Despite having given it over a week, I have failed to illicit a single comment on the work I submitted in my previous blog. The irony of this hasn’t passed me by – and maybe within this there lies a solution to something that has been bothering me; – pupils make work from it, yet an adult audience appears to ignore it.
There is a duality in the title I write under. I suggest that there is an art in teaching that if done with passion and consideration produces outstanding results that need no assessment or evaluation – (a process that ultimately devalues the art and deflates the student – perhaps the reason that my work hasn’t received opine), as well as the art teachers produce to inspire and start new trains of thought, being worthy of contemplation in contemporary galleries.
So todays task is very simple; – draw me a shoe!
Maybe I have approached this from the wrong angle? Maybe to start with I’m asking the wrong question? Perhaps the starting point isn’t how we teach Art. Instead, maybe we should be asking; why teach Art? What do we want our students to learn?
But why teach Art?
I have been reading two texts – Jan Jagodzinski’s chapter ‘Badiou’s Challenge to Art and its Education’ in Kent Den Heyer’s Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou , and “The Impossibility of Art Education”edited by Geoff Cox, Howard Hollands and Victoria de Rijke, for a post MA reading group I was invited to join back at BCU. Both texts when read together, throw up some intriguing propositions.
The group met for the first time last night – (the joy of stimulating debate again, how I’ve missed it face to face), and one of the topics that arose from the readings was the potential that art education was at the point of collapse – failure, yet lacking any viable solution at present.
Nicholas Addison writes in his essay “Rub Out? Appropriation and Pastiche in the Art & Design Curriculum”; – “The National Curriculum has validated, indeed valorized, the potential for mimicry in Art and Design in schools… …Pupils and students learn to copy, transcribe, pastiche, parody, exemplary sources…”
I don’t for a minute believe this is true of my practice… yet… what if it is? Is this what I’m required to do? Is this the purpose of Art education?
I need some help here.
The other worry issue that the two readings left me considering was the idea of instruction; – “A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official ‘truths,’ exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced to the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge… when the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master…” Allan Sekula. “Extract: School is a Factory.”
Does my instruction determine outcome? If so, then pupils are only transcribing my ideas for me. It isn’t their work, their ideas…
I’m aware that I’m fleetingly suggesting at things here. This is new and raw for me. I’m not totally sure what I’m thinking.
Why teach art?
