What Art Teaches Us: Reexamining the Pillars of Visual Arts Curricula

201 Pages·2019·2.724 MB·English

by  Timothy Babulski

What Art Teaches Us
Reexamining the Pillars of Visual
Arts Curricula
Timothy Babulski
What Art Teaches Us
Timothy Babulski
What Art Teaches Us
Reexamining the Pillars of Visual Arts Curricula
Timothy Babulski
Minneapolis, MN, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-27767-3 ISBN 978-3-030-27768-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27768-0
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C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
What’s the Point of It All? 6
References 16
2 What Art Teaches 19
Guilds and Academies 19
Dropouts and Rejects 30
Normal and Public Schools 33
Alternative Paths 42
Habits of the Mind 42
Habits of the Body 43
References 44
3 Formalism and False History 49
The Sales Pitch of Fry and Bell 57
The Alternatives 68
Habits of Mind: Contextualized Disciplinary Forms 70
Habits of Body: Affective Response Protocols 76
References 81
v
vi CONTENTS
4 A Monstrous, Misshapen Ideal 85
Sumer, Vitruvius, and a Woman in Heels 96
The Alternatives 108
Habits of Mind: Grounded Anatomy 109
Habits of Body: Holistic Awareness 113
References 118
5 Twisting Reality 121
Brunelleschi’s Magic Trick 133
The Alternatives 140
Habits of Mind: Multi-Point Perspective 141
Habits of Body: Observational Drawing 144
References 146
6 Finding the Purple 149
Newton, Goethe, and Itten 159
The Alternatives 170
Habits of Mind: RGB/CMY Color Space 170
Habits of Body: Painting 171
References 174
7 Conclusions 177
Advocating for Intellectual Rigor 182
Advocating for Embodied Learning 185
Subverting Curricula 189
Crafting Curricula 191
References 193
Index 195
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 2.1 Timeline of social class influence in art education 33
Fig. 3.1 Bingo card with the twenty-four most commonly used
Elements of Art and Principles of Design 55
Fig. 4.1 Male figure in two-point perspective using Loomis’s ‘ideal’
proportions 93
Fig. 4.2 ‘Ideal’ female figure in two-perspective 95
Fig. 5.1 Simple proof of the correspondence of one- and two-point
perspective within a single pictorial system 131
Fig. 5.2 Elevation of the Baptistery in Florence as seen from the south
with sightlines from Brunelleschi’s position within the
Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore 136
Fig. 6.1 Comparison of the theoretical arrangement of hues and color
pairs on Itten’s color wheel and the actual positions of hues and
color pairs on a CMY/RGB color wheel 168
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Your art teacher lied to you.
I’ll let you sit with that thought a moment.
Your art teacher lied to you.
Before you throw this book across the room in disgust, I should
mention that not everything your art teacher told you was a lie. You may
still be tempted to toss the book—a dangerous and costly proposition if
you’re reading this electronically—but give it a minute.
Your art teacher lied to you.
That’s part of what stings, isn’t it? Teaching is fundamentally a trusting
profession. The relationship between teacher and students is built upon
trust. It hurts us to think of our art teachers as liars who lied to us. But
they were and did.
If you bear with me, we’ll address many of the reasons why your teacher
might have lied to you in the last chapter of this book. Feel free to skip
ahead if you need to. All I will say for now is that generally when teachers
lie, they have reason to believe their lies are necessary and possibly even
productive. You certainly don’t have to like being lied to or approve of
lying. That it is normal does not mean it is natural—if it offends you,
change it! Norm the truth!
That, in no small part, is what I hope to do with this text.
Shrug it off for the moment. So, your art teacher lied to you. All your
teachers did in many ways and for a myriad of reasons. There are likely
excellent reasons why some teachers see the need to omit, to waffle, or just
© The Author(s) 2019 1
T. Babulski, What Art Teaches Us,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27768-0_1
2 T. BABULSKI
outright lie. They may have even been required to lie. Knowing that they
probably had good reason might make you feel better about it. But what
if the substance of their lies had a direct and deleterious effect on their
students? What if it limited the kind and amount of learning that students
could reasonably achieve? What if teachers were in error or had been mis-
led by their art teachers and were carrying those mistakes forward? What
if what they taught you about the pillars of their discipline was false? It’s
easiest to see how this could happen if we set visual art aside for a moment.
Let’s put this in math terms instead.1 When you were little, you probably
