962; Lanier, 1969; Wilson, 1997). While he agreed that the creative practices of children were superficially like those of artists, he believed for most youngsters this was not a step on the road to adult artistry and could not be judged as such. Since his time, the ongoing debate about whether the work made by children and adolescents is art or not continues unabated and, to some extent, mirrors the larger confusion about the nature of art itself. There are still conflicting views about the location of the aesthetic experience, its meaning in development, and how it can be taught and eval-uated. While most observers of children’s creative practice today do see in it the seeds of adult artistry, they also see it in terms of an aesthetic experience that serves youngsters’ own purposes of making their worlds meaningful (Burton, 2005, 2009; Franklin, 1973; Smith, 1983).

Possibly more contentious than the stages in Lowenfeld’s work is his view of the outcome of creative practice encapsulated in terms of two styles of art. Within his theory, creative practice originating from direct physical action on and with materials was characteristically expressionistic in the early years. The artistic path envisioned by Lowenfeld thereafter was composed of building blocks toward forms of pictorial realism. Artistically, this realism took two directions in development: one leading to visual realism, the other to a kind of expressive realism. The former was dominated by an interest in visual detail: the precisions of contour, identification of specific features, linearity, and was thought to be more distanced and objective; the latter drew upon multi-sensory responses captured in color with sweeping and free brushwork and was deemed to be more inner-directed and subjective. Both outcomes of creative practice were thought by Lowenfeld to reflect personality types, the visual and haptic, and both were instruments of mind enabling mental integration. It is inter-esting to note that throughout his text, Lowenfeld clearly prized the more expressive-haptic type and protested about teachers who over-emphasize the visual in youngsters’ creative practice.

It becomes evident that imaginative activity and even the ability to give objective form to the creations of the imagination by no means depend on the capacity to see and observe things. (1957, p. 276)At this point in time it is difficult to sustain the notion that personality

inhabits styles of art quite as Lowenfeld thought. Indeed, if the growth compo-nents and the stages they characterize must now be thought about more flexibly, this has implications for Lowenfeld’s ideas about personality. We now know



that any given self is expressed through myriad traits, motivations, projects, interests, and styles and that these change over time and with diverse experiences (Burton, 2005; Franklin & Kaplan, 1994; Gardner, 1982; Mathews, 1999). While Lowenfeld insisted that his two personality types emerged quite naturally in development, he failed to note that they did so in a cultural setting in which visual and expressive styles of art predominated. Looked at in hindsight, so powerful was Lowenfeld’s voice at mid-century that realistic and expressionistic styles were to dominate much school practice for years to come.

In the world today, however, contemporary practice offers a spectrum of styles that might have astonished Lowenfeld and challenged his rather narrow theory of personality linked to style. It now seems more reasonable to uncouple style and personality. While it is true that some children have interests in visual realism and some in more tactile and embodied uses of materials, most children and adolescents combine both interests. Beyond this, and depending upon how their teachers’ frame learning, young people will explore and experiment with a whole range of styles testing out their possibilities for personal creative outcomes.

Within Lowenfeld’s theory of creative and mental growth not all children and adolescents become professional artists, but they all develop flexible and free minds able to construct and express personal meaning. It is here, perhaps, at its deepest level that Lowenfeld’s work resonates most fully with more contemporary sensibilities. For he envisioned children and adolescents engaged in a process of creative practice which called for reflection that energized imagi-nation and opened new worlds of understanding and meaning to them. The visual expression of meaning in lines, shapes, forms, and colors allowed for a whole network of influences, experiences, ideas, and feelings to interplay and be shaped into coherent wholes. Lowenfeld’s developmental theory is characterized by processes of creative practice exemplifying what he calls creative intelligence at work, rather than the aesthetic products of artistry. It is not that Lowenfeld was unmindful of outcomes or of the needs of the gifted and talented individual. But his emphasis is rather on the continuing need of all young people to make sense of a complex and confusing world, of the need to empower young minds with aliveness and flexibility, and to harness their inherent creative capacities to this end.

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Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth

to Art and Its Education

jan jagodzinski

University of Alberta

This essay argues for a fundamental change in the direction of art, its education and research that draws on Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics and negative affir-mation as well as Deleuze’s reorientation of aesthetics. I draw on the inspiration of Vincent Lanier’s critical spirit and Irwin Kaufmann’s ideas on art, creativity, and research as they appear in the first issue of Studies in Art Education to argue for such a line of flight. A number of neologisms are introduced that develop this potentiality of the force and truth of art that are ‘beyond aesthetics’ as it is commonly understood.

Vincent Lanier, one of the first generation of post-World War II art educators, had an influence on the field of art education that still remains with us to this day. He was a provocateur who would challenge the field from the margins and hold court in hotel lobbies and foyer armchairs during NAEA confer-ences. Fact or fiction, that’s how the legend goes. Vincent was certainly part of the ground floor that helped to establish NAEA and its journal, Studies in Art Education, in those formative years. He published “Implications of the Concept of Action Research” in the very first fall issue of 1959, where he questioned the division between pure and applied research, defending the necessity of scientific research for the field, a position he was to renege on later in his career. I was fortunate enough to attend several summer school courses Vincent taught at the University of Oregon in the late ‘70s. He was also my external dissertation examiner in 1980. I have held a long-standing affection toward him that is unlikely to go away.

For this 50th anniversary Studies special, I offer this article as a tribute to Vincent’s audacity of spirit, especially in the vein of two influential essays that were written around the time I was finishing my Masters and Doctorate degrees: “A Plague on Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education” (Lanier, 1974) and especially, “The Misdirected Eye” (Lanier, 1978) that raised the social import of art and questioned the field’s moral and social compass. There is approximately a 15-year gap between the thrust of Vincent’s first essay in Studies on research and these two key essays that articulate his challenge to the field. The first essay (“Plague”) is a historical review of the field that questions its overemphasis on creativity and studio practices, calling for an “aesthetic education” that addresses social transformation and expands art education to include the popular culture of film and television; the second essay (“Misdirected Eye”) comes closest to my own project. Lanier admonishes aesthetic and environmental education for failing to address social and moral issues. However, “Some art,” he says, “speak[s] to the human condition” (p.14, added emphasis). My orientation is similar but

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at [email protected]


Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth to Art and Its Education

1 From the mid-1980s cultural studies was a scattered practice. It was not until 1990 that an international conference was organized that solidified it paradigmati-cally as a disciplinary field. The conference entitled, “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future,” was organized by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler through the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (April 4-9, 1990). The book that solidified the field, called Cultural Studies, came out in 1992.2 This concept is fully developed in jagodzinski (2008). It refers to the virtuality of memory as culled from the writings of Gilles Deleuze, who in turn borrows from Henri Bergson. The Real (capitalized) refers to the unconscious as developed by the many writing of Jacques Lacan.

the stress is on ethics (not morals) and on art’s ability to disperse power so as to reconfigure social relationships.

In a homologous fashion of renewed provocation, this essay addresses the contemporary field in order to displace “aesthetic education” to the affective realm of the pre-individual (to stand Immanuel Kant ‘on his feet’). This is a turn away from the field’s overemphasis on cognition; it is an attempt to rethink the limitations of visual studies of popular culture, and to steal back the ‘organ of the eye’ from its consumerist trappings by renewing the ‘force’ and ‘truth’ of some art so that its social transformative potential is not lost given the contem-porary socio-historical context of designer capitalism. Creativity is not over-emphasized but redefined, while research is rethought in a direction that has a number of affinities with Irwin Kaufmann’s (1959) essay in the inaugural issue of Studies.

By assessing the contemporary state of art and its education, I hope to present a viable alternative for the field by shifting the axis away from its continued grip on aesthetics and representation—which, in their Kantian foundations are ‘dead’ and in need of repositioning to place him on his feet. Yet, some sectors of art education either do not yet know this, or are not willing to part with Kant, or simply repress his passing. The ‘beyond’ in the title refers to the displacement of aesthetics by Deleuze (1994) and Badiou (2005b). Deleuze does this by turning Kantian transcendental idealism into a “transcendental empiricism” where virtual experience is actualized immanently through the potentialities of open-system thinking, rather than being confined to the legislative and judicial universal form offered by Kant’s closed system. Badiou, on the other hand, through his neologism of “inaesthetics,” severs the grip philosophy (as the discipline of aesthetics) has had on art as its captured object. In this essay, the ‘beyond’ now identifies the originary sense-related aisthetic (from the Greek aisthetos = ‘sensuous’, ‘perceptible’) as the realm of a-signification of the affective body without organs (BwO) discussed below.

This proposal is also a departure from the (more recent) coalesced direction to turn the field toward visual studies of popular culture in relation to the broader enterprise of cultural studies that was institutionally established around 1990 (Grossberg, Nelson, & P. Treichler, 1992).1 A ‘third’ way is proposed that is characterized by “negative affirmation,” a concept developed by Badiou (2005a), which will be explained later. I argue that art and its education under-stood as an aesthetic object or as a cultural commodity within a productionist model of making (praxis/action/myth) must be abandoned for a postaes-thetic and post-productionist position, which redefines art as an event that has a performative and transformative side for society through doing (poeisis/enabling/fabulation—not poetics) as productive desire. The emphasis is on becoming rather than being, recognizing the significance of temporality. The subject is conceptualized along psychoanalytic topological lines where memory and recollection (anamnesis) is characterized by a virtual Real.2 This intro-duces the importance of transitivity in the exchange between all the players in art and its education. To be presumptuous, this ‘line of flight’ alone can escape the utility of art and its education within global designer capitalism,


(continued)

3 These shock waves are directed against critical theory that continues to forward the Hegelian centrality of negation in dialectical thought where the concept of difference remains caught by a logic of contradiction—a ‘thing’ is defined by what it is not. This is a difference of degree. In contrast, this essay follows the Deleuzian notion of difference in kind where difference is internal, temporal, and nuanced; that is, how a ‘thing’ differs from itself in the various phases of becoming. In the first case, entities are located in time; in the second case they are located through time. 4 This assertion is backed up by the roundtable discussion on criticism by a rather esteemed group of artists, theoreticians, and critics to celebrate the 100 issue of October, a cutting edge journal in the field of art (see October, 2002).

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with its attendant cult of beauty, hegemonically supported by a closed circuit between capitalist production (design, Internet art, work) and consumption (visual popular culture, holiday).

Radically, such a position also means a move away from those representa-tional critical art forms as historically supported primarily by the National Art Education Association’s Social Theory Caucus, where resistance and negation are directed at the power circuits of capitalism; namely, those of us who still follow the “dialectical imagination” (Jay, 1973).3 Subversive identity politics along class, gender, sex, and ethnic lines prove to be, I argue, divisive rather than edifying in this alternative proposal that I suggest the field to follow. Critique and criticism, as well, become ‘more negative than negative,’ to allude to Baudrillard (1988) here, within this proposed direction.4 The importance of ethics supplants Kultur Kritic, and difference as the litany of qualifiable categorical subject positions offered by poststructuralist identity politics, and is rethought within this essay to grasp a different understanding of its force. Patterns of racial and sexual inequality and oppression are caught up in circuits of power. Identity politics and the critical art it supports simply fights power with power, often essentializing and idealizing categorizes.

All this has become urgent and necessary for designer capitalism has enslaved visuality, capturing the organ of the eye. Could art education ever entertain the quest of a nonretinal art as bequeathed by Duchamp? Visuality must be inde-signed; that is, its proximity relativized within broader assemblages of lived social relations that escape the circuits of power. Art and its education, as presented here, abide by an immanent political economy that intentionally escapes the circuits of power; they exist at the vanishing point of the commodity where exchange value no longer applies. Art’s very uselessness provides it with a force or Spieltrieb (play drive), a concept retrieved from Friedrich Schiller’s Letters (1794-5), which harnesses life as zoë as opposed to the technicity of biopower. The affect of zoë indicates the creative force of life that has the potential to open up future contingencies. Education should draw on this same impulse. Art’s political economy is tied neither to the Marxist sense of work—the specific human practices of making—nor to labor as its socialized form that a worker (artist) sells to a capitalist. Nor is art and its education an extraction of surplus power from living beings via strategic relations as in biopower, so persuasively developed by Foucault. Rather, art and its education as doing escapes these forms of control only when the ‘play of its force or drive’ (Spieltrieb) undoes its own articulations as an “affirmative negation” (Badiou, 2005a) to create a new form of life. It is ‘negative’ in the sense that art must refuse the existing conditions of a situation; at the same time it must become ‘affirmative’ to offer a new ‘flight’ out.

Kaufman (1959) already signaled this insight of the uniqueness of an artistic ‘event’ (he calls it “the creative process,” p. 13) in the inaugural issues of Studies when he remarked on the impingement of psychology, sociology, and the scien-tific research method concerning its study. Kaufman[QUERY-sp?] further states, “The basic aesthetic drive [Spieltrieb] is not fundamentally dependent on these adjunctive understandings” (p. 15, emphasis added), and continues to



add, “in the process of creating,” the artist “moving ‘on the edge of the unknown’ creates a form which adds another digit to reality—a digit that was not there before” (p. 15). This is a position Badiou would support as the creation of an ‘event’ proper.

Such ‘inactivist art,’ if I can pit it this way, continually bumps against the multifarious social “limits of control” (Foucault, 1972, p. 233) to make them visible, not only to reveal them, but also to transform by acting on them. Such activities of ‘arting,’ which I refer to as self-refleXion (a concept that shall be explained later in the essay) is a form of “unworking”—désoeuvrement in Blanchot’s (1988) terms—an ‘active idleness’ as play that surrounds such an oeuvre. Arting figures a modality of thought that is an alternative to the power of technicity that constantly makes art into an object or a designer style. Art and its education have this potential ability to escape such circuits of power; that is the Foucauldian power/knowledge couplet, which has characterized the struggle of activist art in the 20th century. The potential new strategy confronts the ‘society of control’ anamorphically, in an oblique way and not head on. A new strategy is required because the ‘naturalized’ hegemonic context of the Right (Whiteness, class, masculinity, and so on) has been able to successfully incorporate activist identity politics of de-and re-construction—to turn this threat around like so many Colors of Benetton where difference is once again categorized.

Creativity proper—as Spieltrieb in art and its education—is an ability to engender a transformation of becoming that follows the same lines as Nancy’s (1991) reworking of political philosophy away from the shared identity of community (as an essence) towards singularity. Such is the “inoperative” (again, désoeuvrement) community, of a “being-in-common” rather than “common–in-being.” This means perpetual exposure to/of Otherness (as “compearance”) to our own ‘being,’ which is where difference lies that escapes categorization of identity politics pre-packaged as Other in postmodernity, so prevalent in cultural studies. What we share in common is difference, not identity. This is a fundamental Deleuzian point.

Difference is what characterizes the unconscious as tied to productive desire. This ‘other’ to ourselves is the unconscious Real, the place of difference within our being, as the experience of the uncanny that resists signification—what I qualify elsewhere as the virtual Real (jagodzinski, 2008). Such a position is a move away from representation as ‘story’ that dominates ethnographic research to the ‘surplus’ that is not intelligible—to the gaps, incommensura-bility, and incomprehensibility within representation itself. Lyotard (1991) called this dimension the “inhuman,” a ‘pre-subjective’ realm (infans) to which we all remain hostage and/or enslaved, but this unconscious realm is also the source, as he says, of enfance—what can effectively be thought of as the force of energy (zoë) of desire where life and death are intertwined in their becoming to enable the unthought to emerge—thinking itself. Art and its education through Spieltrieb—a term that invokes the irreconcilability and heterogeneity of Lyotard’s infant within the adult—works with that force of enfance to bring forth the new. Deleuze along with Guattari (1994, p. 204) once wrote that


it is not the empty canvas that the artist ‘classically’ faces, rather all manner of clichés already occupy its surface. The more difficult task is to empty and wipe clean that encumberment; that is to perform the “unwork” (désoeu-vrement) where that void, or emptiness may be found for doing to begin. This is creativity proper. Kaufman (1959) in the inaugural issue was also concerned that “creativity” was being stifled through the constant recuperation of what I am calling the ‘arting process’ by the machinations of research to legitimate the field. Ironically, it was Vincent Lanier (1974) who felt that our field in the mid-‘70s was overdetermined by creativity, whereas in the contemporary situ-ation I argue, not unlike Kaufmann, it has been straitjacketed as innovation by designer capitalism.

W(h)ither Creativity? The Technicity of Learning to Learn.Within our information “society of control” (Guattari, 1984; Deleuze, 1995),

digital technologies, economic globalization, and increasing commodification have set the agenda for the neoliberal educational imagination as a qualitative managerial enterprise to sustain labor as the ‘soul/sole’ definition of life—as a logic of “bare survival” (Foucault, 1990; Agamben, 1998; Masschelein, 2001). Its rhetorical gesture of “learning to learn” (Smith, 2000) comes across as being liberal minded and democratic. Within an information society of control, schooling is mandated to produce flexible and active agents of transformation and change, releasing the potential of every individual’s capacity and compe-tency made possible by rich or strong ‘learning environments.’ Learning should start from the experience of students––that is, from their needs and problems so that they are motivated to actively participate. As supported by cognitive science and psychological constructivism, teacher-centered knowledge is replaced by student-centered approaches that emphasize the active and constructed char-acter of knowledge. Personal growth, development of potential and skills are made possible through facilities, resources, and flexible provisions that facil-itate rather than direct the learning processes by mentors.

For all providers of education, responsibility and accountability are primary values for those who make use of their services and facilities—parents, students, teachers, and clients alike. Permanent monitoring and assessment are necessary to insure quality of learning and ensure creative freedom. The exemplary model is the Charter school where flexible time can be instituted, innovative curriculum set in place, and special emphasis placed on desired areas of specialization such as religion, technology, or language. Demands and needs are therefore the starting points for the evaluation of learning that is formulated in terms of quality; the idea being that the ‘learning organism’ continually responds and adapts to the requirements of the environment. This is what defines flexibility through autopoiesis. Such a neoliberal model sounds very appealing. Placing emphasis on an agent’s own ‘sense-making’ in an open and stimulating environment where new ideas are possible, co-operation enhanced, dialogue encouraged, and responsibility taken for citizenship and community living so that humankind can ‘survive,’ seems virtually exempt from any form of criticism. So, how is the

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question of my sub-heading even possible? The education of art and design seem especially suited to thrive within such an educational Imaginary.

To begin: the neoliberal managerial model defined as ‘living is learning and learning is living’ becomes an all-encompassing permanent life-long process of survival. The future of educational reform is based on “learning to learn” as the hegemonic organizing principle in a society of control. There is no longer any need to hang onto the investitures of past industrial age with set chrono-logical times, rigid subject divisions, teacher centered learning, developmental ages (also an industrial hangover), or even a school building. What enables such proposals of complex designer education to sound urgent, necessary, radical, and convincing to the general public is precisely because students and parents are held hostage by a system where one’s very survival depends on achieving a skill or a post-secondary degree of one kind or another. Since the institutionalization of elementary schooling in the 19th century, public education has been chained to capital interests (Friedenberg, 1959). In the contemporary global market situation, it is no longer necessary to bar entrance into institutions or to deny anyone well-paying positions. Access to the system of economic opportunities and the ‘good life’ is played out on meritocratic grounds, downplaying identity politics, sex/gender distinctions, ageism, and the like (Williams, 1991). These are all reduced to a question of numbers. Availability of access is manifestly possible if one has the necessary tuition fees and has earned a ‘pass’ to continue further through personal initiative. This meritocratic system levels the playing field by strengthening the barriers for entrance along restricted conditions.

In a “risk society” (Beck, 1992) “learning to learn” comes down to acquiring the skills of cognitive self-regulation, self-reflexive problem solving, controlling one’s own concentration, working method, motivation, and concentration. Performance is instrumentalized through self-regulation, permanent self-deter-mination, and conscious self-development, which then take into account proac-tively the requirements of the job market. The overarching organizing principle for such free and liberal learning is functionalism and active adaptation as theo-rized through complexity theory (Taylor, 2001). It is a continuous process since ‘informational’ needs constantly change. Feedback, co-evolution, self-organization, interdependence, creation of a ‘new order’ are its characteristics. The ‘freedom’ associated with creativity and initiative becomes innovation: information (knowledge) is actively decomposed, assessed, dissolved, and recomposed in relation to an internal criterion that is optimal for the devel-opment of one’s potential. The development of a designer self is the model sought. Objectivity and ’truth’ are supplanted by the quality of fit between needs, activities, and the environment.

This permanent ‘life of learning’ is characterized further through complexity theory as autopoiesis, a self-regulating and self-transforming process ‘driven’ (Trieb) by an internal criterion from which one’s relation to the environment (a designated space of possibility) is guided. In the rhetoric of complexity theory this is known as emergence. Such emergence can only be facilitated internally within the self rather than guided or directed from outside as if by structural force. Everything is therefore counted in terms of its functional relationship


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with the learning/living organism, reduced as information. The becoming of time is calculated stochastically as possibility rather than the potentiality of creative Spieltrieb.5

In the designer capitalism of a digitalized information society, it has become imperative to put art and aesthetics to productive use; that is to work (Heidegger’s Machen) by making it an intrinsic calculable and available source of technique. For art programs to survive, the demand is that their utility be manifest. Any number of possibilities can be given for art’s usefulness: art is useful to other subject areas—as a supplementary activity for social studies, drama, set design, English, and so on; art is useful when it aestheticizes the school, when art tracks around its premises showing that a ‘viable’ art program is in place; art is useful if it can be correlated to boost grades in other subject areas, such as math or social studies; art is useful as well, when graduating art students from high school to enter one of the myriad of available art and design schools where they will be find a job related to design industry—from fashion or computer graphics to industrial design and communications—even archi-tecture; in the academy art has become useful as arts based education. It is rather amazing that Kaufman (1959), once more cautioned art educators as to the way art and its education was being hijacked via an instrumentalization. He has a similar list of appropriations, not once but twice on pages 12 and 14.

