Promise and paradox: Art education in the postmodern arena

Promise and paradox:
Art education in the postmodern arena

Adapted from original publication in
Studies in Art Education, 35, 4., pp. 209-217.

Dennis Earl Fehr, Ed.D

Someone tells a new mother, “What a beautiful baby.”
The mother replies, “Oh, that's nothing. You should see her picture.”

Historians inform us that the late twentieth century demarcates a new historical period (Crimp, 1981; Nicholson, 1990; Wallis, 1991). Few, however, seem to agree on what the period is. At first no one even knew what to call it. While some scholars searched for a name, others started calling it postmodernism. Like nature, language abhors a vacuum, so that name took. This naming process reflects one certainty of postmodernism: its ambivalence. Ambivalence is a common theme in the artwork of the last two decades. A paradox of postmodernism—and perhaps its primary virtue—is that its ambivalence is deliberate. The notion of Truth is replaced with that of purposeful uncertainty. The postmodern visual image walks the tightrope between high suggestibility and thorough ambiguity. The postmodern notion of art as `text' signifies the instability of the image as `sign'—that is, as a visual symbol that possess only one meaning. Duchamp's ready-mades went against the modernist grain by making clear that the art object was a result of discourse, not revelation. Only recently has this idea been fully explored. Artists such as Sherrie Levine, Mary Kelly, and Barbara Kruger expose language as a codifier of cultural values. Through their appropriation of images, the site specificity and impermanence of their work, and the media hybridization that results, such artists have notched the earmarks of postmodern art.

One might expect postmodern currents to have some impact on the art education field; yet art educators, who purport to teach of the art world—one of our society's most creative segments—are themselves often conservative. Art education when properly understood is complicated. Postmodern art educators realize that they are not selling out to the modernist cant of the `transcendental artwork' in acknowledging that works of art still can be records of artists' prescience, of their heightened sensitivity to the nuances of cultural change. However, this message is wasted when art is removed from daily life. Not only society, but the art community itself, has failed to realize—to the considerable loss of both—that art education programs may the best vehicle for the insertion of art back into daily life.

Section I delineates seven issues that define postmodernism and the impact of these issues on the art community. Section II delineates six responses to these issues. The unmatched numbers indicate that Section II is not a point-by-point reaction to the items in Section I. Such a reaction would imply a linear relationship between postmodernism in general and art education in particular. In fact postmodernism is a philosophical pastiche that covers the postindustrial West. Art education is one of the many squares making up this patchwork.

Certain values emergent within postmodernism are reminiscent of values more typical of pre-than post-Renaissance Europe. Values that today would be called socialist or even Marxist were prominent through the Middle Ages but disappeared with the advent of the Renaissance. Prior to the Renaissance, the artisan worked free of the notion of art as a superhuman activity. Artistic production was typically anonymous and collective. Master builders and painters took novices, but even then, the products were considered group efforts (Efland, 1990). Wolff, writing in 1981, pointed out that while the formalized communal system of artistic production, that is, the medieval monastic model, has largely disappeared, the view of the artist working independently has obscured the fact that art has continued to be a collective product. While sometimes described as the director's work, film obviously is a collective effort of director, writers, actors, technicians, producers, financiers, attorneys, marketing specialists, and others. Comparable lists can be made for music and theater. Production in the static visual arts is more similar than dissimilar to that of film, music, or theater. Someone educates the artists, someone makes the artist's materials, someone criticizes the work, someone places it in its historical context, someone sells the work, and someone buys it.

