In the discussion about a new kind of art school it may be useful to present a picture from some of the issues raised by my recent research. This research project has examined the lives of twelve visual art graduates and the role an art school education has played in these lives. The research project is about to be submitted for the degree of M.Ed. (hons) in Adult Education & Training, at the University of New England, Australia.

The history art schools, their role with in society and their relationship to art, will frame the context in which any new art school initiative emerges. The purpose of art schools, the reasons why different people attend them, and why other people agree to support them, raises fascinating questions, because art is situated in recruitment, articulation, manipulation and sometimes repression, of realities, which suit powerful interests.

What I intend to do in this paper, is to trace how some of these varied interests are played out in the constitution of an art school. To do this I propose share what I have learned from the research project; from the graduate lives I studied, from the literature made relevant by the analysis of my data, and from reflection on my own art school experience some 25 years ago (which has changed in the light of my initial findings).

Background

My interest in art schools was rekindled in 1996 when as part of a Grad. Diploma in Adult Education & Training I was asked to make an analysis-- or meta-analysis -- of an educational plan. I chose an arts & media training plan of the technical and further education in the region where I had been teaching.

I realised that this plan to implement art education took no account of where its graduates may end up. There were significant untested assumptions about graduates practising art, the type of work that would be available for graduates, and most importantly, there were assumptions or may be presumptions about why people would choose to study fine art, and what they may get out of it. I have since found these untested assumptions are quite common to tertiary visual art education in Australia, and there is some evidence of these same assumptions in the Web pages of British art schools.

Assumptions

Assumptions are important because they determine what an art school will become. Very often assumptions remain hidden, unless someone makes a point of looking for them. Finding assumptions and making new ones is an interesting journey that opens up the door to new possibilities.

The most obvious assumptions I have found are;

1. That artists are a profession

2. Art schools educate towards that profession.

3. That people applying to art school are intent on becoming artists, and

4. Graduates become artists, unless they give up practice.

While these assumptions may be in part true from time to time, they are not necessarily exclusive, or as important as they seem when framing art education provision. Assumption No.4, is for the most part untrue.

To build my picture in the British context, let me provide a few excerpts from current Web pages and Fine Art prospectii of four British art schools:

Graduates pursue careers in the contemporary art world as artists, designers, teachers, arts administrators or in related areas of cultural work. Increasingly graduates are entering new areas of design, industry and innovation.a

[This art school] has enjoyed a long and distinguished history of producing innovative, creative and successful artists, designers and architects. Today, we aim to build on our established traditions and areas of proven strength while addressing the contemporary needs of society. ... Students are exposed to the expertise and experience of a range of architects, artists, designers and guest lecturers...b

The course is structured around the belief that individual practice should be central to your education. It is designed to enable you to develop your intellectual, imaginative and practical abilities and to encourage an expansive and critically informed approach to Fine Art practice. ...The teaching staff are all practising artists and represent a broad spectrum of knowledge and experience.c

... the Fine Art degree programme has been dedicated to maintaining a continuity of creative, educational purpose which is crucially dependent upon the mutual commitment of staff and students to share their experiences, understandings and ambitions. ... All full-time and part-time staff are practising artists.d

These kinds of statements are very similiar to those found in Australian art schools. They relate to concepts of "art as industry" "professional practice" and ultimately to a special category of person, the "practising artist". The term "practising artist" is interesting in itself, because it creates the possibility for another quite opposite category, the "non-practising artist". These are the artists we don't speak about, a category who we perhaps desperately hope never to join. There is a problem in relating visual art graduates to the category of practising artists in any meaningful way. In Australia, there are close to 2000 graduates from visual and performing art courses every year. However, there are only 12,000 visual & community artists working in Australia. The majority of graduates simply disappear. I would suggest that the statistics in the United Kingdom are likely to be very similar, although I haven't studied them.

Personal Experience

Given that the majority of graduates do not become, or stay as, "practising artists" it appears quite clear that the artist-educators in TAFE and Universities have, in the past, chosen to ignore the real work they are doing as educators. They are clearly educating a population for a purpose they don't seem to understand, or have in the past wished to acknowledge.

In the 25 years since graduating in Fine Art at Leeds, experience as an educator, community development worker, a frequently reluctant participant in the workforce/society, and sometimes artist, has taught me that visual art education is extremely valuable. When I looked at what the training plans and Web pages said about visual art education, it led me to conclude that either my experience was exceptional (artist do think they are special don't they?) or that the value of art education and purpose was being misunderstood.

