Transcript
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National Art Education Association

Beyond "Art History" ... and before ... and beyond ... and before ... and beyondAuthor(s): Elleda KatanSource: Art Education, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 60-69Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193197 .

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I was talking to an elementary art teacher the other day who is held in the highest esteem by her school and her students. She was irate. She'd just come from a conference where she'd been told once again about what more she should be doing. "The more for this year," as she put it, "is art history". She was loading up her art cart with the materials needed to teach puppetry to the first through fourth grades and touching up a demonstration puppet head with long nose and fat springs for hair. As she talked and glued, the coiled wires on the puppet's head waved and jerked about in the air.

"Here I am, an art cart teacher, and I'm not only teaching puppetry to all grades, but I've got all three sections of the fourth grade making Pariscraft puppets and scenery and staging performances for Parents Day. Why aren't I hearing: "Hats off to you, Mrs. Rosenwald. However do you manage it and all from an art cart?' But, no. What I do hear is that all this is not enough. There should also be art history. Now, can you see me finding the space to add a screen and slide carousels to this cart or finding the time to borrow and sort slides after refilling the glue?

"Besides, to show slides means five minutes to set up, ten to show. That's fifteen minutes from the 40 I've got with the kids. This leaves 25 minutes to motivate, distribute, finish, and clean up. Impossible. The only other option is to give over the whole period to history, and the kids hate that. They want action, not facts, and we have little enough time for that. Forty minutes once a week. You know what that is for the year? That's twenty-four hours. So tell me about art history ... and

criticism ... and aesthetics. Put all that into class time, and what happens to art - I mean real art, the stuff I love to teach and the kids love to do?

"It's not," she went on, "that I don't try to give a solid background to everything we do - backgrounds I've had to pretty much put together myself. My college education wasn't much help. A couple of art history courses, plus the survey. Nothing in criticism. Nothing in aesthetics. And my college art history text? Janson? A lot of information he gives about this!"

She turned the puppet head so that its freshly glued eyes stared into mine, and shook it at me.

"When I look for slides in the college library, I'm told that puppetry might be taught in an ed course or in continuing studies, but not in art history - so no slides. As for books, when Library of Congress replaced Dewey Decimal, the few puppet volumes were re-shelved under 'craft', 'technology', 'anthropology' - not 'art'. Imagine that! According to the college that trained me in art teaching, what I teach in my art class is neither art media nor art history.

"It all leads me to believe," said she, her demo puppet head finished and the bell ringing for class," that they don't write histories for school teachers. They write them for somebody else."

"They write histories for somebody else"? How can one talk of histories tailored to a particular group's needs... like a housing project? Isn't the discipline of art history, the scientific study of the objects of high culture in human society? To the degree that Janson and survey courses

Art Education/January 1990 61

Elleda Katan

? Vivienne della Grotta 1980

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serve well the discipline, they serve all of us well and all equally, don' they? One might need to adapt the language or the concepts to the age and maturity of one's audience, but these are never differences in kind. They are mere adaptations.

So ... what could this lady be saying? But there was no time for discussion. I

followed her into the classrooms where I found out why she is esteemed among teachers. And while I watched her in action, I thought over her words. Very slowly, I began to understand better her thoughts about the several art histories.

Cardboard and masking tape. By Chris Vencevich, senior, Art A.P. and Commercial Art, Piano Senior High School, Piano, Texas.

Number one and most essential, she was a teacher who cared passionately about the content she was teaching. Because she'd taught art for a long time and had loved puppets even longer, she had endless stories to tell. Standing among the buckets of water and the Pariscraft strips, she told of the puppets in her childhood and the shows she had pro- duced; of the summer performances in the local park and the puppet creatures on TV; of the Thanksgiving Day Macy parade and of Ralph Lee's Halloween puppets; of past school projects and the present work by one former student now grown; of Calder's circus and of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theater. Her stories bound her professional authority into a biography resembling those of her students and illustrating the many measures of a lay participation. They linked those gooey Pariscraft strips to images of Big Bird and Kermit. They signaled puppet examples within the life of the community and of artists and so tied classroom projects to present and future possibilities.

