is aesthetic education possible?

National Art Education Association

Is Aesthetic Education Possible?Author(s): Jack HobbsSource: Art Education, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 30-32Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3192215 .

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Is A isthetgiai Eduis tab n Pe m LI mc~t0~~A-1 ~~~~~~~si j- m I i( I(

Jack Hobbs At some point in the early 1960's, ca.

1963, art education began to question the values of self expression and creativity (some would say that the syn- drome of self criticism was set in motion in 1957, the year of Sputnik). Since that time all the things that have happened are so numerous and com- plicated that they defy analysis. But at least one thing seems to be recogniza- ble: aesthetic education, to judge from all the writings, research, symposia, funded projects, etc., has emerged as one of the most, if not the most, domi- nant themes in the "post-Lowenfeld" era. For example, a recent study showed that "aesthetic behavior" was by far the most popular research topic for dissertations between 1970 and 1974.1 What is less clear, however, is the impact of all this on the part of the field that matters most-the art class- rooms of elementary and secondary schools. Therefore, if I had to identify another theme of the era, it would have to do with the widening gap between words and practice, and more seriously, between aspiration and real- ity. This gap applies to a lot of things in art education besides aesthetic education, but it is the latter that I am concerned with in this article.

There are probably many reasons for this alleged gap, but I think one villain has to do with art educators' lack of rapport with aesthetic issues due, apparently, to decades of concern over the ways children make art rather than the ways they respond to it. Along with this we would have to point to the training of art education students in which the studio model has been heavily favored. Not only have art philosophy, theory and aesthetics, and even art history been under emphas- ized, but the role of art and aesthetic theory as it relates to teaching and curriculum building has almost been non-existent.

Another villain may be the field of aesthetics itself. I'm referring to the traditional approaches to problems having to do with the central issues of the aesthetic experience and the work of art. Art educators interested in aesthetic education, like philosophers interested in problems about beauty and art, find themselves involved in trying to identify a particular domain of human behavior. They are asking the same questions: Can the aesthetic

be defined?; Can it be isolated from other dimensions of experience? Furthermore, they are asking about the nature of art and the ways in which it is coextensive with or different from the nature of the aesthetic. But unlike the situation with philosophers, with the art educators it isn't just an intel- lectual game. They will also have to ask the hard questions that seek practical solutions, that translate theory into the everyday world of decision making and actions.

What I would like to do in this writing is explore (or expose) some of the more beguiling issues in aesthetics and education and suggest how they might be, in their devious ways, thwarting the development of aesthetic education. I have divided what I refer to as "metaphysical issues" into three categories: the first two have to do with the central issues that have occupied the field of aesthetics for centuries-the aesthetic (aesthetic experience) and the nature of art; and the third is an issue that has preoccu- pied education for a long time-child centeredness vs subject centeredness. Even with the first two I will not deal with aesthetics in a vacuum; I will talk about it in the context of education. And with the third I will show especially how all three metaphysical issues converge. And then, at the last, I will be presumptuous enough to offer my own theories and recommenda- tions.

Metaphysical Issue #1: The Aesthetic The recognition of the aesthetic as a

domain of life probably goes back to the 18th century. Without reviewing its history and development, I would like to offer (in simple words) a fairly widely-held definition for an aesthetic experience. It might go something like this: An aesthetic experience occurs when a person is attending to and being absorbed in some thing (object or event) as an end in itself (rather than as a means to other ends-such as practical, economic, religious, moral, etc.). Thus we could say that non-instrumentality-not leading to any intended ends-is a necessary condition, marking it off from all other experiences which are instrumental. But the definition usually includes two other conditions which mark the aes-

thetic off from "ordinary" experiences, and these are that it has a unified character and that it is vidid (at least more so than the average experience). In summary then, most defini- tions of the aesthetic experience provide that it is an experience that is 1) non-instrumental 2) unified and 3) vivid.

Now, I want to show that this accep- table definition when applied literally to the educational context can lead to some rather anomolous situations.