Marxist analysis of culture—unlike the Id-Like egocentrism of capitalism with its embracing of the notion of humanity as ontologically primary—starts not with humanity per se, but with a given socio-economic period. It examines existing modes of production, how these modes bear on class relations, and the nature of the resulting class struggle. People form the point of arrival, rather than departure, of such analysis. The modernist construct of the `artist as bearer of meaning' is attuned to the capitalist worldview, with its emphasis on the word “I”—”Through hard work, I can buy myself a better life” (an instance of what Althusser in 1976 referred to as the “fetishism of man”)—as opposed to the socialistic emphasis on “we”—”Through hard work, we can make the world a better place for everyone, including myself.” The postmodern construct views the artist as cultural producer, and the work of art as a dialectical catalyst, a beginning rather than a monument. Wolff (1981) writes that the replacement of the notion of artistic creation with that of cultural production is not a demotion, but rather a means to discuss art divorced of its baggage of mysticism. Before as well as after a work is finished, the artist is less central to its production than the Western humanistic concept of the artist implies, even as bearer of the artwork's meaning. An image is not a bundle of shapes releasing a single theological meaning—the message of the Artist God—but a multidimensional space in which a variety of shapes, none of them original, blend and clash. The image's meaning is never singular, but rather, an amalgam of quotations cobbled together from countless corners of culture. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this refusal to fix meaning is that, followed to its logical conclusion, this refusal leads to the refusal of the Western concept of God and Her/His/Its hypostasis—reason (Barthes, 1977).

The resurgence of pre-Renaissance currents poses intriguing possibilities for art as an instrument of social change, but art is a social bellwether only when it gets people's attention. An important response is the new iconography of empowerment being evolved by women and artists of color. As these groups seek access to the mainstream, their new visions, their new images, penetrate social consciousness. This has enabled women and artists of color in the art world to make progress toward visibility equal to that of white males, although that level of visibility still has not been achieved (Parker and Pollock, 1981: Collins and Sandell, 1984; Gadon, 1989; Chadwick, 1990).

A corollary of this issue is that the peregrination toward an egalitarian society calls not only for a new iconography for the female and the artist of color, but for the white male artist as well. Postmodern thought is addressing once-begged questions about commodified art and its ugly cousin, the heroic artistic genius. The artist as white male hero is exposed as a modern myth. The traditional male hero has served neither male nor female well. The hero's journey has taken him away from his emotions, away from gender harmony. Women and artists of color are well on the way to developing a postmodern visual iconography, but that of the postmodern white make is only beginning to emerge. The form it will take remains one of art's question marks as we enter the twenty-first century.

Until postmodern ambivalence emerged within the scholarly community, art history was a tidy affair. Every artist and movement had its own drawer. Now the entire chest of drawers is being called into question. Who made the chest of drawers, and why? Who wanted to make it, but could not get a job at the furniture factory? And is it only a chest of drawers? Is it even a chest of drawers? Is it furniture at all, or is that just a label imposed by powerbrokers to create an artificial line between furniture and the rest of cultural production? And last, who sells the chest of drawers, who buys it, and how is the money divvied up? What emerges is a mis-en-scene in which power lies more and more with the historian, who defines the past; the critic, who establishes the present; and the media, toward which both must genuflect. They determine the hierarchies, set the agendas, and make the rules. It is as important for oppressed groups to establish representation in these circles as within the circle of artists themselves. The art pedagogist may conduct lifelong relationships with works of art without ever seeing the originals. We depend on the media as intercessory. These new conditions lend uneasy meaning to Wallis's (1991) observation that the issue may now be less how critics can serve artists than how artists can serve critics. Today an artist's work may have no meaning, for all intents, until it is blessed by the media.

One aspect of this restructuring of power forms a nexus of agreement among post-modernists—modernism's substrata of dominance and commodification must be dug up and replaced with something more secure. One debate today is whether women and artists of color should work for increased recognition within the mainstream—with the risk of being satisfied merely with higher quotas and thereby perpetuating old censorship systems—or continue to develop alternative galleries and educational programs—with the risk of perpetuating the status of annex to the mainstream. Both avenues should be pursued, but directing primary attention to this debate misses the more important point—neither necessarily places marginalized groups in the center of the critical dialectic that defines supposedly important ideas, good art, and major artists. The highest level of power in today's art world exists within this discourse. This power is held less by the artist than in the past. The power shift is away from the visual image—heretofore the obvious center—toward the once-peripheral written record of that image.