And her stories? Well, they were histo- ries of sorts - open-ended ones to which the kids also contributed and which nour- ished their sense of rootedness, of experi- encing home as the archive of a personal and tribal past. They were histories that

grew out of students' lives in order to give direction to their futures. They might be ill documented within college slide libraries, but they were well referenced within the students' imaginations and the print media of their everyday world.

Not only were her histories open-ended, so also was the organization of her teach- ing. How could that be? As an art cart teacher, you would think that she would have had all that she could do to deal with the usual problems of storage, portability, and clean-up at classes' end. She really did have to have projects that were com- pleted within that forty-minute time. How- ever, whenever possible, she selected

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these projects around a central theme which informed their selection throughout all of the grades and over a several week period. Puppetry was such a theme. Everybody knew it. Her fourth graders had been waiting to be fourth graders since grade one because they knew that at last they would have earned the right to begin complex construction. More important, the fourth grade teachers were ready with story ideas from social studies and English, with storage and drying space, with volunteer help sewing bodies. And, quite unforeseen, the gym teacher was ready, who, it turned out, had a passion for puppets and was delighted to make a display of his collection atop the dressing- room lockers. Last, but not least, the parents were ready. They'd been supplying materials and were preparing food to be served at the performance. Thus her content was inclusive of individual enthusi- asms and of the social roles of all those around her. She placed no barriers of individual expertise. Only doorways of collaborative caring,

And conceptually, she studied her subject matter with a disciplined commit- ment to open it up to the largest reaches of its role both within human life and within the lives of each of her kids and their community. She cared about puppets not simply as a successful teaching exercise, but as an activity that shaped her life and held a same possibility for the lives of her students. It wasn't just a clever problem to sharpen critical skills. It was also some- thing humans had made throughout their history and that kids could appreciate the more deeply for having tried themselves. It was never simply a stimulation for self expression, but also gave kids the re- sources to take on roles within the society around them. She saw it as a toy, as craft, as theater, as art, as technology, as skill, as history, as self, as design, as other, as language, as work, as therapy - as so many aspects of human society that any of

us, no matter what our needs or our abilities, should be able to find a strong place within its possibilities.

I learned of this when I asked her what the first through third grades did during the period of time that the fourth grade readies its performance. Her answer took me by surprise: She said that she made abso- lutely sure that the kids understood the relative unimportance of clever technolo- gies. When I asked her what on earth she meant, she said that she wanted them to know that a puppet was anything they could move about with the gestures and the voices to create a good story - that it was the quality of their goals, not the wit of their means, that counted. So the early grades worked with instant puppets made of socks and paper bags. They spent their time hidden inside boxes and behind curtains, emitting extraordinary sounds and making outrageous gestures. They played pass-the-voice, the-sneeze, the-hiccup, the-jump, the-double-take. They watched films of Charlie Chaplin and tapes of The Three Stooges until they learned them by heart. And they told stories to themselves and to each other. It all seemed perfectly reasonable to the youngsters though new teachers often asked if this really was 'art'.

This she loved to do, she said, but her biggest joy and challenge were her fifth and sixth graders. These grades were in another building where she had a class- room of her own. When puppet time comes round, her fifth graders protest that they have nothing more to lear. They are experts and should be given something more worthy of their greater dignity. Her challenge is to prove to them that the only experts are those who've stopped thinking and feeling. The first year she builds upon their passionate attachment to music, and they go abstract. No story this time, just music. To it, they animate an amazing range of objects, now manipulated not simply with the hand, but with rods and strings, and both as shadow puppets and

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? Vivienne della Grotta 1979

Z

? Vivienne della Grotta 1987 _

as front screen. They view 'Fantasia' and computer animations to the music of Ravi Shankar. Their work takes on strange levels of suggestiveness precisely because the forms are non-representative and the stories without words. (The music teacher speaks fondly and repeatedly of the fifth grade's X-rated abstractions.)