From Eye-Wor(l)d to Brain-Eye: Reorienting Art Education From Praxis to Poiesis

Given the state of affairs as presented above, how might art and its education escape or offer a ‘line of flight’ out from the grip of both the technologization of the aesthetic by designer education and popular culture? There is yet another way that some contemporary artists have taken where the traditional aesthetic categories no longer hold in terms of interpretation, perception, and judgment, nor do the usual sociocultural categories of production, manipulation, and critique. The selectivity of specific artists for the purposes of forwarding my argument of yet another ‘line of flight’ is based on the unevenness of history; there is no coherent ‘story’ of art, only a dispersion of competing socio-political chaosmosis. Hence, this direction, which I believe art, its education and research should follow, tries to restore the force of art’s truth as an activity of doing (art-ing)—to act as a “forcefield” in Ziarek’s (2004) terms. Its experience is grasped as an “encounter” in Deleuze and Guattari (1994) vocabulary, through the uncon-scious force of the “figural” in Lyotard’s (1971) case, whereby the relationality of power is freed up providing a form of post-productivity. In this sense, art is not an object, a commodity, nor a harbinger of encrypted meaning, but an “event” (Badiou, 2005a) with material effects that redistributes the flows of power.

Kaufman (1959) once again, utilizing a different language game, bravely makes a similar gesture when defending art against insidious research para-digms. He states “art is experienced and perceived as an immanent quality, as a thing-in-itself” (p. 11, emphasis added). He was calling for a rethinking of the orientation between artistic creativity and the research modalities employed

5 Deleuze (1994, pp. 211-214) makes a sharp distinction between possibility and potentiality; the former belongs to the order of representation (what I deem as innovation) while the latter belongs to virtual actualization (what I take to be creativity proper).



in art education. Following Badiou (2005b), Kaufman’s view of art-ing can be identified as an “inaesthetic” direction between art and philosophy as a particular ‘research’ orientation. Philosophy (as aesthetics) no longer takes art as its object, but recognizes that art, in and of itself, offers us ‘truth.’ As educators, such a position should provide us with renewed energy. The force of this truth, however, does not follow the hermeneutic Romanticism of aletheia as a secret encrypted in art, which then must be ‘released’ by the critic/ teacher/or philos-opher. Rather, the truth of the event of art points directly to the void or the Real (in the Lacanian) sense of a ‘situation’ so as to rework the understanding of the relations that circle around it in terms of dominant discourses and fantasies thereby freeing up relations that are in the grips of power. The art-ing process in its performative articulations sets up an encounter for a potential event to take place where the potential for exposing the flows and intensifications of power enable us to be loosened, healed, or free of them. This is an art and its education that is paradoxically ‘power-free.’

As educators, it is the force of the virtual Real as productive desire that needs our attention, so that we may shift our position from the dominant Eye-Wor(l)d of the visual trapped by designer capitalism of popular visual culture to the Brain-Eye of potential transformation by the art-ing event. This may well address that inaugural issue of Studies by its six authors where the relationship between the nature of art and its research remain as key questions. Ultimately, it is what the event of art as a shaped temporal product(s) is able to ‘do’ or ‘act’ in terms of its force on two levels that should concern art and its education. The first level—identified by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) as the “body-without-organs” (BwO)6 and by Lyotard (1971) as the “figural”—refers to the flows of affect energy (zöe or jouissance) as the elemental constituents or materiality of ‘being’ prior to their relative stabilization into substances, objects, and bodies; that is, as signifiers. The second level is the force of the artistic event in its ability to change, rupture, and transform a system of set relations—the dynamics of being and unfolding as judged along ethical grounds. This doubled force of art is the process of art-ing, written as a gerund to indicate art and its education to be transitive, transitional, and temporal; that is, manifesting ‘time out of joint’ in its performative affect of becoming. This is not a question of form and content, images and artistic statements, the sensible and the intelligible, what is seen and said. Rather, these dynamics of art’s force operate on and around the edge of a void as the Real of a situation. This is a non-site that forms the unconscious kernel as to what holds the ‘situation’ in the present state of its power dynamics. As Badiou put it, “the idea that what the state seeks to foreclose through the power of its count is the void of the situation, and the event that in each case reveals it“ (in Hallward, 2003, p. 100, emphasis added). Theorizing art as event in this way, where the void is necessarily always already there, does not confront the power/knowledge dynamic that characterizes dialectical critical art and its education. Rather, the ability for the artistic event to redefine, expose, and redispose the constitution of reality in terms of its production as relations to the ‘outside’ world (audience, society) at the microlevel of molecular forces in a “power-free” way, as Ziarek (2004) persistently maintains, is what is called on as

6 This well theorized concept refers to the pre-subjective state of the body. In my usage it is the affective body of the unconscious Real.


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foundational for an alternative art and its educational practice and research. The artist can only ‘show’ and bring about the unthought as the void of the situation. This is not knowledge as argued by many strands of arts based research, but knowledge yet to come (l’avenir in Derrida’s sense—the unpredictable future as the unexpected coming of the Other).

Rethinking ‘Action’ in Art and its Education: Three Indesign Circuits of Force

This force of art suspends violence. Rather than an art and its education based on forms of praxis as in ‘action research,’ which have structural violence already inherent in them by their very attempt to negate power structures, the direction for art, its education and research proposed here can be distinguished by at least three nonproductive responses to power as a way of dissipating, annulling, and dissipating it, by inversing the inside of its relations through what I call indesign. Indesign may well be a response to Irving Kaufman’s (1959) search for a research strategy that speaks to, as he put it, the “concealing” (p. 15) nature of art. It further addresses his concern for art’s “state of becoming“ (p. 10), as well as its “immanent quality” (p. 11), along with it being a “realization of life in form” (p. 12).

Indesign has a kinship to Deleuze’s (2003) idea of a “diagram” that displays the relations between forces. I reserve this term for specific performative articu-lations of art-ing that display a form of déoeuvrement or nonproductivity. Such artistic events—from which we can draw pedagogical lessons—engage in the non-sense of language and hence are not a matter of ‘experience’ as generally thought in a relation of a subject’s experience with an object. The encounter with indesign processes of art-ing place the subject in a different mode—as a reconfiguration of relations at the unconscious a-signifying level, the level of the BwO; that is, below the threshold of presentation and meaning—apart from images, forms, content—at the molecular aisthetic (not aesthetic) level. Badiou’s (2005b) neologism, inaesthetic, demarcates such a displacement.

This level of poiesis (not poetics) supplants praxis. The dialectical principles that underpin the relations of form/content, subject/object, activity/passivity do not hold on this level of fractal force flows. Artists who perform such artworks are operating at the level of self-refleXivity (jagodzinski, 2008), exercising a middle voice where subject and object meet in an in-between space, what Deleuze (1992) called a fold. This is where subjectivation happens and change occurs. The “X” in self-refleXivity refers to the void of the Real, the level of molecularization of forces, which certain artists point to through their oeuvre. The void is a “nomadic” site in art—the site of the Real. It is not locatable spatially and locally in any of the three paradigms for site-specific action art research— phenomenological, the social/institutional, and the discursive—as influentially categorized by Kwon (2002). Such an X, the unconscious place of the situation that must be negated, cannot be represented, only alluded to anamorphically.7

The forcework of eventual art as poiesis that disperses relations of power is mobilized on at least three economic fronts that ruin the production of designer

7 Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding “relational aesthetics” as championed by Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) in relation to my thesis cannot be taken up here due to space. I would argue that only some aspects of “relational aesthetics” would align with my thesis, but this has to be articulated on another occasion.



capitalism through various speeds and intensities. They mobilize a re(circuitry) of the BwO for the spectator and the social public space through (at least) three indesigns (or differentiacions8) that overload the circuits of power, short-circuit power, and in(direct) power anamorphically. These processes of doing art, or art-ing do not confront power, but through poiesis, transform the situational relations of power. We might call these ‘strategies’ to reveal the void of the Real of the nomadic site. The tonality or nuance of power is inflected differently in each case to enable the transformation of relationships between elements to present a force of truth as an alternative to power. The forcework (what Ziarek (2004) ends up calling “apheis” (p. 22) that connotes releasing and liberation) cannot be presented positively, for it would then fall into the field of represen-tation and be caught up in the circuits of power. It is, as mentioned earlier, a “negative affirmative” process in Badiou’s terms. It is negative since it must pull away from the given sociocultural situation that is presented, but must remain affirmative because it must provide a way to change that can only be completed by continual social and political transformation. Such a force of art remains outside the scope of aesthetics and culture critique as it is currently theorized.

Indesign Overloaded Circuits: Bill ViolaAn overloaded circuit taxes the system to a standstill, the flow has to over-

saturate and stop or slow down the means of our attention. Bill Viola’s many video/sound installations are exemplary of the technicity of vision turned against itself, attaining the criterion of undoing its own articulations mentioned at the start of the essay. Viola stutters perception by slowing down the speed of the image to a threshold where it cannot be quickly eaten—he stretches and manipulates the accompanying sound. The brain-eye circuit is overloaded by too much and not enough information. As witnessing-viewers, Viola focuses our attention on what has ‘always already’ been there but was never ‘quite’ seen. A situation’s ‘thingness’ begins to emerge as an uncanny Real dimension. We have to dwell on what does not usually enter into our visible scope— a supple-mentary ‘extra visibility’ that the temporality of experience constantly misses. Slow motion places us in an economy that seems absolutely contrary to calcu-lation and measurement, expanding the present—making it a fractal ‘thing-like’ space.

Why should this be important within the realm of technicist power? Viola utilizes digital technology to make visible the folds (Deleuze) within tech-nology, to free up vision so that the ‘brain’ can begin to seize the ramifications of our watching. The body of a witness/observer in front of a Viola video feels awkwardly positioned, for Viola explores the unseen world of feelings, memory, and the impossibility of wholeness—that is the Real of his unconscious desire. An ethical face emerges, especially in his amazing series of twenty video works, The Passions, which he began in 2000 and continues to make. Against the post-emotionalism of media visuality, Viola’s study of the expression of emotions in The Passions series is presented in almost imperceptible movement forcing the viewer to wait and then ‘look again’ if there indeed had been movement. In Passage, memory and the distance of perception play a role. The sensuous level of perception presents an overwhelming amount of confusing data. Sensations

8 “Differentiations” spelled with a “c” follows Deleuze’s (1994) neologism for virtual multiplicities, the idea being that while I identify only three artistic actualizations or events, there are many more yet to be actualized or have already been actualized.


are experienced that no longer seem to conform to conventional time and space, estranging images. The BwO in front of this video installation becomes self-conscious and uneasy. The force of truth of Viola’s video/sound installations show how the speed of modernity has compressed life, constricted the body, and converted data into efficient calculability.

Indesign Short Circuits: Alfredo JaarTo short-circuit a situation/or site so as to expose the void of the Real is

to create an abnormal condition between two points of differing potentials, especially when they are related hierarchically. It is a way of causing a shock by crossing wires that do not usually touch. This is done intentionally to cause unexpected connections and shifts in intensity, which arises in a particular failure that ends up in a zero voltage in the network condition—bringing it to a standstill so that another step must be taken to make it “run” again. My primary example of an indesign short-circuit is an installation performance done by the Chilean-born New York artist Alfred Jaar, who was commissioned in 2000 (one assumes a millennium project) by the city council of Skoghall, Sweden to build a cultural place of community gathering because the city did not have one. Skoghall was the site of the world’s largest paper mill. It was a company town shaped by industrial paternalism but bereft of culture. Jaar proceeded to build the Skoghall Konsthall entirely out of the paper made by the mill and then preceded to have an exhibition of young Swedish artists, inviting the press and the government to the opening. Twenty-four hours after the festive opening, and according to Jaar’s plan, the building was ignited and allowed to burn down and collapse in on itself, despite the protests and pleas to salvage the wood (Jaar’s background as an architect made this a possibility). The immolation of the building highlighted the community’s impoverished cultural life. Jaar’s spec-tacular orchestration of heightened expectations brought on by the exhibition and then his withdrawal and destruction of the community’s desire by his act staged a trauma of loss and shock.

Jaar’s claim was that the community could not invite an outsider artist simply to produce a sense of ‘art’ and ‘community’ in a site where they weren’t supported in the first place. It was now up to the city council along with the paper mill company to form their own cultural initiative. Jaar’s installation performance certainly took aim at the void of Skoghall’s Real: the unwillingness, silence, and the lack of political initiative to generate a cultural center. Jaar staged an artistic event that is for the world; despite its negativity (destruction) it remains an affirmation as a trace that must now be followed by the community of Skoghall if a new body (BwO) is to emerge. Jaar’s installation performance inscribes the inexistent Real and it practices a new sort of politics of action without place—as non-site.

Indesign In(direct) or Anamorphic Circuits: Krysztof WodiczkoWhen relations are influenced indirectly or anamorphically there is a medi-

ation by a third party. In its simplest of forms, X and Y are mediated by A, where A has bi-directional connections to both X and Y; through A, X and Y are connected indirectly. A direct confrontation is by-passed in such a way that the

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relationship of X and Y can be changed. This can be a therapeutic and healing approach to an otherwise irresolvable deadlock in terms of power or psychic blockage. The artist, situated as A, orchestrates a performative process with X and Y (and Z, and V, and W and …) to defuse the existing blockages, and to have the circuits flow ‘otherwise’ at the molecular levels.

The master of the indesign indirect circuits who deals with the void of the Real is Krysztof Wodiczco. His public art mobilizes technology (like Bill Viola) to expose the X, Y, V and … and … relationships of power in economic, political, and symbolic realms. His events are “performative articulations,” harnessing Otherness, rupturing and evacuating power by exposing its circuitry in the way these relations come to be formed, distributed, and configured by in dominance, resistance, ideology, critique and so on. As Wodiczko (1999) puts it, his performative articulations are not meant to represent (survivors, the vanquished, immigrants, and so on) or to stand in or speak for them, rather indesign in(direct) circuitry should be developed with them so as to present a critical inquiry into the conditions that produced the crisis in the first place, for this is where the void lies. This enables those with no voice to relate to their cultural surroundings differently.

Wodiczko is not playing identity politics. His events have nothing to do with representing the other, or “making” art, but everything to do to release the existing relations from the grip of power so as to initiate a different dynamic. This is ‘inaction research’ that does not confront power directly, but opens up currents that could flow differently by disrupting the silent transmission of trauma from one generation to the next—as his The A-Bomb Dome, Hiroshima and Bunker Hill projects did. Mobilizing memory of the nameless in the tradition of the vanquished, he undoes exclusion and forgetting, defuses the visibility/invisibility power couplet so that voices are released to speak to and encounter power.

In SummationRather ironically, Vincent Lanier’s 1959 essay in that first Studies journal on

“action research” defended scientific research, a position that he later abandoned while Irving Kaufmann was searching for a research direction that would be more true to the creative process. It is my conviction that art, its education and research should be about a particular kind of action that is nonproductive—characterized by désoeuvrement—a radical (non)praxis. Such art-ing works the spaces between action and inaction, activity and passivity, not signifying within the practices of power, but redirecting its relations through indesigns as a challenge to designer capitalism of a consummatory oral eye, escaping its optics of power. This is a research direction (if it can still be called that?) that remains specific to the creative artistic process necessary to meet the demands of contemporary society in a direction other than the one assigned to art and its education by designer capitalism. I have tried to invent a new vocabulary for such ‘useless’ art-ing and its education and research that aims at a mid-voice that ‘speaks’ at the edge of the void. Besides the neologisms of indesign, self-refleXion, virtual Real and the homonym site/sight/cite, within such a postaes-


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thetic position, art criticism now becomes kritik, an ethical assessment of what the act of art-ing has done in terms of diffusing the power/knowledge couplet. I have a special term for such artistic engagement—Da-Da-sein (an allusion to Heidegger’s famous Dasein, but also to Dada, as a double inflection). The neol-ogism refers to the disturbed presence of existence (Dasein) and to the Dada avant-garde who caused such disruptions. This is a mode of relating that is anterior to subjectivity, which disrupts the power/knowledge couplet that binds subject and object rigidly and hegemonically together. Art and its education should pursue this post-Duchampian Brain-Eye trajectory of ‘research,’ rather than being swallowed by the Wor(l)d-Eye of designer consumerism. There are avant-garde artists who are already doing this, and as art education researchers, we can continue to draw our lessons from them to initiate a contrary Imaginary to “learning to learn.” Our survival depends on it!

ReferencesAgamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller Roazen, Trans.).

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Badiou, A. (2005a). Being and event (O. Feltham, Trans.). London and New York: Continuum.

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Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author, Dónal O’Donoghue, Assistant Professor of Art Education, The University of British Columbia, Faculty of Education, Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2125 Main Mall Vancouver, Canada, V6T 1Z4. E-mail: [email protected]

Are We Asking the Wrong Questions

in Arts-Based Research?

Dónal O’Donoghue

The University of British Columbia

Arts-based researchers distinguish themselves from other qualitative researchers on the grounds that they use artistic processes and practices in their inquiries and in the communication of their research outcomes. Like artists, they operate out of a particular community of practice, with its own distinctive history of emer-gence, set of responsibilities, and criteria for evaluation. Given the epistemological roots of arts-based research, it is argued in this article that arts-based researchers cannot ignore the processes and practices of artists as they continue to develop and theorize a counter-hegemonic research discourse and practice to the logical rational scientific one so embedded in educational inquiry. Attending critically to artists’ practices, as this article demonstrates, raises many and difficult questions about doing research in, with, and through the arts. Given that arts-based research is a long-term project, these questions need to be addressed for what they might mean for the practice of arts-based research.

Arts-based educational research is founded on the belief that the arts have the ability to contribute particular insights into, and enhance understandings of phenomena that are of interest to educational researchers. As Elliot Eisner (2006)1, the first to articulate a place for the arts in educational research, claims, “The arts provide access to forms of experience that are either un-securable or much more difficult to secure through other representational forms” (p. 11). To him, the most distinguishing feature of arts-based research2 is that it employs aesthetic qualities to illuminate and reveal educational situations and experiences (Eisner, 2008). As a field of inquiry, arts-based educational research has grown significantly in recent years (Barone, 2006). To date, the literature in the field has been mainly concerned with describing the conditions of this research approach (see Barone, 2005a, 2006; Barone & Eisner, 2006; Eisner, 1995, 1997, 2006, 2008; Finley & Knowles, 1995; Piantanida, McMahon, & Garman, 2003). Different methodological approaches of engaging the arts in educational research have been advanced, including a/r/tography, arts informed research, and aesthetically based research to mention some (Bresler, 2006; Cole, Neilsen, Knowles & Luciani, 2004; Cole, 2002; Irwin, 2004; Irwin & deCosson, 2004; Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind, 2005; Springgay, Irwin, Leggo & Gouzouasis, 2008). Philosophical understandings and rationales for researching in, with, and through the arts have been put forward. Questions about validity, reliability, transferability, and comparability all feature in this literature. And, in the past decade, we have witnessed an increase in the number of articles that deal with the visual in arts-based research (see Cole & McIntyre, 2004; Irwin, Beer, Springgay, Grauer, Xiong & Bickel, 2006; O’Donoghue, 2007a, 2007b, 2008; Slattery, 2001; Springgay, 2008; Springgay, et al., 2008; Sullivan, 2005, 2006).

1 In the special issue of

Studies in Art Education devoted to arts-based research, Tom Barone (2006) claims, it was in the 1970s in Stanford, when he was a doctoral student, that Elliot Eisner was imagining a place for the arts in educational research. As Eisner himself explains, in that same issue, the first Arts-Based Research Institute was offered at Stanford University to members of the American Educational Research Association in 1993.2

The terms arts-based educational research and arts-based research are used interchangeably

(continued)


Are We Asking the Wrong Questions in Arts-Based Research?

throughout this article. For the purpose of this article, both denote the same meaning. 3 A primary purpose of earlier work was to disturb and trouble the prevailing consensus that educational research had to be scientific in orientation, and to demonstrate the potential of research approaches located in the arts for inquiring into educational phenomena. As a long-time advocate of arts-based educational research, Barone (2005b) describes candidly what he expe-rienced as an audience member at Eisner’s 1993 American Educational Research Association (AERA) presidential address at which Eisner argued for meth-odological pluralism in educational research: “I sat excitedly in the audience sensing sweet victory, believing that a new age of educational inquiry had arrived. The coming era would be one in which we arts-based researchers could divert our energies from the arduous tasks of convincing our scientist brothers and sisters of the potential of our research approach, toward achieving our common goal–the improvement of educational policy and practice” (p. 123).

