1
Before continuing with this article, I have attempted to outline the theoretical framework by which the observations and assertions which follow are conceived in relation to.
I do not intend to construct unproductive dichotomies (although they may emerge) but I believe mapping differing conceptions of art; how it is organized as an educational endeavour; and, how the learning within this system is interpreted, evaluated and valued (i.e. assessed) can help us locate the issues of dissensus within the teaching of art. By pointing out some of the continuums upon which these concerns sit, and mapping out the nature of the contrasting polarities involved, I hope to identify some productive tensions in which tutors and students can orientate themselves.
When discussing the concept of art and its mediation within this article, I am primarily deploying a definition of the concept via Arthur Dantoâs (1964) invocation of the artworld and its necessary ability to qualify anything as art, and, George Dickieâs (1974, 1984, 1997) unpacking of this procedure as being indebted to the agency of institutional representatives within said artworld to be able to confer the status of art onto an artefact. This does not mean I will be ignoring functionalist definitions of art. The distinction between functionalism and proceduralism has been extensively explored by Stephen Davies (1990, 2018) but the most succinct articulation I can offer is that a functionalist definition of art presumes a function or purposeâmost often as having an aesthetic character (Beardsley, 1982) or constituting an aesthetic experience (Zangwill, 2007). Whereas, proceduralism does not necessitate that art has a function; yet proceduralism can accommodate a range of functionalist perspectives within its mediation of art, especially within education institutions, but without committing to a singular one.
It is the remit of this collection of essays to explore institutional criticism of art. Here I am interpreting an institution of art education as one which is simultaneously a Durkehiemian actor unto itself endowed with thought, will and purpose (Latour, 1988, p. 384) and, as an assemblage of all the individual agents whose community of purpose is the maintenance and perpetuation of the system of art they ascribe to, writ small. As stated above, the institutions of art I am focusing on are further and higher education institutions who organize and accredit the teaching and assessment of art. Institutions which (explicitly or implicitly) operate on the presumption of a proceduralist definition of art. I do so because, aside from proceduralism being one of the most applicable and flexible theorizations of current art practices, a proceduralist conception of artâand the institutions it requiresâalso accommodates intentionalism and
A significant element of what is often occluded from students within processes of assessment of their learning is the roles of intent and the presumption of its function. Specifically, that more often than not, their learningânot their artworkâare being assessed. The issue of intentionalism within art education teaching and assessment has been a focus of Dina Zoe Belluigiâs (2011, 2017) research which is empirical and situated. The critical argument evidenced by these studies is a compelling one and one I intend to abduct into to my own framework and argumentation.
Additionally, I also wish to highlight the scholarship of Susan Orr (2007; Orr & Shreeve, 2018; Bloxham, Boyd & Orr, 2011), which provides the most recent and comprehensive overview of assessment and evaluation in art education within England and Wales (not Scotland or Northern Ireland). Orr and Shreeve (2018, pp. 132â133) state that while most western universities now prioritize the processual aspects of a studentâs learning journey (via the principles of constructive alignment), this tends to neglect the âprocess-productâ continuum upon which professional practice as an artist operates. Tutors should support their students to understand and gain experience of, whether the overarching evaluative framework accommodates the artefactual elements (i.e. products) of their learning or not (Orr & Shreeve, 2018, pp. 132â133).
In this sense, the articulations I am mapping remain a hidden curriculum to many art students, especially within (but not exclusive to) the English art education system. My mapping of these issues is an attempt to give shape to the interrelated issues which underwrite the reality of experiencing such assessment processes. By grouping perspectives rarely attended to, but constantly at
One general inference I am positing is that intentionalist forms of art education assessment corresponds most strongly with proceduralist understandings of art making; and inversely anti-intentionalist forms of art education assessment generally share characteristics with functionalist conceptions of art. Further, that these general polarities within assessment paradigms reflect the forms of aesthetic criticism students will be subjected to in other institutions of art beyond educational ones.
In reality, students often have to independently negotiate the spectra between both conceptualizations of art and how much weight each position is given within their institution or course and more broadly beyond these settings. Such an endeavour is rarely articulated to students as a tangible aspect of their education, nor are they made aware of the long tail of this concern and how artists-as-students have since at least the 1960s had to navigate its complexities in some form or another.