In the sixth grade, she introduces them to an idea familiar within most cultures, but little considered in America- the puppet as vehicle for the sacred and the political. She kicks off with the old 'screen down, lights off, projector on,' and places a cow's skull in the light's beam and, moving the jaw, she proclaims: "In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word was undoubt- edly spoken by a puppet" (Crawley, 1976). Then she introduces her students to members of her puppet collection. A favorite is the Wayang golek. She tells of its ceremonial and mystical role within the Javanese culture. With students stretching a sheet across the room and a bright light projected on one side, she seats the boys on the puppet side, the girls on the shadow. They discuss the differences in the two experiences, esthetically and socially, and the roles of men and women in Javanese culture, relating them to their own world. Once again, the art class stops looking the way art classes should, and once again the results are felt when the kids begin developing their own produc- tions around an issue, often gender, that is central within their lives. A slide projector turned on and a cow's skull placed before it? A toy puppet speak- ing words from the Bible? Are we making a mockery of art history and of religion? Or are we restoring to them a deeper mean- ing?

Certainly there is little resemblance to discipline-defined art history a la Janson, with its 'coverage' from caveman to Goya.' No shades down, lights off, 'first slide please.' No bodies seated face front, no single focus, no predetermined sequence,

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no single authoritative voice. Instead of a stilled darkness, there was a day-bright accumulation of photos, news clippings, reproductions, to which everybody contrib- utes and revisits as their increased learn- ing brings them to see more deeply and knowingly. Instead of chronology, a pocket of Javanese research, an interlude of contemporary and near-contemporary films, a reseeing of puppets on TV. Nary a date. Few individual names. A limited number of terms. An intermingling of famous artists with local talent; art objects with parent hobbies; museum blockbusters with community craft sales.

Is this a teacher with only a limited command of art history? One who popular- izes the discipline in order to curry the favor of students? Distorts it in order to make of it an instrument towards lesser ends? Should she be recalled to the higher duty of an aesthetic education? Offered further university study to correct her deficiencies?

Or is it just possible that what she has created here is another form of art history, one with a dignity at least the equal of the academic but serving quite different social goals? Is this perhaps a form of common- sense history, so common that Mrs. Rosenwald sees it only as 'a strong background' and not as art history at all?

How characterize tlie art history of this art cart teacher?

Certainly, she does not treat art history

'Fortunately, art history a la Janson is experienc- ing a grand challenge from feminists such as Linda Nochlin [(1971) "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" reprinted in Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker (eds), (1973) Art and Sexual Politics New York]; and from the 'new art history', described by Svetlana Alpers [(1971) "Is Art History?", Daeda- lus, 106 (3)] as the study of the art work according to its common functions as a social object rather than according to its intrinisic functions as confirmation of period style. And always there has been the Marxist alternative [see: Ernst Fischer, (1959) The Necessity Of Art, (English trans, 1963) London: Penguin Books].

as a single thread of development, illustrat- ing a generic expressiveness and good taste as did my art history survey. Rather she tailors a separate history to each of the visual media, a history that is attentive to the very concrete and varied ways in which different peoples have transformed that particular material from nature in order to serve human needs. Since her goals are to heighten her students' understanding of the expressive potential within the art medium of puppetry, she reaches back to the first impulse that brought humans to lift bison's skull in firelight in order to recover the most fundamental relationship of humans to puppet. In so doing, she enlarges the concept of puppetry beyond the diminished role assigned it within expert societies and recaptures its potential for the highest and most adult forms of expression. And as her goals are to heighten the sense of worth and purpose of all of her students, what- ever their background, her art histories profile peak experiences and traditions of puppetry within ALL human cultures. She wants her students to understand quality as issue of particular cultural and social contexts, in order that, whatever their own traditions, they be empowered to speak for their community in asking questions now of their world.

