introduction: the cultural significance of art

Introduction: the Cultural Significance of Art D A V I D T H I S T L E W 0 0 D United Kingdom

The VIIIth Regional Congress of the International Society for Education through Art (Europe, Afiica and the Middle East) was held, by kind patronage of the city authorities, in Bath in April 1985, under the auspices of the National Society for Education in Art and Design, I N s E A’S recognised national organisation in the United Kingdom. The N S E A D was host to some two-hundred- and-thirty delegates from thirty-six countries, and also to delegates attending the simultaneous Conference of the Art Advisers’ Association of the United Kingdom. Twenty-four exhibitions were mounted, and one hundred congress papers and workshops were presented, bringing to this country an enormous variety of insights into art and design education as practised throughout much of the world. Reciprocally, the N S E A D has devoted this special double issue of its Journal of Art and Design Education to sampling the proceedings of this I N S E A event.

The organisers issued an open invitation, to all members of I N S E A , to contribute to the most general of themes: Many Cultures; Many Arts. They offered no predetermined thesis and did not attempt to achieve a congress consensus. What they did nurture was the relatively modest ambition of encouraging a large number of art educationists, from all over the world, to represent their experiences, values, hopes, fears, predictions and beliefs in relation to this conjunction of concepts. And this indeed is what took place. Some contributors celebrated an interrelationship, even a fundamentally vital interrelationship, of ‘cultures’ and ‘arts’: others doubted that such correlations were necessarily use- ful. Most welcomed the plurality embraced by the theme, while recognising great difficulties in cross-cultural familiarity. To some, an interaction of as many as possible of the world’s cultures was the most pressing modern need, while others required not exactly isolation, so much as cultural consolidation, to sustain perhaps a weaker culture in the face of domination by others. In the realm of teaching, however, there was almost consistent accord: sound practice carries the dual obligation to know thor- oughly one’s own culture while being sensitive to those of others.

If there was no predetermined thesis there were certainly unwritten parameters, which must be stated if these proceedings are to be appreciated by non-delegates. The term ‘arts’ did not signify the rich mixture of creative activities which are its usual associations, for the congress included little music or dance, less drama or film, and negligible references to such essential arts as architecture, language, poetry or literature. It did engage, in

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Journal of Art & Design Education Vol 5, Nos 1 & 2, 1986

D A V I D T H I S T L E W O O D order of decreasing emphasis, drawing, painting, craftwork, Cultural Significance ritual, sculpture, design and photography; and just about equal of Art emphasis was afforded to the creative educational work of

children and adolescents in ‘Western’ countries and the expressive work of whole societies in the ‘Third World’. And the term ‘cultures’ was generally held to signify not those comprehensive, habitual interactions of thoughts, actions, values and truths which societies have evolved in relation to social, economic, geographic, religious and political circumstances, so much as the outward and visible manifestations of these pheno- mena as conveyed in societies’ visual and plastic art and their created artefacts.

What resulted from the linking of these two concepts, and their elaboration and comparison by contributors from throughout much of the world, was a corporate, urgent voicing of certain propositions. Art, while not being the whole of any particular cultural body, is nevertheless its heart and its face, for it nurtures its profoundest ideals and is their most expressive countenance. Societies whose arts are impoverished, either by neglect or over- regulation, are impoverished to similar degrees. Art cannot be relied upon as natural skill, but must substantially be taught. When its teaching assumes a low priority this is both evidence of cultural decline and a sign of accelerating deterioration.