Perhaps as a backlash against the power shift from image to text, the image is becoming more accessible as it becomes more political. In the 1970s, European critical theorists—the Frankfurt School, Roland Barthes, Michael Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, Continental feminists, and British film theorists, among others—fueled change in American art and criticism. By ignoring the definitions of art object as Art Object and artist as Artist, they shifted attention to the agendas behind modernism. One effect of this extensive new body of theory was to reintroduce representational imagery to visual art. This development was inevitable: If art was to become politicized, it needed recognizable references to convey its socially critical messages. Thus far the art of this era called the postmodern has drawn heavily on recognizable imagery, although often presented in visual terms that reflect late twentieth century life, such as neo-expressionism, installations, graffiti art, performance art, and computer and video imagery. Sociopolitical subject matter—advocating the concerns of ethnic, religious, and environmental groups as well as women—is now common. However, that familiar ideologeme, the apolitical modern artist, and the accompanying attitude that activist art is beneath pure art, are as resistant to extinction as are the tired claims that craft is beneath art or that folk art is beneath fine art.

This issue is raised by Garber (1992), who summarizes an account by bell hooks which dismantles the myth of the universal standard viewpoint and the elitist view that art is better than craft—two favored modern legends. hooks refers to the differing criteria with which she and her grandmother evaluated the quilts her grandmother made. Her grandmother preferred the fancy quilts made later in her life, when she was free of the economic need to produce a more utilitarian product. hooks preferred the quilts made for everyday use because to her they represented the story of the daily life of the African American woman. (In 1991 Alice Walker, in the short story Everyday Use, dealt with this issue and poignantly iterated the same message.) Faith Ringgold, raised in Harlem, began as a painter but turned to the fabrics she had watched her mother use as a dressmaker. She, like hooks, felt that quilts better expressed the seldom-voiced experience borne by black women in America (Henry, 1992). Her elaborate creations, known as `story quilts', combine painting and storytelling.

The repercussions of postmodern activism have generated developments on the international front. The phrase art world is taking on literal meaning. A welcome emergence onto the scene is being experienced by the nations of the newly-christened Pacific Rim, from Australia through Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, and the state of Hawaii. Each is at last being recognized for its artistic heritage (Madoff, 1992). The demise of Soviet communism—and its concomitant lock on artistic expression—has resulted in a renewal of energy among artists of the new Commonwealth. Akinsha (1992), writing from Moscow, reports that for the first time in years, a measure of pluralism has entered the scene. Not surprisingly, a new generation of Russian artists is seeking anchor in what they believe to be ideology-free bedrock. This rejection of communism establishes ironic kinship between them and the Western modernists of fifty years ago, who thought their denial of representation was a rejection of capitalism. Both instances undermine the presumption that art can be apolitical. The West awaits the emergence of a new generation of strong Russian artists. Because of the brutal censorship of the Soviet state, we have not seen one since before the revolution.

To summarize, the return to pre-Renaissance values, the deconstruction of the artist as bearer of meaning, the political activism of marginalized groups within the art world, the restructuring of power within the art community, the return to recognizable imagery, the blurring of borders between art and craft, and the validating of non-Western images signify a welcome rupture with the modern past. However, modernism likewise defined itself as a rupture with the past. One finds the rhetoric of the avant garde in the manifestos of both. The term avant garde, today pejoratively linked with the modernist artist-as-hero idea, was defined by filmmaker German Dulak in 1932 as “... a renewed expressiveness of image and sound, {a} break with established traditions to search out, in the .... visual and auditory realm, new emotional chords...detached from motives of profit, march{ing} bolding on towards the conquest of the new modes of expression...” (in Wallis, 1991). This sounds eerily like the rhetoric of postmodernism. Although postmodern in spirit, the advent of democratic government in the United States and France, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the women's suffrage movement happened under modernism's watch. Yet, profound as these developments have been, they failed to achieve gender or racial equality, at least so far. In fact, one of modernism's most defining characteristics is its patriarchy.

Will postmodernism eventually ossify into its antithesis—a rigid, historical moment that fails to achieve its ends? The short answer is yes. What then is the purpose of our interest? For one thing, the postmodern awareness that visual images form as well as reflect reality. Today's artist—as with artists throughout the ages—possesses heightened keenness of vision. Today this vision is generating images which shake the belief—heretofore held by the oppressed as well as the oppressor—that the oppressed are inferior. Art since the Renaissance has failed to rise to its potential, amounting to little more than a Richter Scale sending its skittering lines across canvases that measured society's tremors. The goal of art today is loftier: It wants to kick-start the earthquake (Fehr, 1993). And as always, a culture is measured by its art. Although it will not finish the job, postmodernism will move us closer to a democratic world.