My hypothesis at the being of my research project was that an art education had a very broad applicability. The Australian statistics1 showed that the majority of visual art graduates, some 78% of them, would not work in the arts. Therefore I thought it would be an easy matter to go out and find some examples from this majority of graduates who were applying their education to other purposes, and thus prove my hypothesis. It wasn't to be. Here I am in the next century, only just ready to submit my thesis. The reason is, that while it is true that visual arts graduates can and do apply themselves to a wide variety of work situations, their true situations are far more complex, and more interesting than simply bringing creativity to a wide variety of work places.

The Graduates

The group of graduates I studied were a diverse group by age and background. This group comprised six women and six men. Only two of the graduates lived outside the metropolitan area, one in the hinterland beyond a metropolitan region and the other in 'regional' Australia. Several had already completed other undergraduate degrees, and chose to leave full time work to attend art school full time.

In total, the graduates had attended five art schools, four Australian and one in the USA. Their experience spanned twelve departments, and five visual art disciplines across the range of schools. Most had graduated in the early 1990s. Some had completed a post-graduate year.

Key aspects of their experience

These graduates had chosen to go to art school largely to open up, or follow some aspect of their personal development. Either they sought a lifestyle change or alternatively through participating in part-time study, or making art, they had discovered an interest that they wished to pursue full time.

Here are some explanations of entry into art school:

So I did it more out of just as something I really liked doing, rather than something that was going to be a career move or anything like that.

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... I managed to have 8 weeks off work and during those 8 weeks I started painting and drawing and gradually started not going to work because I’d stay up till , like you know 4 [a.m.] because I couldn’t stop doing it. And then I couldn’t get to work for seven. So I just wouldn’t go, and gradually I didn’t go, and didn’t go and then I decided well I’ll have to do something about this. I’ll have to permanently not go. So I left work and I started working on a part-time basis and -got a folio together and got into the [art-school]

Sometimes entry to art school was more capricious:

I was interviewed by a very charismatic guy ... and he just said - he just saw a young, lost bloke from the South Coast - and said " look, if you're prepared to work hard, Glass is very young here in Australia you could probably make a go of it. We need people like you." And that’s all I needed to hear!

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I’d actually become a chef because I got expelled from school and had to find a job within 3 days or go to boarding school. . . . and chef wasn’t even my idea for a career it was somebody else’s . I actually chose someone else’s career path and ten years later I decided it wasn’t really [me]

I was doing quite well as a chef but I just didn’t enjoy it. So I came back to Australia and decided I wouldn’t work until I found out what I wanted. So it took three months and I was lying in bed one day and my housemate got a phone call and he came and asked me could I make a giant prawn.

This was the beginning of a short journey that led this last graduate first into the film industry building props and eventually to art-school to intent on gaining a credential. He now works out of a cooperative art studio with 17 other artists, where they undertake all sorts of work that can co-exist with art practice. For example, house restoration and making decorative security doors.

Inside art schools, the culture of art school leads its students towards far more specific ideas about the nature of art practice.

When it came to talking about their experience directly after art school, most framed their words in terms of holding narrow views of their post art school career. Here is the same graduate again:

I have to admit that coming out of undergraduate, you are still in that sort of naive idea of being an exhibiting artist and living with your studio, and do some work, putting work in a gallery every couple of months.

And another:

I left art school with the same notions that most graduates come out with and that is that I was making art. I didn’t expect to make a living from it, and I had these incredible notions of how I suppose I was going to go around in my practice. But I still wasn’t taking it very seriously I still thought I’d make my living doing something else. like bar work or waitressing and I thought the glass was always going to be something, esoteric...

One graduate provided an anecdote which encapsulates what may be, or hopefully what once was seen to be rather typical:

I was working with this woman ... a photographer from Melbourne, and someone actually came up and said "well you’re so-and so, I’m a photographer too" and she said,

"Well if you are a photographer why are you working here?" It was in a cafe or something and he said,

" because I have to make some money" and she said " well why don’t you take photographs?"

" Oh because I’m an artist"

And she said "Well you’re not a photographer then are you. You are a waiter", which is a bit rough, but its sort of - but she’s been working for a local newspaper taking photographs of mothers with children to make money, but the whole time she’s still working as a photographer, the way she saw it.

The idea of artists working in the hospitality industry is still a common theme in the minds of art students2, even though some (mainly art school staff)9 see an emerging trend of artist graduates using multi-media skills,web-development as a source of economic support.

The issue then, is that as enrolling art students these people sought freedom, change of lifestyle and personal development. By the time they left art school they had "incredible notions" about how they could or should be artists. Another of the graduates called 'art school art' 'incredibly narrow' and 'constraining and disempowering'. You might like to ask how art turns people into waiters?

For this conference it may be important to consider the source of these constraining influences, which have been implicit in art education, during the last half of the 20th. Century.