Going one step further, I also suggest that these categorizations of arthood and art education assessment also map, in general terms, onto the diglossic nature of the art academy. Namely, that of the ars/technê etymological root of art embodies a desire for craft, functionality and an anti-intentionalist understanding of art educationâs role in society, which contrasts (but does not contradict) the artes liberales holism and perceived intentionalism of fine art education established from within the medieval university and now more prominently positioned within further and higher education conceptualizations of art education. As Mulholland (2019, pp. 2â3) advocates, the distance between these articulations is not an aporia, rather it is the source of art educationâs agency. Engaging with this paradox as a productive proposition can be form of power. The current models of assessment within western universities do not necessarily harness this potential power, rather they delimit it and are inimical to it.
I am wary that grouping these associations may universalize and flatten distinctions between these approaches (however well-intentioned). This is not my aim, as I know from experience as a lecturer and program director this only leads to consternation and misunderstanding between tutors and students. I will use this article to focus on a singular example from Englandâs art education history to exemplify the confusion contained in a single exchange in relation to the institutional histories and theories which produced it. Everything that follows is secondary research collaged into, what I think, can be a useful exemplative analysis applicable to current efforts to assess artistic learning within further and higher art education.
2
To exemplify some of abstracted ideas outlined above Iâve decided to reframe (somewhat anachronistically) an example of how each of the polarities Iâve attempted to plot, map onto a historic example from english art education. This will allow me to contextualize some of the social and institutional conditions which precede and proceed the example given in an applied manner.
The example is from a then-student David Millidgeâs personal documentation of their participation in the Mask (1972) project on Sculpture Course âAâ at St. Martinâs School of Art. During the project students were allocated individual spaces and given the option to prepare work and then allow their tutors into the space, if allowed in tutors then donned bag-like masks and began performatively mock-evaluating and interrogating the student and their work (Keshvani, 2020, p. 282).
The emergence of Sculpture Course âAâ was possible due to a regulatory interregnum within English further and higher art education. The typical historical account provided of this period often starts and ends with an invocation and discussion of the âColdstream reformsâ; The Coldstream reform is a term generally used to refer to the first report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (established 1959) chaired by Sir William Coldstream. By examining the subsequent overhauls in the sector primarily through the lens of the âColdstream Reformsâ practitioners can sometimes tend to overlook the interconnectedness of such reforms with the municipal massification of art education, which preceded it and the expansionism of higher education that proceeded it, along with their contextual implications.
I will attend to some of the earlier associated developments during the Victorian era of English art education further into this article. For now, letâs focus on the period generally inferred when discussing the Coldstream reforms. This period included the creation of ânew universitiesâ mandated by the report of the Committee on Higher Education (aka the Robbins Report) authored by Lord Lionel Charles Robbins (1963), which was quickly followed by the âbinary policyâ in England and Wales, which initiated an overt split between universities (new and old) and technical colleges, which began in 1965 and led to the establishment of 30 âpolytechnicsâ in 1968 (Pratt, 1997, p. 2). This binarism only reified and exacerbated some of the dichotomies Iâve attempt to sketch out in the first section of this article. English Victorian Art Schools were largely subsumed into the new polytechnic institutions, it was primarily these institutions who would interpret and apply the National Advisory Council on Art Educationâs first reportâs advisory suggestions and would be regulated by the
The Mask project on Sculpture Course âAâ was only conducted once, as the concerns staff had regarding their studentâs preparation to receive criticism (performative, symbolic or otherwise) was unfounded (Keshvani, 2020, p. 282). The approach contrived by tutors was a response to the requirement from Englandâs central academic body to evaluate their students as part of the then new diploma in art and design. St. Martinâs was one of a relatively small selection of institutions and courses given permission to accredit students within the then newly established qualification structure. Sculpture Course âAâ took a behaviorist and cybernetics-influenced approach to teaching involved a range of radical interventions into teaching art such as locking students in rooms to silently explore material processes; fore fronting theory in advance of practice, and the integration of a non-teleological assumption to what students might produce through their studies along with a politicized and culturally critical approach to studying the history of art (Westley, 2010, pp. 31â35).