Within the terms of these concerns the congress provided a barometer of international opinions and assumptions [l]. It is notable, for example, that within the profession of art education it is still considered productive to associate the art of Western children and that of non-Western, mature practitioners as belonging to a single field of enquiry, while the art of similarly mature Western men and women (unless they are self-taught or possess rudimentary skills) is seen as belonging to some other domain. This is perhaps explicable by the fact that art education is still dominated by Western requirements to demonstrate its intrinsic value-by establishing links with other disciplines, such as Geography or Local History, which may come to depend upon certain of its modes of perceiving and learning, and by demon- strating causal relationships between the quality of art and design in the classroom and the quality of art and design in the culture at large. It is not especially easy to argue such consistency in a Western context, since there are few obvious correlations between school art and design on the one hand and that of merchandised individuals and organisations on the other. The concept of a widespread, informed participation in creative art-making by the mature population is missing in Western societies; and there is thus an unavoidable temptation to annexe as examples those societies in which it is present. This is why Western early learning and the art of so-called ‘primitive’ societies are still theoreti- cally linked, even when many of the original premises (for example, relating to ‘primitiveness’) have been discredited. Whereas a hundred years ago it was thought that ‘primitive’ art was evidence of ‘early learning’ in an inevitable process of civili-

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sation, it now offers a model of integration for disintegrated cultures to aspire to.

This change of perception is of course obvious and did not require a congress to reveal it, but it was revealing to note that an association of child art and the art of technologically non- advanced societies is still made, however unconsciously. What was also apparent, though, was a change of attitude of more- recent origin: no contributor argued for an undifferentiated art education, to be adopted throughout the world irrespective of cultural diversities. This surely is of great significance, since many of the founding members of I N S E A had hoped to encourage some visual and plastic equivalent of Esperanto on the basis of those ‘universal’ principles detected in child art and the art of ‘primitive’ societies. As recently as 1970, in INSEA’S XXth World Congress held at Coventry, it still seemed right for delegates to propound a largely monistic view of art and art education. Art was to be presentation of feeling and thought embodied in created symbolism. Art education’s purpose was to be substantially remedial, stressing the human organism’s abilities to per- ceive by insight and intuition in a world which chiefly valued intellectual perception. Proof of art’s coequality with science could be found in the possibility of harnessing advanced techno- logy to intuition. Education was to accommodate the kind of experimental risk-taking peculiar to art but absent from the methodological disciplines [2]. And the ultimate ambition underlying all of this was to develop each individual’s potential for uniqueness.

What emerged at Bath in 1985, however, was a widely as- sumed probability that such essentially north-European, visionary and humanist conceptions, while having utmost validity in relation to certain locations, histories and states of consciousness, have less significance in relation to others. Far from being central truths, to be reflected as perfectly as possible by the vast array of world cultures, they had themselves become aspects of the array. Hopes for a single medium of exchange, on which INSEA was founded, had by 1970 been modified to feature certain perceived common principles as a unifying force for cultural diversity, and these in turn, by 1985, had been replaced by celebration of the greatest possible diversity. In this sense the 1985 congress provided a sample of international values in art education, an accu- rate register of present concerns, and an indication of the movement of thought which had taken place since the last occasion on which such matters were sampled at an international gathering in the United Kingdom.

Marie-Francoise Chavanne, I N S E A’S President, anticipated many of the congress’s sub-themes in her opening address. The most important issues to be debated, for her, were the necessary pluralism, giving rise to the greatest possible diversity; the fullest development of each discrete culture as the means of symbolising national or regional identity and self-esteem; and a concerted exposure of these to one another as the world’s best hope for

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mutual understanding. The enemies of such enterprise would be cultural uniformity, the likely result of mass capital’s tendency to homogenise world markets by extolling a grossly simplified sys- tem of symbols; cultural oppression, or one-sided interaction; and nostalgia for past or lost cultures, a form of aesthetic distraction from matters requiring the co-operation of all individuals. (Mme Chavanne’s address is reproduced in this volume of selected papers, as are the contributions of all to whom I refer in this brief Introduction.)

Solomon Irein Wangboje of Nigeria gave the opening keynote lecture, and he too cautioned against a relentless elimination of smaller cultures by the most dominant. When cultural confronta- tions take place, he said, it is always the weaker which have to make adjustments. Because they are weaker in the first place it is unlikely that they may ever be re-established in the event of expiry. As a culture is by definition a collective response to reality, any attempt to cultivate one artificially, by contriving favourable, and therefore unreal circumstances, is doomed to failure. African arts organisations have realised this, and instead of attempting re-creation (in Mme Chavanne’s sense mere nostalgia), they are making efforts to consolidate all traces of original cultures which have survived colonialism and ‘multinational’ symbolism.