had a teacher who taught you one of the fundamental facts of Western
mathematics:
2+2=4
And it is, isn’t it? Two plus two equals four. We are confident that that
is true. “Two plus two equals four” is something we can hang our hat on.
Columbus didn’t discover America. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb.
The plum-pudding model of the atom is inaccurate. Juliet wasn’t looking
for Romeo from her balcony. Two plus two, however, equals four at every
moment in history, in every place we could conceivably travel, and no
matter who was doing the counting. Or is it? What if I were to tell you that
it was only partly true, that the truth of that equation did depend on con-
text and identity? What if I were to tell you that I could arrange things so
that 2 + 2 = 10?
We know it doesn’t because we agree on the values “2” and “4” pos-
sess, the action of “+,” and the relationship indicated by the “=” sign.
One possibility would be to change the definition of “2.” If we redefined
the symbol “2” to mean five of something, then clearly 2 + 2 would equal
10. But what if I were to tell you I could make 2 + 2 = 10 without chang-
ing any of those definitions? Maybe we could spin the two around and flip
it so that it looked like a five. If we transformed a numeral two to look like
a five, would it still contain enough two-ness to remain two? What if I
could keep the two a “2,” still meaning two of something, and make
2 +2 = 10? And if you’re willing to accept that, through some chicanery,
I could make 2 + 2 = 10, how about making it also equal 11 while still
1 For anyone objecting that the first pragmatic example in a text on art education comes
from mathematics, I have to say this: art includes everything. What subject isn’t implicated
in artistic practice or divorced from aesthetics? Anatomy? Physics? Literature? History?
Chemistry? Not only is it all there, part of art, but all inquiry is entangled in the aesthetics of
being and derives from human experience—even mathematics.
1 INTRODUCTION 3
equaling 4? And, of course, I can: in base 3, 2 + 2 = 11; in base 4,
2 + 2 = 10; and in all integer bases >4, 2 + 2 = 4. If you don’t believe me,
ask a mathematician. Not only is it correct for all three, but all three are
also true simultaneously.
Now imagine that you were teaching first grade. You’ve had your stu-
dents copy down the math facts for the number two because it’s the sec-
ond week of school. Nearly the whole class has done as you expect, copying
the typical sequence: 2 + 0 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, 2 + 2 = 4, and so on. One stu-
dent, however, has a different series: 2 + 0 = 2, 2 + 1 = 10, 2 + 2 = 11, and
so on. By the time you get to 2 + 10 = 110, you’re shaking your head in
disbelief.
How would you mark their work? Would the answers be wrong because
they differed from the “facts” as you taught them? Would you notice the
pattern and wonder what was going on? If you knew about bases, would you
suspect a mathematician parent was trying to make your day a bit more sur-
real? Would you be willing to accept that there might be a child in your class
who was gifted in mathematics, who had been exposed to and understood
the concept of bases, and who was trying to show off their knowledge?
And this is just the result of presenting our students with a “fact” that
is contextual rather than universal. While I might quibble with using the
word “fact” precisely because it is contextual, the mathematics learning
that students undertake in first grade nonetheless does not undermine
their later learning. Determining that different bases exist and that two
plus two could equal 10 or 11 doesn’t require unlearning that two plus
two also equals four. We need students to unlearn only when their prior
knowledge prevents new understanding. Teaching students that 2+2
equals 27.419, the color teal, the smell of rain on a Wednesday, or some
other random thing all necessitate unlearning. In those cases, the “fact”
we taught negatively impacted both their present math fluency and
impaired their subsequent learning. Those facts would have to be
unlearned and relearned before students could move on.
Strangely enough, that is the situation of visual art education. The “facts”
we teach students about what I am calling the four pillars of visual art instruc-
tion—the elements and principles, proportions of the figure, linear perspec-
tive, and color theory—are frequently and flagrantly false. Learning them
necessitates unlearning. Picasso is claimed to have said, “Learn the rules like
a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”2 Unlearning—learning the rules
2 He didn’t, but it’s a decent meme and would look good on a poster or a throw pillow.
Who would check the attribution of a throw pillow or dispute the words on a classroom
poster when the sentiment is widely shared?