Artist Statement

Vision Statement for Visual Arts Education

Dr. James K. Hill

            My experiences at Teachers College, Colombia University opened a door that lead me to begin contemplating the role of art in education and how the fine arts interrelate with the liberal arts.  The education of artists in higher education sets in motion the need to establish art as a means of inquiry and as ways of knowing.  Deriving meanings from seeing and touching, as distinguished from thinking in language, may be how the visual arts function in epistemology.  Attentive awareness to sensate phenomena can support a type of knowing that is informed by insight/imagination.  The making of art and aesthetic analysis offers something unique to the pedagogy of higher education in that learning proceeds form direct sensate experience, intuition and actual doing.  Philosophers like Kant, Dewy, Collingwood, Langer, and Merleau-Ponty described the process of feeling as an “apprehension” of knowledge instinctively different from rational comprehension.

Anton Ehrezweig (The hidden Order of Art ) criticizes the limitations and taboos of “modernism” that are place upon art students.  During the past fifteen or twenty years the visual arts moved beyond the old age of modern art into what is currently called “Post Modernism”.  Some modernist methods of teaching art may not need to be discarded, but at least in current art schools the old utopian values that denied diversity of style and intent should certainly be questioned for validity in the twenty-first century.  One of the unfortunate causalities of modern art was the figurative humanist tradition.  As images of art, people became signs. Symbols or masks but not real people.  Representational art was cast aside as being unworthy for modern art to seriously consider.  In today’s art schools this age old tradition could be allowed to re-enter art instruction as one o f the many expressions of visual art

My vision of an art pedagogy would be very much in agreement with the art critic, Theodore Wolff, (The Many Masks of Modern Art ) in that neither one of us would support the idea that only the most recent style of art is acceptable.  The belief that form as content would always provide significant meaning has been debunked, and individuals should have the right to challenges this basic concept of “high art”.  Art students need to be encouraged to seek for their own identity and to understand how the arts could extend their perceptions of the nature and purposes of living a self reflective life.  An art program with this goal in mind would be expansive not restrictive.  Any style of tradition would be acceptable as long as quality prevails.

Instead of tying to create contemporary artists in the first year of a college art program, I believe more fundamentally things need attention.  Perception and imagination are noticeably weak in the work of too many beginning students.  Consequently, drawing and modeling skills should be a foundation for all advanced coursework in order to develop perception because a creative imagination grows from a discrimination perception.  Hence, teaching students how to see the phenomenal world around them as well as to see their won responses to their worlds promises to be a solid way to initiate art students into creativity.  The old foundations program of two and three dimensional design courses should be questioned seriously if not abandoned because all too often there is very little carry-over from them to beginning level studio courses.  It seems that freshman students might have lobotomies immediately after passing foundation design courses.  This lack of continuity might stem from the fractured and itemized way of introducing design concepts.  Foundations projects are too often contrived to produce a fail safe design that has little or nothing to do with a student’s comprehension of what it all might mean in terms of self expression.  I believe that beginning drawing as composition could do more than the traditional way of teaching foundations especially if every introductory level studio course also dealt with composition in its own medium.

Graduating seniors should be expected to mount an exhibition, write an articulate statement about their work, and make a presentation to a faculty committee before a student audience.  My vision continues to include teaching student to be articulate about their artwork and to be capable of visually analyzing works of art including their own.  Also, they need to be taught how to return to the same level of unconscious submersion or autonomous activity that directed their initial creativity.  What they have conceived through critiques all too often short circuits any return to the same kind of creative energy that started a project.  When we make art, our mid that use languages usually does not function, at least not in the same way that it does in conversation or in rational explanations.  Apprehension through the senses and feelings works well while artists are completely engaged in the making of art.  Whereas the rational way of knowing by comprehension is the vehicle for analytical refection about one’s own art work.  Both of these ways of knowing by feeling and by thinking are necessary for an art student.  Art professors must relied upon language to articulate what their inner perceptions and feelings may be able to see.  Hence, students hang on to the discursive explanations and criticism so much so that they easily can be derailed from getting back into their own initial creative energies.  If art students understand that they have more than one means of making judgment and that these processes can be independent of one another, then they would consider apprehension and comprehension to be like their two legs.  To run a race we need both of them; otherwise, we merely are hopping around!

I might add that the same might be true for a liberal arts major because education would be incomplete if it did not sharpen both methods of discover whether that means by thought processes or by non verbal insights of feelings and intuitions.    Whether a students is a liberal arts major or a fine arts majors should not make that much difference in educating his or her understanding go the meanings of the “human condition”.  While the fine arts are usually more non-verbal, they never the less can produce the same kind of insights that literature, history and philosophy seek to record and articulate.