CIRCA 89 Art Education Supplement
WHAT IS IT ABOUT ART?
You cannot lead people to what is good, you can only lead them some place or other.
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
Why, each year, do several thousand apply to do art and design? Where did they get the idea that this was a good thing to do and how close do art colleges come to meeting their desires? Is it the interaction of these two attitudes; the institution's and the individual's, that ultimately constitutes the dialectic that is ‘the education'? And how has that changed over the past twenty years?
Twenty years ago parents might come to see me because "We are worried. Our son thinks he wants to do art!" (Yes it was usually he that was the cause for real concern.) I would try to explain the excellencies of a liberal arts education through the visual arts; how culturally important it was and how brave they would be if they gave their support to this fragile ambition. Today it is more likely that the parents will inform me that their off-spring will be doing art and they just wanted to check that the course covered PhotoShop and Quark Xpress. (The news that Information Technology is rising is general all over Ireland. IT is ‘it'.)
The profile of the student twenty years ago was not exactly clear. That was because the students, with the exception of the precocious and the blessedly obsessed, were not themselves too clear about it. Some wanted to express themselves; some were concerned about the environment or injustice in general and art could counter that! Some really loved Surrealism (what is it about Surrealism that has such powers over teenagers?); some thought it was a way into rock and roll (see the CVs of many 1960s rockers); some knew an anguish they felt only art could assuage; some just wanted to see if they'd like it; and some sensed that being an art student explained everything and would put an end to the tiresome question "why are you doing that?" (Trust me, I'm an art student!) But at some deeper level all of them sensed that this was the best thing with which a life could possibly be employed. How they got this truth—in disparate suburbs, on farms, in small towns, homes without a picture, solo drawing hours; movies or personal fantasies—cannot be known until some artist is later asked the question and the answer usually hovers in the vicinity of the above.
Twenty years later and something of Adorno's nightmare of a ‘culture industry' has become reality—and it's not so bad really. More of everything—galleries, agencies, grants, courses, awards, commissions, all of which need co-ordinators, installation officers, facilitators, curators, liaison officers, community workers and, yes, of course, directors. So it is not a one-option deal and, depending on what you consider ‘creative action in the world' to mean, many more can now participate in what is still the best thing in a world of sad alternatives—brain surgeon, nun, jet pilot, professional boxer, etc., etc.
So the motives of the present day student are clearer. They want a career, they want a third-level education—and art is now that—they want professional studies to better understand the idea of brand imaging (they are much more up-front on those subtle questions that clustered around the issue of what used to be called personal style) and they are often infused with a self-confidence that no longer wonders ‘could this possibly be for me?' but reaches out in the fixed conviction that ‘this is mine'. Full of dubiety still, but much more articulate because of the exquisite mutations that contemporary theory can lend to that condition.
What the student will probably come to infer, and what the institution may confirm, as a primary byte of contemporary artworld ontology, is that:
- The art world is the totality of all artworld systems.
- An artworld system is a framework for the presentation of an artwork by an artist to an artworld public.
- An artist is a person who participates with that understanding in making an artwork.
- An artwork is an artefact of a kind created to be presented to an artworld public.
- An artworld public is a set of persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to understand an artwork which is presented to them.
How students deal with George Dickie's institutional theory of art may set the tone of their future practice. How institutions address it will set the tone of the institutional culture. The weightings are being reversed; what was a liberal visual arts education with the possibility of a career as artist is now more clearly dedicated to an artworld terminus.
It is here that the concept ‘this is mine' kicks in for both the student and the institution. For the student does it mean ‘this is mine' with the possibility of power to alter and take control, or does it mean ‘this is my place', a discipline like others with a clear career path through which students may choreograph a Dickie course that leads to their being ‘artists'? The task then, I believe, for the institution is to try and give the appropriate art knowledge that will sustain the student's art practice as the shifting patterns and agendas of the artworld search for winners.
It is in the theory area (if that is up to speed) and in the studio tutorials that that which cannot be taught for certain (art) can be discussed as possible. It is this unspecific mode of interaction that is coming under most pressure from the modular, time-and-motion, quality-assessment managers who see this as lost time. I think this tendency is growing. The model exists in the U.K. and in spite of our claims to be free we tend to pick up on what they do after a time lapse. The model is attractive to managers because: it is rational; it is cost effective and it is efficient. But often the price of rationality is meaning, especially in art. And it is the meaning of art, or what art might mean (other than the tautological institutional moves) that may get filtered out.
For this not to happen depends on the integrity of the staff and the character of the students. These are the essentials. No course document, four-colour brochure or computer in Galway can help if these are not present. And very often these (students and staff) must work to find the gaps in the rational plan which, often in direct proportion to its rationality, may act more as a brake than a spur to the possibility of art.
The issues in this short piece are simplified. But their ultimate complexity must be accommodated in any art course of value. It is not simply a task for the institution. The quality of students and what they bring to the case are crucial to the education of the institution. So there is hope because ‘in disparate suburbs, on farms, in…
Noel Sheridan is an artist and Director of the National College of Art and Design, Dublin.