To date, many of the rationales advanced for considering the visual arts as a viable alternative to linguistic-based research approaches advocate philosophical understandings of the role and purpose of art. Due attention has not been given to emerging theories and philosophies of contemporary art (such as relational aesthetics, and the altermodern) to critical accounts of artists’ lives and practices, or to their auto/biographical writings. This is not to say that philosophers have not made significant contributions to our understanding of art, its purpose, and its educative dimension; it is to point out that we do not tend to draw on, or be influenced by, the positions and perspectives of cultural theorists, sociologists of art, and critical art historians. While it is difficult to argue against such philo-sophical understandings of art, I think it is important to ask to what extent does the proliferation and celebration of these theories/philosophies (at the expense of socially informed and radically contextualized understandings of art) limit the way art is imagined, understood, and practiced within arts-based research. The argument that I am advancing here is that as arts-based researchers address the epistemological, ontological, and existential tensions that reside at the core of arts-based research, they need to work more diligently, at a theoretical level at least, with the practices and theories of art from a wide variety of intellectual traditions. Structuring and shaping the field primarily and almost exclusively in relation to aesthetic theories of art denies the fact, as Elizabeth Chaplin (1994) put it, “[that] the production and reception of visual art works are social processes, and they cannot satisfactorily be explained by reference to internal aesthetic factors” (p. 161-162). For Bourdieu (1993), “the work of art is an object which exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a work of art” (p. 35). Attending to the social conditions that produce this belief is essential.

Although the above-cited literature establishes and plays a role in sustaining and reproducing dominant beliefs about the function and contribution of the arts as research processes (and it could be argued, generates a repressive form of power), it too offers a place from where new and additional questions about doing arts-based research can be posed. I contend that the following questions need to be asked and addressed as the field develops:

How do arts-based research processes, products, and theoretical orientations 1. connect with those in the professional fields of the arts? How might a close, critical, and deeply contextual analysis of the work and 2. work practices of artists advance, develop, and enhance understandings, theories, and practices of arts-based research? What types of questions, challenges, and concerns might such an analysis of 3. artists’ work and their work practices raise for arts-based researchers?

Perhaps it is only now when the foundations of the field have been laid and the struggle to seek legitimacy and recognition is no longer all consuming that questions such as these can be asked and addressed meaningfully.3 The history of arts-based research suggests that arts-based researchers have not in any sustained manner considered the relationship between their practices and the practices of artists, or the different contexts in which they work. Nor have they engaged in


a process of mapping out their practices in an effort to find commonalities and resonances with the practice of artists.4 Rather, in the literature, we continue to find questions such as “How can a piece of research include poetry or sculpture and still be substantive and useful to academic and lay audiences in education?” (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2008, p.1). Given that Eisner (1981, 1997) and others have raised and addressed questions such as these in the past, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions in arts-based educational research at this time.

In this article, I address these three questions by engaging the work of two contemporary artists: Huang Yong Ping and Clive Moloney. I examine their practices not only to address these questions but also to raise new ones. In addressing these questions, my approach is informed by Eisner’s ideas of educational criticism and educational connoisseurship and is situated in the traditions of art criticism. I am interested in what lingering in these works and work practices might offer. As Liora Bresler (2006) observes, “[lingering] invites discoveries, emergent issues, and ideas, mobilizes ways of seeing, and being” (p. 56). Following Latour (2004), who claims that the critic assembles rather than debunks, I want to find connections, parallels, and resonances between the work of contemporary artists and arts-based educational research theory and practice. I want to create an arena where ideas about doing art and doing arts-based research come together. To critically examine the work and work practices of both artists, I draw on practice theory as advanced by Reckwitz (2002), Schatzki (2001), and Schatzki, Knorr-Ketina & Von Savigny (2001). A ‘practice’ (praktik), Andreas Reckwitz (2002) explains, “is a routinized type of behaviour which consists of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, ‘things’ and their use, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, know-how, states of emotion and motivational knowledge” (p. 249). The role of the individual, “as a bodily and mental agent,” Reckwitz explains, “acts as a carrier (Träger) of a practice” (p. 250) and indeed a carrier of several different practices simulta-neously. Thinking about and mapping an artist’s practice in and through this theory is useful for several reasons. It gives a structure for making visible and articulating how and why artists operate as they do. And, it provides oppor-tunities for identifying and advancing alternative rationales for engaging in research through art.

My selection, analysis, and readings of the work and work practices of both artists is deeply engrained in the histories and practices of the fields in which I operate––visual art, art education, and arts-based research––and the ‘routi-nized ways of understanding’ and knowing that are particular to each of these fields (Reckwitz, 2002). While there are limits to self-reflexivity, I am aware that as an artist and academic who prioritizes activist-informed, interventionist, and participative art practice, I seek out, interpret, understand, and write about visual phenomena in particular ways. For this article, I have selected the artwork of two artists who work through the medium of installation (a choice that reflects to some degree my preference and knowledge of this art form and art practice). To understand and make visible the practices of these two artists

Dónal O’Donoghue

4 There are of course exceptions: In the visual arts there is the work of Graeme Sullivan (2005, 2006) and Rita Irwin and her research colleagues at the University of British Columbia (see Irwin et al., 2006). In the performing arts, Donald Blumenfeld Jones has written on the processes of art-making and its relation to arts-based educational research (see Blumenfeld-Jones, 2002, 2008).



requires understanding the history of the positions they occupy and the history of their dispositions (Bourdieu, 1993).

As an art education professor in a Canadian university who recently moved from Western Europe where the discourse around arts-based research is framed somewhat differently and has a different history of emergence (with a greater emphasis on the practice of art as research) and, as a researcher who uses arts-based research methodologies that are deeply connected with the practices and processes of contemporary art, I operate out of particular paradigmatic alle-giances. I also work within a set of domain assumptions (i.e. non-theoretical beliefs, assumptions, and value systems that have evolved and developed through my biographical, linguistic, and cultural experiences)5 that enable access to particular ways of knowing, representing, and evaluative structures. Given that I am keenly aware that position shapes dispositions, and dispositions have the ability to shape position, issues of my positionality are problematized further when they resurface at various points in this article.

For this article, I chose Yong Ping and Moloney because their work had a profound impact on me when I first encountered it. But that alone is not a good reason; the why and how they make art was a significant factor in making this choice. In his practice, Yong Ping never wages one system of knowledge or aesthetics against another, but rather, employs one to better understand the other and in the process identifies a third option (Vergne, 2005). This is precisely the grounds on which many advocates of arts-based research have made a case for the arts as a form of inquiry. They contend that the arts as well as the sciences (which have long been thought of as extreme opposites) have rich potential for generating and representing deep understandings of educa-tional phenomena. Much like arts-based researchers, Yong Ping is devoted to pioneering a new genre of art that goes some way toward undoing conven-tional modes of artistic production, participation, and consumption. As with Yong Ping, Moloney’s practice and artworks are full of ‘teachable moments.’ The materials he selects, the ways in which he uses them, combines them, and transforms them, the forms he creates in making the unfamiliar familiar and the familiar strange, and the associations he generates in and through his work teach us much about how ideas can be worked out and presented visually and spatially for the purpose of communication, critical reflection, and meaning making. While Yong Ping and Moloney operate out of different social, political, and cultural contexts, and are at different life stages in their careers, both are engaging visual forms to address and make sense of issues that, while private to each of them, are indeed public concerns. Their practices problematize the traditional relationship between the artist and the artwork. Both use processes and practices that emanate from the history of art, but challenge and push the boundaries of art practice in an effort to discover new possibilities of artmaking. Both borrow from their respective cultural heritage to inform and shape the work that they do. Their work provides opportunities to learn about the worlds in which we participate and, in particular, how we participate. First, I describe and engage with Moloney’s installation Rural Monument.

5 See Gouldner (1970) and Lynch (1999) for a discussion on this.


Dónal O’Donoghue

Rural MonumentFirst shown at the Limerick School of Art and Design graduate show in

Limerick, Ireland during the summer of 2007, Rural Monument is an instal-lation comprising nine white 3-dimensional plaster casts lying scattered on a grey floor in a space enclosed by white walls. These plaster pieces are casts of both tangible and intangible forms. The tangible forms are rural artifacts (milk churns and pallets), while the intangible forms are evidence of movement and rural migration. Similar in some respects to the work of the British artist Rachel Whiteread, Moloney takes casts from cow tracks, the depressions cows leave behind in the mud as they move along mud pathways making their way from one place to another (see Figure 2). In the studio, he brings together and builds these plaster casts into cylindrical forms. He makes several of these forms. Following this transformation, these cylindrical forms resemble white crumbling chalk pillars, already in the process of falling away, similar to those that one might see in excavation sites of ancient civilizations. He arranges these cylindrical forms in what appears to be a haphazard manner alongside the casts of milk-churns and wooden pallets. This installation, he claims, is a monument to rural ways of life in Ireland. Is this installation, then, a materialization of thought? Or, is it as much a materialization of the engagement with working with materials and processes and being open to the possibilities that both offer for advancing ideas, for in making work, artists remain open to the possibilities that configurations

Figure 1. Rural Monument, installation photograph. Limerick School of Art and Design, Limerick. Ireland. Courtesy of the artist Clive Moloney ([email protected]).

Photograph, Dónal O’Donoghue.



and combinations offer as they work through a process (Serra, 1994). For me, Rural Monument is more than an effort to monumentalize and preserve the memory of a particular way of life that is fast disappearing because of increased urbanization in Ireland. It is about making us see that we do not always see. The work is an attempt to direct consciousness to the things we take for granted, to forms that for the most part go unseen. As viewers, we are confronted with our own “unseeingness” in being presented with forms that are out of context and transformed, yet retain their original characteristics. Moloney’s aim here is to raise awareness by cultivating the curiosity of the spectator. Curiosity in this instance is cultivated by ambiguity.

It is in the forms that he creates; the processes he uses to create them; the materials he has chosen; and the manner in which he places these forms in the gallery space, that Moloney works out and works through these ideas. The forms are not cast in lasting and irreversible materials such as bronze or concrete. Neither are they made from their original materials. They are made with plaster. Plaster is a material that remains somewhat soft even when dry, a material that is prone to erosion depending on environmental conditions, and a material that can crumble easily, but a material that always leaves a trace. The material embodies the fragility of preservation. The selection of material alone, notwithstanding the form and symbolic associations of these pieces, plays a significant role in what, and how, ideas are presented, represented, and inter-preted. Meaning resides in the production of the work, in the work itself, as well as in the interpretation of the work.

For arts-based researchers, what types of questions do Moloney’s work and work practices invite? First, they open up a space for us to think about arts-based research as a process (coming to know), and as a product (representation of knowing and providing opportunities for others to come to know). Both conceptualizations present different opportunities for engagement, and different possibilities for meaning making. They also demand different criteria for eval-uation. Moloney’s installation (a product), serves as a site of knowledge and meaning making––as a place from which we can engage in a series of reflective, reflexive, and relational acts. While it triggers curiosity and opens up a space for engagement, it too creates conditions for engagement. The artistic proc-esses employed by the artist in making the work also act as a site for meaning making, for the maker and the knowing viewer. Moloney has clearly engaged in a sophisticated process of searching for innovative ways to make visible prac-tical concerns. He has worked through his ideas from raw data on one site, transferred it to another where he continues to research and make meaning, and finally places it in a site that requires the viewer to continue this process of meaning making. He engages as much in the process of finding and making (giving form) as he does with the intentionality of the work. The result is that his artmaking is both a site for research as much as a representation of research involvement in a given topic.

Second, his work and work practices generate questions about interpretation. In addressing, in a visual, spatial, and narrative manner, the problem that he has identified, Moloney attends to the relationships in and between the conceptual,


Dónal O’Donoghue

theoretical, and practical, and he finds ways of generating and conveying ideas that are not actually physically present in the work itself. The work suggests a certain degree of productive ambiguity.6 In Rural Monument, Moloney trusts the readers to tease out, unravel, and make connections among and across the

Figure 2. Rural Monument, preparatory work. Courtesy of the artist Clive Moloney. Photograph, Dónal O’Donoghue.

6 For Eisner (2005) productive ambiguity occurs when “the material presented is more evocative than denotative, and in its evocation, it generates insight and invites attention to complexity” (p. 180).


artifacts they see, experience, and interpret. This is a necessary condition of the work. Meaning is open, unfixed, and fluid.

I grew up in rural Ireland and I am very familiar not only with the purposes and uses of the installation’s artifacts, but also with the changing nature of rural society to which Moloney refers. I have worked with plaster, casting, and mould-making. Therefore, my experiences give form and meaning to this installation. I know the potential as well as the limitations offered by the chosen material and its associated artmaking processes. For me, this knowledge provides an entry point to interpreting the work. I am not required to move outside of what I know; rather I am required to make connections between the mode of represen-tation and the object of representation. Familiarity with the objects in the instal-lation and with the processes of production itself, allows for a comprehension that is deep and meaningful. But perhaps, too, this familiarity has resulted in an identification of an intention that may not have been present in the making of the work. And, to what extent is the intentionality of the artist mediated or altered in my written rendering of his work, for, as Bourdieu (1993) claims, “the production of discourse (critical, historical, etc.) about the work of art is one of the conditions of production of the work” (p. 35).

Ambiguity, then, can be productive given certain conditions, but perhaps unproductive given others. What degree of ambiguity can arts-based researchers employ in presenting their work without running the risk of their work losing its communicative value? When is there a sufficient degree of referential clarity so that the work makes sense to a broad educational community? Given that artworks have significance only for those who have the means of appropriating them (Bourdieu, 1993), will the products of arts-based researchers be compre-hensible only to those who have the means to access them? Can re/presenting research outcomes in, with, and through an art form serve as an effective way of reaching multiple and diverse audiences?

Similar to Moloney, in conceptualizing, doing, and representing educa-tional research outcomes, researchers attend to form, to the organization and arrangement of parts to whole, and to the relation of one form to another. In addition, researchers attend to the expressive as well as to the aesthetic dimen-sions of their form. They carefully consider the communicative potential of their materials, their words, and grammatical structures, and they draw on associations as ways of creating empathy and understanding in readers of their work. As researchers, they attend to types of understandings that are made possible through different representational forms. But, in the presentation of their findings and research outcomes, is it enough for arts-based researchers to do what Moloney does? That is, present open-ended data so that readers can arrive at multiple and perhaps contradictory interpretations? If we subscribe to the idea of research as public intellectual work, and, by extension, the arts-based researcher as a public intellectual, who critiques and communicates as well as creates ideas that are disseminated not to disciplinary colleagues alone, but also to the broader world, it follows that we have a responsibility to think critically about and address issues of interpretation in arts-based research. This leads to my second example, Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World.



Dónal O’Donoghue

Figure 3. Rural Monument, detail. Installation photograph. Limerick School of Art and Design, Limerick. Ireland. Courtesy of the artist Clive Moloney.

Photograph, Dónal O’Donoghue.



Theater of the WorldShown at the Vancouver Art Gallery Canada as part of Huang Yong Ping’s

retrospective exhibition (House of Oracles) during the summer of 2007, Theater of the World was a sculptural installation that contained tarantulas, scorpions, crickets, millipedes, and lizards (none of which cohabit in the wild) housed together in an wooden oval-shaped plywood mesh-covered cage in the shape of a turtle. It was positioned under a suspended wooden python that stretched almost the entire length of the gallery’s second floor. As an artwork, it spoke to questions about life, mortality, coexistence, relations, and power. Core to this artwork were elements of chance, uncertainty, and uncontrollability. In assembling the piece and in placing the insects, reptiles, and arachnids in it, Yong Ping did not know how this would all play out. Even though he created a very controlled and artificial situation (somewhat like an experiment), he didn’t know if these insects, reptiles, and arachnids would devour each other or coexist harmoniously. Neither did he know what the public reaction to the piece might be, nor how the piece would evolve and become something else, something unrelated to the artist’s intention. A certain ambiguity concerning the purpose of the work is evident in the description of the piece in the exhibition cata-logue.7 In many respects this work was no different from other work he has produced in the past insofar as it relied on chance, and disrupted, undermined, and partly erased the traditional relationship between the artist and the artwork. The degree of uncertainty and chance which was present in assembling the work extended into the viewing and interpretation of it. In looking at the piece, nobody was ever quite sure what exactly was going to happen, but waited in anticipation: looking, watching, conjecturing, speculating. Interested in how the work would transform over time, viewers wondered if the insects, reptiles, and arachnids would kill each other, and if so what would happen to those victims—would they disappear, be left in the theater-like structure to decay, or be removed.

In housing these creatures together, it would be expected that from time to time they would practise the natural law of survival of the fittest and consume one another,8 and this, along with the fact that these creatures were placed in an ‘unnatural environment’ designed to foster conflict for the viewing of onlookers, provoked and outraged many individuals (some of whom never saw the exhibit). Shortly after the Yong Ping exhibition opened, a sign at Theater of the World, read:

On Friday April 13 the BC SPCA [British Columbia Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] issued legally binding Orders to the Vancouver Art Gallery and Huang Yong Ping. It was deemed by the artist that these orders would compromise the integrity of the artwork, Theater of the World. The artist, supported by the Vancouver Art Gallery, was regrettably forced to close Theater of the World … on Sunday April 15, 2007.

7 In the exhibition catalogue, Huang Yong Ping asks, “Is Theater of the World an insect zoo? A test site where various species of the natural world devour one another? A space for observing the activity of ‘insects’? An architectural form as a closed system? A cross between a panopticon and a shamanistic practice of keeping insects? A metaphor for the conflicts among different peoples and cultures? Or, rather, a modern representation of the ancient Chinese character gu?” (p. 34).8 It was reported that one lizard, one tarantula, one scorpion, and one cockroach died over the course of the exhibit, although, according to the gallery director none of the four had fallen victim to predation.


Dónal O’Donoghue

The gallery text accompanying the exhibit stated, “The work functions as a metaphor for the conflicts among different people and culture––in short, human existence itself ”.

During the time of the exhibit and afterwards when it was closed down, conversations and heated discussions about art, artists, animal rights, and ethics occurred in the gallery space, as well as in cyberspace. Individuals posted comments on blog-pages, wrote and sent e-mails and letters of complaint to the gallery and to the local and national press. Visitors to the gallery posted their responses to the piece on a comment board provided by the gallery. Two TV monitors that showed footage of the event as it unfolded in the media stood to the right of the exhibit. Posted close by were e-mails received from the public, along with newspaper cuttings. In and across these fora, questions about the purpose and role of art were raised and debated, as were questions about the ethical implications of this work. Some argued that the piece ought to be dismantled because of its inherent cruelty, while others claimed that any attempt to alter it or remove it would violate the artist’s right to free speech and compromise the integrity of the artwork. That the gallery had already altered the work in the beginning days of the exhibition by providing more

Figure 4. Theater of the World, Huang Yong Ping (1993), installation photograph. House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, exhibition at the Vancouver

Art Gallery, April 5 to September 16, 2007 (organized by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis). Used with permission from the Vancouver Art Gallery.



lighting, water, and hiding spaces for the insects, reptiles, and arachnids (at the request of the BC SPCA) raises important questions about authorship, and the retention of authorship. That the animal-rights concerns eventually took prec-edence over the artistic integrity of the work raises important questions about artistic freedom and about the right and role of a major visual arts institution to show work of a contemporary artist. For me, it raises the question, who is the producer of this work?

When the exhibit closed on April 15, 2007, the collection of writings, visuals, and sound pieces from the print and broadcast media became another exhibit––an off-shoot of the original work. The director of the gallery claimed that in doing this, the gallery was encouraging discussions about freedom of expression, power, and censorship. New questions were generated in taking this step and old ones imagined anew. The work was now being contextualized and understood differently. Different evaluative and analytical frameworks were being deployed to make sense of the work.

This entire process and set of unfolding events invite several questions not only about the work, but, for the purpose of this article, about art as research. First, what does it say about where a work begins and ends, how and where data is generated, or where such research might be disseminated? I argue that the sensationalist manner in which this work was taken up in the public press and broadcast media (with an almost exclusive emphasis on animal cruelty), along with the involvement of animal protection and humanitarian organiza-tions, overshadowed and obfuscated the fact that the opportunities for meaning making that this work presented were not the same for all viewers or partici-pants. Yong Ping’s work would have been unthinkable without the history of art practice that preceded it. He was not the first artist to involve living animals in an artwork. Before him, Zhang Huan and Joseph Beuys, for example, exhibited artworks that involved live animals. The opportunities for meaning making that this work provided for those who, because of their educational level, their position in the artworld, their ability to reference other works by Yong Ping and similar forms of representations involving animals, were very different to the opportunities it provided for those who did not bring the same artistic knowledge and competence to the work and to the process of deciphering its meaning. As Bourdieu (1993) argues, whenever the conditions that make it possible to experience an artwork in a deep, meaningful, and contextual manner are not fulfilled, misunderstanding is unavoidable. And this is precisely what Yong Ping claimed following the closure of the exhibit. Bourdieu (1993) holds that “in the absence of the perception that the works are coded, and coded in another code, one unconsciously applies the code which is good for everyday perception, for the deciphering of familiar objects, to works in a foreign tradition” (p. 217). And, he argues further, “uninitiated perception, reduced to the grasping of primary significations, is a mutilated perception (Bourdieu 1993, p. 219). This is precisely what occurred in the reception of Theater of the World. Second, writing in the Vancouver Sun on April 12, 2007 (4 days after the exhibition opened), Nicholas Read claimed that the American Zoological Association stated that any zoo that exhibited these creatures in one display area


would risk losing its accreditation. But this was not a zoo. The idea here was not to preserve or present these creatures in a habitat that resembled their natural one. The concept and ideology behind this work was different. In most cases the intention of the exhibit was missed. Does this matter? Third, the majority of viewers engaged with Yong Ping’s work at a very surface level. Does arts-based research that is expressed in non-comprehensible ways run that same risk? What is lost in simplifying complex ideas and practices for the purposes of interpre-tation? And, finally, what of the question of chance, of doing research that involves a significant degree of chance offerings, as the insects and reptiles did in this sculptural installation?

