the language of vision and the vision of art

National Art Education Association

The Language of Vision and the Vision of ArtAuthor(s): R. A. LandorSource: Art Education, Vol. 26, No. 7 (Oct., 1973), pp. 14-17Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191879 .

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R. A. Landor

It is no myth that the gaze of a child is innocent. A child has no knowledge of the self's abyss. Be- cause of his innocence and because the language of vision has no notation that a child must learn before he can use it, his use of this language may often achieve striking results. Children express themselves more "artistically" in this language than in any other.

However, color, line, texture, and shape achieve esthetic validity only as vision and craftsmanship compose them. The artist has learned -of the language and of himself-to express with power what he feels powerfully. The iconography of a Paul Klee may seem childlike; but a real child is not like a child- he is one. An artist may spend the better part of a lifetime discover- ing the visual forms that speak truly for him and powerfully to us.

Art education must keep the way open for the student to develop his own iconography, but, at the same time, teach him the language well enough to be able to communicate intelligently and imaginatively with it. Giving him crayons or other art materials with which to scribble, dibble, dabble, or putter, along with an encouraging pat and a few reassuring words, cannot even charitably be described as education.

The first aim of art education-be- ginning in the first grade and continuing throughout the entire course of elementary education- should be to teach visual art as a quality of response to visual ideas. It should be to develop visual intel-

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ligence and imagination: to teach the student to look, which is to observe; to see, which is to understand; and to make, which is to transform.

Second, art education should teach the student to see through the eyes of others, as well as with his own peculiar variation of feeling, thought, and retina. It should give the student knowledge of representative masterpieces of different periods and styles. Each generation has the responsibility to encourage what is alive of its art and to discourage what is not. But lacking knowledge of the central works in which the integrity of the art is to be seen most clearly is like trying to tell this difference in the dark. The student will learn better what is to be his own way of seeing visual form when he has first learned to look with an eye informed by the best.

"The examples of the great mas- ters," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins, "are the soul of education." But he also observed that: "The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise."

Half of art education consists in learning how to read works of visual art and half in learning how to use the language of vision, not, however, as separate halves but as one in- tegrated course. Everychild should learn the language as a serious artist does. He will be able to estab- lish his authority over the space that he stakes out for himself only by first acquiring power over his medium.

Third, Everychild should learn the making and doing of visual art in every way possible: crafts, drawing,

painting, photography, sculpture. "Draw and draw," wrote Ben Shahn, "and paint and learn to work in many media: try lithography and aquatint and silk screen. Know all that you can about art, and by all means have opinions."

If this approach to art education seems antiquated and simplistic, it may be because, having lost the way, the schools no longer know where to look for the beginnings. When everything is Now, craftsmanship may seem quaint and the long way around. Even the study of works of enduring interest and im- portance seems meaningless from this point of view.

The development of technique engenders the increase of power, not only in the history of an art but in the history of an individual's education. For the language of visual art, competence in drawing might be considered the area of "special- ization" that would serve to clarify and to center the enterprise.

As Paul Valery writes (italics his): I know of no art which calls for the use of more intelligence than drawing. Whether it be a question of conjuring from the whole com- plex of what is seen, the one pencil stroke that is right, of sum- marizing a structure .... every mental faculty finds its function in the task, which no less forcibly reveals whatever personality the artist may have. Fourth, art education should teach

the student an ability to make dis- criminate rational judgments about the ways in which visual intelligence and imagination employ space,

line, color, shape, and light, to achieve composition, tension, proportion, perspective, movement, rhythm, and harmony.

Although the language of vision- unlike the language of discourse, mathematics, and music-has no notation, and therefore no "code" that must be learned as part of acquiring competence in its use, it does exhibit an analogy to one in its "conventional vocabulary of basic forms"-ways in which formal ele- ments of the language in relation to optical laws and psychological phenomena generate the possibilities of visual art.

The teaching of art that sees it only as play takes the deeper pleasure out of it. An indispensable condition of genuine play is that it does not, cannot, seriously matter to any beside the players. Art discovers incongruity between the self and the world and shoulders the consequence. Play discovers incongruity between the self and the world and finds the consequence hilarious. Visual art is as meaningful a discipline as mathematics. "It is true that plastic art has to direct itself more directly to the sense than pure mathematics," wrote Le Corbusier and Ozenfant. "But there is no art worth having without this excitement of an intellectual order." It could only improve education to introduce some imaginative play into the study of mathematics and some intellectual discipline into the study of visual art.