One problem of the definition is that, although its conditions suggest that an aesthetic experience should have a certain amount of intensity (a combi- nation of unity and vividness), these conditions do not in any way provide for what the contents of the experience should be. Listen to John Dewey talking about an experience, i.e. an aesthetic experience:

. . . we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of experience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satis- factory; a problem receives its solu- tion; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eating a meal, playing a game of chess, carry- ing on a conversation, writing a book, or taking part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation.2

First of all, if we were to use this concept of aesthetic experience as a central principle for aesthetic education in the schools, one could legiti- mately ask, what is the necessity of art (or art teachers)?-since obviously aesthetic experiences can be had in anything, including anything in school, such as arithmetic, phys. ed., or even driver ed. Of course a weak an- swer to this is that they can be had in art education also. (A stronger an- swer-if we're really concerned about our jobs-would consist of arbitrarily writing art into the definition of aesthetic education.)

But a more serious ramification-if there could be anything mare serious than a threat to our jobs-has to do with curriculum. Developing a curric-

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ulutn for aesthetic education in which the intensity of an experience was stressed without stipulating its content would be something like making a car with a big engine and no steering wheel. Again, let's listen to what Dewey has to say, "An experience has a unity that gives it its name, that meal, that storm, that rupture of friendship."3 Now, if it doesn't matter at all what the content is-whether it be a meal or a rupture of friendship-then it would be perfectly valid to give an "A" to a stu- dent who responded vividly to "that squirming insect as I pulled off its wings and legs one by one," or "that look on Mr. Brown's face when he stepped out into the parking lot and saw that his tires had been slashed." These examples may be extreme, if not a little ludicrous, but the question they raise could just as easily manifest itself in more typical educational situations. For example, would we want our students to enjoy things like Saturday morning cartoons-Woody Wood- pecker, Shazam, and Archie, etc.- more intensely or to be exposed to some different things, say, Mondrian, even though this might mean a reduc- tion of intensity? In other words, would we, as teachers, be willing to say that, aside from unity and vividness, it makes no difference what kind of aesthetic experiences we'd like our students to have?

So far in this analysis of the aesthetic I have not attacked the definition itself but tried to illustrate some anomalous situations it could lead to or some questions it would raise, if fol- lowed strictly. As far as the concept itself, I will simply inject some doubts about the conditions of unity and vividness. Dewey rhapsodizes about experiences reaching fulfillment, etc., and I'm sure all of us cherish memo- ries of peak experiences in which ev- erything seemed to be just right. At the same time I'm sure all of us have had many experiences in which we were (by common-sense definition) aes- thetically engaged-perhaps looking at pictures in an exhibition-when the unity didn't seem terribly strong and lightning failed to strike. In order to account more adequately for the vari- ety of ways in which art (or even non- art) is encountered, I think it is more sound to refer to aesthetic situations rather than experiences. I simply define an aesthetic situation as one in which the qualities in the experience are perceived primarily as ends rather than as means; and I leave out the other conditions. (On the other hand I wouldn't be a purist about my definition-or anybody else's.)

Metaphysical Issue #2: The Nature of Art

The second great metaphysical

issue has to do with the nature of art. It won't be necessary here to review the various theories of Plato, Aquinas, Kant, etc., except to refer briefly to some of the more influential ones in the 20th century, such as: Bullough's theory of psychic distance, Lipps' theory of empathy, Langer's thesis that art works are analogues of emo- tive life, theories that distinguish between the physical object and the perceived object, sometimes called the "aesthetic object," etc. In one way or another these theories seek to de- scribe the structure of the experience with art; in other words they are involved, at least indirectly, with the psychology af art.

It is difficult at this juncture to figure out just exactly the position of the field of art education regarding the above theories. Again, due to the emphasis on creativity, the subject of respond- ing to art has not been addressed by art educators very seriously until recently, and, so far, a new "position" is at best inchoate. But if one looks hard enough at the literature in art education-art for elementary teachers books, introduction to art texts, curriculum guides, etc.-one cannot miss a strong partiality for an old artistic orientation loosely referred to as "formalism." And this observa- tion is not limited just to the conservative literature; in some of the more progressive writing, in which perception theories, behavior modifi- cation, and system approaches are popular, formalism seems to have found a favorable climate. It varies in sophistication from "principles of design" found in every curriculum guide to Arnheim's translation of Ges- talt theories into structural principles of art.