ConclusionArguably, research practices and modes of representation based in the arts

can disclose particular insights and generate particular understandings about educational settings and situations in addition to, and in ways, that linguistic-based research methods cannot. A critical examination of the work and work practices of contemporary artists for the purpose of identifying how their work

Dónal O’Donoghue

Figure 5. Photograph of the space created for showing blog entries, e-mail correspondence, and media coverage of Theater of the World, Huang Yong Ping (1993). House of Oracles:

A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective, exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April 5 to September 16, 2007 (organized by Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).

Used with permission from the Vancouver Art Gallery.


and practices operate to secure particular opportunities for meaning making is essential for the development and advancement of arts-based research. A number of important questions come from this process.

First, there is the question of how do arts-based researchers create the condi-tions for others to interpret and understand their research findings/outcomes? Moloney trusts the viewer to make connections among and across the arti-facts in his installation as a way of interpreting. Is it enough for arts-based researchers to do what Moloney did? That is, present open-ended data so that readers can arrive at multiple and perhaps contradictory interpretations? Yong Ping’s Theater of the World is conceptualized and executed around elements of chance and impermanence. In allowing nature to take its course in shaping and forming Theater of the World, the artwork took on a whole range of unex-pected twists and turns. While a commitment to chance occurrences and unex-pected turns are key requirements of the creative process, what degree of chance and uncertainty is productive in educational research? What are the implica-tions of introducing a significant number of chance elements in research and dissemination?

Second, there is the question of access. Who is in a position to access the outcomes of research inquiries conducted in and through art in ways that are meaningful and generative? As Bourdieu (1993) argues, and as I have demon-strated in this article, there are different degrees of access, some which provide richer possibilities for meaning making and understanding than others. Based on the number of visitors to the Huang Yong Ping exhibit (more than 5,000 individuals were reported to have visited it), the sheer quantity of e-mail and blog postings that the exhibit generated, and the amount of airtime it got in the media, it could be argued that as an artwork Theater of the World was accessed by many, and was therefore accessible. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth, as the artist’s statement at the closing of the exhibit so eloquently captures. At this end, what are the implications of misinterpretation for educa-tional research conducted in or through the arts? Is this not a key question that ought to be of concern to arts-based researchers?

Third, there is the question of ethics. From a traditional research ethics standpoint, some art practices are perceived to breach codes of practice, and Huang Yong Ping’s Theater of the World is no exception in this regard. The perceived abuse of innocent insects, arachnids, and reptiles led to the closure of this piece. In the exhibition catalogue, Philippe Vernge (2005), the senior curator of the exhibition, asks, “Why should an artist demonstrate any kind of respect for anything? Since when should an artist be well behaved?” and he goes on to argue that the artist’s “subversiveness lies in his indifference to conven-tional wisdom or knowledge” (p. 24). What kinds of ethical questions does this understanding of the artist and artistic practice raise for those doing research in, with, and through art? Are the ethical principles underpinning contemporary art practice applicable to arts-based research practice? Does researching in and with art require different ways of thinking about ethics? I believe it does. It requires a different relationship with the practices and procedures that have



Dónal O’Donoghue

come to define appropriate ethical behavior in educational research (see Bresler, 2006).

While it is impossible to argue against Graeme Sullivan’s (2006) claim that “art practice is a profound form of human engagement that offers important ways to inquire into issues and ideas of personal, social and cultural impor-tance” (p. 32-33), neither must we forget the social conditions underlying the production of art, art practice, and the classificatory schemas that are activated in artistic perception (Bourdieu, 1993). As Bourdieu (1993) holds, and as referred to earlier, the work of art, and by extension the practice of art, exists as such only by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as such. Not all individuals have the same access to artistic experiences, artistic knowing, and the objects of art. While the internal logic of arts-based research differs from that of art practice, identifying what is different and similar in, between, and across art and educational research can suggest ways forward as we articulate what we understand as art, as research, and as arts-based research, and continue to imagine the possibilities that arts-based research offers for inquiring into the educational worlds we care about.

A commitment to the arts as an approach to educational research brings many challenges, but equally it brings responsibilities. It requires us to think deeply about how we understand, articulate, and engage in educational research; how we ask and hope to answer questions, as well as the types of questions we might ask. Moreover, a commitment to the arts as an approach to educational research requires us to locate and develop our practices firmly in the professional fields of the arts, as much as it does in the field of educational research.

ReferencesBarone, T. (2005a). Arts-based educational research. In J. Paul (Ed.), Introduction to the philosophies

of research and criticism in education and the social sciences. (pp. 68-72). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Merrill Prentice-Hall.

Barone, T. (2005b). Arts-based educational research and the professional heroism of Elliot Eisner. In P. B. Uhrmacher & J. Matthews (Eds.), Intricate palette: Working the ideas of Elliot Eisner (pp. 117-126). New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Barone, T. (2006). Arts-based education research: Then, now, and later. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 9-18.

Barone, T. (2008). How arts-based research can change minds. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 28-49). New York: Routledge.

Barone, T., & Eisner, E. (2006). Arts-based educational research. In J. Green, G. Camilli & P. Elmore (Eds.), Complementary methods in research in education (pp. 95-109). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Blumenfeld-Jones, D. (2002). If I could have said it, I would have. In C. Bagley & M. Beth Cancienne (Eds.), Dancing the data (pp. 90-104). New York: Peter Lang.

Blumenfeld-Jones, D. (2008). Dance (choreography) and the body: Practicing social science research. In Ardra Cole & Gary Knowles (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 175-193). Thousand Oaks: Sage Press.

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production: Essays on art and literature, (R. Johnson, Ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press.



(continued on p. 168)

Bresler, L. (2006). Toward connectedness: Aesthetically based research. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 52-69

Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & Siegesmund, R. (2008). Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. New York: Routledge.

Chaplin, E. (1994). Sociology and visual representation. London: Routledge

Cole, A. (2002). The art of research: Arts-informed research. University of Toronto Bulletin, 12(16).

Cole, A. L., Neilsen, L, Knowles, J.G., & Luciani, T. (Eds.). (2004). Provoked by art: Theorizing arts-informed inquiry. Halifax, Nova Scotia: Backalong Books & Centre for Arts-informed Research.

Cole, A., & McIntyre, M. (2004, December). Research as aesthetic contemplation: The role of the audience in research interpretation. Educational Insights, 9(1). Retrieved March, 17, 2008, from http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publications/insights/v9n01/articles/cole.html

Eisner, E.W. (1981). On the differences between scientific and artistic approaches to qualitative research. Educational Researcher, 10(4), 5-9.

Eisner, E.W. (1995). What artistically crafted research can help us to understand about schools. Educational Theory, 45(1), 1-6.

Eisner, E.W. (1997). The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. Educational Researcher, 26(6), 4-10.

Eisner, E.W. (2005). Reimagining schools: The selected works of Elliot W. Eisner. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge.

Eisner, E.W. (2006). Does arts-based research have a future? Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 9-18.

Eisner, E.W. (2008). Persistent tensions in arts-based research. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 16-27). New York: Routledge.

Finley, S., & Knowles, G. J. (1995). Researcher as artist/artist as researcher. Qualitative Inquiry, 1, 110-142.

Gouldner, A.V. (1970). The coming crisis of Western Sociology. London: Heinemann.

Irwin, R. L. (2004). A/r/tography: A metonymic métissage. In R. L. Irwin & A. deCosson (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living (pp. 27-38). Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Pacific Educational Press.

Irwin, R. L., & A. deCosson (Eds.). (2004). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Pacific Educational Press.

Irwin, R.L., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G. & Bickel, B. (2006). The rhizomatic relations of A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 70-88.

Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, 225-248.

Lynch, K. (1999). Equality in education. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd.

O’Donoghue, D. (2007a). Place-making in boys’ schools: Researching with and through art practice. Journal of Artistic and Creative Education, 1(2), 68-101.

O’Donoghue, D. (2007b). ‘James always hangs out here’: Making space for place in studying masculinities at school. Special Issue: The visible curriculum. Visual Studies, 22(1), 62-73.

O’Donoghue, D. (2008). ‘That stayed with me until I was an adult’: Making visible the experi-ences of men who teach. In S. Springgay, R.L Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with A/r/tography (pp. 109-124). Rotterdam: Sense Publishing.

Piantanida, M., McMahon, P.L., & Garman, N.B. (2003). Sculpting the contours of arts-based educational research within a discourse community. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(2), 182-191.

Reckwitz, A. (2002). Towards a theory of social practices: A development in culturalist theorizing. European Journal of Social Theory, 5(2), 243–263.


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Schatzki, T. R. (2001). Introduction: Practice theory. In T. Schatzki, K. Knorr-Ketina & E. Von Savigny (Eds.). The practice turn in contemporary theory. London: Routledge.

Schatzki, T. R., Knorr-Ketina, K., & Von Savigny, E. (Eds.). (2001). The practice turn in contem-porary theory. London: Routledge.

Serra, R. (1994). Writing/Interviews. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Slattery, P. (2001). The educational researcher as artist working within. Qualitative Inquiry 7(3), 370-398.

Springgay, S. (2008). Nurse-in: Breastfeeding and a/r/tographical research. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 136-140). New York: Routledge.

Springgay, S., Irwin R. L., & Wilson Kind, S. (2005). A/r/tography as living inquiry through art and text. Qualitative Inquiry, 11(6), 897–912.

Springgay, S., Irwin, R., Leggo, C., & Gouzouasis, P. (Eds.). (2008). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Sullivan, G. (2005). Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. London: Sage.

Sullivan, G. (2006). Research acts in art practice. Studies in Art Education, 48(1), 19-35.

Vergne, P. (2005). Why am I afraid of Huang Yong Ping? In P. Vergne & D. Chong (Eds.), House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective (pp. 24-31). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.



Forget This Article: On Scholarly Oblivion,

Institutional Amnesia, and Erasure of Research

History

Mary Hafeli

State University of New York, New Paltz

Eternal return is a condition that characterizes the world of art education and its scholarship, though it seems that the phenomenon goes largely unnoticed by many writing in the field today. The failure to name our work as part of an existing family of ideas, with themes that may date back to the years 1950-1970 or earlier, has implications not only for how we understand the evolution of the field’s knowledge base but also for the sophistication and depth of our scholarship. This article reveals how, as a custom, contemporary researchers in art education rarely reference early research from the field. Citing evidence from personal experience and from an analysis of citations in research articles published over the past 5 years in Studies in Art Education, I present reasons why the condition exists generally in art education scholarship. Finally, I argue that our custom of not acknowledging early research results in a fragmented, incoherent knowledge base, a condition that may ultimately deter substantive refinements in our practice.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, 1984

Eternal return, the idea that events and experiences are repeated over time, is an ancient concept dating back to the Egyptians. Puzzling to philosophers, a useful theoretical tool for historians and physicists, eternal return can be considered a means by which people learn from the past. This happens, for example, when we use our insights about historical events as an interpretive lens to understand seemingly similar, present-day occurrences as actions projected or echoed across time and within different contexts.

Eternal return can also be considered a condition that has come to charac-terize the world of art education and its scholarship, though it seems that the phenomenon goes largely unnoticed by many of us writing in the field today. This lack of awareness is evident when we fail to acknowledge that scholars from the field’s history may have already explored, in some form or another and through public presentation, questions and projects related to the topics we engage as scholars working today. The failure to name our work as part of an existing family of ideas—a family with past generations, historical lineage, and roots—has implications not only for how we understand the evolution of the field’s knowledge base but also for the sophistication and depth of our documented collective insight, or scholarship.1 In this article, I examine the concept of eternal return by revealing its presence in recent scholarly inquiry,

1 The phrase eternal return has different meanings in different disciplinary contexts—for example, physics, theology, philosophy, and history. Even within a single discipline there is not always a uniform interpretation of the idea, and among multiple disciplines, definitions may be shared, blended, or blurred. A detailed analysis of Nietzsche’s “eternal return” falls outside the intent and purpose of this essay. I reference Kundera’s literary investigation of the concept—which chronicles the experi-ential consequences of eternal return—because the novel focuses on “lightness of being,” a state that occurs when people do not recognize, or may fail to benefit from understanding,

(continued)


Mary Hafeli

the implications of their repetitious actions, drives, and desires. I equate “lightness of being” with a potential “lightness” of the field’s insight into enduring and perennial issues inherent in the practices and demands of art teaching and learning. This belief is based in the fact that much of our current research fails to cite, thus does not thoughtfully build upon, related historical precedents. In clarifying this distinction, I acknowledge comments on an earlier draft of this essay from one of the manuscript’s reviewers.2 Zimmerman, Chalmers, Hausman, & Stockrocki (2007).3 As Chalmers (2006) reports, Smith said at the time: “‘we live in a preeminently fast age’, where ‘we think no more, but perhaps less; we have no time to think, but go crashing on to save ourselves from being crushed in the hurry of progress’” (p. 292).4 For example, more than 35 years ago Efland (1971) wrote: The tragedy that our recent history shows seems to be that art education trades off one set of values for another. We seem foredoomed to wander from one rallying call to another. Between the thirties and

citing evidence from personal experience as a researcher and from an analysis of research articles published over the past 5 years in Studies in Art Education. I then present some reasons why the condition exists more generally in the field’s ongoing scholarship. Finally, I argue that our custom of not explicitly acknowl-edging, connecting to, and building upon the work of other art education scholars, particularly those from the more-than-recent-decade past, results in a fragmented, incoherent disciplinary knowledge base—a condition that ulti-mately may slow the deepening of our collective insight and deter substantive refinements to the field’s evolving theories and practices of art teaching and learning.

The Eternal Return of Eternal Return in Art Education Scholarship

Others also have noted the current lack of regard for antecedents in art education scholarship. At a National Art Education Association (NAEA) conference presentation in March 2007 titled “Old Wine In New Bottles: What is Wisdom in Art Education?” similar arguments were made.2 And in the Summer 2006 issue of Studies in Art Education, guest editor Graeme Chalmers wrote:

Not only do we easily cast past events aside … we do the same with people and ideas; we ignore the historical precedents. We become suspicious of reading lists for graduate level courses that list too many pre-1996 books and articles. We weed older books from our libraries and personal collections … we jump on new bandwagons before exhausting the possibilities of the preceding wagons.” (Chalmers, 2006, p. 291)Chalmers, himself not guilty of ignoring past voices in the field, reminds us

that our current institutional obsession with new practices, and the breakneck speed with which we rush to adopt and discard conceptual rationales, was also noted by Walter Smith in an address to Massachusetts art teachers over 130 years ago.3 And, in regard to our more recent past, a number of editorials and commentaries in NAEA journals published over the last 50 years evidence the concern that lack of historical connectivity and depth among topics of schol-arship and practice has repeatedly been part of the field’s zeitgeist, at various points in our history.4 How is it that art education scholars, as a practice, do not seem to extend their reviews of relevant works to integrate the historical research literature that stands to inform contemporary lines of inquiry? In what follows, I describe my own professional experience with this phenomenon.

Scholarly Oblivion––A Confessional TaleAs an artist and art teacher in the 1980s, I was intrigued by the idiosyncratic

ways in which the children and teenagers in my classes went about making their art works.5 During my graduate studies in the 1990s, past anecdotal obser-vations about young people’s studio processes became research questions and, eventually, a qualitative, case study dissertation. Part of this work, of course, involved an extensive reading of “the literature” to find empirical studies and (continued)


the sixties we went from child-centeredness to discipline centeredness, and now we are on the move again searching for another alter-native (p. 24). Blandy (2008), offering a more optimistic view, writes that: While the field of Art Education has not yet conceptualized and implemented formal genealogical projects, members of the field do have an enduring appre-ciation, affection, and critical orientation to the myriad and complex networks of relation-ships that define who we are as individuals and as a collective (p. 5).5 I noticed early on that, far from responding as a “class” to whatever I thought I was teaching them, my students had individual ways of working and took distinctly different approaches to thinking about the works they were creating. Some identified fixed themes and subjects at the outset while others liked to let narratives evolve and shift directions. Some loved to work with clay or paint or electronic media—or a needle and thread—while for others this clearly wasn’t their “thing.” Some seemed to think in line, others in colors or textures, or forms and structures, weight and balance. Some worried about

On Scholarly Oblivion, Institutional Amnesia, and Erasure of Research History

theoretical and philosophical works that surrounded and contextualized my research.6 I found then that conducting a literature review is a bit like finding friends or discovering relatives you did not know you had. These connected writings give us new perspectives about our work and these new considerations, hopefully, make the work better—more thoughtful, robust, and fully realized. As a novice researcher, I wanted to be sure I had searched extensively, read widely and deeply about my topic—for this is what I was told was in the tradition of scholars. I didn’t want to miss anything that may have been relevant. Or leave anyone out who should have been included.

For the dissertation fieldwork, I spent a semester in the seventh-and eighth-grade classes of two middle school art teachers to try to find out, among other things, how students thought about their studio works as they made them. I wanted to understand what happened in the translation of the teachers’ “given” assignments as students formed personal intentions for their works; I was particularly interested in the push and pull of teachers’ goals and agendas for the learning of their students as they became aware of the students’ own goals for their artworks.7 In analyzing and interpreting different layers of data, I found a particular form of resistance that was necessary for students to maintain if they were to develop independent judgment as artists, in the context of set assignment guidelines or criteria given by their teachers. Resistance is an oppo-sitional quality, and I found that students who exhibited this kind of inde-pendent thinking defined their own artistic desires and intentions, and relied on a sense of autonomy, in finding and solving problems and making aesthetic decisions in their studio works.

Over 50 years ago, in an article published in Research in Art Education, 7th Yearbook (1956),8 Manuel Barkan and Jerome Hausman reported much the same thing in their study of creative behaviors of students making works in art class. But I learned about Barkan and Hausman’s study not through my own review of related literature. I know about this work only because at the end of an NAEA conference session in which I was presenting my dissertation findings, Jerry Hausman raised his hand and said, “You know, I’m so excited to hear about your research. Did you know that Manny Barkan and I found something quite similar years ago in a study we did?”

My excitement about this connection quickly turned to embarrassment at not having cited the Barkan and Hausman research. When I later tracked down the article I was delighted that here was a study—on identifying “level of involvement” as a component of creative behavior in arts practice—that described a phenomenon similar to what my study found. Barkan and Hausman’s research gave me a new way to look at and interpret my findings, almost 50 years later, and “new” language with which to describe and name them. The researchers’ differentiation of the “official task,” or that which is “suggested or assigned by the teacher,” and the “private task,” or the student’s “perception of his own task,” and their hypothesis that “children exhibited behaviors of high involvement when the ‘official task’ coincided with their ‘private tasks’” (Barkan & Hausman, 1956, p. 138), crystallized the context that surrounded the kinds of artistic resistance and instructional negotiation I had identified. The obvious (continued)


Mary Hafeli

following assignment guidelines closely to “get it right” (“Is this right, Miss H.? Is this the way we’re supposed to do it?”), while rightness for others had to do with not worrying much about anyone’s guide-lines but their own. 6 Although “the literature” is a concept we take for granted, in practice “doing a literature review” can take many forms and can reveal contradictory assumptions about what constitutes an acceptable body of work to be reviewed. What we mean when we use the term is anything but clear as far as purpose and depth and breadth of content over time and across disciplines. 7 For a full description of the study and its methods see Hafeli (1999, 2000, 2001).8 Research in Art Education, 7th Yearbook (1956) is one of three NAEA research compendia (1954, 1956, 1959) that preceded Studies in Art Education.9 The analysis focused on publications of empirical research, both qualitative and quan-titative and including studies that used, among other approaches, ethnographic, case study, grounded theory, phenom-enological (Huberman & Miles, 2002),

irony is that although new to me at the time, the language was historically established through publication in the leading art education research journal of the 1950s. These operational terms were new in 1956 and took root through public reading, interpretation, and debate. Then they were “lost” and, 50 years later, “found” “anew.” In what I thought at the time was a rigorous literature review, I had found only a few studies that were directly related; not one of these was as germane as the study by Barkan and Hausman. But I had not discovered this work––it was given to me; I learned about it by accident, not by design. And had that not been the case, I would still be oblivious to its presence in the literature that is related to a now ongoing area of personal inquiry.

This story is one small example of how eternal return and scholarly oblivion operate. Scholarly oblivion stems from the failure to understand that recurring themes, issues, and concerns are part of any field or discipline and that they permeate the trends and pendulum swings of not only a field’s practices but also its research questions. Art education researchers are continually carrying out seemingly original, well-documented work that, without much historical citation, revisits issues that were addressed years ago. In a sense, we engage in the practice of collectively forgetting what came before. By not citing these studies we are, in effect, erasing the ideas—and silencing the voices—of those scholars in the field who preceded us.