Art school opening doors to narrow passages ? or art school opening up the door to personal development?

One of my research participants explained his motivation to go to art school in this way:

I was longing for some formal education to see what the big people think about art. What doors one could [open] ... Obviously art cannot be taught but something that is common all around in those circles. And also I wanted to get in those circles, which means that you have to go through. I thought that doing this process[going to art school] is the easiest and fastest way to get in

Art school pedagogies (or andragogies as they should be, given that the majority of students appear to be adults) often stress that the purpose of studying art is about personal inquiry, (also indicated in the above British art school Web pages) not about becoming rich and famous. Personal inquiry, transformational learning8 through the reflection, problem finding and problem solution, are the processes, where the real benefits of art school lay. Two other participants put the benefits they found in art school this way:

... it's about that I’ve actually managed to understand something to actually transfer or yes it's about understanding that I’ve looked and I’ve seen where the light is and by just playing with light, and darkness and colour you can create something on a flat - you know - that looks like round I really love that ability to do that...

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...if I was to reflect on myself now, and the person I was before [art-school], I was a very constrained person, really. Thought there were a whole lot of rules and limits to what you could do and that you always had to work full time, you always had to - you know- things related to what a "man" did, and responsibility. It's your sense of self in the world. If I look at myself then and now I know I’m a much freer person and less limited by other people's idea of what you should do, or my own idea of what I should do. And I am more open to change.

These comments are just two examples of this kind of benefit that graduates found in art school. It is in keeping with the kind of freedom, and knowledge that prospective students are looking for, when they enter art school.

What seems to happen however, is that "the big-end of town" 'those circles' loom into vision, by the time the graduate exhibition comes around. The art schools' outcomes are the creation of "practising artists", and the students by the time of graduation see themselves in that light. They take as their role models, previous artists, art school staff, or more frequently, highly "successful" artists. This is another expectation which is latent in the above art school Web page quotes.

It is now well known that the creation of a successful art movement is not something that exists in within some perfect framework of art criticism or a society's aesthetic taste. Recent art movements and art education movements are created according to the interests of powerful elites, seeking to control or direct the development of culture10. Brook3 has called this the Institutional Theory of Art. Let me give an example from Saunders4

A terrible vision of the barbarians at the gates of the palace of high art now insinuated its way into the imagination of the cultural elitists. Dwight Macdonald denounced these attacks as "Kulturbolshewismus", and argued that while they were proposed in the name of American democracy, they actually mirrored totalitarian attacks on the arts. The Soviets - and indeed much of Europe - were saying that America was a cultural desert, and the behaviour of the US Congressmen seemed to confirm that. Eager to show the world that here was an art commensurate with America's greatness and freedom, high level strategists found they couldn't publicly support it because of domestic opposition. So what did they do? They turned to the CIA. And the struggle began to assert the merits of Abstract Expressionism against attempts to smear it. (p.257)

Saunders is documenting the Central Intelligence Agency's intervention on behalf of Abstract Expressionism, in the face of State Department withdrawal of support to the exhibition 'Advancing American Art'. The CIA sought only one thing, to create a reality in which America was viewed as 'the Land of the Free' because it supported artistic freedom, and works that expressed freedom like the works of Jackson Pollock.

How many art students of the 1950s or even 1960s, presented graduate exhibitions with works influenced by Abstract Expressionism, I wonder? How many emulate Damien Hurst or Tracy Emin today? Even if, graduates do not directly emulate other artists, the concept of success is framed in these terms of these artists, and it is this idea of becoming (or having to be) a 'practising artist', which can be the most debilitating legacy of an art school education.

The same situation does not really occur with other professions. If you study law, you are not considered unsuccessful, if you go into industry, rather than being called to the Bar. If you study literature, and go into the public service, you are not necessarily unsuccessful; just as if you are an engineer who goes into marketing it may be considered quite normal. Art however is different. It is different because, the knowledge gained, or a good deal of it, is personal. It is about who the artist is, as a person. Because art schools have been focusing on "the practising artist" as a profession for at least the last forty years, and because so many people want to study art for their own personal improvement, a situation has been created where these societal objective and personal objectives have become mixed up.

The New Art School

My thesis here then, is that any new art school needs to take account of the importance of art to personal development rather than just the idea of creating "practising artists". More than ever we live in a society where conventions are breaking down, and most people need to be able to determine and create their own reality. More than ever people have to find problems and fix them, to create reality in the way artists used to do on behalf of society.

