Full text

Tomaž Zupančič,
University of Maribor,
Faculty of Education,
Slovenija
tomaz.zupancic@uni-mb.si
Bridge over troubled water
(A bit on contemporary art, a lot on art education and maybe something on society)
Abstract
Who should be blamed for the gap between contemporary visual art and the society?
Certainly this is not art, irrespective of how strange could be at the first sight. Contemporary
art education should build the bridge over troubled water of incomprehension between
contemporary visual culture and the society. According to Arthur Efland the main purpose of
art education in a post-modern era is to widen and deepen our understanding of the cultural
landscape we inhabit. Today’s art education involves contemporary art into classroom by
using the same methods, attitudes, principles that determine and are characteristic for
contemporary art. It stresses teacher’s descending the pedestal, the diversity of
comprehending, reading artworks and other principles. An artist who is critical of Society
sees as a creator, not a destroyer. Contemporary art education tries to do its best and step
toward contemporary art, enjoy it and permit it to mirror and reflect the other, sometimes the
dark side of ourselves.
Introduction
Art educational theories have been stressing important art educational problems for
the last two decades: “The practice of art education in schools and colleges developed from
a form of modernist values and ideas adopted in the early years of this /Twentieth/ century.
The world proposed by Modernism was one untroubled by the discourses of other disciplines
or views. This now seems anachronistic but much art teaching still measures and defines
itself in relation to the particular practices and materials which are thought to be intrinsic to it.
Largely dissociated from everyday life, art can seem both mystifying and irrelevant to many
young people, who see little or no relation between it and the things that are important to
them” (Cole, 1996, p. 146).
This is one of the reasons for the gap between contemporary visual art and the
society. It seems that a lot of people are stuck in the early 20th century. Maybe they can
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accept Picasso and abstract art but they have serious problems with Duchamp, Beuys and
other contemporary, conceptual based art practices. The following question is not rare even
among art educators: Should we blame art for this? Is the art itself responsible that we are
squatting on different river banks, gazing into the muddy river and despairing. Why not?
Contemporary art is stinking (Piero Manzoni: Merde d´Artista), freaky (Stelarc´s obsolete
body performances), grotesque (Ai Weiwei: Fuck you), distorted, ugly, etc. For example
Herman Nitch´s bloody artistic rituals on Austrian countryside that probably do not contribute
to the better understanding of contemporary art.
Ai Weiwei
Of course art cannot be blamed, irrespective of how strange it appears to be at first
glance. Art education or more competent art educators should build the bridge over the
troubled water of incomprehension between contemporary visual culture and the society.
In what direction should today’s art educators be oriented – toward traditional
or toward contemporary art?
Different types of art educators have different affinities. Jakobi (1996) wrote: “A
traditionally oriented art educator feels authorised to communicate old aesthetic relations to
students. His task in classes is traditionally oriented. He tries to provide support to students,
which is supposed to help them find their way in a complex multitude of aesthetic value
judgements. A logician believes that art helps in and leads to the discovery of the world and
tries to thrust his beliefs upon his students. His understanding of teaching is based on logic.
Students are supposed to comprehend art rationally. The third type of art educator, the
avant-gardist, glorifies art as a means of change. Classes held by such a teacher will
discover, analyse and criticise. Students are supposed to liberate themselves, plan and
engage. The avant-gardist believes in the development of life’s creativity of each individual.
The avant-gardist’s educational work and comprehension of art are directed towards saving
the world.” (p. 132) Jakobi points out that each of the described teachers possess
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knowledge, facts and abilities that are valuable for visual arts education, but with its onesidedness, each individual type in a way trims visual arts education.
But, irrespective of Jakobi´s typology, some problems of contemporary art education
are above the personal educational style. One of the major questions of contemporary art
education is: “What are the obligations of art educators to society, if any? Arthur Efland
(1992) points at this problem with different words: “Given the crises in culture, what is the
purpose of art and hence, the purpose of art education in a postmodern era?” (p. 118). His
answer is: “In my view the function of the arts continues to be “reality construction.” And
hence we teach art to widen and deepen our understanding of the cultural landscape we
inhabit” (p. 118). Establishing the relation between students and art culture is one of the two
major tasks in contemporary art education. “In institutional art education, contemporary art
education practices operate predominantly in two directions. The first leads towards the
development of pupils’ artistic, creative and other skills and the second towards establishing
an appropriate attitude towards fine arts and art culture in general.” (Duh, 2010)
So, teaching sciences enables students to understand the natural world around them
and teaching arts enables students to understand the cultural world around them.