Institutional AmnesiaWhat and where is the evidence for these claims that contemporary thought

and scholarship in art education routinely disregard historical precedents? To explore this question with a focus on recently published empirical research, I undertook an analysis of reference lists for studies published over the past 5 years in Studies in Art Education. My aim was to determine how far back in time we typically go as contemporary researchers in our citations of literature pertinent to our topics. I counted the number of articles for which the primary purpose was to report empirical studies.9 From a total of 100 full-length articles, 43 (43%) were empirically based, with an average of 34 items on the reference lists. I then tallied the number of references cited in the articles (1449) and the number of those references that dated to before 1980. For empirical studies published over the past 5 years, with a total of 1449 references, 138 (9.5%) of the cited works were published prior to 1980.

The fact that over 90% of the references cited in recent, empirical, art education research articles were for scholarship produced in the last 25 years did not seem odd, for that meant that about 10% of the citations represented scholarship from the ‘70s or before. However, when I reviewed the 138 cited works from the 1970s and earlier I found that more than half (66%) were published in the ‘70s—of these, most were from the late ‘70s—with only a few from the ‘60s (20%) and ‘50s (7%). To put this finding in context, just 3% of the 1449 references cited in recent articles about empirical research highlighted scholarship produced prior to 1970. This finding spurs two critical questions: Where, in our present day institutional memory, is the scholarship produced during the years of 1950-1970 and why is it not cited in current writing?(continued)



narrative (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000), and/or portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) meth-odologies and tools of data gathering, analysis, interpretation, and presentation. In using the term empirical I do not mean simply studies based in narrow posi-tivistic research orienta-tions. I use the term as Schwandt (2001) defines it—studies that exhibit as a primary function or feature the systematic gathering, analysis, and inter-pretation of observed or experienced (lived) phenomena, or data. I included all full-length articles that devoted at least half of the text to describing research question(s) investigated and their relation to existing research, the method(ology) of the study (including quali-tative, quantitative, and mixed methods), and the analysis, interpre-tation, and implications of findings. Twenty issues—Winter, 2007 (Volume 48, Number 2) to Spring, 2002 (Volume 43, Number 3)—were reviewed. I chose Studies in Art Education because it represents peer-reviewed scholarship that our national professional organization considers to be worthy of publi-cation and because it is the most widely dissemi-

Unnecessary Remembering, Necessary ForgettingThere are multiple reasons why researchers writing today may, deliberately

or unwittingly, ignore studies from art education’s research history that relate to our own areas of inquiry. First, discounting relevant scholarship from the past can be linked to two modernist characteristics that persist in culturally defining the field—Walter Smith’s “fast age,” which has only intensified over time, and its accompanying infatuation with hypercurrency10 in ideas and ideals. Postmodernism, at least in theory, had it that we should be acknowledging, revisiting, reinterpreting, and recontextualizing much more of our histories than that of the past 10 or 20 years. But in our current practice of empirical inquiry in art education, with our reference lists consistently excluding tempo-rally distant yet potentially related historical antecedents, we seem to have side-stepped that principle.11

Hypercurrency abounds in places where novice researchers learn the tools and craft of research, and this is a prime locus for the lack of attention to art educa-tion’s early scholarship. In graduate schools, for example, common advice for preparing literature reviews is to begin by searching for sources written within the past 5 to 10 years, or to look as far back as necessary to understand the context, key studies, and research methodology of one’s topics and questions. Beginning researchers are trained in using the most technologically up-to-date databases for their areas of inquiry, such as Education Full Text and Art Full Text in art education, and these databases in themselves have historically been biased towards current scholarship.12 Published guides for writing literature reviews (Galvan, 2006; Hart, 1998) recommend mapping the most current research, but they also direct scholars to identify and cite historical landmark studies. Galvan advises researchers to determine the historical “landmark” or “classic” scholars and studies by looking for names and citations that are repeated in multiple sources. Hart recommends a similar approach through citation analyses, where the researcher examines the reference lists of related studies to identify the publications that appear most frequently. Hart’s and Galvan’s advice makes sense for education research and social sciences fields that actively acknowledge, in current scholarship, the landmark studies from the field’s more distant past. But given the analysis above, how would any of us writing in art education today recognize the historical landmarks, when 30 years of poten-tially “classic” studies do not show up in the past 5 years of our own professional organization’s research journal?

A second reason we neglect early research may have to do with a propensity for blazing new trails instead of cultivating and broadening, with multiple and diverse perspectives, established paths of inquiry. As scholars in a disciplinary field of thought and action that has long rewarded such qualities as origi-nality and creativity, and iconoclasm, we aim for uniqueness. We seem to find replicating past studies—a practice that for other fields has served to deepen understanding of relevant concerns and topics—unnecessary and redundant.13 We consider revisiting historical art education topics to be less heady than pioneering or introducing new—or at least new to art education—themes, philosophies, and methodologies. We consider retooling or building on older (continued)


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nated of the field’s art education research journals. Historically speaking, Logan (1975) credits the NAEA with, in the early ‘50s, choosing to “take the leadership” to encourage research in art education at a time when scholarly studies in the field were, and had historically been, few (p. 8).10 “Hypercurrency” (hyper – over + currency – present time) refers to a well-documented public obsession with culturally perceived temporal edginess, newness, novelty, and speed with which we produce and consume. Additional evidence of this current state is the backlash “slow movement” and its accompanying cultural artifacts like the magazine Real Simple and the growing public interest in and demand for slow foods, slow travel, yoga and medi-tation, and other means of slow-ness.11 Although the analysis was limited to the past five years of empirically-based research articles published in Studies, I would not be surprised if a similar pattern was found for both non-empirical works from the same issues and contemporary research published during this time in other art education journals.

theories from the field to be less innovative and groundbreaking, and ultimately less noteworthy, than inventing our own. There has been little recent interest in systematically searching out, analyzing, synthesizing, and re-engaging topics and findings from art education’s early research. For some, the question may be “Why bother?”14

This attitude in the field is not new. Its effects were noted a quarter of a century ago by Rush (1984), who wrote in a Studies editorial,

The resulting idiosyncratic nature of art education research comes as no surprise, but it is surprising even in comparison with other areas of education. The lack of systematic and coordinated research programs in our field is not only disappointing, it is stifling its professional growth. (p. 140) Rush’s observation, echoed more recently by Zimmerman (1996) and

Burton (1998), conveys an earlier vision and hope for research in the field, that systematically designed investigations based on critical questions and involving multiple teams of researchers would provide a sophisticated, cumu-lative network of related findings for the purpose of directly impacting what art teachers actually do with young people in art classes. As McFee (1966) and others at the time saw it, “each bit of information adds something to the dimen-sions known” to “help us clarify our efforts in attempting to increase artistic awareness among those we are entrusted to educate” (p. 2). These earlier hopes, that research would not simply expand or substitute in our consciousness one set of pedagogical understandings and approaches for another, but would also provide an element of coherence and depth to our knowledge base, and improve instructional practice as well, have not been borne out over time. While coor-dinated and complementary research programs have existed at different points in our history, there have not necessarily been attempts within those efforts to systematically search out, analyze, synthesize, and bring to the forefront relevant findings from art education’s early research, to forge those potential connections and relationships.15

A third reason that we fail to acknowledge early research as we conduct our own may have to do with another communal practice considered to be character-istic of our time—that of forgetting. Like eternal return, forgetting as a state of social existence is infused in our contemporary cultures. We are living, as literary critic Charles Baxter (1999) puts it, “in an age of forgetting.” Baxter writes,

It’s possible that in the last part of the twentieth century, we are pioneering a new kind of literature, a literature of amnesia, as we assemble the fragmentary texts of forgetting. This new literature is probably one side effect of data nausea, of which narrative minimalism may be another. If memory stands against death, forgetting stands against data. (p. 154)Is our neglect of past scholarship in art education a symptom of “data nausea”?16

Is there just too much to sift through that we do not even attempt detailed historical analyses of the topics and findings of previous art education research? Or is it that, in art education, we shift topics of essentiality so frequently that (continued)


12 At present Education Full Text, Art Full Text, and ProQuest Education Journals collectively contain full-text articles from art education journals such as Studies dating back 25 years at most. ERIC contains citations for art education journal articles and research reports dating to 1970, but not all documents are available in full text. Things have improved with the advent of JSTOR, Education Index Retro, and Art Retrospective, which contain full-text issues of journals that date back to their inception. 13 Meier (1997), writing as the editor of the American Journal of Political Science, highlights the value of replication studies in social science research: “publishing research attempting to replicate, extend, or cross validate earlier studies will encourage authors to exercise greater care in their published work, preserve their data, facilitate discussion among scholars, and generate a more comprehensive research literature.” He goes on to say that replication studies “encourage the discipline to become more cumulative” and that “[e]ncouraging replication should motivate people to read each other’s work and to


we don’t realize—we institutionally forget—that we are channeling and recy-cling historical themes, problems, and questions? Perhaps changing conceptual courses and taking on different philosophical identities in this way necessitates the kind of institutional amnesia that makes “new” knowledge possible. Maybe many of the “old” topics have run their conversational course.17 But what are the ramifications of not remembering, of erasing, our research history? When are scholarly forgetting and historical amnesia acceptable, even desirable, practices?18 And when, on the other hand, do they lead us to the kind of oblivion and igno-rance that actually thwarts the depth and sophistication of our scholarship?

Rethinking a LiteratureToday, we don’t know whether a consensus about what might constitute

a thematically robust and networked knowledge base—one that is informed by an overarching understanding of conceptual and methodological gaps and needs in the field’s scholarship, and one that provides thoughtful implications for affecting what teachers and students do daily in art classrooms—is even possible.19 But if we could come to such a consensus, what might be done to reconsider past scholarship in art education and bring its relevant layers forward in time, to coexist with and provide added significance to our contemporary pursuits? A first step, one that would begin to address the lack of historical coherence within and across our topics of inquiry, might be to invite teams of researchers to produce a series of literature reviews based on early research that addresses areas, issues, and concerns that are currently critical to our content and practice, and that could be of particular relevance to art educators’ contem-porary lines of inquiry. Art education, unlike other subject areas in education, lacks a collection of comprehensive syntheses of the topics, methodologies, theories, and findings of past studies—one that gives deliberate attention to early research. Unlike the comparatively extensive published descriptions of historical key figures, movements, classroom practices, and purposes for art education, and unlike early and more recent attempts to articulate agendas for future research in the field (for historical examples see Hartman, 1961 and Arnstine,1965; for more recent ones see Zimmerman, 1996), there is no systematic, detailed comparative analysis of topics, methods, and findings in our comprehensive art education research history that dates to and includes the present. Topical syntheses have recently been published in art education research handbooks such as the International Handbook of Research in Arts Education (Bresler, 2007) and Handbook of Research and Policy in Art Education (Eisner & Day, 2004), but it was not the particular purpose of these compendia to search out and review early scholarship with the degree of detail necessary to understand historical patterns of methodologies, and specific findings, that might be relevant to our scholarship today.

Some earlier syntheses also exist, and these need to be interpreted with some understanding of the philosophical, world-view orientations and values of the authors who made selections about what studies to include, the times in which the reviewers lived, and the particular purposes or limitations of the syntheses. For example, an early review done in 1940 by Strange (in Davis, 1967, 1971; (continued)


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talk to each other more, rather than allow the average journal article to languish after publi-cation, never to be cited by anyone” (B7).14 This is a legitimate response for researchers whose lines of inquiry are simply not addressed in early art education research. However, seemingly and relatively “new” topics—such as multicultural and social justice art education, interdisciplinary teaching and learning, action research, research on the effects of learning in art on learning in other subject areas, and collaborative art production practices—that have been “introduced” within the last decade or so were originally addressed early on in art educa-tion’s research history (see, for example, Beittel & Lowenfeld, 1959; Freyberger, 1956; Lanier,1959; Montgomery,1959; Russell,1956). These topics continued to be studied, at various times, prior to 1970 (see Bolton,1969; Eisner,1969; Fischer, Irons, & Fischer,1961; Hoepfner, Silverman, & Hendricks, 1969; Neperud,1969; Salome, 1968).15 Consider Discipline Based Art Education (DBAE) as an illus-tration. Clearly, the plethora of studies

Hamblen, 1989) summarized “scientific investigations relating to art” during the years 1883 to 1939. Davis (1967, 1971, 1977) summarized the trends in topics but not, in comprehensive detail, the findings, of specific studies carried out between 1883 and 1972. Other examples include targeted analyses, such as Hamblen and Smith’s (1994) review of 30 years of Studies in Art Education (vols. 1-33) in search of a particular “research art style”; occasional Studies editorials or commentaries that, like Burton’s (1998) survey report, analyze, and categorize common research topics and/or methods of the times (for historical examples see Beittel, 1961; Chapman, 1978; Ecker, 1965; Hausman, 1959); and other essays and reports that analyze in greater detail the thematic research trends of the day or then-recent decade(s) (Arnstine, 1965; Barkan,1957; Hamblen,1989; Hardiman & Zernich,1976; Hartman,1961; Hoffa,1987; Lanier,1974-75; McFee,1960).

What forms might future syntheses of early art education research take and how might they be organized and positioned? First, decisions would need to be made about the specific questions and purposes particular reviews might address, and about how to focus the investigations and determine boundaries. Should these syntheses be systematic, where a research question is clearly defined and the author seeks to include all prior research that is relevant? Or should they be conceptual, where the purpose is to “gain new insights into an issue” through integrative, theoretical, empirical, and/or methodological lenses (Kennedy, 2007, p. 139)? Kennedy describes some of these distinctions in detail, and discusses the differences between systematic reviews that ask what is known about a topic and conceptual ones that ask more nuanced questions, such as “why we don’t know more” (p. 139). She also compares the values and limi-tations inherent in various approaches researchers might take in conducting literature reviews. Any efforts to seriously revisit early research in art education would benefit from first attending to these issues of purpose, focus, limitations, and forms of presentation.

Obviously, an initial step in all of this would be to systematically build a full-text database, to make accessible early publications of art education research. NAEA would need to reissue the research Yearbooks that were published in the ‘50s before Studies in Art Education was launched—in these three publica-tions alone are 38 research articles encompassing both theoretical and empirical inquiry. Those articles, along with the 131 articles from the first 10 years of Studies, and art education research published in books from the same time period, could provide a base and starting point for generating questions and focusing individual syntheses.

I do not mean to suggest that the areas of investigation, specific questions, methodological approaches, and findings from every early study currently absent from our consciousness would be useful or even related to our contemporary lines of inquiry. Some titles found in early issues of Studies and in the research Yearbooks would seem conceptually inconsequential to researchers today, and some of our current topics may not have obvious historical precedents. Moreover, research methodologies, like philosophies, ebb and flow regarding their value and degree of fit with attitudes and circumstances based in contemporary contexts. Early (continued)



conducted in the ‘70s and ‘80s on students’ understanding of art history, art criticism, and aesthetics (among many others are Ecker, 1974; Erickson 1977, 1979, 1983, 1985; Gray, 1974; Johansen, 1979) was translated by methods textbooks and many art teachers and teacher educators into a curricular move away from reliance on young people’s autonomous expressive ideas as authentic creators of art, and toward teacher-directed modeling of children’s art production based on the visual styles and conceptual themes of adult artists from the past. In doing so, the field did not build upon—it instead rejected—its compre-hensive scholarship on children’s artistic development and creative studio practice (in addition to the large body of research on creativity in young people’s studio practice from the ‘50s and ‘60s, see Abrahamson, 1972; Beittel, 1978; Korzenik, 1976; Kratochwill, Rush, & Kratochwill, 1979; Packard, 1973). The DBAE movement as a whole deliberately discounted and ignored this earlier research, as exemplified here by Hamblen (1988): “In a DBAE curriculum, the emphasis is on learning art content,

research in art education—much of it reflective of a positivistic worldview20 that sparked an uncomfortable dissonance between experiments and measurements on one hand and idiosyncratic creative practice on the other—was not without its critics.21 But we now need to look again and more deliberately, suspending judgment about obvious limitations, and search for perhaps more subtle aspects of these works that may hold potential value for our lines of inquiry today. One such project sorely needed is a synthesis of research on creativity, the art instruc-tional practices that foster it, and a translation of these findings for use by teachers—topics that occupied many early art education researchers and are again of critical concern in today’s educational worlds.22

My personal ignorance about and eventual awareness of early research that would strengthen and enrich my own gives credence to the idea that there may be some additional historical studies that are more than worth our time ferreting out. What other findings, theories, and questions from studies in our more-than-recent history are we, as contemporary researchers, unaware of? What collected knowledge and historical insights into the practices of making, responding to, teaching, and learning art and culture have we effectively erased and forgotten? How can we be sure we are not missing a key study, or theory, or even hypothesis that might profoundly inform our own work, even in some unlikely way, unless we take the time to search through the studies hidden away in vintage editions of our research journals and book publications?

If we take up the project of reviewing early research, we will need to resist the inclination to immediately dismiss as irrelevant or inferior past ideas, ques-tions, findings, and people. We will also need to use analytical and interpretive approaches that lend themselves to open-minded and critical review, and adopt presentation forms that effectively merge past ideas and voices with our own. Kevin Tavin’s (2005) citing of “palimpsestic discourse,” a time-layered visual dialogue around theories and ideas that emerge in the dual action of erasing and retaining the past, is a useful strategy to consider in this pursuit. An essential source for historians in the recovery of ancient literary works, a palimpsest is, traditionally speaking, a document that has been written on repeatedly, at different times, with the earlier writing not fully erased and in part still legible, thus merging past and present ideas and voices. Tavin’s own over-laying of contemporary visual culture scholarship with ideas and people that came before is the kind of conceptual connectivity with art education research history that is lacking in much of our writing today. Judith Burton’s (2001) revisiting and critique of Lowenfeld’s ideas, with a simultaneous uncovering and recovery of issues and contexts and the suggestion “that what one might see as omissions or difficulties … can also be interpreted as important cautions of contemporary relevance” (p. 33), is another example. Many of the topics of early research—creativity, artistic thinking and practice, aesthetic response, art as social engagement, cultural influences on student learning, and methods of teaching, among others—are relevant to our lines of scholarly inquiry today, even if past methodologies and interpretations are necessarily expressive of different times and milieus. (continued)


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21 There were, at the time, insightful and impassioned critics of the nature and methods of early research, particularly those studies that used scientific and experimental methods to try to measure creative behaviors or artistic practices of young people in art class settings. Irving Kaufman, in the 1959 premiere issue of Studies in Art Education, had this to say: The findings in these studies are singularly divorced from any real relationship to creative behavior and relative understanding of art…. The current findings… may add an iota of knowledge to educational statistics, but the quantitative analysis of art and its educational consequences do not really shed any meaningful light upon art. Nor does the supposed objective examination of the number of strokes Johnny places on a sheet of paper (that is 9 x 12 or 18 x 24) as he is emotionally stimulated by the prox-imity of Mary, the little blond, while manipulating a significantly small, soft brush in preference to a large, hard one, have any real bearing on the condition of creative expression (p. 11).22 See, for example, Florida’s (2002){QUERY!! Ck date: Florida, 2003 in Refs} urgent call for the fostering of a new “creative class,” and Elkind’s (2007) and Paley’s (2005) work on the critical necessity of creative “play” in the school experiences of young people.

And yet, we continue to do much more erasing than retaining of past ideas in our written publications of art education research. Our scholarship, while it may continue to amplify and grow in amount and volume, has not matured correspondingly in depth, sophistication, and coherence across time. We need to work toward search and recovery of forgotten scholarship—not with an uncritical, romantic sense of nostalgia, but to evaluate it from the point of view of conceptual and methodological currency—and integrate relevant ideas and voices from the past with our own as we continue the pursuit of evolving philosophies, theories, and practice-based research. As Blandy (2008), citing Lesieutre’s “academic genealogies,” points out:

Such exposition allows for a critique and analysis of what is exposed. In this way, scholars, and the fields of study they are associated with, can undertake a rigorous self-examination of what has shaped and is shaping them as well as what is, and is not, recognized as knowledge. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion can be noted. Conscious decisions promoting change in the future can be considered and applied. (p. 4)How do we envision the acknowledgment and valuing of our own schol-

arship by future generations of art educators? Ivan Johnson, NAEA president in 1956, wrote in the preface of the 7th Yearbook:

The contents of this yearbook are “dead” unless they challenge us to study them and to utilize their findings for improvement in the teaching of art. Obviously, it is not all inclusive; many old problems are as yet unresolved and new ones appear continuously. We, as art educators, have in research a threshold for change. It should stimulate us to still further exploration and evaluation. (p. 6)Will the contents of this “yearbook” be dead and forgotten 20 or 30 years

from now? Should they be? How shall we balance necessary forgetting with remembering in our creation and documentation of collective scholarly insight in art education?

ReferencesAbrahamson, R. (1972). The development of an instrument for measuring the degree of divergent

responses revealed in clay images formed by first grade school children. Studies in Art Education, 14(1), 47-58.

Arnstine, D. (1965). Needed research and the role of definitions in art education. Studies in Art Education, 7(1), 2-17.