Mrs. Rosenwald is certainly not present- ing history as self contained, detached, and intellectual, as did my art history survey. Instead, she treats the past as an enormous repository of great stories, shared by everyone and illustrating the people's on-going engagement in the arts and in life. Because her goals are to draw each student into the highest form of participation, she shapes her stories to tease the imagination of each child to the possibilities in the physical material at hand. Thus knowledge of the past is inextricably tied into concrete action within the present. And because her goals are to nourish in the younger generation a sense of its capacity and responsibility to act

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upon the world around it, she draws upon their own stories and encourages every student to explore her own past more deeply. Thus with each year and each class, the histories take on the particular spirit and nature of those drawing them into service. Their value is measured, not by exhaustiveness of 'coverage', but by the capacity to reaffirm the values of commu- nity and of commonsense and to under- stand them as foundational to future decisions.

Rather than impersonal and distant, the teacher is emphatically present, grounded in the specifics of locale and biography. Rather than acquiescent and silent, the students heighten and modify collective meanings with the stories they bring. Rather than the tight linearity of dates, terminology, ascriptions, there is the animation of individual vision engaged with material process and social purpose, moving outwards and drawing inwards the community. These art histories of Mrs. R. are not, then, a diminished form of aca- demic art history, are they? While they may draw upon some of the same information, they provide a dissimilar learning.

And why not? They serve a very differ- ent population in order to move toward quite different social ends. Janson and survey courses service the education of specialists, of art historians and their work of curating objects. What would this have to do with the general education of citizen- participants within the public debates of a democracy? Clearly, for the latter, there must be an art historical knowledge actively informing present decisions and concrete actions. And why would a history foundational to a single work culture be suited to. the education of children taking their first steps out of the home culture and into the broad diversity that is America? Clearly there, they need to hear about all forms of work related to the visual arts enterprise, along with the histories and educations that bind them into their lives

and the life of the larger society. And why would we want a history offered to the selection of mature students to ressemble the histories imposed by law upon young- sters? Clearly, if we are all, adults and children, equally members of a democracy, the choices denied the compulsory student by our laws and the experience denied them by their youth, must be designed into the instructional practices and content. And within that broad ecology of art knowledge, the essentially vocational education of curators should hold a very minor role, no?

Now, that's just common sense, isn't it? Then why does this 'common sense'

sound strange? Simple. It's because so much of the art

history, art education, art studio we learn is learned in the university, and what the contemporary university offers best is an urcommon knowledge, or the knowledge of experts. Each content area is shaped self-sufficient of other areas of expertise and away from common sense. Consider the art history survey: whirlwind sequence, blackened hall, luminescent slides, royal figures, naked nymphs. The student is swept into a world at a high remove from the everyday. Silenced, hurried, guided by that single disembodied voice of authority, the student is cut off from the common- sense world of biography and community and the critical standards borne within them. Linear, verbal, esoteric, illustrated by endless reproductions devoid of social and architectural contexts, of material and sensory truth, there is little to connect learing to the body, the senses, the imagination of the learner. And lastly, in the name of objectivity, the past is held at a remove from the present, thus closing it off from the burning issues of a world in which cultures struggle to gain the dignity of a name in order to maintain an identity or to claim an absolute authority in order to dominate others. In sum, the only experi- ence that is included is that of the expert art historian and the social class in whose

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service the expertise was formed - the newly international art market of post- WW I white western society (Goldin, 1975).

But we are not made aware of that, are we? Quite the contrary. We are offered and we accept this experience as timeless and universal. The socio historical conditions of its production as well as those surrounding the artist and the artwork are held invisible. Slide images are grouped around individ- ual biographies, tracing recurrent tides of youthful promise and mature realization, and building a mythology of transcendent figures. Expression is accepted as a power unique to the artist - even though the common sense of Mrs. R.'s classroom would know it to be a component of all human activity. The art object is described "without relating it, intellectually or emotion- ally, to anything outside of itself" (Pan- ofsky, 1955). Aesthetic quality is accepted as a formal property unique to special objects -overlooking the common sense that these are conceptual categories into which all visual perception can be analyzed (Goldin, 1971-72). Attention is directed, on the one hand, to the mechanics of scholar- ship rather than to educational purpose, and on the other, to the diffuse spiritual possibility of Artistic Process, rather than to the material conditions necessary for its attainment. Thus, the cultural ground linking artist with audience, the fine with the applied, is lost from view. Mrs. R's histories, in contrast, are constructed around in artisanal notion of process and .the specifics of each medium, thus linking the diverse spheres of society, both high and low, both western and eastern. And because Mrs. R. restores the negotiated relationship between culture and nature, between individual and community, culture is understood as product of individual spirit active within an historical and public process. The academicians, on the other hand, working from their notion of a content 'intrinsic' to a special sort of thing called 'an art object', produced by a special

sort of person called an 'artist,' treat culture as an inalienable and timeless attribute of a special class of persons and of things- namely, of themselves.

