QUESTIONING ART EDUCATION

De Duve's Three Paradigms

Two models, even though in reality they contaminate each other, divide up the teaching of art. On the one hand, there is the academic model; on the other, there is the Bauhaus model. The former believes in talent, the latter in creativity. The former classifies the arts according to techniques, what I would call métier; the latter according to medium. The former fosters imitation; the latter invention. Both models are obsolete. [1]

Thierry de Duve thus introduces his interrogation of the dominant paradigms in art education in Europe and North America. His full analysis, as laid out at a conference at the University of Southampton in 1993, is succinct, direct and persuasive. This analysis leads him to postulate a further paradigm of art education. De Duve now sees "the most advanced art schools" organised according to "the disenchanted, perhaps nihilistic, after-image of the old Bauhaus paradigm." In place of the models of "talent-métier-imitation" (academic) and "creativity-medium-invention" (modernist) De Duve posits a "new triad of notions: attitude-practice-deconstruction." He reserves his most scathing critique for this, as he terms it, "imploded paradigm." Describing the development of art education in the 1970s, he points to the prior emergence of conceptual art, with special mention for the When Attitude Becomes Form exhibition of 1969 (Bern/London) and claims:

Linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, structuralism and post-structuralism, in short ‘theory' (or so-called ‘French theory') entered art schools and succeeded in displacing—sometimes replacing—studio practice while renewing the critical vocabulary and intellectual tools with which to approach the making and appreciating of art.

De Duve acknowledges that this shift in emphasis from creativity to attitude occurred "with considerable differences depending on national and local circumstances." He concludes that in general, however, "with or without the conscious or unconscious complicity of their teachers, what had started as an ideological alternative to both talent and creativity, called ‘critical attitude', became just that, an attitude, a stance, a pose, a contrivance."

The tendency toward a reorganisation of Fine Art courses which plays down the separation of traditional studio disciplines and mediums (the familiar trio of painting, print, and sculpture) may be seen to be part of this foregrounding of critical attitude or critical process. The much-vaunted interdisciplinarity of contemporary educational initiatives may do service for a great number of conflicting agendas, and can in itself become just a stance or a pose. Whatever the case, it is clearly exemplary of De Duve's third paradigm of art education.

De Duve's analysis more thoroughly questions the dominant paradigms of art education than most available accounts, which tend by and large to privilege a theory-practice dichotomy. I cite it here because it underlines a profound sense of crisis when it comes to the formulation of a definitive core philosophy to the teaching agenda. I also cite it here in order to take license in questioning art education along other lines: along the lines of a performance script I rehearse quietly between classes.