Barkan, M. (1957). The research committee and the nature of research in art education. Art Education, 10(5), 10-12, 20.

Barkan, M. (Ed.). (1954). Research in Art Education: NAEA 5th Yearbook. State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Barkan, M. (Ed.). (1956). Research in Art Education: NAEA 7th Yearbook. State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Barkan, M., & Hausman, J. (1956). Two pilot studies with the purpose of clarifying hypotheses for research into creative behavior. Research in Art Education, 7th Yearbook (pp. 126-141). State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Baxter, C. (1999). Shame and forgetting in the information age. In C. Baxter (Ed.), The business of memory: The art of remembering in an age of forgetting (pp. 141-57). St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.

not on students’ artistic development or the conveying of original qualities in their art products. Hence, simi-larities among students’ products are not viewed with alarm, but rather as a sign of success” (p. 23). Had research on students’ responses to and understanding of art and its contexts been purposefully merged with what the field knew at the time about young people as independent, authentic, creative producers of art, the instructional outcomes of DBAE might have been quite different.16 Baxter (1999) wrote: There is more information all the time. No one can absorb all the information. No one wants to. The day ends, not with physical exhaustion, but with data-fatigue ordata-nausea …Because there’s always more infor-mation, an information explosion, but a limited capacity to absorb it or even know what information is essential and what information is trivial, anxiety often results, data-anxiety. What do you need to know, what do you need to absorb, what do you need to remember? Who can say? No one can keep up. No one is in a position to tell you (p. 146),

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Baxter, C. (Ed.). (1999). The business of memory: The art of remembering in an age of forgetting. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf.

Beittel, K. (1961). Editorial. Studies in Art Education, 2(2), 3-6.

Beittel, K. (1978). Inquiry into the qualitative world of creating: The S-E model. Studies in Art Education, 20(1), 26-36.

Beittel, K., & Lowenfeld, V. (1959). Interdisciplinary criteria in the arts and sciences: A progress report. Research in Art Education, 9th Yearbook (pp. 35-44). Washington, DC: National Art Education Association.

Blandy, D. (2008). Editorial: Legacies and lineages. Studies in Art Education, 50(1), 3-5.

Bolton, S. (1969). An introductory study of art as creative learning for the rural culturally disad-vantaged. Studies in Art Education, 10(2), 50-56.

Bresler, L. (Ed.). (2007). International handbook of research in arts education. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

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Burton, J. (2001). Lowenfeld: An(other) look. Art Education, 54(6), 33-44.

Chalmers, G. (2006). Of Kuia and Kaumatua (Guest Editorial). Studies in Art Education, 47(4), 291-293.

Chapman, L. (1978). Editorial: Value orientations in art education theory and research. Studies in Art Education, 19(2), 4-5.

Clandinin, D., & Connelly F. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Davis, D. (1967). Research trends in art and art education. Studies in Art Education, 20(7), 12-16.

Davis, D. (1971). Research in art education: An overview. Art Education, 24(5), 7-11.

Davis, D. (1977). Research trends in art and art education: 1883-1972. In S. Madeja (Ed.), Arts and aesthetics: An agenda for the future (pp. 109-147). St. Louis, MO: CEMREL.

Ecker, D. (1965). Editorial. Studies in Art Education, 7(1), 1.

Ecker. D. (1974). Teaching art criticism as aesthetic inquiry. Curriculum Theory Network, 4(2/3), 112-123.

Efland, E. (1971). The transition continued: The emergence of an affective revolution. Studies in Art Education, 13(1), 13-25.

Eisner, E. (1969). The drawings of the disadvantaged: A comparative study. Studies in Art Education, 11(1), 5-19.

Eisner, E., & Day, M. (2004). Handbook of research and policy in art education. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Elkind, D. (2007). The power of play: How spontaneous, imaginative activities lead to happier, healthier children. New York: Da Capo Press.

Erickson. M. (1977). Uses of history in art education. Studies in Art Education, 18(3), 22-29.

Erickson. M. (1979). Historical thinking and aesthetic education. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 13(4), 81-92.

Erickson. M. (1983). Teaching art history as an inquiry process. Art Education, 36(5), 28-31.

Erickson. M. (1985). Styles of historical investigation. Studies in Art Education, 26(2), 121-124.

Fischer, T., Irons, I., & Fischer, R. (1961). Patterns in art and science: Their creation, evolution, and correspondence. Studies in Art Education, 2(2), 85-100.

Florida, R. (2003). The rise of the creative class. New York: Basic Books.

Freyberger, R. (1956). Differences in the creative drawings of children of varying ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds in Pennsylvania based on samplings of grades one through six. Research in Art Education, 7th Yearbook (pp. 115-125). State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

17 In thinking about art education research as a multi-vocal dialogue protracted over many years, it is natural for topics to attract great interest and urgency at various times, given particular social/contextual conditions—and wane and therefore shift or “turn” at other times as conditions in the field change. My point here is that as contexts change, neces-sitating what we often characterize as “new” lines of inquiry, we need to look back through the extensive collection of published scholarship that preceded us to at least be aware of previous studies that may have some relevance for our “new” work.18 For further reading on intentional and necessary cultural forgetting see Gross (2000) Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture.19 The lively debate on this topic that took place in November 2008 on the NAEA Higher Education Division list serve is evidence of this claim. David Burton (1998), in a survey of art education researchers’ topics of inquiry 10 years ago, found that subjects of choice among higher education faculty and doctoral students were largely theoretical

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in nature, and that research addressing any practical applications for teaching, curriculum, and student learning was limited to 40% for faculty research and 53% for doctoral research. However, given that the response rate for the survey was less than 25%, these findings cannot be considered fully representative of the field. And, as Zimmerman (1998) has pointed out, it is impos-sible to know whether the studies reported were idiosyncratic, one-time investigations or part of ongoing lines of inquiry, and whether they were individual pursuits or undertaken collaboratively as part of a coordinated effort. 20 Hartman (1961) described the mission of early research efforts this way: “to provide a laboratory for the testing of educational methods derived from various theorists” (p. 4).21 There were, at the time, insightful and impassioned critics of the nature and methods of early research, particularly those studies that used scientific and experimental methods to try to measure creative behaviors or artistic practices of young people in art class settings. Irving Kaufman, in the 1959 premiere issue of Studies in Art Education, had

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Galvan, J. (2006). Writing literature reviews: A guide for students of the social and behavioral sciences (3rd ed.). Glendale, CA: Pyrczak.

Gray, J. (1974). A teaching strategy for clarifying aesthetic values. Art Education, 27(7), 11-14.

Gross, D. (2000). Lost time: On remembering and forgetting in late modern culture. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Hafeli, M. (1999). Drawing and painting in the middle school: Intentions, decisions and judgments of students and their teachers. Ed.D. dissertation, Columbia University Teachers College. Retrieved January 15, 2008, from ProQuest Digital Dissertations. (Publication No. AAT 9921386).

Hafeli, M. (2000). Negotiating “fit” in student art work: Classroom conversations. Studies in Art Education, 41(2), 130-145.

Hafeli, M. (2001). Encountering student learning. Art Education, 54(6), 19-24.

Hamblen, K. (1988). What does DBAE teach? Art Education, 41(2), 23-35.

Hamblen, K. (1989). Research in art education as a form of educational consumer protection. Studies in Art Education, 31(1), 37-45.

Hamblen, K., & Smith, S. (1994). Identifying a research art style in art education. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, April 4-8, 1994. ED 376 188.

Hardiman, G., & Zernich, T. (1976). Research in art education 1970-74: Portrayal and interpre-tation. Art Education, 29(2), 23-36.

Hart, C. (1998). Doing a literature review: Releasing the social science imagination. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Hartman, F. (1961). The future of research in art education. Studies in Art Education, 3(1), 4-8.

Hausman, J. (1959). Editorial. Studies in Art Education, 1(1), 3-8.

Hausman, J. (Ed.). (1959). Research in Art Education: NAEA 9th Yearbook. Washington, DC: National Art Education Association.

Hoepfner, R., Silverman, R., & Hendricks, M. (1969). Developing and evaluating art curricula for disadvantaged youth. Studies in Art Education, 11(1), 20-33.

Hoffa, H. (1987). Research as caring skepticism. Design for Arts in Education, 88(5), 5-9.

Huberman, A., & Miles, M. (2002). The qualitative researcher’s companion. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Johansen, P. (1979). An art appreciation teaching model for visual aesthetic education. Studies in Art Education, 20(3), 4-14.

Johnson, I. (1956). Preface. Research in Art Education: NAEA 7th Yearbook. State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Kennedy, M. (2007). Defining a literature. Educational Researcher, 36(3), 139-147.

Korzenik, D. (1976). Creativity: Producing solutions to a problem. Studies in Art Education, 17(2), 29-36.

Kratochwill, C., Rush, J., & Kratochwill, T. (1979). The effects of descriptive social reinforcement on creative responses in children’s easel painting. Studies in Art Education, 20(2), 29-39.

Kundera, M. (1984). The unbearable lightness of being. New York: Harper and Row.

Lanier, V. (1959). Implications of the concept of action research. Studies in Art Education, 1(1), 38-49.

Lanier, V. (1974-75). Conception and priority in art education research. Studies in Art Education, 16(1), 26-30.

Lawrence-Lightfoot, S., & Davis, J. (1997). The art and science of portraiture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Logan, F. (1975). Up date ’75: Growth in American art education. Studies in Art Education, 17(1), 7-16.

(continued)


this to say: The findings in these studies are singularly divorced from any real relationship to creative behavior and relative understanding of art…. The current findings… may add an iota of knowledge to educational statistics, but the quantitative analysis of art and its educational conse-quences do not really shed any meaningful light upon art. Nor does the supposed objective examination of the number of strokes Johnny places on a sheet of paper (that is 9 x 12 or 18 x 24) as he is emotionally stimulated by the proximity of Mary, the little blond, while manipulating a significantly small, soft brush in preference to a large, hard one, have any real bearing on the condition of creative expression (p. 11).22 See, for example, Florida’s (2003) urgent call for the fostering of a new “creative class,” and Elkind’s (2007) and Paley’s (2005) work on the critical necessity of creative “play” in the school experiences of young people.


McFee, J. (1960). Research in art education. Studies in Art Education, 2(1), 16-21.

McFee, J. (1966). Editorial. Studies in Art Education, 7(2), 1-2.

Meier, K. (1997). The value of replicating social-science research. Chronicle of Higher Education, 43(22), B7.

Montgomery, C. (1959). Creative work within a group: Its situational factors. Research in Art Education, 9th Yearbook. Washington, DC: National Art Education Association.

NAEA Commission on Research in Art Education. (1994). Art education: Creating a visual arts research agenda toward the 21st century: A final report: 1994. Art Education, 47(4), 29-44.

Neperud, R. (1969). Visual arts instruction in primitive societies: Its implications for art education. Studies in Art Education, 10(2), 12-26.

Packard, S. (1973). Creative tempo in children’s art production. Studies in Art Education, 14(3), 18-26.

Paley, V. (2005). A child’s work: The importance of fantasy play. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rush, J. (1984). Editorial: “Does anyone read Studies any more?” Studies in Art Education, 25(3), 139-140.

Russell, I. (1956). Relationships between certain aspects of creative expression and reading development. Research in Art Education, 7th Yearbook (pp. 103-114). State Teachers College, Kutztown, PA: National Art Education Association.

Salome, R. (1968). Perceptual training in reading readiness and implications for art education. Studies in Art Education, 10(1), 58-67.

Schwandt, T. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative inquiry (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Strange, M. (1940). A summary of scientific investigations relating to art. Unpublished master’s thesis, Baylor University, Waco, Texas.

Tavin, K. (2005). Opening re-marks: Critical antecedents of visual culture in art education. Studies in Art Education, 47(1), 5-22.

Zimmerman, E. (1998). Further commentary: Response to Burton’s Survey of Current Research in Art Education. Studies in Art Education, 39(2), 187-189.

Zimmerman, E. (Ed.) (1996). Briefing papers: Creating a visual arts research agenda toward the 21st century. Reston, VA: National Art Education Association.

Zimmerman, E., Chalmers, G., Hausman, J., & Stockrocki, M. (2007, March). Old wine in new bottles: What is wisdom in art education? Paper presented at the meeting of the National Art Education Association, New York, NY.



Reconceptualizing the Role of Creativity

in Art Education Theory and Practice

Enid Zimmerman

Indiana University

Reconceptualizing contemporary notions about creativity in visual arts education should be an important issue in art education today. Currently, creativity may not be a primary focus at National Art Education Association conferences or in its publications. There are recent indications that art education is a site where creativity can be developed and nurtured for all students with emphasis on both individual processes and cultural practices. It is advocated that through critical analysis of concepts related to art education and creativity that research and practice can be developed to cultivate creative education for all art students. Topics discussed in this article, related to reconsidering creativity, include the history of creativity in art education, definitions of creativity, assessment of creative processes, dispositional factors and creative individuals, cultural variability and creativity, and educational interventions that promote student creativity.

Often when I tell people I am an art educator an immediate response is, “Oh, you deal with the creative part of schooling.” I expect that in the minds of the general public, and in the field of general education, studying the visual arts is synonymous with creativity and is the place where creativity should be located in public schools. What is also conjured up is a vision of students having a grand time creatively expressing themselves by playing with a variety of media.

It appears that the general public places value on the role of creativity in contemporary education. In the April 2008 issue of the NAEA News, a headline, “National Poll Reveals Need for Creativity, Imagination in Public School Curriculum,” caught my attention. Results from a national poll conducted by Lake Research Partners, supported by Arts Education Partnership research, demonstrated that:

Americans are concerned that we are falling behind as a nation and that imagination, innovation, and creativity have been the foundation that moved the United States into a world leadership role … To maintain our competitive edge, we need to balance instruction, encouraging our children to be creative and develop their imaginations. (p. 7)In this survey, those polled felt that the United States devotes less time than

other nations to developing creative and innovative skills and parents thought that creative skills could be taught with an outcome of helping students lead successful lives.1 How do art educators and those closely associated with art education value the place of creativity in present-day visual arts education?

NAEA Convention and PublicationsThe 2008 National Art Education Association (NAEA) annual convention

is a good place to begin exploring how creativity is viewed in the field of art education today. The theme of this convention was “Innovations in Teaching,

1 See http://www. theimaginenation.net for more information about this poll.

Correspondence regarding this article may be sent to the author at [email protected]


Reconceptualizing the Role of Creativity in Art Education Theory and Practice

2 Note that sessions that referred only to creating as making artwork were not counted as directly related to the topic of creativity.3 NAEA Books 2007-2008 publication listing in Art Education (November, 2007), 6 (6) 1-15.

Learning, and Leading.” A dozen of the 117 exhibitors’ booths, where art materials and resources were sold and distributed at this convention, adver-tised creativity as being an integral part of their programs, resources, or media. Emphasis in the main, but not exclusively, was on inherent creative possi-bilities of media and programs and developing student creativity. Examples ranged from topics such as “renewing the creative spirit” by having art teachers participate in media workshops; using high quality art supplies for achieving “a world of imagination,” “celebrating creativity” by building student self-esteem through promoting student artwork for parents to purchase; “creativity express” where making animated movies and games help “develop creative kids;” and books promoting “visual literacy” by developing students’ skills of “observation, reflection, and creation.”

In the 1023 sessions at the NAEA convention, there were 16 sessions in which the concept of creativity in art education was mentioned in either the title of a presentation or its description in the convention program book.2 These sessions could be found across many divisions, workshops, and affil-iates with a notable exception of creativity not being mentioned in any of the titles or program descriptions of the 58 research sessions. The 16 sessions focused on creativity from many different perspectives. Of these, three sessions (Curriculum and Instruction, Middle Level, and a Secondary divisions) sessions included integrating creativity with other subjects to produce “creative results.” Creativity and its role in healing and teaching special populations was the topic of three sessions (one in the Museum division and two in Issues Group: Special Needs). In a fourth session (Curriculum and Instruction), going “beyond creativity and empathy” to teaching art disciplines to special student popula-tions was advocated. Creative strategies were presented in two sessions (both in the Museum division) as a means for experimentation, producing best practices, and developing leadership in museum settings. In one session (Secondary), participants in the 2007 NAEA Academy for Creative Educators shared how this program impacted their teaching practices. Creativity was used to promote art education standards in one session (Higher Education) and as a form of resistance through art making and writing in another (Issues Group: Women’s Caucus). In two sessions (Higher Education and Curriculum and Instruction), “creative learning” and art making processes for professional development were highlighted. Creativity was described in two other sessions (Curriculum and Instruction and Higher Education) as a specific mode of thinking and behaving including fostering innovative art learning through creative thinking and creative problem-solving exercises.

Due to the small number of presentations at the 2008 NAEA convention about the topic of creativity, I decided to search NAEA’s book list for 2007-20083 and the two NAEA sponsored journals, Art Education and Studies in Art Education, to see if creativity was included in any of these publications. Of the 100 books on NAEA’s list, there are three that make direct reference to teaching about creativity. Published in 1968, one book, edited by Brittain, is a retrospective compilation of Viktor Lowenfeld’s speeches from 1946-1968 that evidences his concern about the importance of creative self-expression in


Enid Zimmerman

education. A second book, authored by Karnes, was published in 1979 and contains 45 art lessons designed to develop preschool students’ “desirable” social, emotional, and intellectual “behaviors” for later school success. The most recently published book is Szekely’s (2006) in which he advocates “creataive” art teachers use creative ideas from home and play that encourage children to bring their own ideas about artmaking without allowing adult art lesson plans or teaching about adult artists to dominate their art learning. Ideas such as Szekely’s were popular during the Progressive Education era and persist to some extent in art education practices today. These three books contain notions about creativity that represent thinking about this topic that needs to be reassessed and revalued in light of current art education theory and practice.

One article, published in 2007 in Studies in Art Education, was related to creativity. In this article, Freedman referenced Florida’s (2002) ideas about the rise of a creative class and the growing number of jobs in the United States that now depend on creative responses to political, economic, and cultural demands. In our post-industrial society and information age, Florida explained that creativity is multidimensional in fields in which artists, entertainers, and cultural producers are involved. Three kinds of creativity that Florida cited were technological though innovation, new products and ideas, and economic entre-preneurship creativities. Freedman posited:

In the past, student artistic production has been characterized by student self-expression. In contemporary contexts, creative production may need to be thought of less as creative self-expression and more as the development of cultural and personal identity. (p. 211)

She called for a reconceptualization of creativity “as an act of leadership as well as the expression of an individual” (p. 205).

As evidenced by books published by NAEA and at the NAEA 2008 convention sessions as well as by exhibitors’ wares, creativity mainly has been associated with notions of self-expression not necessarily related to the cultural contexts in which art is produced. Past and postmodern notions about creativity need to be revisited to explain how they have potential to become an important part of contemporary art education theory and practice. I will present five topics that view creativity through a new art education lens. Through discussion of such topics, I hope that a critical dialogue can begin that addresses current concerns about creativity and art education for all students.

Creativity and Its History in the Field of Art EducationCreative self-expression in art education was a child-centered approach that

had its roots in psychology that was dominant in the field as early as the late 1930s and lasted for over 50 years. The core of the creative self-expression movement was to develop each student’s inherent creative and expressive abil-ities. Creativity was regarded as being innate and developing naturally without imposition of adult interventions. A teacher’s role in a visual arts program was to provide motivation, support, resources, and supplies, but not to interfere directly in students’ artmaking activities. There was an intense interest in



4 D’Amico’s Creative Teaching in Art (1942), Cole’s Arts in the Classroom (1940), Viola’s Child Art (1942), Lowenfeld’s The Nature of Creative Activity (1939), and Creative and Mental Growth (1947) to name a few. The 8th edition of Creative and Mental Growth (Lowenfeld & Brittain, 1987) continued to be published into the late 1980s. 5 See http:/www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/StudioThink.htm

creativity, both nationally and internationally, evidenced by art education books first published in the late 1930s and 1940s4. The early 1980s witnessed establishment of the Getty Center for Education in the Arts with its emphasis on a subject-matter-centered approach that fostered excellence in art education through attainment of skills and understandings in art disciplines (Clark, Day, & Greer, 1987; Dobbs, 1988; Smith, 1989).

Whereas creativity in the middle of the last century was viewed as a compa-rable ability particular to individuals no mater what their origins or where they resided, more recent conceptions acknowledge creativity as a social construct. In art education in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a focus on community-based art education that emphasized local settings in which art was produced individually as well as collectively around concerns for society as a whole (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Okiakor & Ford, 1995). At this same time, society-centered education and multicultural art education, which also addressed general needs of students from a wide variety of ethnic, cultural, and racial backgrounds, became popular (Berube, 1994; Cotter, 2001; Diaz, Massialas, & Xanthropoulous, 1999). In the late 1990s, in an expanding tech-nological world, global art education and intercultural art education approaches to teaching came to the fore. In this art education orientation, understandings about a variety of peoples and their beliefs and values worldwide were under-lined (Davenport, 2000).

