limitations of research in teaching art

National Art Education Association

Limitations of Research in Teaching ArtAuthor(s): Irving KaufmanSource: Art Education, Vol. 20, No. 9 (Dec., 1967), pp. 2-6Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191009 .

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Limitations of Research in Teaching Art



BY IRVING KAUFMAN. One may be honestly dubious concern- ing the worth of writing or talking about art. The words cannot help being tenuous substitutes for the actual object or experience and often are mistakenly accepted as the real thing. As Paul Valery said: "We must always apologize for talking painting." Art communicates and establishes its meanings on its own sen- sory and perceptual level of form. It is a direct experience, re- quiring no mediation of words except in a literary form. The immediacy of the individual senses, the distinctive perceptions, and the singularly private emotions of the creator or onlooker precede and outweigh any abstract notions or precisely rational considerations in art. Intuition and internally ordered aesthetics predominate, and these qualities function in other than logically discursive ways. Painting is primarily visual; music, aural; dance, kinesthetic; and so on; each form characteristically orders a felt emotion and an inner vision through an aesthetic awareness expressively merged with the concrete possibilities of the materials of any particular medium. Art is created and encountered in unique, complex, and contrasting ways, bending any approach in the making or appreciating of its forms to the emerging and imaginative needs of the moment of dialogue existing between the maker and the process of making. This is as true of the child initially exploring the possibilities of paint as it is of Picasso creating "Guernica," though the relative degrees of sophistication, expressive capacity, and preparatory experience are worlds apart.

The teaching of art follows a similar open pattern, remaining for the most part a very personal affair. It exists primarily as an exchange of human nuances and spontaneous relationships, not too amenable to objective analysis. Its loose sequence of hap- penings and interchanges may focus upon the particulars of expression or craft. But it is also given to an infinite shading of human interests that may be diffusely behaved and disparate in habit. A teaching method is as much a projection of personality as it is a giving over of understanding. It would be difficult, if not basically inexpedient, to suggest any specifically repeatable patterns of teaching art except in the most general terms. To no two people is the experience identical, nor is the context of any one classroom a readily manufactured condition that may be arbitrarily transferred to another.

The processes of uncovering conditions that affect the teaching of art as well as the making and understanding of art cannot always be explicit, simple, or straightforward ones. The elements involved are frequently intangible and, just as often, inconsistent. Art is inherently possessed of many paradoxes and it is difficult to contain or abstract them and interpret them beyond their own forms without the risk of noticeable and undesirable change or even corruption. It is no simple behavioral matter to speak of sensitivity and awareness, to refer to the expressive rhythms, the subjective intensities, and intricate motivations of the creative process. These loosely ordered elements are all basic to the making, appreciating, and the teaching of art, yet they defy a translation of contained analysis. To objectify them for precise pedagogical reasons is to grapple with almost ineffable qualities of human nature and the immediately given properties of art. A mechanistic residue that creates a restricted or even spurious guide seems to be left. The verbal equivalents evaporate into high-blown sophistry as the atomistic findings disperse into their separate and unrelated niches. Because of their fallacious gen- erality and confusing associations organized as an accumulation of fragmentary consideration, there is a tendency toward trite, sentimentalized, and fractured presentation. Yet the very qualities of sensibility which are characterized by a diverse and even uncertain engagement with experience function as a vague pa- rameter in research. Nevertheless, they remain more important as focal considerations than all the obvious skill and technique requisites or specified behavioral patterns which normally func-

tion as the objective elements of art education. These latter are the scaffolding built around the structure of art, if art may be said to possess any structure in the narrow definition of that word. The former subjective aspects are the core. The vivid metaphoric images, the vitality of internal visions, the intensity of direct and felt perception, the sensuous richness in the manipu- lation of materials, the poetic exploration, the critical intuitions, and the expressive symbolic intent of formative process are the very stuff of art. They deserve a focus of discussion in art education and a teaching emphasis in the classroom despite their conceptual elusiveness and ambiguity. The intrinsic aesthetic fac- tors of art education-its transforming nature-need to be stressed over and above the description of appearances and the tight procedures of craft. The teaching of art has to enter into the subjective realms of experience, into seemingly illogical or non- rational but artistically appropriate areas of perception and feeling if it is to function as a genuinely valued integrant of human development and personal understanding. Research in art education must be cognizant of these inherent conditions if it is to provide legitimate insights for teachers.