Finally, art education should teach the student to look with an open, a liberal eye upon new ways of seeing

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the world of appearance. What indeed is genuine visual art

in our time? If we have no reason- able answer to this question, how can we profess to know what art has ever been? The Italian Alberto Burri, declared Herbert Read,

... is a representative artist of my time! Precisely because he challenges the whole tradition of "fine art" which has about as much relevance to the Age of Hiroshima as a jewelled sword: Precisely because he takes old sacks, charred plywood, metal scrap, any characteristic debris of our time, and from this waste defiantly creates the magic of a work of art. But what is the worth that inheres

in a work "precisely because" the artist takes "characteristic debris" as his materials? If all is not art that litters, what is the principle by which one distinguishes artistic trash from non-artistic rubbish? It is increasingly difficult to tell where the avant-garde begins and free enterprise leaves off. The combined forces of an affluent society and a cultural revolution go to prove nothing so much as that Bohemia and Philistia are sisters under the skin-the New Vision followed hard upon by The Wall Street Journal.

However, again, it is the enduring that the real artist (and the real educator) wants. Time is also a way of prevailing. To become a ninety-day wonder in the art world is not to win a very large stake. Although current market prices are one criterion of this kind of acceptance, they are obviously not an esthetic one. The artist is a radical by nature. (What is more radical than a new, powerful way of seeing?) But to be radical must mean more than Anything Goes at its zaniest; it must mean the proving of a credible alternative. Art looked at as a game has only one rule: if it's In, it's Out. Once this relatively

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simple piece of intelligence has been mastered, what else is there for a player to do-if he is a serious man, a bona fide radical and not a clown-but to forget the game and get on with the search for meaning and truth? There is a place for in- spired nonsense, but utter confusion can be ridiculous without amusing.

Let who will claim artistic validity for his art. He may be right. But let him be up against the critical, informed judgment of those who have a mind to see and whose interest in seeing and criticizing perceptive- ly is as powerful as the artist's own. The liberal spirit that is able to recognize and value even the strangest and most radical art must be allied with the uncompromising spirit that is able to recognize and reject artistically invalid expressions.

It is as possible to give Every- child an elementary education in the language of visual art as it is in the other languages of learning. But it requires an educational system that is at least as serious in its intent as to employ visual artists as teachers, rather than the present practice of handing this responsibility to those who know little or nothing of the subject. Even where school districts do employ "specialists in art", there is, typically, little time given to the subject and little substance to the understanding of or competence in the art transmit- ted there. No unified, comprehensive program of visual art for all children exists in our school systems, perhaps because the schools do not see visual art as a subject that has a deeply humanistic content indispensable to education. School students may "take" art once a week for six or eight years, but they do not acquire even its rudiments there.

Aptitude is no more a prerequisite for learning the language of vision than it is for any of the other languages of liberal education. If education were to lead students

only according to their interests or aptitudes, most subjects would be excluded, as would most students. That, for whatever reasons, some children are more apt than others in the pursuit of learning in general and certain subjects in particular is hardly to be disputed. But this piece of worldly wisdom is a place from which to start, not at which to stick. The fact that a student can't draw a straight line need be no disabling condition. Insofar as art education is interested in straight lines, it is for the purpose of stimulating the student's thought about them. Reflec- tion about straight lines might lead him to thinking about lines that are curved. Eventually he might want to try thinking about lines that are straight looked at one way and curved looked at another: lines to engage him in revery. Education should provide the student with the right stuff to daydream. If imagination is encouraged in him when he is young, it may one day help keep him from being buried prematurely.

The truth that justifies the exertion of an adult's mind to its utmost also justifies the validity of the child's effort. But the maturity required in the making of a genuine work of visual art engages the mind too comprehensively than is possible for the eyes of childhood. The pre- adolescent child cannot even see the appearances of the world well enough to describe with an artist's understanding, imagination, convic- tion, and strength, a brave new one. The eye is a part of the brain; a child cannot see as an adult, even on the level of simple percep- tion. The eye is also a part of the self. The life that the artist reveals in his work is a wonder of contrast, of miraculous escape, of resur- rection. He who has seen into the abyss has death, destruction, degradation, and decay against which life must be made to come alive. An adult may be surprised by joy; a child finds its absence incomprehensible. Much of the suffering of childhood is rooted in the simple inability to find ways of understanding experience equal to the self's need. Andr6 Malraux states:

Though a child is often artistic, he is not an artist. For his gift con- trols him, not he his gift .... The mere fact of being a man means "possessing" . . . the attainment of manhood implies a mastery of one's resources.... The charm of the child's productions comes of their being foreign to his will; once his will intervenes, it ruins them. We may expect anything of the child, except awareness



and mastery .... The art of childhood dies with childhood. In the pre-school years visual art

activities can be taught primarily for the pleasure they afford the child and as an introduction to the language of vision. But from the point at which genuine instruction begins-- where the better and worse ways of using the language are under- stood 'as the difference between what is and what is not visual art-the pleasure principle alone can't be the primary one by which art education proceeds.

