Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2014

This article is about changes in fine art pedagogy that took place at two North American institutions: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design from 1967 and California Institute of the Arts from 1970. At these, a radical, new paradigm of art pedagogy came to be developed, which has had widespread ramifications. This placed an emphasis on criticality, information and interdisciplinary practice rather than self-expression, formalism and media-specific instruction. It began as an onslaught on modernism, commodification and traditional art practice and discourse. However, through bringing process and enquiry to the fore, this paradigm came to accommodate work in any medium, whether traditional or not, provided it could be explained and justified. Although some aspects of these institution’s pedagogy, such as their formal assessment regimes, would seem very unfamiliar today, in general the pedagogy they developed has come to dominate fine art courses throughout the world. By providing this historical account, it is intended that the present day context is brought into sharper focus.

As tutors at Winchester School of Art we have worked through a series of copy projects over the past four years. We began remaking historic art objects including Anthony Caro’s Early One Morning (1962) and Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960). Works were fabricated collectively with undergraduate fine art students and staged at an end of term event. The project developed to reconstruct apparatus to make copies, including François Willème’s Photosculpture apparatus: a paradigm for nineteenth-century modernity that provides a genealogy for three-dimensional (3D) prototyping and is arguably an antecedent of cybernetic culture. Obsolete technological positions were restaged in order to better understand current cultures. Over this process, which we characterize as a material historiography, we have worked collaboratively with archaeologists at the University of Southampton to share practice and knowledge around both contemporary visualization technologies and ancient processes, most recently working speculatively through the production process of carved Neolithic artefacts. Both projects draw together technical and contextual teaching and define new uses of space and collective research structures.

Art schools in Poland and Eastern Europe after the collapse of Berlin Wall went through various changes, including liberalization of their educational programmes, modernization of buildings and equipment, commercialization of their educational content, and last but not least, the preservation of the old balance of power within the institution. Art schools are also facing a new demand: how to supply ‘workers’ for the new creative industries and art markets. According to the author, many questions from the beginning of the transformation still remain open to answer: What is an Academy of Arts? Does the Academy have to be a fossil devoid of life, a Jurassic Park where frightening and comical figures can be met? Save for odd exceptions, art schools are facing the dilemma of whether adherence to tradition is more important than subjection to current tendencies in art. Writing about the dilemmas facing art education in Poland he refers to the book Teaching Art in a Neoliberal Realm (2011) edited by Paul De Bruyne and Pascal Gielen, with a special focus on Daniel Muzyczuk’s article about neo-liberal changes in the Polish art education.

The growing interest of many artists in alternative spaces for artistic creation and the interdisciplinary nature of most educational curricula have encouraged the teaching staff at the University of Barcelona’s Faculty of Fine Arts to adopt a new methodology – an educational turn – that offers students the direct experience of creating ‘artworks in the user’s space’. This article reports on that experience, ‘Art in the Library’, which in recent years has formed part of the University’s Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, in the subject Interdisciplinary Attitudes. The student artworks reported on in this paper are site-specific projects, which constitute a professional challenge for their creators and were exhibited to a general public. The authors of the paper propose that ‘Art in the Library’ meets a challenge in contemporary educational practice and understands art education as an act of creation.

This article will explore the FLΔG Collective’s ‘cake methodology’ developed to enable a shared praxis between a group of multi-level (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.) fine art students and staff. Cake methodology is a term developed to frame FLΔG’s working methods analytically by describing the methods and exploring how these approaches may have a critical purpose both within and potentially outside the art educational institution. The methods include baking and sharing cakes within the group and with participants, but rely on forms of engagement that move beyond the association with food or eating. Praxis, as the process by which a theory, lesson or skill is enacted, practiced or performed, is central to our approach, and was developed through an exploration of, and engagement with, the ‘educational turn’ in the contemporary art world. FLΔG, however, re-turned the exploration of pedagogy and art to the academy, and cake methodology emerged as part of this ‘re-turn’. The praxis afforded by this re-turn can thus perhaps provide a perspective on current higher art education and on aspects of relational and socially engaged art practice. Two FLΔG events will be used to exemplify this methodology: Workshop in the Workshop at Chelsea School of Arts (2014) and Quiet Cake Conversation at The Showroom Gallery (2013).

This research article looks to provide an alternate account of creative pedagogy to the predominant view that maintaining change and the generation of options is the bastion of creative teaching. A tenet of modern art is that it eschews continuity of form in favour of ideological disjuncture. The zenith of this paralogical development being the dematerialization of the art object and the conceptual turn in art making. From 1968 onwards, free from material certainties, and aiming itself beyond the commodity address of historic modernism, contemporary art has proved to be an uncomfortable relative of education. Artistic practice has developed a problematic relationship to knowledge. A contested and unshackled pursuit, it possesses no consistent method and its teaching is cloaked in the overtly mythological outline of tacit-knowledge. The resurgence in popularity of Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not-Knowing is symptomatic of the hiatus that is now at the centre of the expansion of artistic pedagogy. This article sees the known and accepted view of the development of art pedagogy subjugating a parallel account of creative development that has stasis, dwelling and the maintaining of a fixed position at its core. This research suggests that an alternate account of artistic creativity can be developed from a number of artists who emerged during early and late 1960s whose artistic contribution was to establish a fixed and defined position that has remained unchanged for over 40 years. This article will look at the artistic work of two British Artists who have long-standing relationships to British and European Art education (Alan Charlton, Roger Ackling) to present a counterpoint to ‘not knowing’.

The aim of the Creative Curating at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway, is to create an understanding of what it takes to shape and carry out curatorial projects. The programme is built around two focal points: the development of individual projects realized in ‘real-life’ and the internal exchange of knowledge during the seminars. One of the questions raised in the process of creating the programme was how to institute numerous voices as an integral part of the learning environment. Theoretical sources for this article come from Mikhail Bakhtin and Paulo Freire. Both discuss dialogue as part of a learning environment. Bakhtin sees the dialogue as an on-going event that involves manifold voices of the past and the future. For Freire dialogue is a creative activity; it happens between people with common interest and mutual respect. Both underline how real dialogue can challenge pre-conceived ideas, demanding and creating critical thinking.

Written and verbal skills have risen in prominence within today’s fine art curriculum. Their provision is clearly outlined and quantified, and this is beginning to overshadow what happens ‘in the studio’. This article outlines ‘the problem with making’ in fine art education today by focusing on the teaching of drawing, asking the questions: what exactly are the skills of drawing, what is gained by learning them, and how, in practice, are they intertwined with theory? By establishing the educational value of drawing, we might then influence ways skills in general are perceived and deployed within fine art education today.