It is not suggested that the disciplines or the crafts inherent in the making and understanding of art are to be ignored. Possibly the artistic disciplines and the use of craft would be strengthened if they were based on an imaginative and artistically appropriate teaching. The craft would flow from a genuinely expressive involvement with art and all that it entails, rather than from the more common "bag of tricks" or a divorced craftsmanship taught for its own sake. Skills would be developed as the need for them arises naturally in a student's efforts to express himself. The cute projects, the trivial busywork, the awkward composing, and the superficial fun activities also stem from a shallow understanding and blandly naive teaching of art unrelieved as yet by any research findings. They are the leavings of a grossly sentimentalized, blatantly misunderstood, and otherwise meretricious presentation of art. These spurious activities bypass a more demanding commitment to, yet freely exploratory insight into, artistic conditions and values. Too many teachers accept arbitrary and superficial models because they are easily observed, initiated with small effort, and produce popular results. They tend to avoid what is for them the esoteric and seemingly mystical subjectivity of the serious artist and critic, insisting that the latter has little relevance to setting educational goals.

However, the uncovering of artistic experience does lack an objectively logical sequence and its unfolding in the individual may come about through apparently contradictory or seemingly mutually exclusive means. The artist, nevertheless, accepts such ambiguity as a creative point of departure. Art in the classroom, if it is to be guided by a parallel set of germane considerations, consequently cannot accept the rigorous command of abstractly rational and overly systematized procedures, despite a superficial efficacy of operation. The emotions and feelings follow their own peculiarly unique and changing patterns which many behavioral psychologists more often redundantly describe than understand. Emotions and feelings are the underlying elements which propel and shape the forms of art along with an intelligence of sensibilities beyond the scope of an intellectually rea- soned set of propositions. Flashes of intuition, flights of fancy, insights that emerge from below the threshold of consciousness, the congruence of sensations and symbols, reverie, and emotional impulses, and even that old rubric of inspiration are some of the subjective means which come more nearly to the heart of artistic process. Though these considerations may necessitate dif- fering, oblique, and circuitous ways of teaching art at times, they are the authentic means inasmuch as one may categorize the authentic in art. They do not block any confrontation with experience as it may appear to the pedantic mind but, on the con-

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trary, lead much more directly to a significant insight and expressive act. Some humanistically oriented psychologists are beginning to sense these creative dynamics, though no undisputed findings have as yet found their way into qualitatively successful guides for teachers in the arts. The trick lies in examining the problems encountered in the teaching of art by their most appropriate points of entry. Any artistic resolution should jibe with both the inherent yet singular conditions of personal expressiveness and the larger aspects of aesthetic integrity which are generic to creative goals. That is, the problems of form and expressive content are to be empirically resolved within a context of formal relationships as they arise during the artistic process. Each work of art, each attempt at expressive form, has its own rationale and independent means of achieving aesthetic order and comprehen- sion, whether it is a child or a mature artitst who is creating. Though the work might partake of certain universal artistic elements such as line and color, and principles such as balance and rhythm, such considerations are the means rather than the ends of art. Each individual creative product, if it is to possess any quality of genuine artistry and expressive unity, travels this independent road, joining the paths traveled earlier, but essentially making its own way in the metaphoric landscape. Such an approach to the teaching of art may stumble upon discrepancies. The result- ing contradictions, in the abstract, would be calamitous to the logic of intellectual order. But they serve as the empirical means for further discovery in art, guided by the felt qualities of artistic integrity mentioned above and a context of pertinent dialogue which the sensitive teacher creates as a classroom climate. These are points of departure that have always fascinated the artistic mind, which finds in them a logic that is peculiarly its own, dif- fering from formal systems. We can learn from Cezanne, for instance, when he says: "There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform." It is within understandings of this nature that the essential value of art and the revealing honesty of its forms lie. They cannot be reasonably provided in a teacher-proof syllabus.

It may be that not every student is capable of sustaining such a disparate or recondite set of conditions, though the fault probably lies more in the insensitive and unknowing quality of a commonplace teaching of art. However, the theorists in art education are now accepting the obvious limitations of a creative art program ostensibly democratically designed to reach every student in the schools. More stress is being put upon aesthetic education or critical evaluation, and I believe rightly so. This development of a critical base and artistically literate background leading to a cultivated appreciation is being recommended widely, without discarding some large measure of actual participation in art along the way. Thus the schools may provide a corollary of personal creativeness insofar as the individual student has the capacity adequately and creatively to express himself through art. Yet the developing of critical faculties and an appreciation for the qualities of art is itself a creative or, one could say, a recrea- tive process. In order to establish a sound basis for responding to, knowing, and valuing art, the student may not require the broad creative paraphernalia necessary to successful personal expression. He need not possess quite the storehouse of vivid imagery or manipulative and exploratory skills, nor the intensity of artistically creative commitment characterizing the initiating artist. However, he does need a correspondingly high degree of sensibility and artistic intelligence, achieved through continuing dialogue and the result of a cultivation of perceptual discrimina- tion, evocative association, and critical sensitivity.