In the lives of individuals, the practise of art plays a moral role. Read, Plato, Dewey and many others have attested to this fact. This role is about naming the world, creating reality and freedom, as Maxine Greene5 and Herbert Marcuse6 saw it:

'aesthetic transformation as a "vehicle of recognition," drawing the perceiver away from "the mystifying power of the given" ...[where] the arts ... help open the situations that require interpretation... help disrupt the walls that obscure the spaces, the spheres of freedom' (Greene 1988:133, Marcuse 1978:72).

A large percentage of people do not have this aspect of education well-developed by the time they become adults (development is probably even discouraged during adolescence in high school11), and this explains the high proportion of mid-life enrolments to art school. Art schools are very much in the business of life-long learning.

A new art school should take account of this need, and focus on making participation in visual art commonplace. The media won't like it, the star-makers won't like it, the marketing divisions of the corporate world won't like it. I mean who with power would like to see a population aesthetically, critically aware? It would do Nike and the other style makers no good at all. An art school could take pride in playing its part in real moral education, the like of which has been largely missing, or at least largely confused over the past half-century.

Art schools have always had the means for this development, and it has been part of visual art education throughout this confused era. The making of art, and the process of critique used in art school are very powerful tools for personal development, and it is these tools that should be at the core of a new art school. The new art school needs to politely dismiss any calls that; it has a responsibility to an art industry (In my view a very dubious proposition in itself), or to vocational training, or to job-creation - the making of practising artists. Art schools are or should be about people creation.

This does not mean that art schools cannot teach practical skills. On the contrary, skills are always useful and central to the development of any art. However, the desperate need is to unlock the relationship between art as personal development, and the rather odd concept of training people to become (elite) "practising artists". The majority afterall, are not going on to fulfil such a role. I have suggested in other papers that a new concept of "citizen artistry"7 is necessary, where a visually literate culture, contains more people who recognise the capacity of the fine arts for problem finding and reality creation. Implicit in this concept is the development of a society where citizens do not blindly consume and do not accept that all work is meaningful and worth doing, but through aesthetics and freedom of action arising in their individuality, struggle for better quality of life all round. This would be in place of a society, where artists, like stars, are "a priestly caste"12, where aesthetics are dispensed by these elites, and population is subservient to the profit motives of corporations. This is a big job for visual art educators, but a job I ultimately believe is worth doing.

Paul Reader,

25th. September 2000, Armidale, Australia 2351

Paul Reader is "the principal" of artlearn.net, and a post-graduate researcher in the School of Administration & Training, University of New England. He graduated in Fine Art (Hons), Leeds Polytechnic in 1972 and exhibited as an artist at the ICA London, and Bath International Arts Festival. For the last twenty years he as been engaged in community development, TAFE teaching, the community arts, and public art projects, at regional locations in Australia.

Bibliography

1. DEET 1995 submission to: The Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee 1995
2. Candy, P. Crebert G. O'Leary J. 1994: 193-200, Developing Lifelong Learners through Undergraduate Education, National Board of Employment & Training, Australian Government Publishing Service

Also: Thaller,E. 1993 Program and Career Perceptions of Undergraduate Students Majoring in Fine Art. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Tennessee. (ERIC)

3. Brook, Donald 1992 Art, Representation, Education Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts W.A.

4. Saunders, F.S. 1999 Who Paid The Piper? Granta Books, Great Britain

5. Greene, M. 1988 The Dialectic of Freedom Teachers College Press N.Y.

6. Marcuse, H. 1978 The Aesthetic Dimension Beacon Press, Boston

7. Reader, P Sept 2000 'Smart Missiles, The changing role of the artist, on-line art schools and "citizen artistry" in proceedings of Rural/Regional Art Conference Australia & NZ. Journal of Art.

8. Mezirow, J. 1991 Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning Jossey-Bass Publishers San Francisco & Oxford.

9. Snell, E. 1998 'Are there Too Many Art School Graduates?' in nAVa newletter Dec.1998 National Association for the Visual Arts, Potts Point NSW

10. Elias, N. 1969. Über den Prozess der Civilization: Sociogenetische und Psychogenetische Untersuchungen. Bern/München: Franke

Cited in:

Van Gent, B. 1997, Lessons In Beauty Peter Lang GmbH. Frankfurt

11. Gardner, H. 1991 The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach. Basic Books N.Y.

12. Senate Environment, Recreation, Communications and the Arts References Committee 1995 Arts Education Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Web pages accessed 24/09/00:

a. Leeds Metropolitan University

b. Glasgow School of Art

c. University of Central England

d. Falmouth College of Art

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Created at The Art Learning Network by Paul Reader © 25/9/2000 Last revised: 1 November 2000 Email:preader:metz.une.edu.au University of New England, Armidale, NSW, 2351.
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