What can be the implications of a content so emptied of common sense and cultural context when employed within the common schools? Well, when we teachers accept the 'intrinsic' as the possession of certain objects, we blind ourselves to the presence of design and of expression in non-expert productions. We leave out Peter Max and M. C. Escher from teaching references even though they inspire our students to the making of art. We delete Norman Rockwell, even though compari- son between his work and de Kooning's reveals linkages which bind the art of experts into the creative lives of the lay community. And when we accept the superiority of a self sufficient expressive- ness, we end up rejecting projects with a social and collaborative expressiveness. Requests to design year books or theater sets are viewed as interruptions to serious purpose. And yet these projects serve better the purposes of a public education than do private exercises. Included, they could move art education beyond frill and into substance. Well pursued, they need exclude nothing of the 'intrinsic' nor of 'artistic process'. However, because our attitude and knowledge about them are limited by our'higher' education, public projects tend to impoverished results, and so give proof to the claim of inherent limita- tions. Finally, when we accept the ele- ments and principles of design as organiza- tional concepts for instruction, we accord a self sufficient meaning to that which only has meaning as constitutive qualities within purposeful statements. We study the many ways in which line can be varied, instead of the many urgent statements that demand expression. By making ends out of means, we reduce a complex activity to the scale of one of its parts. A design content, which, like the public education, should engage

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with issues of social needs and possible futures, is trivialized into a series of deco- rative and formalist exercises. The result is an art education so one-dimensional it excludes the meanings of most students; so subjective it ill serves a public educa- tion; so elitist, it ignores the values of the community; so technical it draws little of the teachers' artistic sensibility into play. It is exactly what the larger public has labeled it: a 'frill.' Hardly the label of an ill- informed public, as the experts would have us believe, but of a public that has stayed in touch with common sense and social purpose.

If 'they' don't write histories for school teachers, where should we turn for the art histories supportive of the social role and democratic purposes of the public school teacher?

Simple. Look to the great teachers. Value them more and study them deeply. Fortunately, no matter how questionable the values embedded within our institution- alized practices, there are always individu- als whose sense of responsibility to democratic values draws them beyond the academic and towards alternatives. Committed to the community and to students, they invest themselves in their development as teachers and draw deeply upon the contexts within which they work in order to reshape their practice. As Mrs. R. said of herself: "When I began teaching, I taught 'art'. Now, after ten years, I teach kids." It was not, as we have just seen, that she is teaching 'art' any less. Quite the contrary. Spurred by student energies and community ventures, 'art' has been recon- ceptualized so as to regain its connections with life. Rather than deny that which is irreducible to the discipline format, she has embraced all of the concrete manifesta- tions which surround her and drawn them into connection with the widest adventures of the human race. Those resources in self and in community, those historical and

social frameworks eliminated from expert study are restored over time by the values she brings to her work and the continuous reshaping of her work process to reflect them.

Less simple: We must free ourselves from an over dependence upon specialist expertise - whether it be that of the artist or the scientist. This is not easy. Not only does the university nurture a knowledge that is isolated and exclusionary, esoteric and absolute, it feeds the attitudes of reverence before expertise. The hierarchy internal to its practices places the expert/ scholar as superior being and essential to the larger social good, the non-expert or educator as inferior and dependent. But the women's movement has alerted us. It has demonstrated how much the authority of the medical doctor over the midwife depends upon making that healthiest of human creatures, the pregnant woman, into a patient who calls herself 'sick'. Now we must start to understand how much the authority of the higher education over the lower depends upon making that most imaginative of social roles, the teacher, into a passive consumer of expert knowledge and needy. And as individuals who love the arts, we must be aware how much the dominance of the 'fine' arts over the visual arts depends upon identifying 'civilization' with the one and 'barbarism' with the other; the dominance of expert knowledge over generalist wisdom by calling the one 'truth', and the other 'popularized' or 'child cen- tered' or 'merely political'.

We need to stop listening to what more 'they' say school teachers should do. We need to start asking them just what 'they' are doing - not as researchers or as artists, bL is teachers. Remember: No matter how tied to the studio and the stars may be the loftier voices in our trade, we all earn our living in a same way. When 'they' tell school teachers the 'more' that should be done, they are only playing out the expert role: a role that says the schools

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are the problem, and universities, the solution. Change these assumptions with your questions. Ask of each speaker just where they have moved beyond conven- tional practices? Where they have recon- ceptualized content? How they have shifted programmatic relationships in order to foster newer and fresher connections between individual intent and public purpose? And always, insist that they illustrate their answers with examples from their own teaching practice.

More positive. Look to and take pride in your own accomplishments. The super- structure of the expert society rests upon the invisibility of the teacher and of teach- ing. Become visible -first to yourself, and then to others. In reexamining your prac- tice, recognize it for what it is: Is it possible that what you are doing is much more than a compromised adaption of expert thought? Have you, like Mrs. Rosenwald, recognized a multiplicity of histories and of arts, and the necessity of selecting from among them according to educational purpose? Has your research into expres- sive media raised the use of technologies within your classes into a deeply felt understanding of the inherent aesthetic nature of each medium? And what of your research into human culture? Has it raised the sensory play with materials and with personality into an insight into human nature? If so, congratulations. By working from your own theory and your own research {albeit unpublished}, you are rescuing art education from the experts and from the exclusive function of a ritualistic interlude within the dominant culture. You are making of art education a potentially active ingredient in reshaping the status quo.

If we could all do likewise and with an equal conviction, perhaps a new faith would begin, one far more serviceable to our society and its children. We would spend our intellect and our imagination more in the classroom and less in the lab

or the studio. We'd measure our success more by the number of students who would be teacher than by those who would be artist or historian. We would call ourselves "teachers of art" - and never, never never 'artist-teachers'. Rather than extolling art as a heightened form of work, we would recognize all forms of work as potentially 'heightened' depending upon the quality with which they are pursued and the social goals they serve. Rather than an art content increasingly marginal to social purpose and fully deserving the label of 'frill', we would see to the integration of the visual culture with the literary towards the empowerment of the younger generation (Beyer, 1984). We'd recognize that it is "the experiences in which the widest groups share (that) are the essentials" (Dewey, 1915), those experiences that fund community and that are informed by a common sense. We'd understand that the only attribute intrinsic to art is power, and that as art educators we weld a mighty seduction (Hamblen, 1985). The question is ours: Shall we use it to sustain a sideline alternative or in a partnership at the core? Shall art history remain a 'discipline' or be- come a part of life, as it was before andiwill be after academia, for at least as long as there are Mrs. Rosenwalds in our schools?

Elleda Katan is Consultant, Arts/Education, Mattapoisett Massachusetts.

References Beyer, L.E. (1984). The arts, school practice and

cultural transformation. The Bulletin of the Caucus on Social Theory and Art Education, 4, 1-13.

Crawley, Suki (1976). Unpublished manuscript. Dewey, John, (1915). Democracy and education.

New York: MacMillan Publishing Co. Goldin, Amy (1971-72). A non-survey art course.

In Art Journal, 31, winter, 175-7. Goldin, Amy (1975). American art history has

been called elitist, racist and sexist. The charges stick. In Art News, 74, April, 48-51.

Hamblen, Karen (1985). The art educator as disenfranchised intellectual: A problem of social legitimation. The Bulletin of the Caucus on Social Theory and Art Education, 5, 1-14.

Panofsky, Erwin (1955). Meaning in the visual arts. New York: Doubleday & Co.

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