SCIENCE
ART
NATURAL WORLD
CULTURAL WORLD
If an object of contemporary visual culture offers us something that we, as average
consumers, do not agree with (for example a destroyed gallery, which Hans Haacke did in
his famous installation Germania in Venice in 1993 as one of the countless examples in
contemporary art), the problem is not in art, but in us and our incapacity to understand the
cultural world around us.
What competencies of today’s art educator are essential if he/she wants to
deepen pupils’ understanding of the cultural landscape they inhabit?
Manfred Blohm (1995) represents the thesis for contemporary art education. He
stressed that the only, proper and successful way of involving contemporary art in
classrooms is by using the same methods, attitudes and principles that determine and are
characteristic of contemporary art.
“More modern approaches to planning, implementation and evaluation of
pedagogical work should be present in all subjects, including visual art education or in
subjects with artistic content.” (Duh, Herzog, 2010, p. 176) Competent art educators show
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interest in contemporary art, they visit contemporary art exhibitions, follow contemporary art
theories and so on.
The art educator should be competent to raise open-minded, fluent, indefinite and
mutual dialogue among students and among students and the teacher. Teacher – student
relations should be based on equality. A teacher is not a person consecrated or initiated into
the holy secrets of contemporary art, he/she is not the only one in the classroom who
understands and properly interprets the art to students. Well, the teacher operates with much
more data and has more experiences than students. This teacher shares this information
with students, but the interpretations must be their personal and individual matters.
(Zupancic, 2007).
A competent art educator considers contemporary art educational principles, among
them the diversity of comprehending and reading artworks. The students’ responses on
contemporary art practices are, irrespective of the ways and manners they are using,
legitimate. There is no such thing as a wrong interpretation of art. He or she is well aware of
the impossibility of foretelling the results of the art educational process. Contemporary
artworks, made by adult artists – and the same holds for the students’ artwork – are a kind of
a work in progress. Rules, principles and didactic methods in the contemporary art classroom
are loose and enable different ways of representing ideas, combinations, art techniques,
interpretations and similar, so the results of artistic practices in the classroom cannot be
predicted.
The art educator should be competent to discuss contemporary aesthetic problems
with students. Traditionally oriented and/or traditionally educated (older) art educators should
be open-minded to expand old aesthetic relations with contemporary attitudes. These views
are often diametrical to the old ones.
Oliviero Toscani, an Italian artist and photographer, well known as the author of many
provocative Benetton’s advertising campaigns and an acknowledged artist can serve as an
example. In one of his interviews in 2001, he said:
“Question: You said that only dumb people search for beauty in beautiful things.
Where do you search for it?
Answer: No, I said that dumb people see beauty only in beautiful things. This is
something completely different. They don’t even try searching for it. They take what they see.
Those are dumb people, which doesn’t mean that I myself am not sometimes dumb.
Q: What can still excite you after all these years of observing the world through the
lens? What would you describe as beauty?
A: Beauty is...something that shocks and shakes you. Sometimes, beauty can also be
in tragedies, which is evident in classic art. However, we are living in times, when beauty has
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become a certain pattern and we thus react only to certain rules of beauty that are dictated
by the media and fashion magazines. This isn’t beauty. This is boredom.” (Milek, 2001, p. 20)
The same attitude toward contemporary aesthetic is held by Vinko Globokar,
Slovenian composer and trombone player. He expressed his standpoint on this matter in an
interview:
Question: Your music is very tuneless. Can’t you find any inspiration for the melody?
Answer: Ha-ha! No, none. Not for the melody. It’s ugly, isn’t it?
Q: No, not ugly.
A: Aggressive?
Q: No. I would rather say shocking.
