Discipline-Based Art Education || The Romanticist Legacy and Discipline-Based Art Education

National Art Education Association

The Romanticist Legacy and Discipline-Based Art EducationAuthor(s): Norma K. PittardSource: Art Education, Vol. 41, No. 2, Discipline-Based Art Education (Mar., 1988), pp. 42-47Published by: National Art Education AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3193112 .

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The Romanticist Legacy

and Discipline-Based

Art Education Norma K. Pittard

his paper is a response to issues raised by Eisner on the role of discipline- based art education in the

public schools. (Eisner) The problem with Eisner's explanation is that he never commits himself to what he wants art education to be. He is ambivalent about goals and pedagogical practice, urging art teachers to refrain from predictive objectives and to rely on some sort of "rule of thumb". He argues that art should be taught for transfer so that it relates to the world outside the classroom and then asserts that cultural aspects are incursions on aesthetic aims. He states that expressive visual qualities are "immediate," and yet he also argues that it must be learned - strictly speaking, whatever is immediate is only immediate once, it is, in fact, unique. Moreover, the structured curriculum and the organized content he advocates seem rather redundant if the entire enterprise is subject to "productive novelty" as a "virtue". On the whole, except for references to the inclusion of art history and aesthetic theory, DBAE is clothed in the same romanticist aesthetic doctrines that have plagued art education for the last sixty years.

While one might share Eisner's regret that art is seen as an ornamental frill in the general educational curriculum, it seems fairly certain that there can be little change without radically reforming the tacit assumptions that have been the source of the difficulty. For, as long as art educators are preoccupied with a legacy that fosters spurious notions about singular, autonomous 'qualities' that isolate art from other humanities as well as art history, to that extent will art education maintain a state of inertia. The difficulty is that aesthetic philosophy is rooted in romanticist concerns with autonomous criteria of taste and naive views of perception; matters which have little relation to teaching students to understand what art is, what artists actually do, and how it relates to human experiences. The purpose in this paper is to examine the romanticist legacy in the light of questions raised by Eisner's view of DBAE.

The major difficulty for art educators has been that they have pursued assumptions derived from the philosophers of art that are irrelevant both to the ideas and problems of artists and the educational process. Instead of the

historical and cultural framework required to understand the nature of art, aesthetic philosophers, for their part, define art in terms of appearance and qualities that are assumed to characterize the 'disinterested' perception of 'aesthetic experience'. At the core of the diverging concerns are statements such as Osborne's, (about the advantage of art in museums): "Not until the art products of the world were displayed in isolation from the living cultures that gave them birth could people begin to see them with the mature aesthetic awareness as works of art divorced from the social or religious purposes for which they were made, stripped of the extra- aesthetic values which they once carried." (Osborne p. 157) It is at this point that art education and aesthetic philosophy part company. As a premise for the art curriculum, Osborne's formalist criterion for aesthetic value reduces art to a design technology moving in a predetermined direction towards the holy grail of 'significant form'. "In the formalist ethic, the ideal critic remains unmoved by artist's expressive intention, uninfluenced by his culture, deaf to his irony or iconography, and so proceeds

42 Art Education/March 1988



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undistracted, programed like an Orpheus making his way out of hell." (Steinberg, p. 66)

The task of the art educator is not to validate or invalidate art . . . particularly if validity is limited to questionable "immutable" criteria. The purpose of education is to inform and enlighten, to define the role of art in terms of its inextricable connection with life and culture, and to provide students with models of the intellectual tools that will enable them to formulate their own judgements. The child, or the adult, sitting in the classroom confronts us with the simple truth, ignored by the aesthetic philosopher, that every

individual is bound up in some way with the whole of human history. Seen in terms of individual commitment in a historical context the accomplishments of art affirm its significance as well as its pleasures by means of serious understanding of its role in life rather than by perception severed from practical concerns. For the aesthetician, on the other hand, "much that makes art entrancing and absorbing and important often is simply philosophically irrelevant . . . the philosopher is apt to bring to bear the weight of his entire system, and to pick from art only that which happens to be pertinent to his concerns." (Danto p.

55) The art educator attempting to

reconcile the philosophy of art with the needs of the educational process confronts a methodological controversy of mutually diverging concerns. The problem is unmistakable when aesthetic experience, an essentially prescholarly experience, is declared the object of scholarly inquiry. It is particularly evident when Eisner attempts to validate art as a cultural achievement and then argues, first, that art teaches us to see the world "for its own sake", and then, that cultural and aesthetic aims are a matter of "priority and

Art Education/March 1988 43



emphasis . . . When the visual arts are integrated into other subjects . . . their distinctive contributions are often neglected or under emphasized." (p. 21) At the heart of Eisner's conflict is the discrepancy between the philosopher's mistaken notion that aesthetic aims are autonomous, separate from culture, and the quite reasonable assumption that art is a cultural achievement.