Much of this cultivation falls into the intellectual sphere, though not in any narrow sense. The student has to be nurtured in what educational psychologists now refer to as appropriate "modes of inquiry" or encouraged in the necessary "strategies."

These are to be the means by which a mature, independent, and personal vision, critical appraisal, and educated taste are to be developed. Such a desirable development of the student's perceptions and sensibilities has already been damaged by the amor- phous mystique of creativity which has prevailed largely unchal- lenged for several decades. Obviously there has to be a renewed emphasis upon the relevance and growth of mind in the art evaluative process or even in simple appreciation. This stress need not be convergent in procedure or stereotyped in aim. Re- search could certainly address itself to such a problem area, examining the means by which students could be encouraged to confidently express their responses to art, the strategies by which the expression of value and judgment could be related to the actual forms of art, the most conducive channels by which the interplay of symbols and perceptions can be synthesized into insightful meanings, and so on.

Some balance of pedagogical elements between the objectively intellectual and subjectively emotional has to be found. There is doubt that this may be resolved by any predeter- mined set of criteria which frequently degenerates into a "harden ing of the categories." Rather, the most appropriate points of entry into the problem area would seem to be in the individual teacher's own enriched background in art, in the cultivated personal resources which offer an educated and dynamic basis for either analytical or intuitive understanding or both as the need may be, guided by the shared understanding of serious practi- tioners in the arts. The philosopher Croce tells us that art functions as the root of things whether we make it or observe it. "By creating the first representations and by thus inaugurating the life of knowledge, art continually knows within our spirit the aspects of things, which thought has submitted to reflection, and the intellect to abstraction. Thus art perpetually makes us poets again. . . ." Any success in art education, whether through critical appreciation or creative participation would necessarily guide the student to the vital sources-to an unencumbered but enriched encounter with the intrinsic qualities of art; all people are capable of responding to such a natural stimulus, provided their aesthetic intuitions can rest on an educationally "prepared" or openly sensitized mind and spirit. For some magical moment, we may all be poets.

The joining of learning in art to independent awareness and uniqueness, of education to intuition, finds its critics among more structured educators and researchers. They point disparagingly to such ideas-to what they consider to be a mystical core of faith in the spirit of art-in the largely preconscious, spontaneous, and ambiguous nature of its activities. They would insist upon more rigorously structured knowledge, more standardized cognitive models, more objectively controlled procedures, all of which reflect a supposedly scientific methodology and a rational exten- sion of order through educational method. They would further insist upon a clarity of presentation and a relative preciseness of discipline and appreciation, even in art, for otherwise how can one measure what is being learned? Or they may indicate a skepticism of any learning taking place simply because the central elements of the art experience are diffuse and ambiguous An art teacher may teach not only out of conviction and artistic sophistication, but may also establish a rich yet elusive rapport merging the students with the experience of art. Yet if this rapport or the activities it stimulates is not conducive to categorical structuring, the nagging question remains in too many minds as to whether a worthwhile educational process has occurred; such educators cannot honestly accept the autonomy of the art experience. What is not recognized is the inappropriateness of many of the technologies of research in the social sciences when ap- plied to art. For art, like it or not, is possessed of extra rational and uncategorized, unique elements which we sometimes call

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the magic of poetry or the spiritual gratifications of beauty. Though these phrases may connote innumerable images and responses, the secure and knowing teacher or artist recognize such qualities when they encounter them. Conversely, it may be only the innocent, untutored, or dogmatic teacher who requires the presumably objective cues and behaviors with which he or she believes art may be efficiently taught, fearful of trusting the emotional contingencies of the freely developing creative process.