A: Shocking! Bravo! Look at the world today. Already in the 1960s, the philosopher
Herbert Marcuse said that a happy end in art can only be a lie. This should be put on all your
walls.
Q: Isn’t this rather pessimistic?
A: Why pessimistic? It’s a fact. Do you find what’s going on in the world, in terms of
politics, in Afghanistan for example, funny? Should this be sung about with beautiful notes
and a hand over one’s heart?
Q: No, but not everything is so black. I don’t believe we should lie or create illusions,
though.
A: Ha-ha! There are two viewpoints in music. One is what you talk about, i.e. to
entertain the public. This means that you take on the role of a clown and hide the dirty
laundry. There is also another direction, where art takes on the role of society’s critic, a critic
of the environment in which you operate and a critic of yourself. And in that moment, the art
is automatically unkind. Unfortunately, the world of entertainment too often stultifies and
saddens joy.” (Klarič, 2002, p. 22)
Not only artists but also (part of) contemporary art theory stresses this attitude. Peter
Weibel commented critically on Freud’s theory of culture and society in his paper presented
at the Living with Genocide symposium in the Ljubljana museum of Modern Art in 1996:
“According to Freud’s theory, culture and society are founded on the function of two drives:
Eros and Thanatos. But while Freud held that the suppression of destruction and aggression
by means of beauty, purity and order enables the development of culture, Weibel claims that
the goal of art is to reveal Thanatos as something belonging not only to nature, but also to
society and its culture. Art which aims to surpass naïve humanism should not hide the dark
side of human nature; instead, it should cut into the body of the society which produces
aggression and destruction and in which it forms a part.” (Briški, 1999, p. 56)
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The art educator should be competent to reveal the nature of contemporary artistic
production to the students, or better said to present them the mechanisms of forming today’s
artistic collections. Observing contemporary artworks (starting with Duchamp´s Fountain in
1917 and onwards), the students often ask the teacher: “Can anybody be an artist?”
Considering readymades (things from everyday life in the gallery), the question is justified
and expected. In one of the artworks from the Venice Biennale of contemporary Art in 2011 ,
the artist Norma Jeane put 100 kilos of red, white and black plasticine in the middle of the
empty gallery space and asked the visitors to make something of it.
Picture 1: NORMA JEANE - #Jan25 (#Sidibouzid, #Feb12, #Feb14, #Feb17...),
Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2011, plasticine (Photo: Tomaž Zupančič)
Competent art educators can provide the answer to the student who wants to know if
he/she can also become an artist by bringing plasticine into the gallery. They are able to
explain that repeating the artistic act, no matter how simple or profane it is, will not put them
on an artistic pedestal. They are able to discuss the nature and systems of creating
contemporary art. They are able to connect the problem with Kandinsky´s idea of “artists as
the most sensitive nerves of the society”. They introduce the students to Boris Groys´s term
“the logic of collection” (Groys, 2002, p. 83), where the answer to the question what
establishes art as art cannot be found in simple artwork (we can observe a urinal for 100
years and we will not get the answer). Instead, they enable the students to observe the
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whole collection and try to find the answer from that perspective. They are able to argue for
the rejection of the universal rules for judging contemporary art and so on.
Conclusion
Contemporary art educators can love or hate contemporary art, they can be annoyed
with the so-called “curator’s predomination over artists”, they can be aware that there is a lot
of bluffing in contemporary art, they can even think that Duchamp´s Fountain, although
declared as the most influential artwork of the twentieth century, is still nothing more than just
a common urinal. They can envy Damien Hirst (the richest living artist of today) and his
millions and they can think about contemporary art whatever they want, but they cannot
close their eyes and pretend that (often) ugly and annoying contemporary art has
disappeared, they cannot deny its existence. This is the culture we live in. This is our culture.
Contemporary visual art is here and it is nothing worse than art before. It is just different. The
artists did not suddenly become bluffers and cheaters; they still are, according to Wasilij
Kandinsky, “the most sensitive nerves of the society”. They just express themselves in a
different way. So, a competent art educator is well aware that there is no other way as to do
our best and step toward contemporary art, enjoy it and permit it to mirror and reflect the
other, sometimes the dark side of ourselves.
References
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