Can art and design be taught?
James Elkins and types of knowing
we talked last week about how art education started out in academy’s with huge focus on geometry and beauty linked to modernism times, however these types of institutions supressed expression and resulted in students producing middle of the road results and art work
In the Bauhaus, they paid close attention to the experience of art; it was a core factor on their agenda. We think of the Bauhaus as an experimental studio with an open agenda in the work and what the experiential quality can be produced through the artwork. The Bauhaus then became more industrialised and rationalised creating a more generalised experience, this is what informs the universalism in design and the way human nature comes in different forms. The importance of process in empathised to create interesting work becoming more complicated.
The Bauhaus became about teaching people to see, not just the obvious things but the idea of paying close attention and seeing less obvious things. For example the use of tight vector lines, they were interested in geometry and its playful interaction in our perception.
However the black mountain collage focus's more on the material problems which is a more American experimental culture, where are the Bauhaus tends towards the order ideology.
Moving into this lecture we focussed on the art critic James Elkin, previously a painter James Elkin wrote a number of books, 'artists with PHD's' and 'why art cant be taught' in these books he doesn’t directly talk about the issue of art in institutions but frames some observations that arise when art encounters universities. He is an early voice in this debate and talks about it in a critical way.
In 1991the higher education act was passed by the government, this generated all the problems that we see in university based research because it combined a lot of institutions into one they all bound together to create larger institutions now known as universities. From a pluralism and multiplicity point of view it generates a huge amount of noise in the institutions. Before this combining of the subject everyone under the same roof agreed and had the same opinions on the matter however placing everyone from different places under one roof created a lot of noise known by the pluralists as agonism.
However this can be seen as a good thing its how things have transformed and changed over time.
Going back to Elkins books, we focused more on 'why art cant be taught'. James Elkin explains that art is an irrational activity meaning there is no rational way of teaching it, but he celebrates this. The material and experiential way of working that art demands is not about producing irrational thought, the aim of art is to push against the ideals that you associate with classical university, but this is also the fantastic thing about the art practice.
James Elkin is the middle ground is this debate, as an art critic, former painter in one sense he is celebrating the art form but he's also questioning what this has to do with university teaching. The empathise on James thinking and opinions comes from the issue of rationality and irrationality.
James Elkin then moves on to talking about real life situations and how this presents a strange nature to the problem, he believes the conversation we have on this issue is also irrational.
He starts by talking about 'the crit'. The crit is a panel of art critics involved in a discussion, it proceeds onto one to one chats between tutor and student in an institution set in 1970. He looks at these sessions as phsycodramatic, mini therapy sessions where the formation of opinions can be exchanged and emotions can he highly charged, this due to the emotional attachment the students can have to their work.
When a tutor enters a crit situation they have to find a way to respond to the work they are looking at and find words to critique it. Students can be stressed or precious about their work, not in a neutral way but they are passionate and emotionally invested in a way. They have 2 options... they can be confrontational, which will make the tutors life hard as well as the students, it creates new emotion intensity and the conversation can go very wrong for both parties as well as being upsetting.
The second option is to approach the work with positive mediation, they can absorb something and take it lightly saying that its less serious.
An example that a tutor might lead with is the idea of kitsch. Kitsch is a term used for art that has no serious agenda and no cultural significance to address any issue. Kitsch is usually used as an insulting term for artwork apart from in a postmodern term linked to a movement in art history.
James uses the phyconalytic framework to look at everything in relation to how art schools work, incorporating the idea that its a 'psychodrama'. He starts by applying it to art school, thinking back to when we had art school however it's now applicable to what we do now in studio based teaching today. He believes that people ignored the emotional charge that underpins everything; he takes this line of discussion and starts to relate examples to the issue...
He starts by using life drawing as an example, using two images
1. Naked female subject in the middle of men artists drawing her, slightly pornographic nature
2. a male subject in the middle of all women artists dressed an American Indian.
He thinks this type of drawing is repressed and believes if you have to repress something it cant then be expressed.
Cultural and sexual otherness are thrown into the mix of the life drawing classes and everyone pretends it not there or happening, getting at the undertones of the sexual and racial differences that are in work in images, but the obliviousness of the audience.
Getting at the idea that within the studio they’re all kinds of levels of understandings (quasi- numeral strategies (under the radar things we don’t see on the surface but have to dig for)
Categories like ideology, unconscious or semiotic are all at work and played out in the studio framework
Presenting a picture of the studio being a place where all this can flourish, a huge difference to the traditional academic setting. He criticises the fit of artistic perspective but also celebrates the power of artistic ways of knowing.
Painting is a emersion in substances, a wonder and delight in unexpected shapes and feeling, thinking about the assembling of material constructivism, where nothing much is known about the world. Painters watch their paint carefully to shape exactly what they will do. Although they had no contemporary language, the alchemists already had names for it.
Science has closed off every unsystematic encounter with the world, alchemy and painting are the only two paths left. When something is called irrational it seems negative but he's actually celebrating the artist ways of knowing.
What we get from all of this is that the idea that there is potential for something new to emerge from the noisy situation, resulting in the strange observations. In his books, James transcribes crit situations, the things tutors have actually said, he spent some time sitting in studios and studying, listening to what was being said. a lot of this was half formed sentences, tailed off sentences that lead no where, it was an unstructured way of speaking. But they were masses of authority at that time.
Asking the question if art practice cant be taught, what can? There were a few options. Arguing that no one knows how to teach it or that it can be taught but few students come out of it being outstanding, majors don’t usually emerge from academic institutions and most are the ones that dropped out.
The other argument is that maybe you can teach art up until a certain point, until they start making real artwork. Mediocre art can be taught but that brings us back to the problem that art institutions limits irrationalism and results in student’s only making middle of the road art.
Ultimately, he thinks all these things play a part, but teaching is directed towards the reasons that we value art and not the art we produce it. Art is towards, knowledge, control and expression. For example general lecture programs are designed to give us a broad engagement with visual culture
Thinking about why we are interested in art and design and how we value them as a practice. It depends on non-verbal learning as appose to learning a set of rules.
Nonverbal transmission of knowledge has become important in the material context of art and design foe example book by Gilber Rile ad ' the reflective practitioner' have all became the idea of what practice based learning could be they are all interested in non verbal modes of education
James's simple claim was this, art cannot be taught because there is nothing rational to teach, its about experimentation and its construction