Today, when artworks are made and displayed publicly, they have potential to supply opportunities for thinking and learning about the visual arts as part of individual processes, cultural practices, and technological systems for commu-nication. There now is a groundswell in art education of a society-centered approach to art education that focuses on visual culture. Emphasis in this approach focuses on how pervasive images and objects can play major roles in providing students with knowledge about the world outside and beyond their own personal experiences (Duncum, 2002a, 2002b). In this sense, visual culture implies that processes and products of culture are studied in relationship to a variety of contexts that are socially, politically, economically, culturally, sexually, age-based, and racially oriented (Bolin & Blandy, 2003; Freedman, 2003a, 2003b; Wilson, 2003).

Another contemporary art education movement, arts-based practice, considers sites for inquiry that have as a foundation studio-like theories, prac-tices, and contexts used by individual artists in particular social settings (Barone & Eisner, 1997; Brown, 2000; Sullivan, 2004, 2005). Sullivan (2005) presented a model for arts-based research in which an artist readily adopts roles of both practitioner and theorist engaged in creative inquiry that not only results in an individual product, but also is mediated by both community settings and what currently exists globally within similar genres. Project Zero at Harvard5 grounds its Studio Thinking Framework in praxis based on case studies through observation and analysis of teaching in the visual arts. This project includes eight Studio Habits of the Mind that are dispositions, inclinations, or sets of


Enid Zimmerman

behaviors applied to life tasks that extend beyond teaching about techniques and support development of “serious thinking dispositions that are valued both within and beyond the arts” (Hetland, Winner, Veema & Sheridan, 2007, p. vii). These artist-based and visual culture approaches to art education have potential for developing conceptions of creativity and creative processes as bases for research and construction of new pedagogical paradigms and practices in art education.

Definitions of CreativityLack of agreement about a common definition of creativity may undermine

consideration of the concept being included in school curricula by practically minded school administrators (Coleman & Cross, 2001). Many contemporary psychologists and educators agree that creativity is a complex process that can be viewed as an interactive system in which relationships among persons, processes, products, and social and cultural contexts are of paramount impor-tance (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feldman, 1999; Gruber, 1989; Sternberg, 1999). All creative work, according to Sternberg (1999), happens in one or more domains. People are not creative in a general sense; they are creative in particular domains such as the visual arts. Talented individuals fit well in certain domains of knowledge within their own cultures and are recognized as highly competent by members in their fields of expertise (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feldman, 1982; Gardner, 1999; Winner & Martino, 1993). Creative persons, however, often do not fit easily within a domain of knowledge, and it is only after much time and effort that they may be able to establish a body of work that comes to be valued. Creativity from this point of view is an individual characteristic as a person reacts with one or more systems within a particular social context.

Different conceptions about the relationship between intelligence and creativity, however, make it difficult for agreement to be reached about a common definition of creativity. Some researchers assert that to be creative, a person needs intelligence, but not all intelligent people have high creative potential (Davis & Rimm, 1998; Renzulli & Reiss, 1985). MacKinnon (1965) argued that a basic level of IQ of about 120 as necessary for creative produc-tivity, although some researchers posit there is no direct relationship between creativity and intelligence. Sternberg (2001), however, differentiated between intelligence and creativity and viewed intelligence as advancing societal norms and creativity as opposing societal norms and proposing new norms. As a result of case studies of adults who achieved success in the arts and sciences, Feist (1999) concluded that giftedness, measured by high IQ scores, might not be a good indicator of adult creative achievement, and that the relationship between creativity and intelligence was small as most creative people do not conform to conventional ways of knowing.

Many scholars concur that creative achievement is reflected in production of useful, new ideas or products that result from defining a problem and solving it in a novel way within a particular cultural context (Hunsaker & Callahan, 1995; McPherson, 1997; Mumford, Connely, Baughman, & Marks, 1994; Wakefield,



1992). There is, however, another source of difficulty about defining creativity in that a number of scholars distinguish between expert, adult creative acts and those of children. Some think that children can demonstrate talent in a number of areas, but cannot be creative because creativity involves changing a domain and ways of thinking within that domain (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feldman, 1999; Winner and Martino, 1993). A case can be made, on the other hand, for differentiating creativity at an individual level as a person solves problems in daily life at a societal level that can lead to new findings, programs, movements, and inventions (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Sternberg, 1999).

It would not be productive in art education to adopt the point of view that children and students cannot be viewed as being creative. Then, there would be no reason to include any concepts related to creativity and creative behaviors in art education theory or practice. Some researchers hold a position that nearly everyone has some creative ability and this potential should be supported in educational settings (Parkhurst, 1999). From such a point of view, creativity can then be viewed as what is creative for an individual locally rather than empha-sizing changing the society in which he or she resides.

Assessment of Creative ProcessesIn educational contexts, interest in practical applications of creative processes

have resulted in development of means to measure creativity even though consensus about a theoretical basis for defining creativity has not been reached. Although techniques for measuring creativity are plentiful, each process presents an incomplete or diverse picture of creative processes (Coleman & Cross, 2001). Standardized tests, rating scales, checklists, and work-samples have been used for studying student creativity and creative processes (usually without consid-eration of their educational or cultural backgrounds). It is suggested, however, that multiple measures be used to make decisions for assessing creative processes (Clark & Zimmerman, 2001a, 2004).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Torrance (1963, 1972), Guilford (1975), Wallach-Kogan (1965), Rimm and Davis (1976), and others developed what became known as creativity tests. When originally designed, creativity tests were used to measure general problem-solving skills and divergent thinking abilities applicable to various situations and subjects. It was found that some divergent thinking scores on tests and creative behaviors could be increased with education. It is debatable if these tests could predict creative behaviors and if behaviors on creativity tests can be directly linked to how creativity is manifest in the real world of adults in a variety of social settings (Coleman & Cross, 2001; Runco, 1993a, 1993b). Torrance (1963) found that creative achievements in writing, science, medicine, and leadership were more easily predicted than creative achievements in music, the visual arts, business, or industry.

During the 1980s, several researchers developed instruments to measure creativity in the arts. Kulp and Tartar (1986) developed instruments to identify highly able, creative visual arts students and a number of educational researchers endorsed using creativity tests to identify talented students for visual arts programs (Khatena, 1982, 1989; Greenlaw & Macintosh, 1988; Hurwitz, 1983;


Enid Zimmerman

Parker 1989); others such as Khatena (1982) claimed visual and performing arts abilities were closely linked with creativity as a measurable construct. When Clark (Clark & Zimmerman, 2001b, 2004) tested over 1200 third graders in four ethnically diverse communities in the United States, he found a strong correlation between drawing ability as measured by Clark’s Drawing Abilities Test (CDAT)6, creativity as determined on adapted Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)7, and state-wide achievement tests. The TTCT and the CDAT, however, appear to measure different sets of abilities. Clark concluded correlation among the CDAT, TTCT, and achievement test scores indicated performance on these measures may be affected by another factor, or set of factors, which may include intelligence and /or general problem solving skills as well as specific skills acquired through visual arts education. It should be noted that TTCT, developed in the 1970s, is easy to administer to large groups and there is debate about the relevance of this measure of creativity for diverse popu-lations especially when different cultural contexts are considered (Sternberg & Lubart, 1999).

In policy statements, many visual art programs today claim to emphasize creativity as an outcome but do not have valid means for identifying creativity, constructs for developing curricula that include creativity, or a research basis upon which to assess creative outcomes. Creativity tests, such as those developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Guilford and Torrance, are still common measures used to identify art abilities or potential in programs for developing art talent. There does however appear to be a renewed interest in general creativity testing in the area of gifted and talented education as evidenced by a recently published creativity test, Profile of Creative Abilities (Ryser, 2007). It is advertised as a new measure for identifying exceptional creative ability in students ages 5–14. It contains two sub-tests; one is a task where students draw details to complete incomplete figures and another is a task where students sort images into cate-gories. Tests, such as this, relate to general creativity rather than creativity and creative processes specific to art education or to the students’ backgrounds and social contexts. Of interest to art educators is a recent practice of using a work sample, done under supervised conditions, to assess processes that creative people undergo when producing products and having local experts, rather than non-experts, make judgments about their creative performance (Feldman, 2000).

Dispositional Factors Associated with Creative PersonsThere have been a number of traits that have been associated with creative

individuals in general, yet there are many different opinions as what these traits might be and how they are activated in real-life situations. Some of these traits, viewed as positive characteristics, are being curious, open-minded, energetic, artistic, and having a keen sense of humor. Other dispositional factors that challenge teachers’ tolerance levels such as questioning rules, disorganization, absentmindedness, and a tendency to be emotional often are not valued in school settings (Davis, 1992).

6 Clark’s Drawing Abilities Test (CDAT) consists of four drawing tasks and a scoring guide. The tasks are to draw a house as if you were looking at it from across the street, draw a person running very fast, make a drawing of you and your friends playing, and make fantasy drawing from your imagination. On the basis of history and research, the CDAT has been shown to be valid and reliable and effective as a standardized instrument for identi-fying student art ability in a variety of countries and school contexts.7 The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is a stan-dardized creativity test. An adapted version of the TTCT was used here as evidence of fluency, flexibility, and elaboration. The test consisted of three tasks: list as many uses of a junked automobile as you can, draw pictures with titles in four pre-printed rectangles, and see how many objects you can make on one page using 12 preprinted rectangles.



As a subset of creativity, artistic creativity has been defined as a range of multi-dimensional processes that includes knowledge of art concepts and traditions in a culture, highly developed visual thinking skills, and intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1983). In addition, James (1999-2000) defined artistic creativity as a series of “decisions and actions that are both purposeful and not predictable … It is an individual and a social process during which materials, forms, and cultural conventions are fused with the artist’s personal history and emotions. Something is created that has never before existed in exactly that form” (p. 115). Dispositional factors also have been found that differentiate creative art students from those who are less creative. Those considered less creative produce drawings that are realistic without much inventiveness, whereas more creative students find problems and attempt to solve them by producing novel solutions (Getzels & Csikszentmihayli, 1976). Problem-finding and problem-solving, being emotionally involved, and focusing on personal visions were identified by Dudek and Cote (1994) as relevant to creative students’ successful engagement when making art projects. In a study about art students at the college level, Stalker (1981) found cognitive complexity (manifesting many solutions to problems), executive drawing abilities (superior skills in drawing), and affective intensity (strength of emotional responses and judgments) as skills and dispositions that define creative visual arts ability. Other individual creative characteristics, cited by Pariser (1997), include intensity of application and early mastery of cultural forms, production of a large volume of works over a sustained period of time, nurturance from family and teachers, and thematically specialized work.

At Project Zero, the eight Habits of the Mind include many traits that can be aligned with nurturing creativity in school settings such as developing craft, engaging and persisting at art tasks, envisioning what cannot be observed directly and imagining next steps, producing works that convey personal meaning, observing visual contexts closely, reflecting by communicating about personal and others’ art works, and understanding the world of art locally and in the broader society (Hetland, et. al., 2007). Costa and Kallick identified 16 Habits of the Mind including one category: creativity, imagining, and inno-vating. Others Habits they associated with creative thinking included taking risks, being empathetic, posing problems, thinking flexibly and interdepen-dently, persisting at a task, and thinking metacognitively.

Feist (1999) conducted an extensive longitudinal literature review to determine whether personality has an influence on creative achievement in art and science. He found that personality meaningfully co-varies with artistic and scientific creativity. Both creative artists and scientists tended to be more open to new experiences, self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious, hostile, impulsive, and less conventional and conscientious than others in the general population. Artists, however, were found to be more affective, emotionally unstable, as well as less social and accepting of group norms than were scien-tists who were found to be more conscientious. It also was determined that traits that distinguish creative children and adolescents tend to be ones that also distinguish creative adults. Traits associated with adult creativity, therefore,


Enid Zimmerman

might be ones that are relevant for identifying, creating curricula, and assessing products produced by creative art students.

Creative adult traits described by Gardner (1999) are tendencies to have high energy, be extremely demanding and self-promoting, deprecate others, possess child-like traits, ignore convention, and fascination with their own childhood experiences. He characterized five kinds of creative activity: (1) solving a well defined problem; (2) devising an all-encompassing theory; (3) generating work that is distant in time from when it was produced to a time when it is evaluated; (4) performing a ritualized work; and (5) performing a series of actions that bring about some kind of political or social change. Category numbers 3 and 4 are concerned directly, according to Gardner, with artistic creativity.

Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) and Stokes (2001) challenged the notion that successful problem-finding and problem-solving are always a means for producing a body of work that can be considered creative. Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi (1976) studied young college art students and the rela-tionship between their problem-finding behaviors and the originality of their artworks. They concluded that the students’ methods of discovery, visualization techniques, and ways they sought productive questions were often far better indicators of creative abilities than were their solutions to art problems. Stokes (2001) maintained that many creative individuals, Monet as an example, rather than adopting problem-finding strategies imposed restrictive task limitations on his own work, such as the constraining motifs he employed, with outcomes being high levels of variability.

Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues (1996) interviewed over 90 exceptional, creative men and women from around the world, including artists, who were at least 60 years old and had made contributions in a major domain in their own culture. Traits they found associated with creativity were often dichotomous and included: displaying a great amount of physical energy and a need for quiet times, being wise and childish, being playful and disciplined, using imagination rooted in reality, being extroverted and introverted, being humble and proud, displaying a tendency toward being androgynous, being traditional and rebel-lious, being passionate yet objective about work, and displaying ability to suffer and enjoy creation for its own sake (Zimmerman, 1999, 2005, 2006).

As evident, there are many different views of about what sets of dispositional factors mark a creative person. The arts today, Gardner (1999) conjectured, are ripe for creative change due to the lack of attention and agreement as to what constitutes creative dispositions, acts, or products in the arts. This therefore may be an opportune time to research connections between creativity and theory and practice in art education.

Cultural Variability and Expression of CreativityAccording to Sternberg and Lubart (1999), “Cross-cultural comparisons have

demonstrated cultural variability in the expression of creativity. In cultures that are traditional, it may take time to achieve new ways of thinking;” moreover, they have shown “cultures differ simply in the amount they value creative enter-prise” (p. 9). Culture is learned and passed on from one generation to the next



and cultures are dynamic and changing (Lubart, (1999), although the rate of change may differ from one context to the next. Children and adults alike only can be recognized as creative in areas that are valued within their own cultures (Feldman & Goldsmith, 1986; Gallagher, 1985; Greenlaw & McIntosh, 1988; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999; Zimmerman, 2005). In contemporary, industrialized societies, change and creativity are encouraged with emphasis on producing a product that is both novel and appropriate within a particular cultural context. Cognitive problem-finding and problem-solving initiatives are strategies that fit a product-oriented conception of creativity that has as an emphasis individu-ality, a strong work ethic, and belief that progress is always for the betterment of society. Creativity from this viewpoint, according to Csikszentmihalyi (1996), is more likely to occur in settings where new ideas take less time to enact and be accepted. In industrialized societies today, the notion of cultural and artistic creativity involves new ways of thinking, new art forms, new designs, and new concepts that focus on groups of individuals who play roles as interdependent members of a creative class (Florida, 2002).

In some cultures, collaboration, cooperation, conformity, and traditions may be valued more than completely novel solutions to problems. Such views about creativity, as contrasted to product-oriented ones, often are focused less on final products than on creative processes (Lubart, 1999). In China, for example, technical skill in art is viewed as fundamental for development of art ability and expression (Gardner, 1989). Most Chinese art teachers stress developing skills that are necessary before students are encouraged to demonstrate creativity. Peat (2000) suggested that renewing and revitalizing something that already exists should also be viewed as creative. In traditional societies, creativity also should be viewed as dynamic and changing. In these societies, focus often is not on novelty alone, rather, creative acts may be seen as acts of transformation that arise out of respect for a particular art form. Both industrialized and traditional societies adapt styles from the past and employ them in contemporary contexts. For example, traditional Navajo weavers have changed both the kinds of mate-rials used and the content of their weavings in response to local and world events. In respect to intercultural and global perspectives, contemporary notions about creativity and art talent development in a variety of contexts needs to be recon-sidered to acknowledge a more inclusive paradigm than the pervasive notion of creative acts only as generation of original ideas and products made by a few individuals who change cultural domains.

Educational Interventions That Help Foster CreativityIt has been suggested that creativity can be enhanced and teaching strategies

can be developed to stimulate creativity. If it is accepted that creativity becomes increasingly specialized within a particular domain such as art (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Feldman, 1982; Gardner, 1999), teaching for creativity could focus on general creativity processes when students are young and then domain-specific activities can be introduced as students mature and commit themselves to a particular field of interest that involves real-world adult activities.


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Problem-finding, problem-solving, divergent and convergent thinking, self-expression, and adaptability in new situations are all traits commonly associated with general creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1996; Mumford, et al., 1994; Runco, 1993a, 1993b; Runco & Nemiro, 1993; Starko, 2001; Sternberg 1988, 1997, 1999). There is research that demonstrates that problem-finding and problem-solving skills can be taught and students’ abilities to be productive thinkers and creative problem-solvers can be nurtured (Treffinger, Sortore, & Cross, 1993; Hetland, et al., 2007). According to Feldhusen (1992) and Treffinger, et al. (1993), students can be taught to find problems, clarify problems, master productive thinking and creative problem solving tasks, monitor their own learning activities, and seek and test alternative solutions to problems.

Some educators have suggested a number of strategies for developing curricula in different subjects that support creativity. Some of these suggestions include having students practice problem finding as well as problem solving techniques; use unfamiliar materials that elicit novel thinking and lead to new ideas; experience convergent (structured) tasks for skill building and open-ended, divergent (unstructured) tasks for self-expression; rely on both visual and verbal materials; be exposed to curricula with open-ended outcomes that allow for unforeseen results; follow their own interests and work in groups as well as independently; choose environments that support their talents and creativity; and encounter a wide range of tasks intended to encourage, reinforce, and enhance emerging talents (Clark & Zimmerman, 2001a, 2004; Feldhusen, 1995; Mumford et al, 1994; Runco, 1993; Runco & Nemiro 1993; Sternberg & Williams, 1996; Zimmerman, 1999, 2005, 2006).

Educators also might consider factors that hamper creativity and look at ways to avoid or ameliorate these obstacles. James (1999-2000) focused on students in an art class described as having blocks to creativity and found that these obstructions included: cultural blocks in which students were not willing or able to understand art concepts and processes or the meaning and worth of art in contemporary contexts; cognitive blocks manifested in having diffi-culty interpreting meanings and metaphors in artworks; personal blocks that resulted in discomfort with expressing their emotions in public and confronting ambiguity; social blocks about how their products would be viewed in public arenas; and instructional blocks about unclear teacher expectations for students’ processes and products. She suggested that supportive climates be created where students can learn to recognize their blocks to creativity and find personal meaning. Such an environment would encourage risk-taking and instructors could focus on differentiating curricula to meet individual student needs and direct teaching of a repertoire of strategies for working creatively.

Driven by current U.S. federal art education and state curriculum stan-dards, emphasis often is placed on academic achievement on standardized tests where the arts often have not been included. In order for creative autonomy to be fostered, teachers and students need to be able to identify when creativity emerges and know how it should be nurtured and supported. In an environment where art achievement is tested nationally, Brown and Thomas (1999) studied high school art students in Australia and found that when they were becoming



ready to make a creative leap to individual self-expression due to developed skills and maturation, they were expected by their teachers to produce conven-tional outcomes as determined by examination expectations. Individual creative responses, as evidenced in either process or products, were not encouraged. They found that supporting creativity in art classrooms involved having art teachers encourage groups of students to share processes they experienced when creating their artworks and allowing them to make meaningful choices so that art could become cognitively stimulating and important in their lives. Art teachers, therefore, can be powerful influences in developing students’ creative art abilities by being knowledgeable about subject matter, communi-cating effectively, using directive teaching methods, making classes interesting and challenging, and helping students become aware of contexts in which art is created and why they and others have needs to create art.

Conclusions and RecommendationsThere are many ways to describe and categorize characteristics of creative

visual arts students and no single set of characteristics has been developed to comprehensively describe such abilities, yet there are some common under-standings among researchers from various fields about relationships between creativity and art development. Although the term ‘artistic creativity’ does not have an agreed upon meaning in art education literature, its usage in schools should be reconceptualized and evidence of creativity or potential for creativity should be taken into consideration when conducting research and developing teaching strategies and qualitative educational assessments.

In the International Handbook on Creativity, Sternberg (2006) describes creativity as a topic that recently has received attention in countries around the world. For example, in China, creativity studies are closely related to research about giftedness and intelligence; whereas, in Taiwan, a wide variety of meth-odologies are used to study creativity with a goal of making its population more creative. In Hong Kong, emphasis is on social influences that contribute to the betterment of society. In French-speaking countries, research on creativity emphasizes cognition and imagination, and in German-speaking countries, creative processes have been a research emphasis. In Israel, focus is on the rela-tionship of creativity to real worlds problems, and in South Korea research about creativity has addressed creative processes and constructs related to culture, education, and roles of teachers and family. In Latin America, creativity is viewed from a multifaceted perspective with emphasis on practice rather than research, and in Spain topics related to creativity include study of creative indi-viduals, developing tools for measuring creativity, and researching character-istics of high ability students.

What are some ways that inquiry about creativity and visual arts education might be reconsidered in the United Sates and what emphases should be the focus? In the past, creativity sometimes has been considered as pertaining only to a few individuals within a specific cultural context. A model of creativity for the visual arts that is inclusive, rather than exclusive, and views creativity as possessed by all people, not just an elite, is one that should be encouraged.