QUESTIONING ART EDUCATION:: A PERFORMANCE SCRIPT

What are you for?
(What are you like?)
Why are you subsidised by government?
(And why so poorly?)
What constituencies do you service?
Why are you so resistant to change?
And while I'm at it, why are you so sensitive and defensive?
Why do you cite the creativity in your curriculum and as your raison d'être and so assiduously avoid it in your modus operandi?
Do you understand the visual arts as a particularly exemplary incidence of the unregulated marketing of one-off luxury commodities?
Do you believe in yourself?
Will you forgive me?
Are you worried about being a finishing school?
Will you give us a job?
How do you manage?
Will computers save you?
Will you look after your own?
What about your tired, lazy, hurt and disillusioned devotees?
What strengths do you draw on now?
If you can cultivate such fine problem-solving skills in students, why can't you solve your own problems?
Is it perhaps because you're shy about naming them?
If you can produce such fine graduates who find useful employment in so many arenas (and mostly not in the eensy-teensy art world) why not call yourself by a more helpful and descriptive name?
Are you a form of induction into a secular cult?
Are you getting posher by the year?
Will you ever be able to compete for the budget against that slapper, Design, who you say puts out for all and sundry?
Do you have any ethical qualms about cultural industry and the management of heritage?
Do you have any ethical qualms?
Are these leading questions?
Do you have a website?
Is the resident statistician apprised of the crisis in values in the wake of modernism?
Should you really encourage teenagers to read Adorno?
Why do so many of the mature students who hang around with you seem to be on their way to or from a significant other?
Do you lead them on?
Are you still as straight as ever?
Do your technicians enjoy themselves?
Do you think the special classes that help with the reading-writing difficulties (you so recently officially acknowledged) work?
Do you think your boards are informed of all the appropriate materials?
Should everybody get a first?
What do you do when you're afraid?
Have you ever lost any one to drink or tragedy?
Have you ever tried to release someone to the same?
If you had a therapist would he/she blush at your presumption?
Is your heart in the right place?
Do you think they should leave you, going out in public talking like that?
Neither words nor course documents can express these feelings we have for you?
Can I always be with you?
Is it safe in here?
Is it everyone's individual responsibility or are you a network of institutions and institutional behaviours?
Will you stop me if I'm being too personal?
Would you consider wearing a banner over your thresholds, which said "just because it happened to you, that doesn't make it interesting"?
Are you sure pasta and rice should be served together in the same dish?
You seem to know a lot of people with an overdeveloped sense of grievance, how come?
Does talking about art and politics always embarrass you this much?
Am I your type of smart-ass or am I blaming the victim here?
What would you call a basic skill these days?
Accountancy?
Public relations?
Bullying?
Self-assertion?
How come so many of your graduates turn out so good?
Could more do better?
Does this make me a crank?
Do you ever bore yourself?
What do you do for entertainment?
Did you ever have any dealings with C. J. Haughey?
Did you find him honourable or at least pleasant?
Should I leave town now?
Does the death of painting ever upset you?
Is parochialism a thing you might ever be accused of?
How would I respond?
Have you ever had a tutorial where someone didn't say "I found it interesting that…"?
Does it bother you when your people teach anti-intellectualism?
Is dumbing-down a problem or a blessing in disguise?
Do people often ask you questions?
What are the means of your response?
Into whose charge and care should we commit you?
If you ever felt down or unwell who would you turn to?
Did you ever hear that American expression "get over yourself already"?
Would it be fair to say that there is a fundamental historico-philosophical problematic implicated in your whole project?
And if this is so, would you not further accept that this problem cannot be left outside the curriculum?
On the other hand would you not also accept that there is a serious risk in introducing large-scale critical problems onto the undergraduate agenda?
What is the problem, if any, with good old-fashioned pleasure in making and doing?
Is there more money to be made in teaching art, and managing the teaching of art, than there is in the making of art?
Are rhetorical questions always this devious and unfair?
Are these questions rhetorical, then?
Have we overlooked the radical nature of your project?
Have we neglected to mention the great experiment in dialogue at the heart of your project?
Can we find a way to reinstate this project of education as a discursive pedagogy, which examines its own conditions of possibility?
Who's in?
And who's out?
And why?
Don't take this personally, but do you miss the certainties of yesteryear and long for some orthodoxy?
Will you talk to me again after this?
This probably makes me a bitch, but would you ever consider a change of job-description?
Am I right to think that you are such an old romantic, you'd never hold anything I've said against me?
(Oh, and why is performance off the agenda again, in as much as it was ever on? Is it because you thought they were mostly silly? Well, what else isn't these days?)

And finally.
Eric Hobsbawm in his highly contentious reflections on the fate of the avant-garde in the visual arts has claimed: "Any study of the non-utilitarian visual arts in the twentieth century must start from the observation that they are a minority interest." [2] Being a partisan of the visual arts is not completely unlike being a champion of the merits of crazy-golf and should therefore lead one to conduct oneself with the same degree of circumspection one finds in that equally maligned sport. So I should ask your pardon for any excesses of enthusiasm in the preceding sections. Thank you.

[1] Thierry De Duve, When Form Has Become Attitude—And Beyond, in The Artist and The Academy, ed. Nicholas de Ville and Stephen Foster, Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 1994, pp. 23-40
[2] Eric Hobsbawm, Behind The Times: The Decline And Fall Of The Twentieth Century Avant-Gardes, London: Thames & Hudson, 1998

Mick Wilson is an artist and lectures at the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology.