ART, CULTURAL PRODUCT AND EDUCATION

It seems that we - people involved in or concerned with art education - don't have too clear an idea of what it should be. (Judging from essays in the admittedly dated collection 'The Artist and the Academy: European Perspectives on Today's Fine Art Education' and from responses to the question 'If art schools were abolished tomorrow, what should replace them?' which were included in the catalogue for the 1997 New Contemporaries exhibition.) In terms of educational structures, the liberal, Coldstream-derived model that was established in the 1960's has been destroyed, most obviously by the economistic ethos which has re-defined educational priorities, and the concomitant technocratic structures which have re-shaped education as a whole.

However, independently of these structural changes, I think that there would still have been uncertainty and disagreement about the nature of art education. The liberal model was based on the modernist idea that art consisted of a number of discrete practices - painting, sculpture etc. - which together constituted something autonomous - art - which in turn was part of a larger culture. That idea had long been challenged by various early 20th century avant-garde groups and individuals, but, ironically, it was in the mid-60's, when the liberal model was introduced, that the changes in art which would undermine and side-line it were beginning to take place, although it was impossible to see this at the time. I think that three developments within the field of art, taken together, heralded the collapse of modernism and the transformation of the idea of art: the repercussions of minimalism, particularly in terms of the relationship between work, setting and viewer; the emergence of conceptual art, which led to the questioning of art as an autonomous cultural entity; and the influence of the media-manipulative persona of Andy Warhol.

By the mid 1980's the idea of art which had provided the basis for the liberal model of art education had been shown to be contingent on historical and cultural formations which were seen as definitely belonging to the past. The early and mid 80's was the period of postmodernism. At first, this was generally interpreted as a change within art (sometimes simply as a stylistic shift ) and as a re-figuring of the relationship between the cultural experience of the present and the art of the past . However, it rapidly became clear that the aestheticism and historicism which a modernist approach regarded as synonymous with art ( and which, in the 60's, were as operative in a vanguard idiom such as conceptual art as much as in the more conventional forms of the time) were being replaced by works which emphasised discursive content and socially-orientated meaning and/or spectacular presentation and the uncritical use of new technologies. Evidently, a larger cultural change was taking place. It was not as if art was a container which had changed its contents while retaining its shape, in fact the shape itself was changing, shrinking to practically nothing in some areas, becoming massively inflated in others, but above all, perhaps, becoming distinctly fuzzy and losing a clear sense of outline altogether. Not that the outline had ever been that clear, but this new lack of clarity wasn't the result of the pursuit of exploratory strategies, which extended the idea of art into new areas. It was, rather, to put it crudely, caused by an accommodation of art to the dominant structural features and complex social and cultural changes created by 'turbo-capitalism' (Robert Reich's phrase.)

To characterise this new work I found myself using the phrase 'cultural product' because I needed to differentiate between different kinds of work which were commonly lumped together under the term 'art'. 'Cultural product' was, it seemed, not so much bad art as a new cultural form - a semiotically literate accommodation of elements of art practice to ways of thinking which were both discursive and instrumental (in the sense that advertising is instrumental) . In addition it often utilised new technology in ways that emphasised the work as image and spectacle. (Mariko Mori's work is a good example) At the same time that such work was becoming dominant, major parts of the art world itself were becoming subsumed within the burgeoning entertainment and leisure industries. Art works were becoming increasingly mediated through media hype and consequently changed into cultural commodities by the process. (The whole Turner Prize process is a prime example of this.).

What has all this done, and what does it continue to do for the 'content' of art education. From the point of view of 'receivers' of works the distinctions between those works designated as 'art' and other cultural forms are no longer very clear, as students in general know particularly well. Also, mainstream cultural forms are now so heavily mediated that the experience of a work is generally the experience of its mediation. In the 1980's and 90's certain prestigious educational institutions, here and in the States, were seen to be feeding an art world system - the art business - by effectively becoming launching pads for highly ambitious would-be 'art stars'. Such an approach would seem to fully correspond to the vocationalism that is now rampant throughout education but it also illustrates the extent to which the liberal, approach of the old Coldstream-derived system has been transformed, not simply by structural changes to art education , but by responses to deep changes, and a process of amplification, within culture itself.

Stuart Bradshaw