Enid Zimmerman

This view would infer that all students have ability to be creative. Inquiry in art education that accepts a normal distribution of creativity could lead to new and substantially different identification procedures through which all students’ creativity could be recognized and developed.

In the 21st century, it is apparent that students need to be prepared for a new information age and that educational interventions in art education for all students that foster creative thinking, imagination, and innovation are important for generating solutions to real life problems both now and in the future. Creativity in the visual arts can no longer be aligned only with concep-tions about creative self-expression. Researchers and practitioners need to conceive of creativity as multidimensional with consideration of how cognitive complexity, affective intensity, technical skills, and interest and motivation all play major roles.

In the past, validity and reliability of current creativity tests in the visual arts have been questioned. Conceptual and operational definitions of creativity, as manifest in the visual arts, need to be reconsidered and inquiry should focus on how new tasks can be developed to help discover art students who may not be identified as having high creative abilities through current procedures. Also, in researching and developing identification procedures, socio-cultural factors including contemporary art practices, visual and popular culture, and students’ personalities, ages, values, learning styles, motivations, work habits, ethnicity, gender orientations, and local communities in which they reside all need to be considered if new means of identification and program development are augmented.

In the past, creativity and art talent often were viewed as being synon-ymous. Recent studies have demonstrated that traits associated with creativity are not necessarily those associated with art talent. More research is needed to determine if and how exceptionally creative art students differ from those who are considered talented in art and what implications this may have for art teaching and learning.

Artist-based and visual culture approaches to art education present new avenues for developing conceptions of creativity and creative processes as bases for inquiry and curriculum development in art education. Creativity in the visual arts often is difficult to describe with predictable outcomes that are sensitive to students’ needs, processes they experience, or the products they create. In this era of testing and standards, assessment of students’ progress and accomplishments tends to be concentrated on final products and rubrics that emphasize predictable, pre-determined outcomes. A new conception of creativity and the visual arts should foster research and development that supports art learning in which novel responses are nurtured and students are encouraged and rewarded to find and solve problems in unique ways that take into account their creative abilities.

The present Net-generation of students also needs to be prepared for participation in an intercultural community that uses cyberspace for discourse and emphasizes collaboration with groups of individuals to produce creative



outcomes (Brown & Duguid, 2000). The notion of play, that incorporates participants being willing to fail and try again as a means of solving problems, can result in their minds being freed through play to function creatively (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004).

In a democratic society, all students should be educated to their highest possible achievement levels so their abilities are recognized and rewarded. Students who will later become practicing artists should be prepared to think creatively and develop appropriate skills and abilities in a rapidly changing world in which technological innovation and novel products and ideas are valued world wide. Differentiated teaching and learning should be researched and developed for these students so their creative abilities are recognized and supported.

Peat (2000) suggested that artists need long apprenticeships to practice their crafts, but everyone can learn techniques to “disrupt persistent habits of thought and free us for new ways of thinking” (p. 24). That means that each art student has potential and “psychic energy … to lead a creative life” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p. 344). By reconsidering research and practice in respect to creativity and visual art teaching and learning, art education can play a major role in our increasingly visually oriented world by helping all students use their creative skills and developing their imaginations.

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COMMENTARY

Response to Tavin’s “The Magical Quality

of Aesthetics”

Mary C. Carter

Ball State University

In this commentary, I argue that Kevin Tavin’s (2008) use of Lacan’s objet a in his Studies in Art Education commentary “The Magical Quality of Aesthetics” is not a helpful analogy or solution for art education’s search for the role of aesthetics. I offer that a pragmatist and dialogic viewpoint may be more useful and, because it describes the phenomenological experience of meaning and value, I also suggest it as a way of viewing aesthetics itself. This argument is supported with two examples: the covering of the Guernica tapestry at the United Nations during Colin Powell’s presentation in 2003, and Darryl McDaniels’ (co-founder of Run-D.M.C.) expe-rience with Sara McLachlan’s song “In the Arms of an Angel.”

Kevin Tavin’s reply to the question, “Why is aesthetics one of the most cher-ished ideas in art education?” begins with an application of Lacan’s psycho-analytical theory of objet a. While objet a does not exist in the actual object (art, for example) or in the person (art educator, for example), it does enable a fantasy about the magical quality around or about that object, that elicits a kind of desire between it and the person (Tavin, 2008). The fantasy about the object supports this desire, which reproduces itself as unfulfilled desire (because it isn’t about the object itself—although the person may or may not realize that; it’s about the fantasies and yearning about the object) in a kind of inescapable circular process.

Tavin posits that, in art education, Lacan’s objet a surrounds the concept of aesthetics, which is “a fantasy that attempts at once to create a frame around what art education lacks and fill [that] void within the frame” with our own desires of what we wish it to mean (2008, p. 269). The “phantasmatic” object in our desire creates a need for the discourse—the language—of aesthetics to describe the ideas and the concepts that are important to art education that, in fact, can only be described by aesthetics (Tavin, 2007). He states that this process always “necessarily falls short, requiring another try, another twist, another turn of the signifier ‘aesthetics’—in short, the desire to desire more” (Tavin, 2008, p. 269). In other words, because the fantasy is not based on anything other than a fantasy, and the desire for that fantasy, the discourse of aesthetics in art education references an impossible, unknowable “(w)hole” (2008). Any attempt to appropriate the term aesthetics from elsewhere, and use it in art education, as ordinary language as suggested by Duncum (2008) is, in Tavin’s opinion, a failed effort.

Paradoxically, rather than abandon the effort entirely, Tavin makes two recommendations. First, that we refer to aesthetics as aesthetics, as a way of


Comments regarding this article may be sent to the author at [email protected].


reminding ourselves that this word and its concepts is an irresolvable fantasy (enigma?) for art education. Second, that we should “cut across the fantasy of aesthetics, … traverse its surface” and, by recognizing its (the fantasy’s) hold on the field of art education, be led to a new beginning (2008).

I argue, from a pragmatic perspective, that the use of Lacan’s objet a is not a helpful solution for art education for two reasons: (a) its purpose and use describe a theoretical and abstract mental state, and as such, is not a good application for the discernment of aesthetics in art education; and (b) there are theories from pragmatic (William James and John Dewey) and dialogic (Mikhail Bakhtin) philosophy that can account for the phenomenological (lived) experience of visual culture and aesthetics, and therefore, provide a practical approach to aesthetics in art education.

Lacan’s theory is based on psychoanalysis: understanding and analyzing the mental motivations and mental states of individuals. Objet a concerns itself only with the abstract mental world of fantasy and desire. Because it deals with psychology and mentality, it looks at processes that are not necessarily visible. The use of the term objet a depreciates this desire even further by representing it with the algebraic symbol a. The reduction to an abstract symbol of a mental state is unhelpful for what has such varied and rich consequences.

The emotion, described in the explanation of objet a, was based on a memory (however fleeting and faint) of a lived experience—that of being held closely and breastfed. Tavin/Lacan objectifies this experience by symbolizing it, reducing it, to “the breast.”1 However, that feeling of desire is a very real human emotion. If it had not been for that experience—the lived experience—of being held and fed, that desire would not have been created nor exist in the first place. It is a mistake, in my opinion, to separate a human desire from its experienced context.

Desire is an emotion, along with happiness, sadness, and jealousy. Matthew Ratcliffe (2008) writes about the phenomenology of bodily feelings and our sense of reality. Our experiences are not just caused by events; they are about events. Drawing from the pragmatist, William James, Ratcliffe argues that emotions are not just conceptualized parts of a particular world-formula. “They are the glue that binds worlds together into coherent conceptual patterns and imbues them with a significance that motivates us to act” (2008, p. 235). Emotions are responsible for a meaningful interpretation of the world (interests, goals, and connections to other people) because they are based on phenomenological experiences. Our interpretation then creates a context that we inhabit, where certain events—and images as well—emerge as significant and thus potential objects of our emotions (Ratcliffe, 2008).

This is the making-real of aesthetic meaning and value from the view of pragmatism and dialogics. Both John Dewey ([1934] 1980)2 and Mikhail Bakhtin (1990, 1993) share this view of experience and the communication of that experience as an integral connection between people and their world. The physical expression of an experience becomes a dialogue made concrete between persons throughout time. According to Bakhtin, the creative work lives on,

COMMEnTARy: Response to Tavin’s “The Magical Quality of Aesthetics”

1 There is not the space here for a more detailed comment on these two issues: (a) The use of scientific terminology to make a human emotion into something that is seemingly more “pure” and “objective,” thus giving the argument more authority; and (b) objectifying a woman’s physical ability with its accompanying maternal caring into a isolated object (the breast) that is not connected to a living human being. I am pointing these out as additional ways in which Tavin separates the whole notion of aesthetics and its role from a lived human experience. In my opinion, this is as futile an argument as the ones posed by more traditional analytic philosophers with their “if and only if ” criteria for aesthetic and aesthetic experience.2 The contribution of Dewey’s ideas about the aesthetic to revitalize our notions of art has been strongly argued by Richard Shusterman (1992).


impressing itself on many others who will, in turn, continue the conversation with each of their subsequent acts or deeds (Carter, 2008). I offer two examples: Picasso’s Guernica and Sara McLachlan’s song, “In the Arms of an Angel.”

In 2003, Picasso’s Guernica was covered for Colin Powell’s presentation at the United nations (U.n.). The painting was originally created to document and protest one of the first bombings of a civilian population: the nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. new york Governor nelson Rockefeller had a tapestry made of the painting and then permanently loaned it to the United nations. It hangs just outside the Security Council chambers. In late January of 2003, U.n. officials began hanging a blue drape with a U.n. logo, over the tapestry during reports by weapons inspector Hans Blix, and again, during United States Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speeches arguing for an invasion of Iraq. “[They] thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with the 20th century’s most iconic protest against the inhu-manity of war as his backdrop (Cohen, 2003, p. 1). Three months later, on the week of the invasion, The New Yorker magazine featured the center section of Picasso’s mural on its cover, framed by two red curtains, pulled back, revealing his depiction of an anguished mother, head back, screaming, with her dead child in her arms. Three weeks later, the April issue of Harper’s also featured the painting on its cover, draped with a blue curtain.

The painting was created as a response, as a reaction, to an event. Because it spoke to the feelings of suffering from the violence of war grounded in a collective experience of loss of home, child, and life, it has been held as a work of great value. However, in a later, new context, that meaning and value may have been seen to contradict with the intended actions of the United States government—and the mural was covered. By visualizing this action on their covers, Harper’s and The New Yorker magazines clearly, and in a concrete way, articulated their feelings and response about both covering the mural and its suspected reason: support for the war. Thus, the aesthetic impact of Picasso’s Guernica lived on, re-accentuated in a new age and context, to influence and affect the actions of these magazines, the public who saw their covers, the media, and the officials involved at the United nations.

My second example is from the music world. Sarah McLachlan’s song, “In the Arms of the Angel,” originally appeared on her 1997 album Surfacing. Jonathan Melvoin, who was the keyboard player for the Smashing Pumpkins, died in 1996 from a heroin overdose (VH1 Storytellers). Melvoin’s tragic and fatal act moved McLachlan to write the song for him. That song, playing on the car radio one night, was heard by another musician, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, who was in the middle of a personal struggle dealing with, among other things, the discovery that he had been adopted. McLachlan’s song, he said, saved his life (Lelinwalla, 2006) and had a profound effect on him. It turned him away from thoughts of committing suicide, and instead, to a new direction and purpose. In gratitude, he decided to create something with the woman who had saved his life and recorded a song with McLachlan, who—as it turned out—shared something with the person her song had saved: she had

Mary C. Carter


also been adopted. Twice, McDaniels says, McLachlan told him, “That is what music is for” (Lelinwalla, 2006).

This is value and meaning made real. McLachlan and McDaniels come from very different musical styles—pop and rap, respectively—but both of them responded in dialogue with the events of their life and with each other’s music. McDaniels saw this experience as a valuable thing to pass on through his own music and expressed that idea very clearly:3

It doesn’t matter if you are from the ghetto or if you are from Beverly Hills. When you wake up in the morning and look out the window, you have to deal with the world. When you turn the TV on or pick up the newspaper, you need to deal with all those issues. So I talk about what I have been through. yes, I am an alcoholic. I have been to rehab. So I will make a record about that, as it will help someone out there. I am adopted. So I will make a record about being adopted. [W]hen I make a record, it needs to do two things. First of all, it needs to make people think, to motivate, to inspire, and to educate the people again. This is why Bob Dylan wrote what he wrote. This is why John Lennon wrote what he wrote. (McDaniels, 2006)Bakhtin (1990, 1993) argues that the creative act affects and makes an

impression upon our world. We, the audience, receive that impression. If we are willing, we may share our experience with others, as our creative act. It is in this way that one’s life experiences are actualized and live on in the lives of others. A pragmatic and cultural perspective that describes this can be useful to art education, in my opinion, because it sees aesthetics as something that is acted upon and made real through the ways in which we interact with images. This view asks, “To what purpose? For what result?” I argue that this might be one way to answer the question of aesthetics with ordinary language (Duncum, 2008).

We make decisions—we act on—our fantasies and our dreams, whether it is to run for President or to become a living bomb. But, because the whole host of us also lives in this actual time and place, how we conceive of ourselves (along with our families, friends, and the people with whom we interact), the whole of human society is affected and influenced by our collective actions. Along with the accompanying attitudes and beliefs that precluded those actions. This is why aesthetics matters. This is its reality: aesthetics is lived.

ReferencesBakhtin, M. (1990). Art and answerability: Early philosophical essays by M. M. Bakhtin (V. Liapunov

& K. Brostrom, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act. (V. Liapunov, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Cohen, D. (2003). Hidden treasures: What’s so controversial about Picasso’s Guernica? Retrieved Sept. 16, 2008, from http://www.slate.com//id/2078242/

Carter, M. (2008). Volitional aesthetics: A philosophy for the use of visual culture in art education. Studies in Art Education, 49(2), 87-102.

Dewey, J. (1934/1980). Art as experience. Reprint. new york: Wideview/Perigee.

COMMEnTARy: Response to Tavin’s “The Magical Quality of Aesthetics”

3 He has taken this even further. In September of 2006, Darryl McDaniels was presented with the Congressional Angels in Adoption Award for his work with children in foster care and promotion of adoption. He has founded a summer camp providing 170 foster children with a childhood experience.


Duncum, P. (2008). Holding aesthetics and ideology in tension. Studies in Art Education, 49(2) 122-135.

Holmes, S. H. (2009). The freedom riders. Smithsonian, 39(11), 70-75.

Lelinwalla, M. (2006). Darryl McDaniels: The man behind DMC. Retrieved Jan. 31, 2009, from http://www.vibe.com/news/online_exclusives/2006/04/darryl_mcdaniels_the_man_behind_dmc/

McDaniels, D. (2006). Interview. Retrieved Jan. 31, 2009, from http://www.jprotege.com/ interviews/run-dmc-darryl-mcdaniels-interview/index.html

Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Shusterman, R. (1992). Pragmatist aesthetics: Living beauty, rethinking art. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Tavin, K. (2007). Eyes wide shut: The use and uselessness of the discourse of aesthetics in art education. Art Education, 60(2), 40-45.

Tavin, K. (2008). The magical quality of aesthetics: Art education’s objet a (and the new math). [commentary]. Studies in Art Education, 49(3), 268-271.

Mary C. Carter


MEDIA REVIEW

Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists for the Future

Rita L. Irwin

The University of British Columbia

Mel Alexenberg (Ed.). (2008). Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books/ Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 344 pages. ISBn 978-1-84150-191-8 (hard cover)

Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture is a rare find. Editor Mel Alexenberg has done a remarkable job of bringing together outstanding artist/educators who are grap-pling with issues related to technology, ecology, creativity, agency, identity, and community. Each individual author provides rich written descriptions of projects they have undertaken, the conceptual underpinnings that frame their work, and the implications of their practices for art education in informal and formal learning contexts. I am certain that readers reviewing this book will feel a profound sense of collectivity knowing we are at the edge of transforming the world in which we live.

The volume is divided into the following five sections, book-ended with an introduction and epilogue by the editor: Beyond the Digital, networked Times, Polycultural Perspectives, Reflective Inquiry, and Emergent Praxis. Each section has four chapters making this 22-chapter book an extensive array of ideas from authors representing Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its international character alone makes this book a must read for educators wanting to understand the arts and education at a global level.

One of the most prominent threads running throughout the book (for me) is its references to complexity theory. A number of authors refer to complexity theory being an influential theory coming from the mathematical sciences, while other authors may not refer to complexity theory but rather, the language of the chapter reiterates the characteristics of the theory. One of my colleagues, who coincidentally is a mathematics educator, has joined forces with two curriculum scholars to write several books on complexity theory in education (e.g., Davis, Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 2007). I was delighted to see how artists, scientists, and educators have taken up this theory in such strong yet innovative ways and can hardly wait to introduce this book to the many complexity theorists I know working in education, and particularly art education. It is on this basis that I would highly recommend the book to undergraduate and graduate students as well as to instructors who want to re-imagine how we perceive and understand education, art, science, technology, and culture now and in the future.

Copyright 2009 by the Studies in Art Educationnational Art Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research 2009, 50(4), 405-407

Correspondence regarding this review may be sent to Rita L. Irwin, Ed.D., Associate Dean of Teacher Education, Professor of Art Education and Curriculum Studies, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]


Why complexity theory? Everywhere we look today, we are networked in decentralized (and centralized) structures and through a variety of interactions (with lots of feedback loops) taking place within these structures, creating self-organizing communities or projects. Complexity theory, as developed by several authors in this book, discusses four characteristics of complex systems: differ-entiation, interaction, self-organization, and emergent behavior. For artists and art educators, differentiation is about how we use materials in a variety of ways and how our connections with people can be accessed differently from what may have been expected. Interaction refers to the direct relationships viewers and audiences have with people and processes that, in turn, provide opportunities for participants to alter the artworks or what is learned. Self-organization applied to the arts would suggest that while artists may start an artistic project, others would also participate in the development of the process and/or product, and as such, the project would be attributed to all of the creators. Emergent behavior is very exciting for artists and educators. Here is where a complex system naturally evolves and adapts into a number of possible structures, perhaps even simultaneously, knowing that the end product may look incredibly different from the original proposition. Using these character-istics, many authors described networked projects that can be understood using complexity theory. In some instances, the collectivity that was described had a profound impact on local communities. At other times, the collectivity went far beyond the local to have an impact globally. I mentioned the work of Davis, Sumara and Luce-Kapler earlier quite purposefully. These educational theorists detail other ways of understanding complexity theory that extend or revise the four characteristics described in this book. For instance, ‘enabling constraints’ (e.g., opening possibilities within select choices), and ‘redundancy and diversity within specialization’ (e.g. the need for disciplinary knowledge while setting the conditions for an expression of diverse interests and abilities), are two such characteristics that may help educators (and artists) understand how to set the conditions for learning in formal and informal learning contexts.

Understanding the intersections between art, science, technology, and culture can certainly be understood through complexity theory but what is so compelling about this book is that the authors’ focus on narrating their networked practices first and analyzing theoretical underpinnings second. This means that the art projects stand out. This also means that readers wishing to be inspired will be able to take away clear understandings of how education is shifting from an information-age to a conceptual age, how creativity (as we have known it) is shifting from a focus on the individual to a focus on networks, and how intersections between and among art, science, technology, and culture are richly laden with social, biological, spiritual, political, and aesthetic aspects that portray the in-between generative spaces for enhanced possibilities. Although Alexenberg describes his own journey in learning according to several themes, his ability to integrate high-concept (creating art that recognizes opportunities, narratives, and unrelated ideas into an original design) and high-touch abil-ities (using one’s abilities to understand the human condition while stretching one’s ability in the pursuit of meaning) in his own work, and throughout the

Rita L. Irwin


entire book, brings his themes to the forefront. For instance, learning through awesome immersion, learning through interdisciplinary imagination, learning through cybersomatic interactivity, learning through polycultural collabo-ration, learning through ecological perspectives, learning through responsive compassion, and learning through holistic integration, to name a few, draw out his ability to inspire excitement for embracing our changing worlds. These themes are not limited to his experiences. Instead, they reflect the range of learning experiences portrayed by all of the authors.

I recently had the opportunity to review another book soon to be marketed internationally. Art, Community and Environment: Educational Perspectives edited by Glen Coutts and Timo Jokela (2008) would be an excellent companion volume to Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture. I mention this because while there are different foci between the books, there is a surprising amount of conceptual overlapping. Both books portray artists and educators who are grappling with ethical yet creative projects that are transforming cultures, locally and globally. There is something deeply enlightening about reading new books in our field that illustrate truly international responses to changes in contemporary art, educational practices, and indeed, research across the arts and education. I highly recommend both for teacher education and fine arts education classes in higher education.

ReferencesCoutts, G., & Jokela, T. (Eds.). (2008). Art, community and environment: Educational perspectives.

Bristol, UK: Intellect.

Davis, B., Sumara, D., & Luce-Kapler, R. (2007). Engaging minds: Changing teaching in complex times (second edition). new york: Routledge.

REVIEW: Mel Alexenberg’s Educating Artists for the Future

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