Aspects of the corroding influence they must still endure are the crudely simplifying effects of Western categorisation. This was one of David Best’s principal arguments. Even to refer to a particular manifestation as ‘art’-perhaps because it involves imagery, decoration, or ritual movement-may be to degrade it with an alien concept, for example separating it from ‘ordinary life’ when such separation may be inconceivable. Concepts of art other than one’s own are available, but only to the extent that it is possible to approach an understanding of other cultures (which embody vastly more than art). Art-or what for convenience may be termed ‘art’-may be deeply embedded in a culture; but a culture is the summation of a way of life, including economic, philosophic, social, moral, religious and indeed all other heritable influences. Cultural criteria, then (belonging to one’s own as well as other cultures), may not be explicitly learned so much as assimilated. In this sense to inculcate young people (for example, in inner-city, multi-racial schools in Britain) with a medley of other-cultural references is clearly wrong. For one thing, if they cannot be learned they cannot be taught. For another, such distractions place a pupil at a disadvantage if, as a result, he or she acquires less appreciation of the culture in which he or she must subsist. Conversely they provide an advantage if, first ap- proached with a profound understanding of whatever culture it is that is ambient, they stimulate a process of critical comparison. This of course is an argument for sensitive and informed multicultural education for everyone, not merely for the so-called ‘cultural minorities’.

Two complementary arguments about why education should

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relate to the immediate cultural environment were provided by Patrick Sulpice of France and Magdolna SBfriny of Hungary. Patrick Sulpice referred to a multi-racial school in Paris where cultural minorities collectively constitute the majority; and he described the principal educational task here as one of gradually encouraging familiarity with French customs of thought and visual expression (that is, the cultural conventions of the adopted home), while ensuring that cultures-of-origins are not degraded or trivialised. T o deny pupils access to the host culture would be to handicap them severely for life: to deny the significance of the expressive customs of their origins would be to dislocate their relationships with parents and denigrate time spent out of school. Immigrant children have the right to become equipped for sub- sistence in a French cultural environment, but paradoxically an important role in this preparation is played by strengthen- ing respect for parental cultures, which are the ones sustaining family life. The analogy here is diplomacy, with the art teacher especially (unlike, say, the teacher of mathematics) treading care- fully at the boundaries of several cultures. Opportunities for blundering abound. Images and forms produced in a multi-racial class may appear similar but, originating in discrete cultural codes, their meanings may be radically different; and to praise exotic or decorative imagery might unknowingly be to patronise cliches. These dangers offer another compelling reason for having a single culture as the central frame of reference for all teaching.

Thus Patrick Sulpice argued for the paramountcy of a ‘host’ culture in more than one sense-in the sense of being the teacher’s native culture, whose habits of expression and nuances of meaning he or she can most confidently teach, and in the sense of belonging to the place which is being served by the teaching. Magdolna Sifriny’s concerns were similar, but possessed an extra dimension in the fact that Hungary is affected by dominant cultures to the east and west, and that in a sense the ‘host’ culture there must be constantly discovered and rediscovered by pupils if it is to compete with its neighbours. Hungary is Euro- pean but non-Western, geographically small but culturally great, with an imperialist past and a socialist present, and having the richest of traditions as well as a history of the most consistent involvement in avant-garde experimentation. So what is the es- sence of Hungarian culture? This question highlights issues which are valid everywhere. One response-the one tendered here-is to allow environmental analysis of landscape and townscape, observation of all kinds of habits and mechanisms in social life, and critical appreciation of all sorts of Hungarian art, from ancient to modem and from unsophisticated to the most cerebral, to acculturate education. This is a plea, above all, for prolonged, close and informed association with great works of Hungarian art, and with aspects of an international, contemporary culture which has benefited from specifically-Hungarian contributions. It is echoed evocatively by Magdolna Sifrany’s students in an open

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letter to the authorities, which she reproduces here. And Katalin Pilmai, a producer with the Hungarian Television Service, offers an illustration of one particular response which is being made through educational broadcasting. Her and her colleagues’ programmes encourage children’s critical analysis of accepted, first- rate examples of Hungarian and European art, often invol- ving dissection, rearrangement and reassembly. Just as it is everyone’s right to enjoy a creative education, it is also univer- sally right to subject received conventions to reappraisal and reorganisation. This activity, encouraged in children, helps to ensure both their familiarity with cultural landmarks, and their realisation that everyone responds differently to received concepts and stimuli.

Many contributors addressed the problem of striking a balance between teaching cultural history and guiding cultural practice. Anthony Dyson reported on research with pupils who had also been given reproductions of works of art as their starting points, although their task had not been dissection but to copy the given images, and to transform or personalise their drawings and paint- ings into images wholly their own. He found this an adequate way to teach history and practice simultaneously, arguing that we are in danger of being cast culturally adrift of the past, and also adrift of good practice, if positive and deliberate efforts are not invested in such teaching. He suspected that beneath the veneers of individuality there are universal ways of making and appreci- ating pictorial compositions and three-dimensional objects which may be ‘awakened’ more easily than inculcated; and he suggested that copying-considering the degree of observation it encoura- ges-is an unjustly neglected and perfectly respectable means of stimulating this awakening.

While Anthony Dyson’s main concerns were the constructive recollection and retention of past cultural achievements, Folkert Haanstra of The Netherlands was concerned with cultural expansion and future development. A substantial part of his argument, too, was that great efforts must constantly be made to sustain a culture through teaching; but he added that a prime purpose of keeping a structure intact was to build upon it and make signifi- cant new contributions to the culture in question. Art, to him, both perpetuates and extends a culture; or, put another way, there are aspects of a culture which are sustainable by art, and aspects which, at the moment of their origination, are ‘art intrinsic’. When resources are limited, art education’s responsibilities should be confined to perpetuating the culture, working with all sections of the community rather than the particularly gifted or especially informed. He contrasted the work of two Creativity Centres in The Netherlands, one having this objective, and the other committed to cultural expansion, again working with and on behalf of the entire community.

In contrast to those who spoke about consolidating past cultural experience, recollecting it in forms which are relevant to- day, and initiating programmes for its extension and development

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tomorrow, there were other contributors whose main theme was the timelessness of creativity and its relationship with cultures. Emil Robert Tanay presented his main purpose in art education as simply to familiarise children with images, image-making and symbolic interpretation, in order to make them fully conversant with a principal medium of exchange in a world reliant upon visual communication. This meant ridding them of the idea (or rather never introducing them to it in the first place) of art as specialised, exclusive and highbrow-a conception which pro- motes the idea of changing values. ‘Art games’ provide the vehicle for this approach new to Yugoslavia, encouraging children to originate and symbolise their perceptions in play, and to do so fluently and spontaneously. This is the case for culture as an inherently stable phenomenon, being discovered dynamically (rather than received passively) by each young person in his or her own terms. It is also the case made by Max Timmerman of The Netherlands on behalf of his mentally handicapped artist- students. As the illustrations to his paper testify, these people, whose only disabilities are intellectual, are capable of the most profound creative statements, responding quite naturally to received cultural conventions and customs of expression. This is a reminder of the extent to which cultural awareness is a function of feeling. It supports the idea of an intuitively-grasped cultural ‘constancy’, for only an exceptional few of Max Timmerman’s students engage principles of ‘development’ in their work, which suggests that this is an intellectual overlay on intuition. His contribution, then, was a plea for art as the most potent means of conversing with and between mentally handicapped people, and for it also as the central focus of their education.