The course has now received infamous status as a radical attempt to reevaluate, and challenge, the epistemological terms on which sculpture (and more broadly fine art) could be taught and assessed within England. The unanimity of the perceived success of the courseâs approach, along with the authoring of the courseâs historicization, is contested. This contestation is highlighted in Marina Vishmidtâs article Creation Myth (2010), which reported on a symposium on the âAâ Course, which reconvened tutors and students after nearly 40 years, and the diverging accounts of the long-term affective impact of the pedagogy implemented during the course. The issue of diverging accounts was further compounded by the late withdrawal of Kardiaâs participation in, and permissions related to, the production of The Locked Room: Four Years that Shook Art Education 1968â73, a collection of archival materials and reflections from tutors and students by Rozemin Keshvani in 2020.
3 A Function of the System?
G:Why donât you do something good?D:I think thatâs a ridiculous question.P:Do you consider this good?D:I donât wish to evaluate it.P:Whatâs good about it? Tell me whatâs good about it?D:Well you tell me whatâs good about it?G:Thereâs nothing good about it.D:Thatâs your point of view.G:(From David Millidge personal Archive, reproduced in Keshvani, 2020, pp. 290â291).Nonsense.
Englandâs government had previously established what we could now term a functionalist approach to assessment. This was part of their efforts to massify art education across the nation, this was initiated when a Central budget for Art Education was established via a Westminster Parliamentary select committee in 1835 (Macdonald, 1970, p. 60) and resulted in the establishment of their first School of Design (1836). There followed a rapid expansionism of municipal art school buildings and institutions across England combined with the authoring and implementation of a state authored curriculum. While lobbying for an opening out of art education from the bourgeois and aristocratic clutches of the academy was well-intentioned, in practicality, the system reproduced the ossified curriculum of the academy of the prior three centuries. The misguided attempt to establish a national system based on a ringfenced and largely aristocratic body of knowledge had been intended by the Westminster government to establish an economically competitive culture of applied arts production which could support colonial expansionism and industrialization along with cultivating the burgeoning middle classes sense of taste within England. As articulated by Romans (2007, p. 219), the founding of the 1835/36 select committee was made up of a mix of Whig Ministers with more radical aspirations to instate a liberal public art education were convened with members of the East India Company and Tory Ministers hostile to the needs of industry and with conservative conceptions of arts social function. Under these auspices, the new School for Design was established and directed by the Department for Practical Art under the remit of the Board for Trade (Quinn, 2013, p. 216). What Quinn has convincingly articulated via his research into this period is that these philosophical and ethical dimensions largely map onto a dichotomy of âculturedâ and âunculturedâ attitudes towards art (Quinn, 2013, p. 219), which later councils (such as the Coldstream and Summerson councils) had to attempt to resolve, or at least address in the construction of new qualification and priorities. Quinn is particularly adept at tethering this onto the
One of the earliest and most prominent examples of the overly economically functionalist reifications of this idea was the instating of the âSouth Kensingtonâ curriculum after 1836, which was in full effect by 1852. This system was principally developed at the Slade School of Art by Henry Cole (Brown, 1912) and rolled out across England as an attempt to standardise accreditation in almost exclusively vocational training (i.e. a monoglossic interpretation of ars/technê). This included a set of 23 stages of drawing exam established by Coleâs second-in-command Richard Redgrave (Burton, 2020, p. 13). Such assessment was indicative of what Houghton (2016, pp. 109â110) refers to as the era of the âacademic curriculumâ. Royal Academicians actively attempted to import their curriculum principles into the new art schools, which centred a craft-focused proficiency in drawing into the curriculum and championed this as the transferability of these practices to trade applications as the means by which the new art schools of England would be economically valuable. This impetus ran contra to the initial intentions of Benjamin Robert Haydon, the original petitioner of parliament for the creation of public art schools (Macdonald, 1970, p. 60). The move towards the South Kensington system did not occur unopposed in England, with the largest critic of the purely ars/technê functionalist
4 All Part of the Process?
D:I donât know, itâs not a work of art.G:How do you know itâs not a work of art?D:I donât know.G:How do you know itâs not a work of art? You donât know whether itâs art or not?D:No.G:Why donât you know?D:Cause I donât care.G:What, how do you know that itâs not art? Are you an artist? Is this what is art?P:Do you make art?G:What are you smiling for?D:(From David Millidge personal Archive, reproduced in Keshvani, 2020:290â291)â¦â¦. think itâs rather amusing.
