The Meaning of Artistic Tradition in a

Multicultural Society ROBERT CLARKE

Abstract Teaching art in a multicultural society requires teachers to develop an understanding

of the nature of artistic knowledge with regard to the cultural backgrounds of all children, so that the validity of art relates to the ethnic structure of contemporary

society and takes full account of its historical origins. This requires a sound basis for interpretation of other cultures so that children can see the interrelated connections between what they are shown and know, and how this is always contingent upon

historical antecedents of society and societies. N o longer can artistic traditions be isolated or prioritised in hierarchies that alienate or marginalise the cultural roots of those children who happen to come from ethnic minorities. Therefore, to better teach the requirements of the National Curriculum in Art, with particular regard to Attainment Target 2 , teachers need to be aware of their

responsibilities in interpreting the traditions of non-indigenous cultures. This paper draws on experience of teaching art in a largely homogenised minority of Scottish Gaeldom, where historical perceptions of what constituted its tradition were profoundly significant to the aims of educating its young. And where, the

teacher happens to come from outside that tradition, the importance of understanding the formation and interpretation of trddition[s] is a paramount

consideration in deciding what and how to teach art. This paper focuses on the central issues and draws upon relevant literature to support the case that art must

be taught with commitment to the context and artistic future of a multicultural society.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. [l]

No one today ispurely one thing. [21

The processes of art and education can be seen as the discovery, interpretation and description of culture and cultures; processes by which beliefs of communication and community gain value and substance through the expression of shared conventions of meaning.

Any analysis of the aims of art and education must lie in the clarification of the meanings each embodies as products of particular societies at any given moment in history. For example, the

contemporary production and interpretation of art depends on at least some knowledge of the intellectual and imaginative alternatives valued across history for their communicative power. Viewed in this comparative way, art is a dis- course with the history of all other art. And where a continuity of values occurs across time and space, a tradition is constituted. Moreover, a living tradition is one where past and present form a simultaneous order.

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Whoever has approved this idea of order ... will not jnd it preposterous that the past should be altered b y the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet (artist, teacher] who is aware of this will be aware of great dzjiculties and responsibilities. [31 The difficulties and responsibilities Eliot alludes t o are in the selective decisions we take to keep alive (value, teach, inform and appreciate etc.) certain traditions over others. In making choices of what and how (to teach, to paint etc.), a pri- ority of one set of cultural assumptions is vali- dated in favour of others. Since the formation of priorities is a natural consequence of any decision-making process, significance lies in the cultural implications they have in affecting the values and self-esteem of ethnic-minorities within society. The key is in the interpretation of cultural identity: and where identity is determined by those outside the cultural min- ority, such as teachers, then the pedagogical implications of our choices are profoundly influential. In short, any interpretation we give to culture must be set within a social and his- torical context that takes account of the living traditions of all members of the post-colonial, multi-cultural society in which we live and teach.

Art and education are part of living traditions that engage in the interpretation of human experience for living purposes, be they the expression of forms of feeling, or the descrip- tion o f empirical fact. And any analysis of either,

. . . is an activity of criticism, by which the nature of thought and experience, the form and con- vention in which (each] are active, are described and valued. [41

The conscious appropriation of the past, and thereby the formation of a living tradition, began in the Early Renaissance: in essence it originated with Petrarch, who elaborated a new vision of history after his first visit to Rome in 1337: he conceived classical antiquity as an era of brilliance, where classical works are seen as documentary evidence and expressions of a culture. [51 The resuscitation of antiquity rep- resents a central strand in the complex weave of influences that brought about the Renaiss-

ance in the quattrocento. However, the signifi- cance of this revival of classical ideals marks a crucial historical point from which highly influential attitudes that define contemporary culture subsequently developed. It would not seem to be coincidental that the Medici and their successors should have chosen and reinforced the visual arts to express and confrm the justajication for their vision of a new, fragmented, and competitive structure of human social relations. [6] In other words, art served the image of feudal capitalism and the oligarchic motives of the powerful individual. Michael Baxandall [7], cites the motives of a Florentine merchant and patron, Giovanni Rucellai, for owning art as: the pleasure of possession, piety, and self-com- memoration.

For Renaissance patrons, art was an instru- ment of knowledge and possession. The material ownership of art bestowed the spiritual ownership of a tradition - a tradition that affirmed their right to rule. It is this avid and ambitious desire to takepos- session of the object for the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator which seems to me to constitute one of the outstandingly original fea- tures of the art of western civilization. [81 The object being the ownership of cultural prop- erty.

The acquisitive materialism of the Renaiss- ance encouraged an expansion of trade and voyages of discovery in search of colonies and resources. The undisguised self-confidence with which this was achieved is evident in Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors, (1533) in which two ambassadors stand with pro- prietorial presence and intellectual authority, surrounded by objects which epitomise the tac- tility of wealth and worldly knowledge - the symbols of power. Berger, [9] states that this was the time when the ocean trade routes were being opened up for the slave trade, and for the traffic which was to siphon the riches from other continents into Europe, and later supply the capital for the take-off of the industrial rev- olution.

The Renaissance mobilised the realistic

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possibility of colonialisation that became an actuality by the late eighteenth century with the advent of large-scale industrialisation, the rise of nationalism in Europe and the Napoleonic campaigns, which were innovative in that cul- tural property was accounted among the spoils of war; and not merely as physical objects and artefacts either, but also the intangible and abstract property of artistic style.

In the Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill wrote in the following ‘ruthless pro- priety tones’:

Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their own ... [but are ratherl the place where Englandfinds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities. [lo] By the middle of the nineteenth century, aes- thetic experience could no longer be divorced from the accumulation of cultura; colonial prop- erty in the pursuit of economic wealth. Additionally, the appropriation of primitive images, artefacts and a few other tropical com- modities from non-European traditions, for inclusion in the growing European collections of ethnography, became subsumed in sub- sequent definitions of modernity - so much so that ‘primitivism’ is now integral to notions of modern European art. From Delacroix to Degas, Picasso to Penck, artists increasingly interested themselves in the aesthetic systems and arte- facts of non-western and colonial societies as remote from the old world, classical humanist, values of the Renaissance, as the Renaissance was from those of Byzantium.

The reasons for this are complex and fasci- nating, and central to any understanding of the concerns and functions of art in a modern pluralistic society. However, their analysis deserves more space than the focus of this paper permits, so I shall now simply add that I believe the appearance of non-European aes- thetic systems in modern art, is predicated upon the collision of Romanticism and colonialism, anthropology and psychology, Nature and the industrial revolution. And that ever since the Reformation, and the consequent decline in the

belief of Christian theology as a valid source for depiction, artists looked elsewhere in the search for meaning and identity.

If colonialism made ‘foreign’ cultures avail- able to western Europe, and the industrial rev- olution radically changed the relationship between an individual and society, their combi- nation, in an increasingly secularised and indi- vidualistic culture, turned tradition into a polit- ical commodity. Our culture is the first completely secularised culture in histop, and what seems ominous at this point is that the whole idea of artistic vocation - of the artist who renounces worldly ambitions in order to dedicate himselfto values that cannot possibly be realised by a commer- cial society - does not exert much power of attraction any more. [lll The ‘romantic’ idea that the role of the artist was to create a symbolic life that would have mean- ing for others has been translated by material- istic culture into the secular pragmatism of sus- taining a career. Indeed, the manipulative individualism endemic to modern society, has created the belief that nothing exists beyond consumerism and the authority of the market. If this is true, is it not also the case that the spiritual crisis of modern culture is the conse- quence of affluence, individualism and an arro- gant belief in the power of science and tech- nology to circumvent the dilemmas of morality and social conscience? The father of modern sociology Emile Durkheim, sought to discover the nature of society and the values and prin- ciples upon which education should be based, and believed that there are no, . . genuinely moral ends except collective ones; behaviour, whatever it may be, directed exclus- iuely toward thepersonal ends of the individual does not have moral value. Moral goals involve something other than individuals: their object is society. [121

The art of non-western, pre-colonial, societies was a cultural form of mediating a spiritual, sacred cosmos. The level of understanding depended upon the shared cultural knowledge (social and ritual) of the artist and viewer. For example, until the advent of Europeans to

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Australia in the eighteenth century, Aboriginal art was made purely to fulfil traditional cultural needs. [131 Today, however, the Aborigine seems rather to be underlining what happens when ... social and technological histo y turns against men and women, and robs them of their biologically given potentialities for symbolic life and aes- thetic expression - for, in effect, a true cul- ture. [141

Fuller describes the erosion of cultures, such as that of the Australian Aborigine, as ‘Govern- ment-sponsored decadence’: the provision of tourist trinkets, or exotic spectacles reproduced for newsmen within the whitewashed walls of an Alice Springs art gallery. The implications of such experiences, brings to mind Walter Benja- min’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mech- anical Reproduction, first published in 1936, in which he eloquently argues, that the ‘aura’ of the original, unique work of art is lost to repro- ducibility. This has had significant conse- quences for post-Renaissance notions of ‘auth- enticity’ in a work of art when,

... the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice -politics. [151 My case is that in a post-colonial ‘global village’, notions of the aesthetic should not be divorced from the politics of economic and cultural domination. And that those who ‘own’ tra- ditions (such as teachers) have a moral responsibility in their appreciation and under- standing of other cultures - whose fragile place in the world is threatened by misrepresentation, trivialisation and sub-ordination to western economic interests - to ensure that their cultural future survives in an increasingly standardised world, for:

How can ‘The Dream Time’ co-exist with sky- scrapers, the Coca-Cola Colporation, the cath- ode ray tube, Trans-Australian Airlines, the Sydney Biennale, or ‘Aboriginal Traditional Arts’? And i f ‘The Dream Time’ disappears, then the Aborigine will lose not only his living arts,

cra@s and rituals, but eveything which he has traditionally believed, valued and held dear. [161

Fuller’s statement describes the tide of cultural imperialism that submerges ‘peripheral’ societies and robs them of their words and images by wrecking their definable identities upon the rocks of materialism, modernity and the metropolis, where as Yeats knew, ‘The cer- emony of innocence is drowned.’

For seven years, I taught art in a Scottish Gaelic society situated at the geographical per- iphery of Britain. It saw itself as the historical victim of English colonialism and resented being governed by policies and attitudes that originated ‘down south’ - a euphemism parti- cularly reserved for London and the home- counties, but which also served generically, to describe anywhere in England.

The resentment ran deeply down generations and was justified by a history of subjugation, famine, evictions, enforced emigration, bad government and a poor soil; and if that was not enough: the expression of Highland traditions had once been forbidden, including the Gaelic language - the beating heart of its culture. At no time in my life have I lived among people who had such an acute awareness, both of the pre- ciousness of their cultural and social traditions, and of the injustices and impositions of history. The past co-existed with the present in the con- stant discourse of a living tradition. History was unforgettable but it weighed heavily. Of course, history has treated the working people of England no better: and perhaps in more subtle ways their culture has been ground down by the greed of autocratic industrialists and aristo- cratic kandowners. But the difference seems to me to be, that in England, the interpretation of history is not politicked by any recent experi- ence of cultural colonisation as it has been in Scotland, Ireland, Africa or India. In England, the reverse is true: the poor social conditions and iniquitous treatment in which the English working class survived has been disguised by the anthemic myth of their contribution to the creation of Britannia’s Empire, where English- men ‘never shall be slaves’.

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While the summer landscape of lochs and loneliness attracts southern suburban tourists (English, German, Dutch, French and Aus- tralian, etc.), sold on romantic myths of peat- smoke, salmon and scenery, real life in the Heb- rides has always been hard. The drizzle of an unlucky history haunts the desolate land, and though this is not the place to question the interpretative myths of romanticism, nor of the invention of ‘traditions’ [171 for the sake of tour- ism or nationalism, there is undoubtedly a con- nection between the interpretation of a history and the economic interests of those who pos- sess the culture.

The Gaelic language is the life blood of Heb- ridean culture. It is the deepest expression of Gaelic society and the means by which it defines itself. This is particularly evident in the strong oral tradition of poetry and song, whose forms and structures attain the expression of an extraordinary sensibility and culture.

I suggest theology and climate are the histori- cal reasons why Gaelic culture does not possess a strong visual tradition. Though perhaps there are other reasons too: during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was English and Low- land Scottish artists who ventured north in search of the romantic spirit in nature. Their darkening, windswept orchestrations of crag and heather were dramatic, exaggerated cliches: analogues for the ‘wild’ Highland tem- perament of the ‘natives’, painted for the cosy drawing rooms of absentee landlords who pos- sessed the deeds of vast estates they had cal- lously cleared of crofters, filled with sheep, and rarely visited.

Through a veil of unctuous moralising, Vic- torian romanticism treated everything in its gaze as a specimen - including other cultures, who were possessed, categorised, catalogued and displayed: devoid of context and stripped of any history or tradition of their own. At the ‘amusement’ section of the International and Colonial Exhibition held in London in 1908, Scottish, Irish and African villages were recon- structed together and peopled with the ‘natives’: without exception, these were presented through the official guidebooks as quaint sur- vivals [18] - as though they were aberrations in

an otherwise seamless paternalistic hierarchy; one in which cultures were implicitly judged on the relative success of their assimilation of English values.

The aim of these eugenic jamborees seems to have been to reinforce the illusion of an other- wise homogeneous ‘British’ culture, bringing enlightenment and cricket to the dark conti- nents. Somewhat surprisingly, this vast illusion was not maintained by huge garrisons of soldi- ers 1191, but by the manufacture of ceremonies, rituals and traditions that were handed down or ‘loaned’ to the colonies through systems of law, civil administration, education and architecture.

Hebridean culture has obdurately resisted playing cricket: the Scottish legal and education systems have remained stoutly independent from external interference. Yet ironically, hav- ing ‘survived’ the experience of colonialism, minority societies, such as the Gaels, have struggled to maintain their cultural identity in a world where modern communications, parti- cularly television, have swamped them with the homogenising values and projections of metro- politan society.

In the main, this can be attributed to the fact that television is, by its nature, a simplistic medium with a coarse tendency to generalise the particular and simplify complex issues. Its constituency is with the blandness of consensus and the statistical maintenance of its market share. Control of the television industry is cen- tralised in metropolitan cities, and as a conse- quence the dominant content of its programmes is preoccupied with the self-centred concerns of the metropolis. The issues affecting peripheral communities are either ignored or grossly mar- ginalised. Few minorities have any real control over the way their cultures are depicted

m e general feeling is that people in Giffnock and Gearraidh Sheilidh may have the right to watch programmes, but God forbid that any- body should suggest that they have the right to actually make programmes about the world they live in - in other words, that they have a right to influence and control the creation of images of the society in which they live. [ZOl

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Since Angus Campbell wrote this, the Gaels now have their own television station: a power- ful means of arresting the decline of their langu- age among the young, and editorially determin- ing the images it presents to, and of, itself. However, it would be as naive to suggest that the complex issues surrounding the modern survival of minority cultures can be addressed by the belated provision of a television station, as it would to suggest an interpretation of cul- ture as a fixed concept of nostalgia - resistant to change and adaptation. Furthermore, other issues require deeper analysis: for example, the place of minorities within minorities, which in itself raises some large and serious questions about the ‘ownership’ of tradition and how tra- ditions are sometimes used negatively, as a means of keeping the ‘incomer’ or immigrant at bay: the narrow psychology of a siege men- tality. How far should the ‘incomer’/immigrant be expected to adapt or suppress his or her indigenous culture in order to ‘fit-in’ with that of the ‘host’ society? On what grounds do different cultures meet?

The truth about a society, it would seem, is to be found in the actual relation, always excep- tionally complicated, between the system of decision, the system of communication and learning, the system of maintenance and the system of generation and nurture. [211

History has made us what we are - but it does not necessarily have to determine what we will be: the historical burden of closed attitudes does not have to be the inheritance of future generations. We are free to challenge the assumptions and circumstances of the past, and make the world a richer place for the children we teach by showing them that the world is smaller and more fragile than our grandfathers knew: many things will change, and communi- ties will need greater understanding of each other, and mutual respect for the differences that make them unique, yet interdependent. This means allowing minority cultures to express themselves without fear or intimidation, and so assist the next generation of children to develop inclusive attitudes, free from the dogma, ignorance and the selfishness of exclus-

ive traditions. To re-write the quotation with which I began this paper, I believe: No culture, no tradition of any society, has its complete meaning alone.

Such ideals begin with education: and that within education, the study of the creativity of other cultures is a powerfully civilising influ- ence in the process of forming reflective and mutually generous human societies.

I believe that the basis of all tradition is con- textual; and if culture is the medium through which we express and define ourselves in the search for meaning and identity, then it follows that the meanings we derive from culture are determined by the contextual relationship the culture allows us to form in connecting the values of its traditions with our experience. Forging and interpreting cultural connections is the contribution a civilising arts education makes to a modern pluralistic society. The cre- ative imagination is not the monopoly of any one culture: it is a universal attribute of all humanity, contingent only on circumstance and environment - but not upon content, nor conti- nent.

A central duality of modernism is, on one hand, an unprecedented mingling of cultures, which is a positive departure from the past; and on the other, the threat that the mass con- sumerism of multi-national capitalism will destroy the values of minority cultures and stan- dardise the world’s societies in the image of the strongest political economy - currently the United States. I do not know how this dilemma can be resolved. Neither do I believe that cul- tural change should, necessarily, be resisted -

cultures are not set in aspic for the delectation of middle-class aesthetes - and there is no bucolic vision of a golden past to which they can return. History is the collective memory of cultural experience in search of self-knowledge, and although we can never be conscious of its destiny - it would seem that the direction of the future tends to be determined by those who best ’possess’ (teach) the evidence of their past.

To better understand art, we require knowl- edge of the cultural traditions which have shaped its evolution as a symbolic form of com- munication set within social-historical contexts.

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Symbolic forms are constantly valued and evaluated, acclaimed and contested, by the individuals who produce and receive them. [221

To do this, we adopt rules and conventions that are socially inculcated, not through a mechan- ical process but by the reflective practice of experience - in itself an educative process. For instance, the study and analysis of painting, is in effect the study of social and cultural values embedded in the symbolic forms of the langu- age of painting.

Difficulty occurs when the rules and conven- tions for the interpretation of such symbolic forms are claimed as the exclusive cultural property of a particular class or society. More- over, it is through the exclusivity of the right of interpretation that the ‘ownership’ of a tradition is constituted. And, as I have already men- tioned, it could be argued that the exclusivity with which certain forms of cultural property are held is a method of protecting ‘traditional values’ from individuals or competing societies, and thus preventing them from arriving at dif- ferent interpretations that might challenge the established social order.

The reception and appropriation of tradition is a continuous process of interpretation, inte- gration and incorporation. Interestingly, the modern concept of the avant-garde subvers- ively reversed this order: incorporation of the conventions of other traditions was initiated by the artist as an act of rebellion in the face of alienation from hidher ‘own’ tradition; invariably, critical interpretation followed in the guard’s van with all the incredulity of selective hindsight. However, the failure of the avant- garde was that it attempted to uncouple culture from tradition by embracing false notions of the autonomy and freedom of the artist from his- tory:

l%e artist is not responsible to anyone. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility con- sists in an attitude, an attitude to the work he does ... n e r e is no communication with any

public whatsoever ... It is the end-product which counts, in my case the picture. [231

Here, the contemporary and critically acclaimed German artist, Georg Baselitz, epitomises the individualistic arrogance of modernity. Contrast it with the following:

Art cannot exist unless a working communi- cation can be reached, and this communi- cation is an activity in which both artist and spectator participate. When art communicates, a human experience is actively offered and actively received. Below this activity threshold there can be no art. [241

Here, the artist is not the isolated individualist, but a voice of her community.

Some cultures base their values on the notion that they are part of a single tradition, and that interaction with other cultures dilutes or threat- ens their individuality, and ultimately, their sur- vival. But to return to the second quotation at the head of this paper, I believe: N o one today is purely one thing ... and neither is any culture.

In his influential book, Art and Experience, the philosopher, John Dewey states: Bere is no art in which there is only a single tradition. [25]

A pluralistic society requires a pluralistic knowl- edge of other traditions and an inclusive histori- cal consciousness of the shared cultural prop- erty of all human creativity.

The purpose of art in education is to contrib- ute to this ambition through the selection and interpretation of structures of human feeling embodied across history, rather than in rever- ence for the iconic preciousness of any single tradition.

To do this we need to be able to show that any interpretation we make of art is conscious of the cultural alternatives available across his- tory, and that we are aware, as teachers, of the real nature and responsibilities of our choices.

Robert Clarke

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Notes and References

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Eliot, T. S. (1932) Critical Essays. Faber and Faber, p. 15 Said, E. W. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. Chatto & Windus, p. 407 Eliot, T. S. (1919) Tradition and Individual Tal- ent, cited by Pateman, T. (1991) A Guide to Aes- thetic Criticism and the Arts in Education. Falmer, p. 183 Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution. Chatto & Windus, p. 57 Dacos, N. (1994) Italian Art and the Art of Antiquity. Polity, p. 116 Coutts-Smith, K. (1991) Observations on the problem of cultural colonialism, Hillier, S. (Ed) The Myth of Primitivism. Routledge, p. 20 Baxandall, M. (1972) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth CentuT Italy. Oxford University Press, p. 3 Levi-Strauss, C. G. cited in Berger. J. (1972) in Ways ofseeing. Pelican, p 84 Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. Pelican, p. 95 Said, E. Op. cit, p. 69 Gablik, S. (1992) Has Modernism Failed? Thames & Hudson, p. 58 Ibid. p. 97

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Caruana, W. (1993) Aboriginal Art. Thames & Hudson, p. 10 Fuller, P. (1990) Aboriginal Arts in Images of God: 7;be Consolations of Lost Illusions. Hogarth Press, p. 174 Benjamin, W. (1992) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Illuminations. Arendt, H. (Ed) Fontana, pp. 21144 Fuller, P. Op. cit, p. 174 Hobsbawn, E. and Ranger, T. (Eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition Coombes, A. E. (1991) Ethnography and the For- mation of National and Cultural Identities, Hill- ier, s. The Myth of Primitivism. Routledge, pp. 189-2 14 Said, E. Op. cit Campbell, A. (1986) 7;be Moving Picture. Acair, p. 101 Williams, R. Op. cit, p. 136 Thompson, J. B. (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture. Stanford, p. 146 Baselitz, G. cited in Gablik, S. Op. cit Williams, R. Op. cit Said, E. Op. cit, p. 407