Nor do these well-meaning but misguided investigators and teachers sense that they are merely spectators rather than par- ticipants in the processes they purport to examine. Recognizing a principle of objectivity, they slavishly follow it even when the experience obviously calls for an "in-dwelling" and totality of involvement. Consequently, the "objective" observer does not have the necessary vantage point of understanding-one that comes intuitively from within. And by its very nature, this understanding from within transcends a mere viewing and analysis to arrive at full artistic realization. As a result, the true-false con- cepts that are brought to bear upon art by many researchers can be no more than inert, extraneous considerations, especially if they reflect a no-nonense bias of intellectual logic and observ- able behavior. Research studies are especially harmful when they fragment the processes and qualities of art in formulating specified behavioral models which then assume the character of pre- scriptive statements. The sophisticated research techniques or even the crude bold ones cannot offset their cursory comprehen- sion of art. These aesthetic superficialities then act as unwitting influences in determining curricular content and teaching contexts, especially with the gullible teacher. There is no true-false understanding of art really, no counting of its parts, for all genuine art simply IS. And that is the sum of its being. It directly offers us, existentially, meaning on its own terms. It provides vividness and intensity rather than a rigorous clarity, an immediacy and openness of understanding rather than a sequential accumulation of knowledge, an affirmation and evocation of experience rather than a codifying of an encounter with existence. Of course, there is good and poor art, but that is another matter, once the creative tenor and the individual artistic intention is established. In any case, it should have a natural place in the curriculum, not one contrived from extraneous considerations.

Obviously, we require some measure by which to judge the effectiveness of what we do in the art classroom. We need further understanding as to what and why and when students function in relationship to artistic process and aesthetic insight. We need to know how to further a development of the individual

within personally expressive and critically appreciative contexts. Perhaps, instead of asking thousands of students "What should you see or feel?" in a work of art or in its making, we should ask of ourselves, and of society, "What in our environment pre- vents a natural seeing and feeling?" Perhaps we should examine a fundamental and influential condition of values, rather than an arbitrary and isolated behavioristic symptom. One then begins with an affirmation, and this is vital if in the final analysis we individually create our truths rather than collectively uncover them by arbitrarily poking around. There would be no need to probe vicariously into the artistic development of students if the conditions they were taught in or the values their teachers exem- plified naturally excited a creative response. Their work and their appreciation of others' work would be manifest. My question presumes a cultural determinism and one may wonder about the relevance of such an inquiry. And so we get on to another round robin of polemics and abstract considerations. Somehow in the process, art values are lost, at least in a mass sense. Perhaps the teachers of art may sense a teaching relevance in what Louis Armstrong said: "If you have to ask the question, you ain't never going to know the answer."

Henry Miller, the vital though controversial novelist, also offers a teaching insight, but as an artist, for he has been a watercolor- ist most of his adult life. He relates that perhaps the real impetus toward his own art, at the time unsuspected, was given to him negatively during the high school art class he attended. He says: "My ineptitude was so flagrant that I was soon informed not to bother attending class . . . As the teacher rightly said, it was hopeless to expect anything of me. I was an aesthetic leper, so to speak. I say that this experience, with its accompanying sense of failure, or inadequacy, probably served me in good stead. Sometimes the wrong thing turns out to be the right thing; sometimes a setback is as good, or better, than a push. We seldom realize how much the negative serves to induce the positive, the bad the good." And so we have this vast contradiction producing a man who can write "To paint is to love again." I wonder what research could make of such topsy-turvy ideas, how rational think- ing would have to twist and turn to logically categorize Miller's educational experience so that it could be contained in an abstractly correct methodology to be given over to teachers.

I do not wish to depreciate a careful quest for appropriate teaching methods of art, to belittle the necessary ordering of pedagogical procedures requisite to a significant level of aesthetic excellence in education. I would like to see more passion and sophistication. Research may very well have a vital function to

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perform in this area; but I would suggest that it is essential to first accept art as it actually and organically functions in human experience, accepting it for its own sake, rather than as an instru- ment for extrinsic purposes. As important is the need for research to utilize tools and means which are not foreign to art, nor ones which play havoc with its open-ended nature, masquerading it as something it should not or freezing it into something it cannot be. Though it may possess, for instance, certain sociological and psychological adjunctives such as reinforcement of desirable dem- ocratic values and therapeutic aspects for the emotionally dis- turbed, these elements are not particularly central to its nature. As a matter of fact, art is produced and appreciated in the most undemocratic places and there have been more than a few in- stances when art may have been considered to drive men mad. Art education has to accept its own content as a symbolic means with which to transform feeling into form. It is a way of meta- phorically touching, knowing, and feeling the richness of the world through the shaping or apprehension of visual forms. The latter then establishes a natural and intrinsic morality of insight. The "beauty" and the intensity and personal significance of existence are made vivid through art as well as all of the varied feeling aspects of human expressiveness. Art is largely, then, philo- sophically experienced and accepted as a given quality, much as is the redness of red.