Although Sculpture Course âAâ had been intent on skewering its predecessors, through its behaviorist deconstructive individualist approach to teaching and assessment it, modelled a desire for, or at least highlighted the gap into which, the now ubiquitous, constructivist learner-centered model of assessment could be projected. This is a model which mandates learning outcomes and the assessment of the learnerâs intentionalism as being the predominant way art education can be standardized and given equal footing to its neighboring disciplines. This issue of over-assessing the person is not unique to art education, yet because it cuts to the core of how art was invented as distinct from craft forms of vocational knowledge but remains tethered to them (Shiner, 2001) it presents the fundamentally sticky issue of how teaching and assessment within the subject can vary, drift and ultimately undermine one another.
The shift towards constructive alignment has not occurred ex nihilo, nor has it not gone unchallenged. As Orr and Shreeve (2018, p. 127) point out, Elliott Eisner (1983) a north American educational theorist (and disciple of John Dewey and passionate advocate of art education) challenged the rising ubiquity of educational outcome-based teaching in and assessment (the precursor to constructive alignment), precisely because it attempts to simplify complexity through assuming the possibility of a (somewhat pseudo) scientific inductive form of prediction from which to gauge a learnerâs proficiency exists. Such a presumption is predicated on any given taught subject being a complicated but stable matter. This might apply to arts curricula if it was still a purely functionalist endeavour, whose intended function remained as that of Victorian England, one which prizes reproducibility (i.e. fidelity through the performance of copying) for industry. The inception of art necessitates more than the monoglossia of such a mode of production, which has only been further emphasized since the emergence of proceduralism has facilitated the conferral of the status of art to anything. This means art education also necessitates fundamental unpredictability and undermines the notion of it as a reproduceable performance that can be standardized. Here the importance of clearly teaching and assessing intentionalist elements of artmaking becomes pronounced. It is the incorporation of intentions into assessment of a student that are underwritten by the proceduralist definition of art. It is this same point which the heterogeneity of studentsâ self-defined functionalist agendas is sustained, whether they are cognisant of this or not.
While an outcome-based approach accommodates intentionalism, it often struggles to also accommodate the diglossic desire to assess the artefact and intention together, or even acknowledge their interrelated co-constitution. As Bellugi (2022) has demonstrated in her empirical studies, one of the most
I do not intend to excuse all art educators from their responsibility to clarify these distinctions for their students but as Iâve tried to outline here, the ability to do soâregardless of how clear a tutor may beâwill to some extent be undermined by the self-defeating nature of constructive alignmentâs need to simplify the complexity of an educational experience, a point exacerbated by art educationâs inherent need for explicitly unpredictable outcomes. Constructive alignmentâs self-defeating dominance has largely been used to reify institutional doxa into the form of regulatory documents who have then been imbued with the status of unquestionable art educational dogma. In this sense, the current regulatory moment in further and higher education within England is not far removed from the 23-stage drawing examination of the South Kensington system, only now its intended function is now dressed in neoliberal rhetoric of the individual learner who is presumed to be homo economicus. It is this dissonance which tends to alienate students and tutors from their shared community of purpose, that of learning how to explore the diglossic potential and power of art.
5 Spectra at the Feast
After Englandâs Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, its art schools have only further been subsumed into efforts of standardization within western education models. Initially, within this process, institutions of art education may have been specters at the feast of the university-centered educational regulation. When art schools initially became subsumed into wider university structures, they also adopted the universityâs existing outcome-based models of assessment. While initially it seemed that university assessment culture could prove sympathetic to assessing the procedural and intentionalist forms of art-making, the overzealous commitment to learner-centered assessment within further and higher education has disbalanced the relationship between art education and its neighboring disciplines. This is because artistic learning isnât a purely person-centered endeavor, it is diglossic and requires a more equitable balance between person, process and product to meaningfully be applicable beyond an educational context.