Formalism has a history that goes back to Clive Bell's notion of "significant form" in which the values of the modern art movement were given their most eloquent explanation, at least for the English-speaking world. By now, however, the rhetoric of formalism has fallen into disfavor. There has been skepticism about it for decades in the field of aesthetics; it is being discarded or radically reinterpreted of late in art criticism; and Gestalt theories of or- ganizational fields as explanatory principles have become almost totally defunct in the field of psychology.4

It wouldn't do, of course, to dismiss formalism simply because of the authorities (although this fact should raise some questions). We may also look at some of the problems inherent in the doctrine. For one thing, no one has ever demonstrated what significant form is in any truly generic sense. Bell said that it gave rise to an aesthetic emotion, but he never defined aesthetic emotion-other than

the fact that it came from looking at significant form. In essence his definition of significant form was circular. For another thing, when one uses design principles as normative principles for evaluating real works of art, he finds that they simply don't work for a great deal of 20th century art. How does one explain away the absence of the principle of "dominance and sub- ordination" in the prolix linear patterns of a Pollock, of the "balancing of unequal but equivalent oppositions" in the coldly redundant stripes of a Riley or the steel boxes of a Judd? The inadequacy of formalism to account for happenings, process art, neo-dada, concept art, and all of the other spe- cies and hybrids in the vertiginous world of experimental art in the seventies is even more obvious. But I don't have to rest my case on examples of art from the post world-war II period. If we look at the landmarks of the Fauves, German Expressionists, Picasso's early assemblages, Surreal- ists, etc., we would be hard pressed to claim that all of them are notable solely on the basis of their exemplify- ing better formal structures than other less notable works. Indeed it is more difficult to infer principles of composition-or, at any rate, a con- sistent application of such principles-from the art of the modern movement than from the paintings of the French academy, the art that was so vehemently protested by the modern movement.

In summary, then, the vocabulary and rhetoric of formal concepts that have been so uncritically appropri- ated and bandied about in art education leave much to be desired when used descriptively or evaluatively to enlighten us (or our students) about the real world of art. Even the psychologically-oriented theories of Bullough et al that have received less currency in our field have been found wanting as well. It won't be necessary to explore them here beyond making the point that the pursuit of universal explanations regarding the nature of art, or the habitual reliance on a system of unitary principles that are emi- nently teachable, is at best superflu- ous, at worst, pernicious.

Metaphysical Issue #3: The Nature of Education

The final metaphysical issue has to do with the nature of education, spe- cifically, that great traditional dualism: child-centeredness vs subject- centeredness. Here we can see the potential (if it hasn't happened already) of the convergence of the metaphysics of aesthetics and education.

Undoubtedly, aesthetic educators that lean toward child-centeredness

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will be attracted by the idea of the aesthetic experience (metaphysical issue #1) as a central theme of their pro- grams. The term "child-centered" is, of course, out of date, but "self- actualization" can easily take its place. A premise for the late seventies could very well be, "Aesthetic experiences contribute to self-actualization." If Johnny or Mary have a sufficient number of "turn-ons" per semester, he or she will grow up to be a happier person. Most of us can remember when the same things were being said about creativity, when it was supposed to "contribute to emotional growth." I don't mean to belittle the philosophy or concerns that educators with this orientation have; and such premises as these do contain some truth. But, like all half truths, such premises have a tendency of becoming half deceits.

On the other hand, the supporters of subject-centeredness in art-"art is a body of content"-have a tendency to isolate and crystallize art experiences by defining elements and principles of form (metaphysical issue #2). I appre- ciate their desire to objectify art, but I think they are on the wrong track in looking for a culture-free, universal explanation. Universal explanations, conceived of as eternal verities, have fallen into disrepute ever since the decline of ideal philosophy. And, in my judgment, their modern, scientifically grounded equivalents-physiological- psychological explanations-are just as questionable when used to explain artistic perception.

Finally, I suppose, if one is desperate enough, he could develop a theory of art based on the movements of the stars and planets. Although I don't think I'm that desperate yet, I will use this occasion to present my own theory of art, which could be called a "social analysis of art."