Modern art at times posed as a diversion that attracted such serious comments as, “Isn't that interesting?” The prices if fetches today reveal that it was festooned with the ideology of capitalism. Further, the fact that it is hard to name even a dozen artists of color or women artists who were modern masters (note the gender-preferential term) reveals a further ideology of racism and sexism. As the disquieting messages of today's politicized art enter everyday life, they jolt our comfortable prejudices. Such art, unlike the abstraction of modernism with its tendency to bore or merely annoy the public, prods a complacent society's fat belly. Its angry agenda encourages oppressed groups to disclaim their unworthy inheritance by generating positive images of themselves and making truthful images of their lived experience—no matter how painful. Until these images are globally internalized, the groups that make them will at times fall prey to their own self doubts. Western culture is good at recouping radicalism; it has had a lot of practice. Postmodern philosophy has been accused of yielding to efforts to recast it in the modernist mold. Establishment efforts to co-opt the emerging power bases of the marginalized are inevitable—if their anger cannot be bought out, perhaps it can be stomped out—but counter-efforts have been adamant. Art educators can be among the leaders of this resistance against the status quo, beginning with preschool teachers on one end and university art education professors on the other. A degree of cooptation is certain, but marginalized groups of today have elbowed a space for themselves in socio-cultural discourse that will not be easily reclaimed. Panegyrics to the promise of postmodernism are premature.

The art teacher's attempts to insert artists of color and women artists retrospectively into a visual art canon constructed by white males is not enough. Such an approach misses the point. Time shrouds the gender definitions, political structures, economic constraints, religious currents, and racial prejudices under which such artists worked. Consequently, scholars are often forced to assign significance by reading between the lines, and they are not aided by the fact that the lines themselves are suspect. Although the notion of canonicity is antithetical to postmodernism, the art educator may be reluctant to dispense with it altogether. Something resembling a canon—one informed, presumably, by all voices—is needed to engage in discussion about art , outside as well as within art educational settings. If one can conceptualize a conciliation between canonicity and fluidity, one may have the answer.

Modernism viewed purity as an end. Historicism was the function of the museum; commodification the function of the gallery. The artist was visionary, the artwork unique. The job description of the art teacher, like that of Mary's lamb, was to “make the children laugh and play.” Oppression made the world go `round. Postmodernism seeks to dismantle these constructs. The place of postmodern art education lies outside reified modernist conventions. As the values that heretofore authenticated art are questioned, so the role of the art educator is redefined. The modern artist ignored society and consequently had little impact on it. The modern art educator ignored the art world and produced a visually illiterate generation. Today's art educators can learn from this lesson. Postmodern art education must be more than a chronological term. It cannot reject the oppressive notions of the past unless it understand them.

The well-intended naiveté of many who staff our museums, galleries, universities, and public school art classrooms, facilitates their efficiency at perpetuating that which they think they despise. The applaud fairness in the abstract as they acknowledge only European models. Unlike Orpheus, they do not turn and face the object of their affection—gender-inclusive, politically-powered, multicultural art education. Thus Eurydice is not compelled to return to Hades; hell, she never left in the first place. The irony is that these educators, like Hamlet's players, are poised and ready to learn the new lines of the postmodern playwright. Their problem is not that they reject the script; their problem is that they simply have not read it. Further, the acts of the play are placed in differing settings, only one of which is a school's art classroom. The postmodern teacher's noblest efforts fall short if the art of the streets is contemplated only in the sanitized environment of the school. To understand the arts of the people, teachers must take their students to the people, which means leaving the school building, or bring the people to their students, which means inviting guest artists and speakers from outside.

Postmodern ambivalence does emerge within art education in the ongoing elitist-versus-populist debate over discipline-based art education (DBAE). Is DBAE elitist? Connoisseurship historically has been a tool of class separation. Is it populist? Contemporary with the emergence of DBAE is a push for multicultural art education. As mentioned, sociopolitical subject matter has reappeared in the art world. Generated by marginalized groups, the tenor of this subject matter is, not surprisingly, leftist. Also as mentioned, the repercussions of this activism have generated developments on the international front. These two trends increase the relevance of multicultural study in the art classroom. The reprioritizing of art viewing under DBAE's aegis demonstrates the worth of such study. However, three of DBAE's disciplines are Western and therefore inappropriate for investigating Nonwestern cultures. On the other hand, critical theory democratically acknowledges the value of all world cultures and cautions against Western assumptions; hence offering a preferable means for such study.