it is necessary that general research and teaching inquiries in art education take their cues from such speculative and other ge- nerically varying aspects of art, rather than primarily from the social sciences or from other enclosed research techniques. No matter how discrete or sophisticated the latter are, they are at the most partial, yet essentially irrelevant, in revealing the work- ings of art. They impose extraneous elements of consideration. They are forced to pose inappropriate questions and seek a necessary constraint in standardized responses and objectively ordered resolutions. When research is undertaken it is necessary that any structuring in the field be subject to the examination of practicing artists or by those critical minds that have been shaped by a vital liaison with art and have seriously cultivated a continuing involvement with art and artists. Of course, not all artists or critics have the patience or predilection, the educational insights, or the broad investigative skills to function in art education. However, for those that do, the undertaking is a natural one. On the other hand, an individual who possesses only the skills of statistics and abstract study techniques with little of the cultivated or innate understanding of the artist or critic is doomed to superficial findings, shallow understandings, and erroneous recommendations. Perhaps the research apparatus of the doctoral programs in art education is askew, as may be many of the prem- ises of methods courses in the field. Just recently, a leading art educator commented that he would much prefer doctoral students in art education who had been previously trained in psychology or the other social sciences rather than in art. I can understand the efficiency, the precision, and the endless enthusiasm for the research studies that may result, but I would be highly skeptical of the activities of such individuals, of their findings and their pertinence to good art teaching, and the dissemina- tion of aesthetic values. As is the case now, the archives would grow full of papers and their prime significance would be to gather dust. Somehow, the higher institutions, regional labora- tories, and private foundations have to find additional ways of involving willing artists and critics in the bread-and-butter research projects in art education. Similarly, these same individuals should be employed more fully in the training of art teachers. At the very least, art education researchers should have an artist or critic around on all of their projects, if only as a "reality check," to counteract the oftentime inappropriate directions and straying research designs undertaken by independent investiga-

tors or by educational institutions. Hopefully, the humanistically directed psychologists are opening up new research paths along this line of agreement.

Nevertheless, the one ingredient that everyone can agree upon in art teaching is the need for imagination. This needs to be translated into imaginative methods of teaching and in creating imaginative contexts for personal development. There is the parallel aim of directly activating and enriching the imagination of the individual child, at the same time that one values not only the sense of self but the overall personal relationships of the individual to society. One educator, William Walsh, puts such a goal rather well: "It is on the one hand that restless search for release from the confinement of the single image of one self, and on the other a solicitude to keep inviolable the privacy of another self. We do not know of any one correct way to achieve such an aim in education. Indeed, there may be as many ways as the imagination may conjure up. It may very well be disastrous to narrow our sights to a theoretically secure or correct way."

Art teachers have to recognize when bewildering or alien in- trusions occur in the art classroom. For instance, in an overly simplified and cursory assessment, we may say that science is predicated upon uncovering uniform laws, upon objective obser- vation, upon extensions of predictability and the establishment of laws. It has a convergent goal to achieve, rules to explicate procedures to standardize, even when it is most speculative. Art, on the other hand, seeks diversity, is bathed in subjective consid erations and seeks out the original, the variant, and the novel, reaching out for uniqueness, vividness, and intensity, rather than anticipating what is already known and repeating it. It would seem that any attempt arbitrarily or even innocently to merge the two whether for research purposes or cultural synthesis would be doomed to cross-purposes, despite the fact that both science and art feed from a universal human motive of creativity. What has to be understood is that once this creativity is activated, art and science essentially take separate paths. A synthesis of understanding does not lie in indiscriminately wedding the diverse disciplines, but in engaging in each in terms of their natural struc- tures, the complementing of one against the other, to paraphrase the philosopher Cassirer's "harmony of contraries." These dis- criminations and an enriched ability to observe and feel, to see rather than just to look, have to be passed on to the students en- gendering the more essential and vitalizing value commitments that have always been synonymous with art.

It would seem that there is no right or wrong in art and perhaps in art teaching as well, but there certainly is good and bad The good and bad is, however, a value function of the individual. Objective methodologies of art teaching experimentally "proven" to be correct cannot be packaged and handed over to teachers. In the final analysis, it is the teacher himself who has to find the personal resources for good art teaching in his own psychic insights and range of experience. The latter must be involved with art on a continuing high level and generate a felt enthusiasm. Further, art has to be regarded as the humanizing source, that element of existence which separates man from the beasts in the field-and possessed of the magic and mystery which beckons and may offer a continuing experience of intrinsic satisfactions. Only the forces of individual personality and artistic form can pass on such a fundamentally human realization. The larger as pects of art education, its most seminal and dynamic theoretical position, can only be achieved by a continuing dialogue between the genuine qualities of art and the inherent functions of education. Both art and education have to be regarded as open and suggestive possibilities for significant experience rather than as definitive representations of a fixed dogma. Irving Kaufman is in the department of art, City College of the City University of New York.

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limitations of research in teaching art

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