National Art Education Association

Are We Entering a Post-Critical Age in Visual Arts Education? Author(s): Neil CM Brown Source: Studies in Art Education, Vol. 44, No. 3 (Spring, 2003), pp. 285-289 Published by: National Art Education Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1321014 . Accessed: 28/03/2013 10:51
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Copyright 2003 by the National Art Education Association

Studiesin Art Education A Journal of Issues and Research 2003, 44(3), 283-289

Commentary: Are We Entering a Post-Critical Age in Visual Arts Education?

Neil CM Brown
The University of New SouthWales

The current institutional boundaries of the arts are subject to challenge from various quarters. In a similar way the boundaries of school syllabi in the arts are under reconstruction. This commentary lists a number of reasons why it is that the boundaries between subjects in the humanities such as the Visual Arts, History, English, and Social Studies are being redrawn. These reasons focus on the socio-critical frameworks that are widely advanced as causal explanations of practice in the humanities. The discussion concludes with the proposal that art education has already reached a post-critical moment in its evolution. First, digitization is gradually eroding the distinction between the 'high' and 'low' arts. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin (1968) observed, technology is not merely affecting the patterns of artistic consumption, it is changing the nature of the arts being consumed (p. 224). At first digital technology had little impact upon traditional forms of painting and drawing. Software designers tried initially to capture the expressive intuition of drawing by devising touch sensitive electronic pads and pens to simulate the drawing process. Talented children, it was thought, could possibly use the computer as a tool for drawing expressively only if the interfaces could be sensitively adapted as an extension of the hand. Much later in the century, however, digital artists have dispensed with touch-sensitive pads. The keyboard and mouse have become as indispensable to the process of digital drawing as they are for word processing. As a result there are an increasing number of successful young artists who have never drawn conventionally. This is evidenced in the profile of skills possessed by students enrolled in tertiary design programs. Digitized production of high-quality multimodal images has made positions in music, cinema, and the graphic arts accessible to young people who possess only vernacular levels of technical skill in these disciplines. Digital technology not only de-skills, it popularizes artistic competency. Interactivity via the Internet brings a symmetry to the division between the roles of the artist and audience, the maker and the critic, in digital media, a division in which asymmetry has been the benchmark of communication up until now. Nevertheless, technical innovation as an issue in both the high and popular arts is not new. From the beginning of the century technological change in the recording of parlor music, in cinema, radio plays, and illustrated magazines, has altered the

Correspondence regardingthis commentary may be addressed to the author at College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales, PO Box 259, Paddington, Sydney NSW 2041, Australia. E-mail: neil.brown @unsw.edu.au

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patterns of participation and popular access in the arts. Technical change alone, therefore, cannot account for the continuing relevance of the low/high art debate in the fields of arts education. Second, the popularity of the arts is not only decided by their aesthetic quality; it is decided by the way in which their images and performances are understood. Once defined by their immediate aesthetic quality, the boundaries between the arts are drawn up under cognitive theory according to differences in their symbolic domains. Cognitive approaches to the arts concentrate on the semantic properties of performances, that is, on what artworks mean and how their meaning is framed. To perceive the arts as a symbolic domain is to abstract their meaning. It allows the defining features of objects and performances in the arts to be detached from their specialized material and technical characteristics. It also frees them from their specialized presentation in museums, galleries, theatres, and other centers of institutional guardianship. Abstract or 'meta' notions of the arts, which frame the meaning of representational artifacts within cognitive assumptions of aesthetic value, are easily transportable from art form to art form, thus breaking down the barriers between subject domains. Significantly the portability of meaning in the arts, made possible under the auspices of cognitive theory, also allows the popular and folk arts, even images of the everyday, to be apprehended as art. Cognitive theory not only originates as a literary metaphor ('visual literacy,' for instance) it operates through the explicit medium of language. Under cognitive terms, 'artfulness' is a property that is attributed to artifacts through the language of critical ascription. Rather than a specialized quality belonging inherently to a specialized few, it is a collection of properties attributed to artifacts at large. Ironically, then, the cognitive revolution in the arts has encouraged the increasingly influential opinions of some art educationists to advocate that art is really about 'life' (Freedman & Wood 1999, Duncum 2002). Paul Duncum, for example, argues that education in the arts ought to draw its curriculum from the study of everyday media and the built environment, a source of 'artistic' content he believes to be more relevant to contemporary youth. He bases his view on what he sees as clear evidence of the inverse correlation between the cultural interests of the young and the old. Nevertheless, the popular arts have always had a presence in Western and most other cultures, and interest in them has always been driven by the young. Thus it is not so much the popular leanings of youth towards the mass media but cognitive theory, formalized into the mainly language-based discipline of Cultural Studies, that has given to popular imagery and performances of the everyday, the necessary rigor to be entertained as a serious field of artistic study. Paradoxically, then, advocacy of the popular arts in arts education has been attendant upon their theoretical elevation, under the banner of Cultural Studies, to a state of 'seriousness' commensurable with the high
arts.

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AreWe Enteringa Post-Critical Age in VisualArtsEducation? Third, Cultural Studies treats the opportunity to engage in artistic production as a politics of rights. A political emphasis on human rights is reluctant to do two things. One, it is hesitant about differentiating between good and bad art on the grounds of anti-elitism. Two, it reduces the value of art and its performances to a knowledge of their causes, that is, to their cognitive value. In other words, a politics of rights theorizes the causes of cultural production in the arts by stripping away values based on the virtuoso skills of the maker and replacing them with explanations based on cultural necessity and democratic access of class, race, gender, and so on. The production of high, traditional, and classical art is thus explained under an egalitarian politics of rights as the result of cultural exclusion and of elites. Fourth, cultural studies is currently under division into a number of sub-disciplines. Among the newest of these is the domain of Visual Culture. Visual Culture is represented as a body of literature borrowed from writers such as Virillio, Barthes, Guy de Bord, de Certeau, Hall, Williams, and others commenting upon popular culture and visualization. Much of it is currently assembled within two large readers (Hall & Evans 1999, Mirzoeff 1998). Visual Culture is conceptually underpinned by post-object art, post structural philosophy, and critical theory in sociology, as well as by the psycholinguistic revolution in cognitive theory of the arts. Its critical tone is, in general, disrespectful of the traditional boundaries of artistic fields. There is no question that theoretical changes in the humanities of this kind have altered who and what are authorized to speak and practice under the traditional banners of the different arts. Even more significantly, digitization has reinvented the material and spatial terms under which the arts are engaged. Spontaneously emerging, largely authorless imagery, produced by semi-intelligent but often unreflective commercialized systems, take the imparting of artistic meaning out of the hands of the maker of art and hand it over to the beholder and consumer. Under the auspices of Visual Culture, the prevailing paradigm of artmaking is characteristically one that is distributed, interactive, and assembled as a montage by informed beholders and consumers. The most radical agents on the artmaking scene are the cultural critics who indirectly 'make' the works, not through the application of technical skills, but though the attribution of socio-cultural motive to what are otherwise little less than freefloating and borderless images. This process of critical analysis is referred to as deconstruction. Fifth, deconstructive pedagogy is designed to deliver up a measure of socio-economic critique to students. Under these terms the arts justify their use in education as a critical methodology insofar as they are able to inform and emancipate students' individual experiences from the dominant and over-bearing forces of cultural life (Freedman 2000). However, the use of deconstruction in the arts for purposes of cultural critique is unresolved. For instance, when teachers alert their students to the way in

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which children's naive palates are commercially exploited by the food served at McDonald's?, teachers are not merely warning students against the abuses of a global corporation. Teachers are also being critical of their students' childish tastes. While on the one hand, under the pretext of visual culture, teachers may claim the food served by McDonald's ought to be respected through the democracy of students' popular choice, teachers simultaneously imply, on the other hand, that the food at McDonald's ought to be condemned for pandering 'irresponsibly' to the values which underlie that choice. How does a child reconcile the emotional gratification provided by a Big Mac with McDonald's' rational disavowal as an instrument of corporate exploitation? Elitism can creep into art educational discourse as easily through preferred values brought in through the back door of cultural critique and disapproval, as through the front door of high canonical art and virtuoso talent. Elitism is thus not only confined to the differentiation of values; it also depends upon the way in which those value differences are embedded in the subject domains of the school syllabus. Sixth, the democratic ethic in North America blocks the general entertainment of praxiological forms in education that interfere with an ethics of free choice. It is not so much a lack of recognition of socio/cultural agencies of race, gender and class at work in the practice of artists, students, and in the art of teaching. Rather it is that a politics of subversion is likely to be ascribed to any agency, cultural or otherwise, that thwarts the political and intellectual autonomy of individual actions. Democratic goals can wall off education from those pessimistic explanations that condemn practical outcomes to cultural determination. In other words, there is opposition to those kinds of critical explanation of actions, such as prescribed in public curriculum that cannot be bent by individuals to their own purposes. Thus the task before the protagonists of visual culture is to reconcile the underlying irony of cultural critique with its democratic applications for the individual student. We know that critical deconstruction through the making of art is one formula for producing such a reconciliation. A difficulty with deconstruction, however, is its tendency to highlight the futility of many of our most basic institutional practices, including those that justify the inclusion of the arts in education. In sum, there is an ethical cynicism in the process of critical deconstruction that provides no guarantees for social reconstruction in the practice of art in education. Seventh, deconstruction reduces the value of art and its attendant skilled performances to a knowledge of their causes, that is, to their 'cognitive' value. Hilary Janks (2002) argues that critical literacy is essentially a rationalist activity that does not address the non-rational investments that readersbring with them to texts and tasks. (p. 7) Perhaps, she argues,we are entering a post-critical age. Janks opposes what she refers to as the inherent rationalism of deconstructive criticism. The dominantly causal reasoning

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AreWe Entering a Post-Critical ArtsEducation? Agein Visual that shapesdeconstruction, she argues, leavesout 'desireand identification.' Desireand identification arethe key motiveswhich, for example,drivechildren to eat at McDonald's,but which childrenareunableto accessreflectively through critical reasoning.Children can learn the algorithmsfor at work pointingout and recitingthe dimensionsof corporate imperialism through the McDonald's empire, but the consequences of children's havelittle influenceover the conductof theirown motives 'understanding' and interests. Thus VisualCulture,throughthe critical pedagogyof deconstruction,is unableto bring about felt changesin children'sbeliefs.Janks failsto influencechildren's to cultureinsofar arguesthat criticism responses as it removeshuman agency from culturalunderstanding. Only art can restoreor reconstruct this agency.It is the transgressive power of art that enableschildrento confrontthe forcesof cultural dominationthat colonize their inner most beliefs.Art and humor are the irreverent ways in which childrencan framereconstructive action. They are the ways that teachers are able to bring about changesin children'sbeliefs.The deconstructive agendaof VisualCulturein VisualArtsand Englishmaybe little morethan a form of top-downmoralizing, elite middle classvalues.It is propagating reconstructiveaction through the characteristic forms of expressionin VisualArtsthatbringsaboutcultural change. References
Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. in H. Arendt, (Ed.) Illuminations(pp. 217-252). New York: Schoken Books. Duncum, P. (2002). Clarifying visual culture art education. Art Education,55(3), 6-12. Freedman, K. (2000). Neo-pragmatist views on making meaning: contemporary aesthetics in curriculum. Paper presented at the 40th NAEA Congress, Los Angeles. Freedman, K. & Wood, J. (1999). Reconsidering critical response:Student judgments of purpose, interpretation, and relationshipsin visual culture. Studiesin Art Education,40(2), 128-143. Hall, S. & Evans, J. (Eds.) (1999). Visualculture:The reader.London: Sage Publications. Janks, H. (2002). Critical literacy:beyond reason. TheAustralianEducationalResearcher, 29(1), 7-27. Mirzoeff, N. (Ed.) (1998). Visualculturereader.London: Routledge.

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