Another issue of interest to art educators is that of access to the power lines that crisscross the art world, connecting art production, criticism, history, and aesthetic theory. Well over half of America's schoolchildren, if we combine females and children of color, belong to the groups to whom this access is denied. This circumstance yields a mandate for art educators—the melting down and recasting of the cultural engines that power that discrimination. One only pretends to teach students how to make art part of their lives if the mechanisms that limit their access to the art world are not exposed in one's classes.

As today's art educators address artists' return to recognizable imagery, the roles of the media, including the media of the media—computers, laser discs, CD ROM, video technology, and so on—emerge. The media of the media offer artists—including young ones—new possibilities for image-making. On a more profound level, the power of the media itself to shape culture affects visual art as much as any other area. Students must be given the analytical ability to recognize its power to manipulate. The media sometimes creates events—celebrities become heroes, and themes touted in advertising become values. The relations of leaders with their spouses can eclipse their relations with their constituents. To become famous can replace doing great deeds. One observes, for example, that basketball celebrity Earvin “Magic” Johnson, considered a hero because he is an athlete, further elevated his heroic status when he announced that he is HIV positive and became an activist for AIDS education. He admitted that he had frequent, unprotected sexual intercourse with numerous sex partners. His confessions have been followed with outpourings of support. Johnson is to be applauded for his activism, and his public support is not begrudged. However, as McPhail (1991) points out, a woman who has unprotected sexual intercourse with numerous sex partners is labeled something less than a hero. It was the infection of one heterosexual sports figure that was hailed as the nation's wake up call. May this call ring not only for AIDS awareness, but for awareness of our culture's misogyny and homophobia as well, and may it ring along with the school bell in art classrooms across America.

To train the public school art educator who is capable of these new responsibilities calls for a new university art education model. Historically art students studied in studios of established masters who were willing to take them on. Their work reflected the regional and personal qualities of their mentors' work. How are college art education majors trained at present? Today almost all of our artists are products of university programs, products of the Great Homogenization of Art. Art majors are trained according to curricula that differ little from institution to institution. An important component of many of these curricula is studio training, which places the emphasis on making art rather than viewing it. This traditional view may not be the most effective way to develop an artist. Whether for studio or art education majors, a curriculum that balances art history and criticism with studio may be a better way. As students look at art (presumably with informed guidance from their instructors), they assimilate a visual database from which to draw when they begin their own work. It seems reasonable to expect a high school senior to be familiar with the art of women and men throughout Western history and conversant in the art of tribal and Eastern civilizations.

The observations and recommendations in this paper point to the latent political power of art education. Whether one identifies postmodernism with the emergence of electronic capitalism, or the multinational corporation, or political activism in the arts, or the communications explosion, or the bristling militancy of marginalized groups, or the demise of the Second World, or the capitalist industrialization of the Third, such global changes in how we live demarcate a new agenda with its own critical features. The question in this? After scratching away the hoo-ha, do we find anything new under the sun? One notes points of ideational progress across the expanse of human expertise—for example, democracy and socialism—but what developments within postmodernism occasion reason for hope? Free public education, which unifies socialist and democratic streams, has made its value clear. The educated lead the world. We conclude from this that, next to parents, teachers collectively hold more power than anyone in society. The power of visual language was lost to the West a long time ago. Its dormancy is one of our greatest losses, unappreciated as such because people today do not miss what they never had. They fail to note the difference between a frill subject and a subject of untapped power. This power can take countless forms, one of which is to provide all citizens full participation in the democratic process. Art education's latent power is greater than we realize, and its moment is now. Art education can sweep away much of the detritus of prejudice that has encrusted Western civilization since its inception. A penchant for confusing technological advancement with informed democracy leads some to conclude that ours is the most enlightened of periods. Let us rather hope that a millennium from now, the twentieth century is considered the end of the dark ages. A new snytax is in the making, and art educators are well placed to facilitate the dissemination of this new reality.

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