His education can teach the student to make visual observations knowledgeably; it can teach him the techniques of art; it can teach him to look at works of art with understanding. But every artist must teach himself his own art because only he himself can formulate the terms of his issue with life, with nature, and with existing art; and only he himself can make the language that is common to all be his own distinctive mode of expression. An artist is able to compose his work because in some essential way he has been able to compose his world-if only to query it pertinently, attack it effectively, or celebrate it meaningfully. How should the student tell at the be- ginning stage of his life whether he will ever have what it takes of mind and heart, of technical and imaginative power, to command the language in his own right

The visual artist is a poet of visual forms. Children cannot be artists in any of the liberal arts until they grow beyond the limitations of childhood. By exaggerating their powers, we are more likely to neglect teaching them what they need to know.

To say the least, this point of view is not the prevailing one in the current teaching of art to children. "Natural expression," wrote Herbert Read, "has its own instinctive form, and this would seem to sug- gest that the aim of education should be to seize on this innate sense of discipline, in order to develop and mature it, rather than to im- pose on the child a system of discipline which may be alien to its nature and harmful to its mental growth."

Of course a particular system of discipline may be alien to a child's nature. But for good or ill, all systems of education are committed to one or another kind of discipline. The question is not whether children can, by "natural expression", produce "instinctive form", or whether the "innate sense of discipline" is to be superseded by a kind of discipline not innate (and,

presumably, injurious); but, rather, which kind of discipline is the best that education can provide. There must be something that education can do for the student other than get out of his way.

The school's premature elevation of the child to Artist rank has, like Russian roulette, a too easily predicti- ble result. Even the immediate spark of interest is no longer forth- coming when the means of igniting it into a more lasting flame are consistently absent. Nursery school children take to finger-painting more enthusiastically than eighth- graders to the natural expression of doodling.

In Children Are Artists, Daniel M. Mendelowitz warns against "mature aesthetic goals" and "high standards of craftsmanship". He declares that "such qualities may be desirable, but only when the child feels they are needed to express what he has to say, when they are not restrictive, and when they do not become ends in themselves." However, if the child is never taught high standards of craftsmanship, how would he ever know whether or not he needs them to express what he has to say? Moreover, how could he know what he has to say until he has first acquired the means with which to say it?

The esthetic goals of a child are no different from an adult's: to observe, to interpret, to shape. But by anointing the child an "artist" before his time, we lessen the possibility of its really happening, and we lessen him as a person.

Learning the arts of a language is of course restrictive at first, but in time-and education takes time-- the freedom of the student is not curtailed thereby, but enhanced. He is free to do more than he could before. What freedom can the undis- ciplined mind exercise? The all-too- familiar mindless school student can do nothing, wants to do nothing, except escape. This is horror, not education, as classroom boredom and misbehavior amply testify.

The "natural expression" method of art education puts the child's education into his own hands. He may not know what he is doing or why he is doing it, but those who favor this method do not think that he is disadvantaged thereby. The child is father to the man and must not be contaminated by education.

Meanwhile, the precious years slip past, and the child is obliged to make up his universe anyhow. Keeping the child's mind a blank until he can fill in all the important places himself is an especially magnetic notion when it is not known what else to do with it. Then if his

mind becomes a discontented blank, and life in school grows increasingly incomprehensible, cheerless, and intimidating, who can he blame for his failure but himself? That this philosophy results in student ignorance, incompetence, and the unholy boredom of being free to do, but knowing naught of how to do, what to do, wherewith to do, comes to us as no surprise by now. Anything is possible, it's Saturday night, but there's nothing for it except Pop.

Between being so restrictive that the innocent vision of the child is spoiled, and being so permissive that he never learns to use the language competently, there is, there must be, a happy mean. That it is possible to teach a student the techniques of a language without at the same time blasting in him the freedom that he needs to use the language as an art is not beyond belief. The educational system can no more "produce" artists than it can manhood. But there is a peculiar irony in the doctrine that not even high standards of craftsmanship should be taught except "when the child feels they are needed". If the school student in his musical studies "should be guided to think of music in the way the finest musicians do", why should he not in his visual art studies be guided to think in the way the finest visual artists do? The double standard of performance-one for the school student and the other for the "real" practitioners of the art-works the same fraud here as elsewhere that it is applied.

In Never Never Land, where it is always Now, the child need never learn anything. In fact, alas, he can't. Where there's no discipline, Peter Pans flourish. How unlucky for the student to be permitted only his natural expression! Misplaced philoprogenitiveness appoints him an Artist before he has even passed the qualifying abecedarians. What he wants is to grow up, not side- ways; and what he needs is the language of the realm. To lack the appropriate means of expression is as frustrating to a child as to an adult, but one only discovers as an adult what has been lost in not having learned what he could and should as a child.

What more could one wish for the education of a child but that, standing on the threshold of life, he achieve the language he will need to signify his rage and manifest his praise, and that he achieve it well?

R. A. Landor is coordinator of adult services, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Cleveland, Ohio.

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the language of vision and the vision of art

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