In fact, aesthetic and cultural aims are inextricably interwoven aspects of any work of art. What Eisner overlooks is that intention, purpose, and cultural conventions are inseparable in making any pot or painting or sculpture; it is in this sense that art is a cultural achievement. The notion that appreciating the expressive or aesthetic features of a clay pot "itself", apart from the constructive and functional purpose, in the aesthetician's terms, 'instrumental' aspects, came from philosophers who assumed that art serves as a source of "disinterested" pleasure (as distinguished from ordinary lust and desire) in a 'higher' reality beyond the material concerns of everyday life. Seen as an "aesthetic object" in "immediate awareness" the aesthetic experience is pursued for "its own sake". According to Osborne, aesthetic experience is pursued for "its properties" of direct perception apart from discursive or pragmatic 'instrumental', cultural, or personal and functional elements, i.e. "elements deemed to exist beyond the work as such", and are excluded from the concept of "organic unity" (Radar p. 306-312). Similarly, Beardsley's system of "critical reasons" excludes what he calls "genetic and affective reasons" (Radar p. 384-385).

While such concerns may be consistent within the confines of the closed logic of the Middle Ages, or Aristotle, or even Hume's 18th century "delicacy of taste", the notion that appearance itself, insured by a rigid empiricism, provides criteria for immutable 'intrinsic' qualities, has no bearing on what art is. Not only does it isolate art from the real world, but, by denying content, intention and meaning, it mocks the seriousness of making or

looking at art. To speak of art, for its own sake, as identical with itself, renders it unreal as well as meaningless.

Every thing that is . . . persons, things, objects, ideas . . . exists among a plurality of things, not simply what it is in its own identity, but how it is the same or different from other things. Being different or the same belongs to its very nature. When we think about a thing, attempting to define it, the similarities and differences must be accounted for; so that when we say what a thing is, we can also say what it is not; otherwise we are caught in a tautology; every definition is a needless repetition, hence a negation of identity. In other words, to take a thing out of context with other things and look at it only in 'relation' to itself, for its own sake, in its own identity, reveals no differences, no otherness; along with its relation to something it is not, it loses its reality and becomes nonexistent. Works of art are significant precisely because they are not disconnected from reality; what gives them meaning is that they are the product of transformations of thought processes . . . and human thought processes provide the necessary links between appearance and reality. Without such transformations of thought there would be no painting and no science.

The paradox of aesthetic philosophy also manifests itself in Eisner's view of the nature of problems in art and the conflicting anarchy of the aesthetician's purposelessness. To begin with, while Eisner quite correctly assumes that artistic creation is a matter of dealing with solutions to a problem, problem- solving suggests 'instrumental' purpose and is hardly consistent with the notion of 'seeing for its own sake'. A more serious question arises when Eisner asserts that in art, unlike mathematics, "there is no single right or wrong way to solve a problem or formulate an answer in the arts" (p. 10). However, if there are no right or wrong answers, one must question whether a problem even exists. Further, if there are no rules to "prove" or disprove the correctness of an answer, there would be little need for judgement. In the usual

sense judgement refers to a process of comparing and making a decision, to form an opinion. Without any rules or guides to make a decision, without a definition of the problem, there seems little or no basis for formulating an opinion or making a judgement. Eisner's difficulty stems from the failure to recognize the vital connection between artistic invention and formulating problems within the context of cultural conventions in which works of art are created. Such a stance may suit the critical apparatus of the aesthetic philosopher whose major concern is the apparatus rather than what art is; in the classroom, in the real world, where organized ideas provide purpose and meaning for making judgements, the philosopher's apparatus is anarchic.

In fact, in the arts, as in the sciences and every realm of human endeavor, there is a logical connection between a problem and its resolution. The artworld does provide a great deal of evidence that problems vary and that artists' solutions vary, but the notion that there are no "rules" is an absurd simplification. In art, as in mathematics, there has never been a claim to final and absolute knowledge. Interpretations change as knowledge changes, both for the individual and the culture that nourishes the individual; it is a condition that enables growth for both. It would be difficult to imagine that in the enormous varieties of landscapes, ranging from Turner's expressionistic views to Constable's precise rendering of rainbows, from Courbet's realism to Cezanne's concern for the underlying structure, that each of these artists achieved his results without regard for a precise formulation of the problem and a logical connection in the solution. Are such marvelously wrought works merely the result of what Eisner calls "productive novelty"?

For Osborne, such matters are discarded as "extra-aesthetic". In keeping with his philosophic system, he is bound only by selected criteria which suit the terms of the art for art's sake tautology, rather than historical influences or functions that a work of art might serve. The conflict for Eisner is that such a


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Still Life on Table, 1925, by Henri Matisse. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Henry P. Mcllhenny Collection in Memory of Frances P. Mcllhenny. ACCESSION: '64-77-1

premise tends to retard the educational process. If the arts are a way of thinking and knowing, as Eisner justifiably argues, then one would assume that he would recognize the fact that fictional distinctions between 'instrumental' and 'qualitative' perception have little to do with the nature or value of art.

Romanticist philosophers, in glorifying the nature and creative power of the artist, believed that every work of art is a "unique" penetration of the world of sense, able to come out of the other side, so to speak, and look back at it with the comprehension of God. Inspired by Plato, Schiller and Hegel (following Fichte) held that the artist grasps the world comprehensively, absorbing the actual in the absolute, by means

of, in Hegel's terms, a universal 'Zeitgeist' or Spirit that constitutes the life of the mind. What (Spirit) wants, says Hegel, is sensuous presence, but liberated from the scaffolding of purely material nature. For Hegel the world was foreign because it was outside of the mind; he thought of the sensuous content of art as "spiritualized, since in art the spirit appears made sensuous." The aim of art was "to strip the world of its foreignness", to break out of the isolation of pure thought confronting the alien world of matter, thereby uniting thought and matter. Thinking is not merely about the world, but reconstitutes it, so that material nature is 'born and born again of the mind'. Hegel's aesthetic philosophy, as part of his wider teleological scheme of history, assumed that at

each stage of history the mind found itself differently related to the world, and that at each stage the artist or poet recognized past art but, without regarding it as superseded by the present, merely articulated that relation anew. (Podro)

Hegel's aesthetic philosophy, that art depicts a 'higher' reality beyond the material world, had enormous influence on the directions that art education took. A major one was the belief that 'pure' perception, unconditioned by time and place, penetrated material reality and disclosed a realm that was pure of the foreignness of the material world; henceforth, every childish scribble was seen as a sign of innate creativity. Hegel's notion that realism in art was a mere mirror that covered true reality, rather than a result of




changing directions in thought, influenced art teachers to regard teaching as an imposition of alien concepts, and drawing skills as uncreative copies.

Hegel's historicism also inspired a variety of evolutionism that maintains that human culture everywhere follows and must follow much the same path, though with minor differences, in a predetermined direction. The apparent recurrence of cultural traits was interpreted as evidence for the belief in universal parallelism, immanent determinism, or cultural orthogenesis. (Munro) Biologically, orthogenesis refers to the progressive evolution of certain organisms in a restricted direction throughout successive generations, so that variation is consistently limited to definite trends independent of outside influences. From a sociological point of view, orthogenesis refers to the theory that every culture follows the same fixed course of evolution, uninfluenced by differing environmental factors. In art education these ideas appeared in various versions of artistic

development: as an 'unfolding process' by Schaeffer-Simmern, (see Arnheim); as innate 'perceptual styles' by Lowenfeld; and, as innate gestalts in the visual nervous system that are governed by inherent 'laws' of simplicity by Arnheim.

For the art educators who followed Hegelian ideas artistic creation becomes a phenomena that 'happens' for its own sake, rather than something that is produced by purposeful intention. This may explain Eisner's notion of "productive novelty" and his contention that preconceived objectives and the learning of standard conventions inhibits "fresh ways" of describing the world. In fact, preconceived objectives and cultural conventions are literally the only ways in which 'fresh ways' are understood as 'fresh'. "Pure" perception unconditioned by time or place, may be possible in a vacuum, but it cannot be the source of artistic creation.

On the contrary, if we look at a group of great creative artists, such as Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Cezanne,

Seurat, Van Gogh, or Picasso, to name only a few, who represent a simple but impressive paradigm for the course of artistic creation, it will be found that Eisner's notion of "productive novelty" and his assumption that "codified rules" and "expressive forms" are mutually exclusive, is mistaken. What the achievements of these artists suggests is that innovations begin with a highly developed grasp of the artistic traditions and cultural conventions which are added to or changed, sometimes only slightly, sometimes in significant ways that have profound influences on later generations. In either case, the work will bear traits that reflect the cultural conventions out of which it grew, because it will necessarily involve a selection from one or more past traditions, along with the more original changes. Unique solutions, personal self- expression, do not happen as a consequence of ignorance, nor do they merely spill out as a product of vibrations in the nervous system; it takes years of growth and development for an artist to achieve




what T.S. Eliot called the ability to "sing with one's own voice".

