THE ENDEAVOUR
BLOWN OFF DISCOURSE
The academic discourse of contemporary education is informed by the bureaucracy under which it functions, from administration by government to the curriculum delivered by teachers. This discourse is the white, colonialist, academic voice of modernity. Art is not neutral, nor prescribed―students of the discipline must be afforded freedom to encounter risk and spontaneous expression. Rigidity of the dominant educational discourse constricts expression, impacting negatively on Australian Arts students.
Art occupies an uncertain position in the curriculum, however it is not the space of the predominant discourse. Just as education is not a neutral endeavour, neither is Art. In order for Art to survive and thrive it must be somewhere 'other'. Like Foucault’s (Madness and Civilization, 1989:10) Ship of Fools:
It has become the motif of the soul as a skiff abandoned on the infinite sea of desires in the sterile field of cares and ignorance, among the mirages of knowledge amid the unreason of the world, a craft at the mercy of the sea’s great madness, unless it throws out a solid anchor, faith, or raises its spiritual sails so that the breath of God may bring it to port.
The nature of Art is less about 'shaping and moulding a student into being', and more about uncovering the truth or inner quality. A point of departure is academic writing, which favours the empirical, but excludes the post modern approach that might otherwise tear down the walls of injustice and overt dominance. Feminist theorist Mona Liveholts (2009:121) suggests a paradigm theory to include subaltern views with “a notion of ‘post/academic’ writing to refer to critical, creative and reflective interdisciplinary, cross genre academic writing practices”. The paradigm Art functions under is informed by the discourse of modern colonial academia. “Paradigms can be thought of as frameworks of understandings that guide the ways we produce knowledge” (Kincheloe et al cited Latham et al, 2006:99). Without a 'paradigm shift', Art remains excluded. Such exclusion can be interpreted as censorship. Thomas Main (1983:83), in criticising Goodman’s critique on William H Burroughs’ Naked Lunch said:
The question raised was never whether authors have “the right to discuss sex openly and explicitly in a work of literature”; it was, rather, whether literature could successfully treat sex (or any other subject) outside a moral framework.
Censorship holds a hard, fast position enthroned to deny the threat to power, implying non-neutrality―a tool of control.
The position Art occupies is fluid and dual. In Emerson's essay 'Circles' (cited Neufeldt & Barr, 1986: ) his use of multiple voices provides us a:
“possibility of both views, being both centre and contour, with unsettling results. It makes a travesty of our confidence with the speaker. Not knowing where to stand we are faced with a decision in our mind of where to go”.
Art is irrational, unpredictable; post modern. Art requires risk, challenging the self; breaking new boundaries. Queensland Department of Education, Training and the Arts (2007) states:
Students...enhance their understanding of arts practice through active engagement, both individually and collaboratively, with arts elements, techniques, skills and processes, working creatively and imaginatively, to take risks and focus on how the arts reinforce and challenge their own experience and those of other artists (added emphasis).
Art students must encounter risk as a part of the art making process. Nowhere else does risk enter into an essential learning as a requirement for success.Where teachers hold power over students using colonialist academic discourse, Art reverses the position. Post-modernism is attempting to re-shape education, and Art is at the coalface, often putting it at odds with the hegemonic discourse. Bauman (cited Seidman2007:190) speaks of post modernity as a “fully fledged, viable social system which has come to replace the 'classical' modern, capitalist society and thus needs to be theorised according to its own logic”. Contemporary students of art cannot function within the limited confines of the prescribed discourse of a modernist, academic approach, and must be released to take risks.
The rigidity of the dominant discourse impacts negatively on Art students by constricting free creative pursuit. Educational Discourses have long been ‘behind the times’. From 1903 the words of John Dewey still resonate:
the school has lagged behind the general contemporary social movement; and much that is unsatisfactory, much of conflict and of defect, comes from the discrepancy between the relatively undemocratic organisation of the school, as it affects the mind of both teacher and pupil, and the growth and extension of the democratic principle in life beyond school doors.
Theory must be congruent with its own logic (Bauman cited Seidman, 2007:190). The education system must comprehend and critique Art through Art’s own domain: the post modern paradigm. Art as a teaching area is forced into the role of a controlling mechanism, abiding by discourse-prescribed curriculum, leaving it safely in the realm of empirical distinction, but locked out of its natural abode: the realm of the uncertain and the irrational.
Leftover vestiges of colonialism, functionalism, modernity, and structuralism are voices that post modern Art does not answer to. Freedom to risk and express are central tenets of Art, yet the discourse that dominates the Australian curriculum constricts and limits students’ experience, resulting in a negative impact.
Greg Windsor, MFA, BFA, Sculpture
550 words (excluding references)
REFERENCES
Department of Education, Training and the Arts, 2007, Queensland Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Framework 2007 / Essential Learnings, Queensland Government, Australia.
Dewey J, 1903, ‘Democracy in Education’, The Elementary School Teacher, Vol. 4, No. 4 pp. 193-204.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/992653 accessed April 21, 2010.
Foucault M, 1989, Madness and Civilization, Routledge, London, UK.
Latham G, Blaise M, Dole S, Faulkner J, Lang J & Malone K, 2006, Learning to Teach: New Times, New Practices, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, Australia.
Liveholts M, 2009, ‘To theorise in a more passionate way’, Feminist Theory, Vol. 10, No.1, pp.121-131.
http://fty.sagepub.com DOI:10.1177/1464700108100395. Accessed 24 April, 2010
Main T, 1983, “On ‘Naked Lunch’ and Just Desserts”, Chicago Review, Vol. 33., No. 3, pp 81-83.
Neufeldt L & Barr C, 1986, “’I shall write like a Latin father’ Emerson’s circles”,The New England Quarterly, Vol.59, No.1, pp 92-108.
Seidman, S, 2008, Contested Knowledge: Social Theory Today, 4th Edn., Blackwell, Carlton, Australia
No comments:
Post a Comment