Notes
Specifically, Dantoâs concept of âthe art worldâ, not Dantoâs anti-intentionalist approach to aesthetic criticism. The distance between Danto and Dickie on this matter is pronounced. Catherine Abell adeptly unpacks (2019, p. 136) the issue that Dantoâs rebuttals to Dickie fall into a trap of asserting that artworks across time share a generalisable function that they perform which non-art objects do not also perform, stating the functionalist schema is limited once âone must provide an account of what it is for an artwork to have meaning of the kind distinctive of (good) artworks, and then show both that all (good) artworks meet the accountâs criteria, and that all things that are not (good) artworks do notâ (ibid). Abellâs highlighting of âgoodâ as a qualifier will be useful later in this article.
There are several subsets of intentionalism which engage with the varying angles from which forms of intentionalism can be applied in the interpretation of artworks. In Davies more recent work (2018) he breaks down and considers the strengths and weakness of three subdivisions: âActual Intentionalismâ that is predicated on what claims the author makes for their work and an interpretation of the work in its initial context; âHypothetical Intentionalismâ that imagines the authors intentions and can unmoor the work from its initial context; and âValue-maximisingâ (aka. conventionalism) which builds off of hypothetical intentionalism to interpret the work in a way that maximises its value as art (pp. 411)
âBottleneckâ is a specialist term within the scholarship of teaching and learning deployed by Middendorf & Shopkow (2018) within their âdecoding the disciplinesâ methodology for reviewing and enhancing curricula. A bottleneck refers to assumed forms of knowledge such as mental models, or mapping of a discipline (often presumed to be tacitly communicated) that are not explicitly stated by an expert (i.e. tutor) to a novice (i.e. student) to help them professionalise via their studies.
Abduct here is not used to designate the act of taking away, it is instead an adverb for abductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning being a speculative form of reasoning which combines existing methods and ideas to produce a potentially new understanding, idea or approach to a phenomenon.
St. Martins later merged with the Central School of Art and Design in 1989 and is now referred to as Central Saint Martinâs College of Art and Design.
This report advocated for the establishment of a new qualification, the Diploma in Art & Design, which would supersede the existing National Diploma in Design (established in 1946). The council suggested that the new qualification should be a degree-equivalent qualification; as part of its formalisation, the new diploma courses should aim towards a liberal education in the subject, i.e. studied in its broader context (Strand, 1989, p. 11). This manifested with the recommendation that the new qualifications should include a minimum of 15% of the total courses being studied must include the History of Art and âcomplimentary studiesâ (Strand, 1987, p.12). This was initially advocated for on the committee for by Professor Nikolaus Pevsner (see Pevsner, 1940), who helped establish the broad basis for these studies as a cornerstone of advocating for art as an academic, not vocational, qualification (McLoughlin, 2019, pp. 182â183).
Sculpture Course âAâ was not the first to employ such thinking and approaches in England, it was preceded by the (arguably) even more radical Groundcourse established and led by Roy Ascott at Ealing and Ipswich Colleges of Art between 1961-67. Kate Sloan has produced a brilliant and comprehensive study which provides extensive insight into the Groundcourse (see Sloan, 2019).
See footnote 7 for a more extensive description of how this manifested across the 1960s.
The private/public divide of education remains engrained in the english education at all levels. It is an english choice to maintain this division. This is starkly reinforced when neighbouring nations such as Scotland instead perceiving higher education as a common good which its citizens need not become indebted to the state to access. Only during the post-war reconstruction period was the private/public attitude challenged (although not entirely eradicated) in England, with this contestation only lasting roughly 40 years before the introduction of tuition fees in 1998 via the Teaching and Higher Education Act.
This form of examination was curtailed in England by 1915 (Macdonald, 1970, p. 304)
The function of this particular functionalist curriculum being to service industry via the teaching of academic principles established in academies of art.
While Millidgeâs archive was reproduced in Keshvaniâs (2020) book, a broader, publicly accessible digital archive of Sculpture âAâ course materials is held and maintained by the MayDay Rooms in London (n.d.).
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