A contrast of a different kind was provided by Doug Boughton of Australia, who gave an interpretative survey of the origins of the ‘visual literacy’ movement, and argued why its essential principles ought to inform art curriculum design. As opposed to those who put faith in art education as enhancing intuitive and imagi- native capabilities , he suggested that its potential for developing logic and reasoning should be more positively exploited, main- taining that studio and art-room practice should be directed substantially towards critical, philosophic and historical discus- sion, and that teaching programmes should embrace making and criticising applied and popular art of a wide range of cultural idioms. He is surely right when he points to the increasing proliferation of signs and symbols in Western culture, and the growing importance of visual communication, and insists that systematic educational provision must be made for these. He is right also in demanding an initiative on the part of art educationists, for otherwise communication technologists will accept this role (as manufacture technologists have taken initiatives over design education in the United Kingdom). But many will say that to subordinate making to discussing is too great a price to pay, and that in any case it is impossible to criticise some image or object of another culture in its own terms (side David Best),

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at least without prolonged, mature immersion in that culture and absorption of its customs and values.

Without it becoming a question of alternatives, occasionally we need someone like Doug Boughton to assert art’s value as stimu- lation for intellection. Equally we ought frequently to listen to those such as Elliot Eisner, who maintain (what few art teachers would deny, though it has too-little currency outside their special world) that art is the most comprehensive vehicle for cognition, embracing as it does the entire spectrum of modes of knowing, from intellection to intuition. Elliot Eisner’s contribution here was an encapsulation of much that his writings are appreciated for. He argued that all concepts which are traded in intelligent discourse are fundamentally sensory or aesthetic in their origins. There are stylised images underlying all terms or ideas which are meaningful; and two of the essential purposes of art are to originate insights into reality, and to symbolise these in forms which can be recalled and associated with their original meanings. An important characteristic of such symbols, bearing traces of their original significance, is that they can be imaginatively sorted and combined, creating concepts of possible realities that have never existed in the form of percepts. But for these possibilities to be relevant beyond the self they must be expressed in forms communicable to others-hence the importance of imagination, which enables a concept to be stabilised in an equivalent form for subsequent modification, revision and re-presentation. This may be why cultures are chiefly localised, for they feature visual and plastic equivalents of those concepts (we might also say ‘aspirations’) which preoccupy a community of interest. Even if these are not obviously aesthetic they are at base aesthetic, for even, say, sociological and economic principles, to be intelligible, require qualitative perception and sensitivity to patterns of events. To gain some insight into another culture is to gain an inkling of its inherent realities through its concepts. This necessi- tates sensitivity towards its images and its patterns; and this cannot be gained superficially for it entails appreciation of its original metaphors, contact with its customs and access to its wisdom.

When images encountered in another culture are shocking it is therefore not their configurations which shock so much as their glimmerings of essential meaning. Rufus Boboye Fatuyi of Ni- geria pointed out that this gives rise to two characteristic effects, and he discussed the European acculturation of Africa as an example of their joint occurrence. One effect is when the pres- ence of an alien culture becomes insistent, prolonged and all- pervading, to the extent that culture-shock becomes the normal everyday experience and inherent culture is ousted: this of course is what happened in the administrative centres of colon- ised Africa. The other effect is when there may be sincere attempts at reciprocation, but at the same time the shock of the unfamiliar causes fundamental misapprehension. This, according to Rufus Boboye Fatuyi, is what happened in the early C2Oth

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when European artists made genuine attempts to appreciate an inherent expressionism in African culture but entirely misappre- hended its outlook. Whereas African-inspired expressionism in Europe became storming, stressful and Angst-ridden, the original remained calm and assured in the knowledge that it was a natural way of life. Where it has survived external domination, African culture remains a potential, beneficial third force for influencing the quality of life throughout the world.

Is it to be regarded as inevitable that this would deform in translation as it did in the early C20th? Any attempt to appreciate it outside its own community of interest would surely be to subsume its realities once more within external perceptions of them. This was the subject addressed by Nick Stanley when he argued for more anthropologically-determined research into exactly this process. Our perception of another culture, he said, is a ‘second order’ appreciation. This might not be so detrimental if we accept it as inevitable, and begin to pay special attention to observing the changes which take place in cultural translation. If we are to understand this fully it would seem most productive to observe the most acute cultural collisions, for where there are no obvious disparities problems of translation may remain undetec- ted-that is to say, we may ‘like’ the images and objects of another culture (vide Patrick Sulpice) for the wrong reasons. Nick Stanley proposed, as the best case-studies for research, instances of extreme disaffection for what is encountered in cultural exchanges, as a kind of ‘encounter therapy’ that would oblige both parties to suspend their own cultural preferences and beliefs.

An encounter of this nature, of course, would be bound to create changes, in the form of hybrid concepts on either side of the exchange, which would be irreversible. Alan Simpson’s contribution was to argue that this was both the greatest risk and greatest potential benefit of acculturation. He pointed out a critical paradox between the idea of culture as an evolving phenomenon, constantly enlarging to accommodate its own best accomplishments as well as appropriate concepts requisitioned from outside, and the idea of culture as a finite set of traditions or traits of national identity. He discussed, too, a contradiction between encouraging multicultural education for some anticipated beneficial interaction, expected to result in hybrid forms of great vitality, while on the other hand advocating a multicultural environment in which each discrete part is honoured, protected and practised apart from the rest.

These are the two principal schools of thought which affect multicultural education. Allan Leary subscribes to the latter, and his plea was for subject-matter of appeal to minority cultures to be included in examinable curricula in art and design in the United Kingdom, so that students belonging to ethnic minorities would not necessarily have to adopt unfamiliar conventions in order to succeed. He realised that such minority-cultural matters would have to be taught, and he too argued for ethnology, as a

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central curricular requirement, as a way of achieving this. But (and this was only one of the many full-circles of argument evinced in the congress) this would require a supply of teachers in intimate contact with all of the appropriate discrete cultures. Moreover, as Graeme Chalmers of Canada argued, for any creative work thus produced to have significance it must have an audience and the respect of a specific community of interest. To encourage these as separate entities within a multicultural society would surely be to institutionalise social disintegration. Con- versely to accept, as Alan Simpson does, that cultures cannot be arbitrarily fossilised or self-consciously developed for internal momentum impels them to expand, collide , combine and recom- bine, leads to a conception of multicultural education which is integrative.

It is not enough to try to protect cultural practices by education (or any other means) without preserving the vital beliefs which sustain them. If these become untenable their cultural manifestations cannot be retained except as mere forms devoid of symbolic significance. If cultures of the present symbolise com- mercial exploitation, it is because this is what the cultured hold most dear. If alternatives are desired it is no use harking back to the empty symbols of past cultures. What must be cultivated are new forms of belief in which to invest creativity. There are signs that this is happening internationally in, among other things, the increasing importance of ecological beliefs. Art education has enormous significance for this or any other movement of thought, for it consists in accomplishments in the realm of conceiving and making works of art, the only activity which sheds light on symbolisation. It is this which gives insights into how images come to signify meaning-whether this is national, regional, of relevance to specific interest groups, or personal. For images are not inoested with meaning, separable in some process of analysis. Meaning is pre-existent, and images and forms are discovered to hold it and convey it to the widest audience.

The papers which follow have been selected as a representative sample of the very large number of contributions to the congress. It is extremely unfortunate that more could not have been pub- lished. Many took the form of workshops, tape-slide, video or film presentations, while others required a great many images to illustrate their content. All unpublished contributions are listed by title at the end of this volume. This of course is quite inadequate to indicate the numerous circles of argument and the innumerable tangents of debate, each of which diminishes this collection of papers, as it would have diminished the congress, by its absence.

Notes 1 It is realised that this was a barometer of opinions conditioned by the

fact of their being expressed in the United Kingdom. It seems obvious

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that overseas delegates will convey different arguments here, depending upon their perceptions of the UK as a former colonialist society, or an archetypal Western society, or a society representing a particular shade of Europeanism, or indeed a culture-less society.

2 For an account of these proceedings see Art in a Rapidly Changing World: Report on the XXth INSEA World Congress (Coventry, UK Committee for INSEA, 1970).

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introduction: the cultural significance of art

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