In fact, human beings cannot see "purely"; presuppositions or a frame of reference are primary conditions for human perception. Without presuppositions there is no recognition; without memory and the intellectual associations which form the connections between experiences, the human mind would be reduced to a clutter of isolated events and bits of sensory data. "There is no other evidence for the existence of things . . . We know the thing only by mapping and joining our experience of its aspects." (Bronowski)

What needs to be understood is that the recognition of a work and the creation of art manifests a construction rather than a passive 'immediate' perception of meaning and value; even when it is so rapid that it seems immediate, perception is mediated by prior thoughts and experiences. Meaning and value in a work of art is neither given in the eye, nor in the work itself - which explains why artists are sometimes not readily given recognition when they depart from already accepted conventions, and at later times, when new ideas are more readily assimilated, are received with honor; such as in the case of C6zanne and Van Gogh, among others. The artist presents a work which, in effect, says: This is how I see things - how I believe things are. The viewer as interpreter agrees or disagrees, based on its logical implications for human experience.

For example, Eisner's discussion of the Boccioni and Arp sculptures completely misses the critical importance of the distinction between the Futurist idea of the magnitude of external forces that renders man a flayed figure (not a helmeted soldier) and the Vitalist idea of-the internal forces of growth, that distinguish the work of these two artists. Their aesthetic value is not a matter of Beardsley's 'prima facie' formal properties given in the work itself (Radar), but in the implications that their ideas have for human experience. Indeed, it seems to me that Eisner's assumptions risk destroying the integrity of each work.

To bypass the ideas that content

carries is to lose sight of the most significant human qualities in art.

The status of art education is not enhanced by aesthetic criteria that discard human concerns and motivations; nor is status achieved with fanciful notions of visual privilege. Seeing is surely not a matter of biology, but rather reflects cultural conventions and attitudes which can hardly be explained by the anatomy of the eye. If art educators assume autonomous aesthetic values, art for art's sake, as a premise for the art curriculum, then sadly, it is certain that art education will retain its ornamental status, grandly entombed in its own exclusivity. What is equally certain is that change will require a rigorous examination of the tacit assumptions that have been so much a part of art education theory and practice.

For, as long as art educators discuss art in terms of Hegel's universal essences, phenomena that merely happen, rather than something intentionally created, there will be a failure to come to grips with the basic problems. The point will be missed if, like Hegel, "inwardness", autonomy, and subjectivity are seen as the most fundamental components of artistic creation. Stasis is ensured if art educators rely on assumptions rooted in pre-enlightenment notions of "pure" spirit and "pure" form embedded in the visual nervous system. The notion of the immediacy of perception, a prop inherited from naive concepts of the relation between sensory and intellectual functions, once served largely to insure faith in divine authority, and later, in the 18th century, as a condition of "disinterested attitudes" (Osborne p. 156) to relieve the fear of the delicate balance between lust and the beauty of 'higher' objects of love. By the early 19th century it served to promote a romantic view of artistic genius which, inspired by Hegel's Spirit, attained status from an ability to see the 'higher' reality beyond appearances "directly", through eyes unsullied by intellectual association and cultural concerns. Unfortunately, visions of such "pure" perception have not only nurtured spurious legends about the values of art, worse yet, they have been the source of enormous

confusion and ambiguity in resolving the problem of how and what to teach in the art classroom.

Art educators have been so engrossed in the wishful fiction of 'art for art's sake' and the sanctity of presupposed aesthetic values, they tend to see themselves as standardbearers of some model of qualitative seeing for the misguided. On the contrary, the task of the art educator is to enlighten, to alert the student to the challenge of the ideas the artist presents to the way we think about things, and to clarify those ideas with intellectual rigor and historical reference. Education ought to enrich the student's understanding of the various themes dealt with by artists at various points in time so that the student will understand and share in the ideas about the human condition that interlaces the arts, past and present. Instead of spurious notions of autonomous'immutable' qualities, what can be assumed to be a constant in art is a living tradition that is continually refocused by successive generations of artists. Notions of autonomous aesthetic values fail to accomplish this; indeed, may even serve to deter the development of new ideas. D

Norma K. Pittard is Professor Emeritus, Glassboro State College, Glassboro, New Jersey.

References Arnhein, R. (1974) Art and visual

perception. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.

Bronowski, J. (1956). Science and human values. NY: Harper and Row, p. 31.

Danto, A.C. (1981) The transfiguration of the commonplace. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Eisner, E. (1987) The role of Discipline- Based Art Education in America's schools. Art Education, September 1987. pp. 6-45.

Lowenfeld, V. (1971) Creative and mental growth. NY: The Macmillan Co.

Munro, T. (1970) Form and style in the arts. Cleveland, Ohio: The Press of Case Western Reserve University. p. 240.

Osborne, H. (1970) Aesthetics and art theory. NY: E.P. Dutton.

Podro, M. (1982) The critical historians of art. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Radar, M. (1979) A modern book of esthetics. NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Steinberg, L. (1975) Other criteria, confrontations with twentieth century art. NY: Oxford University Press.




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Discipline-Based Art Education || The Romanticist Legacy and Discipline-Based Art Education