A Social Analysis of Art When writing my dissertation, I de-

veloped a theoretical model that made society-rather than aesthetic principles-a sine qua non for art.5 First of all, it declared that art objects were marked off from other things by social habits and conventions. In theatre, for example, the audience as well as the actors play roles in which con- ventionalized behavior, defined by the traditions of the theatre, occurs on both sides of the footlights. These traditions help to establish the "aesthetic object" regardless of the contents of the particular play or the power of the performance. By contrast, the aesthetic object of a play in a Chinese theatre, where stage properties are changing during a performance, would be quite different, and this difference would be due to different cultural conventions.6 This kind of analy-

sis helps to explain some artists' manipulations of conventions that have created in the visual arts such phenomena as Duchamp's ready- mades, Rauschenburg's goat, and Warhol's brillo boxes. Secondly, my model argued that the interpretation of art works as well as aesthetic preferen- ces were more greatly affected by the cultural component than by the biological component of man's exist- ence. In other words, culture has more to do with structuring our experiences-especially where art is concerned-than other variables.

Finally, on the basis of this analysis of art, I have formulated some recom- mendations for those who are interested in aesthetic education:

1) The basic goal of aesthetic education should be that of bringing students into contact with and in possession of the visual culture.7 I think it would be extremely valuable to enable children to understand their visual culture better and to have the critical skills for grounding their standards and telling the difference between the genuine and the sham.

2) Aesthetics-related research in art education should be less concerned with trying to identify a culturally- innocent "pure" aesthetic perception and more concerned with describing aesthetic behavior as it exists in all its diversity in our vernacular culture. In a recent Journal article, Hardiman and Zernich pointed out that the typical doctoral dissertation dealing with aesthetic behavior compared judgemental responses made by sophisticated sub- jects with those made by naive sub- jects.8 The underlying premise of this and other art education research seems to be, "If a child can be taught to perceive visual relationships in a certain way he/she will be able to have an aesthetic experience." As I have indi- cated before, I'm not sure this is possible, but mainly I'm opposed to such a premise on the grounds of its being too narrow a view of art.

3) Aesthetic educators ought to work with and through the vernacular culture. It would be wrong to think that children, prior to aesthetic education, have not already had (by anybody's definition) aesthetic experiences. They respond, and often very strongly, to certain kinds of popular art. Educa- tors ought to capitalize on this by pointing out the analogy between popular and fine art. Fine art could be viewed in a popular art context, e.g. looking at and analyzing Rubens' "Judgement of Paris" in terms of a modern beauty contest. Popular art could be viewed in a fine arts context, e.g., applying rigorous methods of art

criticism to things like comic strips and advertising.9 What I am suggest- ing here is a model something like that of a humanities course in comparative religions, but with a modern twist or two.

4) And my final recommendation is: We should not let ourselves be carried away. We have a tendency to treat every new idea in art education as the beginning of a new millenium. We should, of course, be enthusiastic, but aesthetic education will be possible only if we approach it intelligently and honestly and carefully avoid the orgies of hyperbole that have characterized some new movements of the past.

Jack Hobbs is associate professor of art, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois.

REFERENCES

'G. W. Hardiman and T. Zernich, "Research in Art Education 1970-74, Portrayal and Interpretation," Art Edu- cation, February 1976, 29 (2), pp. 23-26.

2J. Dewey, "The Experience of Esthetic Quality," in J. Ratner, ed, Intelligence in the Modern World, John Dewey's Philosophy, New York: Modern Library, 1939, p. 963.

31bid, p. 965. 4See Hochberg in Gombrich, Hoch-

berg, Black, Art Perception and Real- ity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1972.

5J. Hobbs, An Aesthetic Model for Art Education, doctoral dissertation, University of Iowa, 1971.

6See G. Dickie, Art and the Aes- thetic, an Institutional Analysis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974. Mr. Dickie's "institutional analysis" is in agreement with my aesthetic model, but his is much more systematically and thoroughly enunciated.

7According to C. E. Silberman in "How the Public Schools Kill Dreams and Mutilate Minds," Atlantic, 1970, 225 (6), Paul Goodman is supposed to have prescribed that the purpose of education was to bring children into contact with and in possession of their culture.

8Hardiman and Zernich, op. cit. 9For anyone interested in the conti-

nuum between fine art and popular art, I suggest J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, New York: Viking Press, 1973.

